CZM Rewind: The White Wolf & White Guns for Hire

to hold onto a part time in South Africa. The first two episodes popped up on Your Feet on Tuesday, making this episodes three and four of that series. The episodes The White Wolf and White Guns for Hire originally aired on March twentieth and March twenty seventh. For this section of the story, I don't really have an update or a correction, but I do have more clues, more information that sort of hints at possibilities I just can't

prove yet. When I first started digging into Monica Huggett Stone, there was this curious claim that she was a member of the American ku Klux Klan. And when I was writing about this back in the spring, I went to great lengths to try to figure out exactly what that might mean. I found some interesting history involving a South African anti Semite who claimed to be running a clan group in South Africa a few years before Monica would

have been involved, and that helped a little bit. Gave me some context, but it didn't actually directly connect her to anything. It didn't explain how she became pen pals with an American clansmen in the late nineteen seventies when she was helping those Italian terrorists build that bomb in Johannesburg. But in the months since, someone was kind enough to send me a newspaper clipping, one I wish i'd had then. This was a recurring theme throughout the series. I really

had to get creative in finding source material. It isn't easy to find newspaper archives in another language from another continent from decades ago. I found more than I expected, but there were always gaps in my timeline that I had a good feeling could be filled in if I just had more access to South African newspapers from the time period. And this clipping is exactly the kind of thing that would have saved me like twenty hours of frustration.

In nineteen eighty one, Monica's mother told a reporter that Monica had been corresponding with an American pastor for years and the pastor's name was one do you know? It was Robert Miles by the mid nineteen seventies, which seems

like it may have been when they started writing. Miles no longer publicly claimed clan membership, but he had been a grand Dragon in the Klan in Michigan in the past, and even after he transitioned away from publicly identifying as a klansman, he was still hanging out with klansmen, plotting to blow up school buses to prevent integration in a very clan like fashion, and writing essays that were published in the inter Clan newsletter. What I'm saying is he

was still involved with the clan. So even though his primary focus was his Christian identity church, he could very well have been Monica's American Clan contact, And if he wasn't, he was almost certainly her introduction to whichever Klansman it was who did mail her that bomb making manual. Notably, both Robert Miles and Monica Huggett were connected to the American Ku Klux Klan in the nineteen seventies, and they

both ended up moving on to the Aryan Nations. Miles died in nineteen ninety two, but in the nineteen eighties he was a regional leader in the Aryan Nations. And you know where this whole story started. When Monica moved to the United States, she was a leading member of the Aryan Nations group operating out of Louisiana. So those are interesting parallel tracks, and it gives me just enough to go on that I'm definitely going to have to keep digging. I mean, I have to write about Robert

Miles eventually. Anyway. On August tenth, nineteen eighty nine, around nine thirty pm, a white sedan pulled up outside the United Nations Transition Assistance Groups Straitive headquarters in aut Yo, a town in northern Namibia. It had what appeared to be UN issued license plates and the United Nations emblem was painted on the side, so perhaps it didn't look out of place there at first. Initial reports say witnesses

saw three men dressed in green camouflage uniforms. The UN Transition Assistance Group had arrived in Namibia four months earlier, authorized by UN Resolution four thirty five. The resolution had actually been adopted over a decade earlier, but it took that entire decade to get all parties to come to the table. The Transition Assistance Group was there to ensure the ceasefire was honored, that South African troops would withdraw from Namibia, and that the upcoming election would be free

and fair. Those first four months had not been without incident, but a ceasefire was re established Over the summer. The South African military was withdrawing s planned and UN officials were making progress on disarming and disbanding the citizen militias paid by the South African government. If things continued on this path, it was looking good for the November elections. But not everyone was on board with UN Resolution four

thirty five. One small group in particular, calling itself Axi Kontra four three five Action against four thirty five, did just what the name implies. They took action. When those men in green camos stepped out of their car outside the UN offices in Autyo that night, they opened fire with automatic weapons hand grenades caused extensive damage to the buildings.

Both the administrative offices and the sleeping quarters. A security guard named Michael Hoseg was killed in the attack, but the men fled into the night without finishing the mission. The entire cell was arrested fairly quickly, and authorities found a massive arsenal of guns and explosives the group planned to use in future attacks on United Nations targets with the goal of stopping the upcoming elections. And those men were in custody in November when the elections were held,

but they didn't stay there. They escaped. They'd failed to prevent Namibian independence, but now the fight was in South Africa, and they would do everything in their power to prevent the end of apartheime. I'm Molly Conger, and this is where the were guides. This is still the story of Monica hugget'st the elderly South African woman who was living in Mandeville, Louisiana, when she organized a series of nationwide

Nazi rallies in twenty twelve. But she isn't in this part of the story because I can't tell you about the international network of mercenaries she was organizing in nineteen ninety four without telling you a little bit more about some of those men, who they were and what they were up to in the years leading up to that deadly shootout with the police on the eve of the South African elections. I know I don't have to make excuses for this meandering narrative. It's my story and I'll

tell it the only way I know how. I never know where we're going when I start putting my notes together, and I really can't help but chase down this seemingly infinite number of surprisingly deep rabbit holes. And I'm so fascinated by this international network. It's come up a bit in other stories. Dennis Mahon and Tom Metzger had close

ties with Heritage Front in Canada. In the early nineties, Denis Mayhon flew to Germany to show German Neo Nazis a good old fashioned American ku Klux clan cross burning, and he gave fiery speeches stoking the flames of the anti immigrant riots that were exploding across Germany at the time.

The week before Dennis started making that bomb that he went to prison for, he'd been hanging out with an Ulster Unionist who'd carried out bombings in Northern Ireland during the troubles, British Holocaust denied David Irving traveled regularly to the United States to network with American white supremacists. Frank Sweeney joined the American Nazi Party in New Jersey as a teenager and later joined the Rhodesian Army as a mercenary.

Members of American white supremacist groups like the Base Adam Waffen and the Rise Above movement and its spinoff active clubs, have a particular fondness for traveling to Ukraine to fight with far right groups like the azof Battalion. Patriot Front. Flags have popped up at neo Nazi marches and Poland, and its members have met with leaders of foreign fascist groups like the Nordic Resistance Movement in Sweden and Cossa

Pound in Italy. One of the young men arrested in connection with the Terogram Collective was taken into custody at the airport before he could board a flight to Ukraine to join the Russian Volunteer Corps. The fascists, racists, and anti Semites of the world are obsessed with borders, but they don't seem to mind crossing them, So that's what

we're exploring. Here, and we'll find Monica again in the next chapter of this story when she does a bit of border crossing of her own, but that's not until nineteen ninety four, and right now it's nineteen eighty nine. In nineteen eighty nine, South Africa was still five years away from ending apartheid, five years away from holding their first election with universal suffrage, five years away from electing Nelson Mandela as their first post of Parkment high president.

