The Klansman's Twin: Dennis Mahon, Pt. 3

that looks like for you. I had every intention of using that week of relative downtime to get caught up, maybe even get ahead. It probably won't surprise you to hear that absolutely did not happen. Something about the twinkle of Christmas lights pulled me away from my maniacal sprawling

notes about Oklahoma City bombing conspiracy theories. I can't explain it, And as I was chipping away at the next chapter of Dennis Mayhon's life, I realized there was a strange little side story that I was going to have to cut. It just didn't fit in the narrative flow, and it wasn't one hundred percent relevant to the story arc I was plotting out, so I was prepared to scrap it. It certainly wouldn't be the first time, and I know

it won't be the last. I love a little side story, but I'm starting to get the feel for the kinds of side stories that will take us off course for an interesting few minutes and the ones that are going to derail the whole episode. And this was the latter. But then I remembered this is my show. I'm the captain of this ship, and for me, getting to the point has never been the point. We're on a journey here, and I never really know where I'm taking making us

until I get there. We'll get back to Dennis Mahon in Eloheim City and the bomb he mailed to a public library in Arizona for the next episode, I promise. But this week we're going on a side quest because I just couldn't bear to cut the story of one of my favorite kinds of things to find in a weird little guy's past, a lawsuit about anti white discrimination.

So if you'll indulge me, here's the story of our convicted bomber's twin brother getting fired because he wouldn't stop wearing the Nazi T shirt he bought it a gun show. I'm Molly Conker and this is weird, Little guys. The last few episodes have been about Dennis May. We've talked about the first few decades of his life. He was born in a small community in northern Illinois nineteen fifty. He served in the army after high school and trained

as an aircraft mechanic. In the late seventies, he joined the Ku Klux Klan and then the neo Nazi group National Alliance. In interviews with journalists over the years, he's often claimed his belief in the importance of racial separatism arose from his experience in the Florida National Guard, when his unit was deployed in May of nineteen eighty to assist in transporting Cuban refugees during the Mariial boat lift crisis.

I don't doubt that he was there, or that having to interact with asylum seekers deepened his hatred of people who aren't white, but the record does seem to indicate that he'd already joined the clan before the first boat arrived in Miami that month. From there, Dennis disappeared for a few years. It claims to have been underground carrying out clan bombings in Florida, Michigan, and Oklahoma, targeting synagogues,

government office buildings, and abortion clinics. He re emerged in Kansas City in nineteen eighty seven and as a regional organizer for the clan. I won't retread the entirety of those last two episodes, but we've been following Dennis all over the country the world, even from Kansas City to Canada, from Tulsa to Berlin. He won a lawsuit over his right to broadcast to race his public access TV show. He lost a lawsuit to Fred Rogers, he got banned

from Canada. He tried to revive the clan in Germany, and he absolutely loved talking to reporters. As far as mid level hate group organizers go, he's a little unusual in that respect. So there's ample record of where he was, what he was up to, who his friends were, and the narrative about himself that he wanted you to believe. But all this time we've been talking about Dennis Mayhan, and there's been someone else in the story that we haven't talked much about. He's been there. He's always there,

but he's much quieter. He keeps his name out of things. But Dennis Mayhan's identical twin brother, Daniel Mayhan, was there all along. As I mentioned in the last episode, Daniel Mayhon has never been convicted of a crime. He was indicted alongside his brother in two thousand and nine saga will cover next week, but unlike his brother, who is serving a forty year sentence in terre hate, Daniel wasn't convicted.

And if you ask Daniel, he'd tell you that he was never a member of any of those groups his brother was mixed up in. I mean I didn't ask him. I guess I could have tried to reach him for comment, but I think he'd tell me the same thing. He told an attorney for American Airlines during a deposition in two thousand and three that he was never what he called a card carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan

or White Arian Resistance or National Alliance. So, just for the record here at the top, I'll make no allegations that haven't been made in sworn statements by agents of the FBI or the ATF. Daniel Mahon isn't guilty of any crimes. A matching set of genes doesn't necessarily mean you carry a matching set of beliefs. But I read a few hundred pages of his own sworn testimony that left me with the impression that these identical twins share

a little bit more than their DNA. With Denis occupying the spotlight, the record on Daniel is actually pretty sparse. A lot of what I can say about him with any degree of certainty came out of his own mouth in this deposition he sat for on October twenty ninth, two thousand and three. He was three years into a lawsuit against his former employer, American Airlines over his termination

