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Sheriff's deputies gunned down by "Aryan" gangsters in Bastrop, La. Tax protesters with bombs arrested in New Hampshire. Gun-toting white supremacists marching in Jena, La. A police officer murdered in Salt Lake City. Nativist leaders demanding sniper teams and mines along the Mexican border. Calls for assassinating politicians, immigrants and Jews. Rapidly spreading racist conspiracy theories.
The end of 2007 brought to a close another year marked by staggering levels of racist hate in America. Even as several major hate groups struggled to survive, other new groups appeared, and the radical right as a whole appeared to grow.
The latest annual count by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) found that the number of hate groups operating in America rose to 888 last year, up 5% from 844 groups in 2006. That capped an increase of 48% since 2000 — a hike from 602 groups attributable to the exploitation by hate groups of the continuing debate about immigration. And it comes on top of some 300 other anti-immigration groups, about half listed by SPLC as "nativist extremist," formed in the last three years.
At the same time, FBI statistics suggested that there was a 35% rise in hate crimes against Latinos between 2003 and 2006. Experts believe that such crimes are typically carried out by people who think they are attacking immigrants.
Although there were some signs that nativist hatred may be starting to abate, you wouldn't know that by listening to the furious rants of many groups. "America is being destroyed from within by a modern version of Genghis Khan's army," the Emigration Party of Nevada, listed by the SPLC as a hate group, said. The group's leader, Don Pauly, wants to send government "sniper teams" to the border and forcibly sterilize Mexican women after a first child.
"If the Jew government waits, and hell breaks out here in the USA, our citizens will not be asking to see any documentation," added Michael Blevins, the Florida state leader of the neo-Nazi American National Socialist Workers Party. "They will go after anyone they think an illegal alien based on race first."
The growth of these groups is being helped by conspiracy theories and other racist propaganda about immigrants that is being spread by mainstream politicians and pundits. While theories about a secret plan to merge Mexico, Canada and United States into a single country began in radical groups, for instance, many key figures have endorsed them. Indeed, 18 states' houses of representatives have now passed resolutions opposing the "North American Union" — an entity that does not exist and has never been planned, but nonetheless inhabits nativists' nightmares.
Promoting such theories, coupled with a history of ties to white supremacist groups and ideology, is what caused the Southern Poverty Law Center to add a major anti-immigration group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), to its list of hate groups last year. FAIR has also promulgated the theory that Mexico is involved in a secret plot to "reconquer" the American Southwest.
"You need to understand that WE ARE AT WAR RIGHT HERE IN AMERICA," is the way another nativist group, the Nebraska-based United Citizens of America, put it. "We are being invaded by a foreign country and we are being betrayed from within. Our government, from top to bottom, is being controlled by global elites. They have infiltrated our government at ALL levels."
Here's a more detailed look at several sectors of the radical right:
NEO-NAZIS
Neo-Nazi groups
While the number of neo-Nazi group chapters increased over the course of 2007 from 191 to 207, this rise was largely due to a shake-up within the National Socialist Movement (NSM). Although the NSM remains the largest neo-Nazi organization in the country, with 73 chapters in 34 states (down from 81 chapters in 36 states in late 2006), it suffered a mass exodus of high-profile members last year, most of whom quickly either founded new chapters of rival neo-Nazi groups or established their own new spin-offs.
The NSM's troubles in 2007 began last February, when it was accidentally revealed during a public court hearing that Florida state leader David Gletty was a paid FBI informant. Discontent over the group's finances, tactics and internal security began to swell among rank-and-file members as well as officers. Last October, several NSM heavy-hitters abruptly quit. These included Ohio division commander Mark Martin, Storm Troop leader Tim Bishop, Washington state leader Justin Boyer, NSM presidential candidate John Taylor Bowles and computer expert and business manager Jim Ramm, all highly visible and active NSM members.
Bowles, along with another disgruntled NSM officer, Nick Chappell, formed a new group, the National Socialist Order of America, based out of The Redneck Shop, a hate memorabilia store in Laurens, S.C., that is owned by Chappell and had been the site of many NSM gatherings.
Ramm launched a website, "NSM Watch," where he posted a list of 111 ex-NSM members who, according to Ramm, had either resigned or been kicked out. NSM "commander" Jeff Schoep countered that he was merely pruning "troublemakers and drama queens." Then, last November, Schoep issued an open letter to NSM members in which he branded Ramm and other defectors "oath breakers and race traitors" and accused them of "working for the enemy."
The following month, Schoep announced that he was leaving his common-law wife and six children in Minneapolis to move in with a new girlfriend in Detroit, where he was relocating NSM's national headquarters. Rumors abound in the neo-Nazi movement that Schoep's new flame is non-white, and that he's using NSM money to support her in a supposedly extravagant lifestyle.
"In 2006 NSM did over $110,000 in sales, and … current projections for [2007] are around $180,000," Ramm claimed on his website late last year. "NSM Records [the group's hate rock music company] is a business that doesn't report total profits to the members, who are expected to just smile and hope the Commander is spending the money wisely."
The greatest beneficiary of the NSM's internal strife was the American National Socialist Workers Party (ANSWP), a neo-Nazi group led by another former NSM stalwart, neo-Nazi gadfly Bill White. White boasted that he's accepting "the best of the best" NSM castaways and, indeed, ANSWP chapters more than doubled from 13 to 30 last year.
Two former powerhouses of the neo-Nazi scene, Aryan Nations and the National Alliance, were in states of more or less suspended animation last year. Aryan Nations still exists but is barely active. In early 2007, two of the group's leaders, Clark Patterson and Jonathan Williams, quit to form a new Christian Identity group called the United Church of YHVH after complaining that Aryan Nations had forgotten its roots in Identity, a theology that says people of color are soulless non-humans and Jews are biologically descended from Satan.
The National Alliance, a West Virginia-based group that has declined precipitously since the death of its founder in 2002, showed signs of life last May when it held a Holocaust denial conference that drew 75 attendees, nearly three times as many people as have attended Alliance "leadership conferences" in recent years. But in August, the Alliance suffered a major setback when Chairman Shaun Walker and two other Alliance members were convicted of federal civil rights violations in a string of three racially motivated assaults in Salt Lake City in 2002 and 2003.