In nineteen eighty nine, Nelson Mandela was still in prison, where he'd been since nineteen sixty two. But in nineteen eighty nine, one of South Africa's neighbors was taking the leap into multi racial democracy. Well. Whether or not South Africa considered Namibia to be a neighboring country or a country at all, depends on who you ask. The present day nation of Namibia had been a German colony from

eighteen eighty four until nineteen fifteen. During World War One, when everyone was a little preoccupied elsewhere, South Africa captured the colony known as South West Africa. In nineteen sixty six, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution declaring that South Africa no longer had a right to the territory, but South Africa continued illegally occupying the area that the United Nations now recognized as Namibia. The conflict lasted over

two decades. The South African Border War wasn't just about South Africa's desire to extend apartheid into this colonial territory. It was inextricably intertwined with other conflicts in the region, things like the Angle and Civil War. It was a modern consequence of the nineteenth century Scramble for Africa. It was the unraveling of a century of colonialism. It was fueled by Cold War anxiety about communist guerrilla forces and

Soviet influence. And it was about white anxiety. If Black Africans were allowed to participate in government, if they were, god forbid, allowed to rule their own nations, what would they do with that power. The whole world got in on the action, both officially, with major power sending material support to their preferred parties and none officially, with independent mercenaries and shadowy state sponsored operations popping up all over Sub Saharan Africa. But by nineteen eighty nine it was

finally time. The border war was over and Namibia was going to have free and fair elections in November. In April of that year, peacekeeping forces from the United Nations Transition Assistance Group arrived to oversee the process. Namibia was going to be an independent nation, one without apartheid, and this was a frightening prospect for those white South Africans trying desperately to hold onto power in an increasingly unsustainable form of government. Now, this next part might sound like

a conspiracy theory. I tried to tread waters like this with immense care. I nearly drove myself to madness trying to thread the needle of fact, fiction and question marks. When I talked about the Oklahoma City bombing a while back, and when I started poking around this particular history, I'll admit I didn't have a lot of context. I don't know the landscape here, so sorting fact from speculation and

sifting out the lies is a tricky prospect. And at first I completely dismissed the idea that these neo Nazi terrorists could have been acting on government orders. That's Tinfoil had territory, right. I saw the idea heavily insinuated in some reporting from the time period. An article published in nineteen ninety, in an issue of Frei Vigblad, a South African newspaper with an anti apartheid stance, opened with this fairly explosive allegation. They are fugitives accused of murder. They

come from South Africa, Britain, Namibia and Zimbabwe. They have one common characteristic. They left a trail of destruction, death and bloodshed in Southern Africa over the past decade, but cannot be prosecuted. They are among the most wanted men in our neighboring states, but enjoy the protection of the South African government because they have worked or still work for the security forces. But that's not proof, right. Think about how often you see similar sentiments expressed when it

comes to American far right groups. Allegations that this group or that one or whichever prominent white supremacist leader hasn't been prosecuted because they're being protected by the state. And that's always a possibility, sure, but that doesn't mean it's true. But some of those men would themselves later claim that they couldn't be prosecuted for murders and bombings because they'd been acting on government orders, And again that's not proof.

I've seen that before too. Sometimes people will say anything to avoid responsibility, and that doesn't necessarily mean it's true. I'd been chugging along, accumulating sources and taking my notes, translating old newspapers. I subscribed to several South African genealogical databases, getting into the weeds here, all under the assumption that

there wasn't really a need to explore that angle. It could be true, but it wasn't something I'd be able to substantiate, And it's the kind of thing I'm not comfortable exploring without something to hold on to. I don't want to abuse your trust by speculating wildly and getting reckless with the facts. But then I realized this is a very unusual set of circumstances. Normally, a government would

never admit to state sponsored terrorism. They all do it, but nobody admits it, and if you ever do prove it, it's nothing short of a miracle. You need leaked documents and deathbed confessions. But the South Africa of nineteen ninety five wasn't really the same South Africa that had existed until nineteen ninety four. This government wasn't admitting to its own crimes the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was an unusually transparent look at the nation's past, and they admitted it.

There is an entire chapter of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission final report called secret State Funding. And according to the report, Oxi Coontra four thirty five, the group behind the attack at the UN offices in Autyo in nineteen eighty nine, is believed to have been entirely a creation

of funded by the South African government. At least one of the men involved was later confirmed to have been an operative of the South African Civil Cooperation Bureau, an odd name for what was essentially government sponsored death squads. And I tell you that now so you can draw your own conclusions later in the story when things get a little murkier. So just keep that in the back of your mind for now. It wasn't long after the attack on Autio that members of Oxi Contra for thirty

five started getting arrested. Although the group's name disappears from the conversation pretty quickly, the men who carried out that attack were members of other groups too. Specifically, they were all members of the Africaner Resistance movement. The AWB led by Eugene terre Blanche. The first to be arrested were two South African citizens, Arthur Archer and Craig Barker, and a German mercenary named Horst Clens. South Africans Darrell stopped

Forth and Leonard Winendhal were arrested soon after. By October of nineteen eighty nine, two months after the attack, and out Yo five men had been arrested. Charges against Craig Barker were dropped early on, and the charges against Arthur Archer were dropped after he agreed to cooperate, And so in December of nineteen eighty nine, it's just three Nandhl Cleans and stop Foth were officially charged with murder in a Namibian court. The courthouse was a three hour drive

from the prison where the men were being held. After the hearing, Leonard Venadal asked to use the bathroom before they were loaded back into the transport van to return to their cells. And this is one of those moments where it's useful to bear in mind that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission names Leonard Venandal as a known operative of the Civil Cooperation Bureau, those government sponsored death squads and he's named as an operative of the CCB, specifically

in connection with these events in Namibia. So with that in mind, Leonard Venandal goes to the bathroom of the courthouse and he somehow knows to take the top off the tank of a particular toilet. Someone had left him a gift in there, a pistol, and he takes the gun out of the toilet and he tucks it away and allows himself to be placed back in the van. About three quarters the way through the drive back to the jail, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, the men

insisted that they just couldn't hold it any longer. They needed to stop to go to the bathroom, and the two Namibian police officers agreed. They pulled over and they let their three prisoners out to pee on the side of the road, and then suddenly another vehicle appeared. It stopped and two men got out, and Vinadel produced the pistol from his hiding place, and the two officers were

overpowered by the three prisoners and their two accomplices. Constable Ricardo van Wick was shot on the stomach and later died. The surviving officer was forced at gunpoint into the back of the van, which the prisoners drove half an hour off the main road before abandoning it. And then they disappeared, and the vehicle driven by their accomplices, and they really

did disappear. Darrel stopped Forth, Leonard Fiennandal, and Horse Glens had murdered a UN security guard and an Amibian police officer. They were supposed to have gone on trial in Namibia, but they vanished for a little while anyway. Just a few short months later, both Leonard Fiennindal and Darrel Stopforth came out of hiding. They were home in South Africa, and South Africa had no extradition treaty with the newly independent nation of Namibia. There were warrants for their arrest there,

but there was nothing anyone could really do. Nadal said in a public statement a few months after his escape, I have now returned to my family and I'm going to devote myself full time to the cause as the revolution is here. A photo of Venandal taken around that time shows him wearing his AWB uniform and holding his newborn son. He'd named the boy Daryl, presumably to honor Darrel stop Forth, the man he'd just committed two murders with and there's an odd thing I keep seeing these

guys do as I'm researching this story. They have this strange fondness for giving interviews when they're supposed to be in hiding on the run from the law. When it was announced in September of nineteen eighty nine, a month after the attack and out YO that Leonard Venadal had been arrested, a reporter in South Africa came forward with a pretty wild story. While Venondal had been on the run, he'd taken the time to sit down for a two hour interview with a reporter, and in that interview he

spoke openly about his membership in the AWB. That fact alone wasn't really a secret. He was Eugene Tablanche's personal bodyguard, and he was the leader of the Johannesburg branch of the group. But he also claimed there had been a split within Aquala, the militant arm of AWB, with some members openly declaring their willingness and intent to die for the cause, forming a sort of Kamakazi unit that planned

to carry out high profile assassinations. He also showed the reporter a small circular placard of sorts with a picture of a wolf. The reporter Yu hung Kus just looked at it with disbelief, and he said, there's no such thing as the White Wolves, and vin ad all smiled at him and replied, believe me, they exist. The White Wolves probably didn't exist, not really, not then anyway, not

in any way that really means anything. I guess they kind of did, in the sense that if someone were to carry out a series of bombings and then call the newspaper to say that the White Wolves did it, you sort of retroactively created the idea of a group that could be imagined to exist, because Venadel would later be connect to an attempt to do just that. But by most accounts, the White Wolves wasn't a terrorist organization

