The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gladio

[American Dream]

DID I NOT SAY JORJANI IS A RIGHTWING US GOVERNMENT "REGIME CHANGE" PUPPET? SO WHAT DOES THIS SAY NOW ABOUT DUGIN AND ARKTOS?






The extreme alt-right are benefiting immensely from the energy being produced by a more moderate — but still far-right — faction known as the “alt-light.”

The alt-light promotes a slightly softer set of messages. Its figures — such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Paul Joseph Watson and Mike Cernovich — generally frame their work as part of an effort to defend “the West” or “Western culture” against supposed left-liberal dominance, rather than making explicitly racist appeals. Many of them, in fact, have renounced explicit racism and anti-Semitism, though they will creep up to the line of explicitly racist speech, especially when Islam and immigration are concerned.

This apparent moderation partly explains why they tend to have much bigger online audiences than even the most important alt-right figures — and why Hope Not Hate describes them as “less extreme, more dangerous.” Alt-light sites like Breitbart, formerly home to Mr. Yiannopoulos, as well as Prison Planet, where Mr. Watson is editor at large, draw millions of readers and are key nodes in a hyperkinetic network that is endlessly broadcasting viral-friendly far-right news, rumors and incitement.

Fluent in the language of online irony and absurdism, and adept at producing successful memes, alt-lighters have pulled off something remarkable: They’ve made far-right ideas hip to a subset of young people, and framed themselves as society’s forgotten underdogs. The alt-light provides its audience easy scapegoats for their social, economic and sexual frustrations: liberals and feminists and migrants and, of course, globalists.

The alt-light’s dedicated fan base runs into the millions. Mr. Watson has more than a million YouTube followers, for example, while Mr. Yiannopoulos has more than 2.3 million on Facebook. If even a tiny fraction of this base is drafted toward more extreme far-right politics, that would represent a significant influx into hate groups.

According to researchers, the key to hooking new recruits into any movement, and to getting them increasingly involved over time, is to simply give them activities to participate in. This often precedes any deep ideological commitment on the recruits’ part and, especially early on, is more about offering them a sense of meaning and community than anything else.

Intentionally or not, the far right has deftly applied these insights to the online world. Viewed through the filters of alt-light outlets like Breitbart and Prison Planet, or through Twitter feeds like Mr. Watson’s, the world is a horror show of crimes by migrants, leftist censorship and attacks on common sense. And the best, easiest way to fight back is through social media.

The newly initiated are offered many opportunities to participate directly. A teenager in a suburban basement can join a coordinated global effort to spread misinformation about Emmanuel Macron, France’s centrist president, in the hopes of helping far-right leader Marine Le Pen. Anyone who wants to do so can help spread the word about supposed mainstream media censorship of the Muslim “crime wave” the far right says is ravaging Europe.

These efforts — a click, a retweet, a YouTube comment — come to feel like important parts of an epochal struggle. The far right, once hemmed in by its own parochialism, has manufactured a worldwide online battlefield anyone with internet access can step into.

And if you’re one of those newcomers happily playing the part of infantryman in the “meme wars” that rage daily, maybe, along the way, one of your new online Twitter buddies will say to you, “Milo’s O.K., but have you checked out this guy Greg Johnson?” Or maybe they’ll invite you to a closed online forum where ideas about how to protect Europe from Muslim migrants are discussed a bit more, well, frankly. Maybe, if you’re really lucky, you’ll eventually discover a whole new political movement to join.

http://wahidazal.blogspot.com/2017/09/d ... ng-us.html

[American Dream]

https://apnews.com/ad9bf9e037e943abb00f ... s-slaying/

California man to stand trial for gay student’s slaying

By BRIAN MELLEY

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. (AP) — About six months before he was stabbed to death in what prosecutors call a hate crime, a gay University of Pennsylvania student graphically discussed hopes to have sex with the man now charged in his killing, an investigator said Tuesday.

Blaze Bernstein texted a friend a photo of Samuel Woodward and said the two had run into each other and he thought they were going to hook up, saying sex with the former schoolmate would be “legendary.”

What led to that encounter was not clear during Woodward’s preliminary hearing on murder and hate crime charges, but investigator Craig Goldsmith said among the anti-gay and hateful material found on his phone was mention of his efforts to pose as “gay curious” to attract men and then reveal it as a prank.

“That’s what they deserve,” Woodward wrote using an anti-gay slur.

Woodward, 21, was ordered to stand trial in Orange County Superior Court on murder and hate crime charges after prosecutors linked him to the stabbing through DNA and showed he had troves of homophobic and neo-Nazi material on his mobile phone. He has pleaded not guilty.

Woodward stabbed Bernstein nearly 20 times in the face and neck after the two met at a park in January, prosecutors said. The two had connected earlier in the evening on Snapchat and Woodward picked up Bernstein at his home.

Woodward told investigators he was disgusted when Bernstein kissed him on the lips in his SUV and pushed him back, but didn’t say he did anything violent toward him.

Investigator Dylan Jantzen testified during the one-day hearing that Woodward said he wanted to curse at Bernstein and call the victim a slur for homosexual men.

Bernstein went missing Jan. 2 and Woodward was arrested about a week later after the body was found in a shallow grave in the Lake Forest park where they had gone that night.

Blood stains from the blade of a knife found in Woodward’s bedroom, under his watch and on the visor of his car matched Bernstein so closely that the chance of the genetic material coming from someone else was 1-in-a-trillion, forensic scientist Corrie Maggay testified.

Defense lawyer Edward Munoz didn’t present any witnesses, but showed on cross-examination that Woodward revealed he had autism and was socially awkward and sexually confused.

Munoz argued there was no evidence of a hate crime because reprehensible writings found on Woodward’s phone were not shared with others, but in emails to himself.

“I think in a hate crime instance you have to have an outward manifestation of your loathing to the world,” Munoz said after the hearing.

If convicted of first-degree murder and the hate crime allegation, prosecutors could seek a sentence of up to life in prison without parole.

Goldsmith testified that Woodward had over 100 pieces of content related to the violent hate group Atomwaffen. The group’s insignia was the wallpaper on his phone.

One email he sent himself was called “Sam’s Diary of Hate,” and he chatted online with a group about attending a “Death Valley Hate Camp” that included mention of weapons, Goldsmith said.

His phone also included pictures with Nazi references.

Bernstein, who was gay and Jewish, was visiting his parents in Lake Forest, California, during winter break from his sophomore year at Penn.

In addition to the email that mentioned Woodward’s gay “pranking,” he also wrote to himself that he terrified gay men by sending them photos on the gay dating site Grindr of other gay men being killed. He said one person had replied that he was going to call the FBI.

“They think they are going to get hate crimed,” he wrote, according to Goldsmith.

Two weeks before the slaying, next to an illustration of a bloody knife, he wrote on Snapchat: “Texting is boring, but murder isn’t,” according to Jantzen.

[American Dream]

A History of Violence: 1960 - 2018

Read more: http://anti-racistcanada.blogspot.com/2 ... -2015.html

[American Dream]

THE HATE NET­WORK

Atomwaffen Division is a militant neo-Nazi group in the U.S. Who is behind it?



The group is also pen pals with the three-time murderer Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber. They have set up a thread to discuss among themselves what questions they next want to ask of the imprisoned Kaczynski.

Yet interspersed in the discussions focused on their idols, National Socialism and violent video games, sentences such as the following can be found: "Carpetbomb your local refugee center;" "Bombing police stations is artistic expression;" and "I want to bomb a federal building."


Bomb-building instructions

It is difficult to assess whether the online posing is an immediate precursor to concrete attacks. Members share links to archives, including hundreds of documents listing the preparations necessary for armed battle and terrorist attacks. Among them are handbooks that describe in detail how to carry out attacks on power plants, electricity grids and highway bridges - and dozens of instructions for building pipe bombs, car bombs and nail bombs along with directions for manufacturing delay detonators and powerful explosives out of household items.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/the ... 26861.html

[American Dream]

Feds: Man charged with possession of machine gun promised to carry out hate crime

September 24, 2018 timesleader Local, News 105
By Jerry Lynott - jlynott@timesleader.com


John Jacob ‘Jake’ Hasay, seen in an image from social media, promised to commit a hate crime, according to federal authorities who filed weapons charges against him. - Facebook

WILKES-BARRE — A Luzerne County man who is facing federal weapons charges and allegations that he pledged to commit a hate crime is back behind bars after an in-patient psychiatric evaluation.

A judge ordered John Jacob “Jake” Hasay, 21, be returned to Lackawanna County Prison from First Hospital in Kingston after a federal prosecutor objected to letting Hasay transfer to a facility that was not secure.

That move followed an attempt by defense attorney Al Flora Jr. to secure conditional release for Hasay following his discharge from the hospital, where he had been admitted Sept. 15.

Flora’s motion proposed that Hasay, the son of senior District Judge John Hasay of Shickshinny, would be required to take anti-depressant medications and undergo partial hospitalization.

https://www.timesleader.com/news/719418 ... hate-crime

[American Dream]

Here is the dad:


IN RE HASAY| Pa. | Law | CaseMine
https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/5 ... 49347a1ad2
On February 10, 1991, Respondent was arrested for rape, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, aggravated indecent assault, indecent assault, kidnapping and ...

[American Dream]

And Shickshinny Pennsylvania is the home of a notorious Sovereign Order of Saint John group that might have just a little to do with the WACL & Operation Gladio:

A Vast Right Wing Conspiracy: The Secret Origins of the Patriot Movement Part IV



The interest Gale and Swift both had in extraterrestrials may well have stemmed from Silver Shirt founder William Dudley Pelley, who was one of the first figures to combine Ufology with occult teachings in the post-WWII era. Indeed, Pelley may even have been one of the first individuals to advocate an early concept of ancient aliens. It's interesting to note that Pelley was indicted for treason in 1942 along with suspected Sovereign Order of Saint John member "Count" Cherep-Spiridovich. Nor was this the SOSJ's only brush with UFOs --during the Willoughby era one of its members was a military intelligence officer named Colonel Philip J. Corso.


Colonel Philip J. Corso

Yes, the same Colonel Philip J. Corso, who became involved with the Nazi "ratlines" in Italy after the war; the same Colonel Philip J. Corso who hinted at helping organize an Operation Gladio-style network in Germany during the 1950s; the same Colonel Philip J. Corso who was working for the staff of segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond in the 1960s; and the same Colonel Philip J. Corso who wrote The Day After Roswell and spent years promoting any number of the classics of UFO lore.



In fairness, it should also be noted that Gale also had a long time association with Freemasonry. Indeed, his "church" held it services for 13 years at a Masonic Temple in Glendale. Gale claimed that one of his earliest followers, Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler, was a Master Mason when Gale introduced him to Identity theology. What's more, Gale alluded to one of his financial patrons as being a powerful Hollywood figure and Freemason.

"Gale collected himself and slumped forward, his elbows on his knees. 'Anyways, I had just been introduced to that element, you might say, living in Hollywood and meeting with people I didn't even know were connected with them. Like one of the wealthiest men in Hollywood...

