What a Decades-Old Denver Murder Reveals About Right-Wing Extremism

Paparazzi cameras flashed.

Movie stars posed. Slowly, the 1,032-seat Sala Grande theater filled during the 81st annual Venice International Film Festival this past August. It was night four of one of the most prestigious gatherings in cinema, and all the beautiful people had been ferried to the island of Lido to watch the world premiere of The Order, a thriller starring Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult. Shortly after 9:30 p.m., the lights inside the historical Palazzo del Cinema di Venezia dimmed, and the crowd hushed.

Seated a few rows behind Law in an understated gray suit, Kevin Flynn was a man out of his element. The 72-year-old normally dresses for Denver City Council meetings, where, with his signature comb-shaped mustache and wave of gray hair, Flynn is known as the resident skeptic, posing difficult questions to his peers about proposed tax hikes or development plans. So dedicated is the avowed policy wonk to municipal administration that he only allowed himself to miss two committee meetings to rub shoulders with the glitterati in Venice.

The trip had been worth the truancies. He stayed in a waterfront hotel overlooking the Venetian Lagoon. He drank wine with Law, with whom he’s now on a first-name basis. He took a water taxi to feast at Harry’s Dulci, a famous white-tablecloth restaurant on the island of Giudecca, during a private dinner with Hollywood producers. If he’d been in Denver, he’d probably have been answering emails from his constituents in southwest Denver about things like downsizing their compost carts. (This would, in fact, be Flynn’s first order of business upon returning from Europe.) Instead, here he was in Italy, strutting down a red carpet with a movie crew.

Inside the Sala Grande, Flynn watched as shootouts, bombings, and armed heists played out on the big screen. The action flick followed an FBI agent (Law) racing against time to take down a white supremacist organization and its charismatic leader (Hoult). The action scenes jolted and surprised Flynn. At the same time, the events were familiar. Forty years earlier, long before he entered politics, Flynn had been a city hall reporter when one of the most notorious murders in Denver history had drawn him into the world of white supremacy. He and Gary Gerhardt, his friend and partner at the Rocky Mountain News, spent years investigating the organization that engineered the high-profile killing. The Order, in theaters on December 6, is based on the revelations in their 1989 book, The Silent Brotherhood (which Simon & Schuster is reissuing under the same title as the movie on December 3).

So, Flynn had taken a small break from tax proposals and constituent emails to see his words brought to life in Venice. But amid the pomp and celebration, Flynn couldn’t help but remember Gerhardt, who died in 2015. Flynn was only there—next to the Adriatic, feet away from Jude Law—because of the work they’d done, together, to uncover the roots of a particularly violent offshoot of far-right extremism. “Gary always said it would make a great movie,” Flynn says.

June 18, 1984, began like any other Monday for Alan Berg. The popular radio host rose early in his Congress Park apartment and started scanning the morning’s headlines for material. He quickly found an enticing mark: Pope John Paul II had recently declared that sex for pleasure’s sake was sinful. Perfect, Berg thought.

Berg was a shock jock, a new breed of radio host emerging in the early 1980s. On air, he alternately came across as combative, acerbic, intelligent, whiny, and, to many listeners, wildly entertaining. The self-described “man you love to hate” had honed his quick wit and rapid-fire responses as a criminal defense lawyer in his native Chicago. He moved to Denver after retiring from his law practice in the late 1960s, accidentally finding his way to talk radio in 1975 when a friend at a small station in Englewood invited him on air one Sunday to chat with callers. Despite being delivered in a high-pitched, nasally voice, Berg’s opinions on such hot-button topics as abortion and religion lit up the switchboard. The station soon offered him his own show. By 1981, Berg had graduated to Denver’s largest talk radio station, KOA, which had an evening broadcast that sometimes reached 38 states.

“I stick it to the audience, and they love it,” Berg said of his antagonistic style. “They can’t stand me, man, but they sneak back and listen because they don’t know what I’m gonna do next, and they want to be there…. Compared to what goes on in Denver, I’m damned exciting.” His June 18 program cast the usual bait: “Does it say anywhere in the Bible that you couldn’t have pleasure while you’re having sex?” he teased his Catholic listeners.