that actually existed. But in September of nineteen eighty nine, as he's sitting there with this reporter from the Sunday Times, everyone in South Africa had heard of the White Wolf, at least in the singular. Earlier that year, a former policeman who called himself the White Wolf had been sentenced to death. He was a former policeman because he'd been dismissed a year earlier. After opposing for a photo holding the severed head of a black man who had died

in a gruesome car accident. He tried to submit the photo for publication in a police magazine, but they declined to publish it. He'd joined a to w B at just sixteen, with his father's support and encouragement. He'd been sentenced to die for something he did. November of nineteen eighty eight, one afternoon, a twenty three year old named Baron Stredam put on his custom belt buckle engraved with

the words white wolf and Afrikaans. He barked his car near a busy city square in downtown Pretoria, and he got out, and he started walking, and then he started shooting. On the day of the massacre, he just walked for several blocks, just shooting black people at random. He murdered eight people and wounded sixteen others, and every survivor says

the same thing. He smiled the entire time. Bradley Stein was just seventeen years old that day and he was on his way home from rugby practice when he saw Stridum. He didn't understand at first what he was looking at. This man with a gun must be a police officer. He must be trying to catch a bad guy. But then he saw Stridem walk up to an old woman carrying groceries, and without saying a word, Stritem shot her

in the head. At that moment, a black teenager called out to stein beckoning him over to the bench he was hiding behind, and the two teens hid behind the bench together, but Stridum found them. He shot the black boy. As Steyne, who's white, cradled this bleeding stranger in his lap. He looked up at Stridam and asked him why.

I've wasted countless hours reading manifestos, and there are plenty of similarities between white supremacist mass shootings. There are a lot of common denominators when it comes to a young white man who carries out a racist mass shooting. But this felt so terribly, eerily familiar to me. It was inescapable. It felt just like the Charleston church shooting. It felt

like Dylan Rufe. And back in twenty fifteen, several South Africa journalists covering that story that American shooting referred to Dylan Rufe as America's white Wolf. So I guess I'm not alone in that feeling. We talked briefly last week about the apartheid era South African flag patch in photos of roof taken shortly before he murdered nine people at the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in twenty fifteen, So we know he had a fondness for apartheid. But I

wonder if he was familiar with the white wolf. So in Venadel is sitting there with this reporter showing him this little picture of a wolf. This is what he's talking about. He's telling the reporter that he's a member of this extremely militant, violent arm of the AWB, that they're planning to get a race war going before Christmas, and he really wants the paper to run a story that will convince people that there are hundreds more Barren

Stritums out there lying in wait. And the reason the reporter didn't believe him is because it had been discussed extensively during Stritem's trial just a few months earlier. There was no reason to believe any actual group called the White Wolves existed. He was a member of AWB, that was fairly certain, but when it came to the White Wolves, it appeared to just be a pack of one. Fienandal

was maybe just planting seeds of propaganda. He was trying to capitalize on this intense fear and trauma surrounding Stritem's murders by convincing people it could happen again at any time.

But Leonard Fiennindal had been telling the truth about at least one thing when he spoke to that reporter before his arrest, there had been some splintering within the African or Resistance movement, members of AWB had started forming increasingly violent breakaway groups, groups like the Orde van de Dude, which translates to the Order of Death, and the Order Borofolk the Order of the Boer People. And that name

might sound familiar. A violent fascist group calling itself the Order we heard that one before its founder would later say that he'd never actually heard of Robert J. Matthews, the American neo Nazi who founded a group called The Order in nineteen eighty three. It seems both men arrived at the name independently, but for the exact same reason. It was the name of the fictional white supremacist organization

in William Luther Pierce's novel The Turner Diaries. And you might remember the name of the man who founded the South African version of the Order. Remember last week we were talking about the trial of Massimo Bolo and Fabio Miriello, the Italian fascist convicted of the vit Commando bombings in

nineteen eighty. As the two men were led into the court room on the first day of their trial, one man and the gallery stood up and applauded for the bombers, and that man was Pritorious City councilor Pete Rudolph, And so by this point in our timeline, Rudolph is a high ranking member of the africaner resistance movement the AWB, and Pete Rudolph maintains to this day that he founded the Order in nineteen eighty nine with the knowledge and

blessing of AWB's leader, Eugene taire Blanche, specifically so that AWB members could engage in more violent resistance without risking AWB itself being sanctioned or banned. And if that's true, it's actually quite similar in that respect to the group of the same name in the United States. When Robert Matthews founded the Order, he did so with the knowledge and blessing of William Luther Pierce, announcing the formation of the group in a speech at the annual meeting of

Pierce's National Alliance. And National Alliance benefited Ida theologically and financially from the Order's crimes, but they had the plausible deniability of having no formal affiliation with the group. Just like Pierce a National Alliance, Terre Blanche and the AWB could sit back and enjoy the political benefit of their orders act of terror without the risk of appearing to have authorized them. The Order Boro Folk was definitely founded and led by Pete Rudolph, but press clippings over the

years occasionally name other men as the group's leader. At one point, Nick Stridem, the father of mass murderer Baronstretem, is quoted as the head of the Order. In nineteen ninety four, a South African TV news program aired an interview with a man claiming to be the leader of the Order. I was perhaps as surprised as Pete Rudolph was to see Leonard Wienendahl staring back at me from

the screen. Rudolph would later tell them Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Venandal had appointed himself as chief of staff of the Order without his permission, and that such a position didn't even exist. And he called Venandal quote a man fond of publicity with strong national socialist inclinations. And he scoffed at the very idea that he would have let Venondal lead anything, disparagingly referring to Venondal's habit of appearing in public in a khaki uniform, saying I despise

a khaki uniform. Let me tell you, because khaki is the color of the British. But I guess the fashion police unit of the Nazi terror squad is really neither here nor there. No one denies Vnondal was a member of the Order. In fact, when Venondal, Cleans and stop Forth had escaped from custody in Namibia, it had been the Order who picked them up on the side of the road there next to the still bleeding policeman. The man driving their getaway car was Rudolph's chief deputy, Hank Bradenhan.

Rudolph claims the Order was formally established in October of nineteen eighty nine, but they didn't announce their presence to the world until February of nineteen ninety, when a small group of quote suspicious looking white men vandalized the British embassy in Pretoria. Witnesses saw them walk up to the embassy gates and spray paint in Afrikaans. The struggle begins and they signed the statement order. Borofolk police looked at the graffiti and said they'd never heard of the group.

One member spoke anonymously with the press and said they were allied with the White Wolves. In April of nineteen ninety, the Order Boro folk took its first big step. Pete Rudolph organized and led a raid on a South African Air Force base. Carried out in collaboration with three young A Tobb sympathizers within the Air Force. Order members, including Leonard Wienendahl, stole a busload of guns and ammunition from

the South African Defense Force. Rudolph called the Pretoria News while on the run to take credit for the heist, saying it was time for war. Quote. I have now crossed the rubicon. The boar now have a chance to arm themselves. We are now going for the a n c's throat. And keep those guns in the back of your mind too, I'll remind you, but one of those

guns shows back up. In June, Rudolph recorded a half hour long video declaring war against the government, and he mailed copies to several New Use outlets as well as other right wing groups. I could only find a short clip of it. I don't know why it looked so hard for the full video. It wouldn't have done me

any good. It's all in Afrikaans, but still frames from the video show Rudolph sitting at a desk flanked by masked men carrying rifles they'd stolen from the military, and the message was part press release, part warning, part call to action. He's speaking to a variety of audiences here and for his fellow African or nationalists. His message was pretty simple. It's not time to talk anymore and it is quote better to die in glory than to live

in disgrace. Within days of this video's release, the bombs started going off. In late June and early July of nineteen ninety, bombs went off every night. A bomb went off on a bust terminal in Johannesburg injuring nearly thirty people. Bombs went off at both the home and business belonging to Clive Gilbert, a Johannesburg City councilor who was both Jewish and a member of the Democratic Party. That same week, a synagogue in Johannesburg was bombed and defaced with swastika's

and pro apartheid slogans. The office of the National Union of Mine Workers, a radical black labour organization, was destroyed by a bomb that went off overnight. A bomb blew out the windows of the offices of the anti apartheid weekly newspaper Freivigblad, and the homes and offices of several members of the ruling National Party were targeted as well, accompanied by warnings that President de Clerk must stop all efforts to adopt moderate reforms. And then the phone calls came.

