Hateland (29 page)

    The pressures of living under such circumstances created problems between Debra and me. Our relationship suffered. We both knew we couldn't continue as we were. As well as the problems at home, many of my so-called friends distanced themselves from me. They feared those loyal to the murdered trio might seek revenge, especially as many believed I'd played a part in their execution. Only Gavin, Ian and Greg kept in touch with me during that difficult time. This involved some risk for them, because they remained working in the unforgiving world of the door, where I'd become about as welcome as a Fenian in an Orangewoman's front room.

CHAPTER 13

CUCKOO KLUX KLAN

My decision to assist the police was my way of turning my back on crim and everything else rotten in my life. I knew my criminal associates would have nothing more to do with me. I'd be free to start a new life without the violence and misery in which I'd immersed myself for too long. I felt I owed my children a better life.

     I decided too that I would, where I could, put my previous experiences to good use in the hope of somehow atoning for my appalling behaviour. In the first instance, I assisted with a documentary and wrote the book Essex Boys , about the drugs trade and gang violence.

     I also made a self-incriminating statement to the police about my efforts to pervert the course of justice on behalf of Lisa and Michelle Taylor, two south London sisters convicted of the vicious 1991 murder of 21-year-old Alison Shaughnessy, then controversially freed on appeal after a 'miscarriage of justice' campaign run by me. I've told this story in my book The Dream Solution.

     I'd long felt embarrassed by my past involvement with the Nazis. For almost three years, my closest friends had been black, my best friend an Asian. Only a few years earlier, I'd have regarded someone like myself as a 'race traitor'. All the same, I'd undergone no blinding 'road to Damascus'-type conversion to the cause of anti-fascism. I hadn't started shaking with fervent faith in multiculturalism. I wouldn't be begging the government to let in another few million asylum-seekers. But I'd changed significantly nonetheless: I'd gradually learned to judge people as individuals. The idea of hating (or even liking) someone merely because they belonged to a particular racial group had come to seem ridiculous. I'd sometimes tried to persuade myself that, because I'd never had much grasp of fascist ideology, I'd never been a 'real' Nazi anyway But I had to face the fact that, though I might never have read a word of Hitler's Me in Kampf, I'd actively supported 'the Movement'. I decided the best way to ease my conscience would be to find ways to undermine that same 'Movement'.

    I'd known for some time of plans to introduce into Britain the notorious American-based white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan. An American Klan member had moved to Wales in the early 1990s. He claimed to have been appointed 'Grand Dragon' of 'the British Knights of the Ku Klux Klan'. He'd been visited by the overall American boss, the so-called 'Imperial Wizard'. Sadly for the British Klan, its would-be leader was then exposed as a fugitive from justice and a convicted child molester. The Klan suspended its plans to expand its franchise in Britain.

    The Klan was founded in the southern states of America in the late nineteenth century, supposedly to campaign non-violently for the rights of whites. But Klan members soon started spreading terror among blacks with a wave of murder and arson. Blacks were lynched, and their homes torched, by men wearing slit-eyed, peak-hooded white robes. Their calling card was often a burning cross.

    The fundamentalist Protestant Klan expressed hatred for Catholics, Jews and Freemasons, as well as blacks. Mainstream America views Klan members as backward, Deep South, inbred rednecks - the sort of people who go to family events to pick up dates.

     In late 1995, I heard that the British Knights of the Ku Klux Klan had reorganised themselves and were planning a new recruitment drive. I discussed this with the News of the World journalist Gary Jones, with whom I'd become friendly after helping him with a story about a critically-ill boy for whom I'd been trying to raise funds a few years earlier. He suggested the best way to counter them would be to infiltrate them. He felt that, with my far-right background, I'd have a better chance than a journalist of succeeding.

    At the back of most Nazi magazines are addresses of like-minded extremists in other countries. I directed my first letter at a PO box number in North Carolina in America's Deep South. I asked if they knew of any 'real right-wing groups' in Britain, as I was tired of 'liberal faggots' like the BNP and wanted 'to do more than talk'.

