A Wisconsin teenager accused of murdering two family members and plotting to assassinate President Donald Trump was inspired by Terrorgram, a white supremacist network that operated on the Telegram messaging and social media platform for half a decade, according to federal court records.
The Terrorgram community, which has been linked to around three dozen criminal cases around the globe, including at least three mass shootings, was profiled last month in stories and a documentary produced by ProPublica and FRONTLINE.
The court documents allege that Nikita Casap, a 17-year-old from Waukesha, Wisconsin, wrote a three-page manifesto calling for the assassination of Trump in order to “foment a political revolution in the United States and ‘save the white race’ from ‘Jewish controlled politicians.’”
In his manifesto, Casap allegedly encouraged people to read the writings of Juraj Krajčík, a longtime Terrogram figure who murdered two people in an attack on an LGBTQ+ bar in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 2022, according to the court records. Casap also allegedly recommended two publications produced by the Terrorgram Collective, a secretive group that produced alleged hit lists, videos and written publications — including instructions for building bombs and sabotaging critical infrastructure — and distributed them throughout the Terrorgram ecosystem.
Launched in 2019, Terrorgram was a constellation of scores of Telegram channels and chat groups focused on inciting acts of white supremacist terrorism and anti-government sabotage. At the network’s peak, some Terrorgram channels drew thousands of followers. Over the past six months, however, the network has been disrupted as authorities in Canada, the U.S. and Europe have arrested key Terrorgram influencers and community members.
But the violence hasn’t stopped.
Casap in February allegedly shot and killed his mother, Tatiana Casap, and stepfather, Donald Mayer; stole their property; and fled in their Volkswagen Atlas, Waukesha County prosecutors say. He was arrested in Kansas. Prosecutors have charged the teen with two counts of first-degree homicide, as well as identity theft and other theft charges. He is expected to be arraigned on May 7, according to court records.
A witness told local investigators that Casap “was in touch with a male in Russia through the Telegram app and they were planning to overthrow the U.S. government and assassinate President Trump,” according to charging documents in the Wisconsin case.
The newly unsealed federal court filings indicate that the FBI is investigating Casap in connection to the alleged assassination plot.
The bureau declined to comment on the matter.
Last fall, federal prosecutors accused two Americans of acting as leaders of the Terrorgram Collective and charged them with soliciting the murder of federal officials and a host of other terrorism-related offenses. The U.S. State Department has officially designated the Terrorgram Collective as a terrorist organization, as have officials in the United Kingdom and Australia. The two Americans have pleaded not guilty to the charges.
“Do absolutely anything you can that will lead to the collapse of America or any country you live in,” Casap allegedly wrote in his manifesto, according to an FBI affidavit. “This is the only way we can save the White race.”
The teen’s writings and online postings that are cited in the affidavit indicate that he is a believer in militant accelerationism, a concept that has become increasingly popular with neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists over the past decade. Militant accelerationists aim to speed the collapse of modern society through acts of spectacular violence; from the ruins of today’s democracies, they aim to build all-white ethno-states organized on fascist principles.
Matthew Kriner, executive director of the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism, a nonprofit think tank, called the alleged Casap plot unique. “It’s the first time we’re explicitly seeing an individual tie an accelerationist act or plot with the president of the United States as a means of collapsing society,” Kriner said. “I think what we have here is a fairly clear-cut case of an individual who is being groomed to take drastic terrorist action in an accelerationist manner.”
Casap’s public defender could not be reached for comment.
A Telegram spokesperson said, “Telegram supports the peaceful exchange of ideas; however, calls for violence are strictly prohibited by our Terms of Service and are removed proactively as well as in response to user reports."
A ProPublica and FRONTLINE review shows that Casap was recently active in at least five extremist Telegram channels or chat groups, including a Russian-language neo-Nazi chat in which posters uploaded detailed instructions for crafting explosives, poisons and improvised firearms. He was also a member of a chat group with more than 4,300 participants run by the Misanthropic Division, a global neo-Nazi organization.
Casap, according to the federal documents, also sought out information online about the Order of Nine Angles, a cult that blends Satanic concepts and Nazi ideology and has increasingly turned to Telegram to recruit and proselytize.
“This is a clear example of how Terrorgram continues to influence murder,” said Jennefer Harper, a researcher who studies online extremism. “Nikita was influenced online by an assortment of ideologies and groups that intersect with the Terrorgram ecosphere.”
A Global Network: White supremacists from around the world used Telegram to spread hateful content promoting murder and destruction in a community they called Terrorgram.
Spurred to Hate: ProPublica and FRONTLINE identified 35 crimes linked to Terrorgram, including bomb plots, stabbings and shootings.
A New Home: After several arrests of alleged Terrorgram members and reforms by Telegram, experts expect that white supremacists will find a new platform for their hate.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
On Jan. 19, 2024, the sheriff of Jacksonville, Florida, released a 27-page manifesto left behind by Ryan Palmeter, a 21-year old white man who had murdered three Black people at a Dollar General store before turning the gun on himself.
The Florida Times-Union, a prominent local news outlet, said it would not be publishing the document, which it said used the N-word 183 times and had an “overall theme of white superiority.” T.K. Waters, the sheriff, said he had posted what he described as the “rantings of an isolated, hateful, madman” to keep his promise of public transparency. An attorney for one of the victims’ families urged the public “to not give Palmeter the satisfaction of publishing or distributing his manifesto,” saying it “contains not one redeemable thought.”
Thousands of miles away, in Elk Grove, California, Dallas Humber saw Palmeter’s view of the world as perfect for her audience of online neo-Nazis. Humber, a now-35-year-old woman with a penchant for dyeing her hair neon colors, was a leading voice in an online network of white supremacists who had coalesced in a dark corner of Telegram, a social media and messaging service with almost a billion users worldwide.
She and her comrades called this constellation of interlocking Telegram accounts Terrorgram. Their shared goal was to topple modern democracies through terrorism and sabotage and then replace them with all-white ethno-states.
Humber quickly turned Palmeter’s slur-riddled manifesto into an audiobook that she narrated in a monotone. Then she sent it into the world with her signature line:
“So, let’s get this party started, Terrorbros.”
The manifesto immediately began to spread, pinballing around the worldwide Terrorgram scene, which celebrated mass shooters like Palmeter as “saints.”
The Terrorgram story is part of a much larger 21st century phenomenon. Over the past two decades, massive social networks like X, Facebook and Telegram have emerged as a powerful force for both good and evil. The ability to connect with like-minded strangers helped fuel uprisings like the Arab Spring and Iran’s pro-democracy movements. But it has also aided extremists, including brutal jihadist organizations like the Islamic State group and white supremacists around the world.
Telegram, which is massively popular outside of the U.S., boasted an array of features that appealed to Humber and her fellow Terrorgammers. They could send encrypted direct messages, start big chat groups and create public channels to broadcast their messages. In the span of five years, they grew Terrorgram from a handful of accounts into a community with hundreds of chats and channels focused on recruiting would-be terrorists, sharing grisly videos and trading expertise on everything from assassination techniques to the best ways to sabotage water systems and electrical transmission lines. On one of her many accounts, Humber posted step-by-step instructions for making pipe bombs and synthesizing HMTD, a potent explosive.
Humber went by a series of usernames but was eventually publicly exposed by a group of California activists. ProPublica and FRONTLINE reviewed chat logs — some provided by the Australian anti-fascist research organization The White Rose Society — court records and Humber’s other digital accounts to independently confirm her identity.
U.S. prosecutors say Humber helped lead the Terrorgram Collective, a transnational organization that ran popular Terrorgram accounts, produced sophisticated works of propaganda and distributed an alleged hit list of potential assassination targets. She is currently facing a host of federal terrorism charges, along with another alleged Terrorgram leader, Matthew Allison, a 38-year-old DJ from Boise, Idaho. Both have pleaded not guilty.
To trace the rise and fall of Terrorgram, ProPublica and FRONTLINE obtained a trove of chat logs and got access to some of the extremists’ private channels, allowing reporters to track in real time their posts and relationships. We combed through legal documents, talked with law enforcement officials and researchers in six countries and interviewed a member of the collective in jail. Taken together, our reporting reveals new details about the Terrorgram Collective, showing how Humber and her compatriots were powerful social media influencers who, rather than peddling fashion or food, promoted murder and destruction.
The material illustrates the tension faced by every online platform: What limits should be imposed on the things users post or discuss? For years, social networks like Facebook and X employed thousands of people to review and take down offensive content, from pornography to racist memes to direct incitement of violence. The efforts at content moderation prompted complaints, primarily from conservatives, that the platforms were censoring conservative views of the world.
Telegram was created in 2013 by Pavel Durov, a Russian-born technologist, and his brother Nikolai. Pavel Durov, a billionaire who posts pictures of himself on Instagram, baring his chiseled torso amid rock formations and sand dunes, became the face of the company. He marketed the platform as a free-speech-focused alternative to the Silicon Valley social media platforms, which in the mid-2010s had begun aggressively policing disinformation and racist and dehumanizing content. Telegram’s restrictions were far more lax than those of its competitors, and it quickly became a hub for hate as well as illegal activity like child sexual exploitation and gunrunning.
Our review of thousands of Terrorgram posts shows that the lack of content moderation was crucial to the spread of the collective’s violent content. Telegram’s largely hands-off approach allowed Humber and her alleged confederates to reach an international audience of disaffected young people.
They encouraged these followers to turn their violent thoughts into action. And some of them did.
ProPublica and FRONTLINE identified 35 crimes linked to Terrorgram, including bomb plots, stabbings and shootings. Each case involved an individual who posted in Terrorgram chats, followed Terrorgram accounts or was a member of an organized group whose leaders participated in the Terrorgram community.
One of the crimes was a 2022 shooting at an LGBTQ+ bar in Bratislava, Slovakia, that left two people dead and another injured. In an earlier story, ProPublica and FRONTLINE detailed how the shooter, Juraj Krajčík, was coached to kill over three years by members of the Terrorgram Collective, a process that started when he was just 16 years old.
Radka Trokšiarová survived the Bratislava attack after being shot twice in the leg. “Sometimes I catch myself wishing to be able to ask the gunman: ‘Why did you do it? What was the point and purpose of destroying so many lives?’” she said.
Telegram declined repeated requests to make its executives available for interviews and would not answer specific questions about Humber and other Terrorgram leaders. But in a statement, the company said, “Calls for violence from any group are not tolerated on our platform.”
The company said that Telegram’s “significant growth has presented unique moderation challenges due to the sheer volume and diversity of content uploaded to the platform,” but that since 2023 it has stepped up its moderation practices, using AI and a team of about 750 contractors. Telegram said it now “proactively monitors public content across the platform and takes down objectionable content before it reaches users and has a chance to be reported.”
Right-wing extremists were flocking to Telegram by 2019.
Many had been effectively exiled from major social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, which, in response to public pressure, had built vast “trust and safety” teams tasked with purging hateful and violent content. The companies had also begun using a shared database of hashes — essentially digital fingerprints — to quickly identify and delete videos and images produced by terror groups.
Even 8chan, an anonymous message board frequented by extremists, had begun pulling down particularly egregious posts and videos. Users there openly discussed moving to Telegram. One lengthy thread encouraged white supremacists to start using Telegram as a tool for communicating with like-minded people and spreading radical ideas to those they considered “normies.” “It offers a clean UI” — user interface — “and the best privacy protection we can get for this sort of social,” wrote one 8chan poster.
Pavel Durov, the 40-year-old Telegram co-founder, had positioned himself as a stalwart champion of privacy and free expression, arguing that “privacy is more important than the fear of terrorism.” After the Iranian government blocked access to the app in that country in 2018, he called free speech an “undeniable human right.”
To the extremists, Telegram and Durov seemed to be promising to leave them and their posts alone — no matter how offensive and alarming others might find their messages.
Among those who joined the online migration were Pavol Beňadik and Matthew Althorpe. The two men quickly began testing Telegram’s limits by posting content explicitly aimed at inspiring acts of white supremacist terrorism.
Then 23, Althorpe came from a small town on the Niagara River in Ontario, Canada; Beňadik, who was 19 at the time, lived in a village in Western Slovakia and went by the online handle Slovakbro.
Both were believers in a doctrine called militant accelerationism, which has become popular with neo-Nazis over the past decade, the chat logs show. Militant accelerationists want to speed the collapse of society by committing destabilizing terrorist attacks and mass killings. They have frequently targeted their perceived enemies, including people of color, Muslims, Jews, gays and lesbians.
Telegram gave them the ability to share tactics and targets with thousands of potential terrorists around the globe. Day after day they urged their followers to go out and kill as many people as possible to advance the white supremacist cause.
Beňadik had been immersed in the extremist scene since at least 2017, bouncing from one online space to the next, a review of his online life shows. He’d spent time on Facebook, Twitter, Discord, Gab and 4chan, another low-moderation message board.
Beňadik would later tell authorities that he was inspired by Christopher Cantwell, a New Hampshire white supremacist known as the “Crying Nazi” for posting a video of himself sobbing after learning that he might be arrested for his actions during the deadly 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. From Slovakia, Beňadik listened to Cantwell’s podcast, which featured long racist diatribes and interviews with white nationalist figures like Richard Spencer.
By 2019, Beňadik had created a chat group on Telegram in which he encouraged his followers to firebomb businesses, torch the homes of antifascists and seek out radioactive material to build dirty bombs and detonate them in American cities.
Althorpe started a channel and uploaded a steady stream of violent propaganda, the Telegram chat logs show. He named his channel Terrorwave Refined.
“Direct action against the system,” Althorpe argued in one post, is “the ONLY path toward total aryan victory.” Althorpe often shared detailed material that could aid in carrying out terrorist attacks, such as instructions for making the explosive thermite and plans for building assault rifles that couldn’t be traced by law enforcement.
Other sizable social media platforms or online forums would have detected and deleted the material posted by Althorpe and Beňadik. But on Telegram, the posts stayed up.
Soon others were creating similar content. In the summer of 2019, the duo began circulating online flyers listing allied Telegram chat groups and channels. Early on the network was small, just seven accounts.
Beňadik and Althorpe began calling this new community Terrorgram. The moniker stuck.
“I decided to become a fucking content producer,” Beňadik would later say on a podcast called HateLab, which has since been deleted. “I saw a niche and I decided to fill it.”
They were becoming influencers.
As the pair grew their audience on Telegram, they studied a massacre that had occurred a few months earlier in New Zealand.
A heavily armed man had murdered 51 Muslims at two mosques, livestreaming the carnage from a GoPro camera strapped to his ballistic helmet. To explain his motivations, Brenton Tarrant had drafted a 74-page treatise arguing that white people were being wiped out in an ongoing genocide. He described the Muslim worshippers he murdered as “invaders” and invoked a conspiracy theory claiming they were part of a plot to replace people of European ancestry with nonwhite people.
Tarrant’s slaughter had sent a surge of fear through New Zealand society. And his written and visual propaganda, which was aimed at inspiring more violence, had spread widely. Researchers would later discover that more than 12,000 copies of the video had been posted online in the 24 hours after the massacre.
Within the Terrorgram community, Tarrant became an icon.
On Telegram, Beňadik and Althorpe dubbed him a “saint” — an honorific they bestowed on someone who killed in the name of the white supremacist movement.
The two men saw Tarrant’s crime as a template for future attacks. Over and over, the duo encouraged their subscribers to follow Tarrant’s example and become the next saint.
For extremism researchers, the rise of the Terrorgram community was alarming. “Neo-Nazis, white nationalists and antigovernment extremists are publishing volumes of propaganda advocating terrorism and mass shootings on Telegram,” warned an investigator with the Southern Poverty Law Center in June 2019. The investigator said he was unable to even reach anyone at Telegram at the time to discuss the matter.
By August 2019, the Terrorgram network had grown to nearly 20 chat groups and channels. The Terrorwave Refined channel had ballooned to over 2,000 subscribers. “Thanks to everyone who helped us hit 2,000!” wrote Althorpe in a post. “HAIL THE SAINTS. HAIL HOLY TERROR.”
In addition to his chat groups, Beňadik created an array of channels to distribute propaganda and guides to weaponry and explosives. One of the most popular attracted nearly 5,000 subscribers.
“He was, I would say, a key architect behind Terrorgram,” said Rebecca Weiner, deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism at the New York Police Department. Weiner’s unit spent years monitoring the Terrorgram scene and assisted the FBI in investigating cases linked to the community.
When compared to mainstream social media, the numbers were tiny. But looked at a different way, they were stunning: Althorpe and Beňadik had built an online community of thousands of people dedicated to celebrating and committing acts of terrorism.
One of them was Jarrett Smith, a U.S. Army private based at Fort Riley in Kansas who was a regular in Beňadik’s chat group during the fall of 2019.
A beefy guy who enjoyed posting photos of himself in military gear, Smith had a love of explosives — he urged his fellow Terrorgrammers to bomb electric power stations, cell towers and natural gas lines — and contempt for federal law enforcement agents. “Feds deserve to be shot. They are the enemy,” he wrote in one chat thread.
Days after making the post, Smith unknowingly began communicating with a federal agent who was posing as an extremist.
In a string of direct messages, the undercover agent asked for Smith’s help in assassinating government officials in Texas. “Got a liberal texas mayor in my sights!” wrote the agent.
Happy to oblige, Smith provided the agent with a detailed step-by-step guide to building a potent improvised explosive device capable of destroying a car, as well as how-tos for several other types of bombs.
He was arrested that September and later pleaded guilty to charges that he shared instructions for making bombs and homemade napalm. Smith was sentenced to 30 months in prison.
The Terrorgram community was becoming a significant concern for law enforcement.
An October 2019 intelligence bulletin noted: “Telegram has become increasingly popular with WSEs” — white supremacist extremists — “due to frequent suspensions and censorship of their accounts across multiple social media platforms. Currently, WSEs are able to maintain relatively extensive networks of public channels some of which have thousands of members with minimal disruptions.”
The bulletin was produced by the Central Florida Intelligence Exchange, an intelligence-sharing center staffed by federal, state and local law enforcement personnel. Today, that five-page document — which was not meant for public dissemination — seems prescient.
It noted that while jihadist organizations and white supremacists were posting similar content on the platform, Telegram was treating the two camps in “vastly different” ways. The company, which had been headquartered in the United Arab Emirates since 2017, routinely shut down accounts created by the Islamic State group but it would “rarely remove WSE content, and typically only for high-profile accounts or posts that have received extensive media attention.”
By 2020, a pattern emerged: When Telegram did take down an account, it was often quickly replaced by a new one — sometimes with a near-identical name.
When the company deleted Althorpe’s Terrorwave Refined channel, he simply started a new one called Terrorwave Revived and began posting the same material. Within seven hours, he had attracted 1,000 followers, according to a post he wrote at the time.
The Terrorgrammers saw the modest attempts at content moderation as a betrayal by Pavel Durov and Telegram. “You could do anything on 2019 Telegram,” wrote Beňadik in a 2021 post. “I told people how to plan a genocide,” he said, noting that the company did nothing about those posts.
Apple, Google and Microsoft distribute the Telegram app through their respective online stores, giving them a measure of control over what their users could see on the platform. As the Terrorgram community attracted more notice from the outside world, including extremism researchers and law enforcement, these tech giants began restricting certain Terrorgram chats and channels, making them impossible to view.
Still, the Terrorgrammers found ways to evade the blackouts and shared the work-arounds with their followers. The network eventually grew to include hundreds of chats and channels.
The Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy, a German organization that studies online extremism, “has tracked about 400 channels and 200 group chats which are considered part of the Terrorgram community on Telegram,” said Jennefer Harper, a researcher with the center.
As the content spread, so did crime. Using court records, news clips and Telegram data collected by Open Measures, a research platform that monitors social media, ProPublica and FRONTLINE identified a string of crimes tied to Terrorgram.
Nicholas Welker, who was active in the Terrorgram community, is serving a 44-month prison sentence for making death threats toward a Brooklyn-based journalist reporting on a neo-Nazi group.
A Missouri man who planned to blow up a hospital with a vehicle bomb was killed during a shootout with FBI agents in 2020; his neo-Nazi organization had posted in Beňadik’s chat group and was using it to enlist new members.
The most deadly known crime stemming from Terrorgram occurred in 2022 Brazil, where a teenager who was allegedly in contact with Humber shot 15 people, killing four. The teen was later hailed as a saint by the Terrorgrammers.
While Terrorgram started as a loose collection of chats and channels, by 2021 Althorpe and Beňadik had created a more formal organization, according to Canadian court records and interviews with law enforcement sources in Slovakia. Their small, clandestine group was the Terrorgram Collective.
The organization began producing more sophisticated content — books, videos and a roster of alleged assassination targets — and distributing the material to thousands of followers.
Court documents, a U.S. State Department bulletin and Telegram logs show that over the next three years, the collective would come to include at least six other people in five countries.
Over 14 months, the group generated three books and repeatedly posted them in PDF form on Terrorgram accounts. Ranging in length from 136 to 268 pages, the books offer a raft of specific advice for planning a terror attack, including how to sabotage railroads, electrical substations and other critical infrastructure. The publications also celebrated a pantheon of white supremacist saints — mass murderers including Timothy McVeigh, who in 1995 bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.
“That combination of tactical guidance plus propaganda is something that we’d seen a lot of coming out of ISIS in years past,” said Weiner of the NYPD. She added that the books are filled with “splashy graphics” designed to appeal to young people.
“It’s a real manual on how to commit an act of terrorism,” Jakub Gajdoš, who helped oversee an investigation of Beňadik and Terrorgram for Slovakia’s federal police agency, said of one book. “A guide for killing people.”
At least two Americans were involved in creating one of the books, according to U.S. federal prosecutors: Humber and Allison, the DJ from Boise, Idaho. The chat logs show they were both prolific creators and influencers in the Terrorgram community who frenetically generated new content, including videos, audiobooks, graphics and calendars, which they posted on an array of channels.
Allison made around 120 Terrorgram videos, including editing “White Terror,” a quasi-documentary glorifying more than 100 white murderers and terrorists. Narrated by Humber, the video starts with the man who assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and concludes with the young man who shot and killed 10 Black shoppers in a Buffalo supermarket in 2022.
These “white men and women of action have taken it upon themselves to wage war against the system and our racial enemies,” Humber intones. “To the saints of tomorrow watching this today, know that when you succeed you will be celebrated with reverence and your sacrifice will not be in vain.”
The pair also allegedly helped create “The List,” a detailed hit list of American politicians, corporate executives, academics and others, according to court documents. The List was shared on a series of dedicated Telegram channels, as well as an array of other accounts, some made to look like legitimate news aggregators. Each entry included a photo of the target and their home address.
It was an escalation — and from court documents it’s clear that The List captured the attention of U.S. law enforcement agents, who worried that it might trigger a wave of assassinations.
The collective’s books influenced a new generation of armed extremists, some of them in their teens.
One of these young disciples was Juraj Krajčík. The Slovakian student had joined Beňadik’s chat groups at the age of 16 and had become a frequent poster.
ProPublica and FRONTLINE obtained an extensive trove of Terrorgram chat logs that show how Beňadik mentored Krajčík and played a profound role in shaping his beliefs. Over the span of three years, Beňadik, Allison and Humber all urged the teen to take action, the chat logs show.
On the night of Oct. 12, 2022, Krajčík, armed with a handgun, opened fire on three people outside of Tepláreň, a small LGBTQ+ bar in Bratislava’s Old Town neighborhood, killing Juraj Vankulič and Matúš Horváth and wounding their friend Radka Trokšiarová.
“I was in terrible pain because the bullet went through my thighbone,” she recalled. “I am still in pain.”
Krajčík took off on foot, and hours later he killed himself in a grove of trees next to a busy roadway. He was 19.
Six thousand miles away in California, Humber promptly began making celebratory posts. Krajčík, she exclaimed, had achieved sainthood.
Shortly after the Bratislava attack, Humber messaged Allison on Telegram, according to court records recently filed by federal prosecutors in the U.S.