"'My offices were in his building when I was with Waddell and Reed. He owned the Outpost Estate development; I bought my home through his real estate agency. He owned the Masonic Temple on Hollywood Boulevard --he built it. He owned the First Federal Savings and Loan building on Hollywood Island.'

"'What was his name?' Seymour asked.

"It was a long German name. I sent him some material, from my office to his executive suite, and he said, "Oh, are you a friend of Gerald Smith" I said, "Yeah." And he said "So am I, but don't let anyone know it." He liked me and he liked Douglas MacArthur. Gerald Smith had all those millionaire people supporting him.'"

(The Committee of the States, Cheri Seymour, pg. 85)

The individual Gale is alluding to can be no other than Charles E. "Mr. Hollywood" Toberman, who developed many of Hollywood's major landmarks including the Hollywood Bowl, Grauman's Chinese Theater, Grauman's Egyptian Theater, El Capitan Theatre, the Roosevelt Hotel and of course the Hollywood Masonic Temple. Gale alleged that Toberman supported him until the time of his death in 1981.




Charles E. Toberman (top) and his Hollywood Masonic Temple (bottom)

I find Gale's claim in this case to be highly probable. Gale was a successful businessman in the 1950s who initially worked for Hughes Aircraft Company after leaving the army before he went to Waddell and Reed. He did indeed own a house in Outpost Estate and reportedly his children played with the offspring of celebrities such as John Wayne. What's more, Gale continued to have ample funds even after his extremist views drove him out of the corporate world and despite the fact his "ministry" never attracted more than a handful of followers. Naturally, "serious" researchers such as Daniel Levitas have chalked up Gale's financial prosperity to his ability to sale life insurance to widows.

Further, while Gale was certainly prone to embellishments from time to time, there is not seemingly a logical reason for him to claim that one of his chief patrons was a wealthy and influential Freemason. Masonry is almost universally despised by the conspiratorial right, the chief audience for Gale's ideology. Such a revelation could have easily thrown his credibility into question amongst such circles, which is probably why he only acknowledged it at the tail end of his life.

Even stranger is that Gale himself was also partly Jewish, a fact researcher Daniel Levitas exhaustively documented in The Terrorist Next Door. Gale went to great lengths to keep this little detail hidden throughout his life, as one would imagine. Colonel Gale is hardly the only ideologue of the racist far right to have a trace of Jewish ancestry, however. For instance, author Kevin Coogan, while researching his ground breaking Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International, also came to suspect that Yockey had Jewish relations as well.


Saint Francis the Jew?

Gale's Jewish ancestry is especially curious when considering his arrest and trial in the mid-1980s. Gale, after nearly three decades in far right causes with an explicatively paramilitary bent, was finally arrested for conspiracy (among numerous other things) in 1986. Gale's arrest was part of a broader legal action targeting an organization he had founded in the early 1980s known as the Committee of the States.

While this endeavor seemed superficially less militant than that of the Posse its impossible to tell what Gale's true objective for it was as his health began to rapidly deteriorate shortly after it's founding in 1982. By the time he was arrested in 1986 he only had two years to live and his pending death was rather evident by the time his trial began to unfold in 1987.


Gale around the time of his trial

His followers, including his wife Roxanne, believed a conspiracy was at hand due to several key dates during Gale's downfall: His arrest in 1986 and the onset of his trail in 1987 occurred during Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. What's more, the trail verdict read just hours after Yom Kippur began in 1987.

Gale was sentenced to three years in prison, but he never lived to serve any of it as he shed his mortal coil on April 28, 1988, two days shy of the forty-third anniversary of Adolf Hitler's death. Had the Jewish conspiracy finally caught with the partly Jewish Gale? Or was his arrest and trail a ready made martyrdom for a man who may have already realized he was dying some time beforehand?

It's especially interesting to note that Gale's trail unfolded at the same time as the Federal government's sedition trail against Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler, Texas Klansman Louis Beam (who brought the "leaderless resistance" strategy to the Patriot movement), and eleven other Patriot leaders who were by and large more vital than Gale at that point as well as far more militant (several of the individuals indicted had been linked to Robert Matthews' "Order"). They were all acquitted on April 7, 1988, shortly before Gale returned to his celestial Aryan beings, in what many have described as a shocking defeat for Federal prosecutors.


Louis Beam

Thus, a dying Gale achieved martyrdom almost simultaneously as several of the guiding lights of the next generation of Patriots were acquitted of sedition and were allowed to carry on Gale's vision. Such is the way the Jewish conspiracy rolls, I suppose.

But let us get back to Gale's ideology and the million dollar question: Where exactly did Gale pick up this curious beliefs? According to Gale himself, it was from the United States Army.

"'We published a little Identity publication at that time; it was a bunch of military officers who asked me to put it out... Colonel Ben (Von) Stahl and Admiral Crommelin and General P.A. Del Valle of the Marine Corps. We had a meeting and they said, "You know, the people should know a little about this law, Posse Comitatus." The military police school in the army had been teaching it for years.'"

(The Committee of the States, Cheri Seymour, pg. 86)

General Pedro del Valle

Yes dear reader, the above mentioned General P.A. Del Valle is the same General Pedro Del Valle of the Defenders of the American Constitution and the Sovereign Order of Saint John. According to Grand Master Charles Pichel himself in his History of the Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, Knights of Malta Colonel Ben von Stahl was also a member of the Order (see page 192 of that work for a full list of military men affiliated with the Order circa 1970).

But before getting to this mysterious group of military officers Gale mentions above, let us first consider the possibility that the US military was responsible for indoctrinating officers with this ideology. As outlandish as it may sound, it is not beyond the realm of possibility. It is beyond a doubt now that the army deliberately indoctrinated officers in deeply racist and anti-Semitic ideology prior to World War II.

"The professional officers corps... was even more exercised that the 'real Americans' were losing control of their own country; as one officer wrote in 1920, 'the "Master Race" is... gradually ceasing to be master in its own house, it is being swamped by... Mongrels, greasers, whelps, and hounds.' Such opinions were part of an official, institutional culture in the military at the time, pervasive among officers... The Army War College, which prepared selected officers for positions of command, invited scientists such as Davenport and McDougall to lecture on race, and Earnest Sevier Cox's White America was assigned to part of the coursework. Another regular visitor, even well into the 1930s, was Madison Grant protege, Harvard-educated T. Lothrop Stoddard, whose books were recommend reading. In The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy, for example, prospective command officers could learn of the need to maintain 'white political domination' in the face of the colored threat --not so much from blacks, who were dismissed as inferior savages, but from 'Asiatics,' the yellow race, who according to Stoddard, constituted the main danger in an impending struggle for control of Africa and 'mongrel-ruled' South America. Up until the outbreak of war, Stoddard continued to lecture on 'World Affairs' at the college, praising the racial policies of the Third Reich and encouraged similar, legally mandated measures for segregation and antimiscegenation in the United States, based on 'increasing knowledge of the true nature of race by modern science.'

"The inner circles of the officers corps were particularly concerned over the threat to Nordic culture posed by the influx of Jews. As Joseph Bendersky has recently demonstrated in The "Jewish Threat," during the teens and twenties racial anti-Semitism among military leaders was 'not only prevalent and open but considere morally,politically, and even scientifically warranted.' The military culture adhered strongly to every anti-Semitic stereotype: Jews were physically weak, cowardly, and incapable of loyalty to anyone but themselves --'a disgrace to the flag,' according to one Colonel in 1918, and the only people in the 'world without moral honor or character.' In addition, they were the controlling force behind every movement for world domination, from Bolshevism to international finance. Predicting 'such massacres of the Jews... as have never been thought possible' by the Russians after World War I, one officer observed that 'nothing they can do [to the Jews] is bad enough to fit the case.' These views became common at the highest levels through the next three decades, as midlevel officers in the World War I era assumed upper-echelon positions. In 1940, recently retired deputy chief of staff General George Von Horn Moseley offered to join the America First Committee only if it first agreed 'to eliminate... all Jews and Jewish influence' from the organization and to 'come out before the nation with a definite statement against the Jew and all he stands for'; after the war, he called for a policy to 'give the Jews a limited time in which to close their affairs and leave our shores.' In 1945, General George S. Patton did not consider 'the displaced person... a human being,' especially 'the Jews who are lower than animals...'"

(The Funding of Scientific Racism, William H. Tucker, pgs. 27-29)

Needless to say, if the military was indoctrinating future high ranking officers with such doctrines as the need to maintain "white political domination," some form the Posse Comitatus ideology would not be out of place. Further collaboration of this possibility is provided by the esteemed historian Alfred W. McCoy, who recently noted a mysterious policy the Army War College embraced circa 1919.

"... In October 1919 an Army War College conference on domestic security described the United States as an 'Anglo-Saxon nation' facing the specter of revolt by ethnic radicals, making it imperative to implement 'War Plan White,' a color-coded strategic scenario that the War Plans Division have prepared in the event of a Russian-style revolution by an estimated 1.5 million American radicals. Making the racial prism explicit, another War Department report stated that the greatest threat were pan-Latinism, pan-orientalism, and bolshevism, which had 'an intimate connection of the Jews and Jewry.'

(Policing America's Empire, Alfred W. McCoy, pg. 314)

Is it possible that the race-based paramilitary forces former military men attempted to create after World War II were some how related to this mysterious "War Plan White'? This was a policy after all that military intelligence, especially that relating to industrial security, was deeply involved in. Vigilante, racist groups spread like the plague in the United States in the wake of the First World War, with a few such as the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies having been founded by former military intelligence officers such as John Trevor Sr. While there was a crackdown on such groups during World War II they seemingly made a vigorous comeback as the Cold War set in, the Posse arguably being the most successful of such groups.

And indeed, prominent Posse members have long claimed that military officers were the chief force behind the movement from the very beginning.

"A noteworthy and generally unpublicized aspect of the radical right's history is the military involvement since the movement's inception, James Wickstrom, head of Posse Comitatus, wrote in a 1989 Intelligence Update circulated from Pennsylvania that 'ZOG thought the "Posse Comitatus" was just a tax rebellion movement. But to their surprise some years later, ZOG found that the movement was loaded with former military officers, being used in an advisory manner.'

"'In Wisconsin alone,' wrote Wickstrom, 'Posse Comitatus officers from 36 states were trained in all types of leadership positions and guerrilla warfare...'

"Indeed, Seymour discovered that in addition to Colonel Gale's paramilitary training and lecturing excursions across the country, other retired World War II and Korean war officers such as Colonel Benjamin [Von] Stahl from Nebraska and Colonel Jack Mohr from Mississippi conducted nationwide training exercises."

(The Committee of the States, Cheri Seymour, pgs. 218-219)

James Wickstrom

It would seem that SOSJ member Colonel Benjamin von Stahl was still involved with the Posse in the 1980s. But then again, former military officers seem to have actively been organizing an underground paramilitary network as early as the early 1960s, possibly sooner (remember, Sovereign Order of Saint John members Pedro Del Valle and Bonner Fellers was already attempting such things with the 1950s-era Defenders of the American Constitution). Journalist Dick Russell would allude to the possibility that both Pedro Del Valle and Charles Willoughby were behind Gale's early 1960s efforts to organize a paramilitary underground.

