The Blotter, Spring 2006

Jerome Wigmore Jr., a white supremacist sporting swastika tattoos and known for yelling racial epithets at black children, was arrested Oct. 27 and charged with imprisoning, torturing and sexually assaulting two black women. Police say he kept the women locked up in a shipping container in his back yard near Philadelphia.

Four Contra Costa, Calif., members of the white supremacist Nazi Low Riders were indicted in mid-November for allegedly selling methamphetamines to raise money for the gang. Authorities say two of the four, Richard Klein and his wife, sold 11 pounds of the drug.

Former World Church of the Creator activist Patrick Langballe was sentenced on Nov. 17 to more than two years in Illinois state prisons for his role in an attack on two women he believed were lesbians.

Sixty law enforcement officers joined in the arrest on methamphetamine and other charges of Michael Drew Williams in Mower County, Minn., on Nov. 18. Officials said he had been associated with the violently anti-Semitic Posse Comitatus.

Neo-Nazi Scottland Kevin Belk, the North Carolina leader of White Revolution and a former officer of the World Church of the Creator, was arrested with his wife in Seattle on Nov. 22. The two are accused of murdering Belk's mother in late October.

Denver firefighter Stan Taran Ford was arrested by federal agents Nov. 22 and charged with selling illegal machine guns. Officials said Ford, described by some neighbors as a racist, had ties to "an unknown domestic terrorist organization."

At least 10 men associated with the Oakland, Calif.-based Your Black Muslim Bakery chain allegedly wrecked two liquor stores owned by Muslims from the Middle East on Nov. 23. Using videotape of the attacks, police found and arrested six men and charged them with vandalism, false imprisonment and hate crimes.

Alleged Aryan Brotherhood member Stephen Lance Heard was charged with capital murder after shooting Fort Worth police officer Henry "Hank" Nava on Nov. 29. Nava was investigating Heard's role in a major Texas identity-theft ring.

Alleged Confederate Hammerskin recruiter Christopher David Kuykendall, convicted in an earlier plot against a black Knoxville, Tenn., church, was arrested Dec. 5 after violating his parole and then fleeing.

Robby Wayne Baalman pleaded guilty Dec. 22 in Salt Lake City to federal charges related to a brutal attack on a black bicyclist. Baalman said he attacked the man as part of his initiation into the white supremacist group American Front.

Accused Aryan Brotherhood captain James Blomquist was sentenced on Jan. 4 in Lake County, Ohio, to nine years in prison for running a bad check ring and a methamphetamine lab. Blomquist denied being a member of the racist AB gang but, curiously, had named his home remodeling company AB Construction.

A Colorado grand jury on Jan. 4 unsealed wide-ranging indictments against 24 members of a white supremacist prison gang, the 211 Crew. The charges ranged from witness tampering and drug dealing to murder, including the 2001 killing of an Arkansas prison inmate as part of an initiation into the gang.

Four associates of Charles Robert Barefoot Jr., the leader of the Nation's Knights of the Ku Klux Klan who allegedly threatened to blow up a North Carolina courthouse and kill a local sheriff, were arrested on Jan. 6 on federal charges of furthering the plot by stealing weapons. Three other Barefoot associates, including his wife, were also charged but were already in custody on the murder.

The attempted murder trial of James Waltz, accused of shooting a bar patron in International Falls, Minn., because he was black, opened on Jan. 9. Police say Waltz, angered that blacks were in the bar, also pointed a handgun at several of Ricky Davis' friends before following Davis outside and shooting him in the stomach.

Ty Fowles, a California man who once was the Wasco State Prison leader of the Nazi Low Riders gang, pleaded guilty to two counts of racketeering and faced sentencing on Jan. 9. Fowles earlier admitted stabbing three black inmates and ordering a hit on a white inmate who was dating a woman with a biracial child.