Aryan Strikeforce members gathered in Pennsylvania in the early fall of 2016 to discuss making a bomb out of an oxygen bottle that was later used by a Strikeforce member who was willing to blow himself up at a white supremacist rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on November 7, 2016. Their intended target would be anti-racist demonstrators who were expected to counter-protest.

During one of those meetings, held September 3, 2016 in Ulysses, Pennsylvania, Pulcher, Steever, Davis, and a Strikeforce member from Buffalo, New York, met with members of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement for firearms training. What they didn’t know was that law enforcement had placed a confidential human source inside the group who reported back on the details of what they were planning.

The bombing never happened, but Aryan Strikeforce members still found a way to enforce their ideology later in 2016.

Steever and another Strikeforce member were at Spanky’s, a bar in Easton, Pennsylvania, on December 4. Steever walked past a group of black men and called them “niggers.” A bouncer tried to calm the situation, but Steever kept pushing things until the bouncer removed him from the bar.

Steever returned to the back door of the bar and pulled out a knife while the black men left, precipitating a fight. It wasn’t much of a battle, though. Steever, wearing his Aryan Strikeforce jacket, was bludgeoned with a rock.

Fights aside, the Aryan Strikeforce needed a way to pay for the bigger plans they had in mind.

For a short time, Pulcher’s marijuana growing operation provided some money, but as Steever noted on VK, that revenue stream ended with Pulcher’s arrest by state authorities in October 2016, the month after the meeting about the bomb plot.

So, they turned to more lucrative — and potentially more dangerous — fundraising sources: guns.

Aryan Strikeforce members liked to pose with guns — they posted multiple photos of themselves holding weapons, including a tactical shotgun, a pistol, brass knuckles and an ASP baton and soon were moving unregistered guns and drugs around the East Coast.

In a recorded conversation on March 30, 2017, Lough met an informant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania with Baird, Steever and an undercover agent and said he was ready to start hauling weapons.

“You call me, I’ll be there … It will be very, very rare if I had to turn something down,” Lough said. “That’s why I always make sure people know, call me, ‘cause I always need the money … I’m always ready to go.”

It was familiar territory for Lough, who bragged several times about his days running methamphetamine and guns and other criminal activity while living in Arizona. Other members of Aryan Strikeforce had criminal records, too, with offenses ranging from illegal possession of brass knuckles to beating a black man with a baseball bat.

“I’m very much accustomed to, you know, making money any way I can,” Lough said in a recorded conversation.

“I’ve probably done far dirtier jobs than you’ve been on,” Baird replied.

A lack of money made Aryan Strikeforce dangerous, and also reckless. While they made big plans, they often couldn’t afford to carry them out, the law enforcement source said.

“That was always a thing,” the law enforcement source said. “A lot of the operations and big things would run into a wall. They had no money.”

As planning for the gun and drug running operations amped up — along with talk of a bombing — law enforcement managed to get more confidential informants into the group to identify members of not only Aryan Strikeforce but Combat 18.