The hate next door, p.5
The Hate Next Door, page 5
I handed in my paper to the woman down at the Department of Motor Vehicles. “Are you sure?” she asked.
I studied the paper again. “Hold on a minute,” I said. “You’re right.” I decided to add a middle name for a “German” flair. The picture taken; my new identity alive.
It was the birth of…Packy Von Fleckenger. (Didn’t even put Patrick on the driver’s license.) Yeah, I know. It sounds like a pseudonym the character Fletch might give and was actually a joke alias I used when I needed a fake name for whatever random reason. It’s ridiculous. Tawni hated it from Day One.
Yet no one in the White supremacy movement ever questioned it. I simply became “Packy,” and if the last name came up at all, it was to be congratulated for my “strong German name.” One supremacist leader was particularly impressed with the “Von” part. He thought it was great. They were just glad to have a body with a pulse and a German-sounding name as White-pride icing. No further inquiry needed. That’s how desperate these people were for fresh recruits.
And they must have been desperate. Or just had excellent customer-service skills. Within a couple of weeks, my new “Packy” PO box was full of pamphlets, and I was a card-carrying member of the KKK, Ayran Nation, and the National Alliance.
No matter the group, the literature all boiled down to the same old lines: Jewish people secretly ruled the world, Mexicans were invading the country, Black people were criminals, and the White race was at a precipice with two choices—either fight back or vanish from the earth. The specific talking points would change some with statistical or historical “proof” given, some “expert” quoted (they often quoted each other)—but there was no real discernible difference between these groups in terms of their philosophies. The national branches focused more on Jewish and Black people. The local Arizona groups were fixated on the Mexicans.
I’d started a small folder of all my White supremacy pamphlets and membership information. Within a matter of weeks, I needed another folder.
In lieu of actual action, rhetoric seemed to be the main goal of each organization. I returned from nearly every trip to the PO box with new pictures of the “Jewish rat” or caricatures of offensively drawn Black men (exaggerated lips and broad noses) standing over a beautiful White woman. The variety and magnitude of flyers, posters, or stickers these guys could make that basically said the same thing were shocking.
Membership dues were requested with every mailing. One of the first things I realized was to never pay my dues on time and, even then, never the full amount. Nothing would have screamed “undercover cop” louder. Few members ever paid their dues. Splurging on a case of beer was considered a magnanimous sacrifice.
The real money in these operations came from older men, often retired from surprisingly well paying jobs. Men who could never quite leave the scene. In the Arizona chapter of the National Alliance, for instance, there were four or five guys who really kept the whole chapter afloat—lawyers’ fees and armaments, hotel conference rooms, printing costs, postage, flags, and patches, paying bands, the beer and food for parties. Within the Alliance, these older retired men fronted the money for all of that.
For the most part, I discovered, skinheads are broke.
Jobs come and go. Apartments are usually shared by five or six skins flopping on the couch and floor, one bedroom reserved for the guy, usually the biggest wannabe in the group, whose name is on the actual lease. Beer is bought by the very few who actually have a full-time job. I’d quickly gathered that candid hate does not pay, as face and neck tattoos with racial slogans are rarely seen by prospective employers as a good thing. The only other way to make money is a life of crime, from small robberies and narcotics sales to home invasions.
For those White supremacists already in jail, supporters were encouraged to provide “outreach” by putting some money into their prison accounts; securing a job for when they got out; even helping out a “brother’s” family when they could afford it. Few could. And so, few in prison rarely received any outreach.
Especially not from Packy.
My only goal was to send them more brothers.
TOO CLOSE TO HOME (PART I)
In 1999, Tawni and I decided to sell our first home and build another on an acre of land. Weeks behind schedule, of course, we were still under the fanciful belief that if you bought food and drinks for the construction crews, they’d work better and faster. Tawni and I made the Costco run and arrived at 6:00 a.m. with Gatorade, muffins, and doughnuts. No one showed up for another hour.