"Willoughby's publisher and friend Billy James Hargis was a short, portly, double-chinned fellow in his midthirties who gained much of his financial support from H.L. Hunt and other wealthy oilmen. Along with Willoughby, who was his Washington eyes and ears, another Hargis' advisory committee members was retired lieutenant general Pedro del Valle, U.S. Marine commander in the Pacific during World War II. After the Korean War, del Valle had become vice president of ITT's Latin American operations.

"In September 1961, Hargis announced that a secret fraternity to coordinate right-wing activities would soon be formed. Then, on March 21, 1962, a carefully selected group was called together in Washington. No press representatives were allowed at the founding session of the Anti-Communist Liaison, which brought together about on hundred delegates representing some seventy-five right-wing groups at the Washington hotel. Named as its chairman and operating head was Edward Hunter, a National Advisory Board member of Young Americans for Freedom.

"The new group's insider was U.S. representative John Rousselot, a John Birch Society spokesman and Christian Crusade board member from Los Angeles. It also had a Southern Californian 'outsider,' Colonel William Potter Gale, yet another ex-MacArthur man. In 1962, as California state chairman of the Constitution Party, Colonel Gale announced his candidacy for the governorship on a platform calling for the abolition of all income taxes. He also organized, soon after the pivotal springtime meeting in Washington, a paramilitary outfit.

"Willoughby, del Valle, and a number of other military officers put together Gale's tactical guide, or manual of arms of the future. It suggested that 'patriotic underground armies should be created, named the "Rangers" who should train to assassinate, sabotage, and overthrow the "People's Democracy."'"

"A Long Beach Press-Telegram expose called Gale's Rangers 'a secret guerrilla group composed of persons devoted to extremist racial and religious beliefs.' Not long after their spring 1962 formation, the Rangers would begin to attract a wide range of wanderers along an L.A.-to-Miami route..."

(The Man Who Knew Too Much, Dick Russell, pgs. 111-112)

http://visupview.blogspot.com/2013/11/a ... ecret.html

[American Dream]

Corruption in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania? What are the reasons?

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/pennsylvania/20091113_Another_guilty_plea_in_Luzerne_corruption_probe.html

Posted on Fri, Nov. 13, 2009

Another guilty plea in Luzerne corruption probe

SCRANTON - A deputy clerk in Luzerne County, where a federal corruption probe is in progress, has agreed to plead guilty to taking a bribe.
Federal prosecutors say a contractor took William Brace to New York City and bought him a tailor-made suit worth about $1,500. Prosecutors say the suit was a reward for help in getting a county contract.

The plea agreement filed yesterday says Brace agreed to cooperate in the investigation. Brace was the 17th person to be charged in the county since January as part of the probe. Most of the accused are public officials.

Defense lawyer Joseph Nocito did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment


http://www.philly.com/philly/news/homep ... abuse.html

Posted on Wed, Nov. 11, 2009


Luzerne officials deny knowing of abuse
By William Ecenbarger

For The Inquirer

WILKES-BARRE - To the frequent frustration and occasional exasperation of a special panel investigating judicial corruption in Luzerne County, yesterday's testimony gave off the steady and unmistakable sound of the buck being passed.
Phrases like "I was not aware," "Yes, but," and "It was not my responsibility" wafted from the witness chair as officials who oversee the county's courts denied knowing that thousands of adolescents were being locked away, often for petty offenses, after hearings in which they had been effectively denied lawyers.

When Luzerne County District Attorney Jacqueline Musto Carroll challenged the 11 members of the state-appointed Interbranch Commission on Juvenile Justice to "tell me what you do when you have a judge who is a crook," she was promptly interrupted by the questioner-in-chief.

"You report him," interjected John M. Cleland, the commission chairman and a judge on the state Superior Court.

Cleland and his fellow panelists have until May 31 to discover how two former judges, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan, managed to get away with what federal prosecutors say was a five-year, $2.8 million kickback conspiracy, a scheme that one juvenile-justice advocacy group called "one of the largest and most serious violations of children's rights in the history of the American legal system."

Musto Carroll said she was unaware that more than half the teenagers whose cases came before Ciavarella did not have legal representation. She said the judge's "zero-tolerance" policy was a result of the 1999 Columbine High School shootings.

"I think Judge Ciavarella was probably doing what he thought he ought to do," the district attorney testified. "I have heard in a number of cases, what he did actually straightened out kids' lives. Some went on to get scholarships and college educations."

That brought an angry response from panel member Robert L. Listenbee, head of the juvenile unit of the Defender Association of Philadelphia. "Ms. Carroll, I remind that you and I as attorneys took an oath to uphold the Constitution. There were children here whose basic constitutional rights were being violated every day. Let's keep that in mind."

Lawyer Kenneth J. Horoho Jr., a commissioner from Pittsburgh, offered a litany of questions about Musto Carroll's having not known or questioned Ciavarella's methods. Horoho concluded, "The bottom line is that 'zero tolerance' went unchallenged by your office."

"Don't worry about Luzerne County," Musto Carroll assured the commission. "As long as I'm here, it's in good hands."

Yesterday's first witness was David W. Lupas, Musto Carroll's predecessor as district attorney and now a county judge, who said that none of his assistants ever brought concerns about Ciavarella's conduct to his attention.

Panel member Dwayne D. Woodruff - the head juvenile judge in Allegheny County, and a former Pittsburgh Steelers safety - noted that 54 percent of the children brought before Ciavarella did not have lawyers. "Would you expect your assistant D.A.s to come to you with that?" Woodruff asked.

"No one came to me," Lupas said.

Cleland interjected, "I could understand a case here and a case there. But 6,000 cases? This went on for years, and it was a massive deprivation of rights. No assistant D.A., no public defender, no private lawyer ever raised a question? That's hard to believe."

Basil G. Russin, who has been chief public defender in Luzerne County since 1980, said that even if he had known the extent of Ciavarella's denial of rights to juvenile defendants, he would not have had many options. "We don't have the time or the money to look into things very deeply. We just do the best we can," he said.

Besides, Russin said, the judges' get-tough stance against juvenile misbehavior had wide public support.

"Everybody loved it. The schools loved it because they got rid of every problem kid. The parents loved it because there were kids they couldn't control. The cops loved it because it got kids off the streets, and the D.A. loved it because they were getting convictions."

In earlier testimony, Sandra Brulo, a former Luzerne County probation official, said she had raised concerns about Ciavarella with her boss, but did not hear back.

"Don't you think you should have taken it further when you didn't get any satisfaction from your supervisor?" asked Ronald P. Williams, a panel member from nearby Wyoming County, raising his arms in amazement.

"I took it to my boss," Brulo replied. "That's as far as I thought I should go."

She testified that probation officers, not attorneys, asked young defendants to sign forms just before they entered Ciavarella's courtroom that waived their right to a lawyer. Commissioner George D. Mosee, a deputy Philadelphia district attorney, asked Brulo if this was a proper role for probation officers.

"We did what the judge instructed us to do," she said.

"Even when their very liberty was at stake?" Mosee asked. Brulo did not answer.

Joseph Massa, senior counsel for the state Judicial Conduct Board, which investigates complaints against judges, told the panel that his agency had acted properly more than two years ago when it referred allegations it received against Ciavarella and Conahan to federal prosecutors.

By not acting on its own, the board allowed the jurists to stay on the bench until they resigned this year. The judges stepped down after a federal grand jury indicted them on racketeering, bribery and fraud charges.

"To allege the [Judicial Conduct Board] members put their heads in the proverbial sand while juveniles in this county were sent to the hoosegow is a disgrace," Massa told the panel.

Ciavarella is accused of taking bribes from operators of two for-profit detention centers in return for sending children to the centers. Conahan is accused of securing lucrative contracts for the private jails, which the state paid according to the numbers of inmates they housed.

Once the scheme was set up, prosecutors say, Ciavarella guaranteed that the jails were filled with a steady stream of juvenile offenders.

Ciavarella and Conahan are awaiting trial. They initially pleaded guilty but withdrew their pleas after a federal judge rejected the terms of their plea agreements.




http://www.philly.com/philly/news/local ... cases.html

Posted on Tue, Nov. 10, 2009


Judge tells of perverted justice in Luzerne juvenile casesBy William Ecenbarger

For The Inquirer

WILKES-BARRE - The judge who studied Luzerne County's "cash-for-kids" scheme said yesterday that children's constitutional rights had been denied and justice perverted "in ways that I would never have dreamed possible."
Judge Arthur E. Grim of Berks County, who reviewed transcripts of about 100 cases of juveniles caught up in the scheme, said the scandal grew out of "unfettered power, greed, opportunity, and intimidation."

Lawyers, court employees, and school officials knew of the scheme, but winked at it for convenience or self-preservation, Grim testified.

He described his findings to the Interbranch Commission on Juvenile Justice, an 11-member panel named by Gov. Rendell, legislative leaders, and the state Supreme Court to look into the scandal.

The commission opened two days of hearings here yesterday in its inquiry into systemic failures that permitted what federal prosecutors say was a $2.6 million kickback conspiracy involving former Luzerne County Court Judges Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan.

Grim said "an almost routine disregard for the rights of juvenile offenders" was known to lawyers, court staff, and school authorities, yet went on for six years or more.

He said many school officials supported Ciavarella's "zero-tolerance" policies toward teenagers no matter how minor the offense.

"When a misbehaving kid was brought to school authorities, they immediately picked up the phone and called the police," Grim testified. "They did this because they knew that if they did, that child would go before Judge Ciavarella and would be out of their hair as a problem."

He said many court officials failed to speak out because they owed their jobs to either Conahan or Ciavarella. Under orders from Ciavarella, Grim said, officers of the Juvenile Probation Department stationed themselves outside the courtroom and persuaded parents to give up their children's rights by signing waiver-of-counsel forms that were improper and legally defective.

Grim noted that in 2001, the state Superior Court reversed Ciavarella's sentencing of a 13-year-old because the judge had failed to inform the defendant of his right to a lawyer.

"Judge Ciavarella vowed publicly that this would never again happen in his courtroom. This was widely known by the general public, and especially by the members of the bar. Yet Ciaverella subsequently repeated this behavior over and over again. To my knowledge, not a single member of the Luzerne County bar ever spoke out."

He speculated that local lawyers were silent because Ciavarella was the president judge of Luzerne County Court and they feared retribution in other cases that came before him.

Grim noted that many parents who sought out lawyers to defend their children were told not to bother, because it would "only make matters worse" with Ciavarella.

"It was common knowledge that something was rotten in Denmark," Grim said.

The state Supreme Court appointed Grim, a senior judge, to review juvenile cases Ciavarella handled. Following his study, Grim recommended that about 6,500 convictions meted out by Ciavarella between 2003 and 2008 be overturned. In an unprecedented step, the high court adopted this recommendation on Oct. 29.

