Based on true events in Northern Idaho

Jude Law’s “The Order” tells the story of an FBI agent from northern Idaho who hunted down white supremacists in the 1980s

News post by James Hanlon | The Speaker Review

Forty years ago this week, FBI agents raided a safe house on Whidbey Island, leading to a standoff with Robert Mathews, the leader of a white supremacist movement who was born in the northwest.

Mathews refused to surrender peacefully. A machine gun battle ended with the house ablaze and Mathews still inside.

“The Order,” a new crime thriller released Friday directed by Justin Kurzel and starring Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult, is based on true events that led to this showdown.

The Silent Brotherhood, better known as The Order, was a radical split that broke away from the Aryan Nations, a neo-Nazi complex based near Hayden Lake.

The premise of the film

The film explores the tensions between Mathews, played by Hoult, and Richard Butler, the leader of the Aryan Nations, who insists on gaining power within the system by electing politicians.

Mathews becomes impatient with Butler talking and doing nothing. So Mathews takes action. His new followers help him rob a Washington Mutual Bank branch in Spokane at gunpoint.

Meanwhile, Law’s character, hardened FBI agent Terry Husk, arrives in Coeur d’Alene and is tasked with reopening a field office of his own. He enlists the help of the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office and befriends a young deputy, played by Tye Sheridan.

“In my experience, hate groups don’t rob banks,” Husk said.

“Maybe it will be different this time,” replies the deputy.

The script is based on “The Silent Brotherhood: Inside America’s Racist Underground,” a 1989 nonfiction book by Denver journalists Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt. The co-authors covered the case for The Rocky Mountain News, beginning with the Order’s murder of Alan Berg, a provocative Denver radio talk show host who was Jewish.

Comedian-podcaster Marc Maron plays Berg in the film.

It is not the first film adaptation of the story.

The 1988 film Betrayed, starring Tom Berenger, is a highly fictionalized version set in the Midwest. That same year, Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio focused on a character inspired by Berg and his assassination.

“The Order” is a more accurate depiction of the crimes committed in the Northwest.

Shot in Alberta, the film evokes a larger, less developed northern Idaho.

The real Terry Husk

While Husk is fictional, his actions are certainly based on former FBI agent Wayne Manis, who still lives in the house he built in 1984 not far from the Aryan Nations compound.

The first two words of “The Silent Brotherhood,” he proudly points out in an interview with The Spokesman-Review, are “Wayne Manis.”

His main complaint about the film?

“I don’t smoke,” Manis said.

Law, who produced the film, said in an interview with FRED Film Radio that the filmmakers decided to make Husk fictional so they could use him as a flawed character.

“We wanted it to represent certain characteristics of society in the story,” Law said. “It helped a lot. This meant we could really design Husk the way we needed it. The fragility, the physicality, the smoking, the drinking, the fatigue, the broken family, we were able to slowly piece it all together instead of saying, “Look at what really happened and who was involved.” ”

Manis’ story

Manis, now 84, moved from Alabama to Idaho in February of the year the film is set, ahead of his wife and daughter, who joined him that summer. Ten months later he came into conflict with Mathews.

His daughter Christa Hazel said watching the film reminded her of how intense this year has been for the family. She was 10 years old.

“It wasn’t unusual not to hear from him from time to time,” said Hazel, a former Coeur d’Alene school board member. “So I won’t forget the call from Whidbey Island where he called to tell us he was involved in a shooting, but he was OK. We would probably see it on the news, but he needed us to know he was OK.”

This wasn’t Manis’ first rodeo. Before Idaho, he was an undercover agent investigating left-wing extremists, the Mafia and the KKK.

He was once arrested undercover in Chicago and unwittingly released on bail by the Communist Party.

Manis retired in 1994. In his memoir, The Street Agent, he writes about everything about his career, including The Order.

Reign of Terror

Manis said the film does a good job taking into account all of Mathews and his followers’ major crimes, even if some of the scenes and characters blend together.

“I’m glad it’s being shown because even though it’s Hollywood, maybe it will bring awareness to how serious this really was,” Manis said.

