Feature: Abner Comes Home

“There were many questions, hours of questions,” said Greg Auld, an FBI special agent. “Basic questions: What color is cocaine? I mean, that’s how basic we were at that point.”

Pyfer realized the Amish aren’t stupid, but he needed to teach them a whole new vocabulary if they were to understand the threat from drugs. He remembered a pamphlet he had used with young Boy Scouts, called “Drugs  — A Deadly Game.” “It was written at about a fifth-grade level,” Pyfer said. “That’s just what we needed.”

On the day of the Abners’ sentencing, in June 1999, a flock of 300 Amish faithful walked down Market Street to the U.S. Courthouse. They had, extraordinarily, rented a fleet of vans and ridden into the City of Philadelphia, with its strange sounds and sights and smells. Buildings leaned in on them; cars careened on all sides. The long corporate Amish memory bore down on them: cities and technology, beheaded and stoned.

They stepped into the courthouse lobby, where armed guards guided them through a great metal arch that squealed like a roped calf. “It almost took an act of Congress to get them all through the metal detector,” Pyfer said. “They use pins instead of buttons in their clothes, so it took forever.”

In the courtroom, Judge Clarence Newcomer and his deputy clerk, Mike Finney, marveled at the number of Amish supporters. The crowd overflowed into the hallway outside.

“I must note this,” the judge told the courtroom. “I have, in my going onto 28 years on the bench, never received such an outpouring of expression. … ”

It didn’t make sense. The Amish are famous for “shunning” church members who stray, yet they turned out in droves to support two of the worst offenders in the history of the sect. They wave to Abner as he roars past their buggies in his big diesel truck.

"There’s a lot of people who don’t understand about the Amish,” Peter Seibert, director of the Lancaster County Heritage Center, told me. “People think they only act according to good vs. evil.”

More often, the Amish act according to push vs. pull. They avoid things that push the community apart, and embrace things that pull it together. For instance, electricity is not, in itself, evil. But if you’re up late at night watching TV, you probably won’t make it out of bed at sunrise to milk the cows. So the whole community suffers. Old Sam Stoltzfus with his century-crossing memory fears the Lunch Pail Threat, not because non-farming jobs are wrong, but because they take fathers away from their families during the day.

“Let’s say you and I are standing here talking and your cell phone rings,” Seibert said. “You’re going to answer it, and that makes me feel less important.” So the phone, in tiny increments, pushes each member of the community apart.

Most English misunderstand shunning, too. They think it’s a way to cast people from the community without aid. But it’s the opposite: When an Amish congregation excommunicates and then shuns a member—usually for an offense coupled with an unrepentant heart—other members are supposed to give him help or food if he needs it, but can’t receive his help or services while the shunning lasts. So that’s the most dreaded punishment in Amish culture: not being able to help out the community.

The Abners weren’t evil to the Amish community. They were useful. They cast light on the drug crisis. “I think it’s great they’re welcomed back into the community,” the Amish gazebo-maker told me. “Both boys did things they shouldn’t have. Both paid for it. So they deserve to come home.”

Judge Newcomer had given the Pagan bikers fairly stiff sentences, around five years in prison. “But I saw them much differently,” he told me. “They were instigators. And they knew. They knew.” He decided: a year in prison for the Abners, and then five years’ monitored release.