The hate next door, p.1
The Hate Next Door, page 1
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2023 by Matson Browning
Cover and internal design © 2023 by Sourcebooks
Cover design by Heather VanHuizen/Sourcebooks
Cover images © Daniella Fishburne/Arcangel, John Coletti/Getty Images
Internal design by Tara Jaggers/Sourcebooks
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional service. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.—From a Declaration of Principles Jointly Adopted by a Committee of the American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and Associations
This book is a memoir. It reflects the author’s present recollections of experiences over a period of time. Some names and characteristics have been changed, some events have been compressed, and some dialogue has been re-created.
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CONTENTS
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
1. American Nazis
2. Going Undercover
3. Hate Groups
4. A Question of Faith
5. Skinbyrds & Dragons
6. Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes
7. Hate Crimes
8. Mr. Hitler Goes to Washington
9. Border Song
10. Small World
11. Extremism on Main Street
12. Solutions
Terms and Symbols to Recognize
Note on the Language Used
Reading Group Guide
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
Back Cover
To our children, who taught us what love really means.
INTRODUCTION
Six of them had driven 250 miles to start a war with Mexico.
They were mostly quiet and had been since the start of their long trip. No radio. No bragging about the “wetback” they’d recently sucker punched or some rant about keeping America pure. The only sound was the car’s tires heading south quickly. There were empty McDonald’s bags and soda bottles and cigarette butts on the car floor. In the trunk lay several hunting rifles with scopes, AR-style semi automatics, and one shotgun.
I was still an hour behind them as my truck rattled down I-10 at 90 miles per hour. My Glock pistol lay heavy, and admittedly consoling, on my hip. I’d also snatched my own shotgun, now loaded and resting beside me in the front seat.
I’d gotten the call that afternoon from a buddy in the Department of Public Safety. He’d asked in short breaths if I was familiar with anyone who owned a red four-door Nissan Sentra. I was, and my whole body clenched like a fist. They were actually doing it.
“You gotta get down here,” the DPS guy said.
A red Sentra had been spotted loaded with a full crew of skinheads heading south. I’d run back into the house to grab my guns, kiss my wife, Tawni, goodbye, and jumped in my truck.
I’d first heard of this road-trip possibility only days before at a downtown meeting of the Arizona branch of the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi organization whose conceptions of “White supremacy” marched in lockstep with its notions of “patriotism.” The president of the group—Jerry Harbin, a guy I’d now known for years while working undercover—had been rallying his Mesa-area troops to help out the Minutemen Project, another anti-immigration, keep-things-White type of militia, down on the border. Harbin wanted a carpool to head to the border and help.
I’d gotten curious. Then, I got alarmed as Harbin added, “Some of our Unit 88 brothers are going.” Unit 88 is the most violent strain of skinheads in the Southwest. They were generally hard for other hate groups to manage and only brought in for muscle and so-called “wet work,” the spilling of blood. Their newest scheme offered plenty of opportunity for that.
I’d headed straight to my new office at the FBI and began writing a memo. I still have no idea what happened to it once submitted. The Phoenix FBI didn’t have a great reputation for doing much with our intel. Ironically, I shared an office with the same agent who’d written the infamously ignored 9/11 Memo, which had advised the FBI of Bin Laden’s flight plans before the attack.
Four days after I submitted my ignored memo, these six skinheads were heading south. Mathew, Brian, Billy, Cam, AJ, and Wes were not men to mess with. In the past few years working undercover, I’d gotten to know each of them—and I knew what they were capable of. Given any opportunity, these guys were prepared for a racial holy war—a RAHOWA, as they called it. In their minds, it was a prophesied crusade destined to put Whites forever atop the hierarchy of humanity. The U.S.-Mexico border, they also believed, was the perfect setting for such a crusade to begin.
The ranch they were likely heading to was seventy-some acres and owned by a “White brother” named Casey Nethercott. I knew Nethercott as your typical antigovernment racist. His property on the border was where many of the most influential and hard-core activists often gathered; the price of entry was only hate. If I had any hope of stopping these guys, I’d find them there. Every night, Nethercott’s crew of volunteers went out with rifles with infrared scopes, loaded with expanding all-copper bullets designed for elk and wild boar but intended to shoot at Mexicans and Guatemalans.
Opposite one stretch of Nethercott’s property, which lies directly across the border and marked only by a dirt road and a chain-link fence, was a small outpost of the Mexican Army composed of a dozen soldiers with German G3 assault rifles.
