Uncover - S13: "White Hot Hate" E3: Hate Camps

Episode Date: December 29, 2021

Outed as a member of The Base, Patrik Mathews disappears. His abandoned truck is discovered near the Canada-U.S. border. He could be heading to a training camp. But what exactly are they training for? For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/white-hot-hate-transcripts-listen-1.6226840

Hi there, I'm Gavin Crawford. I'm a writer, an actor, and a comedian. And for the last eight or nine years, I have been navigating life with my mother's increasing dementia. Has it been sad? Yeah. Has it been funny? Also, yeah. That's what my podcast series, Let's Not Be Kidding, is about. It's the true story of my life as a comedian, my mom, and dementia. Let's not be kidding. With me, Gavin Crawford.

Available now. This is a CBC Podcast. The following episode contains coarse language and descriptions of violence. Please take care when listening. So just slow down here, cross the bridge here. And just make a right turn onto that approach. There, you can barely see it, but there's grass in there. Okay, you can just turn right here.

This is, well, let's just call him Wallace, because he asked that we not use his real name out of concerns for his safety. He's been living here in the community of Sprague, Manitoba, since 1966. The town was a bustling community at that time. But it has a school, a bank, and a store. Can you imagine that? Still a store, you know? How many communities have lost their stores? I guess this is part of the times, isn't it? Wallace was working here one September day in 2019

when he saw something out of place. The reason I discovered the problem is this is my property here. And I was bringing dirt and soil from the other side of the road into here just to dump it to get it out of the way. So I just came around the corner here, right about where the V is there. He stumbled across an abandoned red pickup truck, one he didn't recognize.

I said, I better check who that license plate is. Checked the door, the door was open in the pickup. And it looked like someone had been sleeping maybe in the front, you know. In the back was a whole pile of tools. It wasn't one of the local boys that I knew. So I went back. I stopped at my granddaughter's place.

And she didn't know, but I gave her the license number. Walsh's family had been following the news. There'd been reports that police were on the lookout for a red truck. It had been driven by an army reservist who'd recently been outed as a member of a militant neo-Nazi organization. Police had raided his home, took him into custody, but he was released without charge. Then abruptly, he went missing. And the alert went out. Whilst his family, they checked the plate number.

Sure enough, that was it. The truck the cops were looking for. It belonged to Patrick Matthews. You know, by parking there, who's going to, you know, look for you? It could have been here for a month if I hadn't come on here. Once the police came and took away the truck, Wallace and his son did their own sleuthing to try to figure out where Matthews could have gone by foot. Right down there, there's another creek that comes in right behind here.

He found the tracks where he crossed the river. There's a gas pipeline going through here. You know, you could actually follow it right into the United States. I'm Michelle Shepard, and this is White Hot Hate, Episode 3, Hate Camps. When Patrick Matthews disappeared, Ryan Thorpe's friends and colleagues were worried about him. He had just outed Matthews as a neo-Nazi recruiter in the pages of the Winnipeg Free Press. What if Matthews wanted revenge? Most people seem to think like,

oh, he's disappeared and he's going to retaliate. And my concern was he's disappeared and he's going to do something to himself. Then, almost two weeks later, Wallace found Matthews' abandoned truck near the U.S. border. Well, police got the call yesterday afternoon. The abandoned truck was found on a rural property in the RM of Piney off Highway 12. Now that's right near the American border.

RCMP say that truck belongs to Patrick Matthews. He's the former master. I remember contacting people locally around there. I learned that if you were going to try to cross over on foot into the United States, this would be a place to do it. So my thought at that time was like, OK, he's driven there. You know, he's crossed over on foot, likely to meet up with members of the base. But admittedly, that was speculative. There's a good chance the cops were thinking the same thing, though,

because there was a file on Matthews. In June 2019, nearly three months before Ryan's first article, Matthews had been stopped by the CBSA. That's the Canadian Border Services Agency. He was crossing the border driving back to Canada from the U.S. They searched him and found posters in his backpack about joining the fight against a white genocide. He also had a journal listing all the mass shootings in the U.S. for the last three decades. It wasn't clear exactly where he had just been in the U.S., and according to the CBSA, his story seemed to change the more he talked to the officers. But after questioning him, they let him through.