Walker was sentenced to 87 months in federal prison, while his underlings received shorter sentences. Former Chairman Eric Gliebe, who had stepped down amid much criticism earlier, re-assumed leadership of the troubled group amid swirling rumors of drug use and a pending divorce and custody battle with his estranged wife, former stripper Erica Gliebe — a woman who now calls herself "Hollycast," an apparent sarcastic reference to the Holocaust.
Finally, the National Vanguard looks to be all but finished. Its leader, Kevin Alfred Strom, pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography and is facing up to 10 years in prison when he is sentenced in April.
RACIST SKINHEADS
Racist Skinhead groups
Racist skinhead gangs, or "crews," are unstable and often transient by nature, making them difficult to track. However, over the course of 2007, it was possible to identify 90 racist skinhead outfits operating in the United States, up from 78 in 2006. Five of the new chapters are reactivated or recently established divisions of Hammerskin Nation (HSN), a once-mighty coalition of skinhead crews whose power waned earlier in this decade but is now clearly resurging. In addition to the five new domestic chapters, HSN also now claims active crews in at least 10 foreign countries, including Australia, Hungary and Switzerland.
Last September, the leaders of HSN and the Vinlander Social Club, a rival skinhead coalition in the Midwest, unexpectedly announced they had reached a peace agreement, ending a blood feud of nearly 10 years. The following month, Hammerskin Nation celebrated its 20th anniversary at Hammerfest 2007, a hate rock festival held near Portland, Ore., and hosted by the Northwest Hammerskins, a regional affiliate of HSN. The Portland-based, neo-Nazi skinhead gang Volksfront provided security. Members of the neo-Nazi group White Revolution and the white nationalist organization Women for Aryan Unity were in attendance. One of the speakers was Michael Lawrence, a prominent member of the Confederate Hammerskins, another HSN affiliate, and the founder of the Christian Guard, a major Christian Identity organization.
KU KLUX KLAN
Ku Klux Klan groups
Although most Ku Klux Klan factions continued to exploit the roiling national immigration debate in 2007 by holding anti-"illegal alien" rallies (rather than their more typical "anti-black crime" fare), last year was a relatively quiet one for the KKK. The number of Klan chapters dropped to 155 last year from 165 in 2006, marking the second straight year of decline after five years of rapid growth.
One important development in this sector came in August, when the National Aryan Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, LLC, merged with the United Northern and Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. National Aryan Knights chapters in Louisiana resisted the merger by forming a new splinter group under the banner of the National Aryan Knights.
The Imperial Klans of America (IKA), meanwhile, declined from 23 chapters in 2006 to just 16 last year as a case filed last year by the Southern Poverty Law Center against IKA chief Ron Edwards, five followers and the group itself neared trial. The lawsuit seeks damages for a boy who was attacked and severely beaten during an IKA recruiting drive at a Kentucky county fair.
BLACK SEPARATISTS
Black Separatist groups
The death last May of black separatist cult leader Yahweh ben Yahweh (born Hulon Mitchell) coincided with the ongoing rebirth of his Nation of Yahweh, a notorious religious sect that has preached violence against "white devils." Nearly 500 Nation of Yahweh members, many of them conspicuously flaunting material wealth in the form of expensive cars and jewelry, attended the funeral of Yahweh ben Yahweh, who shortly before his death was released from parole after serving 11 years of an 18-year sentence on federal conspiracy charges related to 14 murders committed in South Florida in the 1980s.
Formerly moribund Yahweh websites flared with activity following the funeral. In Rochester, N.Y., a white man who started a nonprofit food pantry for the homeless said that a Yahweh member who joined the nonprofit's board in 2004 orchestrated a campaign to push him out of the organization shortly after she returned from the funeral. The man says that he now fears for his life and that the Nation of Yahweh has taken over the building housing the organization.
The New Black Panther Party, a racist group unrelated to the original Black Panthers, was also highly active in 2007. Although Chairman Malik Zulu Shabazz was barred from entering Canada last May because of his radical ideology, Shabazz did successfully organize a major rally for a black hate crime victim in West Virginia, made a public show of force in Jena, La., and held an Atlanta "Black Power Summit" last October that was attended by about 100 party members from across the country.
GENERAL HATE
General Hate groups
Anti-Gay groups
Anti-Immigrant groups
Racist Music groups
Other events of importance on the radical right included the emergence of Watchmen on the Walls, an international and incredibly virulent anti-gay organization with strong ties to Latvia. The organization has gained a foothold in the United States among Russian-speaking Slavic immigrants on the West Coast, holding a major conference in Lynnwood, Wash., in October.
Also last year, the hate group list's only campus outfit, the Michigan State University chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, which was added in 2006 after the group sponsored a "Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day" contest and put out a manifesto calling for white, male control of the MSU student government, continued to promote hate by hosting a series of lectures by extremists such as Nick Griffin. Griffin is a Holocaust denier and the head of the whites-only British National Party, that drew skinheads and other white supremacists to the MSU campus.
Angela Freeman, Anthony Griggs, Janet Smith and Laurie Wood contributed to this report.
Intelligence Report
Spring 2008
The Nativists
Profiles of 20 Anti-Immigrant Leaders
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They're 25 to 81 years old. Their homes are scattered from California to Connecticut. Their occupations include auto dealer, Web designer, Baptist preacher, documentary filmmaker and full-time border vigilante. They agitate on behalf of policies ranging from mining the U.S.-Mexico border and placing government sniper teams in the desert to the forced sterilization of Mexican women and the immediate deportation of all Latino immigrants and Muslims, regardless of legal status or citizenship.
They are 20 of the most active and influential nativists among the looming second wave of anti-immigratio
The net effect of their collective effort has contributed mightily toward darkening the skies of an already harsh political and social climate, with the tone of the national debate on immigration growing nastier by the day and with Latinos increasingly being subject to discrimination and violence. The most current FBI hate crime statistics suggest that hate crimes targeting Latinos in this country spiked 35% over the past four years, and a recently released Pew Hispanic Center study found that Latinos, whether American citizens for generations or undocumented, are feeling more and more vulnerable and discriminated against.