The plot of those in the red Nissan seemed simple enough—they’d meet up with others at the Nethercott ranch and then get one of those Mexican soldiers in their sights. BAM! If all went well, the soldiers would fire back. How could they not? And if one of the skinheads was killed, or even all of them, so be it. True patriots had died for America for three hundred years. And, if America was to have another three hundred years, blood would need to be spilled again. It’d be the biggest event since 9/11, when, they believed, America had finally woken to the wolves at its doors. Their ancestors had once hunted wolves and hung their heads from fortress walls. Now, they believed, America was too weak to even build a wall. The outcome of their attack—Americans murdered at the border by Mexican soldiers—would change all that. The American people would rage, unite, and finally be heard; the wall finally built; illegals rounded up, and then…
But first, they needed to get to the ranch.
I could well imagine Wes turning to Billy, no doubt checking his pistol for the tenth time. “God bless America,” Wes would say.
* * *
I once thought I knew what hate looked like.
I could easily picture a handful of drunk bumpkins sneaking around at night with pointy hoods on their heads. Maybe some unformed teenage skinhead spray-painting a poorly drawn swastika on an overpass.
Nothing worse. Not in America. Not today.
(It also hadn’t yet occurred to me that such “silly” actions were genuine threats to marginalized folk and an easy path to future physical violence.)
I was wrong.
Hate, and its particular rendering of White supremacy, has morphed over the past forty years. The pointy hats became shaved heads, bad tattoos, and shiny Doc Marten boots. Then the boots morphed into camouflage and the idea of “protecting our borders.” Later the camouflage became guys in khakis and golf shirts carrying torches and shouting about “taking America back.”
It’s Volksfront, a notorious global White separatist organization, using government money to run a clinic for British veterans with PTSD returning from Afghanistan—a clinic they were using to indoctrinate and recruit young soldiers.
It’s playfully shooting at targets of Black men down at the local gun range or driving down streets with historic Confederate flags while living in places like Arizona or New Jersey.
It’s suburban high schoolers drawing swastikas on their cheeks before the big game “as a joke” or chanting “He can’t read! He can’t read!” from the student cheering section whenever the single Black student on the court gets the ball.
Or it’s a single man in body armor covered in graffiti borrowed from the Crusades with two AR-15s entering a mosque in New Zealand.
For twenty years, I was an undercover cop with a front-row seat to all this hate. And even merely p retending to be part of this world almost killed me.
* * *
This book tells the history and hard realities of racial hatred and the many organizations and systems that advocate and support such thinking.
To tell such a huge story, it’s been framed largely within an account of my own career as an undercover detective within these very organizations. With an invented identity, as a churchgoing, suburban father of five (I mistakenly believed at the time that such labels were some kind of counterpoint or antidote), I was able to infiltrate, study, and then even thwart hate groups from the KKK and Unit 88 skins to several of the various militia groups now flooding to our southern borders and state capitals in America’s heartland.
I won’t pretend it was always perfect. Far from it.
For example, one White supremacist, a man named JT Ready, remained the “one who got away.” He’d begun as a racist, leaflet-passing loudmouth and become a violent militia member, an elected official, and ultimately a murderer. He’d already allegedly killed several Mexican Americans in “self-defense,” organized local hate groups, was leading hunting parties on the U.S.-Mexico border, and, with the support of nationally known politicians, even ran for local and state office. He was always one step ahead of me.
If anything, I was the one being destroyed. As a direct result of my work against White supremacy, my entire family was threatened in public (years later, we learned our son slept with knives under his bed for “when the bad guys came”), our pet butchered with a shotgun, my hard-built reputation vilified in weeks by a methodical smear campaign. Eventually, they even took out contracts on my life while Ready and other local racists systemically dismantled my career. If only they’d known, I was already falling apart anyway.
Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be very careful what we pretend to be.” Damn, I wish I’d known that quote twenty years ago. Spending all that time with hate-filled men was like walking into a radioactive wasteland. You could only stay for a short time, and even then, the toxic stuff still got into your clothes and hair, eventually under your skin. My thoughts grew violent and filled with hate, and I eventually struggled to define who I was anymore. I even started looking at my Mexican American neighbors…differently. Eventually, for too many long nights, death seemed the only option out for me. I know that revelation may sound extreme, but the FBI won’t let their crew stay undercover for more than two years to protect their mental health; as a Mesa, Arizona, detective, I did almost twenty.
Fortunately, I also had my wife of thirty years, Tawni, who kept me sane (mostly) while I worked undercover for decades and over time became a legitimate partner in gathering intel on these people, eventually going so far as to go undercover with me—all in the name of protecting our family and me.