    Within days, I received a handwritten letter from a woman calling herself 'Breeze'. Her group called itself 'Air, Trees, Water, and Animals' (ATWA). They sounded more like Greens than white supremacists, but I thought the name might be some sort of front to mislead snoopers. She asked me a few brief questions about myself and suggested I join.

    Around a week later, another letter arrived:

Hi Beaver,

Good you joined the team. I would like you to send me a postcard of that beautiful land over there. And would you please sign the card Beaver. I'll let you be Beaver ok? Whatever you can do for our earth, big or small all counts as our team. I myself don't eat meat except a few times when I eat with people who didn't know and the meat is mixed with whatever like Chicken casserole or spaghetti. And we try to buy recycled things, cant always, we just do our best at whatever we can do ok? There is people in our team that do eat meat but don't kill - hunt animals, even kids pick up cans and sell them and paper and we have cleaned up lakes and parks and we have done petitions on different things that hurts ATWA our earth, our air, water, trees, animals. So, whatever you can do, we thank you and who loves earth will thank you and you'll thank yourself.

   Sincerely, 

   Breeze. 

The nutcase Nazis I'd met tended to call themselves 'Beast' and 'Breadknife', not 'Beaver' and 'Breeze'. I decided to put my demands more explicitly.

    Breeze's response to that letter seemed more promising. She said she wished she had the money to fly me over 'to some white power, Klan and other rallies'. She asked if I could put up ATWA's flyers in 'occult papers and places'. She also wanted me to send $10 to join and $25 for a tape and photo 'of the great Charlie Manson'.

    I was stumped. I knew absolutely nothing about the occult and very little about Manson. I'd always thought of him as some sort of drug-crazed hippy serial killer from the free-love '60s. I'd never linked him to White Power and the Klan. I sent my subs and the money for the tape and photo.

    This prompted a letter from another fruitcake:

I was given your address by Charlie Manson and I assumed that you were supposed to get the tape list because that is what I was doing with Charlie. All the tapes are done totally be Charlie except for a few voices from the friends of his (very little), inside the prison. A.T.W.A. is the way to shorten and say all the living on earth, of earth. It is to say . . . leave the Life the way God has it. . . air trees water and animals; all the way alive. Charlie has said A.T.W.A. is the body of all religion. And it is his King . . .

Charlie Manson sounded more like Dr Doolittle on crack cocaine than a white supremacist. I felt myself becoming sidetracked from my Klan mission, but I was curious to discover what, if anything, linked Manson to the White Power extremists. I began reading up about him and soon saw that pattern of extreme childhood trauma followed by war on 'normal' society that I could trace in my own life and in the lives of many of the disturbed people I knew.

    Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1934, the illegitimate son of a teenage prostitute who abandoned him, Manson never knew his father. Brought up in homes and reform schools, he soon graduated to prison. Armed robbery, assault, homosexual rape, forgery and pimping ensured he spent a large part of his teens and 20s behind bars. He spent his incarceration taking drugs, learning steel guitar and studying magic, Satanism, hypnotism, the Bible and cult mind-control.

    Soon after his release in 1967, aged 32, he came to regard himself as the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Manson - the Son of Man. He gathered around himself a group of largely female disciples, whom he called 'the Family'. Between bouts of group sex, acid trips and car theft, he preached that the world was coming to an end. Based partly on his reading of the Bible's book of Revelation, he predicted war between blacks and whites. The blacks would win, but, after a few years, they'd realise they lacked the intellect to rule and would ask Manson and 'the Family' to take over.

    Wannabe pop star Manson took his term for the coming revolution, 'Helter Skelter', from a song by the Beatles. He believed the Fab Four to be the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, communicating with him through their songs. In the space of a few months in 1969, he incited his followers to murder at least nine white people in and around Hollywood. The victims, often murdered in a bestial and sadistic way, included the pregnant Sharon Tate, actress wife of film director Roman Polanski. Manson wanted the murders to be blamed on blacks, thus provoking a race war. He was sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment.

