“Can I fix you a plate, Brother Joe?” asked a woman I recognized from the bar where I’d initially passed muster from the most senior members of the klavern, including Bicky, prior to being naturalized.
She spoke from behind a serving station packed with hamburgers, hot dogs, sliced pig fresh off the spit, and all the fixings. William Hawley’s Fourth of July Summer Bash was in full swing, heading toward the evening’s annual fireworks celebration. As far as I knew, Hawley didn’t have a permit to shoot them off, but that clearly was of little concern to him, based on how he greeted the half dozen law enforcement officers from nearby communities, including Wayward. They weren’t in uniform, but I recognized them from earlier encounters over the course of the past nine months since I had become a member of the Klan. Those months had been dominated by a lull in activity for this particular klavern, with little to report on to my FBI handlers, but things were about to ramp up in a big way, as I would soon learn.
“Do you need me to bring anything to the barbecue?” I’d asked Hawley when he invited me.
He flashed a big grin. “Anything Black.”
This was the Klan in all its glory, on the surface as American as apple pie, as the saying goes. The members had brought their families, and the women mostly stood off to the side, chatting among themselves and showing deference to their husbands.
The previous month, my future wife, Shannon, had given birth to a son we named Jordy. It was the happiest day of my life and also changed my outlook about the importance of my work inside the Klan for the FBI. Whereas before I was doing it out of duty to the country and the oath I’d sworn to the Constitution, now my paternal instincts had kicked in. It wasn’t just the country I was doing this for anymore, it was my own son, who I didn’t want to see grow up in a world dominated by division and hatred. I could either put the responsibility for that future on myself or risk leaving it to someone else.
My choice was obvious.
When I arrived back home in Jacksonville from Los Angeles in 2002 to live with my mother and stepfather, I was able to continue working as a welder for the same industrial company that employed me in LA. They specialized in maintaining power plants, and there was no shortage of them in Florida. Five years later, I joined a crew rebuilding the lone elevator inside a building housing the local power company. As luck would have it, my future wife worked for the power company. Shannon had been assigned to play the role of a glorified elevator operator, controlling the cab’s movements in the intervals it was online, a truly thankless job. In the first two days on the job, we smiled at each other a few times, and then, on the third day, her gaze lingered on me outside at a picnic table where we were eating lunch—well, at least everybody else was; I hadn’t brought anything.
“You look hungry,” Shannon said, tilting her paper plate toward me. “Want some fried chicken?”
I accepted her offer, and it was the best fried chicken I ever had, probably because of my feelings for the young woman who’d handed it to me.
“I think you’re fun,” she said to me. “I like you.”
“Then I think we should go out on a date.”
We never looked back after that. We started dating in February 2007 and moved in together the following month, right around the time I helped her brother, Ryan, out of his scrape. If it hadn’t been for that incident, I almost surely would never have become a confidential human source for the FBI. I’d never been happier in my life and accepted her family as my own, though my first impressions of her mother, Sharon, and especially her stepfather, Rusty, were bad, to say the least. Rusty was all of five foot four and a scrawny 120 pounds, and fit the very definition of a punk. Almost immediately I judged him as the type prone to compensate for his slight stature by dominating those closest to him. This was confirmed by how Shannon reacted in his presence. She turned skittish and subservient, acquiescing to all his opinions without voicing any of her own. That was enough for me to form my opinions about Rusty and Sharon, but I stopped short of voicing them to Shannon, because I was so much in love, I didn’t want anything to come between us.
That included the display of Confederate flags along with other paraphernalia and literature all around Rusty and Sharon’s home, suggesting their embrace of both white supremacist and anti-government movements. Rusty expressed clear disdain for my military service when the subject came up, shaking his head and scowling at my level of commitment and embrace of my duty. He made his contempt for the government plain and was clearly miffed that my beliefs represented the polar opposite of his. He positioned himself closer to Shannon, as if to draw her away from me, and looked at her any number of times, as if studying her reaction in the forlorn hope it would mirror his. When it didn’t, he became even more irked at me and my attitude, but I resisted responding in kind because I didn’t want to add to the discomfort I sensed Shannon was feeling. But it was clear that Rusty resented not only me but also the fact that I was taking her away from him.
