Blood and Politics (62 page)

Two facts quickly became apparent. First, although Willis Carto exercised complete control over the Legion for the Survival of Freedom, he had not been an actual member of its board of directors since 1969, when he had resigned. Legally, Carto’s corporate power rested solely on his role as the designated “agent” of the board of directors. Second, the staff could find only three board directors formally registered with the
state of Texas, where the legion was officially domiciled; and only two of them were listed as officers: LaVonne Furr and her husband, Lewis.
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It had been fourteen years since LaVonne had handled the legion’s affairs from a desk in her apartment. When she left California in 1979, the legion’s niche market in Holocaust-related publications had not yet been created. Mel Mermelstein had not yet sued for the fifty-thousand-dollar reward, and Mark Weber was still working for William Pierce. The Institute for Historical Review did not exist in name or fancy. Once she left California, she never returned—either to attend a conference or visit the legion-IHR offices.
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At this point in 1993, LaVonne and Lewis lived in Arkansas and were increasingly infirm and troubled financially. They had conducted such legion business as they did with Carto while talking over the phone. The staff reached a simple conclusion: the Furrs were the legal linchpin to Carto’s decision-making powers.

Carto had managed to obfuscate the precise nature of his relationship to the legion and its board of directors for more than two decades. The mystery he had created had allowed him to survive, even prosper, while involved in one tortuous lawsuit or another during virtually his entire career. Only those inside the palace were in a position to topple the king. The mechanics of the coup in 1993 would determine whether or not the turnover could withstand Carto’s legal counterattack in the years to come.

Two months after the April meeting at which Carto had screamed and banged, the staff began contacting the Furrs directly. The first letters and phone calls established a friendly relationship between the two parties. The staff began telling the Furrs about legal liabilities that the legion had incurred because of Carto, particularly those involving violations of copyright protections. These liabilities worried the Furrs, who felt burdened by their own distressed circumstances. But their continued presence on the board did not begin to reach a crisis point until a critical phone call on August 21, 1993. At that point the staff informed the Furrs that Carto had transferred one hundred thousand dollars of legion-IHR funds to Liberty Lobby. He had also distributed funds, by his own account, to other “good causes” as he saw fit. LaVonne Furr told the staff that she objected to these transfers. “He can’t do that,” she said. “It’s not his money.” The staff sent the Furrs a package documenting its claims and in a phone call a week later, on August 28, suggested that the elderly couple seek legal advice. LaVonne agreed.

Three weeks later Weber and crew learned that the Furrs had formally resigned from the legion’s board on September 16. “The press of current family responsibilities, our ill health, and age urge us to be relieved of any outside obligations,” the short and sad six-line letter read.
The staff was prepared. It immediately contacted Tom Kerr, the third name legally registered as a director. Until that moment Kerr had been even less involved than the Furrs in the legion’s corporate affairs. But on September 24 he was the sole individual empowered to convene a board meeting, and at the staff’s insistence he added three new board members to the legion: Andrew Allen, Friedrich Berg, and John Curry, according to court documents. This new board then appointed new officers from the staff, including Mark Weber as secretary. And in short order they terminated Willis Carto’s corporate “agency,” the fig leaf behind which he had ruled the legion’s affairs.
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Carto’s first response was to try to undo the Furrs’ resignations. But his ham-handedness quickly undid him. Carto asked LaVonne to sign a set of minutes for a meeting (which never took place) on September 16. According to these phony minutes, a meeting was attended by four supposed board members: LaVonne Furr, Lewis Furr, Tom Kerr, and Sam Dickson, the Atlanta attorney who had hosted (alongside Ed Fields) the British National Party führer John Tyndall and otherwise contributed to various racist and anti-Semitic causes. In this piece of Carto’s revisionist history, the Furrs resigned only to be replaced by Elisabeth Carto and Henri Fischer, an Australian residing in California who worked closely with the Cartos. For some reason Carto also created a second set of minutes, these for a meeting (which also never took place) on October 25. In these minutes, the September 16 minutes were described as “prepared only for strategic reasons,” an admission that the first meeting was a fiction. At this supposed second meeting, LaVonne and Lewis Furr, Tom Kerr, and Sam Dickson were once again in attendance, but this time they were alongside three other names. Once again, the Furrs resigned, only this time they were replaced by Elisabeth and Willis Carto, as well as one other loyalist. In this Alice in Wonderland world, Carto obviously believed the second meeting placing him on the board of directors would forestall the legal ascension of his former underlings and protect his corporate control. But in the real world these fictions had no agency.

