The hate next door, p.15
The Hate Next Door, page 15
(I know. This chapter is the one I’ve avoided writing the longest. But I’ve also never condoned any sacrosanct “thin blue line.” Right is right, and you can’t very well look yourself in the mirror knowing you’ve backed up what you know to be wrong.)
Law enforcement is a representation of society. If a city hires two hundred cops, statistically someone in that group is going to harbor extremist views.
There are eight hundred thousand police officers in the United States. If “only” 1% are supremacists, that’s eight thousand dangerous racists on our streets. And that’s just police officers. Imagine the additional millions in ancillary positions within law enforcement. Now imagine a number higher than 1%.
The scary part is that it takes far less than that to become a real problem.
* * *
White nationalists actively recruit police and military personnel into their ranks. When approaching militia groups, when I actually told them I was a veteran cop, they were more pleased to have me onboard. Detective Matt Browning had far more value to them than struggling lawncare manager Packy Von Fleckenger.
During several meetings with the National Alliance, Jerry begged members, the few who might be eligible, to apply and infiltrate their local police departments. Not to necessarily enforce the law but to learn the tactics of “urban warfare” and to be used as sources of intelligence for the cause.
For decades, biker gangs and the drug cartels have successfully gotten girlfriends and siblings and even their children to become clerks, janitors, dispatchers, and secretaries inside state and local justice system departments—becoming their eyes and ears, gathering intelligence via various databases on ongoing investigations, undercover operations, and the private addresses of witnesses, cops, and judges.
The White supremacy movement has been trying to catch up.
Jerry eventually asked me, of course, as everyone already thought of me as the “security guy” by now. He suggested it might be a good replacement for Packy’s struggling lawncare service.
I told him I couldn’t imagine ever being a damn cop. Funny stuff.
Months later, however, he asserted there was a “bright candidate” already forging his way through the academy process. And it wasn’t the guy I’d gotten tossed out.
No longer funny.
I left that meeting early and went straight to my office to start doing checks on recent candidates. I must have rifled through fifty applications and then BINGO—I’d found one of the biggest, non-felonious (at the time), White-boy names in the valley. This guy, who’d been drummed out of the military, was a prominent White Pride influencer (who is still active as of this writing). Active with the Vinlanders and Tea Party but never arrested—a rare neo-Nazi candidate.
We quickly pulled his application, issuing a “Thanks, but no thanks” letter.
Two down, ten thousand to go…
Who watches the watchmen?
THE GHOST SKIN
An FBI memo in 2006 finally, specifically, warned law enforcementand the military that they were the targets of an active campaign by White supremacists to infiltrate their ranksi. The FBI dubbed such infiltrators “ghost skins”—or people maintaining normal exteriors to blend in and hide their true aims.
But it’s not just an “American” thing.
During an investigation Tawni and I did years ago—one involving Volksfront, once the biggest supremacy group in the world—it became blatantly clear the military was involved in this movement in countries all over the world. Sources told us members of the Spanish military, for instance, were ardent members of Volksfront; and some of their most important, and violent, members.
The UK calls them “insider threats.” National Action is a banned terrorist group within the UK whose ultimate goal is to secure a “free, White Britain” and whose members, including military veterans and active police, have been arrested for a variety of charges ranging from illegal recruitment to possession of illegal weapons, including guns stockpiled for their “upcoming race war.”
North of the United States, in Canada, the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) and military police found colleagues actively pursuing plots to harm and “execute” law enforcement and others in authority.ii In 2018, the Canadian Military Criminal Intelligence Section identified at least six different hate groups within Canadian Armed Forces, from Hammerskins to Soldiers of Odin, a group with violent European White supremacist roots.iii
The Canadian report confirmed what I’d been seeing in the U.S. for years: “Drawing on their training and deployment experience, current and former military members find that their skills are valued by these groups” affording “them the ability to gain positions of leadership.”iv
Soldiers and cops have specialized weapons training and other paramilitary expertise. They are the most highly sought-after recruits.
Racists trained in combat and weapons with authority and intel over their communities. What could possibly go wrong?
* * *
The “Lynwood Vikings” was a secret clique of Los Angeles officers who had matching tattoos and targeted Black and Latino people. Their shared tattoos included 988 (the code for when an officer shoots someone) and a skeleton carrying an AK and wearing a stahlhelm, those distinctive steel helmets Nazi soldiers wore in WWII. Supervisors later described the tattoos as “a mark of pride,” and the police station openly displayed a map of East LA redrawn in the shape of Africa.v
A federal judge ultimately renamed the group a “neo-Nazi, White supremacist gang” and the city paid millions in settlements. Similar White police clubs in town included the “Jump Out Boys,” “Red Devils,” “Grim Reapers,” and “Regulators.”
But it’s not just an LA thing.
Across the country, police speak about the officer with a Confederate-flag tattoo on his back, or the one who plays bass in the town’s White pride band, or the one caught distributing KKK literature at a local mall during his off hours.
