Hate mail delivered to Sandpoint

About 5,000 residents receive white supremacists' pamphlet

Spokane.net/October 17, 1999
By Heather Lalley

A white supremacist group in Sandpoint has sent out another expensive mass mailing to North Idaho residents.

About 5,000 Sandpoint residents in the 83864 area code received the 16-page booklet and glossy timeline Saturday from The 11th Hour Remnant Messenger, Bonner County Postmaster Louise Soles said.

The mailings were addressed simply to "resident" and listed a return address for a leased drop box at Mail Boxes Etc. in Sandpoint.

"We have had plenty of calls from customers," Soles said. "Some people just want to leave it in the mailbox and not touch it, but we can't send them back. They're not returnable."

The 11th Hour Remnant Messenger, a Christian Identity white supremacy church, is headed by R. Vincent Bertollini and Carl E. Story, wealthy retired businessmen who moved to the area from California a few years ago. Bertollini is running as a write-in candidate to become mayor of Sandpoint. He could not be reached Saturday to comment on the mailings.

Last year, hundreds of North Idaho residents received anti-Semitic booklets and a 6-foot-tall poster published by The 11th Hour Remnant Messenger. Dozens of copies of the same material were distributed at the Aryan Nations compound before the group's 1998 march through downtown Coeur d'Alene. Bertollini and Story also funded distribution of a videotaped interview with Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler.

The group's latest mailing includes an anti-Semitic booklet entitled "The Seven-Year Tribulation of Daniel and Revelation." Residents also received a nearly 4-foot-long future timeline prediction that begins with World War III between Russia and Israel and ends seven years later with Armageddon. "God's wrath is now poured out on the entire planet," the timeline reads. "America will be nuked and destroyed. America will burn forever." Postage on the bulk-mailed items cost thousands of dollars, Soles said. Human rights activists denounced the latest mailing.

"Any time a group sends out literature attacking any group it is very much a violation of democratic principles of equality and justice," said Tony Stewart, a member of the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations. "The people of North Idaho always reject any literature that directs comments to attack any group or community within our society."