Michelle Shepherd

It's about a month after the hate camp, and again, Luke Lane is planning another in-person meeting. At first glance, the instructions seem to suggest that Scott and the rest of the cell are going postering. That means putting up the base propaganda around town, unseen. But then Pestilence, real name Jacob Catterley, asks, Should I bring a certain type of weapon?

The sub meant a Kel-Tec Sub 2000 9mm semi-automatic rifle. The FBI's Atlantic case team pushed Scott to find out more.

Scott calls Luke a couple times to gently squeeze out some more detail, but he won't say much on the phone, just giggles a lot, Scott says. Finally, he agrees to meet in person.

Under the awning of that barn, Lane confirmed their targets to be a quote-unquote high-ranking Antifa couple. It was Catterley who had found their names, and he, Lane, and Halterbrand were going to execute them together. Okay. Trying to get in their heads for a moment, like, what do you think, what was the purpose of doing these killings?

It's well reported that the FBI did not have a great reputation for undercover investigations. But it wasn't just post-9-11 cases. There are recent examples too. In October 2020, the FBI announced it had foiled a plan to kidnap and possibly assassinate Gretchen Whitmer, the Michigan state governor.

Matthews, if you remember, was a Canadian Army reservist and outed as a base member by Canadian journalist Ryan Thorpe.

Matthews was supposed to join in on the murder, but the Georgia crew had soured on him after the hate camp and all agreed he wasn't up to the task. They told Scott they thought he knew too much and would talk. So they made another plan. Kill the anti-fascist couple first, then kill Matthews.

So there was an opening for Scott if he was willing. The murders were to take place in a week. Scott's first step in buying time was to point out that this assassination plan was half-baked.

That was Scott's backstory in this case, an aging white supremacist biker who lived in Texas and had a day job doing site surveys.

Luke agreed it was a good idea. Scott had successfully given the Atlanta FBI team more time. Roughly a week later, Scott was back in Georgia and ready to play chauffeur. He'd be driving the base members around, checking out the couple's house and neighborhood.

Led by Luke, the Georgia cell starts to build a more detailed plan.

It was a massive sting operation that involved two undercover FBI agents and as many as a dozen informants. But the case started to unravel when they got to court with allegations of FBI entrapment. In the end, four of the 14 men pleaded guilty and another five were convicted, but the rest were acquitted.

Luke seemed prepared for every contingency.

Helterbrand, first name Michael, went by Helter Skelter online. At the time, he was 25 years old and working in IT. Jacob Catterly, pestilence, was the youngest at 19. In photos I've seen, he looks so young, he was struggling to grow facial hair.

After the mission was complete, they'd go back to the motel, change, destroy evidence, and return to their campsite in the woods, and then disperse. In total, Scott drove base members to the Target's house in Georgia three times.

After the last scouting trip, Scott was pretty certain the men were not going to lose their nerve.

The less Scott could say, the better. He needed evidence that they were serious about what they were going to do. In police talk, it's known as overt acts. Take Helterbrand. Not only was he on tape talking about the acts he intended to commit, he'd homemade a silencer for Luke's pistol and gone out and bought brass catchers for an AR.

So when I first met Scott and he began telling me all his stories, I came at it with a healthy dose of skepticism, especially when it came to the base case. I knew the details from our research in the first season, but his role had never been examined publicly. What influence did Scott have over the group? And what made this case different from anything he'd done before? I'm Michelle Shepherd.

Okay. Okay.

That's him on one of the covert recordings. He'd left the crew in Georgia, drove home, then flew from Tennessee to Baltimore and met with a case team. Then he drove to Matthews and Lemley's Delaware apartment.

That's Matthews' voice.

This was the plot we covered in the first season of White Hot Hate. Matthews and Lemley were going to shoot up an upcoming pro-gun rally in Richmond, Virginia.

They had some complicated justifications for attacking this protest, even though there may be some sympathizers to the cause in the crowd. Basically, it boils down to creating chaos. Once the bullets started flying and no one knew where they were coming from, it would be bloody mayhem.

Just by gently like guiding the conversation or?

