Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Metro columnist Dan Casey: Nazi's prison time won't thin racists' ranks
Dan Casey is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.
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Dan Casey
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One day soon, U.S. District Court Judge James Turk will sentence Roanoke neo-Nazi William A. White to prison for threatening a handful of people across North America.
If you thought that might curtail this valley's ignoble reputation as place some white supremacists put down their roots, think again.
Those pea-brained bigots are just like new crack dealers who pop up on street corners after each narcotics-squad roundup. Other racist nuts already are stepping forward to assume White's cretinous mantle.
I know this thanks to Clifton "Chip" Woodrum, the esteemed Roanoke lawyer and former state delegate.
Last week, he passed along some white-power fliers a former constituent found Jan. 3 in Garst Mill Park.
They were strewn through the Southwest Roanoke County park, wrapped in one-gallon clear zip-lock plastic bags that were weighed down by small rocks.
Each bag contained two black-and-white pitches for the Aryan Nations printed on cheap copy-machine paper.
Both fliers list an address in Idaho and a Web site, aryannations88.com. The latter, which is dressed up with lots of swastikas and white-power gobbledygook, noted that the Virginia chapter is headquartered in Roanoke. Its address is a box at the Cave Spring Post Office off Electric Road.
I e-mailed the "Virginia director" to ask a few questions and soon found myself on the phone with Paul Mullet. He's from Athol, Idaho, a town of about 700 in that state's panhandle. He calls himself the Aryan Nations' national director.
Mullet told me the Virginia director's identity is none of my business.
"Is he ashamed?" I asked.
"We do not want you guys putting their names in the paper and going to their homes and asking questions," or trying to get them fired from their jobs, he told me.
It also is none of my business how many members Mullet has nationwide.
However, they are growing, he claimed, and the fliers distributed locally have helped increase their membership.
Mullet's goal is an all-white, no-Jews enclave in the Pacific Northwest.
He ominously warned me that by 2020, there will be no white women of child-bearing age left in the United States.
The conversation soon got even weirder, which is something that usually happens when you're talking to these creeps.
Eventually he accused me of being a Jewish tool, or something like that.
"But I'm Irish Catholic," I protested.
"But your newspaper is owned by Jews!" Mullet shot back. Jews are behind all media, he harrumphed.
We did not get much further. Shortly after our conversation, Mullet deleted the Virginia director's snail-mail address from the Web site.
This is not the first time Aryan Nations has conducted leafleting campaigns in our humble valley.
Over the past year or so, similar fliers have been found in the Penn Forest area, near Cave Spring High School, and in the northeast county neighborhood known as The Orchards, Roanoke County police Lt. Chuck Mason said.
Mark Potok, the intelligence director for the Montgomery, Ala.-based Southern Poverty Law Center, said Aryan Nations used to be a large and influential white-power group concentrated in the Pacific Northwest.
The SPLC more or less put them out of business with a multimillion-dollar lawsuit and verdict in 2000. The group's founder, Richard Butler, died in 2003.
"What we've got now is a whole bunch of tiny splinter groups working to bring back Aryan Nations," he said.
He estimates that Mullet has anywhere from 35 to 50 followers nationwide.
And a few of them, it seems, are here in the Roanoke Valley, anonymously spewing their hatred and hiding behind a post office box.
Just as we are about to get rid of Bill White.
Sigh.
Follow the daily proceedings of White's most recent federal trial, browse previous coverage and explore a timeline of White's life by visiting our trial blog at blogs.roanoke.com/rtblogs/williamwhite