Whenever a caller challenged him too effectively, Berg would hang up. That way, he always won his arguments. His politics leaned extremely progressive. “His main thing was that he talked a lot about racism,” says Josh Mattison, who, along with producer Shannon Geis, recently released a four-part podcast about Berg called The Order of Death. Mattison says Berg was a vehement anti-racist and, as a Jew, routinely called out antisemitism. Berg sometimes invited bigots onto his show so he could thrash them live. “Whoa—we have got a lot of antisemitism cookin’ here,” Berg said on one of his shows. “You can smell it in each one of these callers.”

After Berg signed off at 1 p.m.on June 18, he ran a few errands in Cherry Creek and then met his ex-wife, Judith Berg, for dinner. Berg returned to his home on Adams Street just after 9 p.m. He steered his Volkswagen Beetle into the driveway, then ducked his famous mop top under the coupe’s low door frame to get out.

At that moment, a man approached and opened fire with a MAC-10 pistol that had been illegally modified into a fully automatic weapon. Shooting .45-caliber rounds, the firearm was—as some reporters would later call it—a meat grinder. A dozen lead slugs sent Berg twisting to the pavement, where he landed on his back. The assailant fled to a waiting getaway car.

When he realized who the victim was, Don Mulnix, investigative division chief for the Denver Police Department (DPD), called every detective on the clock to the scene immediately. Mulnix knew the murder of a controversial radio host would be a huge story; he ordered his detectives to avoid public channels on their radios so that newsrooms couldn’t pick up their communications on police scanners. But the sudden silence essentially sent up a giant flare. Television vans beelined to Congress Park in time to lead their 10 p.m. newscasts with Berg’s death. As word spread, every media outlet in town began mobilizing their best reporters.

Kevin Flynn was 10 years into his journalism career and working at the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News when Berg was killed. “It was all hands on deck,” Flynn says. The Rocky, then going head-to-head with the Denver Post, assigned close to a dozen reporters to the murder. “Here I am as the city hall reporter,” Flynn says, “and now I’m covering this major crime.” Despite the competition, Flynn scored an early scoop when he was the only journalist to locate Berg’s private graveside service in Chicago. The reporter stayed a polite 25 feet away from the proceedings, earning the appreciation of Berg’s family members, some of whom agreed to be interviewed.

Flynn collaborated on the Berg coverage with one of the newsroom’s more seasoned journalists, Gary Gerhardt. The police reporter was a big presence at the Rocky: Standing six feet, five inches tall, with a hulking frame, beard, and booming voice, Gerhardt was open and friendly but commanded respect—including from his law enforcement sources. In the days following the murder, Gerhardt pressed the police for potential suspects. The radio host had been so divisive, however, that one DPD detective simply gestured to a Denver phone book. “All of them,” he told Gerhardt.

But homicide investigators didn’t think Berg’s murder was a random killing. Although no one had claimed responsibility, there were telltale signs—the sophisticated weaponry, the Jewish target—that suggested the work of right-wing terrorists. In fact, police soon began getting tips about Klan-affiliated suspects who were angry with Berg over the radio host’s role in shutting down the Primrose and Cattlemen’s Gazette. The year before, the Fort Lupton newspaper had published a six-part, virulently antisemitic series called “Open Letter to the Goyim.” Berg used his show to criticize the outlet, which was forced to close after its advertisers fled due to the controversy.

By the end of the summer, most of the Rocky’s reporters had returned to their regular beats, but Flynn, Gerhardt, and a young journalist named John Accola continued to break news about the Berg investigation. Developments came fast. In October, FBI agents raided a home in Sandpoint, Idaho, in pursuit of a person connected to the heist of an armored car along a forested highway in Northern California. The man, Gary Lee Yarbrough, escaped, but the bureau recovered the MAC-10 used to kill Berg. The hunt for Yarbrough eventually led the FBI to Robert Jay Mathews, who was believed to be the ringleader of a larger neo-Nazi group. In December, agents cornered Mathews inside a safehouse on an island off the coast of Washington state. He refused to surrender and shot at federal agents. The FBI lit the house on fire in an attempt to smoke Mathews out, but he died in the blaze. Agents discovered a gold medallion melted into the charred remains of Mathews’ chest cavity. It had once spelled out “Bruders Schweigan”—German for the Silent Brotherhood.

