The hate next door, p.16
The Hate Next Door, page 16
The driver’s window was rolled down only enough for me to see the very top of the driver’s head. Something just wasn’t right. Laying down the hose and giving my daughter to Tawni, I started toward the car.
It was a nice day, and as I walked, I’d placed my right hand on my hip checking for my gun. I didn’t have it. I’m at home. I’m supposed to be safe. I shouldn’t need to carry a gun when I’m at my home. Our house sits just sixty feet off the street, but the walk felt like it took forever. As I approached, the driver pulled forward a couple of feet but then stopped again.
The driver just looked back at me staring me down. It was the cadet from the training class who’d known too much. The one who’d been fired.
At our home.
“Something you want to talk about?” I asked, approaching faster.
The driver continued to glare at me as he crept his car in front of our house.
“Hey, jackass, I’m right here!” I yelled and slammed the back of the trunk.
He sped away and I watched as he ignored the stop sign at the far end of the street and vanished back toward the main roads.
“What was that?” Tawni asked, coming down the driveway.
I told her. She shook her head as she went back into the home with our daughter. It was disturbing. Tawni had already been through a lot with me and my career choice, which she’d never really wanted in the first place though fully supported. There’s just something unnerving, toxic, when the “bad dudes” are blatantly seeking you out, at your house—especially in front of your children.
Standing alone on the driveway again, I allowed the adrenaline to work its way through my system as best I could. This guy could have shot me easily. It was likely that he had a gun in the seat beside him but had chickened out. My whole body had tensed for the worst. This time, in front of my own home.
The worst part about this guy showing up at my house was that after a number of phone calls to supervisors and my cop “brothers,” there was no follow-up investigation. The guy wasn’t arrested or even contacted.
I was on my own again. And for whatever reason, that was the hardest part to take. Not because of some skinhead or druggie—but because of some guy who’d been two weeks from becoming a Mesa police officer.
Ultimately, I learned this disgraced recruit had called one of his academy friends, a newly sworn cop, my new colleague—who gave him my home address. Nice way to start your career: giving your “brother’s” personal information to a pissed off ex-employee. I was furious.
I thought about those active police officers who wore their government-bought “raid gear” while standing guard on the border as part of the Minuteman Project—a new border militia.
A classified FBI Counterterrorism Policy Guide in 2015 specified “militia extremists, White supremacist extremists, and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links to law-enforcement officers.”
Though I appreciated this was finally being acknowledged in the open, it was frustrating. I’d known this for well over a decadebut had learned it the hard way. My greatest fear—I could now admit—wasn’t being caught by the “bad guys” I was investigating; it was being outed by another cop.
The bad guys didn’t know who I really was; my fellow cops did.
* * *
Recently, Tawni and I have been trying to work with a group along the border who helps new immigrants who’ve recently crossed—yes, primarily illegally. This activist group has been pressured—mailed threats of violence, damaged vehicles, harassment, destruction of water and first aid supplies left out for the refugees—by border militias and local law enforcement.
When Tawni and I offered to play some role in helping them avoid such intimidation, it has been—so far—spurned. I’m not yet trusted because I was a cop, and they have concern I’m some kind of spy working for the militias.
We’d driven down to meet with them in person to talk better and found two police cars parked in front of their location. The entire town only has two police cars. It makes it kind of difficult to assist “illegals” needing food, water, medical care, trauma counseling, and legal assistance with two police cars parked outside your door. But the cars, they’re told, are there for “their protection.”
Their fear of law enforcement is understood.
Mine had been there for years.
THE OATH KEEPERS
A journalist friend of mine called one day.
He had a list of Oath Keepers—a national antigovernment paramilitary organization made up largely of active and retired cops and soldiers. Scarcely formed in 2009, they were the new kids on the block whose stated goal is to protect the Constitution against forces foreign and domestic. I’d been invited to similar meetings with these types—as a cop named Matt, not as Packy—for years.
Oath Keepers started from the premise that any oath taken by law enforcement or military is not an oath you retire from, but rather, it’s for life. That whenever government violates the rights of its citizens, it is the duty of those who’ve taken an oath to defend those rights to take corrective actions.
JT Ready often preached the same. “All enemies foreign and domestic,” he’d tell the room. “That’s what I swore into. When we took that oath, it was for life. It didn’t say five years after you get out or ten years after you get out that now you burn the Constitution. No, that’s a lifetime commitment…whether you’re a civilian now or not.”
Oath Keepers was founded by Elmer Stewart Rhodes, a Yale Law School graduate and former U.S. Army paratrooper and, a onetime Arizona Supreme Court justice law clerk who’d taken inspiration from the notion that Adolf Hitler could have been stopped if German soldiers and police had refused to follow orders. He reasoned that a totalitarian police state cannot happen in the United States if the majority of police and soldiers simply obey their oaths to defend the Constitution against a potential dictatorial leader or faction.