But after questioning him, they let him through. We know all this because we fought in court to unseal an RCMP document. It's known as an ITO, an information to obtain, and it's what the police needed to get a search warrant for Matthew's home. I gotta say, when I later read these details about his stop at the border and being allowed through, my first thought was that I couldn't imagine a person of color or someone who was Muslim with a backpack full of ISIS propaganda getting the same treatment. We don't know how many times Matthews had been south over the years or exactly what he was doing. But while Ryan had been undercover, Matthews had bragged to him about those trips.

Yeah, because when I met him in the park, he told me he'd been going to the U.S. to participate in hate camps. And when he was in the meeting in the park, did he actually say hate camp? No, he didn't use that term. He just, he said he had probably just said training or something like that or a meetup or whatever. said training or something like that or a meetup or whatever. Hate Camp is the brazen nickname organizations like The Base use for their paramilitary training camps. I tried to advance the story as much as I could, but right around that time is when the trail goes cold a little bit and I don't really know where he is or what he's up to. What Ryan didn't know then, and Patrick Matthews certainly didn't know,

was that Matthews wasn't really escaping scrutiny by running away. As the saying goes, out of the frying pan and right into the fire. Yeah, so little does he know, he's walking into this very sophisticated investigation that's underway into other members of the base in the United States that's being carried out by some of the highest levels of U.S. federal law enforcement. So he's basically trying to flee an investigation there and then walking right into a massive one already underway. Exactly, yeah. So after Matthews dumped his truck in Sprague, Manitoba, he made his way across a few miles of forest and farmland to the Minnesota border.

Eventually, he got to Michigan, where two base members were waiting for him. They were Brian Lemley Jr., a 30-something U.S. Army veteran, and William Bilbrow IV, a 19-year-old who still lived with his grandma. They pick him up and they ferry him deeper into the U.S., crossing over multiple states. They stop at various places. You know, at one point, they're holed up at a hotel. At another point, they're in an apartment in Delaware. They're kind of moving around, trying to keep Matthew safe, keep him off the trail of law enforcement agencies that might be looking into him. And at some point, the three of them would find their way to Floyd County, Georgia. I would think it was probably in the summer of 2019.

It was the first time that I had heard of a possible base element in Georgia. This is Chris Joyner. He's a veteran reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the city's major newspaper. I was born in Atlanta, grew up in Atlanta, but I've reported in Tennessee and Mississippi. But one of the things I've always really liked is uncovering hidden communities. And for a while I was doing, you know, inside prisons and street gangs. But starting with the massacre at Mother Emanuel in Charleston, when was that? That was 2015. 2015, when white supremacist Dylann Roof shot and killed nine people during Bible study at one of the oldest black churches in the U.S. I became really interested in sort of this moment that we're having of resurgence of far-right politics.

In the years since, Chris has been watching the growth of this activity closely, with a special focus on his home state, where white supremacist groups were particularly active. Why do you think that it's so well represented in Georgia? I mean, that's certainly the perception that this seems to be quite popular there. Well, I mean, Georgia is a key part of the deep South of the United States, but it also has a very diverse city right in the middle of it, Atlanta, Georgia.

You know, politically progressive. It is ethnically diverse. And a lot of the far right is reactive. They're activated by things that pop up in the culture that upset them. And they mobilize and they recruit around those ideas. You see the same thing in Virginia as well. And in some ways, you see it in Michigan. Chris knew from local anti-fascist activists that the base had a pretty big sell in Georgia. He also suspected that some sort of

meetup was imminent, the kind of gathering where members from across the states come together to train and churn out recruiting material for social media. So these were sort of hype videos, you know, very stylized looking guys in camouflage and tactical gear and hoods on their faces so you couldn't see their identities and their firing weapons. And it's got a lot of like filter effects on the photos and the videos to sort of juice it up with, you know, really hardcore music in the background. you know, really hardcore music in the background. But you couldn't tell how organized they were, how well-resourced or anything like that. Chris was right.

