Once a Duke lieutenant, Louisiana man now facing prison in pill mill scheme
In recent years, Kenny Knight has been in the shadows of the white supremacist scene.
Still, the former top lieutenant to David Duke did stay busy running medical clinics around Louisiana and Mississippi.
While Knight’s activities on behalf of Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard and well-known white nationalist, never brought him any legal troubles, the medical clinics have.
Knight faces up to five years in federal prison after pleading guilty earlier this year to running pill mills out of Axcess Medical Clinics in the New Orleans area and southwest Mississippi.
Knight admitted to running clinics and overseeing a process by which patients rarely saw doctors, but were prescribed powerful opioids and telling out of state patients to park away from the clinics so their cars wouldn’t draw suspicion at the cash-only businesses.
U.S. District Judge Nanette Jolivette Brown has not yet set sentencing for the 62-year-old Knight, who served as Duke’s campaign manager during his run for statewide office in Louisiana in 1990 and 1991.
Knight’s white supremacist ties go back decades.
He was intimately involved in efforts to save the Liberty Monument in New Orleans, serving an officer in the early 1990s for a group called “Friends of the Liberty Monument.”
The monument stood on Canal Street not far from the Mississippi River honoring a group of white supremacists for their role in a gun battle that ended Reconstruction in New Orleans. It was taken down earlier this year.
Knight also ran Duke’s one-time group, European-American Unity and Rights Organization, taking over after the Southern Poverty Law Center exposed EURO chief Vincent Breeding running a porn site.
Knight surfaced publicly in 2015, when it came to light that U.S. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., spoke to EURO in 2002. Scalise later denied knowing the nature of the group, but Knight told The Washington Post that Scalise attended the meeting and was the first to speak.
Duke himself is no stranger to entanglements with the federal government. He spent 15 months in federal prison for tax evasion after skipping off to Europe for a stretch to avoid the charges.
There’s no real way to know how close Duke, who has railed about the opioid epidemic online, remains to Knight. But, Duke still references Knight on his website and sells EURO t-shirts through his online store.
Beyond racist activities, Duke and Knight do apparently have one thing in common. They’ll sell most anything to make a buck.
