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-----A twisted tale of two brothers
BY JEFF STEIN | He may hate women and lesbians, but he loves his gay brother. Nine months after Eric Rudolph allegedly bombed an Atlanta lesbian bar, and only three months before he became the prime suspect in the deadly bombing of an Alabama abortion clinic last January, the fugitive Rudolph paid a visit to his gay brother in New York. The boyish, dark blond-haired Rudolph, 32, has been the object of a massive manhunt in the forests of western North Carolina since a bomb blew up outside the One Woman-All Women clinic in Birmingham a year ago Friday. The nail-studded bomb gravely injured a nurse and killed an off-duty city policeman, who, as it turns out, also worked as a security guard at a local gay bar. Materials recovered from that bomb led authorities to additionally charge Rudolph for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing, which killed one woman and injured 247 more people, as well as the bombing of a Sandy Springs, Ga., abortion clinic and the double explosion outside an Atlanta lesbian bar, the Other Side, which severely injured law enforcement personnel rushing to the scene. All during this time, Rudolph's younger brother Jamie, a talented recording artist who had come out to his family the year before, has been living with his male lover in a cramped, two-room apartment in New York's Greenwich Village. That the fugitive has a gay brother in New York has long been whispered among residents in the Nantahala Forest of western North Carolina area, where the Rudolph family lived in the 1980s. Until charges were filed in the Atlanta lesbian bar bombing, however, the fact that the brother was gay was considered interesting but not particularly relevant by reporters: It was just another aspect to a long-running case with several bizarre facets: Another Rudolph brother sawed off his hand; a "patriot army" led by ex-Green Beret Col. James "Bo" Gritz combed the hills for Rudolph like a traveling circus, and shots were fired at a fugitive task force command post. Then, after Gritz failed to entice Rudolph into surrendering, he went home and tried to kill himself over a failing marriage. In November 1997, however, shortly before he allegedly bombed the Birmingham clinic and took to the woods, Eric Rudolph arrived in New York with his mother, Patricia, on short notice. They toured Manhattan, walked around Central Park and went to the opera and out for dinner, Jamie said in an exclusive interview. "We hadn't heard from him in a long time," Jamie said as we strolled along a crowded Greenwich Village sidewalk. "He said he'd been traveling, but he wouldn't tell where he'd been." Did he talk about abortion? Jamie shook his head. "I knew he was conservative and anti-government and anti-Clinton, but I didn't know he was anti-abortion." As for being around him and his gay lover, "He seemed comfortable. I could talk to him openly." Reminded that one of the targets his brother was suspected of bombing was a gay bar, Jamie nodded sadly. "Maybe he was thinking something [when we were together], but not acting on it." Jamie attributed his brother's anti-government views to a period in the early 1980s when his mother hauled them off to a Missouri commune run by the "Christian Identity" movement, which espouses militant white-power views. Its anti-abortion stance, a militia member told me, comes "from the fact that the clinics are murdering white babies. If they were murdering black babies, they'd be all for it." Long before that, however, Eric had grown a hard shell to protect himself from the bullying hillbillies in North Carolina, where the family moved from Florida when the boys were young, Jamie said. "Culturally, it was a shock," he said. At school he and his brothers were constantly mocked as "foreigners." Jamie tended to run from the bullies, but Eric stood and fought. Looking back on it now, Jamie wondered if Eric made the decision then to out-crude the hillbillies. Even before they left Florida, Eric had begun referring to blacks as "niggers" and getting into fights with them, he said. "It's ironic that the people in Nantahala shared his conservative views but didn't like him because he was from Miami," Jamie said. "Maybe he developed conservative views to be accepted by those people. I'm just speculating." As the years went on, his brother was increasingly "anti-government and against affirmative action," he said. When Jamie, Eric and their mother were walking around Manhattan last November, "I actually thought it was peculiar that he didn't make some sort of racist remark," Jamie recalled. "I remember during dinner he started to mention something Rush Limbaugh said, but I just changed the subject." N E X T+P A G E+| "This weirdo world of North Carolina"
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