Even though Shannon had moved both physically and emotionally away from her mother and stepfather, they continued doing their utmost to win her back and get her to come back to their home and to their beliefs. I had to tread a fine line between mitigating that and letting Shannon preserve some form of relationship with them for her own mental well-being, because of her attachment to her mother.
I didn’t propose to Shannon until spring 2008, just before she gave birth to Jordy, and a few months before William Hawley’s Summer Bash. We took a trip to one of our favorite places, Little River Spring in O’Brien, Florida. It was where we could be with nature and each other at the same time. On this beautiful, sunny day blessed with low humidity, it turned out we were the only people in the area, and when she wasn’t watching, I placed her engagement ring in the crystal-clear, still water next to a rock. I didn’t even consider the possibility of it floating away, because I was so committed to making this moment special.
“How about that,” I said, after leading her to the water’s edge. “Looks like somebody lost a ring.”
With that I plucked it out of the water and dropped down to one knee.
“Will you marry me?”
I had come alone to the Summer Bash, because the Klan did not know I had a fiancée and son. I didn’t want William Hawley, or anyone else associated with the Klavern, to ask to meet them and ingratiate themselves with my family. Not only was this for my family’s own safety, it was also crucial to my desire to keep my two worlds separate.
The Klan certainly didn’t need to know that the only way to get my infant son to fall asleep was for me to sing Elvis’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love” to him. Having a child brought everything home to me in a hurry. The safety of Shannon and my son was all on me, but so was my work as a confidential human source inside a historically dangerous organization. To say the least, it was a difficult mix to sustain. As much as possible, I needed to separate the man I was when inside the Klan from the man I was outside it, especially at home.
I got the sense that there was ample precedent for that in the form of members committed to the Klan and the klavern who saw their activities as taking place removed from their families. For these men, the Klan was like a social club, albeit one chartered in hatred and bigotry. While plenty of men leave their families behind when they go golfing or boating or to a de facto men’s club, these men left their families behind when they went shooting, were training or planning, or potentially executing operations.
I noticed Beth, Hawley’s wife, mingling about, and their nineteen-year-old son, Joey, was mixing with young men around his age. Although they both lived on the premises, I hardly ever saw them because they were never around on the numerous occasions Hawley summoned me to his property. When there was business to attend to, they made themselves scarce, which was easy for Joey since he worked for his father.
Young kids maybe half Joey’s age rushed about Hawley’s property wielding toy guns that made soft popping sounds when fired, an eerie emulation not only of their Klan parents, but also of those who founded and built the group in the wake of the Civil War.
Unable to accept defeat, veterans of the Confederacy gathered at a social club in Pulaski, Tennessee, on Christmas Eve 1865 to establish a group that would continue fighting for the values that had spawned the war in the first place, namely pertaining to slavery. They assembled in the common purpose of not wanting to see the old South die, as reflected in the name of their new organization. “Ku Klux” stemmed from the Greek word kyklos, meaning circle. According to some historians, Robert E. Lee was approached about becoming the group’s first leader. When he declined, the job went to the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Forrest had no formal military training, but nonetheless had rapidly risen through the ranks from private all the way to lieutenant general. His motto when leading troops into battle was, “Get there first with the most men.” Known best for guerrilla-style tactics focused on upending Northern supply and communication lines, Forrest is infamously remembered for perpetrating a massacre of Black troops at Fort Pillow in April 1864, even though they had already surrendered. At the time, the reputation that incident earned him made Forrest the perfect candidate to run what was clearly envisioned as an anti-government organization, especially once Congress passed the Reconstruction Act to ensure enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted equal protection to former slaves.
