British actor Jude Law is starring in “The Order,” a movie about an FBI manhunt for a leader of a bank-robbing white supremacist group that ended dramatically on Whidbey Island in 1984.
A shootout at the Smugglers Cove Road property led to a fire that killed Robert Mathews, leader of the Silent Brotherhood, while he was hiding out in a cabin that overlooked Admiralty Inlet. The movie, however, wasn’t actually filmed on the island.
For years following the siege, Neo-Nazi groups journeyed to Whidbey Island to mark the anniversary of Mathews’ death. In 2018, an assault of an African-American man at a bar in Lynnwood made national news after it was reported that the assailants had come from a vigil in Greenbank for Mathews.
“The Order” premiered at the Venice Film Festival and is due to be released to theaters in December. Nicholas Hoult of X-Men fame was cast as Mathews, “the charismatic leader of the group, which was considered the most radical hate group since the Ku Klux Klan,” the Associated Press reported.
Law, known for playing a young Dumbledore in the “Harry Potter” prequel movies, “Fantastic Beasts,” both starred and produced the movie. He plays a character who represents an amalgam of different FBI agents, the AP reports.
“What amazed me was it was a story I hadn’t heard about before,” Law said at the premiere. “It’s like a piece of work that needed to be made now.”
Critics have described the movie as a cautionary allegory, illustrating parallels between the rise and mainstreaming of organized racism in the 1980s with what’s happening today.
The movie is based on the nonfiction book, “The Silent Brotherhood: The Chilling Inside Story of America’s Violent Anti-Government Militia Movement,” written by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt. The book begins and ends with a description of dramatic events on Whidbey Island, where Mathews and others fled and hoped to build “an Aryan homeland.” The domestic terrorism group had multiple safe houses on the island that were raided before the final showdown.
In a recent review, “Variety” magazine raves about the movie, which was written by Zach Baylin and directed by Justin Kurzel.
“Kurzel works in a classical way,” the review states, “shooting the movie (the cinematography is by Adam Arkapaw) with a dynamic feel for the beauty and desolation of the rural mountain landscapes of the Pacific Northwest, and for the moment-to-moment logistics of how amateur criminals move through space. The film is full of robberies, stakeouts, shootouts, interrogations, and other hallmarks of the police procedural.”
While the events of the book largely take place in the Pacific Northwest, the movie was filmed in Alberta, Canada.
The Island County Sheriff’s Office is mentioned many times in the book, including “Deputy Bill Flanders of the Island County sheriff’s K-9 squad, handler of a ferocious German shepherd named Oman Vom Kaisertor.” The deputy and his dog took part in a particularly noteworthy scene in which they accompanied agents into the house after they thought Mathews had shot himself; it turned out to be a trap and ended with the exchange of machine gun fire, the book states.
The book doesn’t mention the Whidbey News-Times, even though reporter Mary Kay Doody famously crawled through the woods to get the scoop on the shootout.
The death of Mathews and the arrests of other members of his white supremacy group put Whidbey in international news at the time.
Mathews was the leader of The Order, which sought to raise money for white nationalism groups through robbery and counterfeiting. In 1984, about a dozen men from the group robbed a Brink’s truck of $3.6 million.
After the group was betrayed by a member, Mathews and others went into hiding on Whidbey Island. FBI arrested some of the other members of the group before surrounding Mathews’ hideout and trying to get him to turn himself in. The agents even had two of his friends brought to the scene from the Island County jail in an effort to talk Mathews into giving up, the book states.
After repeatedly exchanging gunfire with Mathews — who fired more than 1,000 rounds — agents decided on Dec. 8, 1984 to lob M-79 Starburst flares into the house, the book states. Agents allegedly knew that the flares would likely set the house on fire, but they believed Mathews would have plenty of time to escape.
The flares did start a fire, but Mathews never emerged. The book states that he was burned alive and his body was later found next to a bathtub.
As a result of the death, the property for years became a beacon for Neo-Nazis to hold vigils on the anniversary of the fire.
Detective Ed Wallace with the Island County Sheriff’s Office, whose father was on the SWAT team at the scene, said the larger gatherings of the late 1990s and 2000s don’t occur any longer. He said residents may have seen one or two possible “Neo-Nazis” in the pre-pandemic era, but the sheriff’s office hasn’t heard anything in well over five years.