    I expressed a lot of interest in Manson to Breeze. I wrote more personalised letters, talking about my loathing of the police and normal people. Slowly, she began to open up, talking about Manson, blacks, the Klan and her criminal associates. One of the latter, 'Lord Spider', had just been arrested for shooting someone.

    The more 'personal' I made my letters, the more personal she made hers. The picture she painted of herself was hardly glamorous. She was 46, had grandchildren, was grossly overweight and owned not only handguns, but a Kalashnikov. She said she'd never been to England (except in 'out-of-body travel') and asked if I thought she was 'coming on' to me. She described herself as a pagan high priestess 'for our white race'. She told me to write to Manson directly. I sent him a brief letter, playing on my membership of ATWA. Manson wrote a reply on red card. He'd scrawled his words over a drawing he'd done of himself:

HEADMAN

The head deadman said the head deadman don't need no head man - I hate what was said man. A little secret can hold a big thought. What I tell you is not what you would tell - even if you think its dumb - don't tell.

     Charles Manson.

He sent three more short letters. I gave up trying to make sense of the drivel:

I will write when I can, I'm not smart, try ATWA P0211 Alpaught CA 93201.1 know you in the will of our god and I do have a lot of respect for you and your command. There is so much to it, I wish I had a telephone . . . Air Trees Water and Wild Animals, one world for one god one mind one money one will one one. A LOT of people use that for other reason but the real of that wheel is the earth will die unless you take it and give it who it wants . . .

    B. OMAHONEY. Before England trees were god, then from somewhere someone came to Scotland, Ireland, with a cross - I'm all before that and the granes that are in forever - rest on my alter stone - I use the word my-I-me . . . I've known a lot of OMahoneys in prison and they were good as bad and bad as good, rocks of sort but rocks do make so they were hard rocks bla bla. I've always been steel and good whisky also. 

     Charles Manson.

The news that my namesakes had apparently been filling up prisons in America, too, didn't surprise me. I never heard from Manson directly again. I wrote him a few more letters, but he didn't reply personally. He delegated one of his disciples to do so, but she made less sense than him. In the mean time, Breeze had sent me her phone number. I rang her. She sounded surprisingly 'normal', at least in comparison to her letters. I said I'd had some problems understanding her and Manson. She said they deliberately wrote in babble to confuse whoever might be monitoring the mail.

    I pointed out that, as they encrypted no code in the letters, the recipient ended up as bewildered as everyone else. She didn't seem to get my point. She mumbled something about 'the Feds' listening to her calls, then rang off. Finally, after a bit of wrangling - I think she was holding out for another donation - she gave me the address of a Klansman called Juss. She described him as a friend of Manson's.

    Juss seemed to warm to me, even making me an honorary member of the Klan in Stone Mountain, Georgia, where he claimed to be 'Grand Kleagle' (that is, chairman) of the local branch. He sent me an 'Invisible Empire' membership card and advised me of its benefits: 'If you're ever in the southern states and the Highway Patrol stop you, show your Invisible Empire Membership card with your licence. The cops will leave you alone.' I was soon inundated with flyers asking me to pledge money to White Power causes.

    Eventually, Juss gave me an American address for the 'British Knights of the Ku Klux Klan'. I had to write to a PO box in Bethlehem, Philadelphia. My letter must then have been sent back to England, because I received an application form in an envelope with an English postmark. A Klansman on a white charger, carrying a flaming torch and wearing the distinctive peaked-hood robes, decorated the top of the form.

    Apart from the usual 'name, address, date of birth' particulars, they wanted to know where I worked, my bank-account number, my National Insurance number, my place of birth and several other ridiculously intrusive details. They also wanted two passport photos.

    I didn't like giving the Klan such information, so I made up most of it. I knew they just wanted to give would-be recruits the impression of an impenetrably secure organisation with the resources to vet applicants thoroughly The same theatre of the paranoid made them base themselves in America, even though the Klan isn't outlawed in the United Kingdom. Yet, shrouded in secrecy and taking precautions that would drive most people away, they hoped to recruit their own anti-foreign legion.