National hate group opens local bureau

Greg Harman

Friday, Sept. 1, 2000 | 11:26 a.m.

A national hate group with a local membership is distributing racist literature in Henderson, a development that disturbs local residents and law enforcement but is protected by the U.S. Constitution.

The opening of a Henderson bureau of the neo-Nazi group, National Alliance, represents the 34th American city with a known active membership in what some civil rights organizations consider the most dangerous hate group in the nation.

Though billed as "Nevada's number one family values organization" working to "preserve the traditions and values of Nevada and the West" in a three-page flier distributed over the weekend to downtown Henderson homes, the group's statement lambasts "Jewish-controlled" television, Hollywood and newspapers for their "multicultural propaganda."

And while the group has indirect links to violent activity around the country, FBI Special Agent Daron Borst said he has no information linking the National Alliance to any local criminal activity.

Complaints about the fliers have been made by residents to both the FBI and the Anti-Defamation League, a national civil rights organization.

"It has come to our attention they are passing out fliers with some anti-government rhetoric, but they have freedom of speech and we don't want to limit that," Borst said.

Residents did not welcome the fliers.

"I've lived here ... since 1940, since I was 9 years old. I've never seen anything like this," Leo Dwiggins said. "Neo-Nazis? I've got no use for them."

Another resident said she simply planned to "stay away from people like that."

Staying away may be easy. The fliers have been distributed anonymously at night, following what is suspected to be a four-year recruiting cycle. The group's Henderson address traces to a private post office box. The phone number reaches an answering machine.

A local National Alliance member answering a message left by the Sun did not give his name but referred all questions to National Alliance leader and former physics professor William Pierce.

Pierce left university life in 1966 to work full-time for the American Nazi Party, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. After the assassination of George Lincoln Rockwell, the ANP's leader, by a disgruntled former member in 1967, Pierce worked briefly for the National Socialist White People's Party before helping found the National Youth Alliance -- today's National Alliance.

From his 200-acre West Virginia compound, Pierce said he is unfamiliar with any specific activities going on in Southern Nevada.

"Fliers have been distributed in many areas of the country," Pierce said. "A primary responsibility of being a member is trying to alert other people to the National Alliance."

Pierce would not say how many members the group has in Southern Nevada.

Borst said the fliers are most likely the work of an individual.

The Anti-Defamation League estimates the alliance has a national membership of 1,500 in about 18 cells. And the Southern Poverty Law Center lists them as North America's most dangerous hate group operating today.

Henderson Police Officer Chris Smith said he had never seen National Alliance activity in Henderson before.

"It concerns me," said Smith, a member of the city's gang unit, "due to the fact that a lot of times that leads to bigger and better things" and may inspire skinhead youth gangs to get active.

But racist gang activity in Henderson has been virtually non-existent since the city clamped down on a group called the International Nazi Skinheads, or INS, about three years ago, Smith said.

"They pretty much got kaboshed," he said. "We put the kabosh on them."

While the Alliance's stated goal is securing a "racially clean area of the Earth" by whatever means are necessary, Pierce played down his many references to violence as a political tool.

"I certainly don't advocate (violence) because I don't think we can win that way," Pierce said. "My members are involved in educational activities."

Pierce denied involvement in the American Nazi Party and said he does not consider his current organization as Nazi or Fascist, though he was recently quoted as extolling Adolf Hitler as the "greatest man of our era," by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

"We don't use those labels, because more often than not they are confusing," he said before praising Hitler's success at taking control over the German media prior to World War Two and driving Jews out of Germany.

In a demonstration of his racist philosophy, Pierce recently told members in a radio address how the group's enemies will be treated.

"All the homosexuals, race-mixers and hard-core collaborators in the country who are too far gone to be re-educated can be rounded up, packed into 10,000 or so railroad cars, and eventually double-timed into an abandoned coal mine in a few days' time," Pierce said.

Authorities believe his 1978 novel, "The Turner Diaries," may have helped inspire Timothy McVeigh to bomb the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

The book, about a white army overthrowing the United States government, contains a scene strikingly similar to the 1995 bombing.

According to some reports, McVeigh attended National Alliance meetings in Laughlin in 1993 and 1995. The meetings were hosted by an Alliance unit that had been based in Fort Mohave, Ariz.

The Anti-Defamation League says the National Alliance also operates a post office box and phone number in Reno, but an Alliance phone list did not include the city.

Larry Wayne Harris, arrested by FBI agents in Henderson in 1998 for possession of anthrax bacteria, was a former member of the National Alliance and a lieutenant in Aryan Nations in Hayden Lake, Idaho, a leading Neo-Nazi compound, according to authorities.

After Harris' arrest, the FBI found he possessed a diluted form of the anthrax vaccine. No charges were filed, Borst said, since Harris "had no intention of weaponizing" the material.