Two phone calls to the offices of a pro government newspaper. The first caller spoke English, not Afrikaans. A day later, a second call came to the same paper, and this caller spoke Afrikaans, but he used the code word the reporter had given the previous caller to ensure he was speaking with the same group. Both callers told the newspaper that the White Wolves were responsible for the bombings and that the bombings would continue if their demands weren't meant.

Their primary demand was pretty straightforward. They wanted President de Clerk to call an election. His moves towards reform and concessions and negotiations with the ANC, and his recent release of Nelson Mandela. These things were unacceptable, and they wanted the opportunity to elect a better white president. But the

group had two other strangely specific requests. They wanted the White Wolf himself, Baron Stridam, released from prison, and they wanted the police to call off the man hunt for Pete Rudolph, who was at this time still on the run after claiming responsibility for stealing all those guns from the military and then sending the government a videotaped declaration

of war. But like I said, the White Wolves almost certainly didn't exist, not in nineteen ninety, not as an actual organized group, whatever that means for a group that didn't exist, though they were very busy in nineteen ninety. In February, shortly after Nelson Mandela was released from prison, letters threatening to assassinate him were received by newspapers and

those letters were signed the White Wolves. In May, when President Declark announced another round of apartheid reforms, including the repeal of the law that segregated libraries, the White Wolves put out a press release warning the president to watch his back. In May of nineteen ninety, three black activists with the African National Congress were run off the road by two white men. Prince Makina and Simon Koba were murdered, but Xavier Likuote survived to testify. He says, before one

of the white men started shooting at them. He'd ask if they'd heard of the White Wolves, Lekuote said, he replied that he had, and just before opening fire, the man looked down at them and said, I'm going to show you just who the White Wolves are. And now in July, the White Wolves are claiming responsibility for most, though not all, of the bombs that had been going

off every night for a week. It's possible that some of the other incidents involving people claiming to be the White Wolves were just people doing what Leonard Binendal had done with that reporter. They were pretending they were acting on their own or in connection with some other group. But they liked the way it sounded to say they

were the White Wolves. They understood the kind of fear it would inspire and the kind of plausible deniability it would give their actual group affiliation for whatever they'd done. And more importantly, they wanted to honor the White Wolf Baron Stredam. I see a lot of parallels here between the way Stritam's murders so quickly achieved this almost religious significance and the way modern terogram culture canonized his mass shooters. I didn't realize they'd been doing that for so many decades.

I don't know that it was ever conclusively proven who was actually behind every instance of someone claiming to be the White Wolves, but in at least one of those cases we knew exactly who it was. The men who murdered Prince Makina and Simon Koba in May of nineteen ninety was Peter Grinevald, son of General Teeny Gunivald, South Africa's head of military intelligence. Peter Garnivald fled the country after the murders, and he spent years hiding in Portugal.

When he was finally brought to justice, he testified that at the time of the murders, he had been an employee of the Civil Cooperation Bureau, just like Leonard Vinendal. I'm not sure with conclusion to traw here, but the only two people I can say with conclusive proof were telling people that the White Wolves were real. Both turned

out to be members of state sponsored death squads. But when it comes to those bombings in July, the police knew it wasn't the White Wolves because they knew it was members of the AWB, And we know more specifically that it was members of the closely aligned splinter group, the Order Borofolk. There are a lot of reasons why we know that to be true, but just in case, here's Pete Rudolph himself saying it in an interview. Last year.

All ten of those men had ties to AWB. Several would later testify that they'd also been members of the Order of Death, a group that required members to commit a random, unprovoked murder as an act of initiation. Now, I'm gonna be honest with you, I don't know what happened next. I tried so hard to sort this out. I love a day by day timeline, but I think there are a lot of factors complicating things here. I mean,

first of all, it was thirty five years ago. Not every piece of news has been archived and digitized, and there's probably reporting out there that I just can't access. And there are still the issues I talked about last week when it comes to locating source material in a foreign language with naming conventions and cultural contexts that I just don't have. I've noticed a surprisingly casual attitude towards

spelling and nick names. I mean, it was incredibly common across all of my sources for this story for someone's name to be spelled a handful of different ways, pretty interchangeably, sometimes even within the same article. And it seems like it might be normal in Afrikaans to refer to a particular individual using their full name or just their first and middle initial with their last name or some kind of nickname, even in very formal writing, again totally interchangeably.

It took me a week to realize that KOs is a nickname for Jacobis, and one guy might be written about both ways, from sentence to sentence. I don't know, maybe this is cultural. I have no idea, but it really complicates the process of looking for information. I've also noticed dates are often wrong. I mean a lot, like markedly provably wrong, just not consistent from source to source,

sometimes just offering information that isn't possible. I mentioned last week that some of the dates in the Truth and Reconciliation Report are definitely not correct. Things like the year the Wit commando trials took place are pretty easy to corroborate with newspaper archives, and it happens over and over again. The bombing of the Frei vik Blot office is widely reported in later sources to have occurred in nineteen ninety one.

The paper's own editor, Max Duprees, even puts the date as nineteen ninety one in his memoirs, but that's not true.

He spoke to a reporter from the London Times about the bombing the day after it happened in July of nineteen ninety and Duprees writes in his book that Leonard Wienendhal had confessed to having planted that bomb, which again could not have happened in nineteen ninety one because Leonard Venendal was in prison in nineteen ninety one, and the confession in question is actually very well documented because Venondal would later testify before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that

he'd only confess to that bombing because police interrogators had electrocuted his testicles in July of nineteen ninety So sorting out a day by day timeline, which is again my preferred strategy, really just wasn't possible here. There is no consistently reliable source when it comes to when a particular event actually happened. And I'm not gidding about that the bit about Venendal claiming to have been tortured. He applied to testify before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, not as

a perpetrator, but as a victim. He offered testimony about abuse he'd suffered after his arrest in July of nineteen ninety.

any follow up. I may be searching for answers that aren't there, because sometimes cops would round up a bunch of guys and put a story in the newspaper, and then I don't know, they just aren't in jail anymore, and there's never any more to the story. Sometimes people escaped two members of the Order Bora Folk definitely did. And sometimes people were quietly released because they secretly worked

for the government. And during this time period especially, the government had a strategy of politically targeted am As part of this effort to cool tensions and advanced negotiations, there were these occasional releases of political prisoners. They just pick a few guys on both sides of the conflict and let them go. And unlike the later, more organized and thoughtful process of granting amnesty through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this, at least to me, I could be wrong here, but

this looked a little haphazard. It doesn't look like these early nineties amnesty releases really involved any sort of long process of thoroughly accounting for what actually happened and documenting the specifics and getting statements on the record, getting people to admit what they'd done. They just sort of let people go and one of the more egregious instances of this was the release of Baron Stretum in nineteen ninety two.

The men who laughed as he shot pedestrians at random had served just four years, and the release of political prisoners was a part of the ongoing negotiations between the National Party administration and the African National Congress. Both sides were getting some of their people out of prison, and the A and C seemed generally supportive of the strategy,

but not when it came to Barons Stritum. Cyril Ramaposa, the current President of South Africa, was the A and C General secretary back in nineteen ninety two, and he issued their statement condemning the decision. Our prisoners will not go out and commit these acts again, he said. But there's no guarantee that the prisoners who hate black people

will not come out and shoot more black people. Baron Stretum didn't carry out another mass shooting after his release, not that I'm aware of, but he did continue to support and encourage far right violence. Shortly after his release. Australian journalist Alan Hogan interviewed Stridam about the murders. Camera

not in a studio or his living room. No, the interview took place as the pair walked together along the path that Stridam had taken that day, and he's pointing out the locations each spot where he took a human life, and he's laughing, and he enthusiastically agrees that, Yeah, if you gave me a gun right now, I do it again, Rock.

