Neo-Nazi National Alliance Email Server Compromised Amid Infighting
Yet another coup appears to be unfolding within what was once America’s most professional and profitable racist organization.
Only bumbling neo-Nazis would try to save a sinking ship by adding more leaks.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of sensitive email exchanges between National Alliance (NA) chairman, William White Williams, and his small inner-circle of supporters have been mysteriously leaking to donors and decision makers in the embattled organization.
The leaked, confidential emails being forwarded and discussed include several disturbing exchanges between Williams and his attorney, Timothy Kalamaros, regarding Williams’ mental state. One email reportedly includes Kalamaros encouraging Williams to stay on his medication and to continue seeing his therapist. Williams allegedly replied he is off his meds and not seeking any further treatment for his psychiatric disability.
Williams also reportedly emailed Kalamaros that sometimes he gets so frustrated he feels like he should just put a gun to his head and “pull the trigger.” Kalamaros is said to have angrily replied that Williams should never send another email to him talking like that again.
If these emails are indeed authentic, Kalamaros, as a member of the Indiana bar, may have been legally obligated to document and immediately report these conversations with Williams to authorities. By allegedly claiming he is off his meds and considering suicide, Williams may meet the criteria threshold as a “dangerous person” under Indiana statute § 35-47-14-1.
Other leaked email exchanges suggest Kalamaros is unraveling just as quickly as Williams appears to be. In one, Kalamaros complains he is really only earning around ten dollars an hour helping Williams with his mounting legal problems and said the workload is affecting his blood pressure, since he no longer has time to work out at a gym three times a week, as ordered by his doctor.
Whoever is disseminating these sensitive, internal office communications seems to have a particular problem with Kalamaros, whose role in the National Alliance dates back to at least April 2002, when he became a generous donor and National Vanguard Books customer (number D5676).
Among the most recent trove of intentionally leaked documents and emails are more than a half dozen transaction records showing Kalamaros making cash donations to the NA and spending hundreds of dollars on neo-Nazi flags, racist coloring books and skinhead music CDs.
Believed to be Williams’ financial advisor and personal attorney, the leaked emails suggest Kalamaros is taking an increasingly active role in the management of the new National Alliance. In another exchange, for example, Kalamaros advises Williams to fire Kevin Alfred Strom as the Alliance media director, telling Williams that Strom, a convicted pedophile, is an embarrassment and simply associating with the NA to get money. Williams evidently instructed Strom to call Kalamaros, which apparently enraged the Indiana lawyer, who may have suspected Strom was recording him. In their brief conversation, Kalamaros reportedly told Strom he can’t sponge off the racist movement any more and suggested Strom “just go get a job at Lowe’s or something.” By email, Kalamaros refused to comment on the situation in the National Alliance and his role with the group.
Hatewatch has no way to independently verify the authenticity of some of these emails, and no one at the NA would comment publicly on them. Most appear to originate from the supposedly “secure” natall.com server created and controlled by Kevin Strom.
But who is leaking these documents and why? A Hatewatch analysis of the insider emails being distributed and discussed among Williams’ critics suggest there are at least three independent factions working to deliberately undermine Williams’ credibility and authority as NA chairman.
National Alliance Board
Probably Williams’ most influential donor left in the Alliance, Illinois farmer John McLaughlin, is reportedly coordinating with fellow NA board member Jayne Cartwright and others to oust Williams from the organization. McLaughlin and Cartwright are said to be concerned Williams is mentally unstable and likely to eventually cause the NA serious criminal and civil problems. The last straw reportedly came shortly after Williams’ Dec. 16 arrest for allegedly assaulting a female employee, when Strom defended Williams online with a stunning American Dissident Voices broadcast on Dec. 19 titled “Solstice 2015.”
Attempting to downplay the fact that “Chairman Williams” had just been arrested on the compound and charged with attempting to beat and strangle his female clerk, Strom began his weekly Internet radio show with one of the most shocking allegations ever leveled against Alliance founder, William L. Pierce. Strom claimed Pierce himself had been arrested and charged with the assault and rape of a female NA staff employee in the mid-1980s.
