Cool Zone Media.
In April of twenty twenty, we were all talking about what we were going to buy with our twelve hundred dollars COVID stimulus check. I vaguely recall making the decision to go ahead and bite the bullet and buy a toaster. No more preheating the whole oven, just a toast of little bread in my house. Life's too short not to enjoy a crisp pot sandwich from time to time, and starting to feel like life might be even shorter. It
was a fraud time. We all coped differently, but about three hundred miles south of where I was obsessively reading reviews for small appliances, an unnamed witness was chatting with an acquaintance at Camp La June. He was thinking about using his check to buy a handgun at a nearby store in Jacksonville, North Carolina, and he was far from the only one with this idea. The FBI reported a twenty percent increase in gun sales over the previous year
during those early months of the pandemic. I guess when Americans get scared, they turn to guns, even when that doesn't really make any sense. But everybody wanted a gun even beyond the average American lust for guns. So lines were long, and prices were high, and paperwork was backlocked. The acquaintance our unnamed witness was talking to about the purchase.
Said, oh, no, you don't want to do that.
I can get you a great deal in a Glocken nineteen with no serial number for just fifteen hundred dollars. You'll even get a silencer. Before discussing the details of the deal, Liam Collins placed his phone inside of the microwave.
For those of you who only have normal friends and have never been asked to put your cell phone in the microwave, the idea is that the appliance acts as a Faraday cage, preventing the device from transmitting a signal of any kind, so it can't be used to monitor a conversation you don't want the government to know about.
I'm not sure this technique is terribly worthwhile.
I mean, the government can get a warrant to track your phone to WI or tap your phone, but I've never read a case where a warrant was obtained to use someone's cell phone as a passive listening device. I'm sure it's possible, I just don't know how likely it is that the government is using your phone this way, but it's a common enough idea in certain circles. And with the spone safely stowed in the microwave, William Collins
started cooking something a little hotter than ramen. We opened the door to the investigation that revealed a neo Nazi terror plot to kick off a race war. I'm Molly Conger, and this is a weird blue guys. I usually start the process of sorting out a story by making a timeline. Chronological order isn't always the best way to tell a story, but it's the best way I found to understand how the pieces fit together so I can try to make
sense of it for us. I lay out every scrap of information I can find in the court record and existing reporting by other journalists, and all the odds and ends I can scrape together from the vast corners of the Internet. After I published a piece last year about a different weird little guy, he actually reached out to a journalist I know who had an existing source relationship with him and asked.
How did she know that thing about my grandmother? Well, it's my job to know.
I spent an entire day finding county court records for everyone you've ever met, and read a few dozen issues of your hometown newspaper from the early nineties. I'm kind of a weird little guy too, I guess, and I can get a little carried away. I mean, I'm deeply committed to placing everything in its proper context, but sometimes I've got four generations of a guy's family tree mapped out.
I'm looking at his cousin's wedding photos on Instagram, and I've got a copy of his grandparents marriage license saved to my desktop, and I realize I've lost the plot a little. In this case really complicated my process. With five defendants, three superseding indictments, and four years in court, it's hard to find a single beginning for the timeline. So than digging myself into a hole I can't get back out of, let's just start in twenty fifteen, Shortly
before these five men's lives began to intertwine. In twenty fifteen, Liam Jan Montgomery Collins, Justin Wade Hermansen, and Joseph Marino were all still in high school. Marino would soon have a chance encounter with a National Guard recruiter in his high school cafeteria. Collins was doing a little modeling, walking in a New York Fashion Week show for the Japanese
designer North Hooleywood. The summer before his junior year, Marine Lance Corporal Jordan Duncan was living in Latvia studying Russian at the Defense Language Institute's Foreign Language Center, and Paul James Kreischuk Junior, not to be confused with his father, Paul Senior, a retired Suffolk County police officer, started more than fifty pornographic films that year, mostly in a genre called facial abuse, despite telling an industry publication the year
before that he was getting out of the business, calling the work he did in facial abuse the most degrading job he'd ever done. Now, I'm not here to judge anybody's private life. I mean, beyond the premise of the show, I guess, which is kind of me passing some judgement of.
These guys' lives.
But as far as consensual adult film work, as long as everyone's safe and doing work they've chosen to do, that's not my business. That's not what we're here to figure out. But personally, I'm not very knowledgeable about pornography. I fear I may be outing myself as kind of apprude here, but I wanted to figure out if this was actually as gross as it sounds, or if it just seemed gross to me because it's not my cup of tea. So I had to do some research here
that I really wish I had not. I read a few industry blogs, some forums for both performers and consumers, some interviews with performers who worked in the genre and with this particular studio.
And some legal documents.
According to a definition used by the examining attorney in an official decision by the US Trademark and Patent Office denying a trademark application, the term facial abuse is the act of sexually humiliating your partner by abusing and degrading her face during rough oral sex, by holding her head deep on your genitalia, slapping her face, and talking to her in a degrading manner during the process. And that's the nicest way to describe what I saw. The company
seeking that trademark. D and D Media is listed as the production company behind one hundred and ninety two of the three hundred and eighty five credits listed on the Internet Adult Film Database profile for Polly Harker, the alias Kraishak, performed under for thirteen years. I regret every second I
spent finding out more about this. I know, I said I'd like to know everything about a guy before I start writing, but I don't actually need to see him naked, and I really didn't expect to see him pour a dog bowl full of a woman's own vomit over her face. This is, unfortunately not the first time my research has led me to see aspiring terrorist's penis, but it is, without a doubt, the worst. Again, I don't want to put my own moral judgment on this aspect of things.