Or the firebombing of a Black family’s home in Kentucky, which ultimately led to the arrest of a Jefferson County police officer.vi The officer proved to be the local Klan leader of a forty-member Klan subgroup called the Confederate Officers Patriot Squad (COPS), half of whom were active police officers. His involvement in the KKK, it was revealed, had been known by his own local department for years and was tolerated as long as he didn’t publicize it.
Or the Border Patrol officer who intentionally ran over a Guatemalan migrant with his car shortly after texting that Guatemalans were “disgusting subhuman shit unworthy of being kindling for a fire” and “mindless murdering savages.” vii He received three years’ probation and 150 hours of community service.
Or the Virginia officer assigned to a local high school who recruited at the school on behalf of the Identify Evropa White nationalist group.viii Or the Ohioan thirty-year military veteran, now police chief, who tells off-color jokes and puts a Ku Klux Klan sign on a Black officer’s desk. Or the Florida police deputy chief and fire chief posting pictures of themselves in KKK robes.
Or the Portland cop who erected a memorial shrine to Nazi-era German “war heroes” in a public park, who wears swastikas and gets married in Hitler’s mountain town retreat, and claims he’s just a “history geek.”ix Or the veteran Michigan cop, who’d shot and killed a Black man a few years before, with KKK materials and racist flags in plain view in the online pics of his home for sale.x
Or the FBI and ATF agents outed by Alabama militia (who were angry with ATF over the handling of the Waco siege) who’d routinely attended the “Good Ole Boy Roundup” in Tennessee—a xenophobic conference that promoted products like mugs and T-shirts with MLK in a crossfire site and “hunting for niggers” licenses.xi
Or the lieutenant in the U.S. Coast Guard, who’d also been a Marine for six years, a self-identified White nationalist who promoted the idea of a “White homeland” and claimed online that “Much blood will have to be spilled” he’d then stockpiled weapons with the aim to “kill Democrats” because their “liberalist/globalist ideology is destroying traditional peoples, especially White.”xii
Or…
You get the idea.
* * *
Closer to home, it was no secret the Phoenix police employed one of the most notable problematic police officers in the nation, Jack McLamb.
Looking at Jack and his organization, Police Against the New World Order, will help to contextualize more national groups like Oath Keepers and Three Percenter. What begins as “antigovernment” or “anti-immigration” or “pro-Constitution”—all common world views—often quickly morphs and escalates into something else as it attracts more-aggressive and dangerous followers.
Jack was antigovernment and a nativist who believed the borders should be completely locked down. He’d picketed the Phoenix Police Department—where he worked—about “The New World Order” (an emerging totalitarian world government) and law enforcement violating their oaths by enforcing “unlawful commands” (concerns involving freedom of speech, search and seizures, the Second Amendment, etc.) He’d also helped with negotiations at the both the Montana Freemen standoff and at Ruby Ridge. He ran an antigovernment short-wave radio show and had penned Operation Vampire Killer 2000: American Police Action Plan for Stopping World Government Rule, a booklet that promoted the recruiting of law enforcement and military to fight against the “ongoing, elitist covert operation which has been installed in the American system with great stealth and cunning.”
He believed the U.S. government was actually fostering narcotics trafficking with an underlying hope to start a race war and that it, Al Gore in particular, planned to reduce the world population by 90%.
Jack would travel to teach law enforcement tactics and New World Order concerns to anyone who’d listen, even arguing the unconstitutionality of a traffic stop, something he, himself, was tasked to perform. Later, he was a regular speaker at various Patriot events—still donning his police uniform and running Police Against the New World Order. He’d also teamed up with Bo Gritz and Jerry Gillespie, a former state Senator who’d led Arizona’s charge against Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birthday Day as a national holiday.
He was doing all of this in the open, zero secrecy needed. He never crossed lines enough to lose his job, and even continued the activities when he retired, still officially an active officer.
Now, we enter the gray area.
Is being in support of tighter border security necessarily racist? If three hundred thousand undocumented Canadians were entering the U.S. every month, would Jack and his supporters head North? Unknown. To say anything more would be only speculation. But the truth remains:
Antigovernment groups, events, and agendas—regardless of actual motivation—attract White supremacists. Their interests and concerns intersect.
Does the fact that Jack and his supporters had bought acres and acres of land in Idaho with plans to live separate from the rest of America and a by-invite only community constitute White supremacy? I can’t say, but many of his followers certainly believed so, that he was preparing a “White homeland.”
And so, whether or not Jack believed this almost no longer matters.
Almost.
* * *
I’d recently started working undercover within a group called the U.S. Constitution Rangers, following the lead of a name I’d gathered while at the Mesa Bible Church. The Rangers were another staunchly antigovernment militia and less so a White supremacy group—although, several members did straddle both worlds.
The group identified as Sovereign Citizens, a movement historically made up of right-wing antigovernment White Americans who believe the federal government has been corrupted since 1871, when the “real Constitution” was “taken and replaced by a fake.”