Why would Sam Dickson, an attorney with a full understanding of the way boards of directors legally function, even temporarily allow his name to be used for such shenanigans? At least part of the answer may be that Dickson believed that the staff “acted deceitfully and duplicitously.” Nevertheless, in a statement to a California court, Dickson later acknowledged that he had not been present at any board meetings—on either September 16 or October 25.
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And early in the dispute he offered to mediate between the warring parties. The staff, by its own account, accepted his offer. Willis Carto, however, immediately went into court,
attempting to void the board of directors constructed by his usurpers and install his own board instead.

After two days of hearings in the Orange County Superior Court, on December 31, 1993, Judge Robert J. Polis ruled decisively for Mark Weber and the staff. The staff-friendly board, appointed on September 24, legitimately governed the organization and was now fully empowered. Carto’s board was out, but one simple adverse court decision could not convince him to surrender.

Unlike Ben Klassen, who had once hoped that young skinheads would inherit his legacy and who then committed suicide, Carto would not go quietly into the political night. Among other assets at stake was a bequest to the legion of $7.5 million. He had battled in courts on two continents for more than five years to secure these funds, and Willis Allison Carto was not going to let go of them now.

Seven and a half million dollars is a lot of money on anybody’s books. To a marginal sales operation like the IHR, it might have ensured long-term viability. To Jean Farrel, an American with Colombian citizenship living in Switzerland, the $7.5 million was less than half her estate, which totaled more than $16 million at the time of her death. An enigmatic figure, Farrel, born in 1920, kept her financial affairs and personal life as private as possible. Farrel, whose mother’s maiden name was Edison, remained single throughout her life and often used Edison as her surname. In fact, she signed her will Jean Farrel Edison. (The Edison name often led to her being described—by IHR associates and others—as a scion of the inventor, Thomas Alva Edison, either his grandniece or granddaughter.) Despite her expatriation, Farrel apparently maintained an active interest in the American far right, including the IHR. In 1983 she had started corresponding with Willis Carto over the best method to protect her huge financial holdings from unnamed “sharks in the background who would destroy me.”
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As a result, she decided, in an extraordinarily complex maneuver, to place her assets in a corporation registered in Liberia, NECA. Ownership of NECA was controlled by twenty stock certificates scattered in safety-deposit boxes around the globe: eight shares at Crédit Suisse Lausanne near her home in Lutry, Switzerland; three shares at a bank in Henderson County, North Carolina; three more in London; three in Singapore; and three shares at Volksbank in Herford, Germany, the birthplace of Elisabeth Waltraud Carto. Her other assets, which included gold, coins, diamonds, and precious stones, were similarly distributed.
Willis Carto claimed to have keys to the safety-deposit boxes and obviously expected one day to control NECA’s assets.
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Farrel periodically sent six-thousand-dollar donations to the IHR during the early 1980s.
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The staff also gave her a grand tour when she visited the California offices in 1984. Carto believed a large bequest was eventually on its way. Seventeen months later, on August 11, 1985, the sixty-five-year-old Farrel died suddenly at her home in Switzerland. The same distrust that had led her to form NECA in the first place and to scatter proof of its ownership across the globe was written into her will. She asked that someone watch over her body for five days before burial, to ensure that she was in fact deceased. It also stipulated a “simple and raw” wooden coffin and a short funeral without any Christian rites. Despite Carto’s expectations to the contrary, only one “universal heir” was named: a Swiss woman named Joan Althaus. Only if Althaus was incapable of fulfilling her duty as executor did the will designate the Legion for the Survival of Freedom as secondary heir.
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Farrel was gone, but the fight over her legacy was just beginning. Upon learning of her death, Carto rushed to take control of the safety-deposit boxes. Banks have rules, however, and attorneys for Joan Althaus were making the same claim on the same assets. Carto needed to do more than just show up with a key. He tried several avenues of approach. His first correspondence to the North Carolina bank was done in the name of “NECA Corporation,” for example, with an address in California and Carto on the letterhead as “president.” He claimed that the contents of the safety boxes were not part of Farrel’s estate (and therefore subject to probate) but were owned exclusively by NECA. A month later, after the bank’s vice president turned aside Carto’s claims, he shamelessly changed tack. In a letter to the same bank officer written on the same NECA letterhead, Carto argued that “the box in your bank is the sole property of the Legion.”
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Over the next five years, Carto, representing himself as the agent of the Legion for the Survival of Freedom’s board of directors, fought tenaciously in the corporation’s name. He went to courts in North Carolina, London, and Switzerland to void the will. He mustered affidavits, sought control of the safety boxes, and countered every one of Joan Althaus’s legal maneuvers with his own. Finally, on July 17, 1990, the battle ended. Althaus could war no more, while Carto’s ability to fight in the courts seemed endless. She settled the dispute. The distribution agreement, filed in Switzerland, was a compromise. Althaus received 55 percent of the estate. The Legion for the Survival of Freedom received 45 percent, or $7,585,189, which was delivered to a Swiss public notary to be held in trust.