What follows are snapshots of these 20 new-wave nativists. Although this collection is not intended to be comprehensive, it provides insight into the attitudes, motivations and personalities of a still-growing fringe movement that regrettably wields more influence in our society now than ever.
Rusty Childress Jerome Corsi Robert Crooks Michelle Dellacroce Wiley Drake Shawna Forde "Buffalo" Rick Galeener William Gheen Dustin Gold Bill Irwin Kris Kobach Greg Letiecq Tom Macklin Chelene Nightingale Donald E. Pauly Rosanna Pulido Jason "J.T." Ready Alberto Rodriguez Vito Vaccaro Brook YoungThis report was compiled by Heidi Beirich, Susy Buchanan, David Holthouse, Brentin Mock and Casey Sanchez.
The Misanthrope Virginia Developer is USA’s Loudest Neo-Nazi By Brentin Mock and Mark Potok
Roanoke, Va. — Last Sept. 20, the eyes of America turned to Jena, La., where more than 20,000 people had gathered to protest what they saw as racism in the disparate criminal treatment accorded black and white students at a local high school. For many, it was an uplifting moment, signaling what they hoped would grow into a renewed striving for racial justice, a reborn civil rights movement for a generation that didn't remember the first one. For one real estate developer in this city in the Blue Ridge Mountains, however, it was an occasion to vent feelings about six black teens in Jena facing harsh criminal penalties for a schoolyard fight.
"Lynch the Jena 6!" Bill White wrote in a screaming headline on his website even before the demonstrators had left tiny Jena. Then he got down to business.
"If these niggers are released or acquitted, we will find out where they live and make sure that white activists and white citizens in Louisiana know it, we'll mail directions to their homes to every white man in Louisiana if we have to in order to find someone willing to deliver justice," White wrote. Next, after some research, he appended home addresses and phone numbers for five of the teenagers.
Within hours, White's amazing statements were all over the Internet and the news. Officials expressed shock such comments could be legal, and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco ordered police protection at some of the boys' homes. Called by a reporter, the FBI said it was investigating White's threats for criminal content.
It was a classic Bill White moment.
William Alexander White may be the loudest and most obnoxious neo-Nazi leader in America. Currently the chief of the American National Socialist Workers Party, White is a former left-wing anarchist who is best known for his name-calling, threats and incessant gossip — not to mention embarrassing pleas of love for women who then publicly spurn him. He is a man who often seems incapable of separating truth from fiction, but also a skilled computer programmer who has built some of the radical right's more important websites. By his own account, White has a juvenile record that includes 22 arrests as a teenager, but he is also a businessman who in the last four years has bought 24 inner-city properties valued at $1,063,000 — most of them apartments he acquired as part of his "ghetto beautification project." Above all, White, now 30, is an angry, resentful and narcissistic loner — a misanthrope.
A Bully is Born Bill White describes himself as a bright child who got interested in politics in junior high school, where he became what he called a "utopian anarchist" and began reading Freud and Marx at 13. The next year, he put out his first issue of the Utopian Anarchist Party newsletter. In it, he railed against juvenile psychiatrists, among other things, who had diagnosed him as particularly paranoid and aggressive.That was reflected in his high school career, which included bouncing between three high schools due to an extensive record of disruptive and threatening behavior toward students, teachers and a principal, according to a psychological evaluation administered by the Montgomery County, Md., public schools.
That same evaluation may be the most sympathetic rendering of White, then 16, known. "Let us not forget that the world needs William White," it said. "And William White needs the world." But, in language that describes well White's career over the coming years, the report added this: "What he hasn't learned is tolerance, patience, foresight, wisdom, cooperation, respect and compassion. He has learned how to be rude, to challenge authority, to denigrate and despise others."
White has written that he was arrested 22 times between the ages of 15 and 19 on charges of "assault, weapons, explosives, property destruction, graffiti and use of false identification.
Aries Defrance Brown, a man little more than half Bill White's size, says he intervened when he saw the neo-Nazi landlord attack a black woman in the street. For his trouble, Brown was accused by White of assault. |
In 1996, two years after his mental health evaluation, White became one of the first to use the Internet to harass his enemies. By now a student at the University of Maryland, White heard gossip about a certain teenage girl who was supposedly being abused by her mother. In a pattern of recklessness that would continue for at least the next decade, White didn't hesitate to go public, posting the mother's phone number to friends along with the suggestion that they harass her with calls.
"We can't stop the calls," the victimized family's father told The Washington Post that February. "It's like a virus. … It could break up our family." White's sneering response suggests the Internet philosophy he has followed ever since: "You should be able to write what you want on the Internet, whether it's true or not."
At college, White remained a spokesman for his Utopian Anarchist Party and loudly proclaimed his left-wing views, including his admiration for Marx and for Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam leader. After the jail visit occasioned by his tussle with police, White, in a ListServ E-mail, trumpeted "all the bomb threats and attacks on schools recently. Over 200 in the area. … I don't think I need to elaborate."
Throughout this period, White was becoming a Web developer, building his own sites on the Internet. In late 1997, just before a failed run as an anarchist for the Montgomery County Board of Education, he built Overthrow.com, the personal website he still runs today. Back then, however, it wasn't a Nazi propaganda center. Instead, it featured links to the Green Panthers, an Ohio pro-marijuana group that wanted to create a "stoner homeland"; to Anti-Racist Action, a group that likes to physically confront neo-Nazis and others on the radical right; to the Revolutionary Workers Party, a Trotskyist group; and to the so-called Lesbian Avengers. The site also included recipes for an array of do-it-yourself synthetic drugs and bombs.
All that would disappear soon enough.
About Face It isn't clear what sent White hurtling from the radical left to the radical right. But the man who had worshipped Malcolm X was soon ranting about "niggers"; the friend of the Lesbian Avengers began to relentlessly attack "homo Jews"; and the one-time proponent of psychedelic drugs became a harsh critic of users.There are some clues. In October 1999, White put up an angry screed on Overthrow.com attacking the Southern Poverty Law Center and another anti-racist group for their criticism of rock musician Michael Moynihan. White also sent Moynihan a sympathetic letter. "Mike, I, being a leftist-communi
After that posting, White seemed to focus his hatred on anti-racist groups and, increasingly, Jews. At around the same time, White says he became an official of white nationalist Pat Buchanan's Reform Party presidential campaign and also that of Brian Saunders, a local candidate for the far-right Constitution Party.