One was released after he agreed to cooperate to escape, and Leonard Wienendal Darrel stopped Forth and Horst Cleans were in jail, originally held in connection with the bombings for violations of Section twenty nine of the Internal Security Act, and they seemed to stay in jail for quite a while. No charges were ever actually filed against them for those bombings in South Africa, but while they were in custody, the newly independent nation of Namibia filed a petition to

have them extradited to face trial for those murders. In nineteen eighty nine. The Truth and Reconciliation Report notes in passing that they were never interviewed by Nimbia authorities during this time period. It doesn't say why, if they asked and weren't given permission, or if they just never asked.

And I do have articles that were published in nineteen ninety and nineteen ninety one that seemed to indicate they remained in continuous custody throughout this time, But after those first few months, the articles stopped mentioning why they'd been arrested in the first place, and they only refer to the fact that they're still being held pending a determination

about extradition. By July of nineteen ninety one, a year after they were arrested, both Vinendhal and Cleans were reportedly dangerously ill from an ongoing hunger strike, along with other incarcerated members of the Order Bfolk. They were political prisoners. They said they'd only carried out the orders of the state. They can't be prosecuted for that, and they said they would continue their hunger strike until their demands were met.

News stories show Fienandl was on a hunger strike as early as January of ninety one and as late as August of ninety two, So that can't have been continuous because he's still alive. But for about two years, I can place him in jail and he's going on intermittent hunger strikes to protest this continued detention. In April of nineteen ninety two, a South African judge did rule that

the Autio three could be extradited to Namibia. Stop Fourth and Venandal tried to appeal that ruling, but horse Glen's wasn't really participating. He just kind of disappeared, and when they were all released on bond in December of nineteen ninety two to await this final ruling, he disappeared entirely. It would take another four years, but in nineteen ninety six, the Minister of Justice finally signed the extradition order. Horst Glens was otherwise engaged by Van He was serving time

for the plot we'll cover next week. But Darrell stop Fourth and Leonard Venondal were ordered to surrender themselves for extradition to Namibia, but they didn't. I can't figure out where Darryl stopped Fourth ended up. I tried, but I know exactly where Leonard Venendall is because just as he was due to present himself to the authorities to be extradited, he stole a car, crossed the border and flew to

the United Kingdom. Some reporting says he initially entered the United Kingdom using a false passport, probably because he was on Inner Poll's most wanted list, and that he didn't try to claim asylum until after he was caught, but it's unclear. The man that Eugene Tareblanche used to affectionately refer to as my little fanatic settled down with his family in Wisbeck, a town about one hundred miles north of London. He's the chair of the Wisbeck Rugby Club

and his wife Tracy, is the treasurer. The payday loan company he started after moving to England went into liquidation a few years ago. I'm not really familiar with how anything works in the UK, and I really don't know how you could bankrupt a business that's pure extortionate profit, but that is what the paperwork appears to show. There's been a handful of articles over the years asking why Leonard Wienandal was allowed to enter and remain in the

United Kingdom. In two thousand and three, a reporter tracked him down in his home in Wisbec, and Searchlight magazine would later report that Vnandal allegedly attacked the reporter, grabbing him and slamming him up against a wall, shouting, you're going to find yourself in a very negative position. Subsequent attempts to write articles about Venondal don't contain quotes from him. He and his wife are South African citizens born in

South Africa. There's no evidence he actually applied for political asylum. Corporate filings for his bankrupt paid a loan company list his nationality as South African, which, again, knowing nothing about British business zoom, means he did not seek British citizenship. So the UK is just willingly harboring a man who still wanted for two murders in Namibia. International extradition law can be a bit tricky, but ultimately even if they couldn't or don't want to extradite him to Namibia, why

is he still in the UK. They could deport him back to South Africa, and presumably the South African government would finish what they started in nineteen ninety and send

him to Namibia. In February of this year, as Donald Trump started parroting white nationalist talking points about South Africa, Mihnandhl made a flurry of online posts praising the American President, writing in one post last month, thank you President Donald J. Trump, not only for hearing the plight of my people, the poor africaners, but for boldly stepping up to stand with them in their hour of need and face of adversity. Jimmy Carter died in December. Bvenandal posted he just died,

so we're supposed to pretend he's a saint. But Carter was instrumental in killing the free, prosperous state of Rhodesia. Like I said, I can't tell you whatever became of Darrell stop fourth, but we'll pick back up next week with horsed cleans. He was released from the South African jail in nineteen ninety two, pending a decision on whether or not he could be extradited to Namibia. Unlike stop fourth in Biennondal, he doesn't seem to have participated in

the legal battle to appeal that decision. He went underground, and he doesn't resurface again until nineteen ninety four, when he's arrested again, this time after a shootout with the South African police that left one of his young German mercenaries dead. And that's where we'll find the woman who set me down this long, strange path. It was Monica Huggett who was graciously playing host for those foreign mercenaries.

In early March of nineteen ninety four, three men left the Bosnian city of Siroki brieg German mercenaries Falk Semang and Ralph Moracas were eager for a change of scenery, not because they had tired of their lives as soldiers of fortune, but because they were in a bit of hot water after murdering two of their fellow mercenaries, and Ronald Doyster, a Dutch mercenary they'd worked with on his last stint with the Croatian forces, was happy to recruit them to a new mission, one far away from the

mess they'd made in the Balkans. Before they left, they took a few souvenirs, a couple of AK forty sevens, one pistol, eight kilos of semtex, a plastic explosive, and a crate of hand grenades. They stashed the stolen weapons under the seats of the old Citron that Doyster was driving. Doyster was no stranger to committing crimes across borders. He'd been a soldier for hire for over a decade and had served a bit of time in Ireland for arms smuggling.

He was confident that his expertly forged un press credentials were all they'd need to ensure a clean getaway without anyone searching the vehicle, and he was right. After driving nearly two thousand kilometers, they reached their first destination, the Belgian city of Roussillara. There they met with Roger Spinewen, the leader of a Belgian Neo Nazi group called the Order of Flemish Militants. He was a bit of a

legend in certain circles. He was already an old man, but in the seventies he'd led a small group of Belgian Nazis in a daring heist of sorts, successfully stealing the corpse of a long dead Nazi priest from his grave in Austria to be reinterred on his home soil in Belgium. And on that day in March of nineteen ninety four, Spinewin paid Douster eleven thousand Deutsche marks for the stolen weapons, but he gave him one more thing directions.

It had been Spinewen who had asked Deuster to return to Bosnia this one last time, not as a mercenary this time, but to fetch hardware and recruits for a new mission, one in South Africa. The Aeging Neo Nazi had spent his life fighting for fascism At home in Belgium. His son John was a member of parliament as a leader in the far right party of Vlam's Bloc. World continued to change around him. He hoped to retire one day in a beautiful white Ethno state in Southern Africa.

Here on the eve of the end of apartheid, though that dream was starting to look less and less likely, unless they could incite enough violence in those final months to convince the white population of South Africa that they needed to secede to form a new pure white nation, and this was the task he'd recruited these mercenaries for. It wasn't safe to depart directly from Belgium, the authorities

there were already a little suspicious. Instead, the mercenaries took the ferry across the English Channel to Ramsgate, a seaside town in Kent. There, with an introduction from Spinowin, they made their next contacts, members of the British fascist group, the League of Saint George. They spent a few days there making final preparations for their journey with the help of their new English friends. This was becoming something of a routine for the members of the League of Saint George.

Just two months earlier, they'd hosted another batch of German mercenaries making the same trip. They didn't know just yet that one of those men was already dead. On the evening before Doyster and the Germans were scheduled to fly out of Heathrow, Roger Spinowen dispatched one of his sons

to Ramsgate with one final message for the mercenaries. Willie Spinowen handed Ronald Doyster a sealed envelope and passed along his father's order, Doyster was to personally hand deliver this envelope to the woman who would meet him at the airport, a woman named Monica hugget I'm Molly Conger and this is weird, little guys. This is the part of the story where we finally rejoined the woman we started with,

Monica Huggett Stone. It's been a long, strange journey. We started out a few weeks ago in twenty twelve, in Sacramento, California, American neo Nazis from the Golden State Skinheads were rallying outside the state capitol holding the flag of apartheid South Africa when counter protesters from a nearby occupy encampment showed up to heckle them. What an odd site, those skinheads in their black jackets rallying for the imaginary cause of

a white genocide against South African farmers. That rally was one of more than a dozen simultaneous rallies across the United States that day, though they were mostly poorly attended and some were barely publicized, and all of them were organized by a short lived Aryan Nations affiliated group called the South Africa Project, and that group itself was almost certainly really just two people, a long time Arian Nations member named Maurice Goulette and a mysterious woman in Louisiana

named Monica Stone. I'm always surprised by the twists and turns that these stories take. Once you start turning over a few rocks, there's always some bizarre new ankle that takes us miles from where I thought we were going. But this one has been the strangest ride of any weird little guy so far. In this chapter of the story, we'll try to trace the paths of these European mercenaries

from Bosnia to South Africa. It turns out there was an international network to funnel guns for hire from one conflict to another, And as cloak and dagger as all of that sounds, it wasn't really a secret, not entirely. Searchlight magazine had reported on the scheme months before Those

German mercenaries even bought their plane tickets. Every year for decades now, European Neo Nazis gather in the Belgian city of Dixmude for an international fascist get together, and at the event in nineteen ninety three, there was a lot of talk about changing their focus about redirecting mercenaries from the Balkans to South Africa, and plans were made. At least fifteen mercenaries were pledged to be dispatched in early nineteen ninety four with plans to fight alongside Robert vent

Honter's Boristock Party. All of this was published in print in English in the fall of nineteen ninety three, months before this actually happened. That same publication, Searchlight magazine, would eventually uncover more of the details about what went on

at Dixmuda in nineteen ninety three. It was at this summit that Roger Spinwin recruited Ronald Doyster to return to Bosnia to recruit more mercenaries for South Africa, and according to another source, it was also sometime in late nineteen ninety three that Roger Spinwin paid a visit to South

Africa himself at the invitation of Monica Huggett. I mentioned a few weeks ago that the first step in tracking this Monica Stone, the one who organized those rallies in twenty twelve, back to her home country of South Africa, was figuring out her maiden name, which is Huggitt, and I did that by digging up old corporate filings for a Christian identity church called the New Christian Crusade Church. And the New Christian Crusade Church was run by a

man named James k Warner. I don't think Warner necessarily qualifies as a big name, but he shows up in a lot of big stories. He was an early member of George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party. He was a leading member of the short lived National States Rights Party, and in his clan days, he was a very close friend of David Duke. I've left myself a note to

come back to James k Warner. I think there's some real weird little guy stuff going on here, and I do have a quick correction to make, as much as it pains me, I just realized I misspoke in the last episode where I mentioned James k Warner. I called him Robert k Warner. Careless. Honestly, I should have caught that. But to be honest with you, I'm recording this at one in the morning, and this is early by my usual standards. I'm always a little down to the wire.

But I think what happened there was just a slight mix up because in my defense, James Conrad Warner did have a brother named Robert L. Warner, and he did use his brother's name on the deeds to some of the church property. But it turns out that Monica's connection to Robert K. Warner may be the answer to a question that's been bothering me for weeks. How on earth did a woman in South Africa manage to join the

Ku Klux Klan? If you recall the story in the episode two weeks ago, Monica Hugget was arrested in nineteen eighty one in connection with a series of pro apartheid bombings by a group that called itself the Vid Commando, and after her arrest, she agreed to testify against the

Italian fascists that she'd helped carry out those bombings. During the trial, she said she was a member of the American Ku Klux Klan, and she told the authorities that the books they'd used as a guide for making those bombs had been sent to her by her American clan contacts, So she wasn't just a member of a Ku Klux Klan style group that operated independently in South Africa. She's saying that she has active contact with the clan in the United States, because there is a big difference there.

There have been groups in other countries that have adopted the esthetic and the ideology of the clan without necessarily maintaining meaningful contact with the group they're modeling themselves after. In other examples, what looks like a foreign iteration of the clan is actually just an American who happens to be living overseas. In the nineteen eighties, there was an American serviceman station in Germany who claimed that he was

leading an active clan group in Bavaria. And in the Denis Mahon story, we saw an American klansman who traveled internationally trying to spark an interest in American clan aesthetics and ideology, but with relatively little success. So what Monica's talking about here is something a little different, and I was stumped, truly. As we'll get to later on in the story, I can absolutely connect Monica huggets Stone to

the American Ku Klux Klan by the nineteen nineties. I've got the Federal election commissioned filings to prove that that's easy. But I still have no answers when it comes to the question of klansmen in South Africa in the late nineteen seventies, not in any concrete way, but I do

have a theory. One of the sources I've relied on heavily throughout this series is a nineteen ninety nine thesis by Mita Visser on the white fascist movements in South Africa in the twentieth century, and she sort of hints at this idea. She writes, quote, the activities of the

clan in South Africa are obscure. Although the police had no concrete evidence that the movement was active in South Africa, there were claims in the press in the late seventies that branch has existed in the country, And so in Visser's thesis she gives a couple of examples that are

definitely evidence of that esthetic copycat behavior I'm talking about. So, when the Vit Commando took credit for those bombings in nineteen eighty, the letters they sent to the press had a symbol in the letter head that was almost identical

to the logo used by American clan groups. And in nineteen ninety, when two members of the Order of Death went on trial for murder, our supporters packed the courtroom, and they were all wearing little clan lapel pens, and one of them even told a reporter the order is

long gone. It's the Ku Klux Klan now. In an unrelated side note, just to wrap up a loose end from the last episode, I can tell I've spent too much time digging around for details I'm not gonna need for this story when side characters start to look really familiar. When I was reading that anecdote about the order of death trial in nineteen ninety, I recognized the names of the murderers. Cornelius Lottering and Fanny Goosen were two of the ten members of the Africaner Resistance movement who were

arrested in the summer of nineteen ninety. So when they scooped up Leonard Wienendahl and Horst Cleans, Lottering and Goosen were in that bunch. And I mentioned in last week's episode that I couldn't exactly tell what became of all ten of those men, but two of them had escaped from custody, and those two were Lauding and Guzen, so I guess they found them again because they did get convicted of murder. But back to the question of the clan.