Finally, two framers arrived and walked up to the house pad. As they got closer, I saw one wore a shirt with the logo “Support your local hammers” with two crossed hammers. The other had a hat that read “AZ Hammers.”
I thought to myself, “Nice, I have me some union workers.”
We shared pleasantries and hooked them up with breakfast.
Then, as the pair turned to the pad, I saw the mark. On the left side of one of their necks was a tattoo of two crossed hammers surrounded by a circle of fire.
It finally clicked. I should have known but I didn’t. I didn’t want to know. It was safe at home. Until it wasn’t.
Come on, Matt, I cursed myself. These guys weren’t union workers; they were members of the Arizona Hammerskins, a neo-Nazi group I’d run into a few up at The Nile. The leader at the time was in prison serving a sentence on the attempted arson of a Jewish synagogue.
I couldn’t believe it. I had all this intel on skin groups, all the hands-on research, but since I was at home on my own real turf, I’d completely dropped my guard. I didn’t expect to see neo-Nazis at my house, so I hadn’t noticed what was right in front of my face. I was so disappointed in myself.
Thankfully, I didn’t recognize these two. And clearly, they didn’t recognize me. The rest of the crew showed up, and I took that as a great time to pull Tawni aside and let her know what was going on.
As the two guys worked, we took their pictures. Everyone thought we were taking pics of the building process, but we were capturing the two skinheads’ features and tattoos to help with future or past cases. We’d also picked up lunch for the framers. Amazingly, the neo-Nazis were the only two on the work crew who actually thanked us for the food. Eventually, as we were talking, I finally realized one of the two skins was the subject of an investigation my department was in the middle of. I wrote up a report later that same day, forwarded it to the detective in charge, and, a short time later, off to prison he went.
He probably still has no idea how they found him.
* * *
My real life officially intersected with my undercover life that day.
It’s something I still worry about. In prison, time stops. Those convicted have all day to piece together how they screwed up their crimes—what and who got them caught, how to get ahold of those they feel have wronged them. I’ve wondered for years if the framer skin ever put the story together in his mind. The young married couple with the doughnuts and lunch. Has he figured out I was the one who sold him out?
I made a decision that day. No more lackadaisical Matt. I had to get serious 24/7 if I was to properly protect myself and my family and do this job right.
Tattoos became the key to spotting skinheads, and I became a self-taught expert in their symbolism. I recognized now, from The Nile, that tattoos told stories. I could now read who’d been to prison, who was Brotherhood (meaning Aryan Brotherhood, an organized White prison gang), Peckerwood (the minor league prison White boy crew who, if worthy, eventually fed into the Aryan Brotherhood), and Nations or skins—as they all had different styles of tattoos.
I was looking at everyone’s tats. To this day, I still do. Judging who they are and what they are about without even speaking to them. In no time, it wasn’t unusual for me to duck into an aisle at the grocery store and pretend to study the new packaging of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese just to get a closer look at a tattoo. As our children entered high school, I’d scan their friends’—and their parents’—tattoos also.
Visiting family in Germany years ago, we toured an enchanting little town somewhere between Koblenz and Trier, but I was mostly trying to get a closer look at the tattoo on some other tourist dad’s right calf —an oversized, steroided-out bulldog carrying a UK flag in one hand and a bat in the other. The bulldog was even wearing a Skrewdriver T-shirt and Doc Marten steel-toed boots with red laces. Who is this guy? I wondered. What crew is he with? I moved in to get some photos and thought I was doing a pretty good job with the detective routine until I realized the little girl on his shoulders had followed me at each angle and with each picture. The guy’s daughter caught me! Later, I sent the pics to law enforcement friends in the UK and Germany; turned out the guy was an old-school hooligan from England who’d decided family was more important than hate.
Another time, I was at home one night working on the truck with my sixteen-year-old and sent him on a run to the local auto parts store. He was gone a long time. When he got back, he showed me what’d taken so long: photos of a White guy with a shaved head and tattoos. He’d taken pictures of this skin’s tattoos as “trophies” to show his dad and asked me to explain what every single tat was. On the back of this guy’s neck was a big 88 just under what would be his hairline. My teen son said, “I knew you’d like this one, Dad.” I agreed it was a good one and promised I’d use them when I taught. But I also recognized the tattoo and well knew the guy who wore it. I tried to shake it off. I mean, it was one thing for me to run into these guys, but it was an entirely different thing for my kids to be anywhere close to the ugliness. It was one of those times when I seriously questioned what I had done for so long and what I once again had exposed my family to.
Was all this tattoo observing hypervigilance, paranoia, fear, or merely due diligence? If I’d merely been looking for the right signs, I’d have noticed the “hammer” hat and T-shirt as the two framers stepped from their cars that day. And I’d know the young couple in front of me at the grocery store line were devout neo-Nazis.
It’s not paranoia, I tell myself, if it’s real.
TOO CLOSE TO HOME (PART II)
A couple months after our new house was finished, the entire family had Sunday dinner at Tawni’s mom’s place. After church, we loaded up the Suburban with our three boys to make the forty-minute trip to Glendale, where we were first greeted with the homey smell of roast beef and homemade bread.
Tawni is one of six kids, and it’s always an adventure when her family gets together. Her sister was still living at home, and she was really excited when we arrived. She told Tawni she wanted us to meet her new friend. I knew the drill well enough; I was to be cordial to the new guy but mostly just wanted to get to important matters—eating.
“Matt,” Tawni’s sister said, “this is Chris.”
Chris was wearing a wifebeater (this was Sunday dinner, remember) and had a goatee and a shaved head. Here we go… He looked me up and down as I surely did the same. His white socks were pulled up to his knees. Then, I realized this guy’s shorts fell over his socks so you couldn’t see any leg at all. Interesting. Still, the tattoo hunt continued.
Leery, I went to shake his hand when I saw a tattoo with the numbers 88 around his forearm (remember: 88 = HH = Heil Hitler).
“Nice tattoo,” I said.
He bent down, nonchalantly, and pulled his sock down. “Here’s another,” he said. This tat depicted a man with a shaved head in a prison cell, trying to pull the bars apart to push his head through. It was surreal. I looked around and found that I was the only one in the room concerned.
Even Tawni was clueless. She was focused on situating the family around the table so we could eat. The kids were complaining they were hungry while my mother-in-law put the food on the table. How could everyone act so normal? Did they not get it? I was stunned. Here we had, no doubt, an ex-con with an 88 tattooed on his arm joining us for Sunday dinner.
I prepared myself for the worst. A safe place, a family home, had potentially become an explosive and dangerous environment.
* * *
A quick break for a peek behind the curtain. When Tawni and I first submitted our outline for this book, our new literary agent advised, “You can’t have all these skinheads appearing in your life at the same time. It’s like your world in Mesa was somehow filled with skinheads overnight. No one will believe it.”
It was good advice. The truth was somehow hurting our true story.
But, to us, the whole Phoenix Valley was filled with skinheads overnight. And there was nothing paranormal or fictional or chronologically challenged about it.
They had been there all along. We just didn’t know what to look for.
Not the boots or the tattoos. Not the extreme haircuts. Not the music.
It was if our eyes had been opened to a whole new reality, which now included neo-Nazis shopping at the mall or catching a smoke outside a local restaurant. Once you saw it, you could never again unsee it. Or perhaps a better metaphor would be that it was as if a light had flipped on in my head and there were roaches scurrying everywhere.
This is why it’s so important for more of us—all of us—to recognize the signs and symbols, the “uniform” of the modern White supremacist.
Yes, our world was “suddenly” crawling with skinheads.
And I too quickly found myself eating dinner beside one.
* * *
With the food on the table and the kids sitting down, I went to take my seat at the only chair left. Tawni was on my right side and Chris, the 88 skinhead, was on my left. We all sat and blessed the food. I wasn’t sure what to anticipate, but my whole body was poised on high alert.