In early 2001, the motto at the top of the Overthrow.com page — "Militant Anti-Government
After about six months, White left the Pravda job. He was growing closer and closer to the leaders of the radical right, as shown by his attendance at the 2002 conference of American Renaissance, a white supremacist journal. While there, he met a reporter for the far-right Washington Times, Robert Stacy McCain. Before long, White was being quoted in the Times, including in a story on an "alternative currency" issued by extremists. Described as "a Web development consultant for political and corporate clients," White gushed on about the dubious notes.
The second time Bill White brought his storm troopers to Toledo, Ohio, police responded with a massive display of force. Some anti-racist protesters and photographers, in fact, complained of being manhandled by authorities. |
The next few years were largely spent building up Overthrow.com, which became one of the best-read sites on the neo-Nazi scene. White wrote often about the internal politics of groups like the National Alliance, then the largest neo-Nazi group in the country. After the death of Alliance founder William Pierce in 2002, his website began to fill with vitriolic criticism, much of it anonymous, of the men who had taken over the Alliance after Pierce's death.
Siding with internal Alliance rebels, White energetically published countless defamatory stories about the group's leaders — stories that were sometimes right, frequently wrong, but always well read.
At around the same time, White was helping build key white power websites, including the Vanguard News Network site run by Alex Linder, and becoming a real power on the radical right. But as has happened often in White's life, it didn't take long for a squabble to develop. In October 2003, White cut his ties to Linder, saying VNN had too many problems to overcome. He added: "Everyone wants to blame me like some nigger on welfare blaming the white man for being broke."
Even as the Overthrow-VNN relationship was collapsing, White was going through other difficult entanglements. And, increasingly, he began to reveal details about these matters — details that would surely have been better left private.
'Marry Me, Jennifer' In late 2003, Bill White was going out with a white-power activist named Jennifer Adams — or so he says. In November of that year, he posted a long screed describing a quarrel the two had. "She attacked me like a wild animal," he said in his breathless Overthrow.com posting. "Only the fact that I am about 215 pounds to her 130 or so left me able to stop her." He also described breaking into a room she was in and finding her "having something very close to cyber sex" with a man.But Adams sneered at that account. "Bill is/was in love with me," she wrote on another neo-Nazi site. "And the feeling was never mutual. He has tried to make advances towards me, but just ends up jacking off, by himself, in the end. … He is a very delusional guy and I am sure everyone knows what a liar he is."
Jennifer Adams |
After absorbing that insult, White took up briefly the next month with another white-power activist, a woman named Erica Hardwick-Hoesch
In early 2004, White apparently decided that it was Adams — a woman he'd spent much energy defaming as a promiscuous slut in the preceding weeks — who he loved after all. In a widely mocked posting in February, he called himself "a blind and stupid fool" and said he had been "lashing out in pain." He said he had realized that Adams was pregnant with their child. "Marry me, Jennifer," he wrote.
Erica Hardwick-Hoesch |
Adams didn't see it that way. "I am not pregnant and I am not having Bill White's love child," she countered on VNN. "Furthermore, if I was, it would be an immaculate conception." A little later, in the same forum, she added, "Everyone who knows me in REAL LIFE knows that I was utterly repulsed by Bill."
Rejected, White turned his energies to building a real estate empire in his new hometown of Roanoke, buying up houses and apartment buildings in a largely black neighborhood. Unfortunately for him, he found himself facing Hardwick-Hoesch
White, spotting the woman he claims is his former lover passing out the fliers on his property, screeched to a halt, ran up two flights of stairs, and punched her in the head. Ultimately, he was convicted of assault and fined $100. He was also fined $250 for contempt of court after losing his temper on the stand and screaming at Hardwick-Hoesch
Buying up distressed properties in the Mountainview neighborhood of Roanoke's West End — a tough area characterized by crime and blight — White began to improve them, raise rents and, often, boot out original residents who could no longer afford to stay. He refused to accept Section 8 government vouchers.
At the same time, White endlessly insulted his clients, writing publicly about their alleged drug use, criminal records, prostitution and so on. Throughout, he slandered African Americans as "niggers," "nig-rats" "vermin" and worse.
Some of the victimized tenants — White often had no proof of his accusations — sought help from the local Legal Aid Society, which jousted with White in court repeatedly in 2004 and 2005. (White had routinely called police on invited guests if their hosts were behind on their rent, calling them trespassers.) Very few of these cases succeeded, but his tenants, many of them black, felt the pressure.
"His modus operandi was to intimidate the people of that neighborhood through defamation," said David Beidler, a lawyer who represented four of White's tenants in court battles with the landlord. "He readily said things on his website that weren't true about his tenants. I had one client who was slandered terribly by him. I tried to encourage her to sue him, but she was too intimidated by him."
In complaints filed with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, tenants claimed White walked around their neighborhood armed with a shotgun and tried to intimidate them by saying the Klan was coming to "regulate" the area. "I was unable to sleep at night," one woman wrote in her complaint. "He forced people to move because they were afraid of what he might do."
Toward the middle of 2005, with his real estate business apparently thriving, White began to move even more into the neo-Nazi world. On June 25, he joined a rally at a Revolutionary War battlefield in Yorktown, Va., hosted by the National Socialist Movement (NSM). At the time, NSM was rapidly growing into the largest neo-Nazi group in America, thanks mainly to huge numbers of defections from the National Alliance, the group White had helped attack on his website earlier.
At the rally was NSM leader Jeff Schoep, along with white supremacists from various Klan and racist skinhead groups. But it was White, drawing attention with his violently acerbic style, who wound up being quoted as NSM spokesman.
Upon his return to Roanoke, Schoep, apparently impressed by White, announced that White had joined the group and would be leader of its new Roanoke chapter. (The chapter's membership appears to have been limited to White.) He also became national spokesman for what Schoep called "America's Nazi Party."
