New Charges Against Neo-Nazi Bill White

Last year was not a good one for bellicose neo-Nazi Bill White. This year could be worse. White, the founder and leader of the American National Socialist Workers Party, was indicted in Roanoke, Va., in December on seven federal counts related to making Internet and other threats. If convicted on all counts, he faces as much as 55 years in prison and $1.75 million in fines. White already was in a federal holding facility in Chicago, following his arrest in October on an obstruction of justice charge stemming from personal information he published on his website about the jury foreman in the trial of another neo-Nazi leader.

Federal authorities in Virginia maintained that White went beyond speech protected by the First Amendment and threatened people on his website, in E-mails and in phone calls. His targets, according to the government: a Citibank employee whom he tried to extort; black tenants in a housing dispute in his hometown of Roanoke; a black syndicated newspaper columnist; a University of Delaware professor; a Canadian civil rights lawyer, and the black mayor of South Harrison Township, N.J.

In February 2008, for example, White posted a headline on Overthrow.com — "KILL Richard Warman" — in reference to a Canadian civil rights lawyer. White went on to write that Warman "should be drug out into the street and shot" and provided the lawyer's home address.

White also posted syndicated newspaper columnist Leonard Pitts' home address and phone number and the name of his wife. He did not advocate harming Pitts. But when one of Pitts' editors at The Miami Herald sent White an E-mail asking him to remove Pitts' personal information, White replied: "Frankly, if some loony took the info and killed him, I wouldn't shed a tear. That also goes for your whole news room."

The indictment also noted that White once wrote on his Overthrow.com website that he would like to personally murder 20 or so African Americans in Roanoke and, if he lived long enough after that, to then "begin picking off the ridiculous 'independent journalists' that staff the [Intelligence] Report." He was not indicted in connection with those statements.

White's legal travails began two months earlier when federal agents seized computer modems, servers and other equipment from the Roanoke apartment where Overthrow.com was based. The website has been shut down ever since. A search warrant affidavit said that agents were looking for Web pages, E-mails and other evidence that showed "an intent to intimidate or injure persons whose personal information has been posted in the same manner as Hale Juror A."

That was a reference to information White posted with the name, photo, home address and phone numbers of a "Gay, Jewish anti-racist" juror he maintained was instrumental in the 2004 conviction of Matt Hale, then-leader of the neo-Nazi World Church of the Creator, for soliciting the murder of a federal judge.

Even before his arrest, White seemed to be unraveling. In May, he said on his website blog that he was closing his real estate business, White Homes and Land, and selling its assets at auction. "I no longer have the patience to continue to govern over white trash and n------ and the scum of the earth, and if I'm going on a murder rampage in the area, I hope to unwind my company and my investments first," he wrote.

White filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection the following month. In July, he wrote a lengthy rant about his woes as a landlord with African-American tenants. "I am convinced … that the only solution to this problem is to kill all of the n------ involved, preferably with state-sponsorship," he wrote. "When the death squads come, line me up as volunteer number one." In another post that month, he claimed, "I, and those who follow me, are literal living manifestations of God."

White apparently lacks God's omniscience. Three months before his arrest he blogged on his website: "I still sit here publishing, with no intent to stop, and no real chance of being stopped for any substantial period of time. Short of killing me, there is nothing the US government can do to stop me from saying what I have to say." Now he sits in jail, denied bail and awaiting trial.

A commentator on the neo-Nazi VNN Forum said White's arrest left his wife and infant daughter financially strapped and urged its readers to send them money - preferably "well-concealed cash." "Many people here at VNN don't think much of Bill White," the commentator added, "but kicking a man while he is down is never the Aryan thing to do."