Just in Time: From Wisconsin, a Tax Preparer for ‘Aryans’
With W-2s and 1040s in the mail, tax season is getting into full swing. And even white nationalists have to pay their taxes if they’re not living off the grid. But where does a proud Aryan go to find a tax preparer who understands the special needs of white people?
They needn’t look any farther than the classifieds at Stormfront.org, the massive Web forum run by a former Alabama Klan leader in West Palm Beach, Fla. Under “Tax Preparation” is this ad: “Please stop using main Jew owned tax services from H&R Block and use one of your own! Please share and pass along.”
Click on it, and it takes you to a Web page for Garfield Accounting Services, “a full service accounting firm specializing in small and individual owned businesses” based in New Berlin, Wisc. According to her biography, its proprietress, Harriet E. Kester-Paletti, earned her associate’s degree in accounting at Kaplan University Online and is working towards her bachelor’s. She has been married to her husband Paul since 2005 and has three children (twins Paul Jr. and Aryan, and Eva). She says she volunteers at the public library, enjoys spending time outside when the weather cooperates, and is pleased to offer her services to everyone from “the single mechanic who works out of his garage to the stay at home mom selling Avon.”
Readers who want to dig deeper will find nothing else to enlighten them on Garfield Accounting Services’ website. But both Harriet and her husband have left deeper traces on the Internet. For starters, Paul Paletti pleaded guilty to battery, resisting arrest, and obstructing police in a Wisconsin state court in 2008.
According to the anti-racist Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Paletti is a prominent member of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement who was originally charged with felony battery as a hate crime for assaulting a Mexican teenager outside a bar in April 2007. But that charge was reduced to misdemeanor battery as part of a plea agreement, and Paletti was ordered to pay $1,713 in fines and serve two years of probation, during which he is prohibited from white supremacist activities. The ADL says that Paletti, 35, has a tattoo of the number 88, which is neo-Nazi code for “Heil Hitler.”
For her part, Harriet Kester-Paletti was mentioned in an article by Eve Conant in The Daily Beast last July. Conant said she was an NSM “sergeant” and described her as “a bubbly working mom” who “only takes off her swastika when she’s at work.” At the time, Kester-Paletti told Conant she had “just sent in her résumé to the mayor of New Berlin, hoping to fill [an appointive] seat on either the Crime Prevention Committee, Police and Fire Commission, or the Parks and Recreation Board.”
The mayor of New Berlin—and its citizens—might want to consider some of the NSM’s beliefs before they hand over public responsibilities to the Aryan tax preparer and crusader against “Jew owned tax services.” “Only those of pure White blood, whatever their creed, may be members of the nation,” the fourth of NSM’s 25 tenets reads. So much for serving everyone. “We demand that all non-Whites currently residing in America be required to leave the nation forthwith and return to their land of origin: peacefully or by force,” reads No. 7.
Then there’s 23(c): “Non-Whites shall be prohibited by law from participating financially in or influencing American newspapers.” And this, which might give New Berlin’s Recreation Board or town librarian pause: “We demand the legal prosecution of all those tendencies in art and literature which corrupt our national life, and the suppression of cultural events which violate this demand.”