Scott left that apartment and made his way to a local Buffalo Wild Wings to meet with the FBI Baltimore team. With those new discussions on tape and the evidence they'd built over months, the feds switched into high gear, preparing for arrests just days away. Which meant Scott had to haul ass back down to Georgia and wrap up his case there.

A couple days later, a sick, worn-down Scott is standing in a motel bathroom. After all the prep and many practice runs with the SWAT team, the FBI were ready to begin making coordinated arrests of base members. Scott gives himself a pre-showtime pep talk in the mirror.

Scott goes to pick up Luke Lane from his house just to take him for lunch and talk more about the upcoming assassinations. He'd made sure that Luke was going to be unarmed.

A Bearcat is an enormous armored vehicle. It's something you'd expect in war zones, not in rural Georgia.

The base case was considered a huge success. The evidence? Solid. Luke Lane and Patrick Matthews, along with other members of the base, were arrested in separate FBI raids in Georgia, Maryland, and Wisconsin. Everyone pleaded out, which meant Scott never had to testify in court. His role as the undercover agent wasn't challenged. Scott stayed on at the FBI a little longer before retirement.

But that was his last big case before he handed in the badge.

How do you think he's handling retirement?

Like most of those who know Scott, his old buddy Joe Ferris wondered what life would look like for him once he was no longer the undercover. That was so much a part of who Scott was.

Scott's wife.

And from CBC, this is Season 2 of White Hot Hate. Agent Pale Horse. Episode 6, Get Behind Me, Satan.

And Higgy, who was on the cover team for the Outlaws case.

You know what I mean? I worry about that in retirement. What is there now after a life that's been sort of so very exciting?

A year after his retirement, in 2022, Scott and I went to Pittsburgh for a conference titled Eradicate Hate.

Scott was always easy to find in the crowd. Aside from physically towering over other attendees, he had a little orbit of fans circling around him. I've been to a lot of national security conferences over the years, and you start to see familiar faces. Academics, lawyers, policy wonks, journalists, reformers, which is the nickname for reformed extremists who now work to help rehabilitate others.

But Scott's attendance felt unique. When I interviewed him on the main stage, the room was packed.

Scott, maybe we could start first with your most recent case, big case, which was the base. How was that different from the other cases that you had over the past two decades?

You know the line. Over the next hour, in front of about a thousand conference goers, I took Scott through the beats of the base case and his career. We ended with a bit of What Now? So. Obviously, you know, white supremacy has been around for years and years and years and decades, but the accelerationist movement is new. And that's what you think. By the time you had retired.

And who is vulnerable to this ideology? It's always dangerous to give a checklist of root causes for future terrorists. But Scott said members of the base had a few commonalities.

At the end, he gets a standing ovation. Thank you very much, Scott, for doing this.

Look at that time.

There's one potential root cause we didn't talk about at the conference. Politics. It's one of the areas we agree to disagree. But sometimes with a base case, it felt like the elephant in the room. So on our last podcast interview, we dipped our toe in. We actually pulled some of the recruiting tapes, you know, one of the ones that were recorded.

And it's like for a lot of those guys who ended up joining the base, Trump was a bit of a gateway. I'm not doing like Republicans versus Democrats, but I mean, the hate that he was preaching. I can actually play you a couple of these just to remind you.

You said we can't cast judgment. And I'm like, yeah, we can. I mean, this is being like the hate is being sanctioned by the most powerful people in politics.

I disagree. I think they know exactly that by mainstreaming that, that's getting votes. I mean, that's the populist playbook, right?

Doesn't it make it hard for you to vote?

That conversation was before the election, before Trump pardoned 1,500 January 6th rioters, including the leaders of far-right militant groups, and before he nominated loyalist Kash Patel as the new head of the FBI.

Scott, a.k.a. Pale Horse, received this text in the lead-up to Halloween 2019. It listed what he needed to pack for an upcoming camping trip with members of the base. And it was sent by 20-year-old Luke Lane, who lived with his father Tom on a vast rural property about two hours from Atlanta, Georgia.