It was no secret that Pierce had purchased the favors of a handful of young, eastern European “mail order brides” over the years or that he seemed to have an appetite for interracial pornography, but the allegation the Alliance founder was dragged off the compound in handcuffs after being charged with beating and raping a female staff employee 30 years ago was news to everybody, including Hatewatch. For more than a week our staff searched through our archives for reports or records of this incident and found nothing in our files.
Subsequent telephone and email contacts with now-retired state and federal law enforcement agents who were professionally familiar with the Alliance during that era said they could “vaguely recall” Pierce’s arrest for sexual assault and two offered to check their notes and records. One former agent said he thinks he remembers the incident and said the case may have involved the wife of the leader of another then-notorious hate group of the 1980s.
Though Strom claimed in his broadcast the rape and assault charges against Pierce were ultimately dismissed, a retired investigator advised Hatewatch that a detailed record of any felony rape and assault arrest would remain on file with the West Virginia State Police and the Pocahontas County Prosecutor’s Office permanently, regardless of its ultimate disposition. Hatewatch plans to prepare official requests (FOIAs) for these files from several agencies. Strom’s helpful tip about his beloved leader will likely result in a future report.
McLaughlin and Cartwright were said to be outraged over this never-before-disclosed allegation about Pierce. McLaughlin angrily demanded the article be removed immediately from nationalvanguard.org. But Williams and Strom refused. In late December, McLaughlin cut off the $500 monthly stipend he had been giving to Strom for the past three years and began to work even more aggressively towards Williams’ ouster as chairman.
Despite several other influential Alliance members objecting to Strom’s broadcast, the program remains on the NA’s main news site.
National Alliance Reform and Restoration Group
Someone also appears to be leaking confidential inside information, financial documents and sensitive emails to a separate warring NA faction, the National Alliance Reform and Restoration Group (known by the odd acronym NARRG), which is working through the courts attempting to remove the entire NA board and seize the remaining assets from Williams, who took over the Alliance in October 2014 in the midst of the litigation. Williams has since been named as a defendant in the NARRG lawsuit and it is unclear if the Virginia court even recognizes Williams as chairman of the organization.
Insiders, however, suggest NARRG’s legal effort may be a lost cause, as there is very little left to argue over. Although the assets, land and physical property of the National Alliance were supposedly frozen by a court injunction in April 2014, pending settlement or adjudication of the civil case, Williams and his associates have allegedly “looted” the compound of anything of value, even making off with William Pierce’s hand-written manuscripts, his office furniture, personal files, his guns and even his passport and ashes, which Williams keeps at the top of the stairs in a barn on his property as some sort of makeshift shrine to the Alliance founder.
Williams’ alleged looting of the compound may eventually result in criminal charges or at least a contempt of court citation. Hatewatch has recently learned that despite the April 2014 court injunction in the NARRG lawsuit prohibiting the removal or liquidation of National Alliance assets, in late August 2014, Williams and McLaughlin traveled to the compound and allegedly drilled out the locks inside the National Alliance main office and began removing truckloads of property from the building.
The NA is also reportedly being buried under a mountain of debt, according to email exchanges among the critics and defectors. Williams has allegedly taken out credit card loans against the NA’s assets for more than $50,000 in the past 16 months. And leaked email discussions between Kalamoros and Williams suggest Williams is now essentially broke and intends to eventually bail out of the organization and declare bankruptcy after taking out a mortgage on the 300-acre compound to recover what he has personally spent on the NA over the past two years. It remains unclear why banks are reportedly issuing lines of credit to Williams based on the disputed property as collateral. His alleged use of the compound property for collateralizing loans and the converting or liquidating of National Alliance assets appear to be in violation of the NARGG lawsuit court injunction.