in May of nineteen ninety nine. For nine hours, he answered questions about his involvement in the company's Caucasian employee resource group. But even a side story has to start before the beginning. So before we get to the strange revelations in that conference room in Tulsa, I want to set the scene a little bit with some history about

the concept of employee resource groups. If you've ever worked for almost any big corporation these days, you've probably seen a flyer in the break room for something like this, they might be called employee resource groups ergs, employee affinity groups, business network groups, or some other mishmash of corporate buzzwords about mentorship and networking. Ergs are, according to a continuing education module for corporate lawyers that I found, quote, organize

based on social identity, shared characteristics, or life experience. Affinity groups are generally initiated by employees and often involve or implicate protected classes such as sex, gender, sexual orientation, race, national origin, disability, and veteran status. Today's employee resource groups have expanded to include other kinds of shared interests, but at their core, they allow employees who belong to a particular group to network, support and mentor one another, and

advocate for themselves within the company. The gules at McKinsey say that they can be a valuable tool to recruit and retain a diverse workforce by fostering a sense of inclusion, and they can provide a ready pool of diverse spaces to send to panels and recruitment events. I found one press release praising the efforts of the Hispanic Employee Resource Group at JP morgan Chase. The group's mentorship program led to a measurable increase in Hispanic women in management positions.

And for the most part, these groups sound like something cooked up by an HR department to put in a shareholder meeting slide show. But there's a history here. The idea of people who share a particular life experience getting together to talk about it is obviously not new. That's not something anyone came up with. You don't have to invent that. But the employee resource group as it exists in corporate America today originated with the National Black Employee

Caucus at Xerox in nineteen seventy. All of the human resources blurbs and business press puff pieces about employee resource groups kind of just leave the story there they started at Xerox nineteen teen seventy. But there's always more to a story than that, And apparently Xerox was up to some pretty radical diversity, equity and inclusion corporate practice decades

before anyone ever said that phrase out loud. In nineteen sixty six, the first student at Xerox's International Fellowship program was a Fulbright scholar from Ethiopia who happened to be the younger brother of a member of highly Selassie's Cabinet. In nineteen sixty eight, the company spent a million dollars

to sponsor a television series called of Black America. The seven part documentary on black history from slavery through the still ongoing riots that followed the assassination of doctor Martin Luther King Junior, aired in prime time, and it earned Xerox threatening letters from the ku Klux Klan and hysterical letters to the editor in papers across the country from small business owners swearing they're going to throw out their

copy machines. An op ed in The London Evening Standard described the program as quote unmistakably hostile to the establishment. That same year, nineteen sixty eight, Xerox partnered with a Rochester based civil rights group called FIGHT, which stands for Freedom, Integration, God,

Honor Today. The New York Times called Fight quote a militant Negro organization and made a pointed note that professional radical Saul Alinsky had had a hand in it, and that the press conference announcing this new venture was held in a room decorated with posters of h Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, and Shay Guevara. But Xerox's partnership with Fight created the first black run community development corporation in the

United States. Xerox spent millions on manufacturing equipment and job training in the creation of these black owned manufacturing companies that employed hundreds of black employees in Rochester. A manager at Xerox who'd worked on the plan said, my only

question is why didn't we do it sooner? The first manufacturing plant funded by Xerox through the Fight Partnership opened at what used to be a boarded up factory, just a few blocks away from the center of the violence that had inspired Xerox president Joseph Wilson to pour millions of dollars into diversifying his workforce the nineteen sixty four Rochester riots. I know we're a little far afield here. Daniel Mahon was fourteen years old and living in Davis Junction, Illinois,

in the summer of nineteen sixty four. But sometimes the way history repeats and rhymes and echoes is just irresistible to me. Because there is another race riot later in this story, and it seems irresponsible not to draw the lines that connect these things. On Friday, July twenty fourth, nineteen sixty four, in Rochester, New York, the Northeast Mothers Association had a permit to hold a block party in Rochester Seventh Ward. They were raising money to build a

playground in the neighborhood. Around two hundred people attended the event in the early evening, but as the night wore on and the children went to bed, the streets were still full of people having a good time. On a hot summer night, around eleven p m. Two Rochester police officers confronted a man they said was behaving in an unruly manner. They moved to arrest twenty year old Randy Manigal. Bystanders saw the officers using excessive force on a young

black man, and some of them tried to intervene. Within half an hour, the Rochester Police Department had set dogs on the neighbors, something they'd promised they wouldn't do again after prior incidents involving police dogs mauling black residents. By one a m. The fire hoses were out, the crowd had swelled to hundreds, and officers were firing tear gas canisters indiscriminately. When the sun Rose State Police arrived to

a crowd that had grown to the thousands. The violence continued for a full forty eight hours, but by the time one thousand National guardsmen arrived on Sunday, it was over. The county Civil Defense director Robert Abbot was surveying the scene from a helicopter hours after the riot ended, when the pilot lost control of the aircraft and crashed into a house on Clarissa Street. Two occupants of the home were burned to death. Both the pilot and Robert Abbot

died of their injuries. A later report on the crash says that alcohol played a role, and no reporting I could find from the time period named the two black men who burned to death inside their own home. By the time the dust settled, five people were dead, hundreds had been injured, and nearly one thousand people had been arrested. Initial reporting, as ever, blamed the unrest on outside agitators.