Toledo, Satan and Beyond On Oct. 16, 2005, White led an NSM rally that was supposed to kick off a provocative neo-Nazi march "against crime" through a poor, black neighborhood of Toledo, Ohio. But the speeches of White and others were so incendiary that a crowd of neighborhood residents and anti-racists began to swell threateningly, and police ushered the white supremacists away, saying a riot was imminent.And it was. As White and the other neo-Nazis were whisked off, the crowd attacked police, police vehicles, and local buildings. The results, from the point of view of NSM, could hardly have been better. The violence made every network TV news show that night, along with reports of more than 100 rioters' arrests.
Crowed Schoep: "The Negro beasts proved our point for us."
Thrilled with the attention, White and the NSM repeated the tactic. On Dec. 10, the group returned to Toledo. The police were far better prepared this time and held violence to a minimum. But the NSM kept going, taking its show to Orlando, Fla., where members held another "march against black crime" on Feb. 5, 2006.
That summer, an internal dispute began to tear apart the NSM. The wife of one of the group's original founders, Clifford Herrington, had long been a leader of the so-called "Joy of Satan Ministries," and as this news leaked out, it provoked widespread ridicule and attacks. Some of the most heated came from proponents of the theology of Christian Identity, which generally claims that Jews are the literal descendants of Satan and people of color are soulless beings who were never in the Garden of Eden. To these men, Satan was an enemy to be taken seriously.
In July, White, who had been an atheist for most of his life, wrote a commentary in which he argued that he was "much more bothered and offended by the reaction from various Christian Identity adherents than I am by anything Mrs. Herrington has to say." He went on to call the theology "stupid" and "harmful to the white nationalist movement" and to suggest that its adherents foolishly relied on the Old Testament, a Jewish document whose dictates "Judaized white people."
That was apparently too much for Schoep, who told White he was suspended from his NSM post. White responded typically, "resigning" from NSM even as Schoep said that he was being ejected permanently. Weirdly, the man who had given campus sermons from a Satanic "Bible" now told the world he was leaving NSM because he could not remain in a group with ties to a Satanic ministry. White formed the American National Socialist Workers Party (ANSWP) the same day.
The Beat Goes On Given White's chronic inability to maintain interpersonal relationships, ANSWP seemed doomed to failure, or at least to essentially be an organization that existed only in cyberspace. But by the end of 2007, the group was actually claiming 30 chapters, and included some former leading activists from the NSM.Still, ANSWP's main purpose seems to be as a springboard for White, who remains very much a creature of the Internet despite occasionally joining neo-Nazi rallies like one held in Kalamazoo, Mich., last August. "They're invisible," Brenda Walker, a Roanoke NAACP official who fielded many complaints about White, said of ANSWP events. "When he stages protests and rallies, he's always alone."
But the racist vitriol never ends. Last Aug. 19, for instance, the former Malcolm X admirer wrote: "[A]ll the 'repressive' acts whites have conducted towards Negroes throughout our history together are justified, from the whippings of slavery through modern 'police brutality.' … The only healthy mode of existence for the Negro in white society is a state of complete subjugation… . I no longer doubt that the expulsion and extermination of the black race on the American continent by their white betters is an inevitability that whites can no longer turn their heads from."
Also last year, White went into a rage when Pulitzer Prize-winning Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts wrote a column on the murder of a white couple in Tennessee that White didn't like. White posted several attacks on Pitts, who he called a "nigger," and also Pitts' home address. He posted his attack on the Jena 6, along with their home addresses. And, closer to home, he took on the entire editorial staff of The Roanoke Times, printing names, addresses, personal information and even the suggestion that his supporters crash the wedding of the niece of an editor he particularly despised — a "Jew-loving piece of shit," as he called her.
Such commentary is what caused Overthrow.com to be cancelled by a hosting company late last year. The site reappeared a short time later, this time hosted on a server owned by racist propagandist Hal Turner. But after the Southern Poverty Law Center revealed this January that Turner was an FBI informant, many radicals questioned White's trustworthiness
None of this — not even the real hate some activists express toward White, who they see as causing nothing but problems — has slowed him down. In January, White used still another Web forum to write: "Sometimes you just have to murder blacks — and, frankly, the killing needs to start with the black leaders and NAACP activists… . I know where my local NAACP 'leaders' live — do you?"
In other words, Bill White remains the same overbearing bully that he has been since his days as a high school anarchist. That trait was in evidence again last December, as he engaged in a court battle with one Aries Defrance Brown, a 32-year-old black man who says he intervened when White leaped out of his car in Roanoke to attack Latoria Minnis, a black woman. (Both men have charged each other with assault, and White has also accused Minnis of attacking him first.)
Brown, a man with a featherweight build and a quiet smile, was being represented by a public defender. Across the courtroom, White, a big man close to twice Brown's weight, was taking no such chances. He had paid a top-dollar criminal defense attorney, known for a fondness for African safaris and also getting defendants off in the most trying of circumstances, to defend the misdemeanor charge. And even that didn't seem to be enough for White — as he sat in court, he kept throwing evil glares and smirks in the direction of the diminutive Brown.
Brown, apparently cognizant of Bill White's vision of himself as the great American führer, found the whole performance amusing. "He's supposed to be a Klan leader or something, but he let a black man whoop him?" he said.
The Transformation Facing Trial, Racist Skinhead Claims Change By Susy Buchanan
Phoenix — Last Nov. 27, Sean Gaines picked up a pencil inside his jail cell and began to write a poem:
I once was quite notorious In Arizona's racist skinhead scene It's taken losing too many years To discover what that meansGaines was indeed once a skinhead's skinhead: 230 pounds of red-laced, jack-booted aggression, recklessness and bravado, notorious for flashing his gun one minute at white power gatherings, and his penis the next.
"Sean Gaines would do anything he was told or asked to do, no matter how brutal and regardless of the consequences," says Arizona skinhead expert Michele Lefkowith, the Anti-Defamation
But four years in jail have tamed Gaines, now 26. His swagger has vanished along with the 60 pounds he's lost since he was arrested on capital murder charges. Awaiting trial for his participation in a February 2002 torture-murder,
His placement there is vital to his survival because Gaines has publicly renounced skinhead ideology. He published a letter in an anti-racist magazine in 2006 and disparaged white supremacists in a Court TV documentary last year. Most recently, he sat for an in-depth interview with the Intelligence Report in which he re-traced his path into the dark heart of the racist skinhead movement and detailed violent crimes that remain unsolved.
