Blood and Politics (78 page)

ATTORNEY
: Now Mr. Genoud was a well-connected man?

CARTO
: Yes.

ATTORNEY
: And he’s a well-respected banker, or was when he was alive?

CARTO
: Yes.

ATTORNEY
: Why did you choose Mr. Genoud to be your expeditor, sir?

Carto’s attorney objected to the question, and the judge overruled.

CARTO
: Because in knowing him and discussing things with him and . . . and because he was available, I felt that he would be effective in performing the personal contact that he was capable of.

ATTORNEY
: Mr. Genoud was a personal friend of Adolf Hitler, correct?
²³

François Genoud was more than an aging, well-connected Swiss banker who once knew Adolf Hitler. In the immediate post–World War Two period, Genoud helped finance the escape of Nazi war criminals from Europe, acquired the literary copyrights of Hitler and two of his most significant adjuncts—Martin Bormann and Joseph Goebbels—and used a Swiss banking fortune to underwrite the nexus of wartime Nazis with a sector of postwar Arab nationalists. Most famously, he also helped the hijacking of a Lufthansa airplane in 1972, engineering the ransom demand by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
²⁴
Genoud’s continued devotion to Hitlerian causes was well known to journalists and Nazi hunters. But his direct link to Willis Carto had never been made public before it became part of the transcript in California.

The Honorable Rustin Maino’s final judgment eviscerated any legal claim Carto had to the Farrel legacy. He ratified the original Polis decision that the staff-friendly board was legitimate. He rejected “all 16 defenses proposed” by Carto’s attorneys. He found that all “$7,500,000 belonged to the plaintiff” legion. And after deducting the costs from fighting Joan Althaus in court and other expenses, he found that the total converted by all the defendants—Carto, Fischer, Liberty Lobby, et al.—was
$6,430,000. That sum was owed to the legion, plus interest, starting January 1, 1993, the day after the first Polis decision.
²⁵

Separate from the formal decision awarding the funds to the legion, Maino wrote a letter explaining his view of the evidence. As a statement of informed opinion, it could have served as a virtual summary of Willis Carto’s history in the courts: “I did not find him to be a witness who can be relied upon. His demeanor when he testified was evasive and argumentative. He could not follow the instructions of the court . . . I found that much of his testimony made no sense; much of his testimony in court was different than his previous testimony; much of his testimony was contradicted by other witnesses and documents. By the end of the trial I was of the opinion that Mr. Carto lacked candor, lacked memory, and lacked the ability to be forthright about what he did honestly remember.”
²⁶

Evasiveness and lack of candor may have enabled Willis Carto to succeed during forty-five years as a white nationalist godfather. But these qualities did not sustain him in 1996 in a California court of American law. Now he owed millions of dollars to a group of relative upstarts, the first reversal of fortune, with several more to come. In addition, at this same moment across the white nationalist movement as a whole, the younger generations were grabbing center stage.

April 9, 1997.
On this tax raid, a multijurisdictional law enforcement task force wore bulletproof vests and kicked the door down with their weapons drawn. Inside a four-bedroom bungalow they found two men operating a few pieces of office equipment and approximately ten thousand compact discs. In a sleepy township outside Detroit, from this most ordinary place, operated the largest white power music distribution outfit in North America, Resistance Records. It had been under surveillance by a six-man team for more than two months. The cops watched the most mundane business activity. Delivery trucks came and went. Young men carried packages to the local post office. They managed customer lists and filled mail orders, as if selling woolen underwear to North Dakota farmers rather than copies of
Cult of the Holy War
CDs to suburban skinheads. Even the neighbors on this quiet country road had little idea what went on inside the house. The landlord, who told the local press that she was Jewish and would have never knowingly rented to a band of skinheads, said that this crew of hard-core national socialists paid their rent on time and had been trouble-free tenants.
¹