I could have left it there, but I think you probably know by now that I didn't, because if he dig just a little bit deeper into the past. There was a man in South Africa who called himself the leader of the South African Ku Klux Klan in the nineteen sixties and into the seventies. He died in the

late seventies. His name was Raymond Kirch Rudman, and by the time he was trying to get a South African clan going, he was already pretty old, and he was decades into his career as a professional anti Semite with impressive international connections. Aside from his clan activities, Rudman was also the leader of an African or nationalist group called the Boranasi, originally founded by Many Merits. Meretz's son, also called many Merits, was a prominent figure in the Africaner

resistance movement. During the same time period as Monica Huggett and Rudman also led a group called the Anglo Norman Union. I can't find much information about the extent to which that group actually operated in South Africa, like did it actually have real members, But in nineteen sixty five. Rudman did use the group to join the World Union of

National Socialists. That was an effort by George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party and Colin Jordan, who was then the head of the National Socialist movement in the United Kingdom, to form I guess exactly what it sounds, a World Union of Nazi groups. But when it comes to the Clan, there's not much written, at least not that I was able to find about the history of the clan in South Africa. But everything that does exist has Ray Rudman's

name on it. Last year, doctor William Robert Phillips completed his dissertation at Emory University, and I know, I know that dissertation has the answers I'm looking for, but it is currently embargoed and not available to read. But a write up about his research tells me I'm on the right track. He was researching anti Semitic bombings in the United States during the Civil Rights era when he came across one of the same sources I did. An old mention of Ray Rudman trying to recruit for a clan

group in South Africa in the early nineteen sixties. Phillips was able to secure grant funding to spend several weeks in South Africa at the University of the Free State, where Rudman's personal papers are held in a special collection. Again, unfortunately for me, I can't read Phillips's research, but I do have the finding aid for Rudman's papers, I can't

actually see what's written. The documents aren't digitized. A finding aid is just an inventory listing the contents of various boxes and folders, and I would love to get my hands on some of those letters because listed in that inventory are entries for correspondents between Ray Rudman and the New Christian Crusade Church dated as early as the sixties and seventies. There's also an entry listing correspondence between Ray Rudman and the National States Rights Party dated from the

nineteen fifties. The inventory also lists more than forty books in Rudman's collection that were published by James K Warner, either through his Sons of Liberty Press or the New

Christian Crusade Church. A similar finding aid for the personal papers of James k Warner, held by the University of Wyoming also lists correspondence between James Warner and Ray Rudman, and Warner's Nazi publishing outfit, the Sons of Liberty Press, also published and sold English language versions of texts by South African anti semi Johann Schumann an African inter nationalist politician Yap Maree. So I can't tell you exactly how Monica Huggett came to join the Ku Klux Klan, but

there is some really solid connective tissue here. It doesn't feel as random now. So when she moved to the United States, she was a close enough associate of James K Warner that he put her in charge of his new Christian Crusade church, and that has to have something to do with the fact that archives show that he was in active communication with the far right in South

Africa from his earliest days in the movement. It looks like I have some more digging to do on the subject of the Fascist International, because the number of connections here is honestly pretty staggering to me. James K Warner visited England in the seventies to speak at a meeting

of the League of Saint George. In nineteen eighty, our Belgian Nazi Roger Spinewen was deported from the United States while he was here visiting members of the National States Rights Party and our South African Clansman Ray Rudman was listed as the South African correspondent in issues of a British fascist magazine in the nineteen seventies. All of these

guys are connected going back decades. But I've been promising to get to this part of the story for weeks now, the part where a handful of German mercenaries get into a shootout with the South African police in March of night eighteen ninety four. A few episodes ago, I told you that one of the first places I found Monica Hugget's name was in the South African Truth and Reconciliation

Commission's Final Report in Volume two. The portion of the report that deals with quote the Commission of Gross Violations of Human Rights, Chapter seven political violence in the Era of Negotiations and Transition. Under the subheading links with international

right wing groups, the report reads. The first link between ultra right terrorism and foreign agencies came to light in nineteen eighty two when mister Fabiomiello, mister Massimo Bolo and mister Eugenio's office all white foreign expatriots known as the White Commando, were convicted of the nineteen seventy nine bombing

of the offices of prominent academic doctor Jan Lombard. Originally, mister Kus ver Mullin and Miss Monica hugget were arrested with them, but Huggitt turned state's witness and Vermullin was released after a few days. Huggett's name was subsequently linked to a shootout in March of nineteen ninety four between the South African police and three German right wingers in the Donkerhok area. One German right winger, mister Stephen Rays was arrested, Mister Thomas Kuns was shot dead, and a third,

mister Horse Cleans, was later arrested. A fourth, mister Alexander Nydeleine, was later charged in the Cullen and Magistrates Court for illegal possession of a firearm. And I read that paragraph before you've heard that bit, and at this point you know some of the back story that paragraph is talking about. Two weeks ago, we talked about the Vit Commando bombings in nineteen eighty and we spent most of the last

episode talking about one of those men Horst Cleans. Before that shootout in nineteen ninety four, Glen's had been involved in a nineteen eighty nine attack on a United Nations outpost in Namibia, killing a security guard and later murdering a police constable when he and his accomplices escaped from custody. And at some point I teased you a little bit with a story about Alexander Nydline. He was the German neo Nazi who swore allegiance to Donald Trump at a

fascist rally in Croatia in twenty seventeen. So we know where Horst Clean's was in the early nineties. He was in South Africa. But how did those other three men actually get there? In nineteen ninety four, Alexander Nydline, Stephen Rays and Thomas Koonst follow the same path as the mercenaries recruited by Ronald Doyster. They deserted from the Convicts Battalion, a paramilitary unit of the Crow Defense Council made up of prisoners and foreign mercenaries, and they left Bosnia with

stolen weapons. Then, with the help of the League of Saint George in England, they made their way down to South Africa and just like Ronald Doyster. They were given the name of a woman who would pick them up from the airport, Monica Huggett. And here is another place in my research for this story where I found a very unlikely source of information that I just couldn't have

gotten anywhere else. Two weeks ago I had to give my begrudging thanks to the Central Intelligence Agency after discovering English translations of South African news stories in archived reports from the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service. And this week I haven't even more unsavory source, I think, though he isn't around to hear it.

his sentence for war crimes would be upheld. I don't speak Croatian, but news reports translated his last words in that video as judges, Slobodon Proliac is not a war criminal. With disdain, I reject your verdict, and then he knocks back the vial of cyanide. We don't have to get into the crimes against humanity that Slobodon Proliac was convicted

of by the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia. He doesn't really factor in directly to our story at all, but he did choose to defend himself without an attorney during his war crimes trial, and as part of that effort, he had a website dedicated to proving his innocence, and that website is actually still online today. But the documents that I found most useful in researching this story don't appear to be accessible on the current version of the site.

So buried in this poorly organized series of files on an archived version of this war criminal's website, I found something terribly interesting. All of the existing reporting that I could find about Alexander Ninelein, Stephen Rays, and Thomas Coonst and their whereabouts in late nineteen ninety three seems to rely on one of those documents, an arrest warrant signed by their commanding officer, a war criminal named Maladin Nalatilic, which I know I've not pronounced correctly, so we'll just

call him by his nickname Teuta. Everyone else did. When those three German mercenaries deserted from Teuta's Ragtag Convicts Battalion in the middle of December of nineteen ninety three, he wrote a memo requesting arrest warrants. Translated, it reads, on December sixteenth, nineteen ninety three, members of the Convicts Battalion fled from Sierroki Brieg to an unknown destination after spending three to four days in the unit after sealing weapons

and ammunition. The memo goes on to specify that, aside from their names and the fact that they'd been briefly affiliated with the unit. He had no additional information about these three men. It's possible that a lot is lost in translation here, but it kind of looks like he's really going out of his way to distance himself from these men, because he's very explicit that they were only there for a few days and he doesn't know anything about them. These guys are strangers to him, and I

guess there's no reason to doubt that. It's what every write up about the incident says. And who knows, maybe they got all the way there and they realized war isn't very fun and they changed their minds. That makes plenty of sense, right, But I think it would be terribly naive to take a war criminal at his word

because he was lying in that chaotic document dump. On Slowbodon Prolac's website, I found tuta's request for the issuance of those arrest warrants, and I found the arrest warrants themselves, and they were both signed by TUTA. I clicked through, I don't know, maybe a hundred documents that mostly meant absolutely nothing to me. I didn't really know what I was looking for or what might even be there for.