Later analysis of those arrests, however, would show that only fourteen of the people arrested lived outside of Monroe County. In the aftermath of the riot, Joseph Wilson asked a manager at Xerox how many black employees he had. The answer was six. Determined to change that, he approached local civil rights leader Reverend Franklin Florence to work out a plan. One of the barriers the company had to hiring more

black employees was a systemic one. An unemployed black man in nineteen sixty five was less likely than his white counterpart to have a high school diploma. The program they developed was called Operation Step Up. Black men in ages eighteen to twenty five without high school diplomas would work half a day on the factory floor and spend half a day in a classroom with teachers hired by Xerox

to prepare them for a high school equivalency test. By nineteen sixty six, Xerox was bringing classes of twenty five men at a time through the program. After finishing their high school courses, the men became full time union factory employees. Wilson worked closely with Reverend Florence to bridge cultural gaps.

Assembly line foremen received additional training on race relations, clergy were hired to assist in classroom management and guidance, and hundreds of young men got high school diplomas and good union jobs. When I first read that Wilson started the Black Employee Resource Group in nineteen seventy in response to those riots in nineteen sixty four. I didn't understand why there were six years in between the inciting incident and the actual formation of the group, But this is why

there weren't any black employees in nineteen sixty four. He spent that time investing in the community and building a more diverse workforce. Today's HR guidance talks about how ergs can attract a diverse workforce, but the very first one only existed at all because work was done to address the systemic problems facing those employees. The formation of the National Black Employee Caucus in nineteen seventy is the only part of this work that seems to get remembered in

human resources industry newsletters about workplace diversity. I'm not sure why Corporate America isn't interested in celebrating his financial support of black radicals. But that's the story of how we got employee resource groups, which brings us back to Daniel Mayhuntsman's brother making flyers for a Caucasian Employee Resource Group

at the American Airlines Diversity Fair nineteen ninety nine. Daniel Mahon did not start the Caucasian Employee Resource Group, but the American Airlines Maintenance and Engineering facility in Tulsa, Oklahoma. By his account, he wasn't even interested in being a member and didn't attend a meeting of the group at all in its first few months, and the fact of

the group's existence wasn't even the issue here. Nowhere in the procedural history of the lawsuit that follows does anyone even say that there should not have been an affinity group for white people. In fact, the Diversity Advisory Council said that they were quote saddened by the need to suspend the group for six months over Daniel's actions, and they called the group a valuable member of the Diversity

Advisory Council family. There was inexplicably no problem at all with the Caucasian Employee Resource Group until Daniel Mayhon showed up in a Turner Diaries T shirt at a meeting to discuss the racist pamphlets he made for the diversity fair. Everyone agrees that Daniel Mayhon wasn't fired just because he was a member of the white employee group, but Daniel went to court claiming that he was fired just for

being white. On March eleventh, nineteen ninety nine, there was a diversity fair at the American Airlines maintenance and engineering base in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The company had, as a part of their corporate diversity program, encouraged the formation of a

variety of employee recas groups. There was an African American ERG, an Asian Culture Association, one for women in aviation, a Jewish ERG and Employees with Disabilities ERG, a Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender ERG, Christian, Muslim, Latin, Indian, Native American one for employees over forty one for people interested in improving their work life balance, and of course there was

the Caucasian Employee Resource Group. There may have been others later on, but these are the ones that were listed in a company pamphlet about the program that was written in nineteen ninety nine, and just as an aside, I was kind of struck by the inclusion of the T in the LGBT group in nineteen ninety nine. You forget sometimes that it wasn't always the lightning rod that it is today. I guess for a long time, everybody just

hated all queer people the same. It's hard to feel like it's progress to get assimilation for some at the cost of heightened demonization of part of our community. But nevertheless, shout out to the trans Aircraft Mechanics in Oklahoma in nineteen ninety nine. I know you were going through it. The Diversity Fair was an opportunity for every Employee Resource group to set up a booth and talk to their fellow employees about the group and hand out flyers and network.