Whether his jailhouse conversion is sincere or a calculated attempt to generate sympathy and perhaps escape the death penalty, Gaines is putting his life on the line by denouncing racism. White supremacist prison gangs will almost certainly put his name high up on their hit lists if he ever "hits the yard" as a general population inmate. In their eyes, he is a race traitor and a snitch.
The stabbing of Wesley "Nazi Dreamer" Lovin led to a 2002 "hunting trip" that may have ended in murder, according to Sean Gaines. |
"You printing this is gonna get me killed," Gaines said. "But I'm tired of living a lie. They can kill me, but at least they kill me with all of this off my shoulders."
By the time reality struck I did not recognize myself The monster people speak of I'd swear is someone elseDuring the interview, which was monitored by two armed guards, Gaines was clad in a black and white striped uniform. Thick chains encircled his waist, binding his ankles and wrists. His eyes were red and watery, his skin pale, his voice shaky.
"I'm focusing so hard on the future and I'm doing anything I can to try and make that future," he said. "I want to write anti-racist literature. I want to open peoples' eyes. Myself and people in that scene, we went after youth. They got me in my youth."
Raising Gaines Sean Gaines was born in Nogales, Ariz., in 1981. His mother was a nurse. His father, Lewis, was a drug addict who slipped deeper into abuse and criminal activity as his son entered his teens. Gaines was first expelled from school for fighting at 9, shortly before his parents divorced, then again in sixth grade. His mother was strict and tried to rein him in, but eventually she gave up and turned him over to his father. Gaines was 15.No sooner had she dropped off Gaines' clothes, hip-hop albums and collection of football cards at his dad's place, than Lewis showed his son how to hotwire a car and sped off doing 80 on a major city street. "My dad taught me how to steal cars that night," Gaines said. When they were pulled over by the police, Lewis Gaines managed to talk his way out of trouble. His son was in awe.
"Everything totally escalated from that night. It just gets worse and worse. He impressed upon me what it was like to be a modern-day gangster and that became a cool image to me. I started to idolize my dad even more because I saw everything he was doing and getting away with. He was some superior being in this mix of screwy society and lowlifes. Everything he did, all the bad things he did, he made out to be like they were for a purpose, for a reason, like he was doing them because it was a righteous thing."
Lewis cooked and sold methamphetamine
"What did Dad teach me? He taught me how to use my fists, steal cars, weigh and sell drugs, cook drugs, kick in doors. He taught me how to put on that mask and play the part. He taught me how to be that tough guy."
His father also showed him the ways of murder. The first killing went down when Gaines was 16.
"An Indian fella, went by 'Chief,' pilfered some of my dad's stuff out of the living room — some old John Wayne-style six-shooter guns, tweaker possessions, basically." Lewis put the word out, and when Chief tried to sell the guns Lewis got a call from an associate. They went to pay Chief a visit with Gaines in tow.
"They lit matches and dropped 'em on his bare stomach trying to get him to 'fess up. They took a pair of scissors, heated 'em up and stuck 'em right by his eye. He had two [tattooed] teardrops there and they were trying to burn them off. They beat on this dude. My father made me beat on this dude. I hit him and [Gaines' father's associate] T-Bone fractured his face, split his face open." Later, after recovering the stolen possessions, Gaines said, "They took him two blocks up the street behind this Dumpster area. I heard a handful of gunshots.
Sean Gaines and Jessica Nelson, who earlier pleaded guilty to the same killing for which Gaines will soon stand trial. |
"They came back alone."
Three months later, his father's meth-fueled paranoia led to another murder. Once again, Lewis made it a father-and-son activity.
"They thought one of their group was an undercover cop, and they were doing some things with making counterfeit money to buy red phosphorus, iodine crystals, pseudoephedrine
Lewis lured the suspect to the house. Again, the victim was tortured.
"I saw my dad take a crescent wrench and hit that dude right in the rib cage and I could hear it crack. I walked out. I didn't want to see anymore."
Lewis left his son alone at the house with the man tied up in the bedroom. Some hours later, a biker arrived, spread a tarp out on the floor and told Gaines to leave the room. He refused. "I was thinking maybe he'd wrap him up in the tarp, throw him in the car and leave. But out comes Crocodile Dundee [a large hunting knife], and he slit his throat right in front of me."
Lewis Gaines was never charged with either killing, and the victims have not been further identified. He was himself murdered Oct. 1, 2007, five days after Sean Gaines related these stories to the Report.
Prison Days After living so long full of Misguided anger, hatred and rage I find myself these days Locked inside a cageIt wasn't long before Gaines starting finding trouble on his own. He says he committed his first felony in May 1998, when he assaulted a man he claims was trying to rape his girlfriend. Gaines split the victim's head open with a tree branch, then dumped him outside a nearby convenience store, called 911 and fled. A court official's pre-sentencing report in that case recommended that Gaines be returned to his mother's custody and given probation. Instead, the judge sent the 17-year-old to adult prison.
"I was a little hip-hop junkie thug until I got locked up. I didn't have any idea of racism till I hit prison, short of my dad saying, 'Nigger-this, nigger-that,'" Gaines said. "I went to prison as a kid, mad at the world, could not understand why they pulled me away from my family, why they locked me up for protecting my girlfriend. I didn't know who I hated. I was just full of hate and they [racist skinheads in prison] see that. They latch on to that."
"I've always had choices," Gaines admitted. "But prison introduced me to what got me to where I am."
Soon after he entered prison in March 1998, Gaines drew the attention of David Soprito, a 28-year-old racist skinhead who went by the gang name Odious. Soprito was serving 10 years for armed robbery. He took Gaines under his wing and began molding him.
Photographed recently in a Phoenix jail, Sean Gaines says he is determined to damage the white power movement. It is a decision that may be self-interested |
Gaines earned his first racist gang tattoo — "White Pride" across his shoulder blades — for beating up a man who owed money to Soprito's crew. "What they do is they get what they call 'torpedoes'," Gaines explained. "That is any youngster on the yard, and if they tell you do it, you do it. It's called running a mission."
Soprito attempted to indoctrinate Gaines in white nationalist ideology but it mostly went in one ear and out the other. "I got out of prison and didn't know my '14 Words' [a reference to a famous white power slogan], wasn't given a pair of boots, nothing."