Grim said yesterday he decided to recommend throwing out nearly all the cases because so much money was involved in the kickbacks that "it was impossible for Ciavarella to be impartial."

Federal prosecutors say Ciavarella and Conahan collected $2.6 million from the owner of two privately run youth detention centers in exchange for the judges' sending teen defendants there.

Ciavarella and Conahan had agreed to plead guilty, but a federal judge this summer rejected their agreements with prosecutors. They withdrew their pleas and have been indicted again on racketeering charges.

Grim recommended that serious consideration should be given to opening Juvenile Court proceedings to the public, and to creating a system of circuit-riding judges and public defenders with special skills in dealing with juveniles. State law closes criminal court proceedings for people under 18.

Superior Court Judge John M. Cleland, chairman of the commission, emphasized in opening remarks that one of the panel's primary goals was to discover "what it would have taken to encourage people to act" and prevent the injustices.

"How do we create a system in which those who see corruption call the police? How do we create a system in which prosecutors who see a judge flagrantly disregard the law make a report to the [state] Judicial Conduct Board? How can we develop a system in which we select and educate our Juvenile Court judges so that glib sloganeering - and using phrases like 'zero tolerance' - is not mistaken for thoughtful judicial reflection?"

The commission may begin getting answers when hearings resume today, with testimony scheduled from representatives of the District Attorney's Office, Public Defender's Office, and Juvenile Probation Department.

Cleland also issued this plea to the people of Luzerne County:

"We know the people in this community did not consciously choose to stand on the side of injustice at the expense of children. But what was it that made it so hard to do the right thing? Were people afraid? Were they intimidated? By whom? What protections would they have wanted? Where would they have wanted to take the information they had?"

The hearing was in a large meeting room at a hotel outside the city. About 50 spectators, including local officials and representatives of advocacy groups, attended the day session. The crowd size doubled for the evening hearing.

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/homepage/20091116_In_Pa__coal_region__a_mother_lode_of_corruption.html

In Pa. coal region, a mother lode of corruption
First came "cash for kids." Now, six school board members are charged with accepting bribes from would-be teachers.
By William Ecenbarger

For The Inquirer

WILKES-BARRE - Early in the spring, the FBI made an extraordinary appeal that was carried by newspapers and broadcast media throughout northeastern Pennsylvania:

"If you are a teacher, prospective teacher, employee, or prospective employee of any kind who has been required to provide money, or anything else of value, to any individual in connection with being hired at any public school in northeastern Pennsylvania . . . you are requested to immediately contact either Special Agent Richard Southerton or Special Agent Joseph Noone in the FBI's Scranton office at telephone number 570-344-2404."

Almost immediately, the telephones were ringing. To date, six school board members have been indicted on charges they accepted bribes in exchange for hiring teachers in their districts. The FBI won't comment, but no one doubts there will be more charges.

Based on indictments and subsequent guilty pleas, the going rate for a teaching job is $5,000 in the Wilkes-Barre Area School District and the Hanover Area School District.

"The harsh truth is that it costs at least a couple of thousand dollars to get a job in a school district around here," says Thomas Baldino, who has taught political science at Wilkes University for 20 years. "You either pay it or you go well outside the area to teach. I have had really bright students who can't get teaching jobs here because they can't afford to pay for them."

Most of the attention in the federal probe into official wrongdoing in northeastern Pennsylvania has justifiably focused on the $2.8 million kickback scheme in which two Luzerne County judges allegedly sentenced juveniles to detention centers without legal representation. However, indictments have been dropping like cinder blocks outside the courthouse as well.

Indeed, as of the close of business Friday, U.S. Attorney Dennis C. Pfannenschmidt said 19 Luzerne County officials had been charged with criminal conduct in an ongoing investigation that goes well beyond the courtrooms of Michael T. Conahan and Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., the former judges who have been indicted in a "cash-for-kids" conspiracy.

The miscreants have included Charles Costanzo, who was convicted of making off with about $650,000 as county workers' compensation administrator, and William Brace, who last week pleaded guilty to accepting a $1,500 tailor-made, monogrammed suit in exchange for facilitating the award of a contract while he was deputy county clerk.

It's all merely the latest chapter in a legacy of official wrongdoing that stretches back more than a half-century and is punctuated by coal barons and mobsters - a "culture of corruption" that has snared judges and congressmen, legislators and councilmen.

Philadelphians upset with corruption in their city may find a mild tranquilizer in Pennsylvania's anthracite coal region, which includes Wilkes-Barre, Scranton, and Hazleton, where the FBI and the Justice Department have been intermittently probing public officials and racketeers for more than a half-century.

Baldino says he was born and raised in South Philadelphia and is "no stranger to crooked politicians." But, he adds, "the difference is that in Philly we have at least had episodes of reform, like Clark and Dilworth in the '50s. Here, there's never been a reform movement. What we're seeing here today is the way it's always been."

"The level of corruption is unbelievable. It's epidemic," says Robert Wolensky, a Luzerne County native who teaches sociology at the University of Wisconsin but returns regularly as an adjunct professor at King's College in Wilkes-Barre. "It wasn't until I moved to Wisconsin that I realized that corruption wasn't a normal part of government."

Baldino and Wolensky agree that the common denominator in the historic corruption has been jobs. "The Depression started here early, when the coal companies started laying off the miners in the 1920s," Wolensky said. "People became desperate for jobs, and the only jobs were with the local governments."

Baldino said at first it merely involved local politicians handing out jobs to their relatives and friends. "But before long, patronage moved into pocket-lining."

A key factor is the unusually large number of local governments. Luzerne County has four cities, 36 boroughs, and 36 townships; Lackawanna County has two cities, 17 boroughs, and 21 townships. "This is an outgrowth of the fact that every coal company had to have its own town so it could control laws and taxes," Wolensky said. "These towns survive today, and each is a little fiefdom."

"Today," he added, "paying to get a job is viewed as the proper thing to do - a way of saying thank you. Many public jobs are expected to be given only after a bribe. If you don't put the thousand dollars in the envelope, someone else will because they are as desperate as you."

Baldino said the citizens of northeastern Pennsylvania were "very forgiving" of government miscreants. He cited the case of Daniel J. Flood, the flamboyant congressman from Wilkes-Barre who was elected to a 16th term in 1978 while under federal indictment for bribery and perjury. He resigned two years later and died in 1994. The Wilkes-Barre Area School District, one of the districts where teachers' jobs were sold, includes the Daniel J. Flood Elementary School.

Joseph Vadella was forced to resign as Carbondale mayor in 1997 after being sentenced to four years in federal prison in a ballot-tampering scheme. Two years later, he was elected mayor again - even though his name wasn't on the ballot and had to be written in.

In Moosic Borough, Mayor John Segilia and Councilman Joseph Mercatili were forced to resign in 1992 after pleading no contest to fixing parking tickets and manipulating DUI cases. Both were elected to the same offices two weeks ago.

On Oct. 15, Allen Bellas was charged with taking a $2,000 bribe as executive director of the Luzerne County Redevelopment Authority. He pleaded guilty, but it was too late to get his name off the Nov. 3 ballot as a candidate for reelection to the Wyoming Valley West School Board. Despite his admission, Bellas was elected to another term on the school board. He is expected to resign.

There was one sign in the Nov. 3 election that voters' forgiveness was running thin. Judge Peter Paul Olszewski Jr. was soundly defeated in his bid for retention. Such retentions are usually routine, but a photograph was published in September in a Wilkes-Barre newspaper showing the jurist with a convicted drug dealer at a Florida condominium owned by Conahan and Ciavarella. The photo was taken in 2005, before the judges' alleged misconduct became public.

Baldino and Wolensky agreed that the "cash-for-kids" scandal had appalled the community much more than other official transgressions. Ciavarella and Conahan are under indictment on 48 federal racketeering and related charges, accused of receiving $2.8 million from the developers of two juvenile detention facilities. In February, they agreed to plead guilty in a deal with prosecutors that called for 87-month prison sentences, but a federal judge rejected the accord last month, saying the two jurists had not fully accepted responsibility for the crimes. They switched their pleas to not guilty.

Wolensky said organized crime was "part of the social fabric" of northeastern Pennsylvania, which is home to one of the nation's old mob families - the Bufalinos. The current leader has been identified by state and federal authorities as William "Big Billy" D'Elia, who is serving a nine-year term for federal money-laundering and witness-tampering convictions.

There has been testimony in an unrelated state Supreme Court case that D'Elia met regularly with Conahan for breakfast at a local restaurant to discuss pending cases.

Late Friday, Gene Stilp, a Wilkes-Barre native who has been active in opposing corruption at the state level, placed "Crime Watch" posters in the Luzerne County Courthouse to give courthouse employees a way of reporting misdeeds. The posters, which depict the courthouse with a big eye, urge respondents to send their information to a box at the Wilkes-Barre post office.

"If anyone thinks that the end of corruption within the Luzerne County Courthouse is in sight, or that all past abuses have been discovered, they are sadly mistaken," Stilp said.

[American Dream]

The corruption in Northeast Pennsylvania seems to be part and parcel of deep political intrigue in North America generally:

The Bufalino file: A look inside the FBI paper trail on NEPA's most notorious mobste

In his time, Russell A. Bufalino was feted by politicians, feared by his fellow mobsters and dogged by federal prosecutors.

Even 17 years after his death, the soft-spoken, eight-fingered Sicilian with a lazy eye, known to his closest associates as "McGee," is still a presence in Northeast Pennsylvania, where he helped nurture the culture of corruption now unraveling under the pressure of a federal corruption probe.

The 2006 arrest of Mr. Bufalino's longtime driver and reputed successor, William "Big Billy" D'Elia, put the FBI on the trail of two Luzerne County judges now facing prison for racketeering, federal prosecutors say.

Casino developer Louis A. DeNaples' alleged evasions about a relationship with Mr. Bufalino in interviews with state gaming regulators forced him to relinquish control of his casino in return for dismissal of perjury charges in 2009.

Mr. Bufalino, or a character based on him, will likely play a prominent role in a film planned by Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese. "The Irishman," based on the biography of a Teamsters official who claims to have killed labor union leader Jimmy Hoffa on Mr. Bufalino's orders, would star mob-movie legends Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino.

But the definitive, if less cinematic, chronicle of Mr. Bufalino's career can be found in his 1,164-page FBI file, acquired by Times-Shamrock newspapers under a Freedom of Information Act request.

Although heavily edited to delete the names of informants and associates and to protect investigatory information, the FBI file makes a compelling case that Mr. Bufalino's quiet and modest life in Kingston obscured a criminal career of nationwide significance. Reports from FBI offices across the United States over a 30-year period link Mr. Bufalino and his crime family to union racketeering, bookmaking, the fencing of stolen goods, loan-sharking, narcotics and related violence.

"He was one of the most powerful mob bosses of his day, if not of all time," said Charles Brandt, a former Delaware state prosecutor whose biography of former Teamsters official Frank Sheeran, "I Heard You Paint Houses," is the basis for the Scorsese film project.