I'm not saying that a guy with a kink that makes my stomach hurt is necessarily evil. So I really did some extra digging here, and I found several women who had done work with dn E Media and with Paul Kreischuk specifically. I had really hoped. As I was gritting my teeth through the videos, I found that the women were just phenomenal actors that they were putting on a convincing show of being terrified of being unable to breathe. I understand there's a market for that kind of thing.
I hoped that they'd all agreed ahead of time that she would only be pretending to sob and what looked like her desperately trying to get the man to stop was only scripted drama. And maybe that's the case for some of the videos, but several women have come forward over the years to say that was not their experience with D and D media. In twenty eleven, DNE released a facial abuse scene between Kreischuk and a woman performing under the name Clara Bo on the form Adult DVD Talk.
Even fans of the genre unsettled, with one user writing they were pretty rough on her, even for fa multiple and hard slaps to the face, prolonged upside down djays both over the shoulder and on the couch, and not one but two body slams. I am sad she even took it for five minutes, let alone ten. Another user responded the editing was weird. They must have had to cut a lot of stuff out so it wouldn't look criminal. I noticed her eyes were closed for the most part
of the second half. I wonder if he told her to do that to hide the bloodshot eye. She had on her blog. Claire herself replied to the thread back in twenty eleven, posting, to be honest, I don't know if I can look at it without dredging up the fucked up feelings it gave me. I'm all for some rough sex, I was happy with my scene for public disgrace, and I can't wait for Princess Donna to get back to the USA so I can get it.
On bound gang bangs.
But facial abuse was exactly what they say in the title abuse with a facial.
At the end.
So this isn't just a woman who is regretful about her time in the industry or someone who showed up to shoot in a genre she was inexperienced with. She's shot BDSM and kink content. People are getting hurt for real, she wrote in twenty eleven. It's not the same as kink or typical BDSM. In twenty twenty three, she spoke again about the experience with journalist Paul mulholland. She told moholland that there was an agreed upon tap out signal she needed to stop for any reason, but when she
tried to stop the scene, she was ignored. I tapped his thighs because I couldn't breathe anymore, and he didn't care. He actually grabbed the back of my head and pulled me closer, and I had to from kneeling push on his thighs, get my feet underneath me, and literally launched my entire body weight backward to get off of him.
They didn't cut this from the video. Paul Kryshut, covered in distinctive tattoos, can be seen ignoring BOE's attempt to end the scene as the blood vessels in her eyes burst. A woman who performs as Felicity Feeline says the videos she did for D and E Media are her greatest regret of her nine years in the industry, and she's made several videos about the violent shoots and the subsequent harassment and coercion from the director, though she doesn't name him.
Both of the credits on her Internet Adult film Database profile for DNA shoots are videos starring opposite Kraishuk.
And that's what their goal is. They want to completely ruin a woman on camera, and they will do anything in their power legally to do it. Maybe they overstep the legal boundaries at points, but that's to be determined by someone in law, because I don't want to go there.
In other videos, I sincerely regret watching Kraishuk chokes and slaps a black performer for rating her and calling her racial slurs as she sobs if her experience was anything like Clara's or Felicity's or any of the other women who've come forward about this company not acting. So that's
who pol was before all of this starts. His last pornographic film was released in twenty eighteen, so it seems likely he stopped shooting porn in twenty seventeen, which is about when he made the career switch to illegally manufacturing firearms for guys. He met on a Nazi message board in twenty sixteen, when Liam Collins was a senior at New Providence High School in a northern New Jersey suburb. He started posting on Iron March.
The forum first.
Appeared online in twenty eleven, launched by a Russian nationalist named Alisher Mukitnadoff, and in its six years online it was an incubator for neo Nazi ideology around the world. Fascist organizations like National Action in the UK, Adam Waffin, and the us Skidas in Lithuania and Antipodian Resistance in Australia were born on the forum. These and other organizations grew and networked, recruiting online posters into real life terror cells.
The site disappeared without explanation one day in November twenty seventeen. The webmaster for The Daily Stormer at the time, Andrew Ahenheimer, perhaps better known as Weave, speculated that there was international pressure to take the site offline after an incident in Florida earlier that year, Adam Woffin founder Brandon Russell was arrested when police found a stash of explosives and bomb
making supplies in his garage. The police were only in his garage because his roommate fellow Adam Woffin member Devin Arthur's and Iron March user, the vice of WULFA, told investigators that Russell planned to target infrastructure and synagogues, and Arthur's was only talking to the police because he'd been arrested for murdering their other two roommates, Andrew Onischuk and Jeremy Himmelman, in the apartment the four shared. Now obviously the double murder and the bombing plot are the bigger
deal here. But do you just want to point out that Devon should have put a little more effort into the screening. These guys love costplaying the whole Hitler vibe, using German words in their handles. But if he's one white wolf, it'd be der weis a wolf. If he's multiple white wolf wolves, it's device in Vilfa. The vice of Volfa isn't anything. I guess it doesn't matter because it'll be twenty five years to life before he logs
back on. Other former posters on the Terrorism Training for Him believed the Russian government pressured Mukitnadov to take the site offline because users were recruiting and raising money for the Ukrainian Nu Nazi paramilitary group Azov Battalion, which is considered a terrorist organization by the Russian government. A twenty twenty investigation by the Russian language office of PHOEBC News.
Doesn't really support that theory.