From its passage in 1867 onward, men who’d been no more than property ascended in public and political life, with men like Forrest and his minions bearing witness to something they would never accept and were committed to stop at all costs. Toward that end, by 1870, the KKK had established a foothold in every Southern state. Though decentralized, these groups shared a common ideology that persists to this day. In essence, they never stopped fighting the Civil War, and in response to that, Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act in 1871, giving the government the right to crush the Klan and its activities, especially under President Ulysses S. Grant. As Reconstruction efforts faded, though, the Klan’s white supremacist doctrine caught renewed fire, spawning the cross burnings the group became infamous for. By 1876, their grip on the South was tighter than ever.
When he turned down the role of Grand Wizard eleven years before, Robert E. Lee is reputed to have requested that his support for the Klan remain “invisible,” spawning the group’s moniker that also encapsulated its mission statement: the Invisible Empire.
As I stood amid all the revelry on William Hawley’s property, my gaze lingered on the children, who represented the future. I noticed the eldest of the group, ten or eleven years old, had a pellet gun that looked very much like the real thing. A pecking order had been naturally established—the younger kids played out their shooting games in a ring closest to their parents, while the older ones strayed out farther, closer to those tarps I’d gotten my first glimpse inside of months before. A tear welled up in the corner of my eye from the sorrow I felt over the thought that my newborn son, or any child, could follow the same path these kids were on.
For the past nine months, since the naturalization ceremony, I’d been sticking as close to Hawley as I could, gathering intelligence and passing it on to Armstrong and Vaughn. Since I was a mechanic, much of our visits were spent working on the collection of cars he kept in the old barn on his property he’d converted into a garage. Among that collection were a vintage 1979 Corvette and a monster truck—a yellow school bus rigged with tires taller than both of us that he drove in local parades to loud cheers from those assembled along the route.
The best way to continue winning someone’s confidence is to bond with them over what they perceived to be a mutual avocation, in this case cars. I made my living as an industrial mechanic, a welder mostly, so I knew my way around machines and machine parts, and that included a close familiarity with motor vehicles. Although being schooled in those skills had nothing to do with going operational for the FBI, they proved vital in generating the trust of William Hawley. Most of what we talked about was engines, drive shafts, and the like. But Hawley also sprinkled in plenty about the operational priorities and structure of the Klan in small talk. The more cars we worked on, the more he took me into his confidence, and the more intelligence I was able to pass on about the inner workings of the organization. Most of the information pertained to the individuals Hawley made it a point to introduce me to, enabling the FBI to establish an elaborate dossier on the members of this klavern, identities previously unknown to them, which shed light on the size and scope of the group.
On that Fourth of July, I took advantage of all the activity to get an extended look at the inside of Hawley’s house, alone for the first time. He hadn’t brought in any Porta Potties for the occasion, so everyone was using a bathroom just off the home’s foyer. It was the perfect excuse to get inside the house. I made a stop in the bathroom first—I was wearing a wire at the time and smiled at the thought of how this portion of the tape might be transcribed. Then I made the most of the few minutes I had to scope out the house before my absence might draw attention, in search of anything that might have changed from my last time inside. The first thing I noticed was that the second of Hawley’s two .50-caliber, armor-piercing rifles still hung over the mantel in the same room in which his KKK regalia was on full display. Nothing had been moved, and I didn’t have the time to riffle through any drawers or cupboards, which likely wouldn’t have yielded much anyway; whatever William Hawley had that might be actionable would, no doubt, have been kept under lock and key. And although my army intelligence training had included a primer on lock picking, I didn’t have time for the full reconnaissance of the place that would have required my skill.
Almost everything I provided was information the FBI was hearing for the first time. In 2008, domestic terrorist groups weren’t nearly the priority they are today. The country was only seven years removed from 9/11, and most of the task force’s attention nationally was focused on foreign extremists. For their part, Armstrong and Vaughn seemed most interested in digging deeper into the confidential 2006 FBI report titled White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement, while I was also providing a treasure trove of additional information.
Many of my conversations with William Hawley included discussion of Senator Barack Obama’s nascent presidential campaign.
