The deeper I became entrenched in the Klan, the more of a challenge it became to leave all that at the door when I went home to my wife and son. It seemed like whenever I was home, all I could think of were Klan activities, and all I could visualize were members kicking in the door to come get me after learning my true purpose. And when I was at Klan meetings and social events, all I could think of was getting home to Shannon and Jordy. That left me on high alert 24/7, with no respite on Sundays or holidays. I had been undercover for nearly two years, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to compartmentalize the overwhelming anxiety and fear—not just for my own safety but the safety of my family. The whole time I was undercover, I wasn’t working another job, making us reliant on a monthly disability payment I had been receiving from the VA because of the PTSD and depression with which I’d been diagnosed back in Los Angeles and that had been deemed service connected. I was also receiving a modest stipend from the FBI.
A week after Gonzalez was arrested, and just days before the FBI planned to arrest Hawley, I noticed some odd behavior from my son Jordy. My in-laws regularly watched him while Shannon was at work and I was busy with Klan business.
When Jordy began acting strangely, my suspicions naturally turned to Rusty and my mother-in-law, Sharon. They were rednecks in the worst sense of the word, and I’d seen nothing over time to change the negative first impression I’d formed of them. I continued to keep my thoughts to myself to keep the peace in my own home, and because I knew how important it was for Shannon to maintain a relationship with her mother. But I did take the provocative step of surreptitiously recording my mother-in-law in Jordy’s company, as much to assuage my own concerns as anything else. I did this with the full knowledge that such taping may have been an illegal act, unless it was illegal activity that ended up being recorded. That was the case according to Florida State Statute 934.03, which also stipulated that all that was required to take such an action—taping—was a belief on the part of the parent or guardian that such activity may have been taking place. The statute specifically referenced suspected sexual abuse of a minor.
And that’s exactly what happened. That night, after picking Jordy up around nine o’clock, I listened to the tape, disturbed by some of what I heard suggesting that my mother-in-law might have been abusing my ten-month-old son. As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and trauma, this was obviously something I was extremely sensitive about. I could not let it go without responding. Shannon couldn’t believe what she was hearing either and came to the same conclusion I had, that we couldn’t take any chances.
I called the local sheriff’s office to make a report. My wife wanted to confront her mother herself, but I insisted that we needed to get the authorities involved. We were told deputies were being sent out immediately to interview my in-laws, which was standard operating procedure in the case of suspected sexual abuse of a child.
Then, around 1:30 in the morning, we heard hard banging on the door of our home in Worthington Springs, which we rented from my in-laws, who were now being investigated for sexually abusing our son. It was Sharon and Rusty. They barged in as soon as I opened the door. My wife’s stepfather was screaming and swearing. He wanted to start a fight with me, maybe hoping I’d beat him up so he could file a countercharge of assault and battery against me, but I left my hands by my side and refused to be goaded into knocking him into tomorrow, which was what I wanted to do.
My mother-in-law, meanwhile, just kept screaming and shouting, with spittle flying in all directions.
“I didn’t do nothing to that boy and you know it!” she ranted.
“I don’t know that you did nothing,” I shot back at her. “And the recording says you certainly may have.”
“I was just playing with him! It was just a game!”
“It didn’t sound like a game to me.”
“You don’t get to talk to me that way, you ungrateful son of a bitch!”
“And you don’t get to talk the way you did to my son. You can call it a game, you can call it anything you want—it was still wrong, and maybe criminal.”
“Fuck you!” my father-in-law added.
“Get out!” my mother-in-law ranted to my wife. “This is our house and I want you out of here now!”
“Mom—”
“Don’t ‘mom’ me,” my mother-in-law said, cutting off her daughter, “not after the sheriff’s deputies showed up at my door tonight. I want you gone! Pack up and leave! Get out of my house, girl!”
Shannon swallowed hard. I knew she was convinced the recording was real, but she was in a state of denial about what to do about it, thanks to the subservience she still felt to her mother and stepfather. I remained calm, managed to defuse the situation, and by 2:00 a.m., my in-laws were gone. But we now faced the daunting prospect of moving immediately. I’d already been homeless once in my life and would never let my family experience that ignominy. And before I could even think about packing, I faced the equally daunting prospect of reporting this to Joe Armstrong.
By the time I climbed into the front seat of his car at our usual meeting spot the next morning, my in-laws had already called the local FBI office and spoke to him as the supervisory agent. They didn’t know I’d infiltrated the KKK, thankfully, but they knew I was doing something for the FBI because Shannon had told them. They had been working hard to drive a wedge between us by trying to convince her I was unfaithful, given how I would disappear for long periods of time. And Shannon felt she had no choice but to counter such a claim with a measure of the truth.
“What the fuck is going on?” Armstrong shouted, and I saw brown drops of juice from the tobacco he was chewing spray the dashboard and windshield. “Your in-laws called and were screaming that you’re crazy, that you’ve gone nuts!”