Patel once referred to law enforcement officials who investigated Trump as criminal gangsters, and he called the mainstream media the most powerful enemy the United States has ever seen. There's been a lot of celebratory chatter online as far-right militant movements regroup and recruit. And the base? It sounds like it's building again.

On the day of Trump's inauguration, the group began a Bitcoin fundraising campaign. Scott and I continue to talk all the time and will often still agree to disagree. But he says he feels like many of us right now, trying to absorb the fire hose of news. And he tells me he's glad he's no longer on the inside. And by that, he means both the FBI and as an undercover trying to infiltrate these groups.

So what now? His plan is to get out there and to talk about where he's been, not necessarily what comes next. He's teaching both to law enforcement and the public, using his experiences, his stories, and what he learned to try to stop the cycle of crime and hate.

This series was written and produced by me, Michelle Shepard, senior producer Ashley Mack, and our producer Eunice Kim. Mixing and sound design by Evan Kelly. Emily Connell is our digital producer. Our intern was Rachel DeGasparis. Our podcast art was designed by Good Tapes Studio. Amanda Cox is our cross-promo producer. Our video producers are Evan Agard, Tamina Aziz, and John Lee.

Special thanks to Andrew Friesen, David Downey, the CBC Reference Library, and Oralation Studios. Executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. Tanya Springer is the senior manager, Arif Noorani is the director, and Leslie Merklinger is the executive director of CBC Podcasts.

This series was produced alongside a book I wrote with Scott, codename Pale Horse, How I Went Undercover to Expose America's Nazis. You can catch up with Season 1 of White Hot Hate wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're enjoying this series and want to help new listeners discover the show, please take some time to give us a rating and review on whichever is your chosen app. It really helps.

Despite his youth, Luke had become the leader of one of the base's most successful cells, mostly because they held a lot of in-person training. They were prepping for their boogaloo, when they believe a civil war will cause society to collapse and their white power movement can take control.

Members from around the country would descend on his family's land and spend days learning to shoot, fight, and survive in the wilderness.

He was like, you better know how to shit in the woods.

The following episode contains strong language, graphic descriptions of animal abuse and racist violence. Please take care when listening. Okay, so tell me the line that I've heard you say many times. Yeah, I knew you were going to get to that. That's unpredictable. Do you want me to say it? Should I say it for you?

Did they ever try and bring that up in court as like providing material support to terrorism?

Accelerationist groups like the base had a nickname for these training events. They call them hate camps. So walk us through going to that hate camp, like what you think is going to be there, who you see that first cold night.

Scott knew some of them only by their aliases. It would take time to figure out the real identities of all the members.

What was the skill level like for these guys?

I'm not sure what's scarier, if they're good or bad with weapons. Probably good.

Scott has to tread carefully. He doesn't want to blow his cover, for one thing. But this is also where accusations of entrapment can come up later. So he has to act innocent and eager to learn, not like a guy who gets paid to train others to shoot.

After a long day, he retires to his truck to rest his bones, which are about twice as old as those of the other members.

What you're about to hear next may sound familiar. We briefly covered this hate camp in Season 1 of White Hot Hate. But the details were secondhand, drawn only from court documents and media reports. Scott was right there in the thick of it.

In 25 years, I've never had to burn Bibles, set fire to an American flag, I'm damn sure I've never been.

Scott approaches Eisen, real name William Garfield Bilbrow IV. He had been talking for days about performing a balat. It's a pagan ritual where you sacrifice something to the gods to ask for something in return. In the eyes of the non-Christian accelerationists, a blood sacrifice to the Norse god Odin would mark the start of their so-called wild hunt to clean up non-whites and Jews.

No, I just have to still work on my accent.

Scott is feeling nothing but bad vibes and makes a last-ditch effort.

This may be a weird time to confess something, but I don't trust cops very much. I blame it in part on a career of being suspicious of authority, being lied to or shut down when trying to report. I was once part of a team at the Toronto Star that was sued by the Toronto Police Union for $2.6 billion.

What's going through your head at that moment?

What happens is that Eisen tries it again and again. No success.