She told him she’d been communicating with another Terrorgrammer who was planning a racially motivated school shooting.The attack occurred weeks later in Aracruz, Brazil, when a 16-year-old wearing a skull mask shot 15 people at two schools, killing four. Another saint.
On a Terrogram channel, Humber posted a ZIP file with info on the attack, including 17 photos and four videos. The massacre, she noted, was motivated by “Hatred of non-Whites.” And she made a pitch tailored for the next would-be teenage terrorist: The assailant, she wrote in a post, would get a “SLAP ON THE WRIST” prison sentence due to his age.
While Krajčík was planning his attack, law enforcement agencies in Europe, the U.S. and Canada were quietly pursuing the leaders of the Terrorgram Collective.
Beňadik was the first to fall. Using information collected by the FBI, investigators in Slovakia arrested him in May 2022 while he was on break from college. He’d been studying computer science at the Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic.
While in jail, Beňadik admitted his involvement with Terrorgram. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six years in prison shortly after the Tepláreň attacks.
Describing Beňadik as “extremely intelligent,” prosecutor Peter Kysel said he believes the student never met with any of his fellow Terrorgrammers in person and didn’t even know their real names. “All the contacts was in the cyberspace,” he said.
But Beňadik misled investigators about his connection to Krajčík, saying they had one brief interaction, via direct message. “This was the only communication,” said Daniel Lipšic, the prosecutor who investigated the Tepláreň attack.
In fact, Beňadik and Krajčík had many conversations, the logs obtained by ProPublica and FRONTLINE show. The pair repeatedly discussed targeting Tepláreň, with the older man writing that killing the bar patrons with a nail bomb wasn’t brutal enough. Krajčík posted frequently about his animus toward gays and lesbians, which Beňadik encouraged.
Alleged Terrorgram Collective co-founder Althorpe is also in custody. Canadian prosecutors have accused him of helping to produce the Terrorgram Collective publications, through which they say he “promoted genocide” and “knowingly instructed” others to carry out “terrorist activity.”
At the time of his arrest, Althorpe was running a small company selling components for semi-automatic rifles such as AK-47s and AR-15s. He has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.
In the U.S., Humber and Allison are facing trial on charges including soliciting people to kill government officials through The List, distributing bomb-making instructions and providing material support to terrorists. Prosecutors say the two have been involved with the Terrorgram community since 2019.
The 37-page indictment says they incited the attack on Tepláreň, noting that Krajčík “had frequent conversations with HUMBER, ALLISON, and other members of the Terrorgram Collective” before carrying out the crime.
In a jailhouse interview that Allison gave against his lawyer’s advice, he admitted he produced content for the collective, including editing the “White Terror” video. Still, Allison insisted he never incited others to commit crimes and claimed The List wasn’t meant to be a guide for assassins. He said it was merely an exercise in doxxing, similar to how right-wing activists are outed by anti-fascist activists.
All of his Telegram posts are protected under the First Amendment, according to a motion filed by his lawyers. They argue that while he was active in Telegram chats and channels, there is nothing in the government’s evidence to support the claim that he was a Terrorgram leader. “The chats are mostly a chaotic mix of hyperbole and posts without any recognized leader,” his lawyers wrote in the motion.
Looking pale and grim, Humber declined to be interviewed when ProPublica and FRONTLINE visited the Sacramento County Jail. Her attorney declined to comment on the case.
During the last days of the Biden administration, in January 2025, the State Department officially designated the Terrorgram Collective a global terrorist organization, hitting three more collective leaders in South Africa, Croatia and Brazil with sanctions. In February, Australia announced its own sanctions on Terrorgram, the first time that country’s government has imposed counterterrorism financing sanctions on an organization that is entirely based online.
“The group has been majorly impacted in terms of its activity. We’ve seen many chats being voluntarily closed as people feel at risk of legal action, and we’ve seen generally the amount of discourse really reducing,” said Milo Comerford, an extremism expert at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based nonprofit that tracks hate groups and disinformation. The “organizational capabilities of the Terrorgram Collective itself have been severely undermined.”
The demise of Terrorgram has coincided with reforms announced at Telegram in the wake of one co-founder’s arrest last year in France. Pavel Durov is charged with allowing criminal activity, including drug trafficking and child sexual abuse, to flourish on his platform. He has called the charges “misguided,” saying CEOs should not be held liable for the misuse of their platforms. He was ordered to remain in France during the ongoing investigation, and, depending on the outcome, could face trial next year.
In a statement, the company said, “Mr. Durov firmly denies all allegations.”
The company said it has always complied with the European Union’s laws. “It is absurd to suggest that Telegram’s owner is responsible for the actions of a negligible fraction (<0.01%) of its 950M+ active users.”
Still, after the arrest, the company announced a slew of reforms designed to make Telegram safer. It promised to police illegal content on the platform and share the IP addresses and phone numbers of alleged lawbreakers with authorities.
In response, white supremacists began to flee the platform.
Pete Simi, a sociology professor who studies extremism at Chapman University in Orange, California, said the incendiary ideas promoting race war and violence that animated the Terrorgram Collective will migrate to other platforms. “Especially given the broader climate that exists within our society,” Simi said. “There will be new Terrorgrams that take its place by another name, and we will continue to see this kind of extremism propagated through platforms of various sorts, not just Telegram.”
Today, many extremists are gathering on X, where owner Elon Musk has loosened content restrictions. White supremacists frequently post a popular Terrorgram slogan about killing all Black people. There are several Brenton Tarrant fan accounts, and some racist and antisemitic influencers who were previously banned now have hundreds of thousands of followers.
A review by ProPublica and FRONTLINE shows the company is removing some violent white supremacist content and suspending some extremist accounts. It also restricts the visibility of some racist and hateful posts by excluding them from search results or by adding a note to the post saying it violates X’s rules of community conduct. And we were unable to find posts on the platform that shared the bomb-making and terrorism manuals that had previously appeared on Telegram. The news organizations reached out to X multiple times but got no response.
In early March, a person who had a history of posting Nazi imagery shared a 21-second video lionizing Juraj Krajčík. The clip shows one of his victims lying dead on the pavement.
Tom Jennings, Annie Wong, Karina Meier and Max Maldonado of FRONTLINE, and Lukáš Diko of the Investigative Center of Jan Kuciak contributed reporting.
Extremist Influencers: Neo-Nazi influencers on the social media platform Telegram created a network of chats and channels where they stoked racist, antisemitic and homophobic hate.
Targeted Teen: The influencers, known as the Terrorgram Collective, targeted a teen in Slovakia and groomed him for three years to kill.
Terrorgram Network: Juraj Krajčík subscribed to at least 49 extremist Telegram chats and channels, many of them nodes in the Terrorgram network, before he killed two people at an LGBTQ+ bar.
Terrorgram Network: Juraj Krajčík subscribed to at least 49 extremist Telegram chats and channels, many of them nodes in the Terrorgram network, before he killed two people at an LGBTQ+ bar.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
The teen entered the chat with a friendly greeting.
“Hello lads,” he typed.
“Sup,” came a reply, along with a graphic that read “KILL JEWS.” Another poster shared a GIF of Adolf Hitler shaking hands with Benito Mussolini. Someone else added a short video of a gay pride flag being set on fire. Eventually, the talk in the group turned to mass shootings and bombings.
And so in August 2019, Juraj Krajčík, then a soft-faced 16-year-old with a dense pile of brown hair, immersed himself in a loose collection of extremist chat groups and channels on the massive social media and messaging platform Telegram. This online community, which was dubbed Terrorgram, had a singular focus: inciting acts of white supremacist terrorism.
Over the next three years, Krajčík made hundreds — possibly thousands — of posts in Terrorgram chats and channels, where a handful of influential content creators steered the conversation toward violence. Day after day, post after post, these influencers cultivated Krajčík, who lived with his family in a comfortable apartment in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. They reinforced his hatreds, fine-tuned his beliefs and fed him tips, encouraging him to attack gay and Jewish people and political leaders and become, in their parlance, a “saint.”
On Oct. 12, 2022, Krajčík, armed with his father’s .45-caliber handgun, opened fire on three people sitting outside an LGBTQ+ bar in Bratislava, killing two and wounding the third before fleeing the scene.
That night, as police hunted for him, Krajčík spoke on the phone with Marek Madro, a Bratislava psychologist who runs a suicide hotline and mental health crisis team. “He hoped that what he had done would shake up society,” recalled Madro in an interview, adding that the teen was “very scared.”
During the call, Krajčík kept repeating phrases from his manifesto, according to Madro. The 65-page document, written in crisp English and illustrated with graphics and photos, offered a detailed justification for his lethal actions. “Destroy the degenerates!” he wrote, before encouraging people to attack pride parades, gay and lesbian activists, and LGBTQ+ bars.
Eventually Krajčík, standing in a small grove of trees alongside a busy roadway, put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
The next day, Terrorgram influencers were praising the killer and circulating a PDF of his manifesto on Telegram.
“We thank him from the bottom of our hearts and will never forget his sacrifice,” stated one post written by a Terrorgram leader in California. “FUCKING HAIL, BROTHER!!!”
The story of Krajčík’s march to violence shows the murderous reach of the online extremists, who operated outside the view of local law enforcement. To police at the time, the killings seemed like the act of a lone gunman rather than what they were: the culmination of a coordinated recruiting effort that spanned two continents.
ProPublica and the PBS series FRONTLINE, along with the Slovakian newsroom Investigative Center of Jan Kuciak, pieced together the story behind Krajčík’s evolution from a troubled teenager to mass shooter. We identified his user name on Telegram, which allowed us to sift through tens of thousands of now-deleted Telegram posts that had not previously been linked to him. Our team retraced his final hours, interviewing investigators, experts and victims in Slovakia, and mapped the links between Krajčík and the extremists in Europe and the U.S. who helped to shape him.
The Terrorgram network has been gutted in recent months by the arrests of its leaders in North America and Europe. Telegram declined repeated requests to make its executives available for interviews but in a statement said, “Calls for violence from any group are not tolerated on our platform.” The company also said that since 2023 it has stepped up moderation practices.
Still, at a time when other mainstream social media companies such as X and Meta are cutting back on policing their online content, experts say the violent neo-Nazis that populated Telegram’s chats and channels will likely find an online home elsewhere.
At first, Krajčík didn’t fit in with the Terrorgrammers. In one early post in 2019, he argued that the white nationalist movement would benefit from large public protests. The idea wasn’t well received.
“Rallies won’t do shit,” replied one poster.
Another told the teen that instead of organizing a rally, he should start murdering politicians, journalists and drag performers. “You need a mafia state of mind,” the person wrote.
Krajčík had found his way to the Terrorgram community after hanging out on 8chan, a massive and anonymous forum that had long been an online haven for extremists; he would later say that he was “redpilled” — or radicalized — on the site.
On 8chan, people posted racist memes and made plenty of vile comments. But the Terrorgram scene was different. In the Terrorgram chats people discussed, in detail, the best strategies for carrying out spectacular acts of violence aimed at toppling Western democracies and replacing them with all-white ethno-states.
The chats Krajčík joined that summer of 2019 were administered by Pavol Beňadik, then a 20-year-old Slovakian college student who had helped create the Terrorgram community and was one of its leading personalities.
A hybrid of a messaging service like WhatsApp and a social media platform like X or Facebook, Telegram offered features that appealed to extremists like Beňadik. They could engage in private encrypted discussions, start big chat groups or create public channels to broadcast their messages. Importantly, Telegram also allowed them to post huge PDF documents and lengthy video files.
In his Terrorgram chats, Beňadik, who used the handle Slovakbro, relentlessly pressed for violent actions — although he never took any himself. Over two days in August, he posted instructions for making Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs, encouraged people to build radioactive dirty bombs and set them off in major cities, and called for the execution of police officers and other law enforcement agents. “TOTAL PIG DEATH,” he wrote.
At the time, the chats were drawing hundreds of participants from around the world, including a large number of Americans.
Beňadik, who was from a small village in western Slovakia, took a special interest in Krajčík, chatting with him in the Slovak language, discussing life in their country, and making him feel appreciated and respected.
For Krajčík, this was a change. In his daily life outside of Terrorgram, he “felt completely unnoticed, unheard,” said Madro, who spoke with several of Krajčík’s classmates. “He often talked about his own feelings and thoughts publicly and felt like no one took him seriously.”
Krajčík started spending massive amounts of time in the chat. On a single day, he posted 117 times over the span of 10 hours. The teen’s ideas began to closely echo those of Beňadik.
In late September, two regulars had a friendly mixed martial arts bout and streamed it on YouTube. Krajčík shared the link with the rest of the chat group, who cheered and heckled as their online friends brawled. Beňadik encouraged Krajčík to participate in a similar bout in the future.
“Porozmýšlam,” replied Krajčík: “I’ll think about it.”
For Beňadik, the combatants were providing a good example. He wanted Terrorgrammers to transform themselves into Aryan warriors, hard men capable of doing serious physical harm to others.
In reality, Krajčík was anything but a tough guy. A “severely bullied student,” Krajčík had transferred to a high school for academically gifted students, a school official told the Slovak newspaper Pravda. Two therapists “worked intensively with him for two years until the pandemic broke out and schools closed,” the official said.
Beňadik created at least five neo-Nazi channels and two chat groups on Telegram, one of which eventually attracted nearly 5,000 subscribers. He crafted an online persona as a sage leader, offering tips and guidance for carrying out effective attacks. He often posted practical materials, such as files for 3D-printing rifle parts, including auto sears, which transform a semiautomatic gun into a fully automatic weapon. “Read useful literature, get useful skills,” he said in an interview with a podcast. “You are the revolutionary, so act like it.”
It was only a month after joining Beňadik’s Terrorgram chats that Krajčík first mentioned Tepláreň, the LGBTQ+ bar in Bratislava he eventually attacked. On Sept. 18, 2019, he shared a link to a website called Queer Slovakia that featured an article on the bar.
Beňadik responded immediately, writing that he was having a “copeland moment” — a reference to David Copeland, a British neo-Nazi who planted a nail bomb at an LGBTQ+ pub in London in 1999. The explosion killed three people and wounded nearly 80 others.
“I DON’T ACTUALLY WANT TO NAIL BOMB THAT JOINT,” Beňadik continued. He wanted to do something far worse. “Hell,” Beňadik wrote, would be less brutal than what he had in mind.
Another Terrorgrammer offered a suggestion: What about a bomb loaded with “Nails + ricin + chemicals?”
Krajčík sounded a note of caution. “Just saying it will instantly make a squad of federal agents appear behind you and arrest you,” he wrote. Beňadik responded by complaining that Slovakia wasn’t producing enough “saints,” implicitly encouraging his mentee to achieve sainthood by committing a lethal act of terror.
Two days later, Krajčík posted photos of people holding gay pride flags in downtown Bratislava. They were “degenerates,” he wrote, repeatedly using anti-gay slurs.
One chat member told Krajčík he should’ve rounded up a group of Nazi skinheads and assaulted the demonstrators.
Then Krajčík posted a photo of Tepláreň.
Beňadik responded that “airborne paving stones make great gifts for such businesses.”
In the chat, Beňadik repeatedly posted a PDF copy of the self-published memoirs of Eric Rudolph, the American terrorist who bombed the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta and several other sites before going on the run. The autobiography contains a detailed description of Rudolph’s bombing of a lesbian bar, which wounded five people.
Urging Krajčík to read the book, Beňadik described it as “AMAZING” and a “great read.” Rudolph, he wrote, had created the “archetype” for the “lone wolf” terrorist.
Eventually, Krajčík joined at least 49 extremist Telegram chats, many of them nodes in the Terrorgram network, according to analysis by Pierre Vaux, a researcher who investigates threats to democracy and human rights abuses.
While Terrorgram started as a loose collection of accounts, by 2021 Beňadik and some of his fellow influencers had created a more formal organization, which they called the Terrorgram Collective, according to interviews with experts and court records from Slovakia, the U.S. and Canada.
The organization began producing more sophisticated content — books, videos and a roster of potential assassination targets — and distributing the material to thousands of followers.
Krajčík was a fan of the collective’s books, which are loaded with highly pixelated black-and-white graphics and offer a raft of specific advice for anyone planning a terror attack.
By the summer of 2022, Krajčík had become a regular poster in a Terrorgram chat run by another alleged leader of the collective, Dallas Humber of Elk Grove, California, a quiet suburb of Sacramento.
Humber went by a series of usernames but was eventually publicly exposed by a group of activists, and later arrested and charged with terrorism-related offenses. ProPublica and FRONTLINE reviewed chat logs — provided by the anti-facist Australian research organization The White Rose Society — and other online materials, as well as court records, to independently confirm her identity.
Beňadik was arrested in Slovakia and charged with more than 200 terrorism offenses. He pleaded guilty and would be sentenced to six years in prison.
In his absence, Humber quickly slipped in as mentor and coach to Krajčík.
She was explicit about her intentions, constantly encouraging followers in her chats and channels to go out and kill their perceived enemies — including Jewish and Muslim people, members of the queer community and anybody who wasn’t white. Her job, she wrote in one post, was to embrace disaffected young white men and guide them “through the end of the radicalization process.”
On Aug. 2, 2022, Humber and Krajčík discussed a grisly incident that had occurred several days earlier: A white man had beaten to death a Nigerian immigrant on a city street in northern Italy.
The killing, which was documented on video, was “fucking glorious,” wrote Humber, using a racial slur to describe the victim. “Please send any more pics, articles, info to the chat as more details come out,” she posted.
Krajčík wrote that he didn’t know much about the circumstances surrounding the crime but was still convinced the murderer had chosen “the right path.”
The killer, wrote Humber, would make an “ideal” boyfriend. “Every girl wants a man who would kill a [racial expletive] for her 🥰 how romantic.”
Three days later, Humber’s chat was alive with tributes to and praise for another killer. Wade Page, a Nazi skinhead and former U.S. Army soldier, had murdered six Sikh worshippers at a temple outside of Milwaukee a decade earlier. (A seventh would later die of their injuries.)
When police confronted Page, he began shooting at them, hitting one officer 15 times before killing himself.
Humber was a big fan of the killer. Page, she wrote, planned the attack thoroughly and chose his targets carefully. “He even made a point to desocialize and cut ties with those close to him,” Humber noted. “No chance of them disrupting his plans.”
“Page did his duty,” Krajčík wrote.
During the same time period, Krajčík started doing reconnaissance on potential targets in his city, staking out the apartment of then-Prime Minister Eduard Heger, a Jewish community center and Tepláreň, the bar.
He posted photos of the locations on his private Twitter account. And in a series of cryptic tweets, Krajčík hinted at the violence to come:
“I don’t expect to make it. In all likelyhood I will die in the course of the operation.”
“Before an operation, you will have to mentally deal with several important questions. You will have to deal with them alone, to not jeopardize your mission by leaking it.”
“I want to damage the System to the best of my abilities.”
Then, on Oct. 11, 2022, he wrote:
“I have made my decision.”
The next evening, after spending a half-hour outside the prime minister’s apartment, Krajčík made his way to Tepláreň. The bar sat on a steep, winding street lined with cafes, clothing boutiques and other small businesses. For about 40 minutes he lurked in a shadowy doorway up the hill. Then, at about 7 p.m., he approached a small group of people sitting in front of the bar and began shooting.
He killed Matúš Horváth and Juraj Vankulič and wounded Radka Trokšiarová, shooting her twice in the leg.
Krajčík, then 19, fled the scene. He had just committed a terrorist attack that would shock the nation.
In court records, U.S. prosecutors have linked both Humber and another alleged Terrorgram leader, Matthew Allison of Boise, Idaho, to Krajčík’s crime. The pair were charged last fall with a raft of felonies related to their Terrorgram posts and propaganda, including conspiring to provide material support to terrorists and soliciting the murder of federal officials.
Krajčík “was active on Terrorgram and had frequent conversations with ALLISON, HUMBER, and other members of the Terrorgram Collective,” prosecutors allege in the indictment. In another brief, they say Krajčík shared his manifesto with Allison before the attack. Then, immediately after the murders, he allegedly sent Allison direct messages saying, “not sure how much time I have but it’s happening,” and “just delete all messages about this convo.”
The Terrorgram posts cited in court documents corroborate our team’s reporting.
Allison spoke with one of our reporters from jail against his lawyer’s advice. He said he did not incite anyone to violence and that prosecutors had misconstrued the communications with Krajčík. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges, and in a motion, his legal team indicated it would argue that all of his posts are protected by the First Amendment. Humber also pleaded not guilty. She declined to be interviewed and to comment through her lawyer.
While Krajčík was at large, Slovakian authorities tapped Madro, the psychologist, to try to communicate with the young man. “After 12 text messages, he finally picked up the phone,” Madro recalled.
The brief conversation ended with Krajčík killing himself. “The shot rang out and there was silence,” Madro said.
Within hours, Humber was making celebratory posts. Krajčík, she exclaimed, had achieved sainthood. “Saint Krajčík’s place in the Pantheon is undisputed, as is our enthusiastic support for his work,” she wrote on a Terrorgram channel where she posted a picture of the victims on the ground, blood streaking the pavement.
She and Allison also circulated his manifesto.
In it, Krajčík praised the Terrorgram Collective for its “incredible writing and art,” “political texts” and “practical guides.” And he thanked Beňadik: “Your work was some of the first that I encountered after making the switch to Telegram, and remains some of the greatest on the platform.”
While they were spreading Krajčík’s propaganda, the owner of Tepláreň, Roman Samotný, was mourning.
The bar “was kind of like a safe island for queer people here in Slovakia,” he recalled in an interview. “It was just the place where everybody felt welcomed and just accepted and relaxed.”
Before the attack, Samotný’s major concern was that some homophobe would smash the bar’s windows. After the murders, he said, “the biggest change is the realization that we are not anymore safe here. … I was never thinking that we can be killed because of our identity.”
Samotný has closed the bar.
The survivor, Trokšiarová, was left with lingering physical pain and emotional distress. “I was deeply confused,” she said. “Why would anyone do it?”
It was late November 2017, and Matthew Bowen, a veteran Border Patrol agent, was seething. A fellow Border Patrol agent in Texas had just been found dead in the field, and Bowen was certain someone who’d been crossing the border illegally was responsible for murdering him.
“Snuffed out by some dirtbag,” Bowen, stationed in Nogales, Arizona, said in a text later obtained by federal authorities.
Bowen, if lacking in evidence, wasn’t alone in his anger and suspicion. President Donald Trump, nearing the end of his first year in office and already frustrated in his bid to construct a wall on the southern border, had promised to “seek out and bring to justice those responsible” for the Texas agent’s death. Brandon Judd, the head of the union that represents Border Patrol agents, declared to Fox News and other media outlets that the Texas agent had been “ambushed.”
Bowen’s work record suggested his distaste for the mix of migrants and drug traffickers crossing the border illegally could be dangerous. He’d been the subject of multiple internal investigations over excessive force during his 10-year career, court records show. In one, he’d been accused of giving a handcuffed suspect what agents called a “rough ride,” slamming the brakes on his all-terrain vehicle in a way that flung the suspect into the ground.
Bowen, though, had stayed on the job. And with the news of the Texas agent’s death, his disgust for illegal border-crossers seemed only to have deepened.
“Mindless murdering savages,” he texted to another agent that November.
Two weeks later, Bowen climbed behind the wheel of a Border Patrol pickup truck and used it to strike a Guatemalan migrant in a dusty parking lot in southern Arizona. Bowen eventually was arrested by federal authorities in May 2018 and charged with using his Ford F-150 pickup, a 4,000-pound vehicle, to menace the man as he tried to flee Bowen and other agents on foot. The truck, according to an affidavit filed by prosecutors in court, hit the man twice and came within inches of running him over. Prosecutors accused Bowen of using “deadly force against a person who was running away from him and posed no threat.”
On Monday, after months of legal wrangling and on the eve of trial, Bowen pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor civil rights charge, an offense that carries a potential term of up to a year in jail. In his plea deal, Bowen admitted to hitting the man with his truck and promised to resign from the Border Patrol. Sentencing has been set for October.
