Christmas, you might say, came early that year when William Hawley didn’t show up at the rally in Cedar Key. The actual day marked Tia’s first Christmas, but it was Jordy who stole the show.
Earlier that week, he decided he wanted a baby brother for Christmas and, instead of asking Santa for one, he approached the stork directly by writing a letter stating his request. I wrote Jordy back in the guise of the stork saying that if he kept putting up good grades and was a good boy, before long the stork would grant his wish. Then, on Christmas morning, Shannon and I drew little stork footprints in the kitchen right around where we kept the cookies and milk we put out for Santa Claus. The footprints led straight to the tree, under which all the gifts he’d asked for, save for a little brother, were waiting for him.
It turned out our little family—Shannon, Jordy, Tia, and I—enjoyed a peaceful Christmas. Even with the stresses and inherent risks of my work undercover, I did my best to stay in the moment and savor these precious, fleeting moments of normalcy.
That peace lasted through the holidays, then abruptly ended in early January with a call from Charles Newcomb. Thanks to the bail money I’d raised, he’d been able to enjoy Christmas and New Year’s Day at home, and was now ready to get back into action.
“We’re having a little get-together Sunday for family and friends, Brother Joe. I’m wondering if you might want to attend. It’ll just be a small gathering.”
“As long as your wife’s a good cook, Brother Charles, count me in.”
“She makes a great fried chicken. And if that doesn’t suit your fancy, I’ll have hot dogs roasting on the grill.”
“The fried chicken sounds great.”
The more Newcomb felt comfortable in my presence, the better I’d be able to do my job, so I accepted the invitation knowing that the FBI would approve, and drove out to his property in Keystone Heights on Sunday. I pulled in halfway between the fence line and the house, where other cars had been parked, and saw around two dozen people milling about outside. The next thing I noticed was Thomas Driver climbing out of his car.
“KIGY, Brother,” I greeted.
“KIGY, Brother,” he said back, lowering his voice as he approached me. “I’ll get my schedule for the next few weeks when I go into work tomorrow.”
“Keep us informed.”
“I will, sir. And I appreciate everything you’re doing. It’s a righteous thing.”
“We’re a family, Brother.”
I extended my hand, and Driver shook it gratefully. We approached the festivities together, passing Jim Heart on the way, who greeted me with a nod I returned in kind. I noticed him pay attention to the way I was carrying my firearm and rehearsed in my mind the actions I’d take if he asked to search me, which would almost surely reveal the wire I was wearing. But he didn’t say a word.
Charles Newcomb approached me straightaway, nodding to Driver as he steered me away from the crowd. The look on his face was different from any I’d seen on him before, softer and bordering on appreciative. I noticed his cheeks and thick neck were red, maybe from getting overheated after standing over the grill too long. I could smell charcoal in the distance. I observed that the men, all Klansmen, were seated at one large table, while the women and children sat separately, crowded around smaller tables set back a bit to free the men to talk without being heard. This was typical of the Klan’s antebellum, patriarchal society, in which women played a subservient role. Newcomb didn’t ask his wife to do something so much as command her in a way that was clearly demeaning. I also noticed that the men’s table was positioned closer to the kitchen door so they could get first crack at any platters of food that emerged. If the barbecue’s attendees had been wearing different clothes, this could have been a scene straight out of 1865, when the KKK had been founded.
“Thank you for your efforts, Brother Joe,” he said, shaking my hand.
“KLASP, Brother Charles. It’s nothing you wouldn’t have done for me.”
“Let’s go inside,” he said, angling that way. “There’s something I’d like to show you.”
Inside the house, the air-conditioning was making little dent in the heat and humidity. Newcomb led me to a glass display case that rose maybe five feet off the floor with several shelves inside, all holding an assortment of knives.
“I don’t show this to a lot of folks,” Newcomb said, obviously proud of his collection.
“Impressive,” I noted, even though it was anything but.
The knives were all shiny and new, most of them with the outline and features of the Confederate flag forged into the steel at the thickest part of the blade, near the hilt. The assortment of folding knives had the same Confederate flag design carved into the handle. As someone trained in knife fighting, it was clear to me these were only for show, ordered from some redneck version of the Knife of the Month Club.
Newcomb didn’t bother opening the case to let me handle any of them, saving me from feeling how poorly weighted these knives were certain to be. Instead he directed me to a mantel where a sword I recognized as the kind used in Klan naturalization ceremonies hung.
“That’s the real thing, Brother Joe, tested in battle and having drawn blood almost for sure,” he said proudly. “We’re going to be using it when we naturalize someone from this point forward.”
I pictured myself, as the Grand Knighthawk, playing the role of the Keeper of the Fire while Newcomb, as the Exalted Cyclops, presided, with that sword laid out on the table between us. Then I thought of William Hawley handing me the Walther P38 he expected me to use to pop that truck driver. The contrast between Hawley and Newcomb was striking when you consider Hawley’s car collection, vast stores of weapons, and respect of the community. While Newcomb occupied a similar position in this chapter of the Traditionalist American Knights to Hawley’s in his United Northern and Southern Knights klavern, the differences in resources and reputation were dramatic. I wondered whether this was emblematic of the Klan as a whole, their nationwide expansion rooted in the willingness to accept more violent loners into the ranks and promote them to positions of leadership, just as the TAK had with Newcomb.
