Colorado officials this morning are investigating the possibility that a white supremacist reportedly killed by police after a Thursday shootout and chase in Texas murdered the head of the Colorado Department of Corrections earlier in the week, The Denver Post reports. Tom Clements, executive director of the department, was shot dead on Tuesday after opening the door of his Monument home to a stranger.

The apparent suspect was identified in several reports as Evan Spencer Ebel, a 28-year-old Denver parolee who was shot to death Thursday after first wounding a North Texas sheriff’s deputy and then crashing his car during a chase that reached speeds of over 100 mph. Officials told the Post and other Colorado news outlets that the Cadillac Ebel was driving is similar to a car that was described by witnesses as waiting outside Clements’ home for about a half hour before the official was murdered.

Ebel was identified as a member of the 211 Crew, also known as the Aryan Alliance, a particularly vicious regional white supremacist prison gang whose size has been estimated at somewhere between several hundred and a thousand members, all in Colorado. A major, four-year racketeering investigation of the group culminated in 2005 with the arrests of 32 gang members and associates. One of them was Benjamin Davis, who started the gang in 1995, and was ultimately convicted of racketeering, assault and conspiracy and sentenced to 108 years in prison. ( continue to full post… )

Federal prosecutors opened the trial of one the nation’s most prominent “sovereign citizens” leaders by portraying him as nothing more than a con man who used antigovernment ideology to peddle illegal debt- and tax-relief scams to the financially troubled.

But James Timothy Turner, delivering his own opening statement at the trial that began Monday in Montgomery, Ala., cast himself as the victim. “I discovered things that big Washington government doesn’t want you know,” he said. “They’re trying to shut me up.”

Turner faces 10 tax charges, including conspiring to defraud the federal government, attempting to pay his own taxes with a fictitious financial instrument and attempting to obstruct an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) investigation. He faces up to 164 years in prison and large financial penalties if convicted on all charges. ( continue to full post… )

A black Birmingham, Ala., man pleaded guilty in federal court Monday to threatening the life of President Obama in a series of tweets, which were intermingled among hundreds of unrelated musings about women, weed and wanting to die.

Jarvis Britton, 25, wrote the Twitter threats last year and now faces up to five years in prison when he is sentenced on June 20.

“Free Speech? Let’s Test This! Let’s Go Kill The President!” Britton tweeted on June 29, 2012.

That was followed the next day with, “@BarackObama I wish you were dead.”

But it wasn’t until “an anonymous female caller” contacted the authorities and informed them about the tweets that Secret Service agents interviewed Britton in his Birmingham home last July. According to court papers, Britton admitted posting the threatening statements but said he didn’t intend to harm the president. ( continue to full post… )

In recent years, globetrotting white supremacist financier and organizer Preston Wiginton has appeared at racist skinhead gatherings (he won a “strongest skinhead” contest at Hammerfest in 2005); co-sponsored lectures with hate groups like the Council of Conservative Citizens and the Michigan State University chapter of Young Americans for Freedom; rallied racist skinheads in Russia (where he lives part of the year in an apartment rented from ex-Klan boss David Duke); and been denied entry to the UK to address a festival put on by the neo-fascist British National Party. ( continue to full post… )

Federal prosecutors are attempting to block the pre-trial release of a Pennsylvania man with militia ties who faces a charge in Texas that he threatened to kill President Obama before or during the president’s inauguration.

William Mose Tucker, 20, was arrested in Oklahoma on Jan. 20, a day before inauguration. A Jan. 16 federal indictment says he “did knowingly and willfully make a threat to take the life of and to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States.” ( continue to full post… )

An armed “sovereign citizen,” accused of printing his own currency and defying government authority, was shot and killed in Florida last weekend after a four-hour standoff with a police SWAT team.

Like so many law enforcement encounters with sovereign citizens, the case involving Jeffrey Allen Wright began with a routine traffic stop before quickly escalating. Wright attempted to pay his traffic fine with counterfeit money, then refused to acknowledge courts had jurisdiction over him when additional charges were filed against him. ( continue to full post… )

A member of a racist skinhead gang has been sentenced to life in prison after confessing to his involvement in a 2012 murder carried out during a home-invasion robbery in Oregon.

Robert Paul Smith, 35, pleaded guilty Friday in Eugene, Ore., to aggravated murder, robbery, burglary and being a felon in possession of a firearm – charges stemming from January 2012 invasion robbery at the Cottage Grove, Ore., home of 48-year-old Terry Fruichantie, who was fatally shot.

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For decades, iconoclastic Seattle artist Charles Krafft has made references to Nazis in his highly acclaimed, sometimes shocking pieces of art that most critics and art lovers brand as simple, ironic satire pushing the boundaries.

He crafted a ceramic Hitler-bust teapot now in a San Francisco art museum, and put swastikas on other pieces of art, even on a ceramic wedding cake. He made a ceramic Uzi assault rifle, hand grenades and an “assassin’s kit” – a gun and dagger.

Now, the 65-year-old hippie-turned-artist is at the center of a growing controversy following a published report detailing evidence — including his own words — that suggests he is a white nationalist who believes the Holocaust is a myth. ( continue to full post… )

The number of antigovernment “Patriot” groups on the American radical right hit an all-time high in 2012, the fourth straight year of explosive growth, according to a report released today by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). As the new year began, serious talk of gun control, prompted by a Connecticut school massacre in December, fueled even more rage on the right, and the threat of violence loomed .

The new report, contained in the latest issue of the quarterly investigative journal Intelligence Report, found that the conspiracy-minded Patriot groups, which numbered only 149 in 2008, soared over the first four years of Barack Obama’s presidency to 1,360 in 2012 — an astounding 813% increase. At the same time, it found that hate groups remained at near-record levels of over 1,000 (see interactive map and state-by-state lists of 2012 hate groups here).

The resurgence of militias and other Patriot groups and an uptick over recent years in non-Islamic domestic terrorism caused SPLC President Richard Cohen today to write (letter pdf) U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to request the creation of a new interagency task force to assess the adequacy of federal resources devoted to the threat. “As in the period before the [1995] Oklahoma City bombing,” Cohen wrote, “we are now seeing ominous threats from those who believe that the government is poised to take their guns.” ( continue to full post… )

Check out the story of the Klansmen and the Crip.

A Ku Klux Klan imperial wizard in Alabama and an African-American Crips street gang member in Memphis, Tenn., say they are teaming up to organize a counter-protest against the Klansman’s fellow hooded haters, who vow to hold “one of the biggest KKK rallies of all time” on March 30 in the Mississippi River city where Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

The Klan rally is a protest of an earlier decision by the city council to rename three Memphis parks that honored the Confederacy, including one named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first national leader of the Ku Klux Klan. The North Carolina-based Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is organizing the rally and says Klansmen from across the country are expected to attend.

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