Bowen’s arrest and a variety of his ugly texts concerning migrants and others crossing the border illegally have been widely reported in recent months. But court documents and interviews suggest that his checkered career speaks to a much broader problem in the Border Patrol: its inability or unwillingness to identify and discipline problem agents.
Bowen’s attack on the Guatemalan migrant was at least the sixth time he had been accused of using excessive force during his decade with the agency.
None of the previous episodes resulted in any discipline beyond an “oral admonishment.” Unlike many police departments, the Border Patrol has no early intervention program for troubled agents, measures that would have triggered additional training or a deeper inquiry into Bowen’s behavior and mindset even if his conduct did not warrant formal discipline. At least two supervisors with direct knowledge of Bowen’s work history said they regarded him as a danger but were resigned to the fact that the agency was unlikely to ever punish or even fire him.
“Other law enforcement agencies would’ve weeded him out,” said one of those who supervised Bowen. “Other law enforcement agencies have much higher standards than we do.”
Bowen’s attorney, Sean Chapman, had sought to keep his record of complaints from being introduced at trial. The lawyer had also asked a judge to bar all or most of his text messages from being made known to any eventual jury. Faced with having to explain the texts, Chapman had said in court filings that the conversations were not unusual, but instead “commonplace” in the part of Arizona where Bowen worked. The texts, the lawyer argued in one filing last spring, are “part of the agency’s culture.”
If true, it’s a remarkable claim, for the messages Bowen traded over the years with colleagues are openly hateful. In one, he said the men, women and children attempting to cross into the U.S. were “disgusting subhuman shit unworthy of being kindling in a fire.” In another, he joked about how tasty Guatemalan migrants can be if they are properly “fried” through the use of Tasers. In yet another, Bowen trained his anger on his own agency, calling it a “fucking failed agency” where he and other agents “are treated like shit, prosecuted for doing what it takes to arrest these savages, and not given appropriate resources to fully do our job.”
In texts Bowen sent after he assaulted the migrant, he referred to the victim as a “guat” and dismissed the incident as all but a nonevent, suggesting the only reason it had resulted in any action was because it was caught on a camera belonging to the patrol’s parent organization, Customs and Border Protection.
With Bowen still awaiting sentencing, Chapman declined to speak in detail about the case or his client. However, the attorney insisted that the offensive messages “were in reference to specific events where Border Patrol agents were assaulted or killed. The texts therefore were not intended to be a general comment about illegal immigrants — only about individuals that attacked or injured agents.”
Officials with the Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection would not respond to questions about Bowen’s case and what it might say about wider problems with the patrol.
In November 2017, enraged about the death of the agent in Texas, Bowen lamented that the border-crossers he suspected of killing the agent might spend years eluding the authorities.
“It will probably take them eight years to find the fucking beaners responsible,” he wrote in a text.
Months later, the FBI completed an exhaustive investigation into the Texas agent’s death. There was no evidence he’d been murdered. The local Texas sheriff said it appeared the agent, 36-year-old Rogelio Martinez, had fallen into a deep concrete culvert and suffered fatal head trauma.
“To date none of the more than 650 interviews completed, locations searched, or evidence collected and analyzed have produced evidence that would support the existence of a scuffle, altercation, or attack,” the bureau’s El Paso office said in a statement.
By then, Bowen had already committed the crime for which he’d pay with his career.
“I’ve Seen Egregious Incidents Get Swept Under the Rug”
Bowen — 6-foot-2, 185 pounds — joined the Border Patrol in 2008 just as it was undergoing the most substantial transformation in its history. With Congress boosting the Border Patrol’s funding, the agency underwent a massive hiring push, a surge that roughly doubled the number of agents in the span of just six years. Former officials now say the speed of the Border Patrol’s expansion made it likely there would be bad hires, perhaps a significant number of them.
Bowen, who had lived in South Carolina before joining the agency, was assigned to the Border Patrol station in Nogales, an outpost in the hill country of southern Arizona, where scrubby mesquite and paloverde trees stud the rugged landscape. The station, a fortresslike compound, stands about 2 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, which is marked here by a rusty, 20-foot-tall steel fence encrusted with coils of razor wire. On one side of the barrier is the small town of Nogales, Arizona. On the other is the larger city of Nogales, in the state of Sonora, a major Mexican manufacturing hub that is home to more than 200,000 people.
The world of the Border Patrol is broken up into 20 geographic regions called sectors. The Nogales station is located in the Tucson sector, which covers about two-thirds of Arizona. While migration patterns and contraband routes are always evolving, the Tucson sector tends to be one of the busiest areas for Border Patrol agents. Agents in the sector made more than 52,000 arrests during the last fiscal year. Only the Rio Grande Valley sector in Texas had more apprehensions.
Over the years, the Tucson sector has also been known as a trouble spot within the patrol. In 2017, there were 701 disciplinary cases involving sector agents, more than anywhere else in the country.
In interviews, several people who worked with or supervised Bowen said he grew to have a reputation as a bully, a man with a bilious disdain for those seeking asylum or illegal entry into the U.S. In texts, Bowen referred to migrants and other border-crossers as “beaners” or “tonks,” a pejorative term referring to the sound made when agents banged their flashlights on the heads of those being taken into custody.
In later texts, he discussed his frustrations with the job and pondered quitting the patrol. A co-worker sent back a message reminding Bowen of the fun aspects of the job, like “running down shitbags who thought they had you fooled.”
From 2012 to 2015, five different people detained by Bowen accused him of needless violence, according to court records.
In January 2012, according to prosecutors, Bowen searched a young man’s car at a security checkpoint without probable cause. Bowen pulled the man from the car, threw him to the ground and handcuffed him. In March 2015, a fellow agent expressed concern after Bowen tackled a migrant and busted the man’s lip. A month later, an undocumented man said that Bowen had dragged him around by his handcuffs, causing painful abrasions to his wrists. In September 2015, Bowen was again reported by a colleague, this time for taking down a juvenile in a particularly violent fashion.
Later that fall, Bowen was accused of the “rough ride” incident. After apprehending an undocumented migrant in the desert, Bowen handcuffed him and threw him on the front of his ATV, according to court records and interviews. Then Bowen made the ride as unpleasant as possible, said a Border Patrol employee with direct knowledge of the incident. At one point, the employee said, Bowen purposely stomped on the brakes, causing the man, still handcuffed, to fly off the vehicle and slam into the dirt.
In these cases, Bowen was investigated by either Customs and Border Protection’s internal affairs bureau or by the Office of Inspector General with the Department of Homeland Security. Neither the internal affairs unit nor the Inspector General’s office responded to requests for comment.
Prosecutors sought permission to bring evidence of Bowen’s allegedly abusive behavior into the expected trial, arguing that the complaints helped to provide broader context for the truck attack. The defense attorney, Chapman, countered, saying in court briefs that the only relevant incident was the ATV episode, since it involved the use of a vehicle as a weapon.
Chapman, in court papers, maintained that Bowen had only been censured for two of the incidents, saying he’d received an “oral admonishment” after the episodes in March and April 2015. According to the attorney, Bowen was cleared of misconduct in the other three cases.
A current Border Patrol manager who worked with Bowen for many years said “oral admonishments are a joke” that do little to deter bad behavior.
The Border Patrol’s system for investigating and disciplining its agents has long been suspect, and in 2016, a blue-ribbon panel of experts named by then-President Barack Obama declared it nothing short of “broken.” Investigations dragged on for years, in part because there were too few investigators. Victims who accused agents of misconduct were largely kept in the dark, barred from knowing whether the accused agents had been found culpable and disciplined in any way. Scores of agents were arrested every year and charged with a wide variety of crimes, but many managed to hang onto their jobs.
One former Customs and Border Protection manager with extensive knowledge of the Border Patrol’s disciplinary process said the quality of casework was lacking and the end results of investigations inconsistent. The former official said the authority to discipline agents for on-the-job misconduct and policy violations generally rests with commanders in each of the agency’s 20 geographic sectors. Of the more than 700 discipline cases in the Tucson sector in 2017, more than 500 led to “informal discipline” or no punishment at all.
“I’ve seen egregious incidents get swept under the rug,” said the former Customs and Border Protection official, citing cases involving domestic violence and assault, embezzlement and lying to superiors.
Bowen’s lack of regard for any oversight at the agency comes through in the texts obtained by prosecutors. The discipline process, he suggested, is little more than a system for supervising officials to cover their rear ends. Customs and Border Protection employees who reported their co-workers for excessive force or other wrongs were “fags.”
“BP is just meant to destroy guys that want to catch people,” Bowen wrote in one text about his frustration with the agency.
One of the supervisors who managed Bowen said the Border Patrol’s disciplinary system is largely punitive and only responds, when it does at all, to one incident at a time. Many big city police departments, noted the supervisor, have created early intervention systems, which can track everything from uses of force to tardiness to public complaints in order to identify troubled officers and help them change course before something tragic occurs. Under such a system, the supervisor said, the pattern of complaints against Bowen could have prompted mandatory retraining or some kind of counseling. Either he would have improved or been squarely on the agency’s radar as a potential menace.
“It absolutely works,” the supervisor said of such early intervention systems.
“He Did Not Deserve to Be Executed”
At some point, records and interviews show, Bowen found another agent in Nogales with whom he felt a sense of kinship, Lonnie Swartz. They would come in the years ahead to share their perspectives on migrants and their dim view of their agency’s stomach for the hard work of ending illegal immigration. While joking darkly about their jobs, the two, records show, once had shared a three-minute video of a Border Patrol agent pummeling an undocumented man, repeatedly smashing his skull against the steel beams of a border fence.
“Please let us take the gloves off trump,” Bowen once wrote to Swartz in a text.
Bowen’s Border Patrol buddy, it turns out, probably never should have been hired. In 1995, he had enlisted in the U.S. Army and was stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky. But, within weeks, he had gone AWOL and fled the base. Facing criminal charges under military law, Swartz lived on the lam for nearly two years before he was captured in Las Vegas by a joint task force of local police officers and FBI agents, federal court records indicate. He was eventually ousted from the Army with an “other than honorable” discharge.
Somehow, however, he made it through the agency’s background check process and was hired by the Border Patrol in 2009, a year after Bowen. Court records indicate that Swartz misled the background investigators about his violations of military law during the hiring process in 2009 and again during a second background check in 2014. The former Customs and Border Protection official said that the Army discharge issue should have kept Swartz out of the patrol.
“That’s just shoddy,” the person said. “That should be an automatic disqualification. Whoever did the background investigation didn’t do their job properly.”
Chapman, who specializes in cases involving Border Patrol agents, represented Swartz during his trials. In an email, the attorney said Swartz “didn’t attempt to mislead anyone” about his history with the Army.
A spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection would not comment on the circumstances surrounding Swartz’s hiring.
In 2012, about two years after graduating from the Border Patrol academy, Swartz was the one facing federal criminal charges. Swartz had shot and killed a 16-year-old boy, José Antonio Elena Rodríguez, during what he and other agents said was a dangerous encounter with rock-throwing Mexican nationals along the border fence. Charging Swartz with murder, federal prosecutors told a very different story. They said that in reality Swartz was in no danger of being struck by a stone when he opened fire and shot the teen 10 times — two bullets hit the youth in the head, the others in the back. Rather, the prosecutors argued, Swartz killed the boy because he was “fed up” after a series of clashes with migrants and other border-crossers.
Whether or not the boy was throwing rocks that night, prosecutors said, “it wasn’t a capital offense. He did not deserve to be executed.”
The shooting prompted a long and unusual series of events. For three years, the Border Patrol would not make public the name of the agent who had shot the boy, including to the boy’s family. It was only after the family filed suit against the agency that the federal authorities brought criminal charges against Swartz. His first trial ended with a jury acquitting him of murder charges but deadlocking on the lesser offense of manslaughter. The second, coming near the end of 2018, resulted in Swartz’s acquittal on all charges. The second jury had repeatedly told the judge it was unable to reach a unanimous verdict, and it only wound up acquitting when the judge ordered the jurors to keep trying.
Swartz’s lawyer argued at the trials that Swartz had followed proper procedure in firing his weapon.
“You can employ deadly force against a rock thrower if he poses a risk of serious bodily harm. That’s the law,” said Chapman during the second trial. “And that’s what he did. He followed his training and he followed the law.”
But a high-ranking Border Patrol agent who served in Nogales said that Swartz was a management challenge from the start of his tenure with the patrol. “He was too aggressive” and was constantly looking to escalate encounters with smugglers or migrants at the border fence, the agent said. Supervisors, said the agent, tried unsuccessfully “to reel him in.”
Disturbed by the teen’s killing — and a raft of other cross-border shootings — Customs and Border Protection leaders in 2013 brought in a team of outside law enforcement experts to examine the Border Patrol’s guidelines regarding the use of firearms. “Frustration is a factor motivating agents to shoot at rock throwers,” found the analysts, who studied 67 shooting incidents and 10 key policy directives. “While rock throwing can result in injuries or death, there must be clear justification to warrant the use of deadly force.”
The report, produced by the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington, D.C.-based consultancy, was followed by a four-page update to the use-of-force policies. Under the new rules, agents who were attacked with rocks or other projectiles were supposed to seek cover and “distance themselves from the immediate area of danger.”
The change left many agents grumbling that the Border Patrol had gone soft.
The Border Patrol would not say if Swartz still works for the agency in any capacity.
“It Just Seems to Keep Getting Worse”
Around 7:30 one morning in December 2017, a 23-year-old Guatemalan national named Antolín López-Aguilar slipped over the border fence in Nogales and tried to hide underneath a parked semi-trailer.
Bowen, who was driving a green-and-white patrol-issued truck, was sent to apprehend the migrant. He was accompanied by two other agents who had been dispatched in separate vehicles.
When López-Aguilar tried to run, Bowen, still in his truck, gave chase. According to prosecutors, Bowen then made the conscious decision to drive his F-150 pickup into the migrant, striking the man twice from behind and pushing him to the ground. The attack, which prosecutors said left López-Aguilar mildly injured and traumatized, was captured by video cameras at a nearby port of entry.
In the days and weeks after the assault, texts obtained by the government show, Bowen appeared both proud of his conduct and confident that little would come of it. In a text to Swartz, Bowen boasted of having performed what he called “a human pit maneuver.” PIT stands for pursuit intervention tactic. In simple terms it involves a police officer or law enforcement agent driving his or her car into the rear of a fleeing vehicle. There is no such thing in American policing as a “human pit maneuver.”
“The tonk was totally fine,” Bowen wrote, using the crude term again. “Just a little bump with a ford bumper.”
“If I had to tackle the tonk,” he said in another message, “I would still be doing memos and shit.”
In his text conversations, Bowen complained that he was only being investigated because the incident had been captured by the video cameras. He acknowledged that he’s been on the “radar” of the internal affairs bureau and seemed to have wearied of the agency’s efforts, however modest, to police its own.
“I’ve decided after this is cleared up, I’m resigning,” he wrote.
It did not get cleared up, and Bowen’s texts reveal his growing anxiety. He noted that he could be charged with assault with a deadly weapon. He feared being sent away from his family. For comfort, he reached out to Swartz, who at the time was still in the midst of his prosecution for the boy’s shooting.
“Guys are being made to think any use of force results in you being investigated,” Bowen wrote to Swartz. “And so they are letting tonks get away with way too much.”
The array of texts obtained by the government, whatever significance they have for Bowen’s crime or the Border Patrol’s oversight of him, do offer a very personal and specific window into the mindset and apparent morale problems that current and former agents say plague the agency.
Bowen derided the “liberal” media and Obama appointees, and he thought in the current political environment, prosecutors were determined to make criminal prosecutions out of virtually any use-of-force case that gets referred to them. He was bitter, he said, about how the system was “rigged” just as Trump claimed, although it’s unclear what system he was talking about. Swartz seemed sympathetic. In one text to Bowen, he complained about how the agency was under-funded, and its equipment was unreliable, even its weapons.
Bowen made clear in his texts that he no longer believed in his own agency, and that he had been contemplating bailing from the Border Patrol for a long time. He’d explored taking classes that might help him get into the real estate business — his wife was a real estate agent — or starting a trucking company. He’s done with his “mindless” job.
“I just have to transition away from BP,” wrote Bowen. “I think it will be like coming out of a 10-year depression.”
He continued, “There were lots of good days. But the past few years the bad has far outweighed the good and it just seems to keep getting worse.”
In a text from Dec. 8, 2017, just days after the incident with the truck, Bowen wrote without irony: “This shit is the kicker I needed to make the decision,” he said of resigning. “I feel like one day I would have to make a decision that would cost me my life or my freedom.”
Members of a secret Facebook group for current and former Border Patrol agents joked about the deaths of migrants, discussed throwing burritos at Latino members of Congress visiting a detention facility in Texas on Monday and posted a vulgar illustration depicting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez engaged in oral sex with a detained migrant, according to screenshots of their postings.
In one exchange, group members responded with indifference and wisecracks to the post of a news story about a 16-year-old Guatemalan migrant who died in May while in custody at a Border Patrol station in Weslaco, Texas. One member posted a GIF of Elmo with the quote, “Oh well.” Another responded with an image and the words “If he dies, he dies.”
Created in August 2016, the Facebook group is called “I’m 10-15” and boasts roughly 9,500 members from across the country. (10-15 is Border Patrol code for “aliens in custody.”) The group described itself, in an online introduction, as a forum for “funny” and “serious” discussion about work with the patrol. “Remember you are never alone in this family,” the introduction said.
Responsible for policing the nation’s southern and northern boundaries, the Border Patrol has come under intense scrutiny as the Trump administration takes new, more aggressive measures to halt the influx of undocumented migrants across the United States-Mexico border. The patrol’s approximately 20,000 agents serve under the broader U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, which has been faulted for allegedly mistreating children and adults in its custody. The agency’s leadership has been in turmoil, with its most recent acting chief, John Sanders, resigning last week.
ProPublica received images of several recent discussions in the 10-15 Facebook group and was able to link the participants in those online conversations to apparently legitimate Facebook profiles belonging to Border Patrol agents, including a supervisor based in El Paso, Texas, and an agent in Eagle Pass, Texas. ProPublica has so far been unable to reach the group members who made the postings.
ProPublica contacted three spokespeople for CBP in regard to the Facebook group and provided the names of three agents who appear to have participated in the online chats. CBP hasn’t yet responded.
“These comments and memes are extremely troubling,” said Daniel Martinez, a sociologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson who studies the border. “They’re clearly xenophobic and sexist.”
The postings, in his view, reflect what “seems to be a pervasive culture of cruelty aimed at immigrants within CBP. This isn’t just a few rogue agents or ‘bad apples.’”
The Border Patrol Facebook group is the most recent example of some law enforcement personnel behaving badly in public and private digital spaces. An investigation by Reveal uncovered hundreds of active-duty and retired law enforcement officers who moved in extremist Facebook circles, including white supremacist and anti-government groups. A team of researchers calling themselves the Plain View Project recently released a hefty database of offensive Facebook posts made by current and ex-law enforcement officers.
And in early 2018, federal investigators found a raft of disturbing and racist text messages sent by Border Patrol agents in southern Arizona after searching the phone of Matthew Bowen, an agent charged with running down a Guatemalan migrant with a Ford F-150 pickup truck. The texts, which were revealed in a court filing in federal court in Tucson, described migrants as “guats,” “wild ass shitbags,” “beaners” and “subhuman.” The messages included repeated discussions about burning the migrants up.
Several of the postings reviewed by ProPublica refer to the planned visit by members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, including Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Veronica Escobar, to a troubled Border Patrol facility outside of El Paso. Agents at the compound in Clint, Texas, have been accused of holding children in neglectful, inhumane conditions.
Members of the Border Patrol Facebook group were not enthused about the tour, noting that Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from Queens, had compared Border Patrol facilities to Nazi concentration camps. Escobar is a freshman Democrat representing El Paso.
One member encouraged Border Patrol agents to hurl a “burrito at these bitches.” Another, apparently a patrol supervisor, wrote, “Fuck the hoes.” “There should be no photo ops for these scum buckets,” posted a third member.
Perhaps the most disturbing posts target Ocasio-Cortez. One includes a photo illustration of her engaged in oral sex at an immigrant detention center. Text accompanying the image reads, “Lucky Illegal Immigrant Glory Hole Special Starring AOC.”
Another is a photo illustration of a smiling President Donald Trump forcing Ocasio-Cortez’s head toward his crotch. The agent who posted the image commented: “That’s right bitches. The masses have spoken and today democracy won.”
The posts about Escobar and Ocasio-Cortez are “vile and sexist,” said a staffer for Escobar. “Furthermore, the comments made by Border Patrol agents towards immigrants, especially those that have lost their lives, are disgusting and show a complete disregard for human life and dignity.”
The head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Joaquin Castro, reviewed the Facebook discussions and was incensed. “It confirms some of the worst criticisms of Customs and Border Protection,” said Castro, a Democrat who represents San Antonio. “These are clearly agents who are desensitized to the point of being dangerous to migrants and their co-workers.” He added that the agents who made the vulgar comments “don’t deserve to wear any uniform representing the United States of America.”
Vicki Gaubeca, director of the Southern Border Communities Coalition, said the postings are more evidence of the sexism and misogyny that has long plagued the Border Patrol. “That’s why they’re the worst at recruiting women,” said Gaubeca, whose group works to reform the agency. “They have the lowest percentage of female agents or officers of any federal law enforcement agency.”
In another thread, a group member posted a photo of father and his 23-month-old daughter lying face down in the Rio Grande. The pair drowned while trying to ford the river and cross into the U.S.; pictures of the two have circulated widely online in recent days, generating an outcry.
The member asked if the photo could have been faked because the bodies were so “clean.” (The picture was taken by an Associated Press photographer, and there is no indication that it was staged or manipulated.) “I HAVE NEVER SEEN FLOATERS LIKE THIS,” the person wrote, adding, “could this be another edited photo. We’ve all seen the dems and liberal parties do some pretty sick things…”
The men proclaimed their innocence, and their backers described them in social media posts as “patriots” and “political prisoners.” The gang, known as the Rise Above Movement and based in Southern California, set up an anonymous tip line for people to share evidence that might exonerate the imprisoned members, and it established a legal defense fund, with donations taken via PayPal and bitcoin.
But in the following months, the men, one after the other, have pleaded guilty. Last Friday saw the final two guilty pleas, including one from Ben Daley, 26, one of the group’s leaders. He was joined by Michael Miselis, 30, a former Northrop Grumman aerospace engineer. The men pleaded guilty to conspiracy to riot.
“These avowed white supremacists traveled to Charlottesville to incite and commit acts of violence, not to engage in peaceful First Amendment expression,” U.S. Attorney Thomas T. Cullen said in announcing the guilty pleas. “Although the First Amendment protects an organization’s right to express abhorrent political views, it does not authorize senseless violence in furtherance of a political agenda.”
The Rise Above Movement and its role in the violence in Charlottesville in 2017 and at rallies in other cities was the subject of reporting by ProPublica and Frontline, work the authorities have credited in taking action against the men. Federal prosecutors in California are pursuing charges against four other RAM members, including its founder, Robert Rundo.
The plea documents filed during Friday’s court proceedings in Charlottesville lay out a detailed narrative of what the authorities say were RAM’s repeated acts of violence two years ago.
The narrative chronicles RAM’s combat training and the visual evidence capturing its members attacking protesters, including in Charlottesville, where, the authorities spell out, they “collectively pushed, punched, kicked, choked, head-butted, and otherwise assaulted several individuals, resulting in a riot.”
In pleading guilty, the authorities said, Daley and Miselis admitted their actions were not in self-defense.
In the contemporary white supremacist scene, RAM had positioned itself as the violent vanguard of the movement, a successor to the volatile and hyper-aggressive skinhead gangs that were prevalent during the 1980s and 1990s. Since its formation in 2016, the group has recruited several members of the Hammerskin Nation, the largest skinhead gang in the country, which has been tied to numerous killings, including the massacre of six Sikh worshippers at a temple outside Milwaukee.
