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The Federal Bureau of Investigation has a long and checkered history of letting confidential informants run wild. Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger famously used his protected status to knock off New England underworld rivals. COINTELPRO-era provocateur Gary Thomas Rowe Jr. was involved in multiple civil rights atrocities. To catch criminals and extremists, you have to play dirty.
Joshua Caleb Sutter firmly fits into this framework. A longtime occultist and neo-Nazi, Sutter became an FBI informant roughly 20 years ago after being sent to prison for trying to buy a silencer and a defaced Glock .40 pistol from an undercover fed in Philadelphia. At the time of his arrest, Sutter was living on an Aryan Nations compound in Pennsylvania. Since then, he’s earned at least $140,000 infiltrating a range of far-right organizations, most notoriously the Atomwaffen Division (AWD) starting in 2017. Details of Sutter’s involvement—which the government has yet to officially confirm—emerged in 2021 during the federal trial of AWD leader Kaleb Cole, information first revealed that August.
Being outed as a federal informant did not force Sutter into the shadows. Sutter kept publishing extremist books through his Martinet Press imprint, which helped fuel the ascent of the Order of Nine Angles (O9A), a murderous blend of Satanism and neo-fascism that is now pervasive in the global far right and has inspired violence in Russia, Great Britain, the United States, Canada, and elsewhere, a WIRED investigation found. The consequences of Sutter’s virulent extreme right propaganda continue to unfold, spawning new varieties of ultraviolent terrorism and violence in the darkest corners of the internet that now involve systemic child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and other forms of child abuse.
Despite this, it’s unclear what, if anything, the FBI is doing with regard to Sutter’s conduct over decades. While the FBI declined to comment on Sutter’s status as an informant, testimony from a confidential human source in the 2021 trial of Kaleb Cole, while redacting Sutter’s name, revealed his relationship with the bureau through details about his 2003 conviction on gun-related charges. A former far-right militant who also met Sutter face to face during this period also confirmed he was an FBI informant.
This spring, WIRED found evidence of Sutter’s extensive influence on and promotion of an international child abuse network that goes alternatively by “com” or “764.” Sutter’s continued involvement in the most extreme corners of the far right, which engage in homicidal violence and systematically abuse minors, raise questions about how the FBI selects their informants, how they hold them to account, and what degree of blowback the bureau is willing to tolerate in order to make cases against violent extremists.
The Company You Keep
As a one-time leader of the Aryan Nations, Sutter’s links to extremism are expansive. He’s pledged fealty to North Korea, operated a Hindu sect, and created the Tempel ov Blood (ToB), a “nexion” or cell of the Order of Nine Angles, an infamous neo-Nazi Satanist cult for which Sutter’s Martinet Press acted as a publishing house and propaganda vehicle—a journey documented by late independent journalist Nate Thayer. In recent years, O9A has become ever-present in the most violent corners of the contemporary far right.
These extremist entities and others—the Tempel ov Blood, the Rural People’s Party, New Bihar Mandir—were based at or near Sutter's rural property in central South Carolina. Sutter testified in late 2017 that his interest in occultism and key role in ToB led him to meet John Cameron Denton, a senior figure in the Atomwaffen Division who went by “Rape” in the neo-Nazi terrorist group; in one court document filed after his arrest in 2020, US prosecutors said two coconspirators claimed Denton possessed CSAM.
In the past few years, Sutter actively promoted the child abuse and extortion network 764 and some of its affiliated groups. 764, as WIRED reported in March along with The Washington Post, Der Spiegel, and Recorder, is the target of an international law enforcement investigation, with more than a dozen members arrested in the United States, Europe, and Brazil.
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Sutter did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment.