“I can’t see him getting the nomination and can’t see him coming anywhere near to winning if he does,” Hawley said once. “If it appears otherwise, we’ll have to step in.”
The veiled threats never went much beyond that until the Obama campaign gathered steam and started to build a formidable lead over Hillary Clinton. Initially, Obama’s run invoked caustic conversations about a Black man in the White House. As Obama’s delegate tally continued to mount, though, shoulders stiffened, voices lowered, and the talk turned more ominous. Given the Klan’s sordid history, the possibility of such an ascension was impossible to accept. While members expressed their open disdain for Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama was like a bogeyman to them, antithetical to everything they represented, and a reality they never expected they’d have to face.
Much of what I learned from the naturalization ceremony forward was more about the inner workings of the Klan than any actionable specific crimes or operations they were planning. The information I was providing was still invaluable to the FBI, since those inner workings had never been documented to the degree I was providing. Indeed, law enforcement in general had seldom, if ever, enjoyed the benefit of a confidential human source planted this deep as a full, card-carrying member. To that point, I was consistently included in high-level meetings and made privy to things like what William Hawley had recently shown me, something he shared with extraordinarily few of his Klan brethren.
A few months before the Summer Bash, he led me across his sprawling property, swinging a big key hanging from a thick ring. We reached those big camouflaged tarps, and he pulled them back to reveal the entrance to what were clearly underground bunkers. Hawley fit the key into a padlock in the first heavy steel double doors and yanked them open. A single dome light snapped on, flickering briefly until it finally held, and we used a small ladder to descend into the bunker. Before me, I saw a dozen Russian-made Kalashnikov AK-47 rifles hanging across brackets on the wall and several cases that must have contained more stacked up across the floor. I also noted the presence of open boxes of converter kits that turned the semiautomatic rifles to full automatic. Off to the side, stacked against the wall, I noticed more cases, made of hardwood that might have been maple.
Hawley squeezed between the containers of AK-47s and raised the heavy lid on one of wooden containers, extracting a weapon I recognized immediately.
“What do you think, Brother Joe?” Hawley asked me with a grin, back in klavern leader mode.
He handed me a Heckler & Koch 91 .308-caliber battle rifle. The HK91 carried that name for good reason. It featured an eighteen-inch heavy target barrel and fixed plastic stock. It was a fearsome weapon, generally considered to be among the finest in the world. And as near as I could tell, this was the latest model.
“That’s some weapon, isn’t it?” Hawley asked me.
I tested the heft and balance, raising it to my shoulder while keeping my finger well clear of the trigger. My next thought, on top of the array of ordnance amassed down here, was about the resources in terms of funding it had taken to acquire such a weapons cache. The Klan was clearly far better financed than the FBI and JTTF had ever conceived.
“For sure,” I said, handing it back to him.
The worst thing an undercover like me could do in such a situation would be to ask too many questions, like How many of these have you got? Questions like that were certain to raise eyebrows and suspicions in a man like William Hawley. I resolved to stay in character, playing the dutiful subordinate at once enamored with and fully loyal to the Klan.
The second bunker contained a collection of 9-millimeter pistols, boxes and boxes of ammunition, canned food and MREs (Meals Ready to Eat), stacks of flak jackets stretching all the way to the low ceiling, ammo vests, tactical gear, and even some night-vision goggles. Such a massive display of ordnance suggested one thing and one thing only:
The Klan was getting ready to go to war, returning to the roots established at the outset of the group’s second era in 1915 with the release of D. W. Griffith’s movie The Birth of a Nation, called “the most reprehensibly racist film in American history” by the Washington Post. The Klan had faded by then, not quite into obscurity but to a point where its efficacy, influence, and membership had severely declined.