Though RAM has eschewed the skinhead style — combat boots and bomber jackets — in favor of a more mainstream look, its members have embraced the bloody tactics of the Nazi skinhead gangs.
Miselis, a onetime engineering student at UCLA, was fired from his job at Northrop Grumman after ProPublica and Frontline exposed his membership in RAM. In a companywide email, then-CEO Wesley Bush said he was “deeply saddened yesterday to see news reports alleging that one of our employees engaged in violence as part of the Charlottesville protests.” Miselis held a government-issued security clearance while at Northrop, a major defense contractor, though the company has so far declined to say what projects Miselis was assigned to.
Rundo, who was living in Orange County at the time of his arrest, has also portrayed the federal prosecutions as a miscarriage of justice. “The rioting charges brought against us have not been used in 70 years,” Rundo said in a jailhouse interview posted on YouTube in February. “This has little to do with rioting and all to do with censorship and silencing anyone that they deem too radical by today’s standards.”
In the interview, Rundo blamed the media for demonizing RAM and described the group as a self-improvement club for white men.
Rundo has pleaded not guilty, and he could be headed to trial.
The RAM prosecutions have become something of a cause celebre for the racist right. Augustus Invictus, a fringe political figure and attorney, has set up a legal defense fund to solicit donations for the RAM members facing charges. “The federal government has taken an absolute political hard line against the right wing,” Invictus said in a 53-minute YouTube video discussing the case. The video has generated more than 22,000 views and nearly 700 comments, most of them sympathetic to RAM and many of them racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic.
One of RAM’s most infamous supporters is Robert Bowers, the Pennsylvania man accused of murdering 11 congregants at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh last October. Shortly before the massacre, Bowers posted a message decrying the RAM prosecutions on Gab, a far-right social media platform. Bowers has pleaded not guilty in the unfolding case.
There likely isn’t such a thing as a “typical” violent white extremist in America in 2018. Still, Michael Miselis — a University of California, Los Angeles doctoral student with a U.S. government security clearance to work on sensitive research for a prominent defense contractor — makes for a pretty unusual case.
For months, ProPublica and Frontline have been working to identify the white supremacists at the center of violent demonstrations across the country, including the infamous Unite the Right rally last August in Charlottesville, Virginia. The Rise Above Movement, a Southern California group that expresses contempt for Muslims, Jews, and immigrants, became a focus of that effort. ProPublica and Frontline were able to quickly identify a number of the group’s leaders, and find evidence that put them in the middle of violence in Charlottesville and Berkeley, California, among other places.
But one seeming member of RAM was harder to nail down. In video shot in Charlottesville, a bearded, husky man is seen in a red Make America Great Again hat with his hands wrapped in tape that came in handy for the brawling that occurred that day. During one encounter, the unidentified man in the red hat pushed an African-American protester to the ground and began pounding on him, video of the episode shows; moments later, a known RAM member choked and bloodied a pair of female counterprotesters. The possible RAM member also had turned up in video shot during hours of combat at a Trump rally in Berkeley, as well. Wearing protective goggles to ward off pepper spray, the man fought alongside RAM members, wrestling one protester to the ground and punching others.
Ultimately, ProPublica and Frontline determined the man in the violent footage was Miselis, a 29-year-old pursuing a Ph.D. in UCLA’s aerospace engineering program. Miselis was identified using video footage and social media posts, and reporters confirmed his identity in an encounter with him outside his home. In interviews, a number of California law enforcement officials said Miselis was a member of RAM.
In addition to his scholarly pursuits, Miselis works as a systems engineer for Northrop Grumman, the giant defense contractor with a plant in Redondo Beach, California.
When approached by ProPublica and Frontline in front of his home in Lawndale, a small city south of Los Angeles, Miselis said he “didn’t know anything” about what happened in Charlottesville.
“I think you got the wrong guy,” he said before driving off in his car.
Miselis did not respond to questions about his involvement with RAM. He did not answer additional questions sent by email.
Several current and former employees at Northrop Grumman told ProPublica and Frontline that Miselis has received a security clearance to work in a computer modeling and simulation group within Northrop’s aerospace division. Such security clearances are typically issued in a two-step process. The federal Office of Personnel Management conducts an investigation into the individual. The agency’s findings are then forwarded to a special unit within the Department of Defense, which makes the final determination on whether the person should receive a clearance, a status that often allows the person access to classified or otherwise sensitive information concerning national security.
Public affairs officers at the Defense Department declined to comment about Miselis and his security clearance. The federal personnel management office referred questions regarding Miselis to Northrop Grumman.
Northrop Grumman did not respond to several requests for comment. However, interviews with current and former Northrop employees, as well as an internal email, make clear the company knows of Miselis’ actions in Charlottesville and involvement with RAM. Miselis informed his superiors about his contact with reporters from ProPublica and Frontline, as is required by any individual who holds a higher-level security clearance, the people said.
So far, it seems, the company has taken no action against Miselis, who remains employed.
Keegan Hankes, an analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center who follows RAM closely, said he was surprised that nothing has been done about Miselis’ employment and security clearance.
“It’s ridiculous,” Hankes said.
“They’re openly motivated by racism,” he added of RAM.
As ProPublica has previously reported, RAM first surfaced publicly last spring and has quickly established itself as one of the violent groups in the resurgent white supremacist scene; members, who regularly train in boxing and martial arts, have been documented engaging in a string of melees. Founded in early 2017 by Robert Rundo, a Queens, New York, native who served an 18-month prison sentence for stabbing a rival gang member six times during a 2009 street fight, the group’s core membership is small — 15 to 20 young men — but capable of real menace, ProPublica’s reporting has shown.
Rundo has recruited followers from the Orange County and San Diego chapters of the Hammerskin Nation, the country’s largest Nazi skinhead gang, and one the authorities say has been behind at least nine murders. One of the Hammerskins who joined up with RAM, Matthew Branstetter, went to prison in California in 2011 on hate crime charges for robbing and assaulting a Jewish man in an Orange County park. The attack left the victim with “a concussion, broken jaw, eye socket fracture, broken nose, cracked ribs, severe facial bruising, and cuts and bruises to his body and face,” according to a news release issued by county prosecutors at the time. Other RAM members have spent time in prison and Los Angeles County Jail on charges for robbery, firearms possession and other offenses.
The FBI has taken notice. Several law enforcement officials familiar with the bureau’s work said agents have opened a formal investigation into RAM. In a statement, the FBI said, “While the FBI neither confirms nor denies the existence of an investigation, our agents investigate activity which may constitute a federal crime or pose a threat to national security. Our focus is not on membership in particular groups but on criminal activity. The FBI cannot initiate an investigation based solely on an individual’s race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, or the exercise of their First Amendment rights, and we remain committed to protecting those rights for all Americans.”
Since last August, local prosecutors have brought charges against a handful of participants in the Charlottesville rally, successfully convicting several men so far, including activists on both sides of the clashes. Now federal authorities are targeting neo-Nazi James Alex Fields, the man accused of killing counterprotester Heather Heyer and injuring more than two dozen others. Federal prosecutors recently filed 30 charges against Fields, including 28 hate crime charges.
A native of Stockton, California, Miselis earned a bachelor’s of science degree in mechanical engineering from UCLA in 2011. UCLA’s website today lists Miselis as a Ph.D. candidate in the engineering department’s hypersonics and computational aero-dynamics group. After Frontline and ProPublica began making inquiries about Miselis, the school issued a brief statement saying only that he is technically on leave from the doctoral program.
Miselis was clearly prepared for the unrest in Berkeley in the spring of 2017. At the Trump rally he wore protective goggles to ward off pepper spray or tear gas, taped his hands up like a boxer, and wore a gray active-wear uniform, as did several other RAM members that day. In video footage reviewed by ProPublica and Frontline, Miselis can be seen fighting alongside other RAM members.
The event turned into a multi-hour street battle pitting Trump supporters, including fascists and extreme-right activists, against counterprotesters, some of them militant anti-fascists. Police made 20 arrests, confiscating knives, pepper spray, a stun gun, an axe-handle, and many wooden dowel rods, which were used as clubs by participants. At least seven people were transported to the hospital for their injuries. Rundo, RAM’s founder, was arrested and detained for assault on a police officer, but Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley declined to file charges. “We determined we didn’t have enough evidence to prove the charges beyond a reasonable doubt,” said Teresa Drenick, an Alameda County deputy district attorney.
After the Berkeley rally, Miselis traveled across the country to take part in the massive white supremacist convergence in Charlottesville, where his activities were photographed and recorded on video, both by professional journalists and other people equipped with smart phones. At the rally on Aug. 12, pictures taken by photojournalist Jason Andrew show Miselis walking alongside two other RAM members previously identified by ProPublica, Tom Gillen and Ben Daley.
At roughly 10 a.m., Miselis and the other RAM members confronted counterprotesters a few steps away from Emancipation Park, where white supremacists had gathered beneath a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
Daley attacked two female counterprotesters, kicking and punching them, a scene captured in video obtained by ProPublica and Frontline. He wrapped both hands around the throat of one woman, throttling her until she fell to the ground, blood seeping from a gash on her temple. The other woman emerged from the incident with a laceration across her forehead. On video, she screams as blood drips across her face.
Miselis jumped into the fracas. In addition to Frontline and ProPublica, National Geographic produced video documenting the brawl.
A sequence of pictures shot by photojournalist Edu Bayer, who was on assignment for the New York Times, show Miselis hurling what appears to be a can of soda at a counterprotesters. In one photo he flexes his biceps muscles in celebration.
It’s this sort of street combat that worries the SPLC’s Hankes. In his view, such brazen criminal activity should be a red flag for both Northrop Grumman and the Pentagon.
“I can’t believe that participation in an organized white supremacist group focused on street-level violence wouldn’t jeopardize your security clearance,” Hankes said.
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It was Oct. 29, 2017, when Ed Beck decided he had to contact the military police.
For weeks, Beck had been tracking the online life of a 21-year-old lance corporal in the U.S. Marine Corps. He said he had concluded the young man, a North Carolina native named Vasillios Pistolis, was deeply involved in neo-Nazi and white supremacist activities.
Beck said he had compiled an exhaustive dossier on the young Marine, tracing the evolution of Pistolis’ racist worldview over recent years and linking him to violent altercations at the bloody white power rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last August. The most recent piece of evidence, Beck said, was a fresh video that appeared to show Pistolis standing alongside a leader of the Traditionalist Worker Party, a fascist group, during a confrontation with an interracial couple at a restaurant in a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee.
Beck was well-positioned both to be offended by Pistolis’ alleged conduct and to report it: Beck had served in the Marines from 2002 through 2006, including a tour in Iraq. In fact, he’d been assigned to the 2nd Marine Logistics Unit, the same unit in which Pistolis was serving.
Beck said he contacted the authorities at the unit’s headquarters, Camp Lejeune, a large Marine installation on the North Carolina coast, and spoke briefly with an investigator for the post’s military police.
“I told them what I had seen him do, the evidence I had,” recalled Beck.
Beck said he offered to share his dossier with Marine detectives, but they didn’t take him up on the offer.
After the phone conversation, he said, “I never heard a thing.”
Beck’s phone bill, which he provided to ProPublica and Frontline, shows that he spoke multiple times with personnel at Camp Lejeune on Oct. 29. The records indicate that he received a brief six-minute call from military police at 9:24 that night.
More than six months later, Pistolis is still serving in the Marines.
At this juncture, it’s unclear precisely what steps if any the Marines took after Beck alerted them to Pistolis. What is certain is that in May, after ProPublica and Frontline featured Pistolis in a joint report about his violent involvement in the white power movement, the Marines said they were investigating Pistolis.
Contacted last week about Beck’s claim of having alerted the military authorities about Pistolis last fall, officials offered varying accounts.
One military official indicated that police at Camp Lejeune and detectives with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, the unit that handles felony-level offenses in the Navy and Marines, had been diligently investigating Pistolis since receiving the information about him from Beck. Another person with knowledge of the matter, an officer with the Marine Corps, indicated that Pistolis had been questioned by NCIS, but that detectives found no connection to any organized groups or evidence that he posed a threat.
In the end, NCIS acknowledged that Pistolis is today the subject of a criminal probe, but added little detail.
“We do not discuss ongoing investigations,” said Adam Stump, an NCIS spokesman. “Regarding the service member you have asked about, the investigation is still ongoing. We cannot discuss further.”
A spokesman for Pistolis’ unit, Samir Glenn-Roundtree, said, “Marines accused of activity counter to our standards and core values are entitled to a thorough and impartial review. We have no further information to provide as the investigation is still ongoing.”
ProPublica and Frontline’s reporting on Pistolis made clear the Marine has spent years in the white power movement, including a stint as a cell leader for the Atomwaffen Division, an armed white supremacist group that espouses political terrorism and the overthrow of the U.S. government. In confidential chats, Pistolis, who received expert rifleman certification during his basic training in 2016 and currently works as a water support technician, claimed to have assaulted four people at last summer’s rally in Charlottesville.
“Today cracked 3 skulls open with virtually no damage to myself,” Pistolis wrote on Aug. 12, 2017.
The young man’s double life came as a shock to Rep. Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat, who shortly after the ProPublica and Frontline report asked the Pentagon to explain what it was doing to keep neo-Nazis out of the armed forces.
Marine Corps regulations forbid the “participation in supremacist or extremist organizations or activities” and violations can lead to a court martial or an ouster from the service. The Department of Defense has also issued rules barring all service members from joining white supremacist rallies or demonstrations.
In interviews last month with ProPublica and Frontline, Pistolis asked the news organizations not to publicize his involvement in the neo-Nazi movement. He denied being in Charlottesville, and said he had not been a member of Atomwaffen, but instead had infiltrated on behalf of another neo-Nazi group. He said he had come under suspicion by NCIS months ago, but believed that investigators had backed off.
As for Beck, his interest in Pistolis started last August when a friend pointed him to a comment Pistolis had made on Facebook. In it, Pistolis seemed to glorify one of the men who had attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, the biggest white power event in a generation.
Beck said he began scrolling through Pistolis’ social media channels and quickly realized that Pistolis was an active-duty Marine — and that he was fairly open about his love of Nazism. Beck, who now works at a New York nonprofit organization, became alarmed. He said he feared that Pistolis “could be radicalizing people around him” in the Marine Corps, or that he might be part of a larger network of white supremacists within the service. Through his research he said he began to worry that Pistolis “might get more violent” unless someone intervened.
In one Facebook post identified by Beck, Pistolis encouraged people to watch a revisionist documentary called “The Greatest Story Never Told,” which praises Hitler. “This should be watched by all,” he enthused. In other posts, Beck says he uncovered Pistolis praised the Golden Dawn, a Greek fascist organization, derided gays and lesbians, and uploaded a snapshot of his AK-47-style assault rifle.
Pistolis used the handle Vasillios88 on Instagram and was known as billythegreek88 on Snapchat; 88 is a widely used white supremacist code meaning “Heil Hitler.”
Beck was shocked that the young Marine would be so public with his views. “It was stunning. It was absolutely astonishing,” he recalled.
Beck had no contact with ProPublica or Frontline prior to our report in May. He later reached out to the news organizations to alert them to the action he said he’d taken last fall.
For Beck, Pistolis seemed both an embarrassment and a threat. Pistolis had been a member of Junior ROTC throughout high school before enlisting in the service. As Beck put it in his dossier, Pistolis’ online self-revelations showed him to be “a hateful and well-armed boy, then man, reveling in white supremacy, white nationalism, and outright Nazism for years.”
Combing through photos and shaky phone-camera video of the Charlottesville melees, Beck found Pistolis popping up over and over. There were shots of Pistolis carrying a custom-made flag featuring the Sonnenrad, a circular Nazi emblem, blended together with the Confederate battle banner. There were images of him swinging the wooden flagpole at people, and others of him holding a torch during a nighttime melee with counter-protesters at the University of Virginia.
Beck’s findings support some of the reporting by ProPublica and Frontline, which placed Pistolis in the center of several altercations in Charlottesville. Through interviews, photos and confidential chat logs, the news organizations concluded that Pistolis had been a leader in the Atomwaffen Division at the time of the rally and had traveled to Virginia intent on violence. In private online discussions, he boasted repeatedly about attacking Emily Gorcenski, a Charlottesville local who came out to demonstrate against the white supremacists.
Pistolis is at least the third Marine to face discipline in recent months for involvement with racial extremist groups.
Last year, two Marines were arrested by local police after they climbed a building in Graham, North Carolina, and unfurled a banner with a white power slogan and a symbol associated with European extremist movements. The banner drop came during a demonstration in support of Confederate monuments. Both Marines have since been “administratively separated” from the service. One of the men, Staff Sgt. Joseph Manning, was also stationed at Camp Lejeune, while the other, Sgt. Michael Chesny, was based nearby at Cherry Point Air Station.
At the Southern Poverty Law Center, Heidi Beirich has been monitoring the overlap between the military and the white power movement for more than a decade. Beirich said she is concerned by the recent reports on Pistolis and his fellow Marines — and noted that Camp Lejeune has had problems with racial extremists in the past, including a lance corporal who was sentenced to 100 months in federal prison in 2010 for threatening the life of then-President Barack Obama and for committing an armed robbery.
Beirich said she was disturbed that the Marine Corps hadn’t acted more swiftly to expel Pistolis and wondered how aggressively the military was dealing with the broader issue of white supremacist infiltration.
“I wish I could get a clear take on the enforcement,” said Beirich, director of the center’s Intelligence Project. “It’s one thing to have a regulation on the books, it’s another thing to actually enforce it.”
The U.S. Marine Corps said it has opened a criminal investigation into the activities of Lance Corporal Vasillios Pistolis, 19, identified as a violent white supremacist in a recent report by ProPublica and Frontline.
Stationed at North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune and assigned to the 2nd Marine Logistics Group, Pistolis has associated with an array of neo-Nazi organizations, including the National Socialist Movement, the Traditionalist Worker Party, and Atomwaffen Division, a clandestine group that aims to incite a race war, according to interviews and an analysis of video and online postings. Pistolis is under investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, or NCIS, which typically examines felony-level offenses involving Navy or Marine Corps personnel.
“We’re looking into the allegations and do not comment on open investigations,” said Adam M. Stump, an NCIS spokesperson.
Through interviews, photos, videos and the Marine’s own online admissions, ProPublica and Frontline documented his involvement with the various fascist groups and his participation in a string of assaults during last summer’s lethal Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Pistolis also made posts in online chats obtained by Unicorn Riot, an independent media organization.
This is the second time Pistolis has drawn scrutiny from NCIS. He told ProPublica and Frontline he’d been questioned about his extremist activities several months ago by NCIS investigators, but the investigation was apparently dropped. Military sources confirmed the existence of an earlier inquiry regarding Pistolis.
Responding to new reporting on the link between Atomwaffen and the armed forces, Rep. Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat, urged Defense Secretary James Mattis to investigate Pistolis and his fellow neo-Nazis. Ellison also requested that the Department of Defense provide information to Congress about the military’s efforts to discipline white supremacists in the ranks and screen out racial extremists during the enlistment process.
“ProPublica and Frontline identified three Atomwaffen members or associates who are currently employed by the Army or Navy,” wrote Ellison in a letter to Mattis. “The involvement of service members in white supremacist organizations or other hate groups is cause for significant concern, particularly given their combat and weapons training.”
Ellison is asking the Defense Department to respond to his request for information by May 21.
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The 18-year-old, excited by his handiwork at the bloody rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer, quickly went online to boast. He used the handle VasillistheGreek.
“Today cracked 3 skulls open with virtually no damage to myself,” the young man wrote on Aug. 12, 2017.
Vasillios Pistolis had come to the now infamous Unite the Right rally eager for such violence. He belonged to a white supremacist group known as Atomwaffen Division, a secretive neo-Nazi organization whose members say they are preparing for a coming race war in the U.S. In online chats leading up to the rally, Pistolis had been encouraged to be vicious with any counterprotestors, maybe even sodomize someone with a knife. He’d responded by saying he was prepared to kill someone “if shit goes down.”
One of Pistolis’ victims that weekend was Emily Gorcenski, a data scientist and trans woman from Charlottesville who had shown up to confront the rally’s hundreds of white supremacists. In an online post, Pistolis delighted in how he had “drop kicked” that “tranny” during a violent nighttime march on the campus of the University of Virginia. He also wrote about a blood-soaked flag he’d kept as a memento.
“Not my blood,” he took care to note.
At the end of the weekend that shocked much of the country, Pistolis returned to his everyday life: serving in the U.S. Marine Corps.
Of the many white supremacist organizations that have sprung up in the past few years, Atomwaffen is among the more extreme, espousing the overthrow of the U.S. government through acts of political violence and guerrilla warfare.
Journalists with ProPublica and Frontline gained insight into Atomwaffen’s ideology, aims and membership after obtaining seven months of messages from a confidential chat room used by the group’s members. The chat logs, as well as interviews with a former member, reveal Atomwaffen has attracted a mixture of young men — fans of fringe heavy metal music, a private investigator, firearms aficionados — living in more than 20 states.
But a number are current or former members of the U.S. military. ProPublica and Frontline have identified three Atomwaffen members or associates who are currently employed by the Army or Navy. Another three served in the armed forces in the past. Pistolis, who remains an active-duty Marine, left Atomwaffen in a dispute late in 2017 and joined up with another white supremacist group. Reporters made the identifications through dozens of interviews, a range of social media and other online posts, and a review of the 250,000 confidential messages obtained earlier this year.
Joshua Beckett, who trained Atomwaffen members in firearms and hand-to-hand combat last fall, served in the Army from 2011 to 2015, according to service records. Online, Beckett, 26, has said that he worked as a combat engineer while in the army. Combat engineers are the army’s demolitions experts.
In Atomwaffen chats, Beckett, using the handle Johann Donarsson, said he was building assault rifles and would happily construct weapons for his fellow members. “Give me the parts and the receiver and I’ll get it all together for you,” Beckett wrote in August 2017.
Beckett also wrote about suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of combat in Afghanistan, and how his time in uniform caused him to radically revise his political beliefs, prompting him to abandon mainstream conservatism in favor of National Socialism.
In online discussions, Beckett encouraged Atomwaffen members to enlist in the military, so as to become proficient in the use of weaponry, and then turn their expertise against the U.S. government, which he believed to be controlled by a secret cabal of Jews.
“The army itself woke me up to race and the war woke me up to the Jews,” Beckett wrote, adding, “The US military gives great training…you learn how to fight, and survive.”
Another Atomwaffen member used the chats to talk about the combat he saw during the U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan.
“I was in the infantry in the army in Afghanistan and did a lot of…shit,” the member wrote. He said the Army wanted him to become a chemical weapons specialist, but he chose to join the infantry. He spent his time, he wrote, blasting “lead into sand niggers.”
ProPublica and Frontline specifically identified Pistolis and Beckett through interviews with a former Atomwaffen member who knew them, the group's internal records, and the men's digital footprints. In his online activities, Pistolis left many clues to his identity, including pictures of himself he uploaded to private white supremacist chat rooms and photos of himself on his public Facebook page. Beckett’s internet handles and Facebook content also helped us to confirm him as the man who had spent five years in the Army before joining Atomwaffen.
Reporters contacted Beckett via phone and Facebook messages, but did not get a response. Beckett’s Facebook page features an image of Donald Trump driving a white convertible emblazoned with the number 1488, a white supremacist code, and a call for whites to jump in the car.
In a series of phone and email exchanges, Pistolis claimed he did not attend the Charlottesville rally and did not assault Gorcenski or anyone else. His online messages about Gorcenski, he said, were nothing more than jokes. He admitted to harboring “alt right” or white supremacist beliefs, though he claimed he had “infiltrated” Atomwaffen on behalf of another extremist group and was never actually a member.
