Neo-Nazi Order member released from prison after radicalizing terrorist group

December 05, 2024

Jeff Tischauser and Hannah Gais

Content warning: This article contains graphic language, including antisemitic and racist rhetoric and descriptions of antisemitic violence. Reader discretion is advised.

A high-ranking member of The Order, a defunct U.S. neo-Nazi group responsible for the murder of a Jewish radio host in Colorado in 1984, is set to be released from federal custody, where he once networked with the leaders of a terrorist organization based in northern Europe, a Hatewatch investigation has revealed.

U.S. District Judge Walter McGovern sentenced Richard Scutari, The Order’s head of security, in June 1986 to 60 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to racketeering and conspiracy charges. Scutari, who has been residing in a prerelease center in Orlando, Florida, since July 2024, will be released on Jan. 21 after serving roughly 38 years for participating in the organization’s violent crimes, according to documents Hatewatch obtained via a public records request from the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

While in prison, Scutari maintained extensive connections with white supremacist groups in the U.S. and Europe. His correspondence with white supremacist activists in Sweden and Finland throughout the late 1990s and 2000s encouraged them to form a series of organizations that would become the Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM), a pan-Nordic neo-Nazi group, according to published correspondence and Hatewatch’s conversation with a former NRM leader. The U.S. Department of State named NRM and three of its leaders as Specially Designated Global Terrorists in July 2024, citing its members’ violent attacks, including the of a refugee center and plots against “political opponents, protesters, journalists, and other perceived adversaries.”

“[Scutari] had the propensity to unify people,” Brad Galloway, a former neo-Nazi leader, told Hatewatch in an interview. Galloway, who now works closely with the anti-extremist group , corresponded with Scutari in the early 2000s while helping lead the U.S.-based racist skinhead group Volksfront.

Scutari’s release is set to follow the December release of a historical crime thriller film about The Order.

Founded and operated by Robert J. Mathews from September 1983 to December 1984, The Order was based in Washington and sought to create a whites-only state in the Pacific Northwest. The group created an assassination list, murdered Jewish radio host Alan Berg and robbed more than $4.1 million from a bank and three armored trucks. It used the money to fund its activities and distribute to other groups within the white power movement. Members of The Order also produced counterfeit money and murdered a law enforcement officer in Missouri.

Hatewatch reached out to Scutari for comment via certified mail but did not receive a response in time for publication.

‘He had a radicalizing effect on me’

During his time in prison, Scutari corresponded with and advised NRM leaders.

NRM was born out of a network of Swedish neo-Nazi groups in the 1990s. Klas Lund established the Swedish Resistance Movement in 1997, upon his release from prison after serving a six-year sentence for bank robbery. Previously, (Vitt Ariskt Motstånd, or VAM) in 1990 — a Swedish neo-Nazi network modeled after The Order. Lund’s Swedish Resistance Movement would later expand to include branches in other northern European countries, operating under the umbrella of NRM. Today, NRM in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Finland.

According to U.S. law, the federal government can impose sanctions on Specially Designated Global Terrorists, like NRM and its leaders, as well as prohibit persons within the U.S. from providing them with financial or other forms of material support.

Esa Henrik Holappa, a former neo-Nazi leader in Finland, told Hatewatch in an interview that he began corresponding with Scutari when he was 17. In 2003, after he came across an advertisement in a British far-right magazine encouraging readers to write and voice their support for Scutari and other white supremacists in prison, Holappa wrote the former Order member a letter. At the time, Scutari was in ADX Florence, a supermax prison in Colorado designed for extremely violent prisoners deemed too risky for maximum security prison.

“I think the first letter — I think it was pretty short. I just introduced myself, and I said that I’m this 17-year-old National Socialist living in Finland,” Holappa told Hatewatch.

Holappa said he corresponded with Scutari for about 10 years and that the white supremacist leader had a strong impact on his development in the movement. In 2008, he founded the Finnish Resistance Movement. From its inception, a 2020 report from the European Center for Populism Studies Holappa’s group as “the most militant Finnish Nazi organization.”

Holappa led the group, which of the broader NRM, until 2012. In 2016, he the neo-Nazi movement.

“I do think [Scutari] had a radicalizing effect on me,” Holappa said. “Because at that time, what was appealing to me in Nazism was its military side. I was really excited about military history.”

In their letters, Holappa recalled, the pair talked about Scutari’s time in the U.S. Navy.

“I wouldn’t, or couldn’t say, that at that time I was too deep in the ideology,” Holappa said. “Even if I was then, of course, considered a neo-Nazi. But I mean that he brought the ideology.”

He recalled that Scutari encouraged him to read white supremacist literature to deepen his involvement in the movement. These texts included William Gayley Simpson’s Which Way Western Man?, a 1978 antisemitic book that described “organized Jewry as a world power entrenched in every country of the White man’s world,” as well as William Luther Pierce’s The Turner Diaries, the book upon which Mathews modeled The Order.

Published correspondence with NRM leaders

Holappa and Magnus Söderman, a Swedish neo-Nazi and another NRM leader, published their correspondence with Scutari in a 2011 collection titled Unbroken Warrior: The Richard Scutari Letters.