Kevin Strom
Based on the content of the emails leaking out it would appear that Kevin Alfred Strom may be working behind the scenes to seize control of the organization, or at least maintain his paid position as Alliance “media director,” by leaking strategic, embarrassing information about Williams to the NA board and others. Strom’s intentions remain unclear, but what is clear is that almost all of the most sensitive and damaging emails being leaked originate from the NA server he personally controls. Strom also controls most of the online presence of the neo-Nazi group, administrating all of the NA’s forums and news sites.
In this case, it seems particularly implausible to believe these confidential, internal email messages are somehow “accidentally” leaking from Strom’s server. Few computer users practice computer security with the intensity of a man who has served time in federal prison over what was found on his computer.
Strom, a convicted pedophile who went to prison after pleading guilty to possession of child pornography images found on his computer hard drive, has always given a high priority to information security. Since his stint in prison he is said to have redoubled his efforts at INFOSEC.
Ballpeen Hammering
Probably one of the most technically proficient professional racists in America, Strom reportedly first applied his electronics engineering skills for the National Alliance in the early 1980s when he designed and installed a security system for the organization’s Virginia headquarters. Today, Strom builds his own PCs, from carefully selected components, purchased online. And keeping the secret information stored on his machines private borders on obsession.
One anecdote of Strom’s technical intensity in this regard comes from a federal law enforcement source who noted anytime Strom upgraded and replaced his personal computer with a newer, faster model he would meticulously disassemble the old machine and slowly smash, into coffee-ground size bits, every chip, circuit board, solder connection and semiconductor inside the computer with a ballpeen hammer.
And even then, the neo-Nazi media mogul wasn’t quite done. Strom would then bag the shattered plastic and silicon bits into several small grocery sacks, get in his car and randomly dispose of them at interstate gas station trash cans over several counties over a couple of hours. Strom claimed these elaborate extremes were necessary in order to prevent the omnipotent “Jewish-controlled System” from studying his discarded computer and learning how he was fighting them.
FBI computer forensic examiners found that Strom had other, more personal, secrets to protect, as well. Though today, Strom claims his child pornography possession conviction, to which he pleaded guilty, was an elaborate scheme by the federal government to shut down his exposure of the Jews, his arrest almost a decade ago came as the result of a mother reporting Strom for stalking her pre-teen daughter.
Arrested for the attempted rape of an elementary school girl in January 2007 and charged under an eight count federal indictment, the Department of Justice alleged Strom used “coercion and enticement” in attempting to lure a “ten year old child” into a relationship in order to “engage in sexual activity.”
On the first day of trial, testimony by the victim’s mother revealed her daughter was a schoolmate of Strom’s stepdaughter. For more than two years, Strom encouraged his stepdaughter to regularly invite the little girl over to Strom’s home for “playdates” and “sleep-overs.”
Though running his neo-Nazi media empire took most of his time, testimony revealed that Strom, who referred to himself as “Daddy” to his stepdaughter, seemed to always make time to play with the girls. He took the children for walks and on shopping expeditions. Over several months Strom began to present the child with small gifts, including a sweater and a newly released CD from a band he noted was on the girl’s MP3 player. Using another NA member’s credit card, Strom had flowers delivered to the child’s home and eventually wrote her a romantic poem where he promised to marry the little girl, telling her how he dreamed of her “showering him with kisses.”
Not a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
With a soft, almost feminine voice and friendly eyes behind Harry Potter glasses, neighbors said Kevin Strom seemed whimsical and playful around the children in the neighborhood. With his Mr. Rogers demeanor and meek personality, no one in the community suspected anything might be wrong about Strom’s interaction with children.
Trial transcripts show Strom’s courtship of the young girl was slow and methodical and it took the victim’s mother a while to suspect anything amiss. Initially, she testified, she considered the relationship her daughter had with Strom and his stepdaughter to be fairly ordinary.
