A Latino street gang leader and his son were sentenced in federal court Monday to lengthy prison terms for their role in a years-long campaign of racist terror and ethnic cleansing targeting African Americans in and around Los Angeles.

Since at least the mid-1990s, Latino street gangs across Los Angeles County have been targeting, beating and sometimes killing blacks in an attempt to drive them out of the region.

Just before Christmas 2006, Cheryl Green, 14, playing on her skateboard with a group of friends just south of 206^th Street in Los Angeles, was shot dead in broad daylight by two men who approached the group and opened fire without saying a word. Two members of the 204^th Street gang were later arrested in the killing. ( continue to full post… )

Students at an Alabama high school who openly engaged in “white power” salutes — including a 17-year-old accused last week of planning to bomb the school and carry out a racist massacre —could have been expelled under district rules, a school board member and a former principal told Hatewatch.

But instead of reporting the neo-Nazi salutes and shouts of “white power” carried out at various times over the past four months at Russell County High — sometimes reportedly in front of teachers, staff and school security cameras — the conduct apparently went unreported and nothing was done about it. ( continue to full post… )

Weeks before Derek Mathew Shrout allegedly started building improvised hand grenades in his military family’s home, before the 17-year-old was arrested for plotting to use the devices against black and gay students and a teacher, he was committing racist acts in full view of everyone at an Alabama high school.

Two of his former friends say that Shrout – sometimes wearing his Junior ROTC U.S. Army-issued uniform – repeatedly performed stiff-arm sieg-heil salutes and shouted “white power” at Russell County High School in Seale, Ala., where he apparently intended to carry out the attacks. The community is some 20 miles from the U.S. Army’s sprawling Fort Benning, Ga., compound, where the suspect’s father is stationed. ( continue to full post… )

A sixth man has pleaded guilty to federal hate crime charges related to the June 2011 racially motivated killing in Jackson, Miss., of a black man assaulted and run over with a pickup truck by a gang of white youths. That brutal murder was captured on surveillance video and broadcast nationally.

Joseph Paul Dominick, 21, of Brandon, Miss., faces a maximum of five years in prison after pleading guilty yesterday to conspiracy to commit federal hate crimes. He pleaded guilty to a criminal information, waiving grand jury indictment and striking a plea deal with federal prosecutors, just a month after The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson published an editorial blasting the Justice Department for a  “thick cloud of secrecy” surrounding the protracted investigation. ( continue to full post… )

Last year at this time, self-described prophet Warren Jeffs was predicting the end of the world. According to eight revelations he issued from a jail cell at the beginning of December 2011, divine vengeance was slated to fall upon a nation “fully ripening in iniquity.” Earthquakes were to rock Arizona, and “melting fire” was supposed to roll out across Idaho.

This year? Jeffs is predicting the same demise, only this time compliments of the geysers at Yellowstone National Park. Once they blow their tops, it’s the end for all humankind. ( continue to full post… )

A man who was once seen as a genteel Southerner defending the “honor” of the Confederacy but who secretly lived lavishly on other people’s money now faces the next 19 years in a federal prison cell — possibly in solitary confinement.

The first jolt for 65-year-old Ron Wilson — former national leader of the southern heritage group Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) — may have come when he walked into a packed courtroom in Greenville, S.C., yesterday to be sentenced for the $57.4 million silver bullion Ponzi scheme he operated for more than a decade. There were so many victims who wanted to address the court that a lottery had to be held to determine who could speak, according to media accounts. Many of his 800 identified victims expect to get very little restitution, saying their lives are forever ruined by the swindle Wilson carried out. ( continue to full post… )

Neo-Nazi Bill White spent years pushing the limits of the First Amendment. Last week, thanks to a ruling by a federal appeals court, the First Amendment pushed back.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on Friday reinstated White’s 2011 conviction for soliciting violence against a jury foreman who helped convict another white supremacist in Chicago, The Roanoke (Va.) Times reported over the weekend. White, an infamous white supremacist and former anarchist who once led a group called the American National Socialist Workers Party, now faces up to 10 years in prison when he is sentenced on a date that has yet to be set. ( continue to full post… )

If a white man is attacked and murdered because he was “hanging out” with black friends, should that be investigated as a federal hate crime?

That question looms in Louisiana after 24-year-old Michael Luke “Boulon” Darby was fatally stabbed earlier this month outside a bar in Lafayette, where he had gone with two friends who are African-American. ( continue to full post… )

Harold C. “Hal” Turner, the right-wing Internet radio shock jock, racist, Holocaust denier, FBI snitch, lynching advocate and jailbird, is back home in his New Jersey condo after spending nearly three years in a prison cell in Indiana for threatening three federal judges on his blog who had upheld a handgun ban in Chicago.

You might add delusional to the Turner list. ( continue to full post… )

Two white supremacists tied to the brutal murders of four people on the West Coast now face a federal indictment filed in Oregon alleging that they embarked on their rampage in order to “purify and preserve the white race.”

David “Joey” Pedersen, 32, and Holly Ann Grigsby, 24, both from Oregon, were named in a racketeering conspiracy indictment returned by a federal grand last Thursday in Portland. The umbrella-style racketeering charge alleges the pair committed various criminal acts in Washington, Oregon and California including murder, kidnapping, use of firearms during crimes of violence, transporting a stolen vehicle, unauthorized use of bank cards, aggravated identity theft, carjacking resulting in death and felon in possession of a firearm. ( continue to full post… )