Simcox has said that after leaving Los Angeles he tried to become a Border Patrol agent but was rejected for being too old. After settling in Tombstone, he worked for a while as a gunfight-show actor before purchasing the local newspaper, The Tombstone Tumbleweed.

Simcox initially told followers he had drained his son's college fund to pay for the paper, but later switched to claiming he had emptied his own retirement account. Simcox used the paper to rail against illegal immigration and to recruit volunteers for Civil Homeland Defense, the outfit he founded in 2002 and described in the Tumbleweed as a "committee of vigilantes."

In January 2003, while on patrol with Civil Homeland Defense, Simcox was arrested by federal park rangers for illegally carrying a .45-caliber semi-automatic handgun in a national park. Also in Simcox's possession at the time of that arrest, according to police records, were a document entitled "Mission Plan," a police scanner, two walkie-talkies, and a toy figure of Wyatt Earp on horseback.

Two months later, in a speech to the California Coalition on Immigration Reform, a hate group whose leader, Barbara Coe, routinely refers to Mexicans as "savages," Simcox offered a dire warning to his audience.

"Take heed of our weapons because we're going to defend our borders by any means necessary," he said. "There's something very fishy going on at the border. The Mexican army is driving American vehicles -- but carrying Chinese weapons. I have personally seen what I can only believe to be Chinese troops."

Of illegal immigrants, Simcox added: "They're trashing their neighborhoods, refusing to assimilate, standing on street corners, jeering at little girls walking on their way to school."

Simcox's big mouth and swaggering manner inspired Tombstone locals and the numerous Simcox detractors within the Minuteman movement to nickname him "The Little Prince."

Wherever he goes, Simcox seems to establish a reputation for arrogance. After failing as a would-be actor in Los Angeles, he took a job in 1990 teaching at a prestigious private academy, Wildwood School.

In interviews with the Intelligence Report, two of Simcox's former teaching colleagues at the school describe him as an instructor who was exceptionally popular with students and parents but isolated himself from his fellow teachers with his condescending attitude.

"He always stayed up on the latest trends in childhood development and teaching methods, and he was always talking about himself like he was God's gift to teaching," said one teacher who taught at Wildwood at the same time as Simcox.

"He had this real holier-than-thou attitude, like he was so far above the other teachers they should be grateful he was even discussing his methods with them. He was insulting."

'A Drastic, Dangerous Guy'
There's one trend that Simcox seems oblivious to -- the growing involvement of racists in the border vigilante movement. Despite the fact that white supremacist groups openly recruit for Minuteman patrols and that a handful of neo-Nazis from the National Alliance and Aryan Nations did sign up for the Minuteman Project in April, Simcox refuses to acknowledge that vigilante border patrols are potentially a magnet for violent racists.

"There's nothing fundamentally racist about national security, so there's no reason that fundamental racists should be interested in joining our movement," he said at the Chicago Minutemen conference.

In multiple interviews and public appearances, Simcox has dismissed the possibility that he's personally racist by pointing out that he once married a black woman and by claiming that he once chaired the diversity committee at Wildwood School.

(Head of School Hope Boyd, who has been at Wildwood since 1992, told the Report she had no recollection of Simcox holding such a post. "I do not remember that he was chair of our diversity committee," she said.)

"When I'm asked by reporters if I'm a racist, I tell them, 'Why don't you go ask my black ex-wife and my biracial children and the members of the racial diversity committee I chaired whether I'm a racist?'" he said at the October conference.

"When they ask me, 'Well, what do you have to say to people who call you a racist?' I come back at them with, 'What do you have to say to people who call you a child molester?'"

That's a strange rhetorical device given the accusations leveled at Simcox in the summer of 1998, when his 14-year-old daughter from his first marriage -- prior to his union with Dunbar -- came to live with him in Los Angeles.

In separate interviews with the Intelligence Report, two of Simcox's former colleagues at Wildwood and his first ex-wife gave the same account. They said that Simcox helped his daughter get a job babysitting for a Wildwood School employee and that one night, Simcox's daughter showed up unexpectedly at her employer's house, visibly upset, alleging that her father had just attempted to sexually molest her.

"He tried to molest our daughter when he was intoxicated," said Deborah Crews, Simcox's first ex-wife and the girl's mother. "When she ran out, he tried to say he was just giving her a leg massage and she got the wrong idea."

Contacted by the Report, Simcox refused to answer four direct questions about the molestation allegations. "I would never answer those questions to you. You can't ask those questions," he said. "You're on a witch hunt and you're trying to discredit our movement, which is to secure the borders. ... My personal life has nothing to do with anything that goes on here."

No charges were filed against Simcox, but Crews said she and her daughter immediately broke off all contact with him.

"He's a drastic, chaotic, very dangerous guy," said Crews. "I'm surprised he hasn't shot anybody yet. I see him on TV and I have to turn if off, because it makes me sick to see him getting all this attention."

Simcox, now 44, recently married for a third time. He met his new wife, 25-year-old documentary filmmaker Alena Lyras when she traveled to Tombstone in April along with hundreds of other journalists to interview Simcox during the Minuteman Project. Simcox organized the massively hyped, month-long vigilante action with current Orange County, Calif., congressional candidate Jim Gilchrist, for whom Simcox says he has been stumping as a paid spokesman.

Simcox and Lyras were married in late August in Maricopa County, Ariz. Simcox sold The Tumbleweed in September and moved in with Lyras at her home in Phoenix. During the "America First" summit, Simcox said that Lyras is "useful to our movement, because she's young enough that she's been infiltrating the ACLU and other open borders groups and filming their meetings and protests."

At that summit, Simcox said he has no plans to run for office like his colleague, Gilchrist.

"My future plans do not involve politics. ... Once we've finally stopped the illegal immigration invasion in this country, I plan to turn my attention to education reform. I believe that's where America needs me next."

But just as Gilchrist toned down his militant rhetoric once he started campaigning for Congress, Simcox continues to finely tune his public image.

But his rivals don't buy it. "Simcox knows how to put on a good showpiece, and he looks pretty on TV, but he's all talk and no walk," said Jim Chase, leader of the rival, more hard-core civilian border patrol organization California Minutemen.

"He's more concerned with finding himself a sugar mama than anything else. I expect that if the bullets ever really start flying or if the going really gets tough, he'll abandon what he started. Until then, he'll go on pretending he's king shit of the Minutemen."

Susy Buchanan and David Holthouse are senior writers for the Intelligence Project's quarterly magazine, the Intelligence Report.