“We should go get ourselves a look at Warren Williams’s home in Palatka, Brother Joe. You know”—he smiled, as if about to share something between us—“do some recon.”
“That would be you and me?” I said.
“And Sarge,” Newcomb said, referring to Moran, whose nickname came courtesy of his prison guard rank. “We’ll do our recon while Driver is at work.”
By this time, I had informed the FBI about the additional three targets Newcomb had mentioned to me during my last visit to his property.
“Joe,” Vaughn had told me at a regularly scheduled meeting, “we’re not going to move these people or put any men on them. We’re relying on you to dig deeper within yourself to keep these people safe.”
In that moment, I could hear my own heart pounding in my chest, along with a tingling on the back of my neck as beads of sweat built up on my forehead from the stress of having more added to my plate.
“Yes, sir.”
The Bureau’s focus, meanwhile, was all on Warren Williams. The challenge the Bureau and the JTTF faced was that this would actually be prosecuted as a state case and not a federal one, since murder wasn’t a federal crime. So Vaughn, Campbell, and company needed to work closely and cooperatively with Florida state prosecutors, which required a lot of coordination behind the scenes. No way the Bureau could risk working with local prosecutors, since my intelligence had already identified several who were beholden to the Klan. Bringing in anybody whose loyalty to our cause was not absolute could pose a big problem in the event the recon of Warren Williams’s home occurred before they had an opportunity to get everything in place.
As things turned out, Driver’s and Moran’s schedules lined up perfectly one week in mid-February, and I got a call from Newcomb.
“We’re on for the day after tomorrow, Brother Joe. Be at my house at eight in the morning.”
His authoritative tone unsettled me a bit, because it indicated he was placing himself in the lead instead of continuing to show deference to my position as Grand Knighthawk. The good thing was he had provided enough notice for the FBI to get my Kia Sportage wired up with devices to record and transmit everything Newcomb and Moran said during our drive. My instructions were to make sure we took my vehicle, and I wondered if I’d need to come up with some way to disable Newcomb’s in the event he insisted on driving.
I dressed in church clothes for the recon, a Gray Man technique that made it appear I was not armed, because the fuller cut of the shirt allowed me to wear a shoulder rig that concealed my pistol under my armpit. I was still confident I could get the gun out and fire in a timely fashion, especially in a confined space like the inside of a car. Newcomb claimed he’d killed four men, but I seriously doubted either he or Moran had ever been involved in a close-quarters shoot-out. My advantage lay in the fact that I had.
I arrived at Charles Newcomb’s home right on time on a Tuesday morning to find Jim Heart patrolling the property on an ATV. I was grateful he wouldn’t be accompanying us, although he did cast me what passed for a friendly wave as I climbed out of my car right alongside Newcomb’s home. Moran, who’d gotten there ahead of me, gave me a similarly friendly wave from the truck he was leaning on and then pocketed the cell phone he’d been on.
Newcomb emerged from the house toting a fishing pole and a tackle box. Taking the initiative, I moved to the back of my Kia and raised the rear hatch to indicate I’d be driving.
“That supposed to be our cover if we get stopped?” I said, nodding at his fishing gear, to distract him from my effort to use my car.
I held my breath when he placed the rod and tackle box inside, afraid he might notice some sign of an FBI recording device. One of them, tucked inside my tool bag, looked like a pipe bomb with an antenna rising from one end. I could picture Newcomb looking at me quizzically while posing the question, Why do you have a pipe bomb with an antenna?
He was looking at me, though, instead of the tool bag on the carpeted cargo area. “No, sir. Come inside and I’ll explain better.”
He led me into the kitchen, where he plucked a pair of glass vials from the refrigerator.
“This here’s insulin, Brother Joe. We happen to see Williams and scoop him up, all we have to do is inject him with this. It’ll kill him quick and there won’t be any sign how he died.”
My stomach dropped as I eyed the vials, but I forced my expression to remain neutral.
“What we do is take him to some secluded fishing spot, shoot him up there, and dump his body in the water,” Newcomb went on. “By the time they find the fishing gear and his body, there won’t be much left, and even if there is the autopsy won’t show a damn thing. It’ll look like an accident.”
I almost asked Newcomb, What if Williams doesn’t fish? But I didn’t pose that somewhat obvious question because I was preoccupied with this new development. As far as I knew, this was supposed to be a reconnaissance trip. Now Newcomb was talking about going operational this morning, should the opportunity present itself. How did I know Newcomb and Moran might not take violent action on Williams? How did I know they wouldn’t storm the house? I knew I might have to gun them down if that came to pass. At least, though, the Bureau would be aware of all our impending actions, thanks to the listening devices in my vehicle.