Two days before Gaines was released in July 2000 after serving nearly three years, he slipped a phone number to a female prison guard he'd flirted with. She called a week after he got out and the two entered into a casual sexual relationship that ended after a few weeks. Three months later, she called Gaines and arranged a meeting.
"She lets me know that she's dating one of the skins on the yard, a pretty high-up-there skin, too, who went by the name Misfit. He was still locked up and she was doing all those wonderful things that guys in prison only dream about female guards doing for them.
"Three weeks later, we're hanging out at a mall and she says, 'Misfit says that since I'm his 'byrd' and since he's in his reds [that is, has earned the right to wear red shoelaces], I gotta get mine.' So we're going into the store and she's like, 'Well, I think you need yours too.' This is how I got my reds."
Dancing With the Stars Gaines didn't know what boots to buy, didn't know how to straight-lace his boots in proper skinhead fashion, didn't know much of anything about being a skinhead until he met Patrick Bearup and Joshua Fiedler at a party in late August of 2001, not long after he was given his red laces.In between prison stints, Fiedler had become one of the dominant skins on the Phoenix scene. A natural leader, charismatic and silver-tongued,
"I told him straight out, 'Look, I ran with a guy in prison but I really haven't run into anybody out here.' I said, 'I'm cool with hanging out but I really don't have the education.' He said, 'You know I run National Socialist Front [NSF] and I run everything out here.' He was playing the big tough guy role. He gives me a flier and some literature and he says, 'You think about it, you hang out for a while, and if we like you then you can probate for me under NSF.'"
This time, Gaines paid attention and did his homework. "Next time I hung out, he's like, 'What are the 14 Words?' and I just spit 'em out and he's like, 'All right, just checking.'"
Less than six months later, Gaines participated in the murder of a man suspected of stealing from Fiedler's girlfriend, Jessica Nelson, while Fiedler was in prison. The details are chilling. After Nelson discovered money missing from her purse, she blamed her roommate, Mark Mathes, and called Gaines for help. He and two other skinheads, Bearup and Jeremy Johnson, went to her house that night to deal with the situation.
Johnson beat Mathes senseless with a baseball bat. The four skinheads then loaded his bloodied and broken body into the trunk of a car and drove him to an area known as Swastika Mine, north of Phoenix. Bearup chopped off one of Mathes' fingers with bolt cutters before they hurled his body over an embankment. Johnson alleges that Gaines then shot Mathes in the face with a shotgun to obliterate dental records, an allegation Gaines adamantly rejects. (Nelson and Johnson took plea deals and have agreed to testify against Gaines, as they did against Bearup, who was sentenced to death in early 2007.)
Hunt for Humans Sean Gaines estimates he personally recruited around 40 young skinheads during the three years he was actively involved in the scene. And violence of some sort, he says, was a near daily occurrence.Instead of lying low after the Mathes murder, Gaines immersed himself in the scene, getting into fights three to four times a week — but never with a weapon and never without provocation, he claims. Even a brute like Gaines had his limits.
"There were quite a few of us that wanted nothing to do with it. I mean if violence came to us, sure. Violence is that scene. But you got the handful that are really sick and twisted that like to go seek it," Gaines said.
But who am I to say My sentence is not fair Society did not deserve the heartaches I caused when I was therePhoenix skinheads called these excursions "hunting trips," predatory outings in which new initiates were taken to a predominantly minority neighborhood to attack a victim at random as a test of courage and devotion to the cause.
The story of one particular hunting trip in the fall of 2002 particularly troubles Gaines. He believes the victim, who received multiple blows to the body with steel-toed boots and several stab wounds to the torso, probably died.
Gaines was not there that night, but said he was told of the details by two people who were. Based on their account, Gaines alleges that the man who wielded the knife was Samuel Compton, an exceedingly violent skinhead who described what may have been the same incident in a 2003 letter to this reporter.
"This act of violence called 'Hunting' is done for several reasons," Compton wrote from his jail cell while awaiting trial for a different 2002 murder for which he was later convicted. "To allow a recruit in his whites [white shoelaces] to 'earn' his reds. Another reason may be retaliation or sheer boredom."
The fall 2002 hunting trip began, Gaines said, after a Mexican man stabbed Charles Wesley Lovin, a racist Phoenix skinhead known as "Nazi Dreamer" who Gaines claims financed his drug habit by mugging undocumented immigrants. "He'd find any old one walking down the street in the middle of the night and he was on it. He'd scream at his old lady to stop the car, and he'd jump out and do his deed," Gaines said. "Well, one night he got stabbed by one of them and ended up in the hospital with the knife still in his lung."
Dreamer's girlfriend got on the phone and issued a skinhead call to arms, Gaines said, and her skinhead "brothers" flocked to the hospital prepared for battle. None was more intent on avenging Dreamer than Compton, Gaines said, adding that Compton was "ranting and raving, wanting redemption and payback and [shouting,] 'Let's get seven for one of ours!'"
Gaines said the skins piled into a truck armed with bats, knives and brass knuckles. Their tactics were simple. They'd spot a potential victim walking down the street, stop the vehicle, bail out and attack. Gaines said that Compton and one of his skinhead initiates soon homed in on two Hispanic men in an area of Phoenix known as Sunnyslope.
"One individual was beaten with whatever inanimate objects they had and he ran off. Another was getting beaten and booted and stabbed between the neck and waist, numerous puncture wounds," Gaines said. He said they left the victim for dead, got back in the car and continued the hunt.
"The next attack didn't go as well. It was probably half an hour between the two. No more than the distance to drive, distance to spot your target and the surroundings, and come back and do the deed."
"Again, it was Compton and one of his [recruits] that did the stabbing. They found one individual, started to beat on him and got one thrust of the knife in. But he managed to run off."
Before they could find another victim, Dreamer called his girlfriend and begged her to come back to the hospital. According to Gaines, the remainder of the crew headed to the Phoenix home of Paul Skalniak, then a member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance organization and stay-at-home dad who still mentors young neo-Nazis in Arizona.
The attacks were cause for celebration and enough, Gaines said, to earn Compton a skinhead promotion — a pair of red shoelaces symbolic of spilling the blood of another race.