The published letters span from June 2000 to July 2010 and only include Scutari’s responses to Holappa and Söderman. In them, Scutari regularly gave advice to Holappa and Söderman on organizational strategy, discussed the importance of ideology and encouraged them to network with other neo-Nazi activists.

Hatewatch reached out to Söderman for comment over a private message on the publishing platform Substack. Söderman didn’t respond. On Dec. 2, Söderman posted a comment to his channel on Telegram, saying that in the event of someone being contacted by the Southern Poverty Law Center, “you make sure to make it clear to [the ��Խ�] that you do not, under any circumstances, ever want anything to do with them.”

Söderman has continued to in white supremacist organizations in Sweden, as well as to praise The Order and Scutari on social media, according to posts viewed by Hatewatch on Facebook and X, the website formerly known as Twitter. In a tweet sent on the night of the 2016 election, for instance, Söderman wrote, “When Trump win [sic], we must demand that he, as POTUS, releases Richard Scutari from prison!”

Scutari advised Söderman while the latter was , a publishing house tied to David Lane, another former Order member. A court sentenced Lane to 190 years in prison, in part for his participation in the murder of Alan Berg. The name of the publishing house is a reference to a 14-word slogan Lane coined in prison that has become iconic among adherents to his white supremacist ideology.

“There is room for both views on revolution,” Scutari wrote to Söderman on Oct. 14, 2000. “Those who think the time now [sic] should quit running their mouths and start acting. Those who do not think the time is now should prepare for when the time is right, while at the same time they should be working on building a cultural foundation.

“A revolution will begin when it’s [sic] time comes and not one day before,” Scutari added. “And it will come when the people of differing opinions are pushed into it.”

Scutari regularly served as a bridge between activists. In his letters to Söderman, he described corresponding with Colin Jordan, a British neo-Nazi activist who believed that a “vanguard” of elites could pave the way for a national socialist revolution. He offered to educate others on Söderman’s and other NRM leaders’ strategies for ushering in a fascist state. In one letter, dated Feb. 23, 2007, Scutari praised Holappa, describing him as “young” and as someone who “has come to be a National Socialist partly through his correspondence with me.”

“He shows a lot of promise. I will send him your email address. I would like to see him get involved with any umbrella group we start,” Scutari wrote.

In a Jan. 18, 2010, letter to Holappa, Scutari described the Swedish and Finnish activists as the future of the movement and implied they were carrying on his legacy.

“[Y]ou have the makings within you to become a major voice for our cause,” he wrote. “You and Magnus and Klas are the new guard. We old timers had our day. It is now time for us to step back and turn the reins over to you.”

‘We should all be networking’

In addition to networking with NRM leaders from prison, Scutari remained an active participant in the neo-Nazi movement through his contributions to multiple publications and his correspondence with various neo-Nazi leaders.

In the early 2000s, Scutari began writing racist articles for white supremacist publications alongside David Lane.

These writings kept The Order relevant in the movement and helped its members maintain a base of support while incarcerated. In 2007, about 100 racist skinheads held a “Free The Order” rally outside a federal building in Los Angeles to support Scutari and other members. Neo-Nazi activists in the U.S. and abroad also encouraged their followers to send funds and write letters to Scutari and other Order members in prison, portraying them as political prisoners.

Scutari described building these connections with other neo-Nazis as crucial in his writings and correspondence with other neo-Nazis.

“There will come a time when all you guys have to go underground and operate covertly. This is why it is important that we should all be networking with others in other countries,” Scutari wrote to Söderman in a June 20, 2008, letter espousing antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Among these networking strategies was a Facebook page on which an apparent Scutari supporter or supporters started to share his writings and updates on his legal situation in July 2011.

The Facebook page continued to post information about Scutari throughout 2024. Meta, the company that owns the Facebook platform, removed the page after Hatewatch reached out for comment in November. A spokesperson for the company said that the page violated Facebook’s policies on .

On Dec. 12, 2017, someone with access to that Facebook page shared a letter from Scutari describing an encounter the former Order member had with Matthew Hale, the white supremacist leader of the World Church of the Creator who has been serving a 40-year prison sentence since 2004 for soliciting the murder of a judge. Hale’s group said that “your race is your religion” and Jewish people and non-whites are “mud races.” The group had been involved in a string of criminal violence in the 1990s and early 2000s, including the firebombing of an NAACP office in Tacoma, Washington.

In the letter, Scutari described having a chance encounter with Hale at a prisoner transfer point earlier that year.

“He looked old and gray headed,” Scutari wrote. “I did not recognize. I heard him talking to someone in another cage and we started talking. We exchange [sic] names and were both happily surprised to be able to talk to each other. We never met before but did correspond before he ended up in prison.”

In an earlier post, the administrator of the Facebook page wrote that Hale and Scutari had met “at the OK City Federal Transfer Center.” The same post shared a petition to release Hale from custody.

Hatewatch was unable to determine who set up the Facebook page in 2011. However, the administrator or administrators running it have continued to provide updates on Scutari’s legal situation, including news of his release to a halfway house on July 17.

