A high-ranking member of The Order, a defunct U.S. neo-Nazi group responsible for the murder of a Jewish radio host in Colorado in 1984, is set to be released from federal custody, where he once networked with the leaders of a terrorist organization based in northern Europe, a Hatewatch investigation has revealed. U.S. District Judge Walter McGovern sentenced Richard Scutari, The Order’s head of security, in June 1986 to 60 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to racketeering and conspiracy charges. Scutari, who has been residing in a prerelease center in Orlando, Florida, since July 2024, will be released on Jan. 21 after serving roughly 38 years for participating in the organization’s violent crimes, according to documents Hatewatch obtained via a public records request from the Federal Bureau of Prisons. While in prison, Scutari maintained extensive connections with white supremacist groups in the U.S. and Europe. His correspondence with white supremacist activists in Sweden and Finland throughout the late 1990s and 2000s encouraged them to form a series of organizations that would become the Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM), a pan-Nordic neo-Nazi group, according to published correspondence and Hatewatch’s conversation with a former NRM leader. The U.S. Department of State named NRM and three of its leaders as Specially Designated Global Terrorists in July 2024, citing its members’ violent attacks, including the 2017 bombing of a refugee center and plots against “political opponents, protesters, journalists, and other perceived adversaries.” (…) Esa Henrik Holappa, a former neo-Nazi leader in Finland, told Hatewatch in an interview that he began corresponding with Scutari when he was 17. In 2003, after he came across an advertisement in a British far-right magazine encouraging readers to write and voice their support for Scutari and other white supremacists in prison, Holappa wrote the former Order member a letter. At the time, Scutari was in ADX Florence, a supermax prison in Colorado designed for extremely violent prisoners deemed too risky for maximum security prison. (…) Holappa led the group, which became the official Finnish branch of the broader NRM, until 2012. In 2016, he publicly renounced the neo-Nazi movement. “I do think [Scutari] had a radicalizing effect on me,” Holappa said. “Because at that time, what was appealing to me in Nazism was its military side. I was really excited about military history.” In their letters, Holappa recalled, the pair talked about Scutari’s time in the U.S. Navy. “I wouldn’t, or couldn’t say, that at that time I was too deep in the ideology,” Holappa said. “Even if I was then, of course, considered a neo-Nazi. But I mean that he brought the ideology.” He recalled that Scutari encouraged him to read white supremacist literature to deepen his involvement in the movement. These texts included William Gayley Simpson’s Which Way Western Man?, a 1978 antisemitic book that described “organized Jewry as a world power entrenched in every country of the White man’s world,” as well as William Luther Pierce’s The Turner Diaries, the book upon which Mathews modeled The Order. PUBLISHED CORRESPONDENCE WITH NRM LEADERS Holappa and Magnus Söderman, a Swedish neo-Nazi and another NRM leader, published their correspondence with Scutari in a 2011 collection titled Unbroken Warrior: The Richard Scutari Letters.
via splcenter: NEO-NAZI ORDER MEMBER RELEASED FROM PRISON AFTER RADICALIZING TERRORIST GROUP