After all, Strom was a trusted member of the small Ruckersville, Va., community where the children attended a private, Christian elementary school. (Investigators later noted the school was located within walking distance of Strom’s house.) Strom even had extra permissions and access to the school as the “unofficial photographer” for school events. According to the victim’s mother, Strom seemed, by all appearances, to be a friendly, involved parent to one of her daughter’s schoolmates.
As the flowers, clothing and gifts began to arrive for the child in the mail, however, her mother became concerned and eventually alarmed. She moved her family more than hour away and enrolled her daughter in another school. But when she observed Kevin Strom’s van slowly driving past her new home one night, she called police.
Virginia investigators, assisted by psychologists with the FBI’s Crimes Against Children Unit, noted Strom’s courtship of the child was “textbook grooming behavior.” The mother’s police report of Strom stalking her child was sufficient for a search warrant. Investigators found thousands of photographs of children on Strom’s computer, including hundreds of images of the victim and a number of pornographic images of children her age. Federal law enforcement assisted county investigators with forensic computer resources and the U.S. Attorney eventually took over the case. Strom was subsequently arrested and indicted for attempting to rape the child as well as for witness intimidation and possession of child pornography.
Wife, Mother and Witness
Around the same time a mother of a ten-year-old was reporting Strom for stalking her daughter, there were similar problems emerging in the Strom household.
The witness intimidation charges in the indictment were related to Strom attempting to strangle his wife, Elisha, as she was on the phone calling 911 after she returned home from errands and found Kevin sitting naked, masturbating to child pornography images in his office. Elisha Strom eventually installed video cameras in the home and recorded her husband repeatedly downloading child pornography. Despite Strom admitting he was caught by his wife on tape viewing these images, the videos were subsequently ruled illegal and never made it into the court room.
The federal case began to fall apart after defense attorneys arranged to have Strom’s possession of child pornography charges prosecuted with a separate trial. After the prosecution rested on the attempted child rape charges, without being allowed to show the jury the images found on Strom’s computer or the secret videotapes, his defense attorneys argued that federal prosecutors failed to prove Strom crossed any state lines or did anything overtly to make physical sexual contact with the child before he was arrested.
The victim’s family was stunned when the court agreed. Upon ordering the dismissal of two of the eight felony counts against Strom, Judge Norman Moon said, "I think the jury can find he was sexually attracted to this child.” But that alone was not illegal, he said.
When federal prosecutor Bill Gould tried to argue Strom’s sexual intentions with the ten-year-old were made clear with the gifts, sweaters, flowers and marriage proposal poem, particularly after he was seen slowly driving past the little girl's house, Judge Moon acknowledged that Strom was sexually drawn to the child but dismissed the prosecutor’s argument, saying, "That's what these people do when they're obsessed."
In January 2008, to avoid another trial and a possible 10 to 15 year sentence, Strom negotiated a plea bargain on the possession of child pornography charges and was sentenced to 23 months in federal prison followed by 15 years of supervised federal probation. During the hearing Strom denied he was a pedophile or a white supremacist and compared himself to the Dalai Lama.
Though now a registered sex offender, the “media master” began revising his record soon after being released from federal prison. By creating a fake news site claiming he was railroaded and using surrogates to make hundreds of Internet postings with similar claims on neo-Nazi forums, Strom has successfully argued to many in the racist movement that the charges against him were all fabricated by the FBI in order to prevent him from doing his important “life’s work” of fighting the Jews. Today, Strom claims his wife was responsible for fabricating all the legal charges against him, though he never speaks of the elementary school girl and her mother who initially reported him to police and testified against him on the first day of his trial.
The Nazi pedophile has gradually rebuilt a financial support base of sympathizers allowing him to basically spend his days blogging about the Jews. Strom lives, reportedly rent-free, in a house in suburban Johnstown, Pa., owned by Martin John “Marty” Fenik, a fellow amateur radio enthusiast active on the racist “Liberty Net,” which has been broadcasting on short-wave radio every Saturday night for decades.
