In Bad Company: America's Terrorist Underground [Hardcover]

Mark S. Hamm (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1555534929 | ISBN-13: 978-1555534929 | Publication Date: November 1, 2001

The dramatic sieges at Randy Weaver's cabin in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, combined with the FBI's reluctance to admit wrongdoing in those tragic confrontations, fueled a virulent hatred of the federal government that unified previously isolated voices within the extreme radical right movement. As a result, the scores of clandestine paramilitary cells that flourished in the aftermath of Ruby Ridge and Waco formed a loosely knit underground network with a shared goal to violently overthrow the U.S. government.

This gripping volume explores one of the most dangerous of those phantom cells-the Aryan Republican Army (ARA). Based on trial transcripts, interviews, a secret diary, newspaper accounts, and ethnographic research, Mark S. Hamm provides a compelling history of the ARA, its organizers, and the revolutionary group's significance in supporting acts of domestic terrorism, including its previously unrecognized role in Timothy McVeigh's devastating bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. He interweaves his narrative with a penetrating discussion of why people like McVeigh and the ARA members turn hatred into terrorist actions.

Hamm centers his riveting account of the ARA on the troubled life histories of founders Peter Kevin McGregor Langan and Richard "Wild Bill" Guthrie, as well as on profiles of the foot soldiers in the movement. He explores the similar social, cultural, and personal forces that attracted these men to the White Supremacy movement and Christian Identity, a theology that gives the blessing of God to the racist cause, and that drove them on a criminal path to terrorism. Drawing historical parallels with the motives and tactics of Jesse James and his gang's crime spree, Hamm focuses on how Langan and his paramilitary gang committed a string of professionally executed armed bank robberies to finance the overthrow of the federal government through such terrorist attacks as train derailments, assassinations, and bombings.

Hamm concludes this absorbing yet disconcerting journey through America's underground terrorist conspiracy by challenging the government's assertion that Timothy McVeigh acted as a lone wolf in the Oklahoma City bombing. Instead, he offers startling new evidence that connects McVeigh to the Aryan Republican Army.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With the roots and trappings of terrorism at the forefront of national consciousness, Hamm's study of domestic terrorism is especially timely. Hamm (Apocalypse in Oklahoma), a criminology professor at Indiana State University, offers a detailed look at the Aryan Republican Army (ARA), a radical right cell that he suspects actively assisted Timothy McVeigh. Based upon information from shared acquaintances, a reconstruction of McVeigh's movements in the months preceding the bombing and other circumstantial evidence, Hamm theorizes that the mysterious "John Doe 2" allegedly seen with McVeigh on the day of the bombing may have been an ARA member. These disaffected racists cast themselves, not unlike McVeigh, as patriots battling a corrupt federal government. Hamm interviewed the group's principal leader, Pete Langan, at length in prison, where he is serving a life sentence, and the account is based largely on his perspective. The colorful Langan took a few ideologically warped young men and led them on 22 successful bank robberies. Not your run-of-the-mill right-wing radical, Langan is a pre-operative transsexual. Hamm perceives sublimated homoerotic undercurrents among these neo-Nazis; Langan hid his sexuality from his gun-toting cohorts. He now blames his criminal actions on "`gender dysphoria.'" Despite Hamm's compelling perspective on right-wing subculture, his central theory that the ARA actively participated in the Oklahoma bombing is less than fully convincing, based as it is on only circumstantial evidence. Regardless, and despite the overlong, overly simplistic psychological portrait of Langan, the book will interest readers seeking more information about this violent subculture. Illus. not seen by PW.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Hamm explores the milieu of the Aryan Republican Army (ARA), whose six members "rode hell-for-leather through the . . . peculiar world of the radical right" in the 1990s, robbing banks and otherwise expressing their "righteous hatred" and often racist political goals. It isn't a pretty story, nor is everything in it what you might expect. Sporting two-inch-long fingernails and painted toenails, ARA kingpin Peter Langan "did not fit the stereotype of a 'typical' American neo-Nazi." Shaved completely except for his dyed, shoulder-length mane, "he had been taking black-market birth control pills" for months, and in the shoot-out before his capture, he didn't fire any of his many weapons. A preoperative transsexual, he was "a poster boy for Nazi homoeroticism," who resisted arrest because of "a conflict between his female personality and his role as the leader of the supermasculine" ARA. With more oblique twists and turns than fiction could sustain, Hamm's exploration of the underground that nurtured the likes of Tim McVeigh reminds us that, Osama bin Laden notwithstanding, homegrown kooks remain a threat. Mike Tribby
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 335 pages
• Publisher: Northeastern (November 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555534929
• ISBN-13: 978-1555534929
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,260,038 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #43 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Crime & Criminals  > Offenders

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

79 of 79 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars FATALLY FLAWED RESEARCH AND CONSLUSIONS, October 15, 2010

By 

E. Woods (Cincinnati, Ohio United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: In Bad Company: America's Terrorist Underground (Hardcover)

The author has offered himself as an expert in the field as a PhD, university criminology professor and author of numerous related materials.