Pistolis, who indicated to reporters that he is stationed in North Carolina, pulled down his personal Twitter account shortly after being contacted by ProPublica and Frontline. He also took down his account on Gab, a discussion channel favored by white supremacists, many of whom have been banned from Twitter and other social media platforms. His postings indicate that after leaving Atomwaffen last November — other members accused him of risking unwanted attention for the group by showing up with Atomwaffen flag at a rally in Tennessee — he became an active participant in online forums involving the Traditionalist Workers Party, another neo-Nazi group.
Since May 2017, three people involved with Atomwaffen have been charged with five murders. Devon Arthurs, an early Atomwaffen recruit, is facing trial for allegedly murdering two other members of the group in Florida. A teenager in Virginia stands accused of killing his ex-girlfriend’s parents, who had tried to keep their daughter away from him; the 17-year-old, who was in the process of joining Atomwaffen, is being tried as a juvenile. Atomwaffen member Samuel Woodward, 20, has pleaded not guilty in the slaying of Blaze Bernstein, a gay, Jewish college student whose body was discovered in a Southern California park early this year. Authorities believe Woodward stabbed Bernstein more than 20 times.
Despite the mounting body count, it is unclear just how aggressive law enforcement — at the federal or local level — has been in investigating the group. None of the men charged in the homicides had a military background.
The FBI had no comment when asked about Atomwaffen.
One Atomwaffen member caught up in a high-profile criminal case has a quite direct link to the armed forces.
Atomwaffen’s founder, Brandon Russell, 22, was arrested last year after investigators discovered a cache of weapons, detonators and volatile chemical compounds in his home, including a cooler full of HMTD, a powerful explosive often used by bomb-makers, and ammonium nitrate, the substance used by Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City attack. Russell was also in possession of two radioactive isotopes, americium and thorium. In September 2017, he pleaded guilty to a single charge of unlawful possession of explosives and was later sentenced to five years in federal prison.
At the time of his arrest, Russell, 22, had been serving in the 53rd Brigade Special Troops Battalion of Florida’s Army National Guard. A spokesman for the Marine Corps, Major Brian Block, said the corps would be looking into Pistolis and would likely open a formal probe into his activities last summer.
“There is no place for racial hatred or extremism in the Marine Corps,” Block said in a written statement. “Bigotry and racial extremism run contrary to our core values.”
He added, “The guidance to Marines is clear: Participation in supremacist or extremist organizations or activities is a violation of Department of Defense and Marine Corps orders” and can lead to expulsion from the service.
Contacted by ProPublica and Frontline, Carla Gleason, a Department of Defense spokesperson and Air Force major, said the military relies on its commanders to identify problematic activities and respond judiciously.
“What we’re doing is empowering commanders at every level to counsel service members on their conduct, and take disciplinary action where appropriate,” she said.
“We do recognize the right to free speech and thought,” said Gleason. But, she added, the Department of Defense insists that service members observe the military’s policies prohibiting discrimination and extremist behavior.
ProPublica and Frontline documented Pistolis’ role in Charlottesville through an analysis of photos and video footage from the rally and his own online admissions, including a statement Pistolis posted to an Atomwaffen chat room saying he “kicked Emily gorcenski” during the march at the University of Virginia.
ProPublica and Frontline contacted the University of Virginia Police Department to check the accuracy of the material involving Pistolis at the Unite the Right Rally, and to see if there was an investigation underway. Sgt. Casey Acord reviewed the material and later said his agency would investigate Pistolis’ apparent role in the melee that occurred during the torch-lit march on school property.
Reporters also showed pictures, video and chat posts to Gorcenski, the activist attacked in Charlottsville. While she didn’t suffer any significant physical injuries that night, the experience, Gorcenski said, was profoundly traumatizing — and she has faced frequent harassment from fascists and white supremacists since the rally. She said she plans to move out of the country.
Gorcenski quickly identified Pistolis as the man who kicked her.
“He’s telling the truth in these logs about what happened,” she said.
Like many white supremacist groups, Atomwaffen initially coalesced in cyberspace — the founders and early members met each other through a fascist discussion forum called Iron March, which is now defunct. But in the past few years, the organization — it is estimated to have 80 to 100 members — has moved into the real world.
Atomwaffen has conducted weapons and other training exercises in at least four states, according to the chat logs and interviews. Current and former members of the military have found that their skills are highly valued by Atomwaffen and have assumed leadership roles within the group. Drawing on their battlefield experience, Marines and soldiers have helped to shape the group into a loose collection of armed cells, according to the chat logs and people with direct knowledge of the organization.
There has long been a worrisome if not fully understood nexus between the military and the white supremacist movement. Over the past half-century, many of the movement’s key leaders have come from the ranks of the military, including George Lincoln Rockwell, commander of the American Nazi Party, Ku Klux Klan leader Louis Beam, and Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler.
Pete Simi, co-author of the book “American Swastika” and an associate professor at Chapman University in California, said white supremacists often draw inspiration from the armed forces.
“Extremist culture tends to be paramilitary — the Klan, for instance, is a clearly paramilitary organization, it was started by former military officers,” said Simi. “A lot of traditional neo-Nazi groups tend to emulate military structure … Some skinhead groups do that as well.”
Organizations like Atomwaffen, he said, “need military people who have explosives experience, firearms experience, combat fighting experience” that they can pass on to other members. But there’s also another factor, in Simi’s view. “I think there’s also a credibility aspect to it, in that it gives more credibility to the group to have people who served in the U.S. military. It brings a certain gravitas.”
Last year, nearly 25 percent of active-duty service members surveyed by the Military Times said they’d encountered white nationalists within the ranks. The publication polled more than 1,000 service members.
The results are jarring in a number of ways, not least because each branch of the armed forces has regulations that bar service members from joining white supremacist organizations. Army policy, for example, forbids soldiers from participating in “extremist groups” that foster “racial, gender, or ethnic hatred or intolerance.” The Marine Corps has a similar regulation, Order 1900.16, which mandates swift penalties for Marines caught engaging in “extremist or supremacist activities.”
Air Force directives note that airmen who participate in racist organizations can face court martial for disobedience.
For Simi, a key question is whether the Department of Defense and various military branches are effectively enforcing these policies by screening volunteers as they enter the service and thoroughly investigating reports of extremist activity by service members. If the figures in the Military Times survey “are anywhere close to credible, then there’s clearly a problem that isn’t being addressed,” Simi said.
A former Marine who currently works for a government intelligence agency told ProPublica and Frontline that the military’s seriousness about combating white supremacists in its ranks can vary.
“At the command level — and publicly — the military takes any extremism seriously,” the ex-Marine said. “There is a zero-tolerance policy regarding Nazis. We defeated them in World War II, and they have no business currently serving in the U.S. military.”
“At the unit level, I believe there’s a willful ignorance,” the former Marine added. “‘If neo-Nazis aren’t allowed to enlist in the military, and if nobody I know is a neo-Nazi, there must not be any within my unit’ seems to be the standard. It’s difficult to take seriously that which you don’t believe exists.”
Pistolis appears to have gotten involved in the neo-Nazi movement long before he joined the armed forces. In online conversations with members of Atomwaffen, Pistolis said that he’d started hanging around with the National Socialist Movement “and other skinheads” when he was 16. He listed some of his favorite books: “Mein Kampf” was one; the autobiography of American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell was another. A third was “The Turner Diaries,” the notorious 1978 novel about race war in America that inspired McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.
Pistolis said in the chats he was also a fan of “Siege,” a 563-page tome preaching the virtues of assassination, political terrorism and guerrilla warfare against the U.S. government that has become something of a bible for Atomwaffen members.
After joining Atomwaffen, Pistolis took on a leadership role in the summer of 2017, running the North Carolina cell and vetting new recruits to the group, according to the chat messages as well as a former member.
Before the Unite the Right rally, Pistolis, who is slim with dark close-cropped hair and a distinctive widow’s peak, sketched out designs for two flags he wanted to bring to the event. One was yellow and black and featured a coiled snake poised to strike and the logo of the Golden Dawn, a Greek fascist party linked to murders and violence in that country. On the other flag, he blended the stars-and-bars of the Confederate battle flag with the Sonnenrad, a circular emblem used by the Nazis and adopted by the new generation of white supremacists.
Pistolis paid a company to manufacture the flags and shared a picture of them online in a private chat room for people attending the rally; the chat logs were obtained by Unicorn Riot, a leftist media collective.
Over a span of roughly two months, Pistolis posted at least 82 messages in the chat room, which was hosted by Discord, an online messaging service aimed at video gamers.
His views were quite clear: Charlottesville Vice-Mayor Wes Bellamy, who is African American, was a “monkey” in a fancy suit. He shared photos of Bellamy and Charlottesville Mayor Michael Signer, who is Jewish, captioned with the words, “Niggers, Jews…Bad News.”
In Charlottesville, Pistolis, wearing a black-and-white Adidas track suit, was among the hundreds of torch-bearing young men who marched onto the campus of the University of Virginia after sunset on Aug. 11 chanting “blood and soil,” a slogan of the Third Reich, and performing straight-arm Nazi salutes. Photos and video from that night show Pistolis participating in the event.
The march ended at a monument to Thomas Jefferson, where the white supremacists were met by a small group of anti-fascist counterprotesters, many of them students, who had gathered at the foot of the statue. There was pushing and punching. Pistolis ran through the crowd and launched a flying kick at Gorcenski.
“He traveled here from out of state with the intent to do violence,” said Gorcenski. “His own statements match up perfectly to what’s happened.
“The military is supposed to protect American civilians and here we see that our soldiers are attacking American civilians — and celebrating it.”
The melee that night immediately intensified, as white supremacists bludgeoned the counterprotesters with lit torches and streams of pepper spray shot in all directions. Dozens of men attacked the anti-fascists.
Pistolis was front and center, according to his post. He told his fellow Atomwaffen members how to spot him in videos of the altercation that were popping up on YouTube. “If you see a guy in a tracksuit that’s me,” Pistolis wrote.
Another Atomwaffen member reminded Pistolis that he could face a court martial if he was arrested for brawling.
“So don’t get caught doing stupid shit,” wrote the Atomwaffen member, an Army soldier.
The day after the torch march, Pistolis was fighting again, this time in the streets surrounding Charlottesville’s Emancipation Park. He was carrying one of the flags he’d had specially made for the rally and wearing a black baseball cap, combat boots, and a T-shirt with the stylized skull logo of the Punisher, the comic book vigilante.
At least two photos taken by a Getty Images photographer capture him smashing a counterprotester with the wooden flagpole.
Later, Pistolis shared a photo of the aftermath with his friends in Atomwaffen. The blue and red flag was splattered with blood. He said he’d “cracked a skull” and left “3 mother fuckers bleeding.”
Another member asked if he could share the “bloody flag” picture on Atomwaffen’s Twitter account.
About a month after the rally, Pistolis got into an online conversation with an Atomwaffen member from Virginia. Unite the Right was “so much fun,” the Virginia man wrote.
Pistolis promptly uploaded two photos of himself from that weekend.
It was about 10 a.m. on Aug. 12 when the melee erupted just north of Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, Virginia.
About two dozen white supremacists — many equipped with helmets and wooden shields — were battling with a handful of counter-protesters, most of them African American. One white man dove into the violence with particular zeal. Using his fists and feet, the man attacked one person after another.
The street fighter was in Virginia on that August morning for the “Unite the Right” rally, the largest public gathering of white supremacists in a generation, a chaotic and bloody event that would culminate, a few hours later, in the killing of 32-year-old Heather Heyer, who was there to protest the racist rally.
The violence in Charlottesville became national news. President Donald Trump’s response to it — he asserted there were “some very fine people on both sides” of the events that day — set off a wave of condemnations, from his allies as well as his critics.
But for many Americans, conservatives as well as liberals, there was shock and confusion at the sight of bands of white men bearing torches, chanting racist slogans and embracing the heroes of the Confederacy: Who were they? What are their numbers and aims?
There is, of course, no single answer. Some who were there that weekend in Charlottesville are hardened racists involved with long-running organizations like the League of the South. Many are fresh converts to white supremacist organizing, young people attracted to nativist and anti-Muslim ideas circulated on social media by leaders of the so-called alt-right, the newest branch of the white power movement. Some are paranoid characters thrilled to traffic in the symbols and coded language of vast global conspiracy theories. Others are sophisticated provocateurs who see the current political moment as a chance to push a “white agenda,” with angry positions on immigration, diversity and economic isolationism.
ProPublica spent weeks examining one distinctive group at the center of the violence in Charlottesville: an organization called the Rise Above Movement, one of whose members was the white man dispensing beatings near Emancipation Park Aug. 12.
The group, based in Southern California, claims more than 50 members and a singular purpose: physically attacking its ideological foes. RAM’s members spend weekends training in boxing and other martial arts, and they have boasted publicly of their violence during protests in Huntington Beach, San Bernardino and Berkeley. Many of the altercations have been captured on video, and its members are not hard to spot.
Indeed, ProPublica has identified the group’s core members and interviewed one of its leaders at length. The man in the Charlottesville attacks — filmed by a documentary crew working with ProPublica — is 24-year-old Ben Daley, who runs a Southern California tree-trimming business.
Many of the organization’s core members, including Daley, have serious criminal histories, according to interviews and a review of court records. Before joining RAM, several members spent time in jail or state prison on serious felony charges including assault, robbery, and gun and knife offenses. Daley did seven days in jail for carrying a concealed snub-nosed revolver. Another RAM member served a prison term for stabbing a Latino man five times in a 2009 gang assault.
“Fundamentally, RAM operates like an alt-right street-fighting club,” said Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.
Despite their prior records, and open boasting of current violence, RAM has seemingly drawn little notice from law enforcement. Four episodes of violence documented by ProPublica resulted in only a single arrest — and in that case prosecutors declined to go forward. Law enforcement officials in the four cities — Charlottesville, Huntington Beach, San Bernardino and Berkeley — either would not comment about RAM or said they had too little evidence or too few resources to seriously investigate the group’s members.
In Virginia, two months after the deadly events in Charlottesville, Corinne Geller, a spokeswoman for the Virginia State Police, would not say if the police had identified RAM as a dangerous group.
“We’re not going to be releasing the names of the groups that we believe were present that day in Charlottesville,” she said. Investigators, she added, are still “reviewing footage” from the event.
Law enforcement has a mixed record when it comes to anticipating and confronting the challenge of white supremacist violence.
Often working undercover at great personal risk, federal investigators have successfully disrupted dozens of racist terror attacks. In the last year, agents have captured three Kansas men planning to bomb a mosque and an apartment complex inhabited largely by Somali immigrants, arrested a white supremacist in South Carolina as he plotted a “big scale” attack, and investigated a neo-Nazi cell that allegedly intended to blow up a nuclear power plant.
But there have also been failures. During the past five years, white supremacists, some of them members of gangs or organized political groups, have murdered at least 22 people, according to the Global Terrorism Database and news reports. And some government insiders say the intelligence services and federal law enforcement agencies have largely shifted their attention away from far-right threats in the years since 9/11, choosing instead to focus heavily on Islamic radicals, who are seen by some to pose a more immediate danger.
State and local police have struggled to respond effectively to the recent resurgence in racist political organizing. Police in Sacramento were caught unprepared in June 2016 when neo-Nazis and anti-fascist counter-protesters, or “antifa,” armed with knives and improvised weapons, clashed outside the California State Capitol during a rally. Ten people were sent to the hospital with stab wounds.
Taking a different tack, Gov. Rick Scott of Florida took the aggressive step of declaring a state of emergency in the run-up to this week’s appearance by Richard Spencer, a white supremacist scheduled to speak in Gainesville.
Michael German is a former FBI agent who during his career infiltrated a Nazi skinhead gang and militia organizations. German, now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, said he is worried that law enforcement doesn’t comprehend the threat posed by this latest iteration of the white supremacist movement.
Police and federal agents, in his view, are “looking at this whole thing so narrowly, as two groups clashing at a protest.”
In reality, German said, “it is organized criminal activity.”
One of the first people known to have been targeted by RAM was a journalist working for OC Weekly, an irreverent liberal publication based in Orange County, California.
The date was March 25, and writer Frank John Tristan was covering a Make America Great Again rally in Huntington Beach. The event, which had drawn more than 2,000 Trump supporters, marked what seems to have been RAM’s public debut. About a dozen RAM fighters showed up, with members carrying an anti-Semitic sign and a massive banner emblazoned with the words “Defend America.”
The march also drew a small contingent of anti-Trump protesters, including some militant antifa activists, and some people intent on physically blocking the procession as it moved along the Pacific Coast Highway. Before long, the scene turned violent and brawls between the political foes swept across the beach.
Tristan and two OC Weekly colleagues, photographers Julie Leopo and Brian Feinzimer, wound up in the conflict.
“The Trump supporters felt empowered to ridicule and intimidate me,” Leopo recalled in an OC Weekly article. “I kept shooting despite the insults and just as I was about to click the shutter on my camera, I looked up and locked eyes with a white woman carrying a flag.”
The woman struck Leopo and Feinzimer with the flagpole. A man shoved Feinzimer, sending him reeling. Tristan intervened, trying to calm the situation.
That’s when two men attacked him. One was a RAM member who charged at Tristan and began punching him in the face. The other assailant, who wasn’t a RAM fighter, grabbed Tristan’s sweatshirt and hit him with a series of punches.
Tristan was staggered. Someone standing nearby fired off a thick stream of pepper spray, and Tristan’s beating ended. Then RAM members fanned out and began fighting with other people.
Another RAM member confronted a masked counter-protester, grabbed the man, and threw him into the sand. From there he pummeled the counter-protester with his fist and elbow. Captured on video and shared through social media, the spectacle became a meme of the so-called alt-right.
In the days after the mayhem, Tristan spent hours studying shaky smartphone videos and scrolling through social media posts trying to identify the men who attacked him. He concluded that a 21-year-old man named Tyler Laube was the RAM member who struck him. Laube appears with his face uncovered in several group photographs of RAM from their training sessions in an Orange County park and at the Huntington Beach rally.
ProPublica was unable to contact Laube, but court records show he has had many entanglements with the law in recent years.
He has been convicted of fighting with a paramedic at a supermarket, illegally possessing a switchblade, disturbing the peace, and DUI, according to Los Angeles County court files. In 2015, Laube pleaded no contest to felony robbery charges — prosecutors said he partnered with another man to rob a 7-Eleven and another convenience store at gunpoint. While in jail before trial, Laube told a detective that he’d gone to a Hollywood strip club and gotten high on Xanax — the potent, often-abused prescription benzodiazepine — before acting as the wheelman in the robberies, which occurred early in the morning in Redondo Beach, according to court transcripts.
Laube, court records indicate, was on probation on the day he allegedly assaulted Tristan.
In the six months since the violent rally, state parks police have opened no criminal case in connection with the assault on Tristan and made no arrests. It is unclear how much of the abundant photographic evidence and video footage the authorities have reviewed, if any.
Capt. Kevin Pearsall, a regional superintendent with the parks police, says his officers can’t act because they’ve received no complaint from Tristan. However, former OC Weekly editor Gustavo Arellano says he’s repeatedly contacted parks police via phone and email in hopes of getting them to investigate. Parks police documents and internal emails obtained by ProPublica show that Arellano has reached out to police brass and that detectives are aware of the assault on Tristan.
Arellano said since the assault not a single law enforcement agency or official had contacted him about the alleged perpetrators.
“We know their identities,” said Arellano, who supervised Tristan and the other journalists until recently, when he left the paper amid staff cuts. “But what good is the truth when the law doesn’t give a shit?”
No charges have been brought against the people who attacked Leopo and Feinzimer, either, though Pearsall says those incidents have been examined by police. According to Pearsall, his agency, which is tasked with maintaining order in California’s vast network of parks and recreational areas, doesn’t have the resources to carry out extensive investigations and must turn to outside police forces for assistance in such cases.
Most of the time, the young men of the Rise Above Movement, nearly all of them in their 20s, look perfectly innocuous: close-cropped hair, clean-shaven faces, T-shirts and jeans.
But for public events, RAM has developed its own menacing signature look, with members often wearing skull masks and goggles to ward off pepper spray. At times, RAM fighters have tied American flag bandannas around their faces to conceal their identities.
A RAM recruiting video posted to YouTube and Vimeo highlights the organization’s violent raison d’être, cutting between choppy footage of RAM members brawling at public events and carefully shot scenes of them sharpening their boxing skills and doing push-ups during group workout sessions.
There is an entire ecosystem of low-budget white supremacist media outlets — websites, blogs, forums, podcasts, YouTube channels and the like — and RAM members have been hailed as heroes on some of these platforms.
“They kicked the shit out of people in Berkeley. It was great,” said a host on a racist podcast called Locker Room Talk. “They like to go to rallies and beat up Communists.” YouTube talker James Allsup saluted RAM members as the embodiment of the ideal American man.
The group portrays itself as a defense force for a Western civilization under assault by Jews, Muslims and brown-skinned immigrants from south of the Rio Grande. The RAM logo features a medieval sword with a cross on the pommel — a symbol of the crusades — and an evergreen tree. On T-shirts they wear while training, the logo appears above three words, “courage, identity, virtue.” At rallies, members have waved red-and-white crusader flags and carried signs saying “Rapefugees Not Welcome” and “Da Goyim Know,” an anti-Semitic slogan meant to highlight a supposed conspiracy by Jews to control the globe and subjugate non-Jews. One RAM banner, which depicts knights on horseback chasing after Muslims, reads “Islamists Out!”
A ProPublica reporter recently met at a restaurant in Orange County with a man who says he’s a leader of the organization. This man, who appears frequently in the videos of RAM members fighting, would only agree to talk openly about the group’s origins and intentions if we didn’t reveal his name. No other RAM members or associates would speak to us.
RAM, the leader said, came together organically. It started when he encountered a few other guys with similar political beliefs, including two active duty U.S. Marines, while exercising at different gyms in Southern California. They all liked Trump but didn’t think his agenda went far enough.
The men began hanging out. Their numbers grew. Many came from rough backgrounds — they’d been strung out on drugs or spent time behind bars — and currently labored at tough blue-collar jobs. Soon they had a name and a mission: They would physically take on the foes of the far-right.
The RAM leader claims his organization isn’t racist and complains he doesn’t even know what the word “racism” means.
“We’re proud of our identity,” he said before launching into a long list of grievances. Whites, he said, are ignored by politicians, taught to be ashamed by leftist academics, and marginalized and driven from the workforce by economic globalization. Young white men, he said, are drawn to the extreme right “because there is no other option for them. They’re disenfranchised.”
This intense sense of victimization is widespread among figures involved in the so-called alt-right.
“I wouldn’t say I’m a fascist,” the RAM leader continued, though he acknowledged that his worldview is close. He said he’s trying to create a “conservative counter-culture” as an antidote to the “complete degeneracy” of contemporary American life and “the left-wing ideology that’s poisoning the youth.”
In the leader’s eyes, “your life should be dedicated to God and country and your people.”
While the RAM leader insists the group isn’t racist, on social media channels, its members regularly espouse blatantly anti-Semitic and racist views.
Ben Daley has used his Facebook page to bash “Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook Jew police” for taking down his “anti Muslim posts”; to suggest that African Americans are “shit” and that former President Obama is a leech; and to cheer the fatal shooting of a black man. “Good riddance,” he wrote. The Facebook page of another member, Robert Boman, is laden with anti-Semitic graphics, including an illustration glorifying the Nazi SS and a cartoon depicting African Americans and Muslims as rabid dogs controlled by Jews. (Court and prison records show Boman served 18 months in prison for a 2013 robbery in Torrance.)
The group has drawn recruits from the ranks of the Hammerskin Nation, the country’s largest Nazi skinhead gang, which has been tied to at least nine murders in four states, including a 2012 massacre at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin.
At the ADL, Segal said law enforcement agencies are struggling to keep up with RAM and the scores of other extremist outfits that have emerged in recent years. Skillful use of social media and the broader internet has allowed some of these organizations to metastasize quickly into formidable operations. And whatever connection, if any, Trump has to their rise, the groups don’t hesitate to invoke his presidency as validation for their belief systems.