Fenik, 59, who goes by the call-sign, N2IRJ, can be heard talking with Strom on the amateur bands through recordings posted on Strom’s website 3950.net
Still Obsessed with Children
Strom recently blogged about living in Fenik’s house and taking long, daily walks around the neighborhood of what Strom calls “the outskirts of a nearly all-White city,” where, he says, he gets “to see how people live, close up.”
Strom complains that people avert their eyes when he tries to greet them, “they usually look away,” he writes. “…when I meet a fellow pedestrian, there’s at least a 50 per cent. chance he or she will just walk by, head down, without a word, even when I brightly say ‘hello’ or ‘howdy.’ It’s like I’m not even there.”
Perhaps Strom’s neighbors do know he is there after finding his photo and name on the Pennsylvania sex offender registry, which lists his residence and place of employment at Fenik’s address. And, if they read or listened to Strom’s January American Dissident Voices broadcast about their neighborhood, they may have cause for concern.
Strom also writes that as he walks through the Richland Township suburb of Johnstown each day he makes note of the homes that have children living in them. “Every block or two there’s a family with kids. And every block or two there are at least twenty houses. By my rough calculation, that’s much less than 5 per cent of the homes having children. To the White children of today’s America, there is seldom such a thing as ‘the kids next door.’”
In the same blog post, the neo-Nazi with an admitted appetite for child pornography also complains that the children in his neighborhood are no longer seen outside unattended by their parents, unlike back in the days when he was a child.
“And the standard practice for parents was to give your kids free rein to go anywhere in the neighborhood until dinnertime. Going even a mile away was no problem, even taking a long walk to the local shopping center was nothing to be concerned about.”
Police Intervention
On Dec. 16, 2015, however, there was something to be concerned about at Strom’s residence when police responded to a report that a 26-year-old woman was being held in Fenik’s house by Strom against her will. Meredith Kellar, the young woman Will Williams introduced to Strom, told the responding officers she wanted to leave but Strom would not let her go.
Three Richland Township patrol units responded to the call and escorted Kellar from the home. Strom, who will be 60 years old in August, is several years older than his “girlfriend’s” father.
It remains unclear what connection Martin Fenik has with Richland Township and why he has allowed Strom to live in his home for the past three years. Fenik was contacted by Hatewatch and asked about his relationship with Strom. He did not return repeated voicemail messages.
Regardless of Strom’s growing standing in the racist subculture, the idea that he would be participating in a takeover of the National Alliance seems absurd with all of his baggage.
Yet, it seems hard to believe after all of his legal troubles over incriminating information being found on his personal computer that suddenly hundreds of confidential email exchanges between the current chairman and key associates are just mysteriously leaking from his Internet server without his knowledge or involvement.
For his part, National Alliance Chairman Will Williams may have much bigger concerns than clumsy coup attempts over a near-bankrupt hate group or the surfacing of a trove of embarrassing emails. Williams is due in a Pocahontas County, W.V., court room today to answer several criminal complaints. And there may be more charges coming.
The Pocahontas County Prosecutor’s Office confirmed to Hatewatch that Williams, his wife, Svetlana, and two others are under investigation for felony larceny over an incident on the property last October where Williams allegedly stole thousands of dollars worth of military ammunition, night vision equipment and other material from his assault victim, Garland DeCourcy. He and his associates allegedly removed a truckload of DeCourcy’s property from the site. Two law enforcement officers are said to be witnesses in the larceny investigation.
The National Alliance still appears strong in cyberspace, with a constellation of websites, blogs and forums, all run by Kevin Strom. And through his influence and uncanny ability to manipulate key moderators, Will Williams has managed to have his say, slander his victims and get his critics banned on Stormfront. Amazingly, after being banned on the neo-Nazi forum for years after his guilty plea for possession of child porn, Kevin Strom is again permitted to post on Stormfront under the username “Ovid.”
But in the real world, with the remaining assets of the run-down, neo-Nazi compound tied up in civil court and the group’s chairman facing mounting criticism and increasingly serious criminal charges, the façade of America’s most infamous hate group seems to be fading fast.