The earliest report in the Bufalino FBI file, dating from 1953, names Mr. Bufalino, who was then 50 and living in Pittston, as a "power in the Mafia" with "close contacts in the underworld in New York City and Detroit" and interests in gambling and racketeering connected to local dress factories. Similar reports from this era also link him to upstate New York mob boss Joseph Barbara, who employed Mr. Bufalino as a mechanic at one of his bottling plants during World War II.

Mr. Bufalino's ties to Mr. Barbara would soon expose him and organized crime to increased and unwelcome scrutiny by law enforcement and the news media.

Apalachin, Cuba, Deportation

In November 1957, Mr. Bufalino helped organize a meeting of dozens of organized crime figures from across the country at Mr. Barbara's 53-acre estate in Apalachin, N.Y.

A New York state police trooper, intrigued by a large number of hotel rooms reserved by the Mr. Barbara family and increased traffic at the estate, set up a roadblock near the estate's entrance, setting off a panic among the mobsters, some of whom fled on foot into the nearby woods.

Nearly 60 men were detained. Twenty, including Mr. Bufalino, would be found guilty of obstruction of justice for allegedly lying to a grand jury about the purpose of the meeting, but those convictions were overturned on appeal.

Mr. Bufalino told a local reporter the gathering was merely a cookout.

For organized crime, Apalachin meant increased scrutiny from J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which had been dubious about claims of a nationwide crime network before the well-publicized raid.

For Mr. Bufalino, Apalachin, and the subsequent decline of Mr. Barbara's influence, created an opportunity for increased power over organized crime groups in Northeast Pennsylvania and the Southern Tier of New York. By 1959, Mr. Bufalino was the boss of the regional crime syndicate, according to the FBI.

Apalachin also resulted in a 15-year legal battle with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, which wanted to deport Mr. Bufalino as an undesirable alien.

U.S. Attorney General William P. Rogers called the Bufalino deportation proceedings "one of the first results of an intensified campaign for enforcement of federal laws against racketeers."

Mr. Bufalino, born in Sicily in September 1903, had been granted permanent resident status, but not citizenship, upon entering the country through Ellis Island in 1914, according to the INS. The agency alleged he falsely claimed U.S. citizenship upon returning from a 1956 trip to Cuba, where he and other mob figures had extensive interests before Fidel Castro came to power in 1959.

In preparing for Mr. Bufalino's 1958 deportation hearing, federal agents discovered birth records in the Luzerne County Courthouse had been forged to indicate he had been born in Pittston in October 1903.

At the hearing, Mr. Bufalino's attorney admitted he was born in Sicily, did not possess citizenship and illegally re-entered the country in 1956. He was ordered deported.

Mr. Bufalino unsuccessfully fought his deportation all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear his appeal in 1973. But in the end, the Italian government declined to accept him and he remained in the United States.

The Hoffa disappearance

No one has ever been prosecuted for the 1975 disappearance of former Teamsters head Jimmy Hoffa, but Mr. Bufalino's FBI file indicates he was among the suspects.

Several men whose names have been tied to the Hoffa case, including Mr. Bufalino and Delaware Teamsters official Frank Sheeran, were subsequently imprisoned on unrelated charges in a concerted law enforcement assault on racketeering and organized crime that raged in the late 1970s and 1980s.

According to Mr. Brandt, the former prosecutor whose book is based on interviews he conducted with Mr. Sheeran, the union official claimed to have shot Hoffa on Mr. Bufalino's orders.

Mr. Sheeran said Mr. Bufalino and other Mafia heads wanted to stop Mr. Hoffa from regaining the presidency of the Teamsters and control of its pension fund, which had been a source of easy loans for the mob. At the time of his disappearance, Mr. Hoffa, who had served time on bribery and other charges, was planning to run for the union presidency despite the terms of his early release, which barred him from union activities until 1980.

Mr. Bufalino's FBI file makes several references to the Hoffa investigation, known as "Hoffex."

"Sheeran was observed driving Russell Bufalino in Detroit right after Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance," according to one FBI report. In Mr. Brandt's book, Mr. Sheeran claimed he, Mr. Bufalino and their wives drove from Northeast Pennsylvania to Detroit in 1975 to attend the wedding of the daughter of William Bufalino, an attorney who had ties to Mr. Bufalino and the Teamsters.

Mr. Sheeran claimed he and Mr. Bufalino dropped off their wives at a diner in Ohio during the drive and Mr. Sheeran and Mr. Bufalino drove to a small airport, where Mr. Sheeran boarded a private plane for an hour-long flight to Michigan. Once there, Mr. Sheeran said, he met Mr. Hoffa and drove with him and another mob associate to a house outside Detroit, where he shot Mr. Hoffa. Mr. Sheeran then flew back to Ohio to continue his trip with Mr. Bufalino.

The FBI file says Mr. Sheeran, a Philadelphia native, was "closely connected" to Mr. Bufalino. Mr. Brandt's book describes Mr. Sheeran as performing numerous services for Mr. Bufalino and Philadelphia mob boss Angelo Bruno.

The FBI report says the Bufalino crime family had only 40 "made" members and 75 associates, but it had regular dealings with larger families in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New York and Florida and ties to Las Vegas casinos:

"We have seen indications of accelerated infiltration of the garment industry … extensive loan shark activity … gambling junkets and casino skims … bankruptcy fraud … corruption of the financial community … laundering of funds … large scale fencing operation for stolen jewels … political corruption … fraud in Government contracts … obstruction of justice and labor racketeering."

Mr. Bufalino was known to associate with numerous local business leaders, politicians and even judges, according to the FBI file, which was heavily edited by the agency to delete their names.

"This Family has also established close political ties with prominent politicians," a 1981 FBI report states. "The extent of this political influence was verified by the debriefing of (name redacted) during the multi-jurisdictional investigation of former Congressman Daniel J. Flood."

Mr. Flood, who had represented the Wilkes-Barre area in Congress for decades, resigned from office in January 1980 and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws.

Hundreds of people, including many local politicians, attended annual dinners held to coincide with Mr. Bufalino's birthday sponsored by the local chapter of the Italian-American Civil Rights League, of which Mr. Bufalino was a leading member, according to the FBI.

Mr. Bufalino and his wife, Carolyn, who had no children, lived in a non-descript home in a quiet residential section of Kingston. But Mr. Bufalino spent several days each week in New York City, where he had interests in restaurants, jewelry stores and garment businesses, according to the FBI.

It was a New York case involving $25,000 in diamonds that would send Mr. Bufalino to federal prison for the first time in 1978 at the age of 74. Mr. Bufalino was convicted of threatening Jack Napoli, who had used Mr. Bufalino's name to secure the diamonds from a New York jeweler, paying for the gems with a worthless check.

When Mr. Bufalino and an associate threatened Mr. Napoli, he went to the FBI and wore a wire during a conversation in which Mr. Bufalino vowed:

"I'm going to kill you, (expletive deleted), and I'm going to do it myself."

Mr. Bufalino was convicted of extortion and got four years.

'RABFAM' and new charges

Federal agents believed Mr. Bufalino continued to oversee the operations of his crime family through his lieutenants while incarcerated in Danbury, Conn. In 1979, they went on the attack with an investigation designed to "decimate the Bufalino Family," according to the FBI file.

It was called RABFAM, for Russell A. Bufalino Family, and it entailed numerous wiretaps, informants, undercover agents and surveillance based out of a new FBI office in downtown Wilkes-Barre.

RABFAM grew from a 1978 FBI investigation in Baltimore into the fencing of stolen goods. Through that investigation, undercover agents developed information on various organized crime figures.

"The evolution of the operation has been changed from a purely stolen goods posture to prosecution of members of Organized Crime Families, either through the purchase of stolen property or other suitable violations of Federal laws," according to a 1980 FBI report in the Bufalino file.

RABFAM, overseen by the FBI's Philadelphia office, involved a squad "engaged full-time in surveillance of members of the Russell A. Bufalino Family," according to the file, which alleged Mr. Bufalino continued to direct family business from jail through two lieutenants. One handled "general criminal matters," while the other took care of "white collar crime matters concentrating in labor racketeering, political corruption and infiltration of legitimate businesses."

The names of those lieutenants have been edited out of the FBI file obtained by Times-Shamrock newspapers, but one page from the numerous RABFAM reports contains the hand-written notation "D'Elia," an obvious reference to William "Big Billy" D'Elia, Mr. Bufalino's former driver and eventual successor. He is now in federal prison on money laundering and witness-tampering charges. He did not respond to a series of written questions provided through his lawyer.

As RABFAM proceeded, Mr. Bufalino was hit with new criminal charges while still in prison. In December 1980, a federal grand jury indictment alleged he had somehow tracked down and conspired to kill Mr. Napoli, the prime government witness at his extortion trial, who had entered the Witness Protection Program.

Mr. Bufalino was released from prison in May 1981 while awaiting trial for murder conspiracy. While free, he met with mob associates, including Mr. Sheeran, in Wilkes-Barre, New York and Philadelphia, according to the FBI.

On Sept. 5, 1981, the local chapter of the Italian-American Civil Rights League held its annual dinner in downtown Wilkes-Barre. Mr. Bufalino was the "guest of honor" and received a plaque in recognition of his "service to the community," according to the FBI.

By October 1981, Mr. Bufalino was back in a federal courtroom in New York, where a jury convicted him of conspiracy. He would begin serving a 10-year sentence the following August.

Meanwhile, RABFAM continued, but there were signs of internal tensions in the Justice Department over the direction of the investigation and frustration over its lack of results.

Mr. Bufalino's indictment in the Napoli case came not from information developed by RABFAM, but through a grand jury in the U.S. Southern District of New York. The Philadelphia FBI office running RABFAM was unaware of the New York case until it learned a Newark FBI agent had been subpoenaed to testify about Mr. Bufalino before the grand jury just weeks before the indictment.

In September 1981, Eric H. Holder Jr., then a federal prosecutor and now U.S. Attorney General, wrote to the Justice Department arguing that RABFAM "has yet to develop a viable, indictable case" and should be shut down.

Mr. Holder wanted to terminate RABFAM because he needed the testimony of a RABFAM informant to pursue a jury-tampering case involving Bufalino lieutenant James David Osticco that had been developed independently of RABFAM.

In response to Mr. Holder's memo, FBI headquarters wrote that going ahead with the Osticco case and unmasking the informant "would entirely void the continuing RABFAM investigation."

In the end, Mr. Holder won. RABFAM informant Frank Parlopiano testified against Mr. Osticco at his trial in 1983. Mr. Osticco was convicted of bribing a juror in a 1977 fraud case involving three Lackawanna County officials and Mr. DeNaples, a Dunmore businessman. The juror was the lone holdout for acquittal in a case that involved overbilling the federal government for flood recovery work following Tropical Storm Agnes in 1972.

After the hung jury, Mr. DeNaples and the other three defendants pleaded no contest in the case. He received a $10,000 fine and three years probation.

RABFAM was shut down for good in 1984.

