HAYDEN LAKE, Idaho — With the crunch of splintering timbers, a watchtower that for years stood guard over the Aryan Nations headquarters came tumbling down, to the delight of human-rights activists who now own the compound.
An excavator was brought in Wednesday to destroy symbols of racism and hate on the former neo-Nazi site, forfeited after a lawsuit bankrupted Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler.
The machine's steel jaws punched a hole through a huge swastika painted on the roof of the compound's commissary. In less than nine minutes, a building that once served up "Naziburgers" for $1.25 apiece was reduced to a pile of rubble.
As the excavator rumbled toward the 40-foot-high watchtower, lawyer Norm Gissel reflected on the years he'd spent trying to thwart Butler's effort to create a white homeland in the Northwest.
"Today is the physical sign of the ending of that effort," said Gissel, who helped bankrupt Butler.
Where skinheads and uniformed Nazi wannabes once goose-stepped around Butler's property in the woods of northern Idaho, the new owners are planning a human-rights retreat or a children's camp devoted to diversity.
Butler, now 83 and in poor health, still lives in the area, in a home donated by a wealthy supporter. His following, which over the years included some of the nation's most violent racists and anti-Semites, has dwindled to a dozen or so people. The Aryan Nations still maintains a phone number, though nobody returned three messages left this week.
Butler moved to northern Idaho from Southern California in 1973. By 1980, when anti-Semitic graffiti appeared on a Jewish-owned local restaurant, community members had taken notice of Butler's menacing, racist rhetoric.
The Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations was formed in 1980 and has battled the Aryan Nations ever since, staging counterdemonstrations whenever Butler held rallies or parades.
The duel effectively came to an end in 1998, when Aryan Nations security guards chased a car they thought had fired a gun at them. (It turned out to be a backfire or firecracker.)
The guards fired repeatedly at the car, shooting out a tire and forcing it into a ditch. One of them grabbed the driver, local resident Victoria Keenan, jabbed her ribs with a rifle butt and put a gun to her head.
Keenan and her son, Jason, sued Butler and last year won a $6.3 million judgment. They gained possession of the 20-acre compound and its nine buildings after Butler filed for bankruptcy protection, and in March they sold it for $250,000 to the Carr Foundation, a human-rights group based in Cambridge, Mass.
The foundation is headed by Greg Carr, an Idaho native and former chairman of the Internet company Prodigy Inc. In addition to his plans for the Aryan Nations site, he wants to build a human-rights center 10 miles down the road in Coeur d'Alene — all in the name of erasing Idaho's image as a haven for racists.
Carr tried to play down the demolition.
"I'm much more interested in what we create than what we tear down," he said.
But local activists are celebrating the removal of what they considered a blight on their community. And on Wednesday, before the demolition, a dozen FBI agents and other law-enforcement officials who had tracked the Aryan Nations toured the site and posed for photos.
Before the watchtower came down, it afforded the best view of the compound.
Looking to the west, visitors could see a pile of charred timbers in the pasture, left over from cross burnings. Tucked beneath pine trees to the northeast was the dormitory, where angry men with nowhere else to go were offered a roof over their head, three square meals a day and a constant diet of White Power rhetoric.
At the foot of the tower was the chapel, where Butler, a minister in the Church of Jesus Christ-Christian, used to preach that northern European whites were the true lost tribes of Israel.
Everywhere there were swastikas: carved into trees, stuck on windows and walls, taped onto wastebaskets. "Beware of Dog" signs remained on the trees. But the German shepherds, like their owners, were gone.
On the Net:
Task force: www.idahohumanrights.org
Southern Poverty Law Center: www.tolerance.org