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Posted: January 29, 2002
R. Vincent Bertollini, 62, co-founder of 11th Hour Remnant Messenger, a white supremacist propaganda ministry based in Sandpoint, Idaho, remains a federal fugitive after failing to appear for trial on charges of driving under the influence.
Bertollini, who has two previous DUI arrests, was facing up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine when he failed to appear for trial last July. Bertollini has not been seen in Idaho since June and his disappearance prompted the Bonner County Prosecutor's Office to request a federal unlawful flight warrant in September. Law enforcement officials and others who know Bertollini believe that he has fled the country, possibly to Ireland or the Caribbean.
It is also likely that Bertollini's partner in the 11th Hour Remnant Messenger, Carl E. Story, has left Northern Idaho. Although the 68-year-old Story is not wanted by authorities, he's put his house up for sale and has not been seen in Sandpoint since November of last year. One report speculated that Story is in California.
Story and Bertollini, who made millions from the Silicon Valley computer chip industry in the 1980s and '90s, became Christian Identity adherents and formed 11th Hour Remnant Messenger in 1990 while still living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Christian Identity is a racist religious sect that views Anglo-Saxons as the Biblical chosen people, Jews as conspiratorial agents of evil and nonwhites as subhuman and on the level of animals.
In 1995, Story and Bertollini settled in Sandpoint, Idaho in the hopes of establishing a white homeland in the Pacific Northwest, following in the footsteps of other Christian Identity groups such as Richard Butler's neo-Nazi Aryan Nations and Dave Barley's America's Promise Ministries.
Over the next several years, Story and Bertollini's 11th Hour Remnant Messenger, which had no specific meeting place or membership roster, spent well over $1 million on mass mailings to Idaho residents of slickly-produced Identity posters, pamphlets, booklets and videotapes. Story and Bertollini became vocal and financial supporters of other racists, including Butler, and the now-imprisoned Alex Curtis, a racist who espoused the "lone wolf" philosophy through his Nationalist Observer publication and Web site.
Curtis envisioned a two-tiered white supremacist movement in which above-ground extremists would spread racist propaganda while a second tier of underground "lone wolves," acting alone or in small groups of three or four, would strike at their enemies "by daily, anonymous acts."
Although Curtis did not publicly endorse Christian Identity, he and Bertollini established a relationship in 2000. Bertollini encouraged Curtis and assured him that Jewish "bastards" must be "eliminated, removed or, otherwise, be neutralized (sanitized) to assure the safeguard of our people." In November 2000, Curtis was arrested and charged with conspiracy to violate the civil rights of various individuals, including public officials and civil rights activists. In March 2001, Curtis cut a deal with the government, pleading guilty to the charges in return for the recommendation by prosecutors of a reduced sentence.
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