That all changed on the movie’s opening night in early December 1915, when a local preacher named William Joseph Simmons led committed Klansmen wearing Confederate uniforms atop hooded horses down Atlanta’s Peachtree Street, firing rifles into the air. Simmons, himself an otherwise unremarkable man, used an early screening he had seen of Birth of a Nation as inspiration to rebuild the Klan. Accompanied by a group comprised of a combination of Klan veterans and new recruits, he climbed to the top of Stone Mountain just outside Atlanta and lit a cross for all to see. In a ceremony that night, he proclaimed himself Imperial Wizard of the Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
The revived Klan was given a further boost the first week of January 1923, when members spearheaded a riot in the town of Rosewood, Florida, in the wake of a white woman allegedly being assaulted by a Black man in the neighboring town of Summer. A mob of several hundred white men led by Klansmen killed every Black person they could find and burned almost every structure in Rosewood. For several days, survivors from the town hid in nearby swamps until they were evacuated to larger towns by train and car. The town was abandoned and, basically, ceased to exist.
No arrests were made for the Rosewood massacre, not a single one, convincing the Klan that it could practice its wanton violence with impunity. Virtually overnight, the group became reinvigorated and restored to its place of prominence in Southern culture, culminating in what some estimates indicated was a sixty-thousand-strong march through Washington, D.C., on September 13, 1926, with all participants donning white robes and the KKK’s trademark hoods. They marched in daylight straight toward the building they fully intended to someday occupy: the White House.
At this point, the Klan’s national membership was estimated to be between three and five million. Figuring that for each of those there may have been as many as ten sympathizers or downright supporters, that number swells, potentially, to as high as between thirty and fifty million. Since the population in the United States at the time was only 117 million, that represents a huge percentage of the population.
Simmons knew he needed to win over hearts and minds to keep the Klan growing at its unprecedented pace. So he hired a pair of public relations specialists out of New York, Mary Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clark, to improve the Klan’s image. The pair published positive articles about the Klan in local newspapers nationwide and helped build a national campaign to have statues of Confederate Civil War heroes erected in community parks, further boosting the group’s profile and efficacy.
The mentality espoused by the Klan reached somewhat of a peak in 1940, when Catholic priest Father Charles Coughlin used his wildly popular radio program, broadcast out of Michigan, to stir up an armed rebellion. Coughlin’s audience numbered in the tens of millions, and any number of them were either avowed Nazis or those who shared such beliefs, which to a great extent even then included the Klan. The priest himself reprinted a speech from Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. He blamed pretty much every problem on the Jews, further uniting him with not only the far right but also Klansmen, under something called the Christian Front. Under that name, a formidable cache of weapons and explosives was acquired, men recruited to the cause, and plans laid by early 1940 to overthrow the United States government. The plan included systematic bombings, assassinations, and creating the chaos needed to usurp the country’s leadership and replace it with something the Klan knew all too well: an Invisible Empire.
By then, the Klan had been decimated by federal tax evasion charges instigated by the Roosevelt administration over fear of the group’s increasing power and influence. Its members, for a time, may no longer have called themselves Klansmen, but they took the ideology the Klan spawned with them to other groups that primarily included the Christian Front, where many became foot soldiers in Father Charles Coughlin’s war on America. The plot may have failed, but it was as impactful as how close the rioters of January 6, 2021, came to preventing a peaceful transfer of power. The fact that neither worked pales in comparison to the resources brought to bear and the commitment of the perpetrators to do anything necessary to make sure they succeeded the next time. And that proclivity was front and center here in Wayward on the nation’s birthday in 2008.
“I’d like you to meet someone, Brother Joe,” William Hawley said, calling me over to a sinewy man with hairy arms and pockmarked face beneath his scraggly beard. “This here’s Brother Deke.”
“Heard a lot about you,” a grinning Deke said, shaking my hand. “Always nice for a Klan lifer like me to meet the new blood. I come from stock that perpetrated the Rosewood massacre. A lot more were killed than you ever heard told. I know this because I’m descended from the man in charge of burying the bodies in a mass grave big as the Grand Canyon.”
I later reported that to my handlers, but the FBI lacked the resources to dig up or dredge the area where Brother Deke suggested the mass grave was located.