The base did put on a so-called training camp in Georgia, near a city called Rome. It's an extremely conservative area. It is very white, you know, demographically. In a remote rural community called Silver Creek. I mean, one of the reasons why I think this area was the spot where people came to train was just because one of the alleged members of that cell just happened to have access to an isolated piece of land that was fairly large. It's where Patrick Matthews turned up, ready to share his military skills with others. You would be isolated. There'd be a large enough area where you could shoot and train

and camp out and discuss your plans. and camp out and discuss your plans. Okay, anytime someone says training camps, I can't help but think of that grainy video that played endlessly after 9-11. It was of Al-Qaeda guys doing somersaults and swinging across monkey bars. Remember that one? It was meant to be propaganda, showing off their training. But later, it became a bit of a punchline,

more fodder for comedy than a warning to the West. We can't seem to find the terrorists, and yet we have a tremendous amount of film of the terrorists training in their little camps, don't we? Seinfeld went for it. So did Family Guy. All right, I got the monkey bars all put together. Oh, God, look at that. They already got Al-Qaida's all over them. Get out of here.

Man, they're going to be so good at swinging bar to bar when they invade. Terror training camps was a news catchphrase for so many years, whether it was just guys running around doing paintball or building bombs. Hamid organized a series of training camps throughout the UK, including one here at Bay's Brown Farm in Cumbria. Unbeknownst to the farmer, however. A chilling video of terror training camps in South Kashmir's Pulwama. It's a frightening thought.

Islamic terrorist training camps right here in America in our backyards. And when you were reporting on these so-called training camps, it was hard to know how to describe them. Were they terrifying or farcical? Or maybe a bit of both? It's, you know what, it's like going camping with your buddies, pretty much, right? It's a very relaxed atmosphere, cracking some jokes. You know, these are young guys.

A very, you know, uplifting mood. This is Mubin Sheikh. I've known him for about 15 years, ever since I covered one of the biggest homegrown terrorism busts in Canada. It was known as the case of the Toronto 18. And they have no idea, but of course I'm laughing along, but at the same time I know that this is no joke. Now I don't know anyone who's attended one of these neo-Nazi hate camps,

but reading about them, they remind me so much of the post-911 jihadi camps. The paramilitary training, the propaganda making, the bonding over who they hate, like very angry Boy Scouts. And Mubin, he knows a lot about them. Did they call it a camp? Like what was the motivation for them doing it? I can't remember. Well, it was. They wanted to bring a group of guys up to a level of capabilities that they could conduct some kind of attacks. Mubin was at the Toronto 18's training camp, working undercover. They initially had very aspirational targets, we'll say. And at this stage it was just that they were still at a very low level of capability.

Their reach did exceed their grasp, but what they intended to do was, you know, catastrophic. The case was huge news back in 2006. 14 men and four youths were eventually charged with terrorism offenses. They had plotted to blow up the CN Tower, the Toronto Stock Exchange, and other landmarks with truck bombs. They said it was to protest Canada's role in the war in Afghanistan. And they were stopped, in no small part, due to the information Mubin could give law enforcement. He would become a key witness at the trial.

We'll come up on a part of it which is, let's see, at that time it was a dirt road. And it will be on our left. Okay. The route that we're taking right now. To refresh his memory of what took place all those years ago, we drove back to the training camp site in Washego. That's a rural community about a two-hour drive north of Toronto. You can imagine December 2005, winter, cold, dark, and we're just driving along.

