Moving to North Idaho to Live Among "Adamic White Aryans"

In the fall of 1995, following six months of travel, the duo settled in Sandpoint, Idaho. "We crossed the bridge into Sandpoint and said, 'Voila, this is it!'" Bertollini told a reporter from the Spokane Spokesman-Review.

Why did Story and Bertollini choose Sandpoint? "North Idaho was selected for its clean air, beautiful scenery, quiet life style, recreation, lack of crowds, low cost of living, low violent crime," they write, "but above all, more than 98 percent of North Idaho's population is of the Adamic White Aryan people."

With a population shy of 6,000, Sandpoint rests at the tip of the Idaho panhandle, just south of the Canadian border. Agriculture, the arts, timber and tourism flourish there. Sandpoint is also in an area that many white supremacists have hoped would become an "Aryan" homeland.

Extremists associated with the Aryan Nations paramilitary Identity group are particularly fond of this scenario. Sandpoint is roughly 40 miles from the Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho. The late Robert Miles, once the Midwest coordinator for that group, urged white supremacists to move to the Pacific Northwest to form a whites-only nation in the states of Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and Oregon. In 1989, Miles sold his Michigan farm and moved to Oregon. The leader of Aryan Nations, Richard G. Butler, moved from Southern California to Northern Idaho in 1973 and has encouraged whites to build a "national racist state" in the region. Many violent extremist criminals have affiliated themselves with Aryan Nations, including Buford Furrow, who attacked a Jewish daycare center in Los Angeles in the summer of 1999, and members of the murderous white supremacist terrorist gang, The Order.

The Identity group America's Promise Ministries, led by Dave Barley, is located in Sandpoint. In 1996, three of Barley's supremacist congregants went on a terror spree in nearby Washington State, bombing a newspaper plant and a Planned Parenthood clinic and twice robbing the same bank. Each was convicted on eight counts of robbery and bomb making.

During their first few years in Sandpoint, Story and Bertollini did not draw public attention to their beliefs, though they reportedly were known around town for riding motorcycles and leaving big tips at restaurants. In December 1996, Joyce Riley, a regular lecturer at the numerous Preparedness Expos that cater to anti-government "patriots," gave two lectures in Sandpoint promoted by America's Promise Ministries. Her speeches were described at length in two major extremist publications, The Jubilee and The Spotlight. Bertollini later admitted that he and Story bankrolled the Riley presentations, but did so covertly. It was not until two years later that they stepped into the public spotlight.