After breaking up with Butler, Mathews founded his faction on his farm in Metaline Falls in northeast Washington. But his influence was far-reaching.

One of their first terrorist attacks involved testing a homemade bomb at a synagogue in Boise, although the bomb caused little damage to the building and no one was inside when it exploded.

The film shows Mathews following a playbook outlined in “The Turner Diaries,” a 1978 novel by white nationalist William Pierce in which a group known as “The Order” overthrows the U.S. government .

An addendum at the end of the film credits “The Turner Diaries” with also influencing the Oklahoma City bombing and elements of the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

In the film and in real life, Mathews’ Order carried out a series of bank and armored car robberies. But it started with a simple job that doesn’t appear in the film: robbing an adult video store in Spokane Valley. They stole $369.

In the months that followed, they hit increasingly larger targets in Spokane and Seattle, where they bombed an adult movie theater as a distraction.

The highlight was a $3.8 million robbery of a Brink’s armored car on a Northern California highway near Ukiah.

In addition to counterfeiting, the money was also intended to finance their higher ambitions: establishing their own white nation in the Pacific Northwest. Other plans included destroying Los Angeles’ power grid and poisoning the water supply.

After Mathews’ death, ten members of the order were convicted of racketeering and conspiracy, some receiving prison sentences of over 100 years. Two other people were convicted of violating Berg’s rights in the killing.

Where the film deviates from the story

Manis pointed out some differences between the film and the story.

One of them concerns the fate of Husk’s deputy.

In another case, Husk discovers the body of Walter West, a member of the Order who was shot in the forest for speaking openly about their activities. But the body was never found, Manis said. It’s an open ending that still worries him.

At the end of the film, Husk runs into the burning house to convince Mathews to come out. Honestly, Manis said, he wouldn’t have done that.

Exposing the threat of white nationalism

For Flynn, the author of the book, the film’s inconsistencies don’t bother him one bit. It gets the larger point right: the threat of white nationalism.

Flynn, now the sitting Denver city councilman, said he wanted to write the book to tell the deeper story that goes beyond the daily headlines he wrote. He wanted to answer the questions: Who were these people and how did they become radicalized?

This resulted in a careful profiling of approximately 40 people associated with the organization. With a few exceptions, they had no criminal record. For most of them, Flynn said, they wouldn’t have done any of this if they had never met Mathews.

“This guy was very charismatic,” Flynn said.

Flynn consulted on the film and was impressed by how authentic the cast and crew wanted it to be.

His co-writer Gerhardt died in 2015. Flynn said Gerhardt always thought it would be a good film because it was a true crime story about cops and robbers. He distributed some of Gerhardt’s ashes on the film set and at the premiere at the Venice Film Festival.

“No end to racism”

In “The Silent Brotherhood,” Flynn republished an image by Spokesman Review photographer John Kaplan of Mathews in which he confronts a woman protesting an Aryan Nations rally at Riverfront Park in June 1983.

The woman held a sign that read, “Destroy racism.”

“What we say in the book is that unfortunately there is no end to racism,” Flynn said. “It’s been around for thousands of years, it’s never going to end, you have to constantly deal with it. That was the shocking conclusion Gary and I came to.”

“This could happen again”

Manis agreed. He paraphrased something that David Lane, a prominent member of the Order, had said after his imprisonment – that the concept of the Order still existed and all it would take was a spark to bring it back.

“I’ve always thought about that,” Manis said. “It could happen again.”

There are still people in the area today who view the order positively, he said.

Today, Manis’ house overlooking Hayden Lake is like a museum. Inside there are taxidermied African animals as trophies from past safaris.

A recurring motif in the film is that Husk’s character hunts a moose but hesitates to shoot. This is contrasted with encounters between Husk and Mathews, in which they also hesitate to shoot each other.

But Manis, a hunter at heart, wouldn’t have hesitated to shoot the moose.

“The Order” will be in cinemas exclusively from December 6th.

James Hanlon’s reporting for The Spokesman-Review is funded in part by Report for America and by members of the Spokane community. As such, this story has been republished under a Creative Commons license.