Mubin had once been on a very different path. In 1995, he met the Taliban in Pakistan, and he embraced the jihadi mindset. Then came 9-11, and the arrest of someone he knew. And suddenly, he was questioning his beliefs. By 2004,

he was recruited to Canada's spy service, CSIS. So when members of the group, later dubbed the Toronto 18, were plotting, CSIS sent him in. By the time they set up the training camp, the investigation was in full swing. CSIS, RCMP, CSC, JTF2, the whole alphabet soup of security agencies

were all over the case. You had surveillance involved. You got special forces literally buried in the snow. Watching this all go down in case the threat escalates. They don't know who the undercover is. I'm sure I found myself in the crosshairs of one of those snipers. So, fun fact, this little mound here, there was a video taken on Zachariah's cell phone of them shooting a TV that was here. Oh, here we go.

Zachariah Amara, the ringleader of the group. TV, like an abandoned TV? Yeah, an abandoned TV. Now if you, now I think it's going to drop down a bit. Now we made the tent area nearby. So as you'll see, it dips down. Because in the training video, the so-called training video, there's an excerpt where Sa'ad Khalid is sliding down holding Fahim's sword. So let's see. I mean, look at all the growth here, of course.

We drive as far into the brush as we can, park, and then go in by foot. as far into the brush as we can, park, and then go in by foot. How many days were you up here for? It was like 12 days. I spent my wedding anniversary up here, camping with these guys. December 25th, Christmas Day. While everyone was, you know, tucked away in their beds waiting for Santa Claus, we were waiting for Yuhadi Claus.

Mubin says he sees clear parallels between the neo-Nazi training camps we're talking about now and the ones after 9-11, those run by al-Qaeda and later al-Shabaab and ISIS. It's like a carbon copy. You can just flip around an image and it could be a brown guy and the next day it's a white guy. And it's a jihadist or it's an anti-government militia. It's all really the exact same thing. It's ideology and grievances, right? Needs, narratives and networks.

These are the ways in which violent extremism comes to be so coming out in training is very important to solidify that camaraderie that you need in a group small unit tactics people realize keep the group small keep them trusted and you will get your job done needs narratives and networks. Small unit tactics. Mubin does a lot of presentations these days for law enforcement. He can talk the talk. But still, the Toronto 18 case remains controversial. In the end, four of the accused went to trial and were given guilty verdicts. Seven other defendants pleaded guilty. And the other seven had their charges stayed, which means they weren't prosecuted. Only

Zakaria Amara remains behind bars today. There were some who believed the case was overblown, the arrests too sweeping, just the latest in a line of law enforcement unfairly targeting Muslim communities. They point to that training video, the one Mubin mentioned of the guys shooting up a TV. You can see them jumping over a fire or sliding down that snowy hill or doing donuts in a van. I mean, it's not quite monkey bars, but how seriously can you take them? It goes back to that question of where do you draw the line between fanciful and fanatical? It was a debate we had so often after 9-11.

And now it's being asked once again when it comes to these neo-Nazi hate camps, sometimes by those closest to the action. They were, you know, shooting their guns. I mean, when I was young, we shot our guns. We got a Second Amendment here. There's nothing wrong with shooting guns. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news.

So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. The headlines, they always read something about white supremacist murder conspiracy. It's always got to do with race. This is Tom Lane.

He works as a contractor providing handyman services for the people of Floyd County, Georgia. He also lives on a sprawling country property. Well, it's about 100 acres. My residence is pretty much in the middle of it. In Silver Creek. I got fields kind of around the house, probably 20, 30 acres of field, and then the rest of it's wooded. Got a creek on one border.

It's the kind of area where the sound of gunshots isn't a big deal. You know, they were shooting ARs and AKs or whatever else they had. Luke had never really had a whole lot of friends. I was kind of just glad to see him get out and, you know, interact with other people. Tom's son Luke is 23-year-old Luke Austin Lane, otherwise known as TMB Online,

which stands for the Militant Buddhist. Luke was the leader of the base's Georgia cell, considered one of the group's most successful in terms of recruitment and real-world meetups. And this is why members converged on Tom's property for paramilitary training. Luke still lived at home. Luke grew up there with you? What was he like as a kid growing up? He was always doing funny little things that we thought were funny. I don't know. He did this kind of a, it was kind of a strut where he would sling his hands back and forth and take big, long steps. Looked like a leprechaun or something, I don't know.

