ERIC BRADY The Roanoke Times

Defense attorneys David Damico (left) and Ray Ferris want the jury to consider whether their client's comments were true threats.

U.S. v. William A. White

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Angry with the way Citibank was handling his account, William A. White dug up a bank employee's home address, her telephone number and the name of her husband.

He then sent the information to Jennifer Petsche in an e-mail, threatening to share it with other dissatisfied customers.

"Consider this," White wrote. "As I'm sure, being in the collection business and having the attitude about it that you do, that you often make people upset. Lord knows that drawing too much publicity and making people upset is what did in Joan Lefkow."

At the end of the e-mail was a link explaining that Lefkow is a federal judge whose husband and mother were killed in their Chicago home in 2005. At the time, the slayings were believed to have been linked to white supremacists -- a movement that White was involved in.

"I was very scared," Petsche told a federal jury in Roanoke on Thursday. "Not only for myself, but for my family."

Petsche, who works for Citibank in Kansas City, Mo., is one of about a half-dozen people who, according to prosecutors, were harassed, threatened and intimidated by White.

The leader of a Roanoke-based white supremacy group, White is accused of using his computer and telephone to threaten people whose actions offended his racist beliefs.

But because White sought personal gain from Petsche -- he wanted to improve his credit score by getting her to clear up his disputed credit card debt -- prosecutors have charged him with threatening her with the intent to extort.

Petsche was the first victim to testify in a trial that could last 10 days. Other targets of White include a newspaper columnist, a human rights lawyer, a former small-town mayor, a university administrator and a group of apartment complex tenants.

"What do these people have in common?" Justice Department attorney Cindy Chung asked the jury Thursday in her opening statements. "Absolutely nothing. They were not related to each other ... except for the defendant, Bill White. Bill White sought out these complete strangers."

Defense attorney Ray Ferris conceded that "Bill White did some ugly things. Bill White did some obnoxious things. Bill White did some things that would really upset me. But that's not the test."

The test, Ferris said, is whether White's comments were true threats. If not, they were covered by the First Amendment.

Although none of White's targets was physically harmed, prosecutors are arguing that the fear they experienced only increased once they realized he was the head of a neo-Nazi organization.

"I have spent the last about three years now in fear of repercussions from Mr. White or his followers," Petsche told the jury, explaining how she has obtained an unpublished number and now screens her calls after getting one from White at her home.

Even though Petsche was not involved in a financial dispute that had already been settled by the time White found her, he threatened to "make you better known to your customers than the security measures you enact at your company indicate you would like."

One of Petsche's co-workers, who had followed the Lefkow case in the news, testified that White's e-mail upset her so much that she broke out in hives.

Because white supremacist Matthew Hale was convicted of soliciting Lefkow's murder the year before her family members were killed, police believed at first that the crime was the work of his followers. Later, they determined the killer was a plaintiff in a medical malpractice lawsuit that was dismissed by the judge.

Not long after the killings, White wrote on his now-defunct Web site: "I don't feel bad that Judge Lefkow's family was murdered. In fact, when I heard the story I laughed. 'Good for them!' was my first thought."

As the trial continues, federal prosecutors will attempt to bring up such postings from White, arguing that they show a pattern that puts the alleged threats into a larger context.