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William Pierce, America's Leading Neo-Nazi, Dies

William Pierce, head of the neo-Nazi National Alliance and author of the racist novel The Turner Diaries has died at age 68, seven years after facing a judgment in a suit filed by the Center.

William Pierce, the former physics professor who organized the National Alliance into America's leading neo-Nazi group, died July 23 at his compound near Hillsboro, West Virginia, after a brief illness. He would have turned 69 on September 11.

The National Alliance has long claimed to be the elite vanguard of the Aryan revolution, and its members actively recruit throughout the United States. In recent years, Pierce worked to professionalize National Alliance operations, building up a national staff, intensifying its propaganda and overseeing its lucrative white power music business, Resistance Records.

Pierce was also the author of the infamous race war novel, The Turner Diaries, a racist fantasy of a white uprising against blacks and Jews that inspired Timothy McVeigh's 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.

In 1995, Center attorneys won an $85,000 judgment against Pierce for his role in a fraudulent scheme to prevent the family of a hate crime victim from seizing the assets of the white supremacist Church of the Creator.