Participants in 764 and its affiliated splinter groups like CLVT, 7997, H3ll, and Harm Nation extort minors into sexually exploiting or harming themselves. They organize on online platforms such as Telegram and Discord, and find minors via Instagram, Roblox, Minecraft, and other popular games and social media apps where children congregate online. One particularly disturbing practice is urging victims to carve the usernames of their exploiter into their flesh, known within the network as a “cutsign.” Participants in this network have also been accused of robberies, in-person sexual abuse of minors, kidnapping, weapons violations, swatting, and murder.
The US Department of Justice is pursuing further charges against alleged members of these groups through federal grand jury proceedings, according to court records filed earlier this year in the case of Harm Nation founder Kyle Spitze. A young English participant in 764 also faces terrorism charges for allegedly plotting to kill a homeless man. The network is also connected to MKU, a nihilist Eastern European skinhead crew whose members are accused of a series of random attacks and killings in Ukraine and Russia.
Sutter’s influence on 764 is readily apparent in the facts surrounding some of the group’s most violent participants, particularly the possession of O9A texts published by Sutter’s Martinet Press imprint, tattoos and flags of the Tempel ov Blood’s insignia, and his consistent promotion of it on social media and in newer publications. Alleged members of the exploitation network include Angel Almeida, who is currently facing a maximum penalty of life on federal charges of coercing a minor to commit sexual acts and possession of CSAM and a firearm, and a Romanian national convicted of possessing and distributing CSAM and had Tempel ov Blood indicia or tattoos of the group's trident emblem.
The connections don't end there. After 2022, Sutter mothballed Martinet Press as a public entity and fired up a newer "publishing" project, Agony's Point Press, posting on Twitter (now X) and Substack and selling original occult titles via Amazon and even Barnes & Noble. Agony’s Point Press advertises itself as “the horrifying voice of Wamphyrism, premiere Satanic Theory and predatory spirituality,” all themes that refer back directly to theories of O9A practices first fleshed out in titles published by Martinet Press.
One of the Agony's Point titles, volume one of the Drums of Tophet zine, features an interview with “Commander Butcher” of MKU, a lethal Eastern European skinhead group that has significant overlap with 764. In July, US authorities unveiled 20-year-old Georgian national Michail Chkhikvishvili as Butcher’s alleged true identity after he was arrested on an interpol warrant in Moldova on federal charges for plotting a mass casualty attack in New York City. In the interview with Sutter’s journal from last fall, Chkhikvishvili describes his own radicalization and characterized the ethos of his group as “religion murder,” complemented by a photo montage of purported MKU attacks.
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Listing the Atomwaffen Division and the Order of Nine Angles as a lasting influence, Butcher also disclosed the nature of MKU’s “alliance” with 764, which was forged by the users “Xor” and “Kush” (both of whom are still unidentified). While deriding 764 for not committing enough in-person violence, Butcher said the two groups “might still stay associates because they keep cleansing their own way by making the weak suicide.”
According to victims of 764 members, “Tobbz,” a troubled young German convicted of killing an elderly woman and stabbing a man in 2022, was in the original 764 Discord server along with Almeida and Bradley Cadenhead, 764’s teenage founder who is serving decades in a Texas prison for CSAM offenses. Tobbz also had a Tempel ov Blood trident tattoo and had joined MKU, according to reporting from Der Spiegel and Recorder.
The second issue of Drums of Tophet, which its authors describe as “designed for the dark warriors of a doom now imminent on the near horizon,” continues in the same vein with features Q309, an occult sadomasochistic, self-described “art project” that borders on CSAM and prominently features Order of Nine Angles themes and a lengthy interview with a founder of the Satanic Front, a southern occultist organization.
In communications with a former Tempel ov Blood member viewed by WIRED, Sutter openly discussed viewing CSAM with other members of his nexion, and seemed obsessed with conspiracy theories like Project Monarch that involved child abuse. The former ToB member also noted Sutter’s fascination with the case of Belgian serial killer, rapist, and pedophile Marc Dutroux. Shortly before taking the Agony’s Point Press X account offline in March of this year, the account posted a photo of an occult altar featuring a blood-smeared photo of Dutroux next to human and animal skeletal remains, as well as a severed doll’s head inked with lightning bolts and a swastika, on top of a flag featuring a Nazi death’s head and the Nazi slogan “Meine ehre ist meine treue” (my honor is my allegiance).