At that point, Carto alone knew that a deal had been finally completed. By 1993, however, the IHR staff had learned that Carto had secured the money. They launched the coup with full knowledge that the generational battle for corporate control of the Legion for the Survival of Freedom was a fight for these funds. And with Judge Polis’s initial decision in the case, the courts seemed to be lodged completely against Carto’s claim. Ultimately, the entire affair brought down his Liberty Lobby empire and marched him off the movement’s main stage. He did not immediately relinquish the money, however, or anything else. He still believed that History was standing with him.

Opposition to the New World Order invigorates the civic debate about national identity. The issue of immigration directly poses the question of who “we” are. A set of counterinstitutions, including militias, pose a challenge to the authority of government. But the Oklahoma City bombing starts a chain of events that reverses gains made by vanguardists, while the mainstreamers thrive.

January 27, 1994.
On this day in the former Yugoslavia, Serbian military forces prepared to crush their Bosnian opposition in the Drina river valley. In South Africa’s first free election the apartheid regime’s last white president, F. W. de Klerk, campaigned in the Eastern Transvaal. In Mexico, Zapatista guerrillas consolidated control over villages seized in a rebellion that had started on New Year’s Day, when NAFTA treaty provisions went into effect. In Virginia, Oliver North opened his bid for the U.S. Senate, notwithstanding a conviction for obstructing Congress during the Reagan-era contragate hearings. In Texas federal court a Treasury Department agent testified about his undercover assignment inside the Branch Davidian compound at Waco.
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And in the empty stretches of Montana, three dozen desperate white men began a revolt that helped trigger a mass-style insurgency. They called themselves Freemen, and eventually landed in jail. But not before a prolonged siege by the FBI rekindled memories of both Randy Weaver and Waco.

Jordan, Montana, is a double-wide spot in the road, the government seat of Garfield County. Across this county, fourteen hundred residents are spread in an area four times larger than the state of Rhode Island (with its population of almost one million). Here the armed Freemen pushed their way past the county’s court clerk and into the main hearing room. They convened a so-called common law court with all the pomp and ceremony available.
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One Freeman acted as presiding judge, while another served as a prosecutor. The offending party was absent, of course. Nevertheless, this group conducted itself like a duly constituted jury. It produced paper documents that it claimed were lawfully binding writs, liens against property, and warrants, even notarizing them with its own seal.