While the group wasn’t officially a White Pride group—in fact, Rhodes publicly bristles at any such accusations, arguing that his is a “civic nationalist” organization and not a “White nationalist” one—it had certainly attracted members and supporters from that world.xv
Did it help, perhaps, that Rhodes had Valhalla tattooed on one arm? That he and other Oath Keepers have marched beside Identity Evropa “identitarians” interested in “preserving Western culture” who’ve also been labeled neo-Nazis? Or the years of Rhodes’s anti-Muslim rhetoric, providing security for ACT For America—the largest anti-Muslim organization in the country?
“I think it makes sense for a guy like you to have this list,” my reporter friend said. “Someone who might actually use it. I’m just sitting on it here. You want a copy?”
Always happy to get more info and cross-reference the groups I was investigating, I was excited. “Sure,” I said. “How many names we talking?”
“North of thirty thousand.”
Good thing I was already sitting down. I’d expected a few thousand, tops.
“Thirty thousand?” I repeated.
Holy… Wow.
* * *
Two weeks later, finally, I got the full list on a thumb drive via snail mail. The thirty-two thousand names were mostly folk in the criminal justice business, cops, and U.S. military. I now had their names, agencies, military branch, rank, dues paid, whether they were active duty or retired—more information than I could have dreamed of.
But going through the list was mentally draining and logistically taxing. I found myself getting increasingly upset with each page.
The Oath Keepers group wasn’t officially formed until March 2009, but the amalgamation of military and cops and extremism wasn’t something new. I’d been tracking it since 1994. This was just the newest name and apparently far larger and more organized than even I’d realized.
Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff, for instance, had started a group called the Constitutional Sheriffs & Peace Officers Association (CSPOA).xvi Mack teaches that because the sheriff is the only elected law man in the county, it’s his word, and only his word, that binds. It was the same old philosophy I’d heard at Mesa Bible Church and taught in “sovereign citizen” meetings across the country.
A similar group are the Three Percenters, also called 3%ers or III%ers. (The name is derived from the disputed claim that “only 3%” of the colonists fought against “the King’s tyranny” during the American Revolution.) Its hot buttons are gun ownership rights and resistance to the ever-expanding authority of the U.S. federal government. Police and military types have also flocked to this group. And, as with the Oath Keepers, while not created as hate or White supremacy organizations, the antigovernment, survivalist, far-right leanings of these organizations is a breeding ground for those with more-racial agendas. That Confederate and Nazi imagery sporadically appear beside or on 3% patches, T-shirts, hats, and flyers is—irrespective of original aims—revealing. (One 3%ers crew was implicated in the firebombing of a mosque in Rochester, Minnesota.)
And, when talking about any of these groups during presentations—that these extreme groups are being trained by police officers and military personnel and many are within their ranks—I never witnessed alarm or outrage.
More telling, there was no surprise either.
There is no easy answer to why extremists are drawn to law enforcement.
Does the military “teach hate” through war? Does law enforcement appeal to some who want revenge or orderliness through extremism?
Those in law enforcement usually lean politically conservative. They’re willing to risk their lives every day for existing laws, for keeping the world as it is—not as it “might be.” The United States Constitution Rangers openly promote themselves as defenders of the Constitution. Why wouldn’t someone in law enforcement, who took an oath to the same end, support that?
But, as some militias evolved from strictly antigovernment into antigovernment with varying degrees of White-pride agendas, many in law enforcement have remained allies with those fringe groups.
This is not entirely a right-wing issue. The NFAC (Not Fucking Around Coalition) is a left-wing Black armed militia of current and ex-military and law enforcement. And Antifa also recruits similar resources when it can find them.
Extremism on all sides exists in law enforcement, I would argue, because those of us in law enforcement are told daily that we are the only ones protecting our cities and streets. An “us against them” mentality is forced down our throats from day one as each one of us ultimately decides what, exactly, we’re protecting our cities and streets from.
THE DEPUTY
The sheriff of Yavapai County, two hours away, invited me north to interview one of his deputies. The sheriff wanted to know whether his deputy of eight years still had any ties to the Aryan Nations.
Still???!
I couldn’t understand why the guy hadn’t already been dismissed but then began convincing the sheriff, and myself, that this officer could be a fount of information on the local—
“Just confirm if he’s still associated with the group or not,” the sheriff replied. “That’s it.”
Skeptical, I made the trip north and sat down with this guy, Justin. It may go down as the shortest and most concise interview I‘ve ever done.
“Are you a member of the Aryan Nations?”
“I was.”
“What did you do for them?”
“I was the youth recruiter.”
He and I stared at each other quietly for a while. I’d already heard enough. A guy who’d once recruited for a neo-Nazi organization should find a vocation other than being a cop. “Do you still have affiliations with the Nations?” I asked simply.
“No comment.”
“Are you still active?”
“I have no comment.”
“Ever met Pastor Butler?” Butler, now deceased, was the founder of Aryan Nations and a “spiritual godfather” of the White supremacist movement.
“No comment?”
“Never met him?”
“What do you think?” the deputy replied, as if insulted by the question.
I honestly wasn’t sure if that meant “yes” or “no.”