Mkitnadov was still living in Moscow and was never charged by the Russian government, something they would presumably do if they felt he was to blame for funding Asov. Both Mukitnadov and a spokesperson for Azov declined to speak with reporters from the BBC, so, despite speculation from his fans that he'd been murdered by Russian intelligence agents, he was alive enough in twenty twenty to hang up on a reporter.
But before the site disappeared, it was a place for lonely Nazis to connect and in September of twenty sixteen, when Liam Collins was starting his senior year of high school, he was already recruiting members for a group project, as he called it, as Niez Gooda. He exchanged messages with a user named Panzerlier, a twenty three year old just finishing up a three year stint in the US Army. Colins said he was forming a group that would eventually
become a paramilitary organization. He planned to join the Marines after high school to get the training he would need to lead the group, and was looking to recruit members with military and policing experience.
I guess Panserliter.
Passed the teens Vibe check because he became a member of the Fledgling group. A few years later, when he was outed as an Iron March poster and lost his job at the Lafayette, Indiana Police Department. Joseph Zacharrek would cooperate with federal investigators and testify before the grand jury then indicted Collins. The core group really came together when Collins, as Niezgoda, started corresponding with Paul Kreischach, who was posting
on Iron March as visions from Patmos. In early twenty seventeen, Collins, still a high school senior, recruited the adult film actor.
To the crew.
Just a few months later, the growing group took a camping trip together, finally getting offline and meeting in real life to discuss their plans for the future. By August, Collins had joined the Marine Corps and moved down to Camp Lea. June, on Iron March, he posted that he had a tight knit crew of x mill and security that he was training with, going on hikes and doing
live fire exercises. Collins posted that he couldn't really get into specifics online, writing that it's an inner circle thing, but it will serve its purpose when the time comes. Think of it as a modern day ss Kryshuck laid out his theory of operations in a post on Iron March in early twenty seventeen.
First order of business is knocking down the system, mounting it and smashing its face until it has been beaten past the point of death. Eventually we will have to bring the rifles out and go to work. We will have to hit the streets and strike as many blows to the remaining power structure as we can. Keep it on the ropes, forget the ponds, and go for the knights, kings, and queens. Second order of business is the seizing of
territory and the Balkanization of North America. Buying property in remote areas that are already predominantly white and right leaning, networking with locals, training, farming, and stockpiling. Essentially, we are laying the framework for a guerrilla organization and a takeover of local government and industry. Start buying property now in the types of regions mentioned above, and get to work
on building your own group. As time goes on in this conflict, we will expand our territories and slowly take back the land that is rightfully ours. As we build our forces in our numbers, we will move into the urban areas and clear them out. This will be a ground we're very reminiscent of Iraq, as we will essentially be facing an insurgent force made up of criminals and gang members.
And he meant it.
You don't have to give these guys credit for anything, but you can't say he didn't mean it. A lot of guys talk like this online, but they don't all start an illegal amateur gunsmithing operation and move to Idaho. It's not entirely clear when Paul Kreischuk started making his own guns. The earliest payment listed across the slew of indictments as a transfer from one of his co conspirators, Joseph Marino, to Paul Kreischuk, in September of twenty eighteen.
The documents don't clearly spell out what that payment was for, but all the other money transfers discussed in the indictments are linked to shipments of firearms or their components. Kreishak had recruited Marino to join the group earlier that year.
In February of twenty eighteen, according to testimony from John Little, the investigator from the Naval Criminal Investigative Services assigned to this case, Marino had attempted to join Identity Europa, a now defunct white supremacist organization earlier that year, so he was clearly shopping around for the right fit, just looking for the right Nazi group for his interests. Little's testimony doesn't elaborate on this at all, but I did go on a bit of a fishing trip to see what
I could find about this my own. He didn't find anything terribly satisfying, but he did find a single message. In the discord leaks published by Unicorn Riot in February of twenty eighteen, a user posted in the identity Europa Discord's new member chat, Hey I'm Joseph from New Jersey. My interviewer was aj But a YouTube channel with the same username has playlists that includes several videos of cops getting shot, a genre of video mentioned in the court records.
Apparently the crew liked to watch things like this as part of their training, preparing to fight police to the death if the time came, and critiquing the way the officers reacted to getting shot, saying things like a true warrior wouldn't show pain. That YouTube account also added a video to a playlist about how National Guardsmen can prepare for overseas deployment at around the same time that Marino's National Guard unit did deploy to Cutter in twenty nineteen.
So I can't tell you with ironclad certainty that the discord post I found is the one the investigator was talking about, but it seems like a pretty solid fit. And I guess Identity EUROPEO wasn't a good fit because he never posted there again. But back to the guns, because that's where all of this started. In April of twenty twenty, investigators with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service NCIS sat down with that confidential witness, the guy who wanted
to use his COVID bucks to buy a glock. When Liam Collins tried to persuade him to purchase the weapon from him instead of going to a store in town, Collins showed the potential customer videos of the kinds of equipment he could get. The video showed a man with very distinctive tattoos firing a pistol with a homemade silencer. John Little, the NCIS agent, later testified that they wanted to find photos of Kryshuk that would show that part of his arm to determine if Kraishuk was the man
in the video. Obviously they had his driver's license photo, but you can't see his tattoos in any of the photos the government already had.
So he set off to do a little.
Open source research online and what he found was Paully Harker.
So this NCIS.
