Robberies for the Revolution

In the early 1980s a man founded a small, secretive white-supremacist group whose members believed the national government was controlled by their enemies and aimed to overthrow it by direct action. To fund the effort, members robbed banks and armoured cars, including one armoured-car robbery that netted about $3.6 million, ran a counterfeiting operation, and killed a man they believed was an informant and a radio talk-show host who had criticised them. Ten members were tried together under the federal racketeering law, which charged the group as a criminal enterprise carrying out a pattern of these crimes. One woman was accused of concealing stolen robbery money. On appeal, the defendants argued that lumping many separate crimes into one racketeering charge was improper and that the trial was unfair.