In April 1985, a federal grand jury in Seattle charged 24 people connected to the Silent Brotherhood—also known as the Order—for racketeering and criminal conspiracy. Flynn traveled to Seattle for seven weeks to cover the trial, often jumping on the phone to give Gerhardt updates and new suspects to research. After writing about a suspected member of the Order, Flynn received a call from an FBI agent who informed him that the man had threatened Flynn’s life. The fed advised him to regularly check underneath the hood of his car for bombs. “I don’t like to talk about that,” Flynn says today.

With Flynn in Seattle and Gerhardt continuing to look for leads in Denver, it emerged in courtroom testimony that Mathews had indeed been the leader of a racist militia based in the Pacific Northwest. Although another member of the Brotherhood, Bruce Pierce, killed Berg, Mathews had ordered the hit, in part as revenge for the collapse of the Primrose and Cattlemen’s Gazette. But Berg was only practice. The Order hoped to incite a race war in Los Angeles by bombing power lines and dumping cyanide into the water supply; its lengthy list of assassination targets included Henry Kissinger, the former U.S. secretary of state. The group’s ultimate goal was to create a “White American Bastion”—a five-state region including Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming—that would secede from the United States before eventually toppling the entire federal government.

As outlandish as the Order’s plans sounded, its pursuit of them had led to murders, a bank robbery, counterfeit operations, numerous bombings, and the heist of the armored car, which netted the organization approximately $3.8 million. What puzzled Flynn and Gerhardt most was the radicalization of its members. For example, Berg’s killer, who was finally arrested in March 1985, had moved from Kentucky to Montana after becoming obsessed with race-based Christian theology. How, the reporters wondered, had these seemingly average Americans become involved in a savagely racist group that was responsible for so much violence?

Flynn and Gerhardt decided to pursue a book to answer that question. “We got a $15,000 advance,” Flynn says, “and we spent it all on research.” Over the next two years, the duo traveled across the country interviewing white supremacists, jailed domestic terrorists, and their family members. (One particularly memorable reporting trip took them to an Aryan Nations compound in Idaho, where they had to drive through a barbed wire gate, under an armed watchtower.) Back in Denver, they split tasks: reviewing thousands of pages of court documents, outlining chapters. Because both still worked full time at the Rocky, they often stayed up until 2 or 3 a.m. working on chapters and sending the drafts to each other over an early version of the internet.

Eventually, an answer emerged. “The Silent Brotherhood was an inevitable outgrowth of the increasingly angry level of rhetoric and accompanying frustration on the far right,” the authors wrote in their book’s prologue. “These white males saw themselves as targets of all other empowerment movements, from women’s liberation to black power to gay pride…. They stared squarely into the prospect of being the first generation of Americans not to be economically better off than their parents…and inflamed by Mathews’ call to arms and inspired by his fervor, they joined him in a conspiracy they believed, with stupefying confidence, would deliver Armageddon to America’s doorstep.”

The Silent Brotherhood came out to positive reviews (and modest sales) in 1989. The authors seemed to have identified a powder keg of discontent beneath the surface of white, male America—one that was threatening to explode if disregarded. “Flynn and Gerhardt have written a book that is essential reading for every American,” the Los Angeles Times wrote in its review. “It is a work we cannot ignore if, as a nation, we hope to survive this century.”

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Nearly 30 years later, in 2017, white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, for the Unite the Right Rally, shouting xenophobic chants such as “You will not replace us!” A neo-Nazi killed a counter-protester by running her over with his car. Despite then President Donald Trump saying there were “very fine people on both sides,” the rally disturbed many Americans, including Zach Baylin. Of particular concern to the emerging screenwriter? The racists wore normcore clothing (polo shirts and khakis); they didn’t feel the need to hide their faces behind white sheets anymore.

Baylin had already been researching the roots of far-right domestic terrorist movements, which led him to the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The perpetrator of that attack, Baylin learned, was inspired by a novel called The Turner Diaries, which spins a racist fairy tale about a white nationalist militia’s takeover of the U.S. government. The same book, Baylin later discovered, also influenced a group in the 1980s called the Order—the organization that killed Alan Berg.

