Blood and politics by Leonard Zeskind

Author:Leonard Zeskind
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux

35

Willis Carto Loses Control of the Institute for Historical Review

October 15, 1993. At a battle at the Institute for Historical Review’s offices in Costa Mesa, California, Willis Carto tenaciously ceded nothing without a determined fight. The pushing and shoving started just before noon. Mark Weber, the IHR’s journal editor and ambassador to Germany’s Holocaust deniers, was gone from the premises, along with three other (male) staffers. They were waiting for a prearranged meeting at their attorney’s office, supposedly with Carto. Meanwhile, at the warehouse the secretary was left in the offices and talking on the phone when she was accosted by an outsider. “I was sitting at my computer with my back to the warehouse door,” she later told police. “A strange man came up behind me and yanked the telephone out of my hand and pulled the chair I was sitting on back away from my desk. I asked who he was and he responded, ‘We’re taking over control.’ I said, ‘Do you mind if I finish this phone call, I have a customer on the line.’ He said, ‘No one is on the phone. That was us.’”1

Willis Carto, Elisabeth Carto, a locksmith, and a couple of thugs had entered the IHR’s offices surreptitiously while Mark Weber and his staff were out of the building. In short, the Cartos and their hired-hands were quickly trying to regain control of the premises. They started changing locks and copying computer data, grabbed the phone lines, and briefly detained the remaining staff. After Weber and the others discovered they had been tricked, they left the lawyer’s and rushed over to the institute offices, just in time to push their way through a door whose lock had not yet been changed. A battle began: the elderly Cartos and their thugs on one side, Weber’s would-be historians on the other. The scrappy Willis came at his opponents with a makeshift wooden club. The elderly Elisabeth waved a concrete doorstop. One of Carto’s hired hands knocked Weber to the floor and began pummeling him. In response, one of the other IHR staffers pulled a gun. At that point the muscle started backing off. Willis and Elisabeth, however, would not stop charging at their former comrades. So one of Weber’s cohorts forced the elderly publisher to the door but did not succeed in pushing him completely out of the building. With one foot inside, Carto clung to the door while Elisabeth waved her doorstop like a character out of a Hitchcock thriller. Finally the police arrived, hauled off the Cartos, Weber, and his gun-wielding colleague. Weber’s two remaining associates resecured the offices. And the Cartos were officially shut out.2

This failed attempt to take over the warehouse offices turned into one of the most humiliating defeats for Willis Carto in his decades of merchandising and mongering. The staff that he had once effectively directed had figured out how to seize control of the Legion for the Survival of Freedom, the parent corporation behind the Institute for Historical Review.

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