On several occasions in the past year, the Agony’s Point Press account on X posted videos and photos highlighting 764 and its offshoots, particularly MKU and the group’s growing interest in the Order of Nine Angles. The account also routinely posted about 764 and com, occasionally adopting a faux journalistic tone to launder posts from the CSAM distribution and extortion network. Around Christmas 2023, @agonyspoint posted a graphic of MKU's hockey goalie mask insignia with a ToB trident emblazoned in its forehead.
All this took place as the FBI’s investigation into 764 expanded and new arrests, including those of alleged member Kyle Spitze and Richard Densmore, who pleaded guilty in mid-July, were made in the early months of 2024. Moreover, there is an active FBI investigation on MKU that stems directly from its ties to 764, according to a law enforcement source with knowledge of the matter.
Earlier this year, the Agony's Point account turned back toward older Martinet Press material, with several threads promoting Bluebird and Iron Gates, two books that Sutter introduced to the Atomwaffen Division as required reading that celebrate child abuse and rape.
“A Deal With the Devil”
The FBI has never addressed Sutter’s role in fueling violent far-right ideology. But the blowback from Sutter’s actions over the past decade is a feature, not a bug, of American law enforcement’s use of confidential informants, says Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Harvard Law School who has studied the topic extensively for more than 15 years. “The informant market is run on this tacit, uncomfortable understanding that the cure sometimes might be worse than the disease,” Natapoff tells WIRED. By utilizing people with criminal or extremist histories to infiltrate hard-to-penetrate milieus like gangs, organized crime, or terrorist groups, she explains, the US government rewards such people for continuing to swim in the same waters.
“Baked into that arrangement is the well-understood, avoidable phenomenon that these individuals are going to commit criminal acts,” Natapoff says. “The FBI has authorized criminal and unauthorized criminal activity by confidential human sources, and the mere fact that those guidelines have those definitions is a recognition about the nature of informants.”
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According to a New York University Law School study, 41 percent of all federal terrorism cases after 9/11 involve the use of a confidential source. Per a former FBI operative quoted in Natapoff’s milestone study of informants, Snitching, “You can’t get from A to B without an informant.” It’s an arrangement Natapoff calls “a deal with the devil.”
Is Sutter still an FBI informant? We don't know: The bureau refused to answer questions about him in 2022 and for this article. However, Sutter’s engagement with the US government more broadly dates back further than it first appears. With the help of researcher Victor Mihail, WIRED was able to determine that Sutter briefly enrolled himself in the US Navy in 2000, serving from June through July of that year, according to military records. It was short-lived as he failed out of basic training, but it predates the 2003 arrest when he allegedly was first recruited as a federal informant.
There’s also evidence that Sutter was perhaps active in the Order of Nine Angles much earlier than previously thought. In old online Satanist texts, a man under the alias “Wulfran Hall” is credited as contributing to some of the original O9A ritual music in 1997. This was alongside early members including Richard Moult, aka “Christos Beest.” Wulfran Hall is known to be an alias used by Sutter shortly after he began to collaborate with federal officials in the early 2000s.
Sutter was also focused heavily on music while running Tempel Ov Blood. As part of this far-right Satanic movement, Sutter had a music project named “Gulag,” which ran alongside his Martinet Press. Both of these projects promoted ultraviolence, demonic Satanism, ritualistic torture, and pedophilia.
While the Agony's Point Press X account is now gone and his informant status remains unclear, Sutter may reemerge after this burst of attention dies down. Meanwhile, the influence of ToB and the books he publishes remains apparent on Telegram, where the com and 764 network is once again coalescing in new channels.
