Family Ties: How Andrew Anglin's dad helped his neo-Nazi son with the Daily Stormer

The real reason was a bit more pedestrian: Anglin’s father, Greg Anglin, simply refused to pick up mail for the site.

“I just didn’t want to do it anymore,” Greg Anglin told attorneys in a deposition.

A partial transcript of Greg Anglin’s Oct. 31 deposition came out as an exhibit to a motion in lawsuit brought by Dean Obeidallah. A prominent Muslim satellite radio host, Obeidallah is pursuing damages from Andrew Anglin after a default judgment in a defamation lawsuit in federal court in Ohio.

The sworn testimony offers the first inside look at how the Daily Stormer’s donations were handled and Greg Anglin’s involvement in his son’s website for the first four years after the launch of the Daily Stormer in 2013.

Greg Anglin’s testimony varies at times from sharp recollection about his actions to memory lapses about the work he did for Andrew Anglin. At least once, Greg Anglin expresses outright mystification about his son’s actions and motivations.

The deposition also includes a disclosure about Greg Anglin borrowing an all-cash loan of $60,000 from his son.

Both the site, one of the most popular neo-Nazi landing spots on the internet, and Andrew Anglin himself are also the subject of several lawsuits surrounding posts and Anglin’s conduct online.

Total Fascism

Andrew Anglin got his start in online neo-Nazism in 2012 with a website called Total Fascism. The webpage was dedicated to long-form pieces on fascists and fascism in general.

4chan, an imageboard known for its lack of censorship, played a big role in Anglin’s move toward fascism.

“I had always been into 4chan, as I am at heart a troll,” Anglin wrote. “This is about the time /new/ [a specific 4chan board] was going full-Nazi, and so I got into Hitler, and realized that through this type of nationalist system, alienation could be replaced with community in a real sense, while the authoritarianism would allow for technology to develop in a direction that was beneficial rather than destructive to the people.”

Anglin discovered he wanted something faster, more immediate and more appealing to younger readers. Thus, the Daily Stormer was born.

Anglin named the page after infamous Nazi Julius Streicher’s antisemitic weekly newspaper, Der Stürmer, which specialized in pornographic attacks on Jews. Streicher was hanged after being convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg.

For Andrew Anglin, though, the name was perfect.

“Using the daily news is a means to propagandize people,” Anglin explained to Vocativ in March 2014. “To get them to look at the world in a certain way.”

Birth of a Stormer

Andrew Anglin has been something of a ghost in public. He’s claimed to have been in Lagos, Nigeria, Russia and Thailand in recent years, but his exact location has been unknown. Anglin is being sued by the Southern Poverty Law Center for orchestrating a terror campaign against a Montana woman. He also faces lawsuits for defamation in Ohio and for his role in promoting the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

By not disclosing his location, Anglin is avoiding being served with the lawsuits and making the relatively straightforward process of serving him with lawsuits, which has the effect of delaying any ultimate judgment or effort to collect judgments against him.

Hiding out made it difficult for Andrew Anglin to file his own incorporation paperwork for the Daily Stormer with the state of Ohio.

So he asked his dad, Greg, to do all the legal paperwork for him with the state.

Greg Anglin, a semi-retired business consultant, said he had no clear idea why Andrew wanted Moonbase Holdings, the parent company of the Daily Stormer, and his own name registered with the Secretary of State.

Greg Anglin was also listed as the original registrant for the website’s domain name.

Andrew Anglin used his father’s credit card to pay the registration fee.

“Do you have any understanding as to why he listed you as the registrant?” attorney Abid R. Qureshi asked.

“I have no idea,” Greg Anglin responded, and explained he later asked Andrew to remove him as the website’s registrant.

Greg Anglin said he visited the Daily Stormer webpage, knew what was on it and had an opinion about it.

“And, with that opinion in mind, you agreed to do what your son asked?” said attorney Abid R. Qureshi asked.

“I have a difficult time as a dad sometimes knowing what to support and what not to support,” Greg Anglin said. “I don’t take responsibility for someone else’s actions. He asked me to record this form and I did.”

Greg Anglin also paid the bills associated with creating Moonbase, and registering the Daily Stormer and Andrew Anglin’s name with the Ohio Secretary of State. Beyond that, Greg Anglin said, his son covers all his own bills.

“Well, I mean, I don’t pay any expenses for his adventures here,” Greg Anglin said. “So he reimburses me for that.”

“How did you get reimbursed?” Qureshi asked.

“I used cash from the money that had been sent to him,” Greg Anglin said.

Greg Anglin allowed two addresses associated with him to serve as the legal address for the Daily Stormer and Moonbase until January 2018.

That’s when it changed to the offices of Zappitelli CPA, an accounting firm Greg Anglin did business with in Hilliard, Ohio. Karen Zappitelli said in an affidavit that she was unaware and didn’t give permission to anyone to list the office as the registered legal agent for the Daily Stormer or Moonbase.

That only became clear in October when she reviewed the address change with the Ohio Secretary of State.

“Until that time, I was unaware that what purported to be my signature had been used to represent Zappitelli CPA as an ‘authorized representative’ of Moonbase and file the Agent Address Change,” Karen Zappitelli wrote.

Who exactly signed the paperwork making the accounting firm the registered agent for Moonbase remains unclear.

Show me the money

The Daily Stormer’s finances have remained mysterious since the site launched July 4, 2013. It doesn’t have advertising or commercial sponsorship.