“Joe—”
“What the fuck did you do?”
“I had strong reason to believe that my mother-in-law was—”
“I know what you accused these people of. I’m asking how the fuck you could jeopardize the whole operation by doing it.”
“We’re talking about my son here,” I said, raising my voice an octave.
“And I’m talking about two years of work we’ve got invested in you. It’s done, it’s over. The operation’s fucking toast.”
My stomach sank. I had just accused my mother-in-law of molesting my son, and now the operation I had given two years of my life to had blown up in my face. On top of all that, we had to move. My whole world was crumbling. I felt like an enormous failure. All I could think of in that moment was how things had ended for me in the army as well, before I relocated here. And now I’d be moving again. I just wanted to put every bit of this behind me and start over wherever we ended up.
“I’m sorry. My family comes first,” I said, defeated.
“Fuck your family!” Spittle continued to fly everywhere, and Armstrong was hammering the steering wheel so hard I could feel it vibrating from the passenger seat. “Thanks to all this shit, we have to pull you out and you can’t even testify. That means everything you did was for nothing. Without your testimony, we haven’t got shit on William Hawley and the others.”
I didn’t bother reminding him that I had very likely saved the life of Barack Obama, so all this had hardly been for nothing. I’d be lying, though, if I said the inability to prosecute Hawley and the others we had on conspiracy to commit murder charges didn’t sting.
“You should have goddamn fucking handled this differently!”
Armstrong enunciated his remark by pounding his fist into the dashboard. I thought it might be about to crack, but remained silent. There was nothing I could say or explain that would satisfy Armstrong, and truth be told, I didn’t blame him. The fact that my in-laws knew I was working with the FBI on something meant operational security had been compromised. As overt Klan sympathizers and supporters, who’s to say they wouldn’t approach William Hawley or someone else inside the klavern to exact revenge on me? My cover was blown and the only way I’d ever see William Hawley again was if he showed up to take action against me, wherever we ended up settling.
“You know what happens now?” Armstrong continued, without giving me a chance to respond. “Social Services is going to investigate. What do you think happens when you have to tell them you’re working undercover for the FBI? What happens if their investigation determines your home to be an unsafe environment?”
I hadn’t thought of that, or something else he said next either.
“It means your status as an informant becomes public record.”
I’d said all I could. There was no reason to respond.
“Get the fuck out of my car!” Armstrong raged.
“I’m sorry,” I said to him, as calmly as I could manage.
“GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY CAR!”
And I did, wiping off the tobacco juice he’d spit all over my clothes.
Three days later, we moved into an apartment in the beach town of St. Augustine, on the northeast coast of Florida, about a hundred miles away. It had long been a dream of my wife to live there, so close to the ocean, near where her grandmother had taught her and her eight cousins how to swim in a motel pool. Strangely, her grandmother hadn’t even known how to swim herself, but she was committed to making sure her grandchildren didn’t suffer the same fate, so her swim lessons always took place in the shallow end.
In St. Augustine, we were free of my in-laws, and my wife and I decided not to press charges. The whole case would go away, ensuring things didn’t get any worse than they already were, and we could keep what little remained of the peace. I could only imagine what Armstrong might have made of that, since in his mind I’m sure the reckless actions he’d deemed I’d committed had resulted in nothing at all.
I had plenty of regrets but harbored no guilt. If I couldn’t protect my own child from monsters, how could I protect the country from them? Now, at long last, my wife would be free from the reach of her mother and stepfather and close enough to the ocean to smell the salt air in our new home. The stress that accumulated between the incident involving my in-laws and the way my infiltration of the KKK had ended, though, caused both my depression and PTSD to spike. It got to the point that it was affecting my reliability once I tried returning to my job as a welder, which is a dangerous job to begin with.
Then I caught a break. Not long after we got settled in St. Augustine, the Veterans Administration stepped in out of nowhere and awarded me an additional two thousand dollars a month in veterans disability payments after finally fessing up to the fact that my army experience was part and parcel of both the depression and PTSD I’d been treated for back in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, Shannon returned to her chosen profession and passion as a home health care worker for the elderly, while I stayed home with Jordy as a true Mr. Mom. Spending those hours with Jordy turned out to be the best therapy imaginable. It gave me a sense of purpose and filled me with a desire to find the strength inside myself to be the best father I could possibly be. And that meant overcoming the effects of the mental illness I was experiencing.
