DENVER — When a white supremacist gunned down outspoken Denver talk radio host Alan Berg in 1984, it inadvertently exposed a network of domestic extremists – a story told in a movie premiering this weekend.
The film is based on the 1989 book “The Silent Brotherhood,” written by then-Rocky Mountain News reporters Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt.
The first showing of “The Order,” starring Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult and Marc Maron, is set to premiere Saturday at the Venice Film Festival. Flynn, now a Denver City Council member, will be in attendance.
“Gary passed away eight years ago, and he always said to me, ‘You know, this will make a great movie,’” Flynn said.
The time from Berg’s killing on June 18, 1984, to this weekend’s movie premiere is a 35-year journey with lots of years where nothing much happened.
Flynn, who joined the Rocky in 1981 after working at a newspaper in south New Jersey, was a government affairs reporter when Berg was killed.
Berg was Jewish, liberal and unafraid to take on anyone on the air – including the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups. He had just pulled into his driveway and stepped out of his Volkswagen Beetle when a hail of bullets cut him down.
“The very next day, both newsrooms – the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post – put great teams of reporters on the case,” Flynn said. “It was probably one of the most notorious murders in Denver's history.”
Working primarily with Gerhardt and another reporter, John Accola, Flynn crisscrossed the country to tell the story of Berg’s murder and the white supremacists who carried it out. His first trip took him to Chicago, where – with help of local reporters – managed to learn the secret location of Berg’s funeral.
“The funeral for Alan Berg was intended to be super secure because at that point, no one knew who had killed him,” Flynn said. “It was clearly a message killing – 13 slugs from a machine gun. And so the wraps were kept around very tightly.”
At the cemetery, Flynn met the funeral director, said he would not bother the family, and watched from a short distance away as five people said goodbye to Berg – his ex-wife, his mother, his sister and brother-in-law, and his nephew.
That night, Berg’s brother-in-law invited Flynn to interview the family. It was the first of many scoops he and his colleagues earned as they pursued the story not only of Berg’s murder but of the group behind it.
Known as “The Order” and “The Silent Brotherhood,” the group pulled numerous bank heists and armored car robberies as part of its plan to launch a revolution and build an Aryan homeland.
The man who started the group, Robert Jay Matthews, died in a confrontation with federal agents on Whidbey Island near Seattle, and other members of the group went to prison.
“When it was all over, we thought, somebody's got to tell this story of who these people were and how they got involved in this and why did they do this,” Flynn said.
Initially, he, Gerhardt and Accola planned to write a book together. Before the project really gained steam, Accola bowed out, giving his research to Flynn and Gerhardt.
The result was “The Silent Brotherhood,” published in 1989.
In the early 1990s, Flynn and Gerhardt twice signed contracts to allow movies to be made based on the book, but each failed after producers could not find funding.
Their publisher released two paperback versions of the book, the last in 1995, and, it seemed, that would be that.
The Rocky’s owners closed the newspaper in 2009. In 2015, Flynn was elected to the Denver City Council and Gerhardt died of cancer.
In fall 2017, Flynn was on a cruise when he checked his e-mail and saw a message from a movie producer interested in discussing whether the rights to the book were available. Ultimately, Flynn and Gerhardt’s widow, Nancy, agreed to a contract allowing the producers to try to put together a movie deal. That contract was renewed multiple times before the producers secured a deal to finance the film in December 2022.
Last year, Flynn and his wife, Harriet, traveled to Calgary for several days to watch filming. Among those who also went were Gerhardt’s daughter, Kim Perigo. Together, she and Flynn buried some of his ashes on an outdoor shooting location.
“I'm thinking a lot about Gary and how he was right,” Flynn said as he prepared to leave for Venice. “And I'm wondering how much of what he put into the action is responsible for all this.”
Gerhardt was on the police beat for years, and many of the action scenes in the book were based on his research and writing.
Murder of Denver talk radio host Alan Berg, hunt for the extremists behind it, is subject of new movie
“I have to think that a lot of what Gary put into it is – is why it got sold,” Flynn said. “This is something I never imagined would happen after, you know, 35 years.”
Flynn called working with Gerhardt on the stories and the book “the most profound and satisfying professional experience I had as a writer.”
Flynn said he's eager to see the movie for the first time in Venice, even though he knows that stuff from the book will be left out and characters will be combined.
“The very first thing that's obvious is they can't have 42 characters in the gang. You know, you have to create amalgamations of characters,” he said. “I haven't seen it. I can't wait to see it.
“But the fact that it's not going to follow all 400 pages of the book is not a bother because what it will do is tell the overarching story of how extremism is endemic in America, how it rises and falls cyclically from time to time," Flynn said. "And that's the story that needs to be told. Not, what did this guy say on page 239?”
> Below from the 9NEWS archive: Ward Lucas reports on the Alan Berg murder:
Editor’s note: Kevin Vaughan was a Rocky Mountain News reporter and worked with Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt for more than a decade.