“There are so many new faces,” Segal said. “It creates a challenge for law enforcement.”
Two veteran Southern California detectives who spoke to ProPublica were not familiar with RAM before our reporters brought the organization to their attention. After reviewing photos and videos of RAM in action, as well the social media pages of its members, the investigators said they were concerned by what they saw. The group, they said, seems to have ties to white supremacist gangsters known to law enforcement, a propensity for violence, and a desire to grow their numbers.
The detectives spoke to ProPublica anonymously in order to freely discuss intelligence on white extremists and street gangs.
Earlier this year, on April 15, about a dozen RAM members traveled from Southern California to Berkeley. The group was met there by a fan: Vincent James Foxx, a 31-year-old video blogger and livestreamer with a fondness for white supremacists and radical right-wing politics.
Foxx, a father of three who runs a growing media operation called The Red Elephants, had become RAM’s unofficial propagandist. After the Huntington Beach brawls, which he attended and filmed, Foxx put together a nearly 10-minute video glorifying the group’s fighting abilities and uploaded it to YouTube, where it has garnered 174,000 views to date.
Foxx and RAM were sure another Trump rally in one of the most liberal cities in America would provide an opportunity for violence.
Two earlier political events in Berkeley had turned ugly, with crowds of left- and right-wing activists engaging in running street battles. Police seized knives, baseball bats, axe handles, nail-studded boards and other weapons during the previous clashes. Few were predicting that the April event, scheduled for Berkeley’s Civic Center Park, would be peaceful. This is what RAM had been training for.
For Foxx’s part, he would be shadowing the group. He knew where the action would be.
When leftist counter-protesters showed up to express their contempt for the president and his supporters, RAM, fighting as a pack, chased them down and attacked them — stomping, punching, kicking. Video shows Ben Daley pounding on a man who is trapped on the ground and kicking other opponents. In one incident, Daley and RAM member Robert Rundo manhandled a journalist, Shane Bauer of Mother Jones, shoving him and yelling at him “Get the fuck out of here! ... Fake news!”
At times RAM fought alongside an ally, Nathan Damigo, a former Marine and founder of Identity Evropa, a prominent white supremacist organization; Damigo wound up punching a female antifa member in the face, an act that would become one of the enduring images of the day’s havoc.
Foxx wasn’t just documenting the violence at the rally — he was inciting it. On video Foxx posted to YouTube, he can be heard repeatedly encouraging RAM members and others to assault people. “Get that fucking cuck!” he screamed when a RAM member and four or five other men grabbed a counter-protester and began beating him. “Charge!” Foxx yelled as a mob of right-wingers went on the offensive.
Reached via email, Foxx declined to be interviewed for this story.
At 11:45 a.m. that morning in Berkeley, police arrested Rundo, a 27-year-old boxer who lives in the beach town of San Clemente, for assaulting an officer and resisting arrest. “Oh shit … that’s one of our guys,” Foxx said as officers handcuffed Rundo, who was wearing a tight gray-and-black athletic shirt and a skull mask. Prosecutors would later decide not to bring charges.
“We reviewed it over the summer in July and declined to file charges,” said Teresa Drenick, an Alameda County deputy district attorney. “We determined we didn’t have enough evidence to prove the charges beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Another violent incident in Rundo’s past was far more clear-cut. In 2009, in Queens, New York, where Rundo had grown up, he confronted two Latino men in a store. Flanked by several other men, Rundo chased his victims into the street where one of them tripped and fell to the pavement. Prosecutors charged Rundo with pouncing on the man and stabbing him in the right hand, right elbow, left arm, chest and neck, according to court records. In a sworn statement the investigating New York Police Department detective noted that the entire episode was documented by surveillance video and that Rundo’s comrades used “some sort of club” to bludgeon the stabbing victim and his friend.
Rundo, who was 19 at the time, struck a plea deal, admitting his guilt in exchange for a sentence of two years in state prison on gang assault charges. He served about 20 months of his term, prison data shows.
As a detective in the 109th Precinct, Francis Johnston helped to build the case against Rundo in 2009. Johnston, who is now retired, remembers Rundo as a hard character — “a bit of an asshole” — with a strong dislike for law enforcement. While police were eager to question Rundo’s accomplices, they were never able to identify them — and Rundo never gave up their names.
At the Berkeley rally, RAM certainly wasn’t the only violent element on the scene — antifa cadres hurled bottles and other projectiles and instigated a number of melees. But throughout the day, interviews and video show, RAM was perhaps the most effective and disciplined group as the fighting dragged on for hours. At least 11 people were injured in the violence, with seven going to local hospitals for treatment, including a stabbing victim, according to local officials.
“From the second we got there it was just chaos,” said the RAM leader. “People like to say we’re Nazis and stuff, but all the people we’ve beaten up are white college kids.”
German, the former FBI agent now with the Brennan Center in New York, says he was shocked by the news reports he was seeing online about Berkeley. He thought: This isn’t a riot. It’s basically low-level political warfare in the streets of an American city. German, who studies national security and civil liberties at the Brennan Center, said he couldn’t believe law enforcement was allowing the two sides to battle it out with each other for hours with minimal intervention.
“The protests in Berkeley really caught my attention,” he said. “This should not be happening.”
In his view, police and federal agents should be focusing on RAM and similar organizations.
“This is black and white,” German said. “There are certainly people exercising First Amendment rights at these demonstrations. However, these people are in the middle of brawls and open about it — they’re posting images of violence and communicating their intent to commit violence. It’s very different than someone exercising their right to stand on a stage and preach their ideology.”
In June, RAM made its way to San Bernardino for a protest by Act for America, a controversial group that urges legislators to pass bills banning Islamic sharia law in the U.S. Act for America, which says its goal is to “protect and preserve American culture and to keep this nation safe,” has been labeled a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has highlighted its ties to Billy Roper, a veteran white supremacist organizer.
In San Bernardino, the RAM forces included at least two members of the Hammerskin Nation, a loosely structured but highly aggressive Nazi skinhead gang with chapters across the U.S. and in Europe.
ProPublica identified the men as Hammerskin members by reviewing video footage, photos, social media channels and court files.
“California has the largest racist skinhead population in the U.S., predominantly based in Southern California,” Joanna Mendelson, a researcher at the ADL, testified at a recent California state Senate hearing. “Adherents have their own unique subculture and are dedicated to furthering Hitlerian ideology.”
The gangs, she noted, range from a few member to a few hundred members, and have been responsible for some of the country’s “most violent hate crimes.”
One of the Hammerskins who has trained with RAM and appeared with them at rallies is Matthew Branstetter, a 25-year-old Huntington Beach resident. In April 2011, Branstetter and an accomplice beat a Jewish man unconscious and robbed him in an Orange County park. Branstetter was convicted of aggravated assault with a hate crime enhancement, and sent to prison for 20 months.
While the San Bernardino march, which attracted about 300 people, was nominally a protest against sharia law, it quickly devolved into an opportunity for protesters to mock Muslims and deride their faith. One man carried a sign that said “Islam is not an American religion.” Another wore a shirt that said “Muhammed was a Homo.”
A smaller crowd of counter-protesters also turned out to condemn what they saw as racism and Islamophobia. Police tried to keep the two groups separated, corralling them on opposite sides of a street. But that didn’t stop RAM, which brought about 15 members to the event. The group’s members crossed the street and began beating counter-protesters, eventually running many of them off.
In a video from the scene, RAM members boast about their actions. “We physically removed ‘em,” said Daley. “We chased ‘em down the block, smashed up their car,” added Rundo, describing an incident in which RAM forces shattered the rear window of a car driven by counter-protesters.
San Bernardino police did not respond to requests seeking comment.
Rundo also said, on video, that RAM members are “fans” of a white supremacist slogan called the “14 Words.” The slogan was authored by David Lane while he was serving a 190-year sentence in federal prison for his role in the murder of Jewish talk show host Alan Berg and a series of armored car robberies that netted more than $4 million, money that Lane and his co-conspirators planned to use to fund a race war.
Lane wrote: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
Lane’s message has been enthusiastically adopted as a call-to-arms by the current generation of right-wing radicals, many of whom believe that America’s ongoing demographic transformation is rapidly pushing whites towards extinction. The only answer, they believe, is an uprising.
What happened in Charlottesville last August looked a lot like an uprising, and RAM was right in the middle of it.
“You will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!” yelled Daley and another RAM member, Tom Gillen, as they stood before a statue of Thomas Jefferson on the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. It was the night of Aug. 11. The men held torches. They were surrounded by hundreds of young white men, all of them shouting the same words.
Both of the Californians were known to law enforcement in Los Angeles County. Gillen, a surfer and 23-year-old native of Torrance, had been jailed in 2014 for possessing an illegal handgun — someone had grinded off the serial number on the gun, making it untraceable. Police seized the weapon, destroyed it and barred Gillen from owning any other guns.
Gillen, like other RAM members, would not speak to ProPublica.
Daley had been arrested on a gun charge that same year. He was convicted of illegally carrying a concealed snub-nose .357 Magnum revolver and sentenced to seven days in jail. Police also discovered an array of bullets in his pickup truck, including .38-caliber ammunition and .223 rifle rounds, the latter used in bolt-action hunting rifles and military-style assault weapons.
In a brief text message, Daley declined to comment on his arrest or his activities with RAM. He did, however, say that he had signed up for the U.S. military and would be going through basic training shortly.
That night in Charlottesville, Daley and Gillen clashed violently with a handful of college students who’d gathered at the Jefferson statue holding a banner denouncing racism. RAM and the white supremacists quickly prevailed, and drove the students off the campus and into the night. Charlottesville police did little to intervene as the conflict unfolded.
Whooping and giving straight-arm Nazi salutes, white supremacists began to celebrate their victory. Some chanted the words “blood and soil,” an old Third Reich slogan.
The violence would continue — and escalate dramatically — the next morning as racists from around the country gathered around a monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee for the “Unite the Right” rally. And once again RAM members were at the heart of the fighting.
Charlottesville police declined to comment about RAM.
Today, according to the anonymous RAM leader interviewed by ProPublica, his organization is “trying to stay away from rallies.” RAM’s next moves, he explained, are confidential.
Oren Segal of the ADL said RAM could prove durable or fizzle out in a matter of months. It’s too soon to tell. But in both their short-term menace and their uncertain long-term future, Segal said RAM is quite representative of what he called the “new alt-right youth brigades.”
The self-described alt-right “really wants to strike while the iron is hot,” he said. “They believe that now is the time to go from online to the real world. And frankly, the street fighting element very much fits this narrative.”
The white supremacist forces arrayed in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend — the largest gathering of its sort in at least a generation — represented a new incarnation of the white supremacy movement. Old-guard groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations and the Nazi skinheads, which had long stood at the center of racist politics in America, were largely absent.
Instead, the ranks of the young men who drove to Charlottesville with clubs, shields, pepper spray and guns included many college-educated people who have left the political mainstream in favor of extremist ideologies over the past few years. A large number have adopted a very clean cut, frat-boyish look designed to appeal to the average white guy in a way that KKK robes or skinhead regalia never could. Interviews show that at least some of these leaders have spent time in the U.S. armed forces.
Many belong to new organizations like Vanguard America, Identity Evropa, the Traditionalist Workers Party and True Cascadia, which have seen their numbers expand dramatically in the past year. Most of these groups view themselves as part of a broader “alt-right” movement that represents the extreme edge of right-wing politics in the U.S.
These organizations exhibited unprecedented organization and tactical savvy. Hundreds of racist activists converged on a park on Friday night, striding through the darkness in groups of five to 20 people. A handful of leaders with headsets and handheld radios gave orders as a pickup truck full of torches pulled up nearby. Within minutes, their numbers had swelled well into the hundreds. They quickly and efficiently formed a lengthy procession and begun marching, torches alight, through the campus of the University of Virginia.
Despite intense interest from the media, police and local anti-racists, the white supremacists kept the location of their intimidating nighttime march secret until the last moment.
The next day, the far-right forces — likely numbering between 1,000 and 1,500 — marched to Emancipation Park. Once again, they arrived in small blocs under military-style command. The racist groups were at least as organized and disciplined as the police, who appeared to have no clear plan for what to do when the violence escalated. The racist groups stood their ground at the park and were not dislodged for many hours.
For many of them, this will be seen as victory. “Every rally we’re going to be more organized, we’re going to have more people, and it’s going to be harder and harder for them to shut us down,” said a spokesman for Vanguard America, a fascist group, who gave his name as “Thomas.” “White people are pretty good at getting organized.”
And though police arrested James Fields Jr., a 20-year-old Ohio man, for allegedly driving a Dodge Charger into a crowd of anti-racist protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and wounding many others, the white supremacists generally avoided arrests.
They also outmaneuvered their anti-racist opponents. On Saturday, a multifaith group met at the historic First Baptist Church for a sunrise prayer ceremony featuring academic Cornel West and pastor Traci Blackmon. The anti-racists, many of them clergy members, walked quietly to Emancipation Park, where they were vastly outnumbered by the white supremacists.
Later, a band of more aggressive counter-protesters showed up at the park, chanting “Appalachia coming at ya. Nazi punks we’re gonna smash ya!” These militant “antifa,” or antifascists, were also repelled by the white supremacists.
Given the scale of the protests, the far-right groups suffered few injuries. That was particularly notable given the fact that multiple people near the protests were armed. Throughout the weekend, right-wing and left-wing militias equipped with assault rifles, pistols and body armor patrolled the streets of Charlottesville. (Virginia is an “open carry” state, so gun owners are legally allowed to tote around firearms.)
State police and National Guardsmen watched passively for hours as self-proclaimed Nazis engaged in street battles with counter-protesters.
Many of the armed men viewed their role as maintaining a modicum of order. A “Three Percenter” militia out of New York state posted itself near Emancipation Park with the intention of keeping anti-racists from disrupting the rally. The group says it disapproves of racism but is dedicated to defending the free speech rights of all.
Blocks away, Redneck Revolt, a leftist militia from North Carolina, watched over the perimeter of a park where anti-racists had gathered, committed to preventing violent attacks by the white supremacist groups.
The presence of heavily armed citizens may have played a role in the decision of authorities to largely stay out of the violent skirmishes between the white supremacists and their opponents.
Those who actually marched included many new to the right-wing cause. The victory of Donald Trump in last year’s presidential election has energized a whole wave of young people who were previously apathetic or apolitical, rally organizer Eli Mosley told ProPublica. The president has served as “megaphone” for far-right ideas, he said.
Mosley and his comrades are seeking to draw in as many of these newly politicized young people as possible. “We’re winning,” he said. “We’re targeting the youth and making a movement that appeals to the youth.”
Some of those who’ve gravitated to the extreme right milieu are former liberals — like Mosley’s fellow rally organizer Jason Kessler — and supporters of Bernie Sanders. Many are ex-Libertarians.
“I was a libertarian,” said Mosley, as white supremacists chanted “Whose streets? Our streets!” in the background. “I looked around and noticed that most Libertarians were white men. I decided that the left was winning with identity politics, so I wanted to play identity politics too. I’m fascinated by leftist tactics, I read Saul Alinsky, Martin Luther King … This is our ’60s movement.”
There was nothing haphazard about the violence that erupted today in this bucolic town in Virginia's heartland. At about 10 a.m. today, at one of countless such confrontations, an angry mob of white supremacists formed a battle line across from a group of counter-protesters, many of them older and gray-haired, who had gathered near a church parking lot. On command from their leader, the young men charged and pummeled their ideological foes with abandon. One woman was hurled to the pavement, and the blood from her bruised head was instantly visible.
Standing nearby, an assortment of Virginia State Police troopers and Charlottesville police wearing protective gear watched silently from behind an array of metal barricades — and did nothing.
It was a scene that played out over and over in Charlottesville as law enforcement confronted the largest public gathering of white supremacists in decades. We walked the streets beginning in the early morning hours and repeatedly witnessed instances in which authorities took a largely laissez faire approach, allowing white supremacists and counter-protesters to physically battle.
Officials in Charlottesville had publicly promised to maintain control of the "Unite the Right" rally, which is the latest in a series of chaotic and bloody racist rallies that have roiled this college town, a place deeply proud of its links to Thomas Jefferson and the origins of American Democracy.
But the white supremacists who flooded into the city's Emancipation Park — a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee sits in the center of the park — had spent months openly planning for war. The Daily Stormer, a popular neo-Nazi website, encouraged rally attendees to bring shields, pepper spray, and fascist flags and flagpoles. A prominent racist podcast told its listeners to come carrying guns. "Bring whatever you need, that you feel you need for your self defense. Do what you need to do for security of your own person," said Mike "Enoch" Peinovich on The Right Stuff podcast.
And the white supremacists who showed up in Charlottesville did indeed come prepared for violence. Many wore helmets and carried clubs, medieval-looking round wooden shields, and rectangular plexiglass shields, similar to those used by riot police.
Clad in a black, Nazi-style helmet, Matthew Heimbach told ProPublica, "We're defending our heritage." Heimbach, who heads the Traditionalist Workers Party, a self-declared fascist group, said he was willing to die for his cause and would do whatever it took to defend himself. He was surrounded by a brigade of white supremacists, including members of the League of the South and the National Socialist Movement.
By the time Heimbach and his contingent arrived in downtown Charlottesville shortly before 11 a.m., what had started hours earlier with some shoving and a few punches had evolved into a series of wild melees as people attacked one another with fists, feet, and the improvised weapons they'd brought with them to the park. White supremacists and anti-racists began blasting each other with thick orange streams of pepper spray.
The police did little to stop the bloodshed. Several times, a group of assault-rifle-toting militia members from New York State, wearing body armor and desert camo, played a more active role in breaking up fights.
Shortly before noon, authorities shut down the rally and the related demonstrations and marched the white supremacists out of the park and into the streets.
Charlottesville Vice Mayor Wes Bellamy defended the police tactics. "I'm not in the business of throwing our police department under the bus, because they're doing the best job they can, " said Bellamy. "I don't think the police officers were just twiddling their thumbs."
The skirmishes culminated in what appears to have been an act of domestic terrorism, with a driver ramming his car into a crowd of anti-racist activists on a busy downtown street, killing one and injuring 19 according to the latest information from city officials. Charlottesville authorities tonight reported that a 20-year-old Ohio man had been arrested and had been charged with murder.
Two state police officers also died in a helicopter crash.
At a brief press conference this evening, Virginia officials declined to answer questions about the police response, but said they were not taken surprise by the violence or the number of protesters. "This could have been a much worse day," said Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, "We planned for a long time for today's incidents."
Charlottesville police Chief Al Thomas said at least 35 people had been injured — many of them from violent encounters between white supremacists and the counter-protesters. He said nobody had been wounded due to confrontations between police and the public.
In the weeks leading up to the protest, city and state officials put together a detailed plan for the rally, mobilizing 1,000 first responders, including 300 state police troopers and members of the National Guard. Judging from how events unfolded today, it appears that the strategy was to avoid direct confrontations with the protesters.
Miriam Krinsky, a former federal prosecutor who has worked on police reform efforts in Los Angeles, said it was too early to assess the law enforcement response in Charlottesville.
But she said a strategy of disengagement generally works to embolden unruly crowds.
"If things start to escalate and there's no response, it can very quickly get out of control," she said. "Individuals can and will get hurt."
But an overly forceful response, she said, can also make the situation worse. Krinsky said attempts to seize weapons might have led to more clashes between police and protesters. "Trying to take things away from people is unlikely to be a calming influence," she told ProPublica.
A good strategy, she said, is to make clashes less likely by separating the two sides physically, with officers forming a barrier between them. "Create a human barrier so the flash points are reduced as quickly as possible," she said.
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In violation of a longstanding legal mandate, scores of federal law enforcement agencies are failing to submit statistics to the FBI's national hate crimes database, ProPublica has learned.
The lack of participation by federal law enforcement represents a significant and largely unknown flaw in the database, which is supposed to be the nation's most comprehensive source of information on hate crimes. The database is maintained by the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division, which uses it to tabulate the number of alleged hate crimes occurring around the nation each year.
The FBI has identified at least 120 federal agencies that aren't uploading information to the database, according to Amy Blasher, a unit chief at the CJIS division, an arm of the bureau that is overseeing the modernization of its information systems.
The federal government operates a vast array of law enforcement agencies — ranging from Customs and Border Protection to the Drug Enforcement Administration to the Amtrak Police — employing more than 120,000 law enforcement officers with arrest powers. The FBI would not say which agencies have declined to participate in the program, but the bureau's annual tally of hate crimes statistics does not include any offenses handled by federal law enforcement. Indeed, the problem is so widespread that the FBI itself isn't submitting the hate crimes it investigates to its own database.
"We truly don't understand what's happening with crime in the U.S. without the federal component," Blasher said in an interview.
At present, the bulk of the information in the database is supplied by state and local police departments. In 2015, the database tracked more than 5,580 alleged hate crime incidents, including 257 targeting Muslims, an upward surge of 67 percent from the previous year. (The bureau hasn't released 2016 or 2017 statistics yet.)
But it's long been clear that hundreds of local police departments don't send data to the FBI, and so given the added lack of participation by federal law enforcement, the true numbers for 2015 are likely to be significantly higher.
A federal law, the 1988 Uniform Federal Crime Reporting Act, requires all U.S. government law enforcement agencies to send a wide variety of crime data to the FBI. Two years later, after the passage of another law, the bureau began collecting data about "crimes that manifest evidence of prejudice based on race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity." That was later expanded to include gender and gender identity.
The federal agencies that are not submitting data are violating the law, Blasher told us. She said she's in contact with about 20 agencies and is hopeful that some will start participating, but added that there is no firm timeline for that to happen.
"Honestly, we don't know how long it will take,"Blasher said of the effort to get federal agencies on board.
The issue goes far beyond hate crimes — federal agencies are failing to report a whole range of crime statistics, Blasher conceded. But hate crimes, and the lack of reliable data concerning them, have been of intense interest amid the country's highly polarized and volatile political environment.
ProPublica contacted several federal agencies seeking an explanation. A spokesperson for the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, which handles close to 50,000 offenses annually, said the service is adhering to Defense Department rules regarding crime data and is using a digital crime tracking system linked to the FBI's database. But the Army declined to say whether its statistics are actually being sent to the FBI, referring that question up the chain of command to the Department of Defense.
In 2014, an internal probe conducted by Defense Department investigators found that the "DoD is not reporting criminal incident data to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for inclusion in the annual Uniform Crime Reports."
ProPublica contacted the Defense Department for clarification, and shared with a department spokesman a copy of the 2014 reports acknowledging the failure to send data to the FBI.
"We have no additional information at this time," said Christopher Sherwood, the spokesman.
Federal agencies are hardly the only ones to skip out on reporting hate crimes. An Associated Press investigation last year found at least 2,700 city police and county sheriff's departments that repeatedly failed to report hate crimes to the FBI.
In the case of the FBI itself, Blasher said the issue is largely technological: Agents have long collected huge amounts of information about alleged hate crimes, but don't have a digital system to easily input that information to the database, which is administered by staff at an FBI complex in Clarksburg, West Virginia.
Since Blasher began pushing to modernize the FBI's data systems, the bureau has made some progress. It began compiling some limited hate crimes statistics for 2014 and 2015, though that information didn't go into the national hate crimes database.
In Washington, lawmakers were surprised to learn about the failure by federal agencies to abide by the law.
"It's fascinating and very disturbing," said Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., who said he wanted to speak about the matter with the FBI's government affairs team. He wants to see federal agencies "reporting hate crimes as soon as possible."
Beyer and other lawmakers have been working in recent years to improve the numbers of local police agencies participating in voluntary hate crime reporting efforts. Bills pending in Congress would give out grants to police forces to upgrade their computer systems; in exchange, the departments would begin uploading hate crime data to the FBI.
Beyer, who is sponsoring the House bill, titled the National Opposition to Hate, Assault, and Threats to Equality Act, said he would consider drafting new legislation to improve hate crimes reporting by federal agencies, or try to build such a provision into the appropriations bill.