No surprise, someone did.

Scott manages to convince Eisen to put the animal out of its misery with another shot. It's what Odin would want.

Scott says no to the psychedelics, choosing to hold the flashlight for the group instead. The cup makes its way around the circle until it reaches the member calling himself Big Siege.

They claimed a series we published that showed racial bias among the police defamed the entire police force. We won the suit, with costs. And then after 9-11, I covered many, many cases of young Muslim men who were profiled and had their lives ruined. Many of those cases involved undercover police operatives and their conduct smacked of entrapment.

Scott's night doesn't end there. The others are tripping on acid, drinking, and eating gar, who had been crudely prepped and roasted on the fire. When Scott gets a chance to peel away, he takes it.

Scott says that's how he learned what he likes to call his verbal judo.

When he graduated from college, it took a while to get a policing job, so he kept bouncing. His first chance at law enforcement came in 1993 when he started working for the Greenville County Sheriff's Office, where that ability to talk served him well.

From beat cop, Scott moved to vice and narcotics. This was the early 90s, two decades into the war on drugs.

As President George H.W. Bush promised victory, Forbes magazine named Pablo Escobar the seventh richest man in the world. On some nights, Scott's assignment would be to pose as a buyer looking for a fix.

Scott knew right away that's what he wanted to do. He was not going to stop until he became an undercover agent.

But there were only so many opportunities that came through the local sheriff's office.

In one corner, drenched in sun, there's a high stool and amps for when he's playing his guitars. When he isn't, he hangs them up like championship pennants, next to an American flag the size of a bed sheet. At the back is a shelving unit that takes up almost the whole wall.

But during one of his shifts, he was passing the hours with this sergeant who he idolized.

you're going to learn that Scott has a lot of nicknames. I'm not sure I've met anybody with as many as he says he has.

So he applies, and he gets in. With his basset hound in tow, Scott packs up his 4x4 truck and heads to the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. Weeks into the program, all the agents in training are assigned a stressful task. List the FBI offices where you'd like to work in order of preference. All 56 of them.

That's Scott's college buddy, Joe Ferris, again.

It's adorned with memorabilia from his undercover cases, rows of trophies and plaques, medals, framed certificates, and photos.

But Scott has a knack for fitting in even when he doesn't. So on the 22nd floor of the FBI building in Manhattan, he finds a home with the Colombian drug squad unit. It was a busy beat. Yet he can't stop thinking about doing undercover work. But to become an undercover agent with the FBI, you have to pass a rigorous certification program at their undercover school.

It's not something you can just sign up for. And it would take him another four years until he even got an invitation to attend the program.

Terry Rancorn spent 21 years in the FBI, and he and his wife retired shortly before Scott in 2019.

Like Scott, he was an undercover agent, and he was also an instructor at the FBI's exclusive undercover school.

Legend. That's FBI speak for your backstory, your undercover persona.

Oh, wow. These are the instructors they're doing. It sounds a little bit like hazing.

What were your impressions when you met him?

After graduating, Scott goes back to his day job. He gets a transfer to another FBI division near the Mexican border in San Antonio, Texas. He's back doing narcotics investigations, human smuggling operations, and he's happy. But he is getting impatient. He really wants an undercover case.

He doesn't get a bite, but he is asked to come back to the undercover school as a role player to get more experience.

And finally, he gets a chance. It's for a massive biker investigation, and there's nothing Scott would love more. He seems perfect for the role. But first, he has to audition. So he flies to Boston.

He thinks the audition went okay, but he's not the only candidate, and he's pretty green when it comes to undercover work. But then, by coincidence, he's in Oklahoma on a case, and one of his mentors is there.

There's a whole shelf devoted to the Klan. There's even a copy of the official KKK handbook with a chapter called Klanversations.

Scott gets the gig. His targets? Members of the Outlaws, one of America's most violent biker gangs and historic arch rivals of the Hells Angels. They're notoriously insular and almost impossible to infiltrate. When you got that and you were like, this is my dream, this is what I always wanted to do, this is why I got into it, did you have any idea what you were in for?