Resistance Records had grown quickly. During the past three years it had produced eight issues of a slick sixty-eight-page magazine and accumulated three hundred thousand dollars’ gross annual sales of white power music, T-shirts, and paraphernalia. The business had not secured a license or paid sales tax, however, and through this opening the police rushed, hoping to shut this enterprise down. When the raiders came crashing through the door, they soon discovered that all the armaments were unnecessary. The staff surrendered quietly. No bullets were fired, and no hundred-day standoff ensued. Instead, the authorities spent six hours loading a rental truck with computers and about one hundred
boxes of business records and merchandise. They also took the Resistance Records mailing list, five thousand names, including two hundred customers living in the Federal Republic of Germany.
²

At exactly the same moment, Canadian provincial police raided the home of Resistance Records founder George Burdi in Ontario. They too confiscated business records and personal effects. Burdi was not home at the time, as he was in jail, having surrendered to authorities the previous February and begun serving a one-year sentence for assault. Upon release he did not return to the business, and eventually he left the movement altogether. He gave away his shares of Resistance Records stock, reconciled with his parents, fell in love with a Canadian woman of East Indian descent, and eventually made public his turn away from white nationalism. At the company he left behind, however, the remaining principals continued their trek.
³

The Michigan authorities could find no criminal charges to post, so the company started selling music again six weeks after the raid, this time from a new location and with the proper business license secured. However, the staff did not begin republishing the magazine. In total, the skinhead subculture did not suffer the same crippling setback that armed militia and common law court groups experienced during this period. Militia-style groups had engaged law enforcement in an ill-fated contest of wills over control of the functions of government and the state, in a Gramscian war of maneuver. Although smaller than the militias, the white power music scene, by contrast, was waging a war of position. It sought the commanding heights of (white) youth subculture.
⁴
And on this side of white nationalism, Resistance Records, and the music scene of which it was a signal part, preserved many of the advances made by this generation during the previous three years.

Among the gains was a change in music venues. This generation had moved away from the cow pasture concerts, such as 1989’s Aryan Nations fest in Tennessee, to sites such as the Westside Clubhouse in Detroit. Playing a regular gig at a weekend show in a barlike setting was infinitely more appealing to bands than standing in the back of a truck bed under the stars. The ability to play its own music and in its own halls ratified the schism between white power Oi and the larger punk music scene. Now that they were not competing for the same dance floors, the two subcults tended to ignore each other. And new groups of screaming and howling young white men were more apt to pick up guitars and blast away. Also, more U.S. bands joined their European counterparts on tours that cruised countries on both sides of the Atlantic. The Hammerskins’ organization, present at Resistance Records’ birth, continued multiplying and generated an increasingly mature indigenous
leadership. As a result, an autonomous international white power youth network congealed.
⁵

Nevertheless, the attempts by older movement leaders to suck money and energy out of the Generation Xers did not end with the failed blandishments of men such as Pete Peters, whose attempt to foist a set of biblical heroes upon skinheads had turned out so miserably. Although Ben Klassen had died and Tom Metzger had lost his leading role, new suitors vied for influence. William Pierce had achieved legendary status as the author of
The Turner Diaries.
And the National Alliance enjoyed growing prestige among skinheads because it had years before served as the organizational home of Robert Mathews, founder of The Order. After the tax raid, Willis Carto also stepped into this picture. And Carto and Pierce followed their twenty-five-year rivalry with a fight for control of the youth music business.