I showed no surprise and posed no questions about the apparent change in plans, not about to risk doing anything that might make Newcomb suspicious. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but then again, until that point he had paid deference to me when it came to planning the murder.
Newcomb climbed into the passenger seat of my Kia, Moran into the back, and we set off on the one-hour drive to Palatka. We made small talk along the way, nothing coming out of my mouth to suggest anything was amiss, other than to pose some questions about the plan and the insulin in order to alert the FBI that things might not be unfolding exactly as per the plan. The FBI would be listening to the entire episode on a live feed; I just needed to choose my words carefully to keep them informed, while saying nothing that might make Newcomb and Moran suspicious.
When we pulled off the highway and reached the outskirts of Warren Williams’s neighborhood, I could see Moran’s eyes scanning about, clocking the number of people on the sidewalk or outside their homes.
“What are all these people doing outside hanging around on a Tuesday morning?”
“Most of ’em don’t work, Sarge,” Newcomb said. “You know how these people are. Rather pick up an unemployment check than do an honest day’s labor. Maybe you should recruit them to work at Raiford,” he finished, joking.
“Nah, these n——are too stupid to pass the written test.”
We took a turn that put us on Williams’s street. He lived with his mother in a small, well-kept home pretty much identical to all the others on the block, squeezed together with small yards at front and back. They were tract homes of a sort, layered in amid an impoverished section of the state that was riddled with unemployment. Right away I noticed unmarked police vehicles, including a van and a truck, were parked everywhere. I tensed up behind the wheel. I figured the FBI had arranged for enough of a law-enforcement presence to dissuade Newcomb and Moran from taking any action independent of me, without giving me any advance notice. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, almost immediately an unmarked highway patrol car, recognizable from recessed lights in the grille, showed up and pulled in right behind me. It followed us past Williams’s house, recognizable from the number on the mailbox, all the way to the end of the block.
I noticed Moran was looking out the rear window. “You see that car behind us?” he asked.
“Suspicious,” Newcomb acknowledged.
“Looks like an unmarked police vehicle,” Moran said.
“Yeah.”
I remained silent and drove around the block twice. The unmarked police cruiser never left our tail. Newcomb let out a breath of exasperation, and I thought I heard him swearing under his breath. I needed to keep one eye on Moran, one eye on Newcomb, and one eye on the road.
But I only had two eyes.
I had to keep myself under control. Breathe, focus, observe . . . Breathe, focus, observe . . . I had to assume the worst, that the unmarked cruiser was going to make a move on us and this was going to go to guns. In preparation for that, I eased my hand up to my sidearm, feeling my heart thudding against my chest, ready to tear back my shirt to grab my gun, as I turned back onto the highway. Just when I thought we’d hit the point of no return, the unmarked patrol car pulled over and made a U-turn. I thought to myself, Thank God, but Newcomb remained suspicious.
“Weird that they were right there waiting on something,” he said.
“Yeah,” Moran agreed, “strange.”
And that’s when my phone rang with Rich Vaughn’s phone number lighting up in the caller ID, listed under a fictitious name. I knew I had to answer it so as not to arouse any suspicion, but I couldn’t believe he was calling me at this moment. Didn’t he know what was going on? By calling now, he was putting me in an extremely dangerous position that could have resulted in a shoot-out.
“Hey, babe,” I greeted, pretending it was my wife, and knowing this would get violent if Newcomb insisted on confirming it was Shannon on the other end of the line.
“Have you left the area?” Vaughn asked me, and I could only hope his voice was soft enough so Newcomb and Moran wouldn’t hear him.
Fortunately, they were paying more attention to what was behind us to see if any more cars pulled up on our tail. I assumed Vaughn wasn’t in contact with the highway patrol and must have been too far out of range for the listening device to reach him.
“Everything’s good, babe.”
Vaughn got the point that I couldn’t talk. “Okay, I’m gonna ask you a few questions you only need to answer yes or no to. Are you still in the neighborhood?”
“No.”
“Are you headed back?”
“Yeah, babe, we’re headed to Brother Charles’s house right now.”
“So you’re not headed back?”
I realized he was referring to the neighborhood. He wanted to make sure we weren’t going to get down the road and then go in search of Warren Williams again.
“Call you when I’m on my way home,” I said, aware the call had gone on for too long already. “Love you, babe.”
Looking back, in my mind this entire scenario could have been staged to leave me no choice other than to kill Moran and Newcomb, in which case everything would have ended then and there. There would have been no need to stage Williams’s murder and then make a case that would have to go to trial. And you can’t try men who are dead. Though I never confirmed this, or even inquired about it, the more I recall the circumstances, the more I think it may have been me who was being set up to execute our targets.
The rest of the drive back to Newcomb’s passed without incident, with not a lot of words exchanged until we pulled onto his property.
“What now, Brother Joe?” he asked me, his voice deferential again.
It was abundantly clear to the FBI in the wake of that trip that these guys had every intention of killing Warren Williams. What we needed to do was come up with an alternative to prevent them from taking independent action.
“I’m not sure, Brother Charles. Let me think on it a bit,” I said, to buy myself some time.