A March 17, 2019, post shared a letter from Scutari. It was two days after an avowed white supremacist murdered 51 people and injured 89 others in a livestreamed terrorist attack on multiple mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. “Things are going to blow up in this country. I hope I get a chance to live for a few years in the so-called free world before they do,” Scutari wrote.

In the same letter, he discussed what he hoped to do when released.

The Christchurch perpetrator “14 words,” a reference to the slogan that former Order member David Lane coined, on one of the assault rifles he used in the attack. In his manifesto, he decried immigration as “WHITE GENOCIDE,” a term Lane popularized in the late 1980s through a manifesto that he wrote in prison.

Assessing The Order’s continued influence

Once Scutari is released from custody on Jan. 21, 2025, Randolph Duey, 73, will become the last remaining member of The Order in prison with a chance of release. Duey is scheduled for release in 2043. David Tate, a member who killed a police officer in Missouri, is serving life in prison. The remaining 14 members of The Order whom authorities charged with crimes have either died in prison or have been released.

Scutari and other Order members “used to brag a lot about what they did, and that they would get out,” Brad Galloway, the ex-neo-Nazi, told Hatewatch.

As one of Mathews’ closest advisers and the head of security for The Order, Scutari played a key role in the group. Scutari vetted new members and worked to find informants in their ranks. He used a voice stress analyzer to gauge whether members were telling the truth during these investigations, according to multiple reports.

Scutari was also among those Order members who planned and participated in the robbery of an armored truck in Ukiah, California, about two hours north of San Francisco, which netted the group $3.6 million in cash. He was also in a car near the scene of Alan Berg’s murder and helped Mathews plan the attack, though he did not participate in the shooting itself, according to prepared for the Department of Justice.

Though the group was short-lived, Mathews and The Order have animated and inspired the broader white supremacist movement throughout the U.S. and abroad since the 1980s. A speech at the 1983 National Alliance conference, which continues to circulate among white supremacist communities on social media and on various websites, gets to the heart of The Order’s recruitment strategy. In the speech, Mathews mixed antisemitism and anti-Black racism with long-standing grievances of white farmers: banks, federal ownership of land and economic insecurity.

“How the weaselly, little city dwelling Jew fears and suspicions, the Aryan Farmer. What a contrast! What a contrast in mind and body between the two,” Mathews said in his 1983 speech. Elsewhere, of The Order, he said, “We have broken the chains of Jewish thought.”

In his short time as a leader of The Order, Mathews distributed hundreds of thousands of dollars that his group earned through counterfeiting and robberies to white supremacist activists throughout the U.S., much of which was never recovered. Racist skinheads and other white supremacist activists still honor Mathews’ death on Dec. 8, 1984, as Martyr’s Day.

J.M. Berger, a longtime researcher of the radical right and author of Extremism, explained to Hatewatch the scope of the group’s influence.

“The original Order was extremely influential and inspired a lot of imitation before there was social media,” Berger said. “During a period in history when it was decidedly not cool to be a white nationalist. Whereas I think the social environment right now is much different, and it’s much more receptive to people being white nationalists.”

These imitators include groups like the Aryan Republican Army, a neo-Nazi group in the U.S. that robbed 22 banks between 1994 and 1996, in addition to Klas Lund’s White Aryan Resistance, the predecessor to NRM in Sweden. Both modeled their structure and activities on The Order.

With the popularity of social media and growing acceptance of some white nationalist attitudes, Berger expressed concern that “[t]here’s a much bigger and more receptive audience than there was before” for a group like The Order.

Mathews’ death and the multiple federal cases against Order members and affiliates also shaped law enforcement’s approach to white supremacist groups for years to come.

Michael German, a former FBI agent and fellow at the Brennan Center for ��Խ�, told Hatewatch that Mathews’ ability to withstand an extended assault by federal agents while locked in his home on Whidbey Island “justified the further militarization of SWAT teams.”

Though multiple members of The Order faced long prison sentences for their involvement with the group, the investigation into the group fell short in other cases. German pointed to the , a 1988 trial of 14 white supremacists including Scutari and several other members of The Order. In it, the government sought to show that the group’s crimes were part of a coordinated campaign. Charges against one defendant were dismissed for lack of evidence, and the remaining ones were acquitted on all charges.

“The failure there, I think, inhibited broader investigation for the movement,” German told Hatewatch.

These challenges, German said, continue today.

“One of the difficulties with the FBI approach, which is often mirrored in state and local law enforcement, is to treat each white supremacist attack as a ‘lone actor,’ ‘lone terrorist,’ ‘lone shooter.’ ‘Lone wolf,’ they sometimes call them,” German said.

The FBI’s refusal to “document and map domestic terrorism incidents,” he added, “blinds them to broader networks.”

Picture at top: Richard Scutari has remained an active participant in the neo-Nazi movement through his contributions to multiple publications and his correspondence with various neo-Nazi leaders. (Credit: ��Խ�)

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‘He had a radicalizing effect on me’

Published correspondence with NRM leaders

‘We should all be networking’

Assessing The Order’s continued influence

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