While it was never easy on us—the threats from criminals and even cops alike, the constant need for secrecy, the nonstop exposure to terrible violence, my own eventual suicidal thoughts—we somehow got through it together.
Eventually, I quit the force and stopped—well, mostly stopped—doing undercover work. If I was going to fight hate and stay alive, I needed to do it out in the open with Tawni officially beside me. Since then, she and I have built a global information-sharing network for law enforcement called the Skinhead Intelligence Network (SIN) to help educate law enforcement and communities worldwide on White supremacy and become internationally sought-after experts on White supremacist groups and border militias. Originally the Skinhead Intelligence Network, the organization has now evolved in more than simply name to keep up with the changing face of White supremacy.
Through SIN, we’ve lectured all over the U.S., the UK for Scotland Yard, Australia and New Zealand, Germany, and Holland as rhetoric, music, and a sense of belonging continue to lure young, disaffected men—and plenty of women too—into these hate movements across the globe. With worldwide economic strife and an ongoing worldwide immigration crisis, each bringing new waves of anti-immigrant hate, we find ourselves busier than ever.
It’s time to “deputize” the rest of the world.
For too long, White supremacists were seen as a fringe movement going largely ignored. But the racists are out again: Confederate banners waving, rifles slung over camouflaged shoulders. Emboldened to emerge from the shadows. Marching in capitals across the Western world. And, with the world economy and labor force recently shaken by a global pandemic, you can expect an even greater surge in the years to come.
Quite recently, I got word that two American militias were calling supporters to the southern U.S. border. “Bring everything you got,” they bragged, referring to weaponry. “It’s going to be a bloodbath.” It wasn’t the first or last time supremacists were hoping to start an actual war with Mexico.
Worse, these border militias are especially interested in recruiting me, a well-trained police officer, their ranks already swelling with ex-military and active police officers, as law enforcement seeks supporters wherever it can find them following the social consequences and rhetoric of 2020.
After the 2020 presidential election, I worked undercover again at a “rally for America” in Gilbert, Arizona, attended by the far-right Proud Boys standing side by side with a bunch of the same skinheads I’d known years before—now middle-aged men and women dressed up for suburban America, tattoos hidden. A similar scene played out earlier this year, as Tawni and I worked undercover at a pro-Trump “Protest the Vote” rally in Phoenix. Most people in attendance were merely disappointed and devoted conservatives, period; but some in the crowd were more than that—White supremacists legitimizing their radical views by joining a larger stage. And there are increasingly more of them every year.
This battle, we fear, is only beginning.
No more than a year ago, I discovered there was a new contract on my life for the recent work we’ve been doing—further proof this threat is escalating, growing more violent, and now morphing into mainstream thought and expression.
This story is written in first person, but in reality, it is told by both Tawni and me, sharing our words, memories, fears, and hopes through my singular narration. It chronicles our time undercover to fully expose these hate groups and the varied profiles of their members, and the geopolitical and psychological dynamics that make them tick, from the racists we locked away to those, like JT Ready, who evaded me, hiding openly within our increasingly fractured and contentious culture.
In telling our story, we hope to fully introduce readers to the dark and complicated world of White supremacy. The who, what, when, and WHY.
A world that, now more than ever, must be exposed.
The supremacists have persevered, and even flourished, for decades because most of us have no idea what a White supremacist looks like, let alone what they actually believe or do. What to look for in our friends, neighbors, and colleagues. I was a detective in an area of the country with a staggering White supremacy problem and, at first, even I didn’t know it existed.
The importance of information and understanding cannot be overstated. It’s everything. The rest—how to tackle the problem—becomes so much easier once you recognize the symptoms and see the issue for what it is: the evolution of racial hate remains an ever-growing threat that has brought us to a fundamental, and frightening, brink.
Maybe close enough now for us all to finally do something about it.
1
AMERICAN NAZIS
Initial Meeting
The first official White supremacist I ever met tried to kill me. It was a fitting start to the next twenty-plus years.
I say “official” because I suspect I’d encountered such people before in my life but was still oblivious to the fact. That’s part of what helps this particular subculture persist and thrive. If you’re not looking for it, it can exist, invisible, for decades.
Growing up in the suburbs of Phoenix, I had friends and teammates of every shape and color, and from what I could tell, we all got along. So, to me, the possibility that someone would hate another person solely because of their skin color or religion was something I might only see in an After School Special. Never in my own school or front yard.