In this particular drama between Carto and Pierce, Jason Snow became the linchpin figure. A Canadian intimately familiar with the skinhead scenes on both sides of the North American border, Snow, age twenty-nine, was already a movement veteran and one of the three original incorporators of Resistance Records. Immediately after the tax raid, he had the controlling hand. He realized that the business needed a new capital infusion to survive, and early in 1998 he turned to a man he had already done business with, Todd Blodgett, an advertising broker for Carto’s
Spotlight.
Snow asked Blodgett to arrange the sale of the company to Willis Carto.
⁶

The transaction involved a complex set of money and stock transfers, made more complicated by the conflict with legion-IHR that troubled Carto’s financial empire. Despite the fact that both Liberty Lobby and Carto personally had already declared bankruptcy, Carto figured out how to use the Foundation for Economic Liberty (FEL) to purchase thirty shares of the record company, at a thousand dollars a share. He also took a warrant to purchase thirty additional shares at the same price by the end of that year. As part of the deal, he gave Jason Snow a full-time job, with a thirty-thousand-dollar annual salary, working for Liberty Lobby. Blodgett, the advertising broker, agreed to purchase twenty-five of the shares. Thus at the end of the first round of buying and selling Carto controlled thirty shares through FEL, Blodgett had twenty-five shares, and Snow owned forty-five, with Carto promising to use one corporation or another to purchase an additional thirty from Snow. Resistance Records’ impudent skinhead start-up had been swallowed whole by Blodgett and Carto, in an unsteady arrangement with Jason Snow.
For the moment it was one more corporation in the Liberty Lobby affiliated lineup.
⁷

The record-selling operation moved from Detroit to a house in California, not too far from Carto’s home in San Diego County. There a skinhead couple filled orders. Rather than restart the magazine, they sent
Resistance
subscribers six months of
The Spotlight
, a sure sign that Carto wanted the record company to pump up the subscriber base of his core publication rather than build a semi-independent business for the younger generation. By November 1998, just six months after the initial purchase, the whole deal unraveled. In a memorandum sent to Snow, Carto reneged on the agreement to buy the thirty additional shares. He demanded that Resistance Records pay back to FEL two “loans” totaling forty thousand dollars. At that point FEL controlled only twenty-one shares of stock. (Carto had given a skinhead named Eric Fairburn nine shares as part of a severance package from his employ at Liberty Lobby.) And he wanted to sell those twenty-one shares as soon as possible.
⁸
Willis Carto and hard rock did not fit together, and the aging moneyman wanted out altogether.

At this point William Pierce quietly stepped into the picture. He already understood better than Carto the significance of the white power music scene, how it attracted and retained young people and created a cultural milieu within which ideologues such as him could recruit. Several years before, he had established working relationships with the original Resistance Records crew. Pierce also knew that Carto wanted out, despite the fact that Resistance was then grossing about five thousand dollars a month. Plus the business possessed instant name recognition and cachet among white power youth. So the sixty-five-year-old former physicist plotted a hostile takeover against the seventy-year-old salesman, just as he had almost three decades before with the National Youth Alliance. Again the target was the youth market. Only this time Pierce took it slow, one step at a time.
⁹

First, Jason Snow, the one stockholder left from the initial set of Resistance Records incorporators, purchased the twenty-one remaining shares from Carto’s Foundation for Economic Liberty. That gave Snow sixty-six shares: the fifteen he kept during the first deal with Carto, the thirty shares Carto never purchased, and the twenty-one newly bought from FEL. Todd Blodgett, the unlikely merchandiser who had put together the earlier deal with Carto, now had thirty-four shares (the twenty-five he had purchased for $1,000 apiece, plus nine more purchased from Eric Fairburn for just a few hundred more). Then Pierce reincorporated Resistance Records in April 1999, as a limited liability corporation in Virginia. To complete the deal, he paid Snow $1,800
apiece for sixty-six shares, a total of $118,800. Carto and Snow were now out of the picture. Pierce owned two-thirds of the stock and controlled the company. Blodgett was still involved, however, on the basis of the thirty-four shares he owned in the old corporation. They were unlikely business partners, an unhappy and unsuccessful entrepreneur and a full-time white nationalist revolutionary, selling music that neither one of them listened to. Within a relatively short period, Pierce forced Blodgett out of the operation, began republishing
Resistance
magazine, and updated the business’s website.
¹⁰