Agent absolutely watched some of the same pornographic videos I had to watch while researching this, and you can probably guess that you can definitely see the tattoos in the video. And given that this initial interview was with NCIS, not the FBI, we can guess that this confidential witness was likely a fellow marine, So credit where credit is due, I guess at least one marine in this story was offered the chance to do crimes of the Nazi and said, I think I got to talk to somebody about this
instead of sign me up. And the NCIS investigators were probably very pleased to hear their new cooperating witness say the name Liam Collins. Just a few months earlier, they'd
tried to talk to Collins himself about something else. When the contents of the defunct Iron March forum were leaked online in late twenty nineteen, Collins was quickly identified in the data Newsweek published an article on November eighth, twenty nineteen, identifying Collins as an active duty marine whose Iron March posts were riddled with slurs and plans to create his
own paramilitary force. When NCIS investigators attempted to interview him about the allegations in the article, he asked for an attorney and declined to comment. There's no information available about what follow up occurred internally between that November interview and this confidential witness coming forward in April, but I really want to believe that they were developing their own investigation into Collins during that time before this gift fell into
an elapse. Instead of arresting Collins immediately for trying to sell an illegal silencer to this witness, they set up a meeting. They needed their cooperating witness to actually buy the gun. Offering to sell it to him wasn't enough. They needed him on record making the transaction, and so on April twenty fourth, twenty twenty, the cooperating witness transferred fifty teen hundred dollars provided to him by the government
to Collins for the pistol and the silencer. Collins told the buyer that the money would then be transferred to someone he had done many similar deals with, someone he's known for years and trusts completely, even showing the witness the Venmo account he was sending the money to. The Venmo account was under the actual name for the man who would fulfill the order, Paul Kreischuk. An affidavit written for a search warrant later that summer says investigators were
then able to follow that money. They went into Kreischuk's personal bank account, and he then used that money to make several purchases for the materials he'd need to fulfill the order.
Now, I'm not a gun guy.
Gun guys are some of the most pedantic little nerds on the planet, and so I'm going to say this preemptively. I do not want you to explain gun guy stuff to me. I did some research, and I consulted a couple of gun guys I know, and this is correct enough for us all to make it through the episode. One of the things Kreishuk purchased with the government's money from this controlled buy was called a solvent trap. If you, like me, are not a gun guy, you don't know
what that is. So I was looking online websites where you can buy solvent traps, and the odd copy on these websites seems convincing enough. It's a little tube you can screw onto the end of your gun when you're cleaning it, and its alleged purpose is to collect the excess solvent that's used to clean the weapon. So convenient, right, But as I read through some of these sites, it felt like I was being lied to. If this is such a necessary object that everyone needs every time they
clean their gun, why haven't they always existed? Why have I never heard of this being an issue that every gun owner is facing every day, big puddles of solvent every time you clean your gun. And I feel like I've seen people clean guns inside. If this is something that makes a large mess with a volatile chemical, surely you wouldn't do it inside. So I asked some gun guys, it's not a thing. Nobody uses a solvent trap to
clean a gun. It's a flimsy gus story for an object that can be easily modified with minimal skill to create a homemade silencer. And silencers are not completely illegal. It's very possible to own one legally, but you have to do some paperwork and pay some money and wait a little while, and then of course the government knows you have it, and they are banned at the state level, and a handful of states, including New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island, three states where we'll see him making
or shipping them to. So based on the information they got from this controlled buy with their cooperating witness, they now know that Liam Collins is selling guns and silencers in North Carolina. He's sending that money to Paul Kreyschuk and Idaho, and then Kryshuck is doing a little amateur gunsmithing, and then he's putting these guns in the mail. And now this isn't arts and crafts between friends or small business entrepreneurship. That's gun trafficking. And they already know Collins
was active on Iron March. They've tried asking him about it, and the investigation quickly leads them to kreischuk'sccount and the Iron March data too, and then to the conversations that Collins and Kreishach had been having together about creating a modern dass about buying land to the Pacific Northwest, about recruiting people with military backgrounds for a coming domestic conflict about arming themselves. Kishak had recently moved from New York
to Idaho, and he's making guns. This plan is already in motion. Based on the package they could confirm was the result of their controlled buy, investigators discovered that Kreischuk was using a fake driver's license with the name Sean Corkoran to rent a private mailbox in Idaho, and their cooperating witness was far from the only person receiving packages
from this Shan Corkoran. Financial records for Collins and Kreishuk showed numerous similar transactions involving the pair with apparent buyers, many of whom were identifiable as other Iron March posters or other active duty Marines. Investigators obtained warrants to intercept a trio of packages from that adres in Idaho and addressed to another marine in Collins's unit. Inside they found a pistol with no serial number and a silencer with the parts distributed across the three boxes. I guess so
it would be less suspicious, I don't know. A few days later there was another trio of packages with the same contents. Both times, investigators opened the packages, documented their contents, packed them back up and.
Put them back in the mail. So just because you haven't been caught doesn't mean you're not caught. Right.
You see this in a lot of investigations where they know exactly what you're doing, and they're watching you do it, and they're letting you do it enough times to get yourself in deeper trouble. So don't think that just because the package with your illegal gun arrived that it's all good now. So the packages go back in the mail, and then they waited outside the post.
Office to see who picked them up.