"The federal government needs to lead by example. It's not easy to ask local and state governments to submit their data if these 120 federal agencies aren't even submitting hate crimes data to the database," Beyer said.
In the Senate, Democrat Al Franken of Minnesota said the federal agencies need to do better. "I've long urged the FBI and the Department of Justice to improve the tracking and reporting of hate crimes by state and local law enforcement agencies," Franken told ProPublica. "But in order to make sure we understand the full scope of the problem, the federal government must also do its part to ensure that we have accurate and trustworthy data."
Virginia's Barbara Comstock, a House Republican who authored a resolution in April urging the "Department of Justice (DOJ) and other federal agencies to work to improve the reporting of hate crimes," did not respond to requests for comment.
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The year was 2012. The place was Bowling Green, Ohio. A federal raid had uncovered what the authorities feared were the makings of a massacre. There were 18 firearms, among them two AR201315 assault rifles, an AR201310 assault rifle and a Remington Model 700 sniper rifle. There was body armor, too, and the authorities counted some 40,000 rounds of ammunition. An extremist had been arrested, and prosecutors suspected that he had been aiming to carry out a wide assortment of killings.
"This defendant, quite simply, was a well-funded, well-armed and focused one-man army of racial and religious hate," prosecutors said in a court filing.
The man arrested and charged was Richard Schmidt, a middle-aged owner of a sports-memorabilia business at a mall in town. Prosecutors would later call him a white supremacist. His planned targets, federal authorities said, had been African-Americans and Jews. They'd found a list with the names and addresses of those to be assassinated, including the leaders of NAACP chapters in Michigan and Ohio.
But Schmidt wound up being sentenced to less than six years in prison, after a federal judge said prosecutors had failed to adequately establish that he was a political terrorist, and he is scheduled for release in February 2018. The foiling of what the government worried was a credible plan for mass murder gained little national attention.
For some concerned about America's vulnerability to terrorism, the very real, mostly forgotten case of Richard Schmidt in Bowling Green, Ohio, deserves an important place in any debate about what is real and what is fake, what gets reported on by the news media and what doesn't. Those deeply worried about domestic far-right terrorism believe United States authorities, across many administrations, have regularly underplayed the threat, and that the media has repeatedly underreported it. Perhaps we have become trapped in one view of what constitutes the terrorist threat, and as the case of Schmidt shows, that's a problem.
The notion of a "Bowling Green massacre," of course, has been in the news recently. Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to President Donald Trump, referred to it in justifying the president's travel ban on people from seven predominantly Muslim countries. Conway had Bowling Green, Kentucky, in mind, but she eventually conceded there had been no massacre there. She meant, she said, to refer to the 2011 case of two Iraqi refugees who had moved to Kentucky and been convicted of trying to aid attacks on American military personnel in Iraq. One was sentenced to 40 years, the other to life in prison.
Her gaffe, accidental or intentional, prompted a mock vigil in New York and a flood of internet memes. The imaginary massacre now even has its own Wikipedia page.
On Monday, Trump made the provocative, unsubstantiated claim that the American media intentionally failed to cover acts of terrorism around the globe. "It's gotten to a point where it's not even being reported," he said in a speech to military commanders. "And in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn't want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that."
At the Southern Poverty Law Center, Ryan Lenz tracks racist and extreme-right terrorists. So far, he said, he's seen little from the Trump administration to suggest it will make a priority of combating political violence carried out by American racist groups.
"It doesn't seem at all like they are interested in pursuing extremists inspired by radical right ideologies," said Lenz, who edits the organization's HateWatch publication.
Indeed, Reuters reported last week that the Department of Homeland Security is planning to retool its Countering Violent Extremism program to focus solely on Islamic radicals. Government sources told the news agency the program would be rebranded as "Countering Islamic Extremism" or "Countering Radical Islamic Extremism," and "would no longer target groups such as white supremacists who have also carried out bombings and shootings in the United States."
It wouldn't be the first time the Department of Homeland Security chose to look away. In 2009, Daryl Johnson, then an analyst with the department, drafted a study of right-wing radicals in the United States. Johnson saw a confluence of factors that might energize the movement and its threat: the historic election of an African-American president; rising rates of immigration; proposed gun control legislation; and a wave of military veterans returning to civilian life at a time of painful economic recession.
The report predicted an uptick in extremist activity, particularly within "the white supremacist and militia movements."
Response to the document was swift and punishing. Conservative news outlets and Republican leaders condemned Johnson's report as a work of "anti-military bigotry" and an attack on conservative opinion. Janet Napolitano, the head of Homeland Security at the time, retracted the report and closed Johnson's office, the Extremism and Radicalization Branch.
Three years later, Richard Schmidt came to the attention of the federal government almost by accident. Schmidt had been suspected of trading in counterfeit NFL jerseys. Searching his home and store for fake goods, FBI agents discovered something far more sinister: a vast arsenal. A secret room attached to Schmidt's shop "contained nothing but his rifles, ammunition, body armor, his writings and a cot," wrote prosecutors in a court document.
Beefy, thick-necked, standing 6-foot-4 and weighing about 250 pounds, Schmidt had spent years in the Army as an active-duty soldier and a reservist. His military service ended in 1989 when he got into a fight and shot three people, killing one of them, a man named Anthony Torres. As a result, Schmidt spent 13 years in prison on a manslaughter conviction and was legally barred from owning firearms.
After searching his property, the government came to believe he was involved with the National Alliance, a virulent and long-running extremist group, which was once among the nation's most powerful white supremacist organizations. They also suspected him of an affiliation with the Vinlanders, a neo-Nazi skinhead gang.
Founded by William Pierce, who died in 2002, the National Alliance has long been linked to terrorism. Pierce, who started the group in 1970 and ran it for many years from a compound in West Virginia, wrote "The Turner Diaries," an apocalyptic novel that basically lays out a blueprint for unleashing a white supremacist insurgency against the government. The novel was described by Timothy J. McVeigh as the inspiration for his bombing in 1995 of a federal office building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.
FBI agents came to believe Schmidt had been planning his own string of racially motivated attacks on African-American and Jewish community leaders. The agents spread out across Ohio and Michigan to alert his apparent targets. "They had a notebook of information from Schmidt's home," recalled Scott Kaufman, the chief executive of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit. "Some of the items related specifically to our organization and staff 2014 people's names, locations, maps. It was certainly disturbing."
In court, the defense lawyer Edward G. Bryan disputed the government's portrayal of Schmidt, who was 47 at the time of his arrest. Bryan painted his client as a slightly eccentric survivalist who didn't intend to "harm anyone, including those listed in written materials found within his property."
The government saw it differently. Schmidt, prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo filed in court, planned to assassinate "members of religious and cultural groups based only on their race, religion and ethnicity." His cache of weapons, added prosecutors, had only one purpose: to start a "race war." Other court documents suggest that he planned to videotape his killing spree and email the video clips to his fellow white supremacists.
After pleading guilty to weapons and counterfeiting charges, Schmidt was sentenced to 71 months in federal prison by Judge Jack Zouhary in December 2013.
These days, Kaufman of the Jewish Federation in Detroit doesn't think much about Schmidt. He's got plenty of other things to worry about. "In the last two weeks in our community we've had two bomb scares," as well as an incident involving spray-painted swastikas, he said. He's noted a spike in anti-Semitic incidents over the past year.
"This whole thing is trending in the wrong direction," he said.
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The following story is original to ProPublica. This is part 1 and part 2 of a series on assisted living facilities.
Joan Boice needed help. Lots of it. Her physician had tallied the damage: Alzheimer’s disease, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, pain from a compression fracture of the spine. For Joan, an 81-year-old former schoolteacher, simply getting from her couch to the bathroom required the aid of a walker or wheelchair.
The Alzheimer’s, of course, was the worst. The disease had gradually left Joan unable to dress, eat or bathe without assistance. It had destroyed much of the complex cerebral circuitry necessary for forming words. It was stealing her voice.
Joan’s family was forced to do the kind of hard reckoning that so many American families must do these days. It was clear that Joan could no longer live at home. Her husband, Myron, simply didn’t have the stamina to provide the constant care and supervision she needed. And moving in with any of their three children wasn’t an option.
These were the circumstances that eventually led the Boice family to Emeritus at Emerald Hills, a sprawling, three-story assisted living facility off Highway 49 in Auburn, Calif. The handsome 110-bed complex was painted in shades of deep green and cream, reflecting its location on the western fringe of the craggy, coniferous Sierra Nevada mountain range. It was owned by the Emeritus Corp., a Seattle-based chain that was on its way to becoming the nation’s largest assisted living company, with some 500 facilities stretching across 45 states.
Emeritus at Emerald Hills promised state-of-the art care for Joan’s advancing dementia. Specially trained members of the staff would create an individual plan for Joan based on her life history. They would monitor her health, engage her in an array of physically and mentally stimulating activities, and pass out her 11 prescription medications, which included morphine (for pain) and the anti-psychotic drug Seroquel (given in hopes of curbing some of the symptoms of her Alzheimer’s). She would live in the “memory care” unit, a space designed specifically to keep people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia safe.
At Emerald Hills, the setting was more like an apartment complex than a traditional nursing home. It didn’t feel cold or clinical or sterile. Myron could move in as well, renting his own apartment on the other side of the building; after more than 50 years of marriage, the couple could remain together.
Sure, the place was expensive — the couple would be paying $7,125 per month — but it seemed ideal.
During a tour, a salesperson gave Myron and his two sons, Eric and Mark, a brochure. “Just because she’s confused at times,” the brochure reassured them, “doesn’t mean she has to lose her independence.”
Here are a few things the brochure didn’t mention:
Just months earlier, Emeritus supervisors had audited the facility’s process for handling medications. It had been found wanting in almost every important regard. And, in truth, those “specially trained” staffers hadn’t actually been trained to care for people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, a violation of California law.
The facility relied on a single nurse to track the health of its scores of residents, and the few licensed medical professionals who worked there tended not to last long. During the three years prior to Joan’s arrival, Emerald Hills had cycled through three nurses and was now employing its fourth. At least one of those nurses was alarmed by what she saw, telling top Emeritus executives — in writing — that Emerald Hills suffered from “a huge shortage of staff” and was mired in“total dysfunction.”
During some stretches, the facility went months without a full-time nurse on the payroll.
The paucity of workers led to neglect, according to a nurse who oversaw the facility before resigning in disgust. Calls for help went unanswered. Residents suffering from incontinence were left soaking in their own urine. One woman, addled by dementia, was allowed to urinate in the same spot in the hallway of the memory care wing over and over and over.
The brochure also made no mention of the company’s problems at its other facilities. State inspectors for years had cited Emeritus facilities across California, faulting them for failing to employ enough staff members or adequately train them, as well as for other basic shortcomings.
Emeritus officials have described any shortcomings as isolated, and insist that any problems that arise are promptly addressed. They cite the company’s growing popularity as evidence of consumer satisfaction. They say that 90 percent of people who take up residence in assisted living facilities across the country report being pleased with the experience.
Certainly, the Boice family, unaware of the true troubles at Emerald Hills, was set to be reassured.
“We were all impressed,” recalled Eric Boice, Joan’s son. “The first impression we had was very positive.”
And so on Sept. 12, 2008, Joan Boice moved into Room 101 at Emerald Hills. She would be sharing the room with another elderly woman. After a succession of tough years, it was a day of great optimism.
Measuring the dimensions of his mother’s new apartment, Eric Boice sought to recreate the feel of her bedroom back home. He arranged the furniture just as it had been. He hung her favorite pictures in the same spots on the wall. On her dresser, he set out her mirror and jewelry box and hairbrush.
Joan, 5-foot-2 and shrinking, had short snow-and-steel hair and wintry gray-blue eyes. Eric looked into those eyes that day at Emerald Hills. He thinks he might have seen a flicker of fear. Or maybe it was just confusion, his mom still uncertain where, exactly, she was.
A Reform Movement Winds Up on Wall Street
The Emeritus Corp., the assisted living corporation now entrusted with Joan’s life, sat atop an exploding industry.
Two decades earlier, Keren Brown Wilson had opened the nation’s first licensed assisted living facility in Canby, Ore., a small town outside of Portland. Wilson was inspired by tragedy: A massive stroke had paralyzed her mother at the age of 55, forcing her into a nursing home, where she was miserable, spending the bulk of her days confined to a hospital bed.
Wilson aimed to create an alternative to nursing homes. She envisioned comfortable, apartment building-style facilities that would allow sick and fragile seniors to maintain as much personal autonomy as possible.
“I wanted a place where people could lock the door,” Wilson explained. “I wanted a place where they could bring their belongings. I wanted a place where they could go to bed when they wanted to. I wanted a place where they could eat what they wanted.”
These “assisted living” facilities would offer housing, meals and care to people who could no longer live on their own but didn’t need intensive, around-the-clock medical attention. The people living in these places would be called “residents” — not patients.
It took Wilson nine years to persuade Oregon legislators to rewrite the state’s laws, a crucial step toward establishing this new type of facility. After that, states across the country began adopting the “Oregon model.”
But what began as a reform movement quickly morphed into a lucrative industry. One of the early entrants was Emeritus, which got into the assisted living business in 1993, opening a single facility in Renton, Wash. The company’s leader, Daniel Baty, had his eyes on something much grander: He was, he declared, aiming to create a nationwide chain of assisted living facilities.
Two years later, Baty took the corporation public, selling shares of Emeritus on the American Stock Exchange, and piling up the cash necessary to vastly enlarge the company’s footprint. Many of Emeritus’s competitors followed the same path.
The company’s rapid growth was, at least in part, a reflection of two significant developments. Americans were living longer, with the number of those in the 65-plus age bracket ballooning further every year. And this growing population of older Americans was willing to spend serious money, often willing to drain their bank accounts completely to preserve some semblance of independence and dignity — in short, something of their former lives.
As the assisted living business flourished, the federal government, which oversees nursing homes, left the regulation of the new industry to the states, which were often unprepared for this torrent of expansion and development. Many states didn’t develop comprehensive regulations for assisted living, choosing instead to simply tweak existing laws governing boarding homes.
In this suddenly booming, but haphazardly regulated industry, no company expanded more aggressively than Emeritus. By 2006, it was operating more than 200 facilities in 35 states. The corporation’s strategy included buying up smaller chains, many of them distressed and financially troubled, with plans to turn them around.
Wall Street liked the model. Market analysts touted the virtues of the company and its stock price floated skyward. One of the corporation’s appeals was that its revenues flowed largely from private bank accounts; unlike hospitals or nursing homes, Emeritus wasn’t reliant on payments from the government insurance programs Medicare or Medicaid, whose reimbursement rates can be capped. As the company noted in its 2006 annual report, nearly 90 percent of its revenues came from “private pay residents.”
In filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and in conference calls with investors, Emeritus highlighted many things: occupancy rates; increasing revenue; a constant stream of complex real estate deals and acquisitions; the favorable demographic trends of an aging America.
“The target market for our services is generally persons 75 years and older who represent the fastest growing segments of the U.S. population,” Emeritus stated in a 2007 report filed with the SEC.
Today, the assisted living industry rivals the scale of the nursing home business, housing nearly three-quarters of a million people in more than 31,000 assisted living facilities, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Keren Brown Wilson, the early and earnest pioneer of assisted living, is happy that ailing seniors across the country now have the chance to spend their final years in assisted living facilities, rather than nursing homes. But in her view, the rise of assisted living corporations — with their pursuit of investment capital and their need to please shareholders — swept in “a whole new wave of people” more focused on “deals and mergers and acquisitions” than caring for the elderly.
She speaks from experience. After her modest start, Wilson went on to lead a company called Assisted Living Concepts, and took it onto the stock market. Wilson left the company in 2001, and it has encountered a raft of regulatory and financial problems over the last decade.
“I still have a lot of fervor,” said Wilson, who now runs a nonprofit foundation and teaches at Portland State University. “I believe passionately in what assisted living can do. And I’ve seen what it can do. But for some of the people, it’s just another job, or another business. It’s not a passion.”
“A Phenomenal Deal”
Joan Boice, born Joan Elizabeth Wayne, grew up in Monmouth, Ill. It was a tiny farm belt community, not far from the Iowa border. Her father, a fixture in the local agriculture trade, owned a trio of riverfront grain elevators on the Mississippi and a fleet of barges. As a teenager, she spent her summers trudging through the fields, de-tasseling corn.
In 1952, accompanied by a friend, Joan packed up a car and followed the highway as far west as it would go. Then in her early 20s, she was propelled by little more than the notion that a different life awaited her in California. In a black-and-white snapshot taken shortly after she arrived, Joan is smiling, a luxuriant sweep of dark hair framing her pale face, gray waves curling in the background. It was the first time she’d seen the Pacific.
Joan had been a teacher for two years in Illinois, and she quickly found a job at an elementary school in Hayward, a suburb of San Francisco. In certain regards, her outlook presaged the progressive social movements that were to remake the country during the next two decades. She viewed education as a “great equalizing force” that could help to remake a society far too stratified by class, race and gender.
“She was just free-spirited and confident,” Eric, her son, said.
Joan met Myron Boice through a singles group at a Presbyterian church in Berkeley. On their wedding day, Joan flouted convention by showing up in a blue dress. The Boice children came along fairly quickly: Nancee, then Mark, then Eric.
Myron Boice was a dreamer. A chronic entrepreneur. He sold tools from a van. He made plans to open restaurants. He had one idea after another. Some worked; others didn’t.
Joan’s passion for education never dissipated. Even in her late 60s, she continued to work as a substitute teacher in public schools. After retirement, she began volunteering with a childhood literacy program.
But age eventually tightened its grip, and hints of a mental decline began surfacing around 2005. Eric grew worried when she couldn’t figure out how to turn on her computer twice in the span of a few months. Then she forgot to include a key ingredient while baking a batch of Christmas cookies. The cookies were inedible.
The elderly couple was still living in the San Francisco suburbs, when, in late 2006, a doctor diagnosed Joan with Alzheimer’s. As her mind deteriorated, Myron struggled to meet her needs. The situation was worsened by the fact that none of the children lived nearby. Mark was in Ohio. Nancee was about an hour away in Santa Cruz. And Eric and his wife, Kathleen, were roughly two hours away in the foothills of the Sierra.
“We offered my parents to come and live with us,” Eric recalled. But Myron said no. He and Joan wouldn’t move in with any of the kids. The family patriarch refused to become a burden.
A physician encouraged Joan and Myron to consider assisted living. It made sense. And so Myron sold their home in 2007 and the couple moved into a facility called The Palms, near Sacramento. The move put them approximately 40 minutes away from Eric and Kathleen.
“They were very attentive to every single thing she needed,” Kathleen Boice said of the staff at The Palms. “They actually re-taught her to eat with a fork and a knife.”
By 2008, however, Myron wanted a change. He wanted to be closer to his son and daughter-in-law and grandkids. He wanted different meals, a new environment. Myron began hunting for a new place to live, a search that led to Emeritus at Emerald Hills in Auburn.
Emeritus opened the Emerald Hills complex in 1998. It was, in many ways, a classic Emeritus facility, situated in a middle-class locale that was neither impoverished nor especially affluent. It was a sizable property, capable of housing more than 100 people.
In part because of its appetite for expansion, Emeritus was in the early stages of what proved to be a period of enormous stress. In 2007, the company had made its biggest acquisition to date, buying Summerville Senior Living Inc., a California-based chain with 81 facilities scattered across 13 states.
The purchase — which expanded Emeritus’s size by roughly one-third — helped the company make another major leap, bouncing from the low-profile American Stock Exchange into the big leagues of commerce, the New York Stock Exchange. News of the Summerville deal propelled the company’s stock to a new high. Emeritus was poised to become the nation’s No. 1 assisted living chain.
But the timing for this bold move turned out to be wretched. The real estate market was freezing up, and it would soon collapse, plunging the nation into an epochal recession. For Emeritus, the economic slowdown and then the housing crash posed direct challenges. Its services didn’t come cheap, so many people needed to sell their homes before they could afford to move into the company’s facilities. With the real estate market calcified, Emeritus’s customer pool shrank.
“Our stock price plummeted,” recalled Granger Cobb, Emeritus’s chief executive officer, who joined the company as part of the Summerville deal. The company’s occupancy rates had been trending skywards. Now they went flat.
At Emerald Hills, the economic slowdown that summer was making life tough for Melissa Gratiot, the lead sales agent.
“It was way harder to move residents in,” she remembered.
But there was some good news. She was close to a significant sale, this one to a couple. Gratiot worked the pitch. She talked with the family. She emailed. She gave them a tour of the facility’s memory care unit, called The Emerald City. She told the family she’d received approval from higher ups to offer the family “a phenomenal deal.”
Gratiot closed the sale. On Aug. 29, 2008, Myron and Eric signed the contract, and the family opened its wallet: A $2,500 initial move-in fee; $2,772 for Joan's first two weeks in Room 101; another $1,660 for Myron.
There had been one oversight, though. No one at Emeritus with any medical training had ever even met Joan, much less determined whether Emerald Hills could safely care for her.
Correction (7/29): An earlier version of this story stated that Emeritus at Emerald Hills had failed a company audit of its memory care unit before Joan Boice moved in. It has been corrected to say an audit found flaws in the facility’s medication handling process before Boice moved in. The memory care unit was audited while Boice was living there and failed nearly every important test.
PART 2 -- "They're Not Treating Mom Well"
When the ambulance crew arrived, about 8:20 p.m., Joan Boice was in the TV lounge, face-down on the carpet. Her head had struck the floor with some velocity; bruises were forming on her forehead and both cheeks. It appeared she’d lost her balance and fallen out of a chair.
But no one at the assisted living facility could say precisely how the accident had occurred. No one knew how long Joan had been splayed out on the floor. She had defecated and urinated on herself.
Worried that Joan might have injured her spine, the emergency medical personnel gently rolled her over and placed her on a back board. They pumped oxygen into her nostrils.
It was Sept. 22, 2008 — just 10 days after Joan had first moved into Emerald Hills.
No Emeritus employees accompanied Joan to the hospital. And even though Joan’s husband, Myron, was living in the facility, the Emeritus workers didn’t immediately alert him that Joan had fallen and hurt herself. Joan, confused, injured, and nearly mute, ended up in the local hospital by herself, surrounded by strangers.
California law requires assisted living companies to conduct a “pre-admission appraisal” of prospective residents, to ensure they are appropriate candidates for assisted living.
But Emerald Hills took Joan in without performing an appraisal. It wasn’t for lack of time. The Boices had signed the contract to live at Emerald Hills more than two weeks before Joan moved in.
Joan, then, had taken up residence in the memory care unit at Emerald Hills. The unit — referred to as a “neighborhood” by the company — is a collection of abouta dozen small apartments on either side of a central hallway. At each end of the hallway are heavy doors equipped with alarms, which sound when anyone enters or leaves. The alarm system is meant to prevent residents from simply walking off.
On the day Joan moved into Room 101 in the unit, a company nurse named Margaret “Peggy” Stevenson briefly looked her over. The nurse realized that Joan needed to be monitored closely to keep her from falling — she wrote it down in her cursory assessment — but facility records show she didn’t craft any kind of detailed plan for her care and supervision.
Stevenson, asked years later about Joan, said she could recall nothing about her or her stay at Emerald Hills.
Kathleen had immediate suspicions about Joan’s fall. The family, she said, had warned the facility not to leave Joan sitting in a chair without supervision because she was liable to try to stand up, lose her balance, and topple to the floor. Joan had fallen several times during an earlier stay in an assisted living facility near Sacramento, but the staff had developed a specific plan to address the issue.
Despite the warning, Kathleen said that when she visited Emerald Hills during Joan’s first days there she often found her mother-in-law sitting in a chair alone.
The recent track record at Emerald Hills featured a host of falls similar to Joan’s, and ambulances were often called to take the injured off to the hospital. Falls are a particular hazard for the elderly, and assisted living facilities like Emerald Hills are required to report them to state regulators.