“If you think I’m going to tell you what I know,” he continued, “and who I know…you’re wasting your time. I don’t know why you were asked to interview me ’cause I’m telling you the same thing I told the sheriff: I just want to be a cop.”
“So, it would be pointless for me to ask you any more questions?”
“I HAVE NO COMMENT.”
I sat there contemplating my next move. I knew arguing with this guy wasn’t going to accomplish much, so I turned off the recorder, leaned forward, and signaled for the deputy to come in closer.
In my best dramatic sotto voce I said, “You just wanna be a cop?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t have the right, courage, or balls for it,” I told him. “Real cops protect what you want to destroy. Know that I’ll do everything I can think of to make sure you’re not wearing that badge for long.”
Justin leaned back, looked at me, and simply said, “Fuck you.”
Fair enough.
I told the sheriff his guy was unquestionably bad news and that I was 99% sure he was still connected to White supremacy. The sheriff looked away, then asked if I could prove it.
“No,” I admitted. “You’d have to make a real investigation out of it. Get Internal Affairs or the FBI to—”
He stopped me. I wasn’t surprised. The sheriff admitted he knew about Justin’s White-pride past. But if and until the deputy broke a law in an obvious way, nothing would be done.
Months later, we discovered Justin hadn’t just been the youth recruiter but, rather, the entire Washington State leader for the Aryan Nations. He’d specialized in booking White power bands for festivals and had been a regular speaker at Richard Butler’s Aryan Youth Action Conference, indoctrinating youth.
Perfect ideology for one who was hired to protect and serve, wouldn’t you say?
Not long after our interview, Justin was arrested for drug charges and went to prison. He faced seven felony counts, including contributing to the delinquency of a minor (for sexual actions against the family babysitter), and involving a minor in a drug offense as he’d sent his sixteen-year-old son to buy cocaine from a local drug dealer.
One more down.
Could we chase out another hundred bad cops? A thousand?
Maybe, someday, all of them?
* * *
At an International Association of Chiefs of Police Conference that Tawni and I recently attended in Philadelphia, there was a large counter-protest in front of the convention center denouncing all police.
A woman in her early seventies held a sign that read “KOPS and KLAN WORK HAND IN HAND!!”
It proved visceral for Tawni. And, before I could advise otherwise, she’d already marched up to the protester.
“See that guy over there?” Tawni asked, pointing my way. “He abhors racism. He was an undercover cop for years in White supremacist groups and put these guys in jail. He got racist cops fired. At great sacrifice to him. And his kids, and our family.”
“Well” —the woman looked directly at Tawni—“he obviously didn’t do enough.”
Tawni was stunned, angry, and sad.
And though I love Tawni for sticking up for me and the hundreds of thousands of cops like me, I also agreed with the lady. We haven’t done enough.
But we’re still trying, ma’am. We really are.
Patrik is a reservist in the Canadian Armed Forces and is a combat engineer with military-explosives training. He is also a chief neo-Nazi recruiter for The Base, an international paramilitary White supremacist group, tasked with forming and uniting cells across the globe. In 2019, Patrik enters the United States to meet racist comrades, including American military, and attends several military style training “hate” camps in Massachusetts. He posts videos outlining his radicalized views against Jewish and gay people and argues that violence is “the only way,” promoting the derailment of trains, an upcoming civil war, and the poisoning of city water sources. “The time for talk has ended,” he warns. “If you think politics is a solution, you are a damn fool. It is the system that is fomenting violent revolution, not us, and they shall now reap what they have sown.” He transports firearms and ammunition across state lines with intent to commit a violent stand at a pro-gun rally in Virginia but is arrested. A month later, a Royal Canadian Artillery veteran and active Canadian Ranger drives more than two days to reach Ottawa from Manitoba. There are high-powered firearms in his pickup, and he carries his military ID with him to aid him in evading the police later. He rams his black Dodge into the gates of the estate where Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau now lives, angry at Trudeau for being a “communist” and a “dictator” and for his stances on gun control and COVID. After an armed standoff with security, the soldier surrenders. It is the first known attempt to assassinate a sitting Canadian prime minister.*
* Patrik: Karen Pauls and Angela Johnson, “Ex-reservist Patrik Mathews and others planned violent revolution, U.S. prosecutors say” CBC News, January 21, 2020, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/patrick-mathews-base-violent-revolution-1.5435323; Mack Lamoureux and Ben Makuch, “Canadian Soldier Turned Neo-Nazi Terrorist Sentenced to 9 Years in US Prison” October 28, 2021, https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dgzpa/patrik-mathews-canadian-soldier-sentenced-nine-years.
7
HATE CRIMES
Cole
When someone is kicked to death, each kick strikes the head with the force of a frontal car crash at 30-plus miles per hour. In the last minutes of his life, Cole had been in up to twenty “car crashes.” And more were coming.
He was twenty years old. He’d just interviewed for a bartender job at River City Pockets, a Phoenix pool hall, and was waiting for a taxi to take him to his girlfriend’s apartment; she was sick with the flu, and he was coming to make her some soup. Then, half a dozen neo-Nazis were tossed from the pool hall and those plans ended—along with Cole’s life.