Physical surveillance showed Justin Hermannson, a marine in Collins unit, and another member of this Nazi paramilitary pick up one set of those packages. A few days later, when NCIS conducted another controlled meat with their cooperating witness, it was Hermanson who arrived to hand over the gun to the buyer. So they're kind of dead to rights here on the firearm trafficking. Collins and Kraaishak, and to a lesser degree Hermanson, have all participated in this scheme to make ship and
sell these guns and silencers. But now it's becoming clear that there's something else going on here. In July Liam
Collins bought a plane ticket to fly to Boise. Joseph Morino, that National guardsman in New Jersey who had made his own transfers directly to Kaishak the year before, bought a plane ticket too, and Jordan Duncan, a former Marine who had also made several transfers to Kaishak corresponding with packages mailed to him and his brother in Texas, was surveilled driving from San Antonio to Idaho and unloading a large number of very heavy boxes from his car into Kaishuk's garage.
What are they doing?
The investigators got a warrant to track Liam Collins's location by his cell phone during this trip, but he ultimately did not go. This was July twenty, twenty lifetime ago. There were pandemic related restrictions for active duty Marines that prevented him from traveling, but Joseph Marino, Jordan Duncan, and Liam Collins's little brother Tate did make the trip. FBI
agents surveiled the group when they met in Boise. Photos and videos were covered from the men's phones show them wearing the skull print half face mask closely associated with Adam Woffen. At the time shooting their guns and posing for group photos giving the Nazi salute. During that visit, they conducted several live fire training exercises out in the middle of nowhere. In August of twenty twenty, investigators installed a pole camera outside the post office near Camp La June,
where Collins and Hermanson were picking up these packages. They considered installing a pole camera outside Joseph Marino's home in New Jersey, probably to document the deliveries of stolen military equipment that Collins was having dropped off by a third party, but the lighting was no good and the camera never
went up. They conducted another controlled by with their cooperating witness, this time having the witness purchase a short barreled rifle and another silencer and confirming the details of the purchase over FaceTime with Collins. They got another warrant to track Liam Collins using his cell phone, and they got warrants for the iCloud accounts belonging to Paul Kreischuk, Jordan Duncan, Justin Hermanson, Liam Collins, and Tate Collins. Joseph Marino was
sparing that particular intrusion. The affidavit notes that he was a Samsung user, so he did not have an iCloud account, And now, unbeknownst to them, they are on a collision course with a federal indictment, and at the same time, they're ready to move past just mailing each other guns. They're ready to move on to the next phase. In August, Jordan Duncan and Paul Kreischuk were chatting about Duncan's upcoming
move to Boise. Kraischuk tells Duncan to go ahead and follow BLM Boise on Instagram because he's been getting a lot of really good intelligence from their posts, and Duncan writes, I'm like four weeks away from being there. Fam been thinking a lot more about stuff you and I need to be doing, and Kaishuk tells him playtime is over, writing he is looking forward to you getting out here so we can get shit done.
Duncan replies, Yeah, I feel you.
The closer I get to it, the more I think about everything we have to do, and brother, we are going to have to move some mountains. In September twenty twenty, Jordan Duncan takes a pretty serious pay cut to take a job up in Idaho and moves up to Boise to be near Kraishuk. Liam Collins is discharged from the Marines and sets off on a road trip that includes a stop in New Jersey to speak with Joseph Marino in person. In October, Justin Hermanson recruits another marine to
the group. Collins instructs this new member to buy a bunch of ten right and explosive that can be ignited by shooting at it. Paul Kreischuk was preparing to take the entrance exam to become a firefighter in Boise, and Liam Collins moves to Idaho, moving in with Jordan Duncan and Boise. On October sixteenth, twenty twenty, Joseph Zakerk, that police officer in Indiana is publicly identified in the Iron
Marsh Leaks. He is immediately fired and so just days before Jordan Duncan, Liam Collins, and Paul Kreischuk are arrested. They don't know they're about to be arrested. They're all in the group chat urging Zacharic to just move out to Boise to be with them. You know you've lost your job, you don't have anything else to do right now. Just come on out here with us. But after being publicly outed and losing his job, Zachark just wants out altogether.
It's just not worth it anymore, and he later tells federal agents that he's very worried the group will think that he talked to the cops, which is I guess kind of a silly thing to worry about, because he was a cop until the day before this, But I guess he means other cops and about this. So the more they insist that you have to come out here. You're not allowed to leave the group, you have to come out here to be with us, the more scared he gets that they only want him to come out
to Boise so they can kill him. And that's the week the first indictment came down, and it's only for Liam Collins and Paul Kreishak, and they're only charged with the gun trafficking. The Feds pick up Jordan Duncan the same day, charging him with conspiracy.
He was arrested as.