Part of my mission that Fourth of July was to make sure I took pictures of the license plates of all those in attendance, around ninety vehicles in all, virtually all of them trucks. That would provide a bounty of intelligence riches for my FBI handlers, unprecedented really, since it would allow them to assemble a roster of the klavern’s membership and sympathizers.
Charles Denton, the Klan’s Imperial Wizard, reveled in telling me that Fourth of July about his days with the Mississippi White Knights and his support for Edgar Ray Killen.
Initially, Mississippi government authorities and law enforcement officials turned a virtual blind eye to the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, performing only a cursory investigation. Incensed by the lack of action, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy took matters into his own hands. Kennedy dispatched the FBI in force in one of the most concerted investigations in Bureau history.
Symbolically and otherwise, Mississippi formed the heart and soul of the Klan in these years. Back in 1964, one of the reasons Edgar Ray Killen believed he could kill three civil rights workers with impunity was that local and even state law enforcement either looked the other way when it came to the Klan’s actions or were outright members in secret. That was the tradition Denton (aka Cole Thornton) intended not only to uphold but also to expand across the entire Klan.
Denton didn’t mention anything about the November 1979 Greensboro [North Carolina] Massacre, but he might as well have. “The Greensboro massacre, as it became known,” Politico reported in an article titled “The Massacre That Spawned the Alt-Right,” “was a coming-out bloodbath for the white nationalist movement that is upending our politics today. . . . The seeds for this iteration of white supremacy were planted 40 years ago in Greensboro, when the white wedding of Klansmen and Nazis launched a new, pan-right extremism—a toxic brew of virulent racism, anti-government rhetoric, apocalyptic fearmongering and paramilitary tactics. And this extremism has proven more durable than anyone then could imagine”.
At the Summer Bash, Denton admitted to me without prompting that his goal was to turn the entire Klan of today into a nationwide version of the Mississippi White Knights. And I took the fact that he had risen to become one of five KKK Imperial Wizards as a strong indication that he was succeeding in his attempt to transpose those radical, militant views and actions onto the contemporary Klan as a whole. He expressed to me how proud he was that the Mississippi White Knights had put a hundred-thousand-dollar bounty on the life of Martin Luther King.
“This man running for president is a gift from God,” Denton told me as the barbecue was winding down, referring to the final weeks of Barack Obama’s campaign. “Going to be a huge boost to the kind of members we need to give this country what it needs.”
He grinned at me as he said that, and I was thinking of Charles Denton as I continued to observe the presence of those six police officers, at minimum, from nearby communities, mixing among the klavern’s membership. There were a lot of people there, families mostly, a portion of whom I didn’t recognize, making me wonder how many more law enforcement officers might be on the grounds.
Night had fallen, and I was sticking as close to William Hawley as possible to discern anything I could about who he was talking to and about what, when my cell phone rang with SHANNON lighting up in the caller ID. She had no idea where I was or what I was doing at the time.
“Hey, babe,” I said, walking discreetly away, while not wanting to do anything that might make Hawley or any of those he was entertaining suspicious.
“Jordy misses his daddy,” Shannon told me.
I could hear him crying in the background. “I miss him too.”
“I can’t get him down. Do you think you could . . .”
She let her question trail off, but I knew what she wanted.
“Sure,” I said and, after waiting for her to lower the phone to our son’s ear, I began to sing. “Wise men say only fools rush in . . .”
Here I was, standing forty feet away from Klan members I was trying to put in jail, trying very hard not to draw any attention to myself. A few of them glanced over and I wondered if they heard me doing my best impersonation of Elvis singing. But Jordy wasn’t sobbing anymore, so I kept going.
At that point, Shannon got back on the phone.
“Mission accomplished,” she whispered. “He’s sound asleep. See you when you get home.”
“Love you, babe,” I said, ending the call and feeling my heart settle in my chest.
I took a deep breath to steady myself, an instant before explosions rocked the night. I held my breath, my whole body locking up, until I looked up and saw the majestic colors and shapes bursting in the night sky above, while in the company of men who fully intended to topple the government of the United States.
The fireworks show had begun.