One of the first things I learned about the United States Constitution Rangers in Arizona was that cops were training them—not retirees or guys who’d been kicked off the force, but active police officers teaching this militant antigovernment group everything from hand-to-hand combat and modifying assault rifles to the best ways to get out of a ticket. And their main target was other cops.
These guys were helping the Rangers target members of law enforcement for committing what they deemed “constitutional violations”—stopping and citing citizens without, they argued, Constitutional authority. The Rangers would record random traffic stops, then follow the person who’d just been pulled over and question them to gather “evidence” and “testimony” to use later if they “felt their rights had been violated.” They often put out decoys to trigger a traffic stop—a staged driving-offense simply to confront, bait, and entrap an officer.
It starts with a simple traffic stop, speeding maybe. The Ranger-trained driver slides a piece of paper through a barely cracked window: “I am a sovereign citizen and you have no legal rights to stop or detain me.” No driver’s license, car insurance, or vehicle registration is ever given. Due to the fact that they are “traveling” in a “mode of conveyance” instead of a motor vehicle, traffic laws—technically—have no jurisdiction over them. (To explain this fully would take another twenty pages and would still take a week in court arguing about legalize and the letter of law to maybe sort out; it is this confusion the Sovereign Citizens depend on.)
The cop writes a ticket anyway and, to avoid further altercation with the driver, simply writes “refused” on the signature line of the citation. They then circle the court date and slide the citation back through the window. Done.
But this, for many, is only the start. What happens next, very quickly, is that the person you cited, or their Sovereign Citizens allies, takes the following steps: (1) checks the officer’s personnel file (something any citizen can do), hoping for a home address and family names; (2) contacts a “sovereign PI” (a Sovereign Citizen specifically tasked with surveillance work) to track the cop down,follow them to and from work, and take pictures, including of family; (3) flies a false lien with the county against the cop for up to millions of dollars (a legal document submitted to satisfy debts and obligations, but one based entirely on fraudulent statements—a typical tool of harassment in “paper terrorism” often against government officials). Months or even years later, the officer goes to buy or sell their house or car, and the bogus lien pulls up: bam…no luck for you. The officer must now work for many months to get the fictitious liens removed.
All in retaliation for conducting a simple traffic stop, a retaliation built upon technicalities and methods taught by other police officers. And bogus filings and “paper terrorism,” as bad as they are, are often just a start.
This group—and others like them—also holds “sovereign courts,” or “constitutional court,” assemblies with no actual validity often convoked in some garage or basement. Sovereign Citizens act as the prosecution, defense, witnesses, and jury for the offending officer. The pretend trail is held and always finds the cop “guilty of treason.” False liens, of course, are ordered. Then false complaints are filed with the officer’s employer. A fictitious “arrest warrant” may even be issued as the Sovereign Citizens take their make-believe justice one step further.
This is what happened to a Metro Police Officer in Las Vegas who was “arrested” by four men and handcuffed to a hook in some garage to “serve time” for violations of their rights and the breach of his oath to protect the Constitution. This officer waited hours to be executed but was eventually freed. (I got this story first-hand from an original SIN member who’d worked the case undercover as a Sovereign Citizen.) The officer, humiliated, never reported the incident.
In Mesa, Sovereign Citizens came to an officer’s home and attempted an arrest, which led to drawn guns and a quick retreat. Other times, there was no retreat. Actual violence is always on the table. One group, the Wolverine Watchmen, recently plotted to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and to “try her for treason” for her handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. In another publicized attack, two West Memphis police officers stopped a father and son on a routine traffic stop.xiii The sixteen-year-old exited the van with an AK-47-style rifle and killed both officers. Two hours later, another shootout ensued in a Walmart parking lot, where both father and son were killed. Jerry Kane, the father, was a self-identified Sovereign Citizen who’d traveled the country giving seminars on how to forestall foreclosures, maintained that money is fictious and insisted that nobody needs a driver’s license.
Go to any gun show or far-right rally and you’ll be able to identify Sovereign Citizens pretty easily: they hand out pocket-sized books that contain the U.S. Constitution; antitax books, Prepper pamphlets (a Prepper is a survivalist preparing for the end of the world or society), and materials; and pre-made “I am a Sovereign Citizen” flyers with explanations for law enforcement if they’re stopped.
In 2011, the FBI labeled Sovereign Citizens as domestic terrorists and a threat to law enforcement.xiv They left out who’d been training them—cops. They also left out that many of its members were linked directly to White supremacy.
* * *
I was outside, washing off our driveway with a hose in one hand and holding my baby daughter in the other. We live at the end of a somewhat long road, which makes it nice because if someone ever comes to the end of the street, I know they’re coming to our house. And someone was.
A white Crown Victoria pulled by, turned around slowly, and then came to a stop directly in front of my driveway. I called out for Tawni.
The car looked exactly like an unmarked police car, complete with tinted windows and antennae on the trunk. I assumed it was either a Mesa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) detective who knew me or there was some other type of surveillance in my neighborhood.