Mr. DeNaples' alleged relationship to Mr. Bufalino would surface decades later when he successfully applied for a state license for Mount Airy Casino Resort in Monroe County. A Dauphin County grand jury indicted Mr. DeNaples in 2008, alleging he lied to gaming regulators about his relationships with Mr. Bufalino and Mr. D'Elia.

The grand jury concluded "DeNaples escaped a lengthy prison term by employing his organized crime contacts to fix his criminal trial."

The perjury charges against Mr. DeNaples, who was not charged in the Osticco case and who has denied having ties to organized crime, were withdrawn and he agreed to transfer ownership of the casino to family members.

Efforts to reach Mr. DeNaples and his attorney in the perjury case were unsuccessful.

Mr. Holder did not respond to an interview request placed with U.S. Department of Justice.

Decline, death and legacy

Mr. Bufalino spent nearly seven years in federal custody for the murder conspiracy conviction and suffered a stroke while in prison. He was released in 1989 and died in a nursing home in 1994.

According to Mr. Sheeran, who was incarcerated in a federal prison hospital with Mr. Bufalino, the mob boss found religion behind bars.

"When you get to be my age, you'll realize there's something more than this," Mr. Bufalino told Mr. Sheeran, according to Mr. Sheeran's biography.

The leadership of Mr. Bufalino's organized crime family, which was dwindling in numbers and influence, eventually fell to Mr. D'Elia, who pleaded guilty to money laundering and witness intimidation in 2008 and is now serving seven years and three months in a federal prison in Arizona.

Mr. D'Elia's arrest has had a wide-ranging impact, leading to the racketeering convictions of two former Luzerne County judges who took $2.8 million in kickbacks for placing juveniles in two for-profit detention centers.

Mr. D'Elia and one of those judges, Michael T. Conahan, were longtime friends who met regularly for early breakfasts in a Wilkes-Barre chain restaurant, according to court testimony.

The kids-for-cash prosecution "sprang from the Billy D'Elia investigation," Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Zubrod said earlier this year. "About six or seven of D'Elia's lieutenants were prosecuted. Ultimately, D'Elia was prosecuted. That led us to Judge Conahan, given his relationships with him, and then from there, we began to focus on the whole financial dealings with Judge Conahan … All of that began to come out."

The kids-for-cash case is just one of more than 30 federal prosecutions of government officials and contractors that have exposed a culture of corruption in Luzerne and Lackawanna counties over the past three years.

As for Mr. Bufalino's crime family, its days as an independent power center are probably over, according to James Kanavy, a former investigator for the Pennsylvania Crime Commission, a now-defunct state agency that issued annual reports on organized crime in the 1980s.

"I don't think there's a standalone family here any more," Mr. Kanavy said. "Any remnants here would be aligned with the New York families."

Mr. Kanavy said the decline of the local coal and garment industries, which offered prime opportunities for labor racketeering and other criminal activities in Mr. Bufalino's heyday, made Northeast Pennsylvania less attractive for mob activity.

"I don't think there was that much money to be made here," Mr. Kanavy said.

Mr. Brandt said the collapse of the Bufalino family was part of a wider decline brought about by new crime-fighting tools like the federal RICO statute, which made it easier to prosecute organized crime figures. The creation of the Witness Protection Program also made it easier for prosecutors to "flip" mobsters to turn on their colleagues, he said. In the waning days of Mr. Bufalino's influence, mob families "closed the books" and stopped recruiting new members who might not follow the old traditions.

In Mr. Bufalino's era, silence, or "omerta," was the order of the day, in and out of the courtroom. Mr. Brandt said his research revealed that investigators had bugged hotel rooms used by Mr. Bufalino during his weekly trips to New York, with little result.

"Russell was so good at keeping his mouth shut. He was really old school. It was a waste of time bugging his rooms. There was no careless talk, no careless chatter."

Even in the file the FBI kept on him for 30 years, Mr. Bufalino remains a shadowy, sinister and mostly silent character.

He was convicted, but never truly captured.

https://www.thetimes-tribune.com/news/t ... -1.1176403

[American Dream]

There is also this:

He grew up listening to his father’s anti-police rants. A lawsuit claims it drove him to murder.


Eric Frein is taken to prison after a hearing in Milford, Pa., in 2014. (Michael J. Mullen/AP/Scranton Times-Tribune)

By Kyle Swenson
September 27, 2017

Before drawing first blood in his guerrilla war, Eric Frein tapped his thoughts out in a letter.

It wasn’t exactly a suicide note, but he did acknowledge the long odds ahead. It wasn’t a last will and testament either, although Frein wrote that he wished to be buried in a simple wooden casket. It also wasn’t a revolutionary screed soaked with anger or philosophical self-justification.

Instead, Frein — a jobless history geek with seven years of college credits but no degree — created a computer document on Dec. 29, 2013, at his northeastern Pennsylvania home.

He addressed the file to “Mom and Dad.”

“Our nation is far from what it was and what it should be,” the 31-year-old wrote. “I have seen so many depressing changes made in my time that I cannot imagine what it must be like for you. There is so much wrong and on so many levels only passing through the crucible of another revolution can get us back the liberties we once had. I do not pretend to know what that revolution will look like or even if it would be successful.”

Frein acted out those revolutionary aspirations on Sept. 12, 2014.

He shaved his brown hair down to a mohawk and drove his parent’s Jeep to the Blooming Grove Station, a Pennsylvania State Police barracks surrounded by wooded land. There, Frein — a quiet guy whose main interest was staging military reenactments with friends — crouched in the brush.

At 11 p.m., when Cpl. Bryon Dickson II crossed his rifle scope, Frein opened fire with a .308 semiautomatic. Bullets pinned the 38-year-old married father of two to the ground. Another officer — Alex Douglass — was shot trying to pull his fellow officer to safety.

[‘Literally hunting humans’: Eric Frein, sniper who killed Pa. trooper, sentenced to death]

As Dickson died and Douglass suffered, Frein ran, eventually surrendering after a massive 48-day manhunt. At his trial, prosecutors portrayed the defendant as a domestic terrorist driven to violence by anti-government beliefs. Last April, a jury sentenced Frein to death.


But the question of blame in the 2014 attack remains unsettled, according to a new lawsuit.

Tiffany Dickson, the dead officer’s widow, is now suing Frein’s father and mother, Eugene and Deborah Frein of Canadensis, Pa. The wrongful death complaint, filed in Lackawanna County Common Pleas Court last week, alleges the parents not only missed warnings signs about their son’s troubles but fueled the very anti-government beliefs driving Frein to violence.

The unique complaint turns the great anxiety of parenthood into a question of legality: Are a mother and father answerable for the crimes of the son?

“Cpl. Dickson’s death and the resulting loss to the Dickson family and the community is tragic,” the family’s attorney, Marion Munley, said in a statement to The Washington Post. “We will pursue justice for the Dickson family to the fullest extent of the law.”


Eugene and Deborah Frein did not return a phone message Tuesday evening. Their attorney also did not reply to a request for comment.

Frein’s relationship with his mother and father shadowed his criminal trial. Eugene Frein, in particular, emerged as the household’s dominating ego.

A career Army and National Guard officer, the older Frein retired after 28-years of military service with the rank of major. Eugene regaled friends and family with constant war stories about serving as a tank commander in Vietnam, according to the Morning Call. He also claimed he had fought as a sniper, trucking out regularly one particular anecdote about covering himself with excrement to hide from the Viet Cong.

But all those stories were fabrications, Eugene admitted at his son’s trial. He had never seen combat.

“It was a household full of false stories of a hero who was not a hero,” Frein’s attorney Michael Weinstein argued in court. “A child was raised amid that hero worship, and it was all a lie.”


The elder Frein also regularly sounded off about the current state of the government. One of the defendant’s friends — Warren Ahner — testified Frein’s father “ridiculed his son while complaining that Americans have become ‘sheep’ in a country where the Constitution is no longer respected,” the Morning Call reported.

When Eugene Frein testified in court, he spoke openly about his feelings for police. “The more they become militarized, the more they become like an army, and this country already has an Army,” the father said, according to PennLive.

Eugene, however, told the court he never encouraged his son to acts of violence.

“If [Eric] had a plan to shoot and kill anybody, I would have stopped him,” the father told jurors.

According to Dickson’s recent lawsuit, that strange relationship between father and son is the skeleton key to understanding the younger Frein’s revolutionary furor.


“Eugene M. Frein, exercised significant influence over his son, Eric … with respect to Eugene M. Frein’s views on government, the police, and the use of firearms,” the lawsuit says. “Eugene regaled Eric with exaggerated stories about Eugene’s career in the military. Eric attempted to emulate his father but could not measure up.” The father also “related to Eric” his “theories about how he believed that the police wielded too much power.”

This amounted to, the complaint argues, a situation where the father “psychologically manipulated” the son “into developing a strong dislike for the police and acting upon that dislike by engaging in the aforementioned actions.”

The lawsuit also notes Frein was actively researching police stations to target, as well as stockpiling “numerous firearms, ammunition, and other supplies in his room that he subsequently utilized in his attack.” His parents, however, did not flag the behavior as troubling.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/mor ... ent-rants/

[American Dream]

Why Are Supporters Of A White Supremacist Terror Group Allowed To Organize On Gab?


Armed members of Atomwaffen Division.

A member named Norman Spear expressed his admiration for terrorist Ted Kaczynski — better known as the “Unabomber.” “Unabomber pledged to stop his deadly attacks if the New York Times & Washington Post published one of his manuscripts — They did,” Spear boasted. “Now imagine if there were 10 ‘unabombers’ or 100 or 1000 who all shared one clear & practical political demand. How long until the system capitulated?”

Another, James Egbert, simply wrote “Kaczynski was right.”

Frederick Namington wrote that there is “no difference between the normalnigger and the kike. They empower and feed off of one another. Nobility means slaughtering them indiscriminately and celebrating those who in the name of truth have given up their lives.” Among those celebrated on “Read SIEGE” are Dylann Roof, Anders Breivik, and cult leader Charles Manson, whom SIEGE author James Mason has an obsession with.

It is quite common to see group members boasting of their collections of Mason’s books or Charles Manson murderabilia. Photos of Manson’s records, signed copies of SIEGE, weapons, and Nazi flags are ubiquitous:



Members also brainstorm strategies for creating better propaganda and for communicating with one another without fear of being watched. In one post, Mengele Manson asked other members about “good ideas for propaganda,” but added, “I think most of our efforts should be directed to causing problems between the government and non-whites.”

In another post, he wrote that he wanted to “start networking with other like-minded people soon,” and advised people to use “Wickr to communicate on cheap phones that haven’t been activated or Ricochet on computers.” Iron Eagle plugged a “New encrypted social media site for like minds of NS, Fascism, etc.” called “Fashbook.”

Some strategies involve openly discussing the best hypothetical targets. Jack Rurik wrote that the “key element” is the point when “you no longer see your doctor, mailman, county clerk, etc. as simple workers on ‘your side.'” He claimed that such people are “the eyes and ears of the illegitimate authorities” and that one must “deal with them as such.” Frederick Namington agreed, and called them “enemies.”