Throughout the entire book there is not one footnote, not one attribution to connect definitive statements (statements offered as fact in most instances) or quotes to actual and credible sources. Instead, in the "Notes" section, the author states, "To facilitate the narrative, sources for each chapter have been gathered into one single note." Then follows a list of references grouped by chapter. This is hardly an authoritative or scholarly method to support a work product that makes such significant conclusions; allegedly based on factual research.

Most of the conspiracy conclusions are centered on the thinnest of speculation by claiming broad overlapping timelines based on some simplistic statistical probability that allegedly connect Timothy McVeigh to Peter Langan, Richard Lee Guthrie, and others, and the Aryan Republican Army (ARA) to the Oklahoma City bombing.

The problem with the conclusions is that none of the source material is properly identified and quoted, or, is erroneously used to prove a weak theory.

For instance, the author bases much of his conclusions on the ninety-one page FBI initial two-week debriefing (FD-302) of Guthrie and Guthrie's "manuscript" (a 315 page handwritten story, entitled The Taunting Bandits, he wrote in jail between his arrest in January and his suicide in July 1996). I for one know that material because I wrote the FD-302, spent hundreds of hours with Guthrie, read the "manuscript" carefully, along with all the other material of an extensive nearly four year FBI investigation into ARA and its bank robbery and white supremacist activities.

Without attribution, the author, to use a phrase, cherry-picks, out of context statements that support this broad conspiracy theory--but completely ignores--explicit and factual material that totally disproves his weak conclusions. The book is peppered with; could have's, would have's, may's and perhap's, without foundation. Knowing the record of this case, it's apparent that the author made up things as he went along. It would be impossible to legitimately source some of the author's allegedly factual claims.

The factual and substantive errors in the book would literally take another book to document and explain. Aside from the erroneous statements in pages 171-174, two other key definitive statements that support the author's theories, page 291 that "...details of the connection were explained in "The Taunting Bandits," and page 263 regarding a supposed meeting with McVeigh in Arkansas, are simply not true and cannot be proven by the author.

If In Bad Company was fiction, it would have been either ignored or dismissed, but that it purports to be a factual basis for alternative theories for April 19, 1995, it is dreadfully lacking in credibility and does a disservice to the victims and their families.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Weak case for OKC bombing connection, January 26, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: In Bad Company: America's Terrorist Underground (Hardcover)

When Hamm sticks to telling the story of Pete Langan and his Aryan Republican Army cohorts, he does a passable job. His sometimes huge jumps in logic to connect Tim McVeigh to the ARA muddy the book. Hamm does not make as strong a case as he thinks when trying to convince a reader that McVeigh was tied to these guys. Hamm's thesis is that McVeigh was a "slash-and-burn" terrorist who didn't have the skill, patience or brains to plan a big project on his own (in his previous "Apocalypse," he makes the case that McVeigh was also a drug addict). Yet the guy sat silently and patiently for six years in prison and went to his death without opening his mouth while Langan told Hamm his story and Richard Guthrie chose prison suicide over time in the slammer. For a not-too-bright "slash-and-burn" criminal, McVeigh did pretty well keeping his mouth shut and being patient. A lot of the connections Hamm makes seem not too well grounded in fact. For example, he discusses a letter he received from McVeigh's Death Row pal David Hammer in reply to one Hamm sent to McVeigh about a robbery mentioned in the book. McVeigh supposedly tells Hammer to write back with the names of guys from the ARA, thereby proving to Hamm that McVeigh is acquainted with these guys. The content of the letter and any follow-up with Hammer or McVeigh then die in their tracks. There's not a lot of good reporting here, just a lot of theories.

17 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A Very Silly Book, January 20, 2002

By 

Tom Blair "dancer" (Perkiomenville, PA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: In Bad Company: America's Terrorist Underground (Hardcover)

Author Hamm has written a silly book. If he would just call it fiction stop pretending that it is an academic work it would be more honest - but then it would not be as good as books by Joseph Wambaugh or John Grisham.

For the record the largest FBI probe in history (prior to Sept. 11) investigated the Oklahoma City bombing for years and found none of the conspiracies that Hamm writes about.

Hamm claims that his subjects ("targets" would be a more appropriate word) - right-wingers - are motivated by "conspiracy theories." But he himself concocts a ridiculous conspiracy theory in which a half dozen sexually perverted teenagers - who would stick out in San Francisco much less the Midwest - run around the country for months robbing banks and planting bombs - all the while eluding the FBI.

This book reads like a long press release from the Anti-Defamation League or the Southern Poverty Law Center trying to drum up contributions to stop "white supremacy" - e.g. the silly rantings of poor, working-class white kids who, far from being supreme, have neither power, education, or influence in American society.

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Hamm's silly conspiracy-mongering is a sad indictment of Indiana State University which allows him to masquerade as a criminologist.

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