Me to find. But I did find another document bearing the signature of the commander of the Convex Battalion, and this one was dated December second, nineteen ninety three, a full two weeks before those men deserted. And it's a list of soldiers under Tuta's command. And it appears to have been written on a typewriter, and next to the name of each soldier who had been paid for their service in the month of November, he had drawn a

check mark in pencil. And there twenty four pages into this list of names are Alexander Nydeline, Stephen Rays, and Thomas Kunst. Nydeline and Coonst both have a check mark next to their name, indicating that they'd been paid for the month of November. Nydeline has over the years taken issue with journalists who characterize him as a mercenary, often arguing that he never actually got paid, so he can't

be called a mercenary. So this document at least offers some possible rebuttal to that next to Stephen Ray's name, though there isn't a check mark. Instead, there's a little symbol that looks like it might be the letter D. I think the soldiers who have died are the ones with a little cross next to their name, and soldiers who are in the hospital either have a B or

the word bolnika, which means hospital written out. And I couldn't find any commonly used word for something like dead, deceased, killed, deserted, quit, captured, any words like that. I couldn't find any that would start with D in Croatian. But there are some words and phrases related to the concept of author leave or a permitted absence that do start with D in Croatian. I'm just spitballing here. I have no idea what it

could mean. I don't know anything about running a mercenary unit to do war crimes, and I don't speak Croatian. I'm just guessing. But regardless of what these mysterious little symbols mean, here's their commanding officer's signature on a document listing their names two weeks before. He says they had only just shown up in the last couple of days. The obvious next question, then, is why would he lie about how long they'd been with the unit. The short answer,

obviously is, I don't know. I don't think anybody knows. But if I had to guess, I would say he covering his ass. The convict's battalion was becoming increasingly unpopular by late nineteen ninety three. It was again exactly what it sounds like. It was made up of people who had been in prison for violent crimes, as well as foreign mercenaries who had volunteered to commit violent crimes, and

they were out of control. A letter sent to a Croatian general, signed by another officer that same month, December of nineteen ninety three, complained about Tuta's convicts running a muck. They weren't just committing war crimes, but they were killing and raping military and police personnel on their own side,

and their commanding officer was protecting them. So I can only assume that he was trying to distance himself from another embarrassing act of misconduct by this ragtag group of foreign murderers when these three Germans deserted the unit with a bunch of stolen guns and bombs. Other sources I found writing about the actions of mercenaries in the Bosnian War single out the German mercenaries in particular for their brutality.

Rob Kraut, a frequent contributor to soldier of Fortune magazine wrote in his book Save the Last Bullet for Yourself that the Germans he served with during the Bosnian War had a terrible habit of cutting the ears off the people they killed and keeping them as trophies. Austrian journalist Christoph Santner co wrote egay yetst Ramboshpielen, which translates to

I'm going to play Rambo now with former mercenary. Wolfgang Nighter writer and Nighter writer recounts seeing a German mercenary hand a live grenade to a seven year old Muslim boy in the Bosnian city of Mostar as a joke of some sort. The mercenary told the boy it was a toy, and the child was blown to pieces moments later. There was no shortitch of violence in the Balkans in

the early nineties. There's plenty of blame to go around, so it seems all the more remarkable that even in this context, other actual war criminals, people sentenced to life in prison at the Hague, people who were guns for hire, they were looking at these German mercenaries and saying that's a little bit too much. Now. I hesitate to build

a theory on the sand of speculation. But if that little D next to Stephen Rays's name does happen to mean that he was on leave in November, that does line up with some other sort of hazy details about this time period, because again we know that there was an international effort to recruit mercenaries to travel to South Africa.

The two men from the beginning of this episode, Fox Samang and Ralph Morajz were recruited by Ronald Douster personally when he traveled to Bosnia in early nineteen ninety four, and by all accounts, Nideline Rays and coonst were recruited by Horsed Klens. But how because remember Horsed Glens had been in South Africa for years at this point. He escaped from custody in Namibia nineteen eighty nine and he

fled back to South Africa. He was arrested again in the summer of nineteen ninety in connection with the Ordo Boro folk bombings, and he didn't end up getting charged with anything, but he spent a while in jail while South African courts tried to figure out if they needed to extradite him to Namibia. He was eventually probably in late nineteen ninety two, released on bond depending a final

decision in the extradition matter, and then he disappeared. It is possible, I guess that Glen's could have gone to Bosnia at some point in nineteen ninety three, but I don't think so, because there's a much more likely explanation.

late October nineteen ninety three. Stephen Rays was thrown out of the hotel after some kind of loud argument and just Stephen Rays. According to researchers from Germany's anti fascist Infoblot, Klen's was also spotted in Hamburg in October of nineteen ninety three.

get to England. What we do know for certain is that all three of those mercenaries left Bosnia on December sixteenth, nineteen ninety three, and on December thirtieth, they robbed a post office in the German city of Lubec, making off with around eighty five hundred Deutsche marks. I don't entirely know how to sort out how much money that is.

In nineteen ninety three, one US dollar was equal to about one point six Deutsche marks, so that would make it a little over five thousand dollars, But those are nineteen ninety three dollars, So I guess you could best understand the actual value of this money is around ten

thousand US dollars today. Don't email me about math. And with cash in hand, they traveled from Germany to Ramsgate, that little seaside town in England, where members of the League of Saint George drove them to the airport, and just like the mercenaries that would follow them two months later, they were given a name Monica Huggit would pick them up from the airport when they got to South Africa.

They arrived on tourist visas in January of nineteen ninety four, and Monica was there as promised to pick them up. She sorted other paperwork and work permits and their mercenary assignments, passing them off to Horst Cleans. They were assigned as armed guards at Radio Pretoria, an illegal radio station that broadcast African nationalist propaganda, and they participated in military drills

led by Willem Ratta, a former Rhodesian military officer. Everything seemed to be going according to plan until March fourteenth, nineteen ninety four. By the time the next round of mercenaries arrived a few days later, there was no one there at the airport to greet them. Thomas Konst was dead, and Alexander Nydelin, Horst Cleans, Stephen Rays, and Monica Huggett had all been arrested. I really do hate to leave you hanging again. I promise I'm not dragging this story

out on purpose to torment you. I was a little preoccupied this past week, and I'll be entirely otherwise occupied during the week you're hearing this. If you're listening to this on the day it comes out, I am almost certainly sitting in court right now. In October of last year, I did a couple of episodes about Virginia's burning objects law. There was a pair of episodes on Barry Black, the Pennsylvania clansman who challenged Virginia's cross burning statute and eventually

won his case at the Supreme Court. And there was a third episode about a man who broke the law Virginia wrote to replace that original crossburning ban. In that episode, I talked a bit about the Nazi torch march that took place here in my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia on August eleventh, twenty seventeen. The episode was about Tyler Diykes, but he was just one of about a dozen men who've been charged with burning an object with the intent

to intimidate. That's the law that replaced the old crossburning statute. Well, this week, another one of those men is taking his case to trial. So I lost a little bit of time this week reviewing the facts so I can be prepared to sit through the trial. And I'm going to lose the entire next week sitting on a wooden bench taking notes by hand. I would love to promise you the final chapter of Monica Hugget's story is going to come next week, but if I'm being realistic, it'll be

something else. I've been planning to do, sort of a Q and A episode, so it might be that you can submit questions for that on the Weird Little Guy's subreddit. Just please don't send them to meet anywhere else, Like on any other social media platform, I'll just lose them.

So if you have a question, please post it to the subreddit, or if you absolutely for some reason cannot do that, you can email it to me, but nowhere else please, And depending on how things go during the trial, I might have a minisode about the defendant Basilio's pistols. If you're curious about Pistolis, I'll include a link in the show notes to the pro publica article about his discharge from the Marines after he was revealed to be

a member of Adam Laffin. So thank you for bearing with me as I tell the story of Monica Stone in these Strange Little Bunks. I've really been enjoying how much digging this one has demanded of me. I just need a little more time to read some very weird racist prophecies before I'm ready to write the last chapter. Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me Molly Conger.

Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I almost certainly will not answer it. It's nothing personal. I don't answer any

of my emails. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit, just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird Blue Guys