Meet the FBI Operative Who Threatened My Life, and the Gov.-Elect Who May Have Helped Him

On December 7, neo-Nazi hate radio impresario Hal Turner walked out of a Brooklyn courtroom a free man. Charged by federal prosecutors with incitement for urging his listeners to kill three judges who issued rulings supporting gun control, Turner escaped conviction when the jury deadlocked, forcing the judge to declare a mistrial. However, Turner will return to trial soon in Brooklyn and in Connecticut, where he faces state charges for telling his followers to "take up arms" against state lawmakers who voted to give Catholic lay members more control over church finances.

The trials of Turner might not have invited any media interest had he been another lone wolf howling into the night about the swarthy evildoers supposedly destroying America. After all, white supremacists across the country are persistently prosecuted for activities ranging from criminal littering to murder. But Turner has been an insider both in the New Jersey GOP and in a controversial federal anti-terror program designed to "flush out" violent far-right plots, making him a treasure trove of information on the many prominent Republicans he has associated with over the years. These characters include Turner's former friend Sean Hannity, who allegedly counseled him on overcoming his cocaine habit and homosexual urges, and New Jersey Governor-elect Chris Christie, whose alleged involvement with Turner may result in the first scandal of his term.

A former moving company manager and real estate agent from North Bergen, NJ, Turner broke into radio when he purchased a time slot on an eclectic short wave station in 2003. He quickly cultivated a small but loyal following of white supremacists, making his show a key hub for an amorphous and violent movement guided by the philosophy of "leaderless resistance." His formula was simple: discarding the racial code language familiar to mainstream conservative radio jocks in favor of hysterical diatribes against "bull dyke lesbians," "hook-nosed Jews," "savage Negroes," and "filthy mongrels." Turner's official website described him as "so far to the right he makes Rush Limbaugh look like a liberal and Sean Hannity seem like a girlie-man!"

Turner consolidated his extreme profile by consistently urging the assassination of any liberal who offended him, from President Barack Obama to an array of lowly circuit court judges to this writer. Indeed, Turner declared me fair game after my 2005 report for the Nation Magazine about his friendship with Fox News personality Sean Hannity resurfaced during the 2008 presidential primary campaign.

"I am perfectly willing to use force and violence against my enemies while Sean Hannity and others are not," Turner proclaimed in an internet posting in March 2008. "Those using me as a prop to attack Sean Hannity would do well to remember this fact. Rest assured I will remember them when the opportunity presents itself; especially as it pertains to that douche bag sodomite Max Blumenthal for the falsehoods and total trash he wrote about me in 'The Nation' magazine."

I might have ignored Turner's warning as I do the hate-laden diatribes and death threats I routinely receive in my public email in-box from deranged far-right fanatics. However, Turner targeted me at approximately the same time that rumors were reverberating across the internet about his employment as an informant by the Federal Bureau of Investigations. This led me to wonder if his call for "force and violence" against me was approved or even encouraged by the FBI, and raised disturbing questions about the degree to which the FBI had guided his extreme behavior.

On January 1, 2008, two unidentified hackers confronted Turner about several messages they had filched from his blog server that revealed collaboration between him and FBI agents on an effort to "flush out a possible crazy." Neither Turner nor the FBI would deny the charges, lending credence to the hackers' accusations and raising disturbing questions about FBI tactics -- the Bureau appeared to be trivializing the lives of the private citizens Turner was inciting his followers to kill.