Internal company records documented 112 falls at Emerald Hills in 2008. Some residents fell repeatedly.
Consider the case of one Emerald Hills resident, 83-year-old Dorothy “Dottie” Bullock.
On April 5, 2008, an Emeritus employee discovered Bullock “on the floor in a semi-seated position” in the memory care unit, according to a state report. She “was unable to tell” the worker what had happened to her. The incident was described as a fall in state records. Emerald Hills sent her to the hospital.
On April 7, Bullock, back at Emerald Hills, fell again, according to the handwritten log of her personal attendant, who was hired by Bullock’s husband to give her extra help.
On April 8, Bullock, complaining of pain, was hauled by ambulance back to the hospital. Doctors concluded that she’d fractured her pelvis, but soon returned her to Emerald Hills. She fell again on April 12.
Bullock would fall again months later, for the final time.
Emeritus records show Bullock tumbled in front of her apartment and was found on the carpet with her aluminum walker beneath her. Blood spilled from her nose and a “bump” developed on her forehead, according to the company documents. The impact broke a vertebra in Bullock’s neck and crushed her nasal bones and sinus structures, hospital records show. A CT scan revealed possible fractures of both eye-sockets and the base of the skull.
Dottie Bullock died in the emergency room.
While Emeritus recorded the fatality in its internal logs, the company did not report her death to state regulators, a violation of California law. The state requires assisted living facilities to file reports on all deaths, even those believed to be from natural causes, so that it can look into suspicious or troubling incidents.
Emeritus said it lacked information about Bullock’s death and thus could not say why it had occurred.
Bullock’s personal attendant, Julie Covich, says Bullock was not supervised properly.
“I think there was neglect,” said Covich, who usually visited Emerald Hills once or twice a week to help out Bullock. “I would go in there and never see a caregiver.”
“It was hard to find anyone that was running the place,” she said. “It was crazy.”
“Heads on the Beds”
In early 2008, the year Joan Boice entered Emerald Hills, Emeritus rolled out a new business campaign. The company dubbed it the “No Barriers to Sales” effort.
The concept was straightforward: Move as many people as possible into Emeritus facilities. Wall Street was looking closely at the company’s quarterly occupancy numbers and a few percentage points could propel the stock price upward or send it tumbling down.
With the housing market foundering, Emeritus needed to step up its sales efforts.
In case there was any confusion about just how seriously the company took this new campaign, a company vice president sent a blast email to facility directors across California. In the body of the email, the vice president got right to it:“SALES and your commitment to sales is your highest priority right now.” Facility directors, the message concluded, would be “held responsible for census and occupancy growth.”
Emeritus employees across the country realized they were entering a new era.
“There was a different sense of urgency. The tone was different,” said a former Emeritus manager who ran a facility at the time. “The message from above was put as many people as possible in the beds and make as much money as possible. That’s what they said. Verbatim. Honestly.”
According to Lisa Paglia, a regional executive in California at the time, Budgie Amparo, the company’s top official for quality control, was openly critical when a Northern California facility declined to admit someone who did not have a doctor’s evaluation.
Such evaluations, which are designed to keep out seniors with problems that assisted living facilities aren’t equipped to handle, are required under a California law known as Title 22.
But on a conference call with roughly half a dozen California managers, Paglia said, Amparo declared that the Northern California facility should have admitted the resident.
“Our priority,” Amparo declared, according to Paglia, “is to get the heads on the beds.”
The issue arose again in October 2008 during a training session for approximately 25 facility directors and salespeople held at an Emeritus property in Tracy, Calif. During the seminar, a company vice president reiterated Amparo’s instruction to disregard California law, according to court records and interviews.
The mandate prompted something of a staff revolt.
At least one facility director spoke out at the meeting: His license to operate the facility was at stake, he said.
An employee who worked at the Tracy facility eventually alerted California regulators. The state dispatched an investigator, and state records show that the investigator met with employees who confirmed that a company official had approved the practice of admitting someone without a doctor’s report. The investigator reviewed a random sample of seven resident files, finding that two people had been moved in illegally, documents show.
Amparo, a nurse whose full title is executive vice president of quality and risk management, denies directing employees to violate the regulation. In a written statement, Emeritus said, “Neither Budgie Amparo nor any of our other officers issued a directive to violate Title 22 or any other law. Emeritus does not condone allowing residents to move in without the proper documents.”
Emeritus eventually fired Paglia, and lawyers for the company have since portrayed her as a poor worker who failed to do her job competently. Along with two other former Emeritus employees, Paglia sued the company alleging wrongful termination, and wound up settling on secret terms.
For assisted living chains such as Emeritus, there is a powerful business incentive to boost occupancy rates and to take in sicker residents, who can be charged more.
Emeritus, for its part, rejects any suggestion that a quest for profits has tainted its admission practices. But in interviews, former Emeritus executives described a corporate culture that often emphasized cash flow above all else. The accounts of the executives, who spoke independently but anonymously, were strikingly consistent.
“It was completely focused on numbers and not human lives,” said one executive, who worked for Emeritus for more than three years and oversaw dozens of facilities in Eastern states.
The company’s emphasis on sales and occupancy rates, the executive said, transformed the workforce into “a group of people who were grasping at every single lever they could pull to drive profitability.”
Emeritus operates a sophisticated, data-driven sales machine. There are occupancy goals for each facility, as well as yearly company-wide goals. The company tracks dozens of data points — including every move-in and move-out of residents — in a vast database. It posts a monthly snapshot of each facility’s sales statistics on an internal website, allowing employees to see which strategies are most successful.
Sales specialists are instructed on how to use psychology to persuade potential customers to sign on. One suggestion: Give the customer “a sense of control and choice by offering two possible options.” A 2009 Emeritus sales manual, which runs 181 pages, encourages sales people to generate publicity by hosting seminars on Alzheimer’s or organizing charity efforts in the event of a natural disaster like a “flood or earthquake.”
Emeritus motivates its workforce with a broad range of financial incentives. There are bonuses for hitting monthly occupancy goals. Bonuses for hitting yearly occupancy goals. Bonuses for boosting overall earnings. And the money doesn’t just go to sales people: The company hands out checks to maintenance workers, nurses, facility directors and other workers.
Nurses play a key role in assisted living, providing much of the hands-on care. But nurses at Emeritus facilities are also expected to be deeply involved in increasing revenue by making sales.
During more than a year of reporting, ProPublica and PBS Frontline spoke to 10 facility directors who said nurses were required to participate in weekly conference calls focusing on little but economics. Those accounts are backed by an internal Emeritus document that lays out the agenda for the weekly calls and that shows an overarching concentration on finances.
Doris Marshall was at the forefront of Emeritus’s efforts to have nurses play the dual roles of caregivers and salespeople. After receiving her nursing license in 1984, Marshall had spent many years tending to patients in the emergency department of a Southern California hospital, and she’d later gone on to help run a nursing school.
But Marshall was intrigued by the assisted living business and in March 2008 she signed on to supervise 10 Emeritus properties scattered across Northern California. Amparo, the company’s head nurse, convinced Marshall to take the job, telling her nurses “had a voice” at Emeritus.
Marshall was to oversee the well-being of roughly 800 elderly people. But her job description went well beyond that: She was to help with “marketing” and “attaining financial goals.” Her job, in the end, actually involved very little nursing.
Instead, she said, she was drawn into Emeritus’s evolving strategies aimed at upping its revenues. The company planned to bring in more seniors with Alzheimer’s and dementia because they could be charged more, she said. Her boss gave her a digital tracking tool showing how much more money Emeritus could make by admitting sicker, frailer residents.
By the fall of 2010 Marshall was worn out and disillusioned. She quit.
Emeritus’s extraordinary drive to put heads in beds — perhaps routine in, say, the hotel industry — has distorted the admissions process at some facilities, records and interviews show. Since 2007, state investigators have cited the company’s facilities more than 30 times for housing people who should have been prohibited from dwelling in assisted living facilities.
A 2010 episode at an Emeritus facility in Napa highlighted the perils of improperly admitting people. The facility rented a room to a 57-year-old woman with an eating disorder, depression, bipolar disorder and a history of suicide attempts. The woman, who was distraught over the death of her husband, taped a note to her door saying she wasn’t to be disturbed and committed suicide, overdosing on an amalgam of prescription painkillers.
The state’s investigation into the death was scathing: the woman should never have been allowed to move in; the staff had missed or ignored bulimic episodes and her obvious weight loss; no plan of care was ever developed or implemented despite the resident’s profound psychological problems.
Emeritus, asked to respond to the state’s investigation, said only that the woman had overdosed on drugs she had brought into the facility on her own, and that as a result they could not be faulted in her death.
“She Barely Even Talked to Us”
In the aftermath of her fall in September 2008, Joan returned to Emerald Hills. But the staff, inexperienced and often exhausted, worried about her.
“She couldn’t walk, she couldn’t feed herself, she barely even talked to us, and her health wasn’t that good,” recalled Jenny Hitt, a former medication technician at Emerald Hills.
But if concern was abundant at Emerald Hills, expertise was in short supply.
Alicia Parga ran Joan’s memory care unit. On some weekends, she managed the entire building — not only the wing of residents with dementia, but the rest of the three-story assisted living facility, one that could hold a total of more than 100 residents.
After Parga started on the job, it took Emeritus roughly 18 months to give her any training on Alzheimer’s and dementia. The state regulations were hardly substantial: Someone such as Parga was obligated to get six hours of training during her first four weeks on the job. But even that requirement wasn’t met.
Emeritus has insisted that Emerald Hills had properly trained personnel to care for Joan and others, and they described Parga as a woman deeply invested in tending to the residents.
But Parga, who had barely earned a high school degree, wasn’t even familiar with the seven stages of dementia. Though she was responsible for the well-being of 15 or more seriously impaired people, as well as the supervision of employees, Parga was paid less than $30,000 per year.
Catherine Hawes, a health care researcher at Texas A&M University, conducted the first national study of assisted living facilities. In her view, training is absolutely crucial. A well-educated employee can “interpret non-verbal cues” from people like Joan, intercept seniors before they wander away from the building, or keep residents from eating or drinking poisonous substances.
“You can do great care,” she said. “You just — you’ve got to know how.”
Other than the Emeritus employees working in the memory care unit at Emerald Hills, only one person saw Joan enough to know what kind of daily care she was getting: Her husband, Myron.
He was worried. And he did his best to sum up his concerns to his son Eric:
When I began investigating the mysterious death of Henry Glover, one of the most notable aspects of the case was the lack of documents.
Here was a New Orleans resident found incinerated in a car just a few hundred feet from a police station in September 2005, shortly after Hurricane Katrina. Yet there was no sign that anyone in authority had ever conducted any sort of investigation. The New Orleans Police Department told me in 2008 that they knew absolutely nothing about Glover’s demise.
Today’s indictment suggests that was not true. The 11-count indictment accuses police officers of shooting Glover and torching his corpse, physically attacking his brother and another man, and then attempting to conceal it all.
What’s most striking about the charging documents is what they do not address: The extraordinary number of officers in the department who were likely aware of these events as they unfolded.
To recap:
David Warren, the former officer indicted for allegedly shooting Glover with a .223 rifle round, was accompanied by another officer when he fired the shot.
At that point, a man named William Tanner tried to help Glover, driving him and his brother to seek medical assistance at an elementary school that had been commandeered by a SWAT team of officers. (Tanner didn’t know that Glover had allegedly been shot by a police officer.)
The SWAT officers at the school failed to provide Glover with any medical assistance. Instead, prosecutors say, Lt. Dwayne Scheuermann and Officer Greg McRae “kicked and hit” Tanner and Glover’s brother, Edward King, without cause.
Numerous – possibly dozens – of other officers were likely present at the site of the alleged beatings. In an interview this week, a SWAT officer told me 50 to 60 cops were camped out at the school at any given time in the days after Katrina. (The officer declined to comment directly on the Glover matter.)
After Glover died, prosecutors say in the indictment, Scheuermann and McRae set fire to Glover’s body as it sat inside Tanner’s 2001 Chevrolet Malibu, which was parked on a Mississippi River levee.
That spot lies a remarkably short distance from the NOPD’s 4th District headquarters. All my reporting shows many other officers were aware that a man had been reduced to ashes there—it’s hard to fathom how cops stationed a few hundred feet away could have failed to notice such an inferno.
Yet none of these officers apparently saw fit to speak out about what happened at the time, or to alert superiors to possible misconduct by their peers.
When I began looking into Glover’s death, nobody at NOPD had conducted any sort of probe—in fact the burnt car was still sitting in the weeds just down the street from the police station.
His mother, Edna Glover, told me she’d gone to the department and made a police report, but had never received any real help in uncovering what became of her son. In the months to come, perhaps she’ll finally get a full accounting.
And hopefully, somewhere along the way somebody will ask the question: Who else within the NOPD knew about the sad and horrible death of Henry Glover?
Federal agents have broadened their investigation of the New Orleans Police Department and are now looking into three post-Katrina police shootings detailed in a news series published by ProPublica, The Times-Picayune and the PBS series “Frontline” in December.
Assistant Superintendent Marlon Defillo of the NOPD confirmed that the FBI has subpoenaed documents relating to the shootings—which included police investigative reports, as well as other related files—in the past two months.
Separately, two independent experts who reviewed the newly available autopsy report of Matthew McDonald, one of those shot, said it raised fresh questions about the shooting and its circumstances. One expert said the man, a 41-year-old drifter from Connecticut, may have been hit by the single round that killed him as he lay prone on the ground. The other expert criticized efforts to gather evidence, calling the New Orleans coroner’s forensic work in the case “incomplete at best.”
Sheila Thorne, a special agent in the FBI’s field office in New Orleans, confirmed that agents were “looking into the circumstances surrounding Matthew McDonald’s death.” She declined to discuss the other two shootings featured in the series.
Jim Gallagher, spokesman for the local Fraternal Order of Police lodge, said Thursday afternoon that he was unaware that the FBI probe had widened and that he was not in a position to comment.
The federal subpoenas are the latest development in the long-running investigation of the NOPD. For more than a year, agents have been examining two controversial post-Katrina episodes: the Danziger Bridge incident, during which officers killed two civilians and wounded four others; and the death of Henry Glover, who witnesses say died while in NOPD custody in Algiers. Federal investigators believe a police officer shot Glover, according to the officer’s lawyer and other sources close to the probe.
DA Declines to Charge
Out of all of the police shooting cases examined in the news series, the McDonald case was perhaps the most mysterious.
Exactly when the NOPD concluded its own investigation into the McDonald shooting is unknown, as are the department’s findings about the case. Police said in their initial report they could find no other witnesses to the incident.
The NOPD has repeatedly refused to provide reporters with the supplemental report by homicide detectives that determined whether or not the shooting was justified. City Attorney Penya Moses-Fields earlier this month stated in a letter that the report could not be released because the case is “the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation,” although she did not explain which agency was investigating.
The Orleans Parish district attorney’s files show the police documents on the case were turned over to the agency in May 2007, said Chris Bowman, communications director for the office. The DA’s public corruption unit, which at the time looked at every officer-involved shooting, reviewed the case and decided in September 2007 that criminal charges were not warranted, he said.
“It was refused because there was no evidence that was contrary to what the police said happened,” Bowman said.
According to the NOPD’s seven-page initial incident report, Lt. Bryant Wininger confronted McDonald on the afternoon of Sept. 3, 2005, because he was clutching a white plastic bag containing a handgun and a bottle.
McDonald was ordered by police to drop the bag, but he refused, instead reaching inside, according to the report. He then allegedly raised the bag toward Wininger, who fired his AR-15 assault rifle at McDonald as he began turning away, the report stated.
After again ordering McDonald to drop the gun, Wininger fired a second shot, and McDonald fell to the ground, the report said.
Wininger has declined to comment on the shooting. The day of the shooting, he was patrolling in a white pickup truck with three other officers: Det. Nicholas Gernon, Sgt. Daniel Scanlan and officer Nick Pearson. NOPD officers are barred, by agency policy, from speaking to the media.
‘Swept Him Under the Carpet’
A hard-drinking drifter from the Northeast, McDonald left behind family members and a girlfriend in Norwich, Conn. McDonald’s relatives didn’t know he’d been slain by an officer until they were contacted by a reporter in late 2009.
His sister-in-law, Kerry McDonald, said the police department “led us to believe it was a civilian” who killed McDonald. In her view, the NOPD “just swept him under the carpet like he was discarded garbage and nobody cared about him, which was not true.”
A friend of McDonald’s who met the Connecticut native on the streets before Katrina and hung out with him after the storm said he doesn’t recall his friend ever carrying a gun.
Mike Perez, a frequently homeless man who contacted reporters after the initial story appeared in December, said the two men spent the days after the storm looking for places to crash and alcohol to drink. During their time together, he never spotted the 9mm handgun that police reported taking from McDonald after he was shot.
Perez, however, remembered his friend picking a white plastic bag out of a trash can that morning to hold beer and water bottles.
The two men had been drinking beer in the French Quarter just hours before McDonald was shot, Perez said. Perez, who was waiting for his brother to arrive to drive him to Baton Rouge, invited McDonald to come along.
McDonald agreed but said he needed to try to get some money from a friend first, heading off toward Rampart Street, he said. McDonald never returned, and when Perez’s brother arrived, he left.
Autopsy Report Analyzed
As federal agents begin looking at the McDonald killing, one key piece of evidence has recently resurfaced.
In December, the coroner’s chief investigator, John Gagliano, told reporters the McDonald autopsy had been misplaced and could not be found.
After the stories appeared, a CNN producer who’d obtained that document several years ago provided it to reporters.
The six-page autopsy report shows McDonald was slain by “one penetrating gunshot wound” to the left back, which broke ribs, punctured a lung and caused internal bleeding. Tracing an upward trajectory, the bullet moved from “bottom-to-top” as it tore through the man’s body, according to the autopsy.
Two independent experts reviewed the autopsy and available police documents at the request of reporters and focused on the angle of the fatal shot.
James Lauridson, a forensic pathologist and former chief medical examiner for the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences, said he was able to draw some conclusions about the circumstances of the shooting from the documents. He saw two likely possibilities.
McDonald was “possibly crouched down in a protective manner” when Wininger fired, said Lauridson. “The other alternative is that he was flat on his face.”
The police report is thin on details, but it suggests Wininger fired the fatal shot as McDonald was standing and trying to pivot away from the gunfire. According to the NOPD report, Wininger took two more shots at McDonald as he lay on the pavement after he allegedly continued reaching for the gun in the white bag. Neither of those shots “appeared to have wounded him,” the report stated.
In Lauridson’s opinion, the possible discrepancies between how the police report describes the shooting and the autopsy findings are understandable. In a shooting situation, he noted, emotions run extremely high, and the people involved often have trouble accurately remembering all the details.
Louis Levy, who worked as a forensic pathologist for several North Carolina counties, also studied the autopsy and police report. Levy, who now performs autopsies for private clients, thinks McDonald “could’ve been standing up, but leaning forward as if he was going to dash away from the police” when he was shot. He didn’t think McDonald was shot while lying down.
However, Levy said it was hard to be certain because the forensic work was “incomplete at best.” He faulted the Orleans Parish coroner’s office for failing to collect the bullet—or bullet fragments—and McDonald’s clothes from West Jefferson Medical Center, where police state in their report they took McDonald after he was shot.
The garments, Levy explained, could have been stained with gunshot residue, which would offer clues about the distance between McDonald and Wininger when the shot was fired.
Coroner Declines to Comment
The autopsy, conducted by pathologist Samantha Huber, noted the body was inside a body bag on a blood-soaked green sheet. No clothing was in the body bag received by the coroner’s office, the report stated, which also noted that “no projectile” was present in the body.
The report did not state how the coroner’s office received the body.
Minyard declined to comment on Thursday, saying he would need to review the autopsy and could not talk until Monday.
But the longtime Orleans Parish coroner has often discussed the gruesome and difficult conditions that faced his team of forensic pathologists after Katrina. With the New Orleans morgue flooded, doctors dissected more than a thousand bodies in makeshift forensic centers in oppressive heat with inadequate resources.
Many bodies were seriously decomposed because they were left out in the heat, but that doesn’t appear to be the situation with McDonald.
For McDonald’s loved ones, the autopsy hasn’t diminished their skepticism about his death. John McDonald doesn’t believe his brother would have disobeyed commands coming from a police officer aiming an assault rifle in his direction. “Matt would’ve put his arms up and said, ‘All right, you got me.’ He would’ve laid down,” John McDonald said. “He would’ve laid down.”
Tom Jennings of “Frontline” contributed to this report.
Earlier this month, with little fanfare, the U.S. Department of Justice released a new study on suicides in juvenile lock-ups -- institutions ranging from county detention centers to state correctional facilities to privately run boot camps and ranches.
Or, more accurately: DOJ released a 5-year-old study based on data dating back to the 1990s.
The author of the study, which was commissioned by the DOJ's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, says federal officials allowed his work to gather dust for approximately a half decade before finally publishing it this month.
"This was the first national study on juvenile suicide in confinement and it was important to get the data out," said the author, Lindsay Hayes, a Massachusetts researcher and consultant who crafted the report as a contractor for DOJ.
Controversy over the report's delay was first reported by Youth Today, a newspaper geared towards social workers and youth advocates.
After scrutinizing 79 suicides that occurred between 1995 and 1999, Hayes came to several fairly startling conclusions, finding that 43 percent of the deaths happened in facilities "that did not provide any type of suicide prevention training" to frontline staffers, and that isolating teens in their rooms dramatically increased the risk of suicide.
Hayes' research also highlighted embarrassing gaps in government regulation. Oversight agencies in several states didn't even know about suicides that had transpired in county detention centers and private facilities and were not tracking deaths in such institutions.
Hayes, who is angry that the study languished, says he delivered his 15-page report in February 2004. While government reports often go through a heavy editing and revising process, Hayes claims the final draft of "Characteristics of Juvenile Suicide in Confinement" is identical to the version he wrote up five years earlier, aside from some minor copyediting.
"It's exactly the same document. None of the data has been changed," Hayes told us.
At Justice, a spokesperson said the department was investigating the delay but stressed that official reports are often years in the making. "We're doing some investigation about why it took so long," the spokesperson said. "That's all I can say right now."
Dan Macallair, executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a San Francisco nonprofit, said the report would have made headlines had it been released in a timely fashion.
"It would have been huge," Macallair said. "It would have led to legislative hearings, newspaper articles ... It would have sparked an outcry."
Over the years, Hayes said, the Justice Department vacillated on the status of the document, saying first that it was fast-tracked for publication and later that it had been rejected and "unapproved." Last fall, Hayes complained about the delay to J. Robert Flores, then-chief of DOJ's juvenile justice office. "I wrote kind of a nasty letter to Mr. Flores saying I was extremely frustrated that this report didn't come out -- that there are youth dying," recalled Hayes.
The Obama administration recently replaced Flores with Jeff Slowikowski, a veteran staffer who is serving as the office's acting administrator.
This isn't the first time controversy has found Flores, who has been the subject of congressional hearings. In June he was questionedby the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about millions of dollars in grant spending, with then-Chair Henry Waxman (D-CA) describing Flores' grant-making process as "neither fair nor transparent."
That same month, the Washington Postreported that Flores was the subject of a criminal probe into his "alleged use of government funds for personal travel expenses and his hiring of a politically well-connected contractor who allegedly performed little work in a high-paying job."
A hard-drinking drifter from the Northeast, McDonald left behind family members and a girlfriend in Norwich, Conn. McDonald’s relatives didn’t know he’d been slain by an officer until they were contacted by a reporter in late 2009.
Two independent experts reviewed the autopsy and available police documents at the request of reporters and focused on the angle of the fatal shot.
Louis Levy, who worked as a forensic pathologist for several North Carolina counties, also studied the autopsy and police report. Levy, who now performs autopsies for private clients, thinks McDonald “could’ve been standing up, but leaning forward as if he was going to dash away from the police” when he was shot. He didn’t think McDonald was shot while lying down.