Meanwhile, the Klan might have been out of sight, but they were far from out of mind. Even though we had moved away from my double life, I didn’t think we were by any means free from danger, but I had no way of knowing for sure how the klavern had greeted my sudden disappearance. Did they suspect I was an informant, and if they did, what steps would they take? I had seen firsthand the extreme lengths the Klan would go to, to satisfy their perverse sense of “justice.” Because of the inauspicious manner in which the investigation had ended, I wasn’t in witness protection or protective custody with someone watching my back. I was totally on my own, facing the very real possibility that William Hawley would try to kill me or, more likely, arrange for me to be killed. I had to assume that my absence could only lead him to conclude I’d been an informant the whole time, and Hawley wasn’t the kind of man to just let that go. I couldn’t keep tabs on the goings-on in the klavern I’d infiltrated or in Wayward in general. And with all my FBI contact broken off, I had no idea how Hawley and the rest of the group had greeted my leaving without explanation.
The stress and anxiety I endured over worrying about whether the Klan would find me were monumental. At night sometimes, I’d sit in sight of the front door with a gun, waiting for the inevitable moment when heavy boots would kick it in and men who came to kill me stormed inside. All I could do was try to move forward in spite of that. We lived spitting distance from the beach, I enjoyed the time playing house dad for Jordy, and I was starting to look forward to whatever form the next phase of my life would take. The spring and summer months passed without any indication the Klan knew our whereabouts or the reason why I had vanished in the first place, leaving me to settle into a routine and compartmentalize my fear.
While I was keeping my mental health in check, though, my physical health started to rapidly decline. I felt very weak and got exhausted doing the simplest things, despite having been so obsessive about staying in shape. I was easily distracted and couldn’t focus on anything for very long at all. My mind would wander, fixating on all the lowest points in my life, from being homeless in Los Angeles to not being able to finish what I started after infiltrating the KKK.
It continued to get worse until one day, feeling weak and feverish, I drove myself to the local hospital. Upon being checked in at the ER, I was found to be spiking a fever of 105 degrees and was immediately admitted to the Intensive Care Unit. They took extreme measures to bring my fever down, including draping bags of ice over my body, and pumping all kinds of fluids into me to get my body to cool. Doctors quickly determined that my system had become septic, and at one-thirty in the morning in October 2011, my heart stopped and I stopped breathing.
The hospital called my wife and, without telling her how dire the situation was, told her she needed to get to the hospital as fast as she could. By the time she got there, with Jordy in tow, I had been revived but remained in critical condition. Mumbling, I asked her to bring me a pad and a pen so I could write out my will, because the doctors weren’t at all sure I was going to make it through the night. My odds were fifty-fifty at best.
But I lived to see the morning and spent the next seven days in the ICU, suffering from an acute form of diverticulitis, an intestinal infection. It was further determined to be far more likely than not that the condition had been severely exacerbated, if not outright caused, by the residual buildup of stress I was experiencing, first from those nearly two years I was leading a double life undercover and then from the strain of constantly looking over my shoulder the past two and a half years.
A psychiatrist I had been seeing likened this to living in a perpetual state of fight or flight. When the body is in this state, it shuts down peripheral components, like much of the immune system, in order to focus almost solely on survival. From a psychological standpoint, it was essentially the equivalent of spending four straight years on the battlefield. Trauma piled upon trauma, given that I had been treated back in Los Angeles for serious complications resulting from PTSD coupled with childhood sexual trauma.
I was discharged after a week, determined to set my life back on course. I had lost some weight and strength, but not enough to curtail my efforts. In three months, I was bench-pressing four hundred pounds and running five miles a day. I got into the best shape of my life since college and later the army. Then, just as I began to treat my body differently, the psychiatrist I was seeing sent me to a mental health therapist who specialized in PTSD, specifically in how to manage the kind of daily activities everyone else takes for granted. That therapist taught me how to discard all the stresses before they got bottled up and spilled out in what could resemble a panic attack. Treatment educated me on how to manage my past, so I could focus on looking forward instead of back. I still kept an occasional gaze cocked over my shoulder just in case someone from the KKK came gunning for me, but I taught myself how to be cognizant of my surroundings without being paranoid about everything and everybody. When I was operational, my life was on loan. And when it came time to pay up, I almost paid with my life.
Not anymore.
Though my monthly stipend from the VA had relieved me of the need to make a regular paycheck, I had taken a job at a local shooting range teaching precision rifle to current law-enforcement and active military personnel, as well as veterans. It was mostly volunteer work, but I did receive some modest compensation from those who could afford it, while never taking money from those who couldn’t. I enjoyed being on the range and shooting, as well as teaching the skill to others, which proved therapeutic in its own right. Meanwhile, we were still living close enough to the beach to hear the waves at night through windows I was no longer afraid to leave open.
Then one day in April 2013, the phone rang.
“Hello,” I answered.
“Hey, Joe,” a voice I immediately recognized as my former handler Rich Vaughn said, “it’s Rich.”
“Been a long time, Rich,” I answered.
“How you been?”
“Good, real good. Thanks for asking.”
“Joe, I’m not going to mince words here,” Vaughn said, dispensing with the small talk. “We need you back.”