That's coming up on the next episode of Agent Pale Horse. This series was written and produced by me, Michelle Shepard, senior producer Ashley Mack, and producer Eunice Kim. Mixing and sound design by Evan Kelly. Emily Connell is our digital producer. Our intern was Rachel DeGasparis. Special thanks to Andrew Friesen, Graham MacDonald, the CBC Reference Library, and Oralation Studios.

Chris Oak and Cecil Fernandez are our executive producers. Tanya Springer is the senior manager and Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts. This series was written and produced alongside a book I wrote with Scott, codename Pale Horse, How I Went Undercover to Expose America's Nazis. You can catch up with Season 1 of White Hot Hate wherever you get your podcasts.

And if you're enjoying this series and want to help new listeners discover the show, please take some time to give us a rating and review on whichever is your chosen app. It really helps.

When he retired and gave that interview to Rolling Stone magazine, he started to get known as a type of hillbilly Donnie Brasco. And he didn't mind at all. Scott says the number one rule of being a good undercover is to be yourself. Or at the very least, know who you are, where you came from, and how to fit in. So, who is Scott Payne? Where did he come from? And how does he fit in?

I'm Michelle Shepherd, and from CBC, this is Agent Palehorse. Episode two, you got anything for rednecks?

What do those people say?

Scott was born and raised in Greenville, South Carolina, home of Shoeless Joe Jackson, Beautiful Parks, and Southern Charm.

It was the 80s, you know when movies like The Breakfast Club came out? And high schools tended to have well-defined social groups.

What was it like? Like, did you hang out with the jocks? Did you have a certain clique?

You don't say clique?

Was this, Byron, your retirement project?

The Beta Club is for high academic achievers. Its motto is developing the leaders of tomorrow. But the stereotype of what a Beta Club kid looks like wasn't exactly Scott.

I've seen the pictures. I know you like that look, but it is god awful.

I grew up in the 80s too. Big eyebrows and shoulder pads. It really wasn't a good looking decade. And Scott, he didn't just have a mullet. He also wore sleeveless shirts, fingerless weightlifting gloves, and a spiked leather bracelet. He was a big kid with an attitude to match. But it was back in high school that Scott first got a taste of undercover work.

And it all began at the Greenville Eastside High School Talent Show, where Scott and his band played Van Halen's Hot for Teacher.

Got it bad, got it bad, got it bad. I'm hot for teacher.

Show's over. The weekend goes by and it's Monday morning. Scott gets called down to Mr. Walker's office.

Mr. Walker grabs the big, clunky VHS recording of Friday night's talent show, and they watch.

Scott's working his cliques, slash cliques, doing what he does best, blending in, chatting, being a people person.

But the Mr. Walker investigation didn't set him on the path of becoming one of the FBI's most storied undercovers right away. Scott had a lot going on at home. He watched his father struggle with depression, and after a year of constant fighting, his parents filed for divorce. Even though he was raised in a devout Christian family, Scott didn't turn to God for comfort.

Scott said he would spend hours watching horror movies. He'd imitate the creepy voices of the characters to try to scare people. And he did. But he says there was one night when he took this shtick too far.

We're in Knoxville, a city in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in eastern Tennessee. It's early June and inching towards that temperature where moving around outside feels like a challenge. It's especially hot inside the barn that Scott Payne built. And calling it a barn doesn't do it justice. It's a man cave, really. Or as Scott calls it, the barn dominium.

Scott cemented his faith that day. Shortly after, he went off to college and he decided to study psychology, in part because he wanted to understand his dad's depression.

So Scott finished up his psychology degree as he began exploring options in law enforcement. But he was also acquiring some valuable schooling at the time that didn't come from higher education. He was about to learn a lot inside a bar called Desperados.

Joe Ferris is one of Scott's closest friends. They both played football in college, and they were roommates. Scott was paying for his tuition by bouncing at a country bar named Desperados. Joe worked there with him.

And I think, I mean, obviously to be a bouncer, you need to have physical strength, but what other kind of skills do you need to have? And in particular, what kind of skills did Scott have when he was working there?