As Tom talks about Luke, his little grandson, his daughter's boy, is running in and out of the kitchen, chatting, laughing, squealing. boy, is running in and out of the kitchen, chatting, laughing, squealing. And he, you know, he was a good kid. He was homeschooled most of the time. I think he went maybe 7th and 8th grade to a local school here. And he did all right, but he didn't want to go to high school so so he went and got his ged and uh he was kind of still deciding what he was going to do because he was young and he started talking to these people on the base i got involved with that and when when he started sort of making these friends online and getting involved with the group,

did you notice any difference with him? Or he must have been spending a lot of time online at that point. Yeah, most of it was at night, though. You know, I questioned about it. He wouldn't tell me the name of the group. I guess he didn't want me to research it or anything. But, you know, it was, I don't know, I guess a white nationalist or something. I don't know. They weren't white nationalist or something. I don't know.

They weren't a violent group, didn't seem like. Tom also wasn't alarmed by what was hanging on Luke's bedroom wall. Yeah, I mean, I saw the flag in there, but, you know, kids that age, they're going to kind of dabble in things, and, you know, they're still trying to find out who they want to be. So I just kind of wrote it all off as that. I figured he'd decide something different later on. Luke's been all over the place.

One time he wanted to move to Russia, and then next thing you know, he's wanting to move to Ukraine and fight the Russians. He didn't know what he wanted to do. He was just a young boy, you know, trying to find his way. And I figured he'd move to something else. What was the actual flag? Was it something identifiable? I think it was a Nazi flag.

I think it was a swastika. I think. I don't remember what it was, to tell you the truth. It was a big red flag. So when you saw it, you didn't recognize it as that necessarily? Or you thought, okay, he's going through a Nazi phase? Well, yeah. Yeah, I just figured he was going through a little phase. When other men started showing up at the house, Tom says he wasn't worried. You know, I thought they were just a group talking, you know, with the same ideology.

And I didn't see anything that they were doing that was wrong. I mean, if I'd have known then what I know now, you know, I'd have pulled the plug on them coming out here. I mean, I didn't share all their ideology, but as far as I knew, they were doing nothing wrong. When I asked him if the name Patrick Matthews rings a bell, Tom said he remembers him well. Tom said he remembers him well. Yeah, I knew him. He stayed here for, you know, a few weeks. He was, you know, polite.

He always had something to say about anything, just about. Yeah. He's a pretty chatty guy, from what I understand. Yeah, yeah, he talked a lot. Luke probably talked less than any of them. You know, when they were out here, Luke didn't say a whole lot, at least when I was around. Yeah, I think Luke paid more attention to him than he needed to a lot of times. I wasn't a real fan of Patrick.

Didn't really like him a whole lot. Why weren't you a fan? Well, it seemed like, I don't know, he tried to manipulate Luke in different ways. I think he'd tell Luke that we need to do this

and we need to do that. It's funny because we know from some of the other guys kind of said they didn't really like Patrick. They thought he was a bit of a loud mouth. Yeah.

Yeah, he always had some thoughts about anything, any subject he brought up. But for Tom, Matthews wasn't the most memorable guy staying on his property. There was another man, older than the rest, who really piqued his interest. I'll call him Scott, because that's what he said his name was, but I'm sure that's not his name. He was probably 20-plus years older than the rest of them. 6'2", 6'3", 240, you know, big man. Tattoos all over his arms.

So they all kind of looked up to him, I think. You know, when I first saw him, I was thinking, this guy's either a pedophile or he's FBI. I asked him. I said, Scott, you FBI? He said, no, no, man. I don't remember exactly what he said, but he denied it.

And I told Luke he was FBI. And Luke said, no, we vetted him. We vetted him. I don't know how they went about their vetting, but it wasn't good, evidently. But I really wasn't alarmed about him being in there because I'd never seen him do nothing wrong. Very seldom did Luke go anywhere. He didn't go off, you know, in bars and drinking and running around. He didn't do any of that.