It's a nice idea. You don't have to be a member of a particular group to show an interest in the work being done by their ERG, and this kind of thing might provide an employee with a chance to find out about something like the Disability erg's advocacy around company policies that impact disabled customers. To be honest, I imagine you probably didn't have to clock out to take an hour to walk around the Diversity Fair. So even if you got nothing out of it, maybe you wasted

a little time at work. You know, everybody wins, but it's always ruined the fun. Dando Mahon wasn't there that day, but the pamphlets he made were Other members of the Caucasian Employee Resource Group handed out a flyer celebrating aviation pioneers. It's pretty amateur stuff. This was before people really had access to computers. Computers existed. Obviously, the nineties weren't the stone ages. I personally was spending hours coloring in shapes

on kid picks. But we were pretty lucky to have a computer at home in the nineties, So this wasn't photoshop, right. He cut out pictures of famous aviators and glued them to a piece of paper, and then he ran that sheet through a manual typewriter to type the captions onto it, and then he took the resulting Frankenflyer to a Kinko's and ran copies. So it's not a high quality product even before we get to the racism, and it's got

some of the historical aviators you're probably imagining. A picture of Amelia Earhart is captioned pioneer woman aviator Wilbur Wright gets first powered flight. Chuck Yeger is captioned first to break the sound barrier. Nothing weird here. Charles Lindbergh was a Nazi sympathizer and a virulent anti Semite, and Verner von Braun was literally a Nazi. But yeah, I guess technically personal lives aside to the extent that being a member of the SS is your personal life. They do

fit the bill here as pioneers in aviation. The problem with the flyers becomes apparent when you get to the back, because underneath a cut and pasted picture of a cartoon airplane, it says, these famous men and women who made aviation history all have one thing in common. They are members of the white race, race of explorers, discoverers, scientists, and philosophers. We are proud of the accomplishments of our noble race in the past, present, and future. Several of these heroes

of aviation have their names misspelled. He's missing the H and Varner von Braun, and I swear it looks like he spelled Braun with a W instead of a U. But to be fair, that could be a photocopyr artifact. World War One fighter pilot Edward Rickenbacker is missing the last two letters of his last name. Italian aviator Francesco brack Papa is captioned as Francisco, and Francisco isn't even spelled right. And in the little racist blurb on the back,

the word philosopher doesn't have an L in it. I'm not just pointing this out to clown on a working class man who can't spell it's okay if you can't spell, that doesn't make you a bad person, because in the interest of fairness, I do want to say that the flyer is full of typographical errors, because he would later claim to have made another typo. He capitalized the first letters in the words white race, where they appear in the middle of a sentence with otherwise standard capitalization, and

this is a standard practice in white supremacist literature. During the investigation, he maintained that it had no particular meaning. He was just a bad typist. So, yes, he did spell a lot of these words wrong, but that's a combination of this admittedly poor typing and probably just plain not knowing. But there aren't any other errors in capitalization, so all things considered, this looks like a style choice, not a mistake. Within hours of the pamphlets being distributed

at the Diversity fair, there were complaints. Two weeks later, the Diversity Advisory Council that oversaw the resource groups made the decision to suspend the Caucasian Employee Resource Group for a period of six months. No one was really in trouble. None of the employees involved with the group were being disciplined.

The group wasn't even being banned. They just needed to take a few months off to reassess their alignment with the company's policies governing such groups, including requirements that all employee resource groups support the company's policy on non discrimination and a harassment free workplace, promoting tolerance and respect for other employees, and not having any financial or organizational ties to outside groups. And Daniel's flyer seems to violate all

of these rules. In the earliest meetings that management had about these flyers, it was clear that everyone knew who Daniel's brother was. To place us back in Dennis's timeline, it's nineteen ninety nine. Dennis Mayon was a well known white supremacist, neo Nazi, and Ku klux Klan organizer. You didn't have to be in the know about clandestine organizations to know that it wasn't a secret. He ran for mayor of Tulsa in nineteen ninety two and again in

nineteen ninety eight. In the mid nineties, he paid to have a billboard put up in Tulsa honoring Robert Matthews, the leader of the Nazi bank robbery gang that murdered Alan Berg. The Nazi skinhead gang that he cultivated for white Arian resistance shot a little girl in the face

in Tulsa. In the late eighties, he was banned from entering Canada, the UK, and Germany, And by this point in the late nineties, Dennis was at the center of a number of conspiracy theories about the Oklahoma City bombