Roanoke neo-Nazi files for bankruptcy
Laurence Hammack
The Roanoke Times
June 20, 2008
William White is seeking Chapter 11 protection after what he called a “cash crunch.”
Four years after coming to Roanoke and starting a rental home business that quickly drew attention to his role in the white supremacy movement, William White has filed for bankruptcy.
White, a neo-Nazi activist who is perhaps better known for his virulent Internet postings than as the owner of White Homes and Land LLC, recently sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
In a petition filed last week in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Virginia, White listed assets of $1.9 million and liabilities of $1.4 million.
White, commander of the Roanoke-based American National Socialist Workers Party, was one of the country’s few white supremacy leaders with a viable business, giving him both credibility in the movement and the financial means to spread his racist views, according to one expert on hate groups.
“Now that’s gone, and I think he has very little left,” said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project for the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“It’s a remarkable end for a guy who simply can’t stop bragging about what a brilliant businessman he is.”
According to an SPLC report issued earlier this year, White came to Roanoke in 2004 to start a real estate business, maxing out several credit cards for the capital to purchase the first of about 20 homes he currently maintains as rental properties in an impoverished part of the city’s West End neighborhood.
About the same time, White began to post racially charged comments on his Web site, complaining about his black tenants and suggesting that he would evict them as part of a “ghetto beautification project.”
A federal housing discrimination complaint filed by the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People produced no charges against White, who continued to use overthrow.com as a forum to comment on race relations both in Roanoke and across the country.
White said Tuesday that his reliance on credit cards had nothing to do with his financial difficulties, which he attributed to medical bills of more than $130,000 from the recent hospitalization of his wife and newborn daughter.
“We’re just reorganizing some debt,” he said.
“The property is certainly not underwater. We have plenty of money in it, but we just had a temporary cash crunch.”
White said he has been planning for some time to sell his rental homes. He said the bankruptcy proceedings should have no effect on his home construction business or on his role as leader of his neo-Nazi organization.
Although White discounted the role that credit cards played in his financial difficulties, a list of his 20 largest unsecured creditors in the bankruptcy filing includes more than $52,000 in credit card debt.
White said he has paid off the credit card used at the start of his business.
As assets, White listed 13 rental properties on Chapman and Patterson avenues with a combined value of more than $1.3 million. He also listed about $565,000 in personal property, the bulk of which he said came from his interest in White Homes and Land. The remaining seven rental properties are listed in the name of White’s company and were not included in his personal bankruptcy.
Another section of the 70-page bankruptcy petition contains evidence of White’s cash-flow problem: While his business grossed about $550,000 in 2007 and $541,000 in 2006, income to date this year was listed as just $78,797.
White’s financial problems come at a time when his neo-Nazi activities have been getting more attention.
In perhaps his most publicized controversy, White used his Web site in August to post the names and addresses of the defendants in the Jena Six case, a racially charged assault proceeding in Jena, La. Next to the black defendants’ contact information, White posted the words: “Lynch the Jena 6.”
Although the FBI said at the time it was investigating White’s actions, no legal action has been taken against him in connection with the Jena Six case.
More recently, White tangled with lawyers involved in a housing discrimination case in Virginia Beach. After White inserted himself into the case — sending racially charged letters to black tenants who had sued their white landlord — lawyers for the plaintiffs asked a judge to impose sanctions against him. The judge has yet to make a decision in that case.
Regardless of what happens to White in bankruptcy court, Potok acknowledged that it will likely have little influence on his penchant for posting nasty and Nazi-inspired views on the Internet.
“My guess is that Bill White will continue to try to be a player in the movement,” Potok said, “because he has an ego as large as the planet.”
WHITE FACES COMPUTER CRIMINAL-CHARGES
ROANOKE – A bankrupt and self-declared anarchist, who has been touted by pro-minority-activist and former George-McGovern-fund-raiser Morris Dees as a “player” in rightist-politics, is headed back to federal-court and, possibly, to jail. William White, who wails against the “bourgeoisie” and “ruling-classes” over his profanity-laced website and who routinely issues denials that he is a mental-patient, has been charged with criminal-contempt for destroying computer-files, subpoenaed by the court, and for sending profane e-mails to a judge’s law-clerk and various others involved in a “housing” dispute. If convicted, White faces up to a year in prison.
Dees had undertaken to “select” unstable, criminal-prone individuals as “leaders” of rightist-politics, in order to mock and bring down pro-majority activism. His self-appointed “leaders,” upon whom he lavished an admixture of praise and derision, included, White, who has professed to being an anarchist, Communist, Green, Libertarian, Socialist and neo-Nazi, Andrew Greenbaum, a Jew, who vanished, when a $13-million judgment was levied against him for spamming the Internet, Matt Hale, who is jailed for forty-years for conspiring to kill a judge, Richard Butler, a bankrupt convicted of assault, and Alex Curtis, who vanished after serving a six-year term for “intimidation.”
Virginia federal-magistrate Judge Michael Urbanski certified the case against White to Judge James Turk, attaching a report of an investigation by a court-appointed computer-expert, attesting that White had deleted computer-files, which linked him to “discrimination.” White, a Roanoke slum-lord, who had filed for bankruptcy, alleging $1.4 million in debts, including $56,000.00 in credit-card expenses, had not only destroyed files, but sent “vile, contumacious and laced with expletives” messages to court-personnel, Urbanski ruled in a ten-page order. White faces similar charges in Norfolk. White responded by terming Urbanski an “idiot.”
White, who had founded the Utopian Anarchist Party, of which he was the only member, had joined the Communist Party and served as reporter for “Pravda,” the Moscow Communist-newspaper. When ousted, White appeared in a Toledo Negro-neighborhood, dressed up as Hitler, touching off a riot. After failed liaisons with numerous political-groups, White, operating solo from his Roanoke-apartment, was dubbed “the second leading” rightist by Dees, after filing a complaint against Nationalists with the Mississippi Bar for shutting down threats over his website. The complaint was dismissed. Nationalists dubbed White “the little anarchist who couldn’t.”
White engaged in a lengthy, on-line smear-campaign against Nationalists, terming them “mentally ill” and “wacky,” including the posting of a White-concocted caricature of a man, dressed up as a woman, who White denominated as “pretty.” Although dismissed by Rusty Shackleford as “just another psychopathic, ego-gratifying misfit,” White continued to be elevated by Dees-spokesman Mark Potok, who insisted that White would “continue to be a player.” However, White’s last, two associates left him all alone, whereupon White labeled his former-aide Justin Boyer as a “nit-wit” and his former-propagandist Michael Blevins as a “schizophrenic.”
http://www . nationalist.org/news/flashes/2008/070201.html
Copyright 2008 The Nationalist Movement
contumacious
Michael Blevins, associate to White, spent part of his money and of his sponsors acquiring the late Adolf Hitler. com … we campaigned against it and ended up closing it … he and his sponsors had paid 150.000 dollars for the site … by managing to close it down we gave him a big financial blow to which he still hasn’t recovered …