Baylin was familiar with Berg. He’d seen Oliver Stone’s 1988 film Talk Radio, which was based on a one-man play and originally inspired by Talked to Death, a book about Berg written by former Denver Post reporter Stephen Singular. Baylin also had a personal connection to Berg: His wife, Kate Susman, a writer and his producing partner, grew up in Denver and was family friends with Berg’s ex-wife. (Susman’s dad even bought a yellow Porsche convertible that Berg had once owned.) Moreover, Susman’s mom, Mary Beth Susman, had served on the Denver City Council with a former reporter who covered Berg’s murder—Kevin Flynn. A film adaptation of Flynn and Gerhardt’s book “felt meant to be,” Susman says.

Flynn received an email inquiry about optioning The Silent Brotherhood in 2017. The prospect of The Order getting green-lit by a studio got a major boost five years later when Baylin’s King Richard, starring Will Smith, earned the writer an Academy Award nomination. On its face, The Order is a cops-and-robbers nail-biter. But it also has a through line that Susman calls “terrifyingly relevant.” In perhaps the film’s most disturbing scene, Hoult (playing Mathews) stands before a room full of white Christians and declares, “I know how you feel: You’ve lost your jobs. Your dignity. I watched my father get knocked down again and again, and he never fought back.” The crowd roars at the end of the speech, chanting, “White power!”

The ease with which regular Americans—upset by economic insecurities, shifting cultural values, and conspiracy theories—can tip over into extremism also influenced Josh Mattison’s decision to produce his podcast about Berg. “This isn’t just a story about a guy who was murdered in 1984,” Mattison says. “This is a story about an ideology that just will not go away.” And, of course, the internet has made it even easier for fringe conspiracies and hateful ideologies to infect impressionable minds: While Mattison researched archival recordings for The Order of Death, he found Mathews’ real speech—the one Hoult re-creates in the movie—on YouTube. The website then proceeded to recommend other right-wing videos that Mattison could watch. “I f***ed [my algorithm] up for a while,” Mattison says.

Flynn agrees that social media and the internet have only exacerbated an underlying trend. “What I would like people to learn from the book and the movie is that this is a movement that doesn’t die,” he says. “When pressure is put on it, it may subside for a while and go underground, like cicadas.” That’s what happened following the Berg murder and the Oklahoma City bombing, Flynn says. But he’s alarmed that the Charlottesville rally and the January 6 insurrection in Washington, D.C., haven’t seemed to dampen the surge of far-right extremism, pointing to Trump’s campaign-trail promise to use the U.S. National Guard to deport undocumented immigrants. “We’re in a flow period right now,” Flynn says. “And it’s frightening. This movie won’t come out until after the election, but are we really talking about rounding up 20 million people in this country with the military? I mean, Jesus Christ.”

Flynn didn’t have to wait long for feedback on the film. As soon as The Order ended, the audience in Venice sprung to its feet and gave the movie a nine-minute-and-23-second standing ovation. When Law rose to wave to the crowd, Flynn’s journalistic impulse to record the moment took over, and he started snapping photos. Each time the applause threatened to die (ovation times are a closely measured metric for success at the festival), the no-nonsense politician clapped harder to keep it going.

Eventually, however, the crowd quieted, and Flynn decided it was time to duck out of the limelight. There was something Nancy Gerhardt, Gary’s widow, had asked Flynn to do before leaving Italy.

Flynn and Gerhardt never wrote another book together but remained close friends. Gerhardt retired from the Rocky in 2007, but Flynn was still working there when the paper shuttered in 2009. Six years later, Flynn won a City Council seat representing Denver’s District 2. “I thought, After covering these bozos for so many years,” Flynn says, “maybe I could be a better bozo.” Gerhardt died from cancer the same year Flynn became a councilman.

With his brother and sister-in-law by his side, Flynn strolled into a nearby courtyard called the Palazzo del Casinò to search for a suitable spot. He noticed a small, shaded lawn that seemed perfect for his needs.

Flynn knelt down, dug a small hole, and took the bag Nancy had given him from his jacket pocket. Since Gary’s death, the Gerhardt family has been spreading the former reporter’s ashes around the world, leaving traces of him in locations that hold special meanings. Flynn poured his friend’s remains into the Italian soil. “I think this is one place,” Flynn says, “that would absolutely be at the top of his list of where he would want to be.”