One member named Trajan denounced lone-wolf terrorism as counterproductive, citing Dylann Roof as an example. “[S]ure you shot a few niggers and maybe it made you feel good for a few hours, but then you end up in a prison cell for life,” he wrote. Namington wrote back that James Mason “took a shit all over you and your cowardly muh pr types,” and posted an archived link to a NOOSE article which called Roof’s target “spot on.”

And, much like the Atomwaffen chatlogs, a member named KaliUnleashed all but advocated sabotaging the Hoover Dam’s cyber security. “Wow, it sure is scary how vulnerable the system is thanks to H1B-Pajeets and niggers not knowing shit about security,” he wrote. “I sure hope no-one takes it upon themselves to exploit the numerous vulnerabilities to create mayhem all over the nation.”

More: https://angrywhitemen.org/2018/10/08/wh ... ze-on-gab/

[seemslikeadream]

From Memes to Infowars: How 75 Fascist Activists Were “Red-Pilled”

October 11, 2018 By Robert Evans
The vast majority of domestic terror attacks in the U.S. are carried out by white supremacist organizations. Atomwaffen, a neo-Nazi death squad with five killings to their name, is probably the deadliest fascist group to have arisen since 2016. One member of Atomwaffen, Vasillios Pistolis, was an active duty U.S. marine when he marched at the first Unite the Right rally. Pistolis also posted regularly on a series of fascist and white supremacist Discord servers, prior to and after joining Atomwaffen.

The media collective Unicorn Riot has archived hundreds of thousands of posts from these Discord servers. Their database includes dozens of conversations where fascists discuss how they were converted to their extremist beliefs. In an effort to understand that process, Bellingcat collected “red-pilling” stories from seventy-five fascist activists. The analysis is below, details on the activists we studied can be found here.

What is red-pilling?

An online community develops its own lingo over time. Among fascist activists “red-pilling” means converting someone to fascist, racist and anti-Semitic beliefs. The term originates with “The Matrix,” a popular 1999 film. The protagonist is offered the choice between a red pill, which will open his eyes to the reality of a machine-dominated world, and a blue pill, which will return him to ignorance and safety. The definition of “red pill,” as used by fascists, is rather elastic. Films and songs are described as “red pilled” if they reinforce a far-right worldview. At least one poster referred to amphetamines as red-pilled.

There appears to be no agreed-upon standard for when a human being is red-pilled. Most fascist activists agree that acknowledgement of the Jewish Question, or JQ, is critical. This means believing that Jewish people are at the center of a vast global conspiracy. The end goal of this conspiracy is usually described as “white genocide”, but there are numerous variations.


https://discordleaks.unicornriot.ninja/ ... pilled#msg

Red pilling is described as a gradual process. Individual people can be red-pilled on certain issues and not others. Stefan Molyneux, a popular author and far-right YouTube personality, is seen as being red-pilled on race and “the future of the west” even though he is not considered as a fascist. Prominent YouTuber PewPewDie is also often considered red-pilled. It is accepted that media personalities need to hide their outright fascist beliefs, or “power level”, in order to have a chance at red-pilling the general population (usually called “normies”).


https://discordleaks.unicornriot.ninja/ ... atent+#msg

How to red-pill others is a constant topic of conversation. In this thread one user talks about how he “skirted the jew question” in order to red-pill a co-worker. Instead, he claims to have exploited his co-worker’s hatred of “SJW”s, a.k.a. social justice warriors. Other users advise starting the red-pilling process with the JQ. Disagreements mainly center around which techniques are most effective. The overall goal is quite clear.


https://discordleaks.unicornriot.ninja/ ... pilled#msg

The “normie” to fascist pipeline

President Donald Trump is seen as having red-pilled many Americans. A number of fascist activists credit his candidacy as the start of their awakening. This conversation between users Buddy Hobbs and ecce_lux is a useful breakdown of how that looks.



https://discordleaks.unicornriot.ninja/ ... pilled#msg

“The great meme war” is a reference to time this user spent on 4chan and possibly 8chan, creating far-right memes in order to red-pill other people during the election. The whole exchange paints a picture of a man who was initially ensnared by candidate Trump’s rhetoric and then driven towards far-right media and, eventually, extremist communities on 4chan. There his commitment to fascist ideology crystalized.

The vast majority of fascist activists are male. Some of these men even doubt that women can be red-pilled. The few users who identify themselves as female tend to be quite extreme in their beliefs. This is consistent with research into the demographics of the far-right done by the Institute for Family Studies. Fascist and white nationalist organizations are “overwhelmingly male,” yet women are more likely to identify with such beliefs.

The American fascist movement has been male-dominated since at least the aftermath of the Vietnam war. The role of veterans in founding many early far-right organizations may be one explanation as to why. It is also likely that the demographics of certain online communities plays a role. 70% of 4chan users are male, and 4chan is the second most frequently credited website in red-pilling stories.

Thirty-nine of the 75 fascist activists we studied credit the Internet with their red-pilling. YouTube seems to be the single most frequently discussed website. The specific videos credited, however, span a multitude of creators, from British YouTuber Sargon of Akkad (Carl Benjamin) to Infowars founder Alex Jones.

Many fascist activists cite a multitude of red-pills which were all integral to them arriving at their current beliefs. User barD’s 18 March, 2017 post is a great example of this. Here’s how he traces his journey:

“Get redpilled on Feminism after reading some crazy SJW posts about MLP [My Little Pony] being racist and sexist and anti-lesbian, get redpilled on islam after getting intruiged [sic] by some islamisists [sic] taking in a youtube comments section. Get redpilled on GG (Gamergate) from sargon.”

From there his evolution continues:


https://discordleaks.unicornriot.ninja/ ... pilled#msg

We see a steady spiral, from arguments in comment sections to far-right YouTube personalities to “the_donald” subreddit to 4chan’s /pol/ board and eventually to fascist Discord servers. This user singles out Sargon of Akkad (British Youtuber Carl Benjamin) for special praise and considers him a major influence. One of Sargon’s most popular video series’ is, “Why Do Men Hate #Feminism?” (Episode #1 is titled “Feminists Hate Women.”)

In later posts barD claims the “gradual red-pilling” of Sargon’s videos stopped him from being a feminist. He also praises Sargon as an “easier step” away from liberal views than outright Nazism. Once he’d taken that step and gotten used to Sargon’s rhetoric, it was easier for him to get used to the more extreme atmosphere of /pol/.

It’s not uncommon for white supremacist, fascist and anti-Semitic beliefs to arise initially as the result of humor. Four of the seventy-five activists we studied mentioned ironic memes as major red-pills. In this thread, a user recalls how his first red-pill came during an argument over an anti-Semitic tweet posted to Facebook.


Another user asks FucknOathMate if he was “only doing it ironically at first,” and he replies: “Well sort of.” He says he knew Jewish people were “weird” and “ran everything,” but he wasn’t yet a Holocaust denier or a fascist. Again, we see someone sliding gradually into extremist beliefs. Ironic memes gave this individual a chance to get used to the temperature before diving in.

Thirty-six fascist activists traced the start of their red-pilling process to an event that occurred offline. Five of these people credited their families with red-pilling them. For the other thirty-one, methods ran a rather wide gamut.

Four fascists say they were red-pilled while tripping on LSD. User Europa is a typical example of this trend. He claims his interest in Nazism started in childhood, with his dad watching Hitler documentaries “every day.” Europa carried this interest into adulthood, watching Hitler documentaries and speeches while taking LSD. This convinced him to start “researching” Nazism which, eventually, inspired him to become an activist.

Other activists cite living in a diverse area, reading a copy of Mein Kampf, mass-shooter Anders Brevik’s manifesto and numerous other factors as their first red-pills. Since our study of these activists is based on messages they exchanged with each other online, we can conclude that even when indoctrination begins offline new converts inevitably go online to deepen their beliefs.

Internet communities and social media services have been integral to the recent growth of the fascist right. The rest of this article will focus on the major online sources of fascist red-pilling.

4chan

Ten of our seventy-five fascists credited 4chan with red-pilling them. Many other activists have referenced it as a place that was critical in their radicalization. The /pol/ board is generally seen as a breeding ground for young fascists. Anticom founder Haupsturmfuhrer Pepe credits 4chan as the site that has “redpilled the most” people. For a number of activists, 4chan is the last “mainstream” website they frequent before getting involved with explicitly fascist media.


In this post, Auralevels claims that 4chan led him to The Right Stuff (referred to as “TRS”) and The Daily Stormer (“stormer”), two neo-Nazi news and culture sites (a recent Daily Stormer article was titled, “Disney’s Jew CEO Admits They Kiked the Goyim with Too Many Star Wars Movies,” to give an example of the kind of materials they publish).

4chan and its descendant 8chan make up a large chunk of what is commonly known as the alt-right. These places are considered fairly moderate by fascist activists in the Discord conversations presented. The alt-right is often referred to as the “alt-light.” The intent seems to be halfway between a term of endearment and an insult. Fascist activists view the alt-right as silly, but also as a crucial recruiting ground.


https://discordleaks.unicornriot.ninja/ ... pilled#msg

This view is common but not universal. Some activists accuse the so-called alt-light of “paralyzing the supply chain”. They accuse them of allowing “normies” to feel radical for reading sites like Breitbart, while meanwhile “[they] don’t realize that those are quite literally (((controlled op)))…” The use of parentheses here is meant to convey the belief that such websites are secretly run by Jewish elites in order to split the right.

Despite these doubts, it’s clear that 4chan’s /pol/ and other alt-right communities provided a great deal of the fascist right’s manpower. Three of the fascists we studied praised the so-called “the Kekosphere.” “kekism” and “kek” with their red-pilling.

I should note that one of the more frustrating elements about covering the fascist right is that much of what they say sounds ridiculous and makes them appear less than serious. This is why it is important to remember that these groups have a body count and represent a real threat. Their absurdity does not negate their danger.

Kek is a term that first appeared in the MMORPG World of Warcraft. The two sides in that game, Horde and Alliance, were not supposed to communicate with one another. So when a member of one side chatted at another, their words were run through a filter to make it sound like a foreign language. When Horde players would type “lol,” it was translated as “kek”. Over time “kek” became another way of expressing laughter online. On 4chan’s /pol/ board kek took on a grander meaning and came to embody the essence of the “meme magic” that first made the alt-right so prominent. The cultural rock tumbler of /pol/ eventually transmuted kek into Kekistan, a fictional ethno-state for “shitposters.”

Kekistan first became prominent with the enthusiastic endorsement of YouTuber Sargon of Akkad. And for many people, including Sargon, Kekistan is just a dumb Internet joke. In 2017 Sargon of Akkad announced that he would try to register “Kekistani” as an official ethnic group for the 2020 U.K. census. This all unraveled into a parody of the refugee crisis.




And over time Kekistan came to be used as something of a Trojan horse by the fascist right. One good example is the flag of Kekistan.


This design of the flag, benign at first glance, is just a color-inverted variant of the German Kriegsflagge (battle flag) from the Nazi era.


