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White Supremacist, 3 Followers Charged With Harassing 4 Officials
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Courts: Publisher of Internet material advocating violence is accused of
violating federal civil rights and hate crime laws.
By TONY PERRY, KIM MURPHY, Times Staff Writers
SAN DIEGO--A 25-year-old man who has used the Internet to become a
rising star in the national white supremacist movement has been indicted
along with three followers on charges of harassing a Jewish congressman, a
Latino mayor and two other officials, federal prosecutors announced
Friday.
"We have zero tolerance for these kinds of cowardly acts," said U.S.
Atty. Gregory Vega.
Alexander James Curtis is charged as the reputed ringleader of a group
that between 1997 and 1999 allegedly smeared anti-Semitic graffiti on two
San Diego synagogues and left graffiti, stickers and leaflets outside the
offices of Rep. Bob Filner (D-San Diego); Art Madrid, mayor of the suburb
of La Mesa; local Anti-Defamation League leader Morris Casuto; and Clara
Harris, former director of the Heartland Human Relations and Fair Housing
Assn.
Indicted with Curtis were three men who met him through his extensive
Web sites dedicated to preaching racial superiority and violence: Michael
Brian DaSilva, 21; Robert Nicol Morehouse, 53; and Kevin Christopher
Holland, 22.
The four defendants are charged with violating federal civil rights
and hate-crime laws that make it illegal to target someone for
mistreatment on the basis of race, religion or national origin.
They are not charged with any violent acts, but during a two-year
investigation by the FBI and San Diego Police Department, authorities
overheard them plotting violence, officials said.
Morehouse and Holland have pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy
and cooperated with authorities in the indictment of Curtis and DaSilva.
DaSilva is already serving a state sentence for possession of a concealed
and loaded sawed-off shotgun.
Curtis was arrested Thursday in his bedroom at his parents' home in
suburban Lemon Grove. FBI agents said they seized racist literature, a
framed picture of Adolf Hitler, racist leaflets, a semiautomatic pistol, a
Confederate flag and a book written by Che Guevara. The materials were
seized as evidence that Curtis has mounted a campaign of hate.
Curtis and DaSilva face four charges that could bring a maximum of 40
years in prison. Morehouse and Holland face a maximum 10 years when they
are sentenced next year. No promises of leniency have been made to them,
Vega said.
Among other acts, the four are charged with sticking the skin of a
boa constrictor through the mail slot of Filner's Chula Vista office. Some
of the group's racist stickers contained the phone number for Curtis'
telephone hotline.
Filner said the graffiti and leaflets had left his younger staff
members particularly frightened. "You keep seeing swastikas, pictures of
Hitler, slogans like 'Jews Must Die'--people get scared because they know
people have guns," the congressman said.
The Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation
League have called Curtis the most radical of a new generation of hate
leaders who have rejected the limitations of traditional groups such as
the Ku Klux Klan and the National Alliance and encouraged a much more
violent racist underground.
With mainstream organizations infiltrated by law enforcement and
plagued with civil penalties such as the $6.3-million judgment that
bankrupted the Aryan Nations in September, Curtis has called for racial
activists to move anonymously as "lone wolves" or to form small, anonymous
revolutionary cells in the name of racial "leaderless resistance."
Turning Curtis' own slogan against him, authorities called their
investigation Operation Lone Wolf.
Rocky Suhayda, chairman of the American Nazi Party, sent out an
Internet appeal Friday for $5 legal aid donations to Curtis, whose father
owns an engineering firm. "For all of you old fighters, he is one of the
young leaders who will take our place when we are gone," Suhayda said.
Internet Magazine Advocates Terrorism
Curtis publishes the monthly Nationalist Observer on the Internet and
offers a weekly and daily telephone broadcast and a racist Internet
magazine in which he advocates biological terrorism and regularly
celebrates "lone wolves" such as Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and
Buford Furrow, accused in the 1998 attack on a Jewish preschool in the San
Fernando Valley.
"In the last 20 months we have witnessed the most prolific and
vicious acts against Jews . . . in U.S. history," Curtis proclaimed
recently. "You haven't seen anything yet."
To fund his operation, Curtis has an extensive Internet mail-order
catalog that features books, T-shirts, white power CDs and videos.
In 1997, he was arrested for distributing fliers that illegally
featured police insignia. He was sentenced to three years' probation, 100
hours of community service and 20 days of agricultural labor.
Tom Metzger of the Fallbrook-based White Aryan Resistance, one of
Curtis' longtime mentors, said the indictment reflects a growing federal
campaign to suppress white supremacist political views.
"Alex Curtis is very highly respected throughout the country, and to
go after him with relatively Mickey Mouse charges is just going to
infuriate more of the people who are in our camp," he said.
William Gore, head of the San Diego FBI office, said he is not
worried about a backlash.
"If followers of Alex Curtis see him as a martyr, so be it," Gore
said. "I feel better having him off the street." +++
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