White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us by Joe Moore

Author:Joe Moore [Moore, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, pdf
Tags: Social Science, True Crime, Discrimination, Law Enforcement, General, political science, Biography & Autobiography, espionage
ISBN: 9780063375406
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-08-13T08:51:08.015054+00:00

Chapter 15

Hot Tin Roof

BRONSON, FLORIDA

DECEMBER 2014

Johnny Grant was out of the picture, but the other two Loyal White Knights with whom he was naturalized into the Traditionalist American Knights were coming into sharper and sharper focus. I’d met both of them at their naturalization ceremonies in early 2014. In my capacity as Grand Knighthawk, I was also Keeper of the Fire, which meant it was my responsibility to don an ornamental black glove and light the fire that had been a staple of the Klan naturalization ceremony since its founding.

The first, David Moran, was a prison guard at the Florida state prison known as Raiford, after the town in which it was located. Interestingly enough, Moran was Native American, a member of the United Houma Nation hailing from Terrebonne Parish in Louisiana—a tribe that actually fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. In the war’s wake, the tribe wasn’t disbanded, like the rest of the Confederate units, or resettled, like the vast majority of Native American tribes of that era. So in that respect, the Klan and die-hard contemporary Confederates consider the Houma tribe as the last remaining active Civil War unit; at least, that is the KKK’s perspective.

That would have been enough on its own to warrant membership for Moran, even though he was not white. But Moran also served as a perfect example of the KKK’s desire to rebrand itself as more of a political organization and less of a racist one. Virtually from 1865 right to Barack Obama’s election, the Klan’s very existence has been based pretty much solely on a hatred of Black people, along with other minority groups, like Jews and Hispanics, to a lesser extent.

The overarching goal to unite the right, though, had increasingly led the organization to make a conscious effort to abandon their racist roots in favor of their anti-government ideology and recruit more minorities into the ranks. Moran was a poster child for that trend.

Across the country, the idea of a “new Klan” came to light. In 2014, John Abarr, a top-ranked recruiting officer for the KKK, started a new klavern in Montana called the Rocky Mountain Knights. Abarr claimed it would be all-inclusive, reformed, and no longer discriminate against anyone because of race, sexual orientation, or religion. Abarr reportedly said of his new organization, “The KKK is for a strong America. White supremacy is the old Klan. This is the new Klan.”

Unlike Moran, the second new TAK member, Charles Newcomb, was unabashedly old Klan. He’d been a patrol cop in Tennessee until, he boasted, he was fired for excessive violence around a decade before, which by his own admission ended his career in that part of law enforcement. From Tennessee, he moved to a town called Keystone Heights, in the Bronson area, and joined the Klan, while also getting a job as a prison guard at Raiford—where he’d met Moran and brought him into the Loyal White Knights around three years before. That group, though, held almost all their

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