Kekistan is a common topic of discussion on fascist Discord servers. Opinions vary from calling it a “forced meme” to expressing serious devotion to the idea. Kekistan flags and other regalia are often seen at Patriot Prayer rallies and other far-right protests. Some fascists lament that many people who fly the flag don’t understand the Nazi origins of its design. But many know exactly what they are signaling when they put one on a flagpole, or their helmet:


You can see the whole USAF video here. It’s frustratingly light on details. The contractor wearing this flag may just be a channer who finds Kekistan funny. He may be a committed fascist signaling to his comrades. Or he may be somewhere in between, finding himself pulled further and further towards extremism as time goes on. When this footage went viral, the contractor was fired by his employer, MAG Aerospace.

While 4chan’s /pol/ board is the most common source of Internet-based red-pills, a close second appears to be the Infowars media network of famed American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

The influence of Infowars

Six of our fascist activists credit Alex Jones with red-pilling them. Jones has been a prominent radio and Internet conspiracy theorist since the mid-1990s and is the founder of the media organization Infowars. Jones first rose to prominence when he served as executive producer on Loose Change, a series of films that began in 2005 and which helped ignite the “9/11 Truther” movement.

Two more activists on our list credit Infowars editor Paul Joseph Watson with their red-pilling. Conspiracy theories appear to be one of the more well-trodden roads into fascist nationalism. This may have something to do with the fact that lack of interpersonal trust and employment insecurity are heavily correlated with belief in conspiracy theories. In 1995 Umberto Eco wrote that at the center of fascist psychology was, “…the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one.” He believed that this was because fascist believers needed to feel “besieged”.

Whatever the “why,” numerous Discord posts reveal the “how.” User Harleen Kekzel claims to have identified as a “polyamorous genderqueer masculine leaning pansexual” at age 16. She claims her red-pilling process started with Alex Jones.


She explains later that she was “was conspiracy pilled,” but also says she and her husband weren’t red-pilled until the Pulse nightclub massacre. A number of other fascist activists say their journey to the far right started with conspiracy theories. Kombat-Unit, one of the most prominent posters in these Discord conversations, at one point notes his approval of this source of new converts; “if you can get some guys through UFO stuff I’m not complaining.” In response, another user says:


https://discordleaks.unicornriot.ninja/ ... pilled#msg

Alex Jones and Infowars are also viewed with skepticism by many fascist activists. Some disregard them as “controlled opposition.” The general opinion seems to be that Jones is useful, but far too milquetoast for people who cheerfully support National Socialism.


https://discordleaks.unicornriot.ninja/ ... r+side#msg

Most episodes of Alex Jones’s popular streaming and radio shows center on him exposing aspects of a grand “globalist” conspiracy to take over the world. Everything from mass shootings to terrorist attacks is accused of being staged at the behest of these globalists. A number of fascist activists use the term “globalist” as a synonym for “Jewish.” It is not hard to find people who have interpreted Jones’ work this way:


https://discordleaks.unicornriot.ninja/ ... pilled#msg

Infowars reached the height of its influence as a result of sites like Facebook and YouTube. By the time they were kicked off of YouTube, Infowars had more than 2.4 million followers and 1.6 billion page views across 36,000 videos. It is likely that banning Infowars will reduce the flow of recruits to far right groups. But even without Infowars, YouTube still provides a pathway for those interested in the American fascist movement.

The importance of YouTube

15 out of 75 fascist activists we studied credited YouTube videos with their red-pilling. In this thread, a group of white supremacists debate with a “civic nationalist” who says he won’t judge an entire race by the actions of a few. It is suggested that he watch a video by American Renaissance, a white supremacist publication. The video, “What the Founders Really Thought About Race,” is essentially a history lesson about why the U.S. founding fathers thought race-mixing was bad. It endorses genocide, via the bearded face of James Garfield:



Fascists who become red-pilled through YouTube often start with comparatively less extreme right-wing personalities, like Ben Shapiro or Milo Yiannopolous.


https://discordleaks.unicornriot.ninja/ ... hapiro#msg

One user explained that he was a “moderate republican” before “Steven Crowder, Paul Joseph Watson, Milo Yiannopolos, Black Pidgeon Speaks,” and other far-right YouTubers slowly red-pilled him. Over time he “moved further and further right until [he] could no longer stand them. That’s why [he likes] those groups even still, because if we just had the Fascists, we’d never convert anyone.”

Other YouTubers like JonTron also come up in red-pilling discussions. At least three fascists credit Sargon of Akkad with starting their journey. An equal number credit Milo Yiannopoulos. Steven Crowder is referenced as a great red-piller. The users who talk about these creators appear to have watched a great number of their videos. Creators are referenced more often than specific videos.

There is, however, one single video that is mentioned repeatedly. Four separate activists all identified 2013’S The Greatest Story Never Told as their red-pill.


Producer Dennis Wise intended The Greatest Story Never Told to present a “more balanced and truthful” depiction of World War II. The documentary is almost six hours long and clunkily edited. It completely leaves out the Holocaust. It is a surprising candidate for the most influential single piece of modern fascist propaganda, but it may in fact be that. Or it may just be the most memorable piece of propaganda consumed by several young men on their long and twisted roads to radicalization.

Human beings are not simple creatures, and so no person’s journey to such an extremist belief system can be boiled down to just “YouTube did it” or “4chan did it.” Millions of people have been exposed to ironic racism and /pol/ without going on to don a swastika armband. Radicalization is a process, and the goal of this study is to reveal several of the factors that can act to prime and nudge a young mind from laughing at Holocaust jokes to truly believing that Hitler did nothing wrong.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/america ... ed-pilled/

[American Dream]

Amtrak Hijacker Participated In Neo-Nazi Chats with Charlottesville Organizers

By Chris Schiano, Unicorn Riot October 8, 2018

Lincoln, NE – 26-year-old neo-Nazi Taylor Wilson was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison last week for his attempted armed attack on an Amtrak train last year. Now, newly discovered materials, including leaked Discord chats from the now-defunct Traditionalist Worker Party, show that Wilson had been planning to make himself a “martyr” for the white nationalist movement, and others were aware of his intent to do so.

Wilson boarded an Amtrak train on October 19, 2017 while tripping on LSD (according to his attorney) and entered the engine compartment, pulled the emergency brake, and disabled lights in the passenger area, leading many to panic and attempt to climb out of the train’s windows. After he was tackled by Amtrak conductors and detained, Wilson stated that he was “trying to save the train from black people.” On October 5, 2018, a judge sentenced Wilson on charges of “Violence Against a Transportation System” and “Possession of an Unregistered Short Barrel Rifle.” In addition to the 14-year sentence with no parole, he was ordered to pay $9,350 in restitution to Amtrak.


Taylor Wilson’s mugshot

Previous media coverage of Wilson’s criminal case had mentioned his membership in the National Socialist Movement (NSM), one of the older and more well-established white supremacist groups in the United States. However, NSM isn’t the only such organization Wilson had connections with. Leaked Discord messages from another neo-Nazi group, the now-defunct Traditionalist Worker Party, published by Unicorn Riot earlier this year, are now known to include several revealing messages by Taylor Wilson, who used the username ‘keksmix.’

More: https://unicornriot.ninja/2018/amtrak-h ... rganizers/

[American Dream]

Documenting Hate’ portrays dynamics of American neo-Nazis

By Eric Black | 11/19/2018

According to an FBI affidavit, while he was shooting mostly elderly worshippers at Pittsburgh’s New Light Congregation on Oct. 27, Robert Bowers, 46, armed with an assault rifle and three handguns told police “I just want to kill Jews. … They’re committing genocide to my people.”

He killed 11, mostly elderly worshippers, and is now in custody.

A.C. Thompson of ProPublica, a journalist doing heroic work, was, in a sense, on the case long before it occurred. The writer, producer and on-camera narrator of a new “Frontline” documentary has been relentlessly tracking down “white nationalists” for the nonprofit news organization ProPublica, under the rubric “Documenting Hate.”

The PBS documentary series “Frontline” adapted the title for its latest documentary, “Documenting Hate: The new American Nazis.” It airs Tuesday at 9 p.m. on KTCA Channel 2 and other PBS stations. I highly recommend it.

Because of his long effort to report on hate groups, Thompson is able to introduce us to the “AtomWaffen Division,” a Florida-based alt-right neo-Nazi organization. “AtomWaffen” refers to atomic weapons, which the AtomWaffen Division hopes to acquire.

Long before the Pittsburgh massacre, Thompson and ProPublica had been reporting on the AtomWaffen movement, which encourages “lone wolf” attacks, like the Pittsburgh massacre, against Jews, racial minorities and gays.

One former AtomWaffen member, whom Thompson has interviewed, tells him that, after the 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia, riot (in which Neo-Nazi chanted “Jews will not replace us”), the AtomWaffen movement concluded that such public displays are counterproductive, and they have encouraged their members to “go underground” and engage in “lone wolf” acts of violence.

As far as Thompson can determine, AtomWaffen consists of only about 60 or so members and initiates who are on the path to full membership. ProPublica has found some former members who are willing to anonymously discuss how the group works.

Thompson traces AtomWaffen to its creation, in Tampa, Florida, in 2015, by a guy named Adam Russell, a national guardsman in in his early 20s.

View trailer: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film ... can-nazis/

[American Dream]

Neo-Nazis Are Organizing Secretive Paramilitary Training Across America

The creation of a new social networking platform called “The Base” appears to be an effort to shift Naziism from a divided digital space to physical, violent insurgency.



A neo-Nazi who goes by the alias Norman Spear has launched a project to unify online fascists and link that vast coalition of individuals into a network training new soldiers for a so-called forthcoming “race war.”

Spear, who claims to be an Iraq and Afghan war veteran, is a self-proclaimed white nationalist with a significant online following. His latest act involves bringing neo-Nazis together, regardless of affiliation and ideology, into a militant fascist umbrella organization. His tool for doing this? A social network he calls “The Base,” which is already organizing across the US and abroad, specifically geared toward partaking in terrorism.

Within the confines of a secure chat room viewed by VICE, Spear and his burgeoning global web of terror cells are networking, creating propaganda, organizing in-person meet-ups, and discussing potential violence or “direct action” against minority groups, especially Jewish and black Americans. An extensive online library contains a trove of manuals with instructions on lone wolf terror-tactics, gunsmithing, data mining, interrogation tactics, counter-surveillance techniques, bomb making, chemical weapons creation, and guerilla warfare.

The network's vetting process serves to funnel committed extremists from around the internet into a group explicitly focused on providing users with terroristic skills, in order to produce real-world violence. Members of The Base have made it clear they’re recruiting applicants with military and explosives backgrounds. And in addition to homemade bombs, members have also begun discussing trying to find unexploded World War II ordnance to make improvised explosive devices.

“I'm all about violence, but I want to gather with people and plan something out,” wrote one user going by the name Rimbaud to the almost 50 other members of the secret network, lamenting that the recent terror attack on a synagogue in Pittsburgh could’ve been more effective. “Maybe some form of bombing, or something a bit more destructive.”

Continues: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3me ... ss-america