He walked across the parking lot on his way into work that morning. A dozen agents through flash bangs before rushing him, and on the day of that arrest, all the Feds know for sure is that these guys are making and mailing guns, and that they have these extremist views. It's not illegal to have those extremist views. You can't
arrest them for having those views. But if you know they're trafficking those guns to members of their Nazi paramilitary group, there are going to be some follow up quests that aren't about the National Firearms Act. And right around the time of these first arrests, investigators interview Maxwell Womack, the most recent recruit to the organization, the one who bought all that tannerite. Justin Hermanson had recruited this fellow marine
just weeks before the indictment. He's only mentioned by name a few times. It looks like he came into things right there at the end and hadn't necessarily broken the law yet and was very cooperative during the investigation. And they also interviewed Joseph Zacherik, the cop with Cold Feet. He too was cooperative and was never charged in connection with the group's activities. And both of these men tell investigators in October of twenty twenty that their former friends
had talked a lot about attacking the power grid. They were obsessed with the Metcalf sniper attacked as still unsolved incident in twenty thirteen, where a small team of gunmen damaged seventeen transformers at the Metcalf transmission substation outside of San Jose, California. The attack failed to actually take out power to the area, but it did cost fifteen million dollars in damage. And it's a source of great fascination for a certain kind of guy, a guy who wants
to turn out the lights. It's sort of proof of concept that you can take out a substation with just a rifle. And when they arrested Paul Kreischak, they found a piece of paper in his wallet. On one side there was a handwritten list of intersections. Each intersection corresponded to the location of a piece of critical infrastructure for the power grid in Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and California. And
on the other side there were a dozen names. The people on the list were mostly local and state politicians. It included the governor of Oregon and a California state representative who happens to be both gay and Jewish. Alicia Garza, a co founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, posted a tweet that week that the FBI had visited her home to inform her that her name was on the list. Investigative journalist Jim Laporta has also posted that he received
a similar visit in late twenty twenty. Physical surveillance conducted prior to these first arrests, along with the information they got back from the warrant for the iCloud accounts, did provide investigators with some idea that the group was considering using those guns they were making. Investigators noted that their observation of the recordings of the live fire drill the group got together for in July showed offensive tactics, so
they're not just out there target shooting. They were drilling in the kinds of paramilitary tactics you would use to carry out an offensive attack. Liam Collins's younger brother, still in high school at the time, recorded a video of Black Lives Matter rally from a high vantage point. He sent the group a photo he took while surveilling the rally, superimposing a swastika over the picture and captioning it if
only they knew. In late July, Paul Kreischuk was seen sitting in his car observing a Black Lives Matter rally at Boise State University, then slowly circling it several times before driving off. A month later, he was seen again sitting in his car across the street from a park in Boys where a rally was being held. Activists and Idaho were understandably outraged when they found out that the FBI had simply watched this man as he watched them,
knowing he was considering opening fire on them. It seems the full extent of the plan was only really uncovered after the arrests in October. With the first three members of the cell and custody, they now had full access to the men's phones and computers. In early October, Duncan and Kryshuk discussed shooting members of the local Black Lives Matter chapter. Videos were also found on Joseph Marino's phone indicating that he had been surveilling Black Lives Matter rallies
in his area that summer too. In one conversation that summer, the height of the uprising after George Floyd's murder, Paul Kryschuk texted the group a photo of a BLM flyer he'd torn down in Boise. He said they should come up with something else. To put up in its place. Joseph Morino replied, the lights will turn off, and so will you. It's a bit of a clunky slogan. I might have workshopped that a little bit. I was in charge of propaganda for the Nazi terror cell, but it
describes the group's ultimate plan. They hoped to do something like the Metcalf sniper attack, and then, under cover of darkness, with emergency responders tied up with car accidents and medical emergencies that would ensue during a blackout, they would carry out a series of targeted assassinations. Searches of Kaishak's devices indicated he had already compiled information about the whereabouts of
many of the names on his list. The group had discussed the most efficient ways of killing their targets, working out the logistics of placing car bombs. As Kraischuk wrote to other members of the group, the final frontier is real life violence. Liam Collins had been stealing military gear from Camp Lajune for years, so when the time came,
they'd be outfitted in military grade body armour. It wasn't until August of twenty twenty one that the Department of Justice actually filed a charge against the men for this particular element of the plot. The first indictment in October twenty twenty charged Kaishak and Collins with a firearm trafficking. Duncan was arrested at the same time in charge with
a conspiracy. The week of those arrests, they tried to speak with Joseph Marino and he was arrested on state level charges in New Jersey for having an unseerialized lower receiver that's the part of the gun that makes it legally a gun. According to the government, I don't know, not a gun guy, and they interviewed Justin Hermanson. According to Joseph Marino's attorney, Herminson was offered an out by
the agents who spoke to him in October. They told him, hey, you've got a chance to help yourself out here, and that may have been true. A lot of the men involved in this plot never got charged. People who made purchases or picked up a package. Maxwell Womack who bought the Tannerite, A lot of men who cooperated and weren't central to the plot did not get charged. And again, according to Marino's lawyer, Herminson did talk to the agents at that time specifically about how involved Marino had been
in these crimes. But either Herminson wasn't that helpful or the agents just didn't realize the time in October the extent to which he'd been involved in the gun running scheme, because a month later, in November of twenty twenty, there's
a second indictment, the first superseding indictment. The term superseding indictment will be familiar to you if you have any involvement with the courts or if you've just been following the Trump criminal cases closely, but it just means they got the grand jury back together to issue a new indictment in a case based on some new information. It could involve adding new charges or new defendants, and in
this case we got both. So in this second indictment, we've got way more details about the specific transactions, the money transfers and the gun shipments. And now in addition to Kryshak and Collins, Jordan Duncan and Justin Hermanson are charged.
But we're still just talking about firearm trafficking. And there's this conspiracy element now making a new allegation that they're engaged in this conspiracy to traffic these guns for a criminal purpose, with the intent being to provoke civil disorder. And here's where we finally get the government talking about them stalking the blm rallies and talking privately about shooting protesters.
The following year, in June of twenty twenty one, a second superseding indictment comes down, and now all five of these men have been charged, Paul Kreischuk, Liam Collins, Justin Hermanson, Jordan Duncan, and now Joseph Marino. And they've known all along that Marino went to Boise in July twenty twenty
to participate in the training drill. And they've known all along that Marino was recruited to the group by Kraishuk in twenty eighteen, and that he transferred money to Kraishuk in twenty eighteen.
It's unclear exactly when.
