Bill White, Neo-Nazi Threatmaker, Convicted Yet Again

William A. White, a one-time Virginia real estate czar who had a second career as a rabid neo-Nazi specializing in making threats over the Internet, now faces the likelihood of another 16 years or more in a federal prison.

On Nov. 1, an anonymous jury in Roanoke, Va., found White guilty of four federal crimes — three counts of making a threat with the intent to extort and a fourth count of sending a threatening E-mail. The convictions are only White’s latest on similar charges and apparently will result in his designation as a “career offender,” meaning he will likely face a harsher prison term than he otherwise might have.

The newest convictions were related to threats White made via E-mail to his ex-wife in May and June 2012 after she stopped mailing him $400 a month payments while he was a federal fugitive living in Mexico. He fled there after being convicted of making threats related to his involvement in the now-defunct American National Socialist Workers Party, a neo-Nazi group he started in 2006.

After the verdicts were read last week, the 36-year-old White, already serving prison time for soliciting violence against a juror, glanced down before looking at his mother in the gallery, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported.

At least one of his supporters, a blogger in Great Britain, claims the case against White was nothing more than a “domestic dispute,” that he was targeted by federal prosecutors as “a convenient scapegoat due to his political beliefs.” While “free speech” defenses haven’t worked as a defense for his threatmaking, White should now become a poster boy for the “Men’s Rights” movement, the writer identified only as “Jonathan” suggested in a “eulogy” posting yesterday on a “Bill White” blog.

Federal prosecutors are expected to use the latest conviction as a reason to have White declared a career offender, making him eligible for a sentence of 200 months of more in prison, court documents say.

A sentencing date hasn’t been set by Senior Judge James C. Turk of the Western District of Virginia, but it likely will be next year after a pre-sentence report is completed and prosecutors file a sentencing memorandum.

The next prison term White gets may only begin to run after his current term, which isn’t set to end until November 2015. As a habitual offender, he is less likely to see the judge allow an additional term to run concurrently with the one he is now serving.

The jury selected for White’s just-completed, three-day trial was chosen anonymously, with each prospective juror and those ultimately chosen for the panel only referred to by number, court documents say. “In light of … White’s two prior convictions involving threats toward participants in judicial proceedings, including a juror, the court concludes that the jury needs protection from interference or harm, or that the integrity of the jury’s function will be compromised absent anonymity,” the judge wrote.

White did not take the stand in his own defense, and the jury was not told of his prior convictions, his affiliations with white supremacists or threats he made to African Americans while running a real estate business in Virginia.

He was convicted in Roanoke in 2009 for making racially charged threats and in Chicago in 2011 for soliciting violence against the foreman of a jury that convicted Matthew Hale, leader of a neo-Nazi group then called the World Church of the Creator (it has seen been renamed the Creativity Movement). Hale was found guilty of soliciting the murder of a federal judge that had ruled against his group in a civil case and sentenced to 40 years in federal prison in 2003.