The major online fundraisers — GoFundMe, PayPal, Amazon Smile and multiple credit card companies — have cut off access to Anglin and other hate-mongers online. An alt-right fundraising site, Hatreon, went offline in 2017, cutting off access to an estimated $3,000 a month for the Daily Stormer.

Andrew Anglin turned to the U.S. mail to raise money.

Initially, the Daily Stormer listed two of Greg Anglin’s addresses for mail drops from supporters. Greg Anglin put a stop to that practice, but he helped Andrew set up a post office box in January 2017.

Greg Anglin said he retrieved mail from the post office box on a “sporadic” basis, between once a week and once a month.

“I received money from readers of the Daily Stormer,” Greg Anglin said. “I received correspondence from attorneys, and I don’t recall anything else.”

When Greg Anglin picked up the mail, he would sort it: Anything addressed to Andrew Anglin that appeared to contain money got opened and the money deposited. Anything from a lawyer went into a plastic tub.

“And what happens to them afterward?” Qureshi asked about the legal correspondence.

“They sit in the tub,” Greg Anglin responded.

“You don’t forward them on to anybody?” Qureshi asked.

“No, I do not,” Greg Anglin said.

Anything from anyone else, including the Internal Revenue Service, or addressed to the Daily Stormer or Moonbase Holdings, the website’s parent company, went into the trash.

“I didn’t specify the Internal Revenue Service,” Greg Anglin said. “What I said was: I will not open any mail sent to Daily Stormer or Moonbase.”

Greg Anglin estimated the site took in more than $1,500 a month in cash and checks mailed to his office, then later a post office box in Worthington, Ohio, a city of about 13,500 in the northern suburbs of Columbus.

Over the nearly five years he collected mail for the website, Greg Anglin estimated that between $100,000 and $125,000 in cash and checks for the site flowed in.

As for who wrote the checks, Greg Anglin couldn’t say.

“I don’t know that I really paid attention to who was writing the checks,” Greg Anglin said. “I’m sure that there were people who sent them regularly and people that did not, but I really didn’t pay attention to that.”

The cash and checks mailed into the Daily Stormer wouldn’t go directly to Andrew Anglin, who claims to have been in an undisclosed country outside the United States for most of the last five years.

Instead, Greg Anglin said, he would take the money and checks to the bank for his son. In some cases, Greg Anglin said he would deposit the money in his own account, then write a check to his son and deposit in Andrew Anglin’s account.

When his bank stopped taking cash deposits — Greg Anglin said he didn’t know why — he started placing cash in envelopes, one for U.S. currency and one for foreign currency.

“The primary foreign currency would have been pounds, but there were multiple foreign currencies,” Greg Anglin said.

Around the time Greg Anglin quit retrieving mail for Andrew Anglin and the website, Daily Stormer fundraising went digital.

The Daily Stormer appears to have launched its bitcoin accounts in January 2017.

Bambenek Consulting in Champaign, Illinois, a cybersecurity firm tracking right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis using the cryptocurrency, lists the first transaction for Daily Stormer on Jan. 28, 2017.

Floating a loan

In early 2017, a bank not named in the deposition closed Greg Anglin’s accounts. Anglin said he never got a reason for the move.

But in April of that year, Greg Anglin found himself in need of a cash infusion for a house he was remodeling.

So, Greg Anglin dipped into the U.S. currency envelope and borrowed $60,038 in cash from Andrew Anglin for work on the house.

“The $60,000 loan you received, that was in the form of cash that had accumulated and was left undeposited?” Qureshi asked.

“So, I called Andrew and I said, can I borrow some of this money for a few months, some of your money. And he said sure,” Greg Anglin said.

Greg Anglin said he noted the amount taken each time — usually increments of about $5,000 — on the back of the envelope containing U.S. currency.

“Andrew had an envelope with foreign currency Andrew had an envelope with United States currency, and I had an envelope,” Greg Anglin said. “When I took the money in loan from Andrew, I would write it down on my envelope, the date and the amount of money that I took.”

The all-cash loan came from donations mailed into Andrew Anglin and the Daily Stormer but hadn’t been deposited in a bank account for either Anglin.

Greg Anglin said he repaid the loan in a lump-sum payment at the end of 2017, then threw away the envelope with the accounting of the loan on it.

'I don’t recall'

The deposition paints the picture of a forgetful and somewhat conflicted Greg Anglin, who worked as a counselor and business consultant in central Ohio until semi-retiring about five years ago.

To many questions, Greg Anglin offered a version of “I don’t recall.” He also asked several times for questions to be repeated or clarified.

Greg Anglin also made clear that he doesn’t know where Andrew Anglin has been staying. Since setting up the website at his father’s Ohio condo in 2013, Andrew Anglin’s exact location has been a mystery.

It’s something Andrew Anglin plays up on the website and the few interviews he gives. And, Greg Anglin said, he doesn’t want to know where Andrew Anglin is staying.

“Did you have an understanding as to where he was?” Qureshi asked.

“No, I did not,” Greg Anglin said.

“You never asked him?” Qureshi asked.

“No,” Greg Anglin said.

Qureshi pursued Andrew Anglin’s location several times in the deposition but ultimately couldn’t get Greg Anglin to disclose a location.

“And you didn’t believe it was important to ask him?” Qureshi asked.

“No, I did not,” Greg Anglin said.

“Why not?” Qureshi said.

“He’s a private person, and I’m a talkative guy,” Greg Anglin said. “And, so he prefers and I prefer to not know where he is.”