“I understand you’re an officer of the law,” Chris said as he turned to me. His voice was very clear, no smile, just pure arrogance.
Looking straight ahead, I answered, “Yup” and tried to keep eating. At work, I knew how to handle situations like this; it was easy when you were on the street with five other detectives standing beside you. But this was different. I was at my in-laws’ home with an invited and likely dangerous guest.
I waited for Chris’s response, ready to hear anything from “Thank you for your service, sir” to fighting words. Tawni leaned closer and put her hand on my knee as she always does when she wants me to remain calm. Bizarrely, or maybe not, the rest of the family remained completely oblivious to anything going on.
“Well, you’re not big enough to take me,” the new boyfriend said.
I was younger then and gladly took the bait. “Reeeaaally?” I partially stood up. “Why don’t we go outside for a little bit?”
This guy—ex-con, White supremacist—was clearly bad news, and I had no plans for letting anyone in my family become a part of it. Tawni quickly changed the topic and passed the mashed potatoes to him. Then we dined.
Sometimes the measures it takes for normal “civilians” to see what’s going on around them are baffling. Here I was getting called out, readying to beat the living tar out of a cocky ex-con during a lazy Sunday dinner, and nobody saw or understood. Did everybody think we were joking?
After dinner, I took Tawni aside and explained Chris’s tattoo and my feelings on the subject. “I don’t want this guy around our family,” I said. “I know what I’m talking about…This guy is no good.”
After that, Tawni explained how, for some people, prison can be rehabilitating and that we didn’t really know what his story was or what put him in jail. She continued that we shouldn’t judge him without getting to know him, that repentance was real and that people can change, blah blah blah…
“Nowhere near our family, ever.” There was little discussion after that.
I went to work the next day and told a few of the guys what had happened at Sunday dinner. After throwing his name around, I found out Chris had a violent prison record. His original charges were for drug smuggling in and out of Mexico, and he’d gotten into serious trouble in prison for things like fights and drugs; the prison guards, I learned later, hated him. I was both cop and protective brother now as Tawni and I actively tried to steer her sister away from him. But her sister just couldn’t see it.
Thankfully, he and Tawni’s sister broke it off a few months later. Before they split, however, he’d gotten criminally violent with her and verbally abused my mother-in-law.
Tawni swore to trust me on such things going forward.
And I swore to better trust myself.
THE NATIONAL ALLIANCE
My alter ego, Patrick Von Fleckenger, soon received daily voicemails, literature, and email from different hate groups and organizations across the country hoping to connect. I knew, however, I could do the best close to home, so I continued to keep most of my outreach with local groups.
One day, Jerry Harbin contacted me.
Jerry was the leader of Arizona’s National Alliance, a sizable White supremacy group based in West Virginia that had been making inroads into the American West. On a national level, especially back east, they were extensive, manifesting a strong history of violence, and ties with The Order, another major hate group.
In Arizona, they were now the hot new thing.
From our first call, I could tell Jerry Harbin was a different sort of fellow from your run-of-the-mill skinhead. He was very personal and motivated, even working at a local hospital. Jerry always proved overly excited to talk about “the cause” and spoke with obvious enthusiasm.
“We’re starting a chapter in Phoenix,” he said. “We’d like to meet you.”
Sure, I said, and we picked a date. We would meet for lunch at a local Tempe hot spot—Denny’s.
Prior to the meeting, I researched the National Alliance. Their national leader was Dr. William Pierce, a legendary supremacist and one apparently with failing health and quickly heading toward his death bed. For three decades, however, he’d been America’s most renowned neo-Nazi. He’d been co-leader of the National Youth Alliance, a right-wing political organization in the late ’60s, and founded the National Alliance in 1974. He was author of two supremacy “classics”—The Turner Diaries (1978) and Hunter (1989), which both tell of White loners saving their race by attacking Jewish people, gay people, interracial couples, the liberal media, and a corrupt government. (The Turner Diaries has been directly linked to the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people, and multiple real-life hate groups, including the Order.i)
