Rico Valentino spent as many as four years infiltrating the Aryan Nations. (SR file photo)

Sitting in the living room of his home in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Rico Valentino listened as two white supremacists hatched a scheme. What was needed, they said, was a smaller group, a specific target and a specific plan. A bomb. Valentino nodded as they spoke. The men trusted the flamboyantly dressed, guitar-playing wrestling promoter who’d endeared himself to the Aryan Nations’ decidedly macho membership. What Robert Winslow and Stephen Nelson didn’t know that day in 1990 was that within a year, they’d both be in federal prison because of Rico’s testimony. On a recent afternoon at a Medford, Oregon, coffee shop, his eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses, Valentino, who now lives in a rural part of Jackson County and describes himself as “78 before breakfast,” says he first became an informant while working in the burgeoning wrestling industry in the 1960s. In those days, the circuit was rampant with drugs, he says/Associated Press. More here.

Question: Did you have any personal encounters with anyone involved with the Aryan Nations?

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