Panzerfaust Collapses Amid Accusations Against Founder
After accusations of violating 'racial purity' and a drug bust, animosity between the neo-Nazi music giant's business partners seems to mark the end of Panzerfaust Records.
Jan. 28, 2005 -- Just a few months ago, Anthony Pierpont, proprietor of white power music label Panzerfaust Records, was sitting pretty. Minnesota-based Panzerfaust had increasingly become the label of choice for American white supremacists, leaving rival hate label Resistance Records struggling to keep up.
Pierpont had just announced his "Project Schoolyard," an effort to distribute a free hate-music sampler to 100,000 children, and the national media was beating a path to his door.
And long-time Skinhead Bryant Cecchini, alias Byron Calvert, had become his business partner — a real plus, given Cecchini's business savvy and experience.
But the good times have apparently come to an end.
On Nov. 30, the Minnesota Gang Strike Force raided Pierpont's South St. Paul home, arresting him after finding a small amount of marijuana and traces of cocaine. Then, after years of rumors in the white supremacist movement that Pierpont was not an "Aryan," his partner Cecchini found Pierpont's birth certificate — a document that shows that Pierpont's mother is a Mexican-born woman named Maria Marcola del Prado.
Finally, in January, Cecchini claimed on an online message board that he had discovered Pierpont traveled to Thailand last October on a "sex tour" and bragged to others about sex in Bangkok with Thai prostitutes. That's not all. SPLC recently obtained a photograph of Pierpont in the yard of a California prison, where he was serving time for a drug offense. He is posing with two men who are apparently his friends — men who appear to be Hispanic.
Cecchini says Pierpont refused to take a DNA test to establish his "white" credentials. As a result, Cecchini wrote in a Jan. 22 internet posting, he quit the label along with its webmaster. Hammerskin Nation and Volksfront, two key neo-Nazi supporters of Panzerfaust, denounced Pierpont and withdrew all support.
As January came to a close, Panzerfaust had virtually disappeared. Its website had been hijacked by something called Free Your Mind Productions — an outfit apparently connected to Cecchini and the Hammerskins — and reporters who'd been talking to Pierpont just days earlier suddenly found him impossible to reach.
