Franklin, Andrews, Kramer & Edelstein

[scion]

Inside a KKK murder plot: Grab him up, take him to the river

By JASON DEAREN
an hour ago
https://apnews.com/article/government-and-politics-business-race-and-ethnicity-racial-injustice-only-on-ap-2b4106de3ebcbfae85948439a7056031

PALATKA, Fla. (AP) — Joseph Moore breathed heavily, his face slick with nervous sweat. He held a cellphone with a photo of a man splayed on the floor; the man appeared dead, his shirt torn apart and his pants wet.

Puffy dark clouds blocked the sun as Moore greeted another man, who’d pulled up in a metallic blue sedan. They met behind an old fried chicken shack in rural north Florida.

“KIGY, my brother,” Moore said. It was shorthand for “Klansman, I greet you.”

Birds chirped in a tree overhead and traffic whooshed by on a nearby road, muddling the sound of their voices, which were being recorded secretly.

Moore brought the phone to David “Sarge” Moran, who wore a camouflage-print baseball hat emblazoned with a Confederate flag patch and a metal cross. His arms and hands were covered in tattoos.

A nervous, giddy chuckle escaped Moran’s mouth.

“Oh, shit. I love it,” he said. “Motherf----- pissed on himself. Good job.”

“Is that what y’all wanted?”

“Yes, hell yeah,” Moran said, his voice pitched high.

It was 11:30 a.m. on March 19, 2015, and the klansmen were celebrating what they thought was a successful murder in Florida.

But the FBI had gotten wind of the murder plot. A confidential informant had infiltrated the group, and his recordings provide a rare, detailed look at the inner workings of a modern klan cell and a domestic terrorism probe.

That investigation would unearth another secret: An unknown number of klansmen were working inside the Florida Department of Corrections, with significant power over inmates, Black and white.

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Thomas Driver took a pull off a cigarette, and exhaled the smoke at Warren Williams. Driver, a white prison guard, and Williams, a Black inmate, faced each other.

It was a humid August day in 2013, about a year and a half before the clandestine murder photo reveal.

The two men stood in a sweltering prison dorm room in rural north Florida’s Reception and Medical Center, a barbed wire-encircled complex built among farmland an hour south of the Georgia state line. The RMC is the state’s prison hospital where new inmates are processed.

Williams, a quiet, 6-foot-1, 210-pound inmate, suffered from severe anxiety and depression. He was serving a year, records show, for striking a police officer. Williams agreed to plead no contest in exchange for a reduced sentence, and an order to receive a mental health evaluation and treatment under county supervision.

He found himself in front of Driver after he lost his identification badge, a prison infraction.

Williams told Driver to stop blowing smoke at him, he’d report later. Driver blew more, and Williams told him to stop again.

When Driver continued, Williams jumped him and they hit the ground. As they struggled, Williams bit Driver and gained an advantage, according to both men’s accounts of the fight.

A group of guards responded, and beat Williams so badly that he required hospitalization, his mother and lawyer said.

Driver, in turn, needed a battery of precautionary tests for HIV and hepatitis C because of the bite. They would all be negative, but the ordeal enraged him.

He wanted revenge.

– VIDEO: Inside a KKK plot to kill a Black man
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More than a year later, in December 2014, a wooden cross ignited in a field hidden by tall trees.

Dozens of hooded klansmen gathered around for a “klonklave,” a meeting of the Florida Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Members of a biker club were being “naturalized” as citizens into the Invisible Empire of the Klan.

Security was tight. The bikers were worried about recording devices, and were checking people.

Driver, known by his fellow klansmen as “Brother Thomas,” was there with Sarge Moran, who was also a prison guard. Moran had worked for the Florida Department of Corrections for decades; he’d also been a klansman for years. He had been disciplined more than once by the corrections department for violent incidents, according to records obtained by The AP. Despite this, Moran had been kept in a position of power over inmates.

Moran and Driver wanted to discuss an urgent matter with Joseph Moore, the group’s “Grand Night Hawk,” in charge of security.

Moore was a U.S. Army veteran. When not in his klan “helmet,” he often wore a baseball hat pinned with military medals, including a Purple Heart. He commanded respect and fear from his klan brothers, and often regaled them with stories of his work killing targets overseas as part of an elite U.S. military squad.

The three men moved away for a private talk, and had another klansman keep watch nearby so they weren’t overheard.

The guards gave Moore a paper with a picture of Williams, his name and other information. Driver described the fight, and how he and his family had worried for weeks about a false positive test for hepatitis C.

“Do you want him six feet under?” Moore asked.

Driver and Moran looked at each other, then said yes.

The very existence of a plot to murder a Black man by Ku Klux Klan members working in law enforcement evokes past tragedies like the 1964 ”Mississippi Burning? case, where three civil rights workers were slain by klansmen. Sheriff’s deputy Cecil Price Sr. was implicated in the deaths and was convicted of violating the young men’s civil rights.

Today, researchers believe that tens of thousands of Americans belong to groups identified with white supremacist extremism, the klan being just one. These groups’ efforts to infiltrate law enforcement have been documented repeatedly in recent years and called an “epidemic” by legal scholars.

FBI Director Christopher Wray said at a March Senate hearing that “racially motivated violent extremism,” mostly by white supremacists, accounts for the most rapidly rising share of domestic terrorism cases.

“That same group of people ... have been responsible for the most lethal attacks over the last, say, decade,” Wray added.

During the Jan. 6 insurrection in the U.S. Capitol, “Thin Blue Line” flags flew alongside white supremacist signs and banners, and more than 30 current and former police officers from a number of departments around the nation were identified as attendees.

“White supremacist groups have historically engaged in strategic efforts to infiltrate and recruit from law enforcement,” said an FBI document released by a congressional committee in September, about four months before the Capitol riots. In the intelligence assessment, written in 2006, the FBI said some in law enforcement were volunteering “professional resources to white supremacist causes with which they sympathize.”

While the FBI would not confirm if it had produced a more recent assessment of the ongoing threat, recent cases have confirmed that the problem the agency described in 2006 continues.

In November, a Georgia deputy was caught on an FBI wiretap boasting about targeting Black people for felony arrests so they couldn’t vote, and recruiting colleagues into a group called “Shadow Moses.” In 2017, an interim police chief in Oklahoma was found to have ties to an international neo-Nazi group. In 2014, two officers in Fruitland Park, Florida, were outed as klansmen and forced to quit.

Despite repeated examples, white supremacists who are fired from law enforcement jobs after being discovered can often find jobs with other agencies. There is no database officials can check to see if someone’s been identified as an extremist.

In 2020, an officer in Anniston, Alabama, was hired by a county sheriff’s department just a few years after the Southern Poverty Law Center posted a video of him speaking at a white nationalist League of the South meeting.

“There’s no trail that follows them even if they’re fired. It’s spreading the problem around,” said Greg Ehrie, former chief of the FBI’s New York domestic terrorism squad, who now works with the Anti-Defamation League.

Domestic terrorism experts have been calling for better screening to help identify extremists before they’re hired. Some states, such as California and Minnesota, have tried to pass new screening laws, only to be prevented by police unions, whose legal challenges argued successfully that such queries violate free speech rights.

Without screening, white supremacists who get inside can operate with impunity, targeting Black and other people of color, and recruiting others who share their views.

“Unless your name ends up in an FBI wiretap” an officer will go undetected, said Fred Burton, a former special agent with the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service. “There are loopholes in the background investigative process.”
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https://apnews.com/article/government-and-politics-business-race-and-ethnicity-racial-injustice-only-on-ap-2b4106de3ebcbfae85948439a7056031