"They're all there, partying and celebrating their victorious night. Skalniak gets a phone call from Dreamer and gets told, 'Give Compton his reds,'" said Gaines. "Skalniak throws them in a big old stein of beer and hands it to Compton and Compton downs his beer and almost chokes on his reds."
According to Gaines, "The only thing [evidence] left standing from that night is DNA on Compton's clothes. A pair of white laces and a pair of blue jeans which he gave to Skalniak. He's got all of Compton's stuff boxed up, waiting for him to get out in 20 years."
It took a lot to do so But I finally walked away From a lifestyle that was never truly mine I just got lost along the way A Racist's Regrets By early 2003, Gaines' reputation and standing among Arizona skinheads had reached its pinnacle. That spring, Gaines and Fiedler threw a series of white-power barbecues in a public park that each drew 80 to 100 racists. They appeared on the evening news together in March, promoting their events, and were interviewed in a local newspaper — oblivious to the fact that whispers about the authors of the February 2002 murder of Mark Mathes finally had reached the ears of law enforcement.Gaines was arrested in May 2003 after he and Jessica Nelson were pulled over in a stolen car with a gun under the seat. He bonded out but was arrested for the final time on Sept. 11, 2003, in an early morning raid.
This time, the charge was murder.
"Once I knew I was going back to do time, I knew I only had one of two choices. It was either go [skinhead] all the way or go all the way in the other direction and as fast as I could," he said. "People hear my name or see me and their eyes get real big still. I could have made quite a standing for myself [in prison] if I had stayed in it, but it's not who I am, and the only way I could for sure get out of that scene was to ruin myself."
By consenting to the Intelligence Report interview Gaines is doing exactly that. Gaines spoke with the Report in the jailhouse chapel, an appropriate enough place for a confession. He was baptized there in June 2006. The water was freezing, he recalled, and he had to climb in and out of the tank fully chained.
"[Religion] helps, but not as much as them good, faithful Christians like to tell you: 'Just put your faith in the Lord and He'll see you through.' It doesn't give me the peace of mind that a lot of people say it does."
Although Gaines maintains his innocence in the Mathes murder, he is quick to point out that innocence in that crime does not make him an innocent man.
"I had an opportunity [to stop the murder]. I didn't no more tell [Johnson] to do it than I told him to stop. So I'm not guilty, but I'm not innocent. The middle's going to get me killed. We've got a good defense and an honest defense, but what's that going to get me? Arizona law says an accomplice is as good as dead."
The weight of the crimes he's been charged with, and some that he hasn't, is nearly suffocating. "I'm guilty of shit they haven't got me for, and I feel I deserve to do time for the shit they haven't got me for," he said.
"I've found an outlet that I didn't have before, a way to deal with my inner turmoil. Do I still have hate in me? Yes, but it's not misdirected anymore. It's not, 'He looked at my old lady in the pool hall so I'm gonna go punch him in the face and call him a dirty name and scream, 'White power!' What the hell was I thinking? What kind of outlet is that? That makes me a disgusting, disgraceful human being. I was sick."
Gaines' life now involves reading, pacing back and forth for exercise, and studying case law. But he says he's eager to do more, hopeful he can inflict as much damage on the white-power movement as possible and that somehow his future will involve righting the wrongs of his past. Last November, Gaines recruited accused murderers in nearby cells to help him draw get-well cards for sick children. They completed 100 brightly colored cards featuring Snoopy, Winnie the Pooh and SpongeBob SquarePants.
Late one night, after several hours of coloring, Phoenix's most notorious skinhead composed the final lines of his poem.
The sorrow in my heart So true and deep and sincere Though the opposition I pose to racists Is something they should fear I suppose it wouldn't be fair to post this info without also providing a rebuttal to the charges brought by the SPLC, so here is a response to the information provided by the SPLC by the Federation for American Immigration Reform:To: URBAN AFFAIRS EDITORS
Contact: Bob Dane of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, +1-202-328-7004
WASHINGTON, March 9 /PRNewswire-USN
Today the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) issued a misleading release announcing a significant increase in the number of hate groups and hate crimes over the last few years. The release then suggests that our national debate over immigration reform has fueled the increase in both. Offering no criteria as to what constitutes a hate group, manipulating the data for self-serving purposes, and then making broad, unsubstantiated
When examined responsibly, the FBI hate crime data show a dramatically different story than the one the SPLC portrays. First, in order to suggest an artificially large increase in the raw number of hate crimes, the SPLC selects 2003 as its base year, one of lowest years on record for hate crimes against Hispanics. If one compares the number of hate crimes between 1995 (the earliest report available on the FBI's website) and 2006 (the most recent statistical year available), one would see that the number of hate crimes has increased only 17 percent.
But even this is not the whole story. The SPLC conveniently forgets to index the raw hate crime data with the population, a step always taken by the FBI to more accurately depict an increase or decrease in crime. Thus, when one indexes a 17 percent increase in hate crimes against Hispanics with a 67 percent increase in the Hispanic population between 1995 and 2006, it becomes clear that the rate of hate crimes against Hispanics has in fact dropped dramatically -- by about 40 percent.
This reduction in the rate of hate crimes against Hispanics is even more apparent when one considers that the number of law enforcement agencies that participate in the FBI's hate crime data collection program increased 33 percent between 1995 and 2006. Between 2003 and 2006 alone, the number of law enforcement agencies participating in the FBI's hate crime data collection program increased by over 700.
Finally, the SPLC claims that there has been substantial growth in the number of "hate groups" since 2000. However, the SPLC provides no definition of a "hate group" and offers no objective criteria that it uses to classify organizations as such. The SPLC appears to think that it can stick this label onto any organization it wishes, including long-standing, highly-regarded
"There is no level of hate crime that is acceptable -- period," says Dan Stein, President of FAIR. "However, the SPLC's calculated abuse of the term 'hate group' and manipulation of hate crime data for self-serving political interests is an affront to hate crime victims and those who advocate on their behalf. The SPLC manipulates data to reach deceitful conclusions, tosses the term 'hate group' at highly-respecte
ABOUT FAIR
Headquartered on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., FAIR is the largest, oldest and most respected immigration reform group in America. With over 250,000 members, FAIR advocates for non-discriminat
SOURCE Federation for American Immigration Reform