So I really wasn't worry about Scott being here. But why would you think he would be FBI? I mean, why would you think that there would be an FBI guy hanging around? Why did I think there would be an FBI guy hanging around? Well, anytime there's anything to do with race, which I knew whatever Luke was into was probably racial, which I don't agree with that. But they got their ears out everywhere. They think anything that's got a hint of racism, they're going to get in on it.

You know, they think that's the worst thing in the world nowadays. Scott, the big older guy Tom suspected was an undercover agent? Yeah, he was. The big older guy Tom suspected was an undercover agent? Yeah, he was. And he's the reason we know as much as we do about the Silver Creek hate camp, which went beyond just flags and shooting guns. Here's Chris Joyner again.

What had allegedly happened is that as part of their camping weekend where they decided to go kidnap what's's been described as a ram it's also been described as a goat i think it's probably a goat not that it matters that much but but they brought it back to luke lane's property and attempted to slit its throat ended up shooting it they had a hard time killing it none of them apparently have very much experience with livestock and beheaded it as part of some sort of pagan ceremony that they had. But it's also part of, you know, building up their both internal camaraderie, I guess, and their sort of external recruiting. Because they took photos of them all dressed up holding the goat head, and that came out in recruiting materials on far-right channels. Someone claiming to have attended the camp later wrote a 3,000-word memoir describing that night, which happened to be Halloween. He says they all drank a sip of the animal's blood around, quote,

the dim glow of our torches as a ritual bringing us closer together as brothers. He also says some of them dropped acid to celebrate. It's actually not that unusual for white supremacists to conduct this kind of ritual. There's a certain wing who embrace ancient Norse religions like Odinism. Anders Bering Breivik, the perpetrator of the 2011 Norway massacres, declared in court he was an Odinist. He named his pistol after the hammer of Thor. And pagans like him sometimes slaughter animals in sacrifice to the gods.

Whatever the purpose of the sacrifice, that wasn't the FBI's main interest in the camp. It was less about what the base members did there than what some of them were planning to do. According to what the undercover officer said, they were planning a series of assassinations. The first one was going to be of a couple they believed were involved in leftist organizing, Antifa organizing. And they were going to go to that couple's home and assassinate them. But law enforcement weren't the only ones listening in. Patrick Matthews was still hanging around the camp and potentially hearing everything, making him a liability. At this point, they've soured on Matthews.

They think he's inept. They think he's bumbling. They're like, if we carry this out with him, you know, we're all going to end up in prison. But they have a bit of a problem on their hands. If this married couple that they've identified together turns up dead in Georgia, Matthews is the one person who could potentially connect them because he would know who carried this out. Matthews doesn't know he's in danger, nor does this couple who somehow landed on the base's hit list. And while the FBI is on the inside, these members are unpredictable and seem determined to act. And the plan for murder? It's not the only plot

they have in the works. Coming up on White Hot Hate. There were no doubt tourists and wannabes at the camp, but it only takes a few to follow through with violence to cause huge damage. They have to murder Matthews, and then they'll come back to Georgia, they'll go to Atlanta, they'll burst into the house of this married couple, they'll shoot both of them dead, and then they'll burn the place to the ground. In this bizarre twist, Matthews now finds himself in the crosshairs. You know, I don't know that the base wasn't created by the FBI.

You know, I don't much trust anything they do. White Hot Hate was written and produced by Ashley Mack and me, Michelle Shepard. Our associate producer is Kim Kasher, with production support from Sarah Melton. Additional reporting by Ryan Thorpe. Mixing and sound design by Danelle Cloutier and Julia Whitman. With technical assistance from Laura Antonelli. Emily Connell is our digital producer. Fact-checking by Emily Mathieu and legal advice from Sean Mormon.

Original music by Quiet Type. Additional material from Fox News, India Today and Channel 4 News. Special thanks to the Winnipeg Free Press, the CBC Reference Library, Joshua Fisher-Birch, Caroline Bargut, and Sean Powers. For CBC Podcasts, our senior producer is Chris Oak, and our executive producer is Arif Noorani. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.