They determined that Marino had been as Collins was engaging in a little bit of his own deal making, selling guns to people, getting their money and then sending that money and the order to Kryshuk to fulfill. But that's what's newly alleged in this second superseding indictment. So now they're all charged for this conspiracy to manufacture and ship
firearms with the intent to cause civil disorder. And then finally, in August of twenty twenty one, the third superseding indictment charges four of them Rreisch, Collins, Marino, and Duncan, but not Hermitsen, with conspiracy to damage an energy facility.
And I guess they.
Should explain a little bit about the idea that taking out a power grid is a rational first step for starting a race war. It's maybe not something that makes perfect intuitive sense to someone who doesn't have a dozen manifestos about it on.
Their hard drive.
FBI, if you were listening, these are research materials. I actually really hate it when the power goes out, but it's an incredibly common belief.
At least in certain circles.
The general idea for many of them is that a massive blackout would cause chaos. That's reasonable enough, perhaps, And most people who think that this is a good idea are accelerationists, people who believe that society is already unstable, and instead of trying to fix it or realize their vision of what it could look like within the current structure, they believe that the best course of action is to
force it to collapse. You accelerate the destabilization of society, you push it over the brink and into complete collapse so you can rebuild it from the rubble. And their vision of what is to be built from the ashes is usually pretty bad spoiler alert, A lot of us
are not alive in it. The general idea is actually predicated on a false assumption that in a blackout, when resources are restricted and there is confusion and chaos and we can't get what we need, that will turn on each other immediately, that we will turn to violence immediately, that we will riot and steal and kill because we've been inconvenienced. But a lot of the documentation we have from real natural disasters shows us evidence to the contrary.
When disaster strikes, we don't turn on each other. Psychologists and sociologists have terms like catastrophe compassion, and disaster collectivism to describe the phenomenon, and research shows that this conventional wisdom that people turn on each other in a crisis is just not true, at least in the short term. Disasters actually bring us together. But I suppose if you're an aspiring neo Nazi terrorist, you don't have the same understanding of love and human compassion as your neighbors do,
so the plan maybe makes sense to you. Attacks or attempted ones anyway on electrical infrastructure are alarmingly common in
right wing extremism. In early twenty twenty two, the Department of Homeland Security shared an intelligence bulletin with law enforcement agencies and utility operators that there had been a marked uptick in attacks on electrical infrastructure since twenty twenty, writing domestic violent extremists have developed credible, specific plans to attack electricity infrastructure since at least twenty twenty, identifying the electric
grid as a particularly attractive target given its interdependency with other infrastructure sectors. Several news outlets lengthy uptick and the resulting bulletins, specifically to a fourteen page zene styled document circulating on Telegram, a messaging platform favored by extremists, And honestly, I've got a copy of that one, I know, which when they're talking about it doesn't really provide any actionable instructions you couldn't come up with on your own. It
doesn't map out a specific attack. It just sort of advances the idea that attacks like this are good. It's flashy, though, I'll give it that. It's got a lot of colors and fonts. Terrible fonts, really bad use of fonts. Honestly, one page is just a diagram of the wound patterns from Sharon Tate's autopsy that does actually make a certain kind of sense. But I fear we'll have to save the pen pal relationship between Charles Manson and neo Nazi
James Mason for another episode. But this document, cited by DHS officials as part of their concern of the rising threats to the grid, tells the reader to be a man of action to topple this anti white system through a variety of means, including attacking the power grid.
The pamphlet writes, but with.
The power off, when the lights don't come back on, all hell will break loose, making conditions desirable for our race to once again take back what is ours.
While these attacks can end up costing millions of dollars, and, according to experts, could theoretically in certain circumstances, trigger catastrophic cascading grid failures that would take months to repair, they've
never actually cost a race war. In nineteen ninety nine, three members of the San Joaquin Militia, an anti government extremist group, plotted to blow up a pair of tanks, each holding twelve million gallons of propane because they thought the ensuing chaos would force the government to declare martial law, which I guess in their minds would inspire more people to join the militia movement to then fight the government.
So these militia groups are terrified that the government would declare martial law, and so in order to prove to people that the government could do that, they're going to make them do that. I don't know, I don't know what it's going on in their minds. That same year, Donald Beauregard, the leader of a militia group called the Southeastern States Alliance, was arrested for a plan to steal explosives from National Guard armory to blow up power transmission
stations in Florida. He too, hoped a government crackdown in response to the disaster would inspire a popular uprising and subsequent violent revolution. And remember Brandon Russell, the Iron March poster who founded Adam Offfen when his roommate Devon Arthur's murdered the other two men they lived with in twenty seventeen. Arthur's told the police that Russell had plans to take
out critical infrastructure. Tampa police searched the apartment mainly because there were two dead guys inside from the double murder, and they found a cooler full of a white cake like substance that FBI technicians on scene recognized as hexamethylene triperoxide diamine or HMTD, an explosive compound, and they found other precursor materials for making explosives and homemade detonators, radioactive materials, a framed photo of Timothy McVeigh on Russell's dresser, and
assorted neo Nazi propaganda materials.
The Tampa police spoke to Brandon Russell.
He told them, yes, I'm a Nazi, Yes I'm a member of Adam Offfen, but no, no, that cooler full of HMTD is actually for model rocketry. The Tampa police let him go, but the FBI immediately contacted the ATF with the details of the materials they'd found in the apartment, and the ATF said, yeah, that's that's bombs. You let the bomb Nazi go, So they immediately issued a federal
warrant for Russell the following day. He ultimately pled guilty to possessing an unregistered explosive device and was sentenced to five years. He was out barely a year before he started conspiring to blow up critical infrastructure in Baltimore, so he is back in federal prison now well. He allegedly conspired to take out the power in Baltimore. I guess he hasn't been tried yet. Christopher Cook and Jonathan Frost were sentence last for a plot to attack the power
grid in multiple US cities. They too, believed the ensuing chaos would spark the race war and that society could be rebuilt by and four white men. And there have been at least four unsolved attacks on electrical infrastructure in North Carolina in the last two years, including a November twenty twenty two incident that left thousands without power in Jones County, not far from Camp La June. A month later, in December of twenty twenty two, a woman died as
a result of the power outage in Moore County. Because her death was a direct result of the attack on the infrastructure, her death has been ruled a homicide, so if they ever do charge someone for the attack on that substation, they'll probably catch that murder charge too. In February of twenty twenty two, Paul Kreishak pled guilty to
conspiracy to destroy an energy facility. His plea agreement dropped all the other charges, even though, if you've been able to follow along this convoluted mess of a story, he's actually the one who made and mailed all of those guns. He was sentenced last month to six years and six months. Justin Hermanson was the next to plead, taking an agreement in March twenty twenty two, and was sentenced last month to one year and nine months for conspiracy to manufacture
firearms and ship interstate. Joseph Marino took a plea deal a month later, in April twenty twenty two, pleading guilty to the same charge, a single count of conspiracy to manufacture firearms and ship interstate. Oddly, he doesn't have a sentencing date that I can find. He's been out on bond since that August twenty twenty one indictment, and after he pled guilty, they set a sentencing date for July twenty twenty three, but it was postponed indefinitely after a
sealed motion was filed. It's possible they needed his cooperation in the cases against his co defendants, and pending that cooperation, they postponed sentencing so they could consider that help in deciding his punishment. I should stop trying to guess why the Department of Justice times their paperwork the way they do. It's too hard, usually fruitless, and even if I'm ridal never know, I just can't help it, I guess. Liam
Collins was the fourth to plead guilty. In October twenty twenty three, he pled guilty to one count of aiding and a betting the interstate transportation of unregistered firearms. He was sentenced last month to ten years. Then finally, in June twenty twenty four, Jordan Duncan pled guilty to one count of aiding and a betting the manufacturing of a firearm. He scheduled to be sentenced in September and could face up to ten years. You have to wonder about the charges everyone ended.
Up pleading to.
At the end of the day, the guy who made all of the guns didn't get convicted of a gun crime. Some of them are guilty of helping make the guns. Some are just guilty of being part of the process of getting those guns across state lines. Marino isn't actually guilty of either, just of being part of a conspiracy to do it. And nobody's guilty of fantasizing about starting a race war because I guess technically that's legal, although
not in Virginia. Actually, Section eighteen point two Dash four eighty five, conspiring to incite one race to insurrection against another race makes it a class for felony here in the Commonwealth of Virginia to conspire with another to incite the population of one race to acts of violence and war against the population of another race. But I don't think anybody's ever actually been charged with that. And these guys were trying to start the race war in Idaho anyway.
They aren't the first weird guys to try to start the race war from Idaho, and they definitely will not be the last.
But today I will.
Leave you with this the best thing I have ever and probably will ever read. In a federal court transcript at in August twenty twenty one hearing to determine if Joseph Marino would be held in pre trial custody, the prosecutor was trying to present evidence that the defendant was armed and dangerous. That's her job at that stage, right to say that this guy is dangerous for these specific reasons and you shouldn't let him out, and that didn't have to be so hard given what we know about
the full situation. But she misunderstood something she read in the chat logs that she'd entered in evidence. Ncis agent John Little reading from the government's exhibit a chat that Marino had sent about procuring guns and ammunition for a trip to West Virginia to shoot guns and hang out with his extremist pals. So he reads aloud to the court, Mister Marino states, he's got seven Mac elevens, about eight thirty eight's and nine nines. It appears to be he's
referring to firearms. These types of firearms were never recovered. These firearms would have different calibers. It appears they're trying to figure out what calibers they need to purchase. If you already know how the sends, I think you're already laughing.
And the judge ruled that day that Marino would be held without bond, citing his apparent leadership role in the group, his violent beliefs, the training he'd engaged in in furtherance of them, the surveillance he'd been conducting of these plm rallies,
and these mysterious missing guns. Shortly after that hearing, the last supersed the indictment was filed, so Marino was back in court in front of the same judge, and now that he'd had a few days to mull it over, Judge Richard E. Myers interjects, just as the government is finishing up their questioning of that NCIS agent, he says, I've got a follow up question about the Biggie Small's lyric, and the federal Prosecutor's confused the what, And the judge
says again about the Biggie Smalls lyrics, I've got seven macalleven's about eight thirty eights and nine nines. That's a Biggie Small lyric. Are we looking for those firearms? The federal prosecutor remains perplexed. Judge Meyer says the court is independently aware of the Biggie Small lyrics. He's taking judicial notice of the lyrics to come on a track on the nineteen ninety nine album Born Again from the notorious big.
The witness and the federal prosecutor are baffled, like the judges started speaking a foreign language to them, and so he says again that list of guns is just Biggie lyrics, and a prosecutor at a loss says, I am still not understanding the word. I apologize, and the judge looks at her and says, Biggie Smalls, Biggie Smalls is a dead wrapper. So five members of a neo Nazi paramilitary group are heading off to federal prison for assorted gun crimes.
Nazis everywhere desperately want to shoot holes in electrical transformers.
No one shot.
The governor of Oregon and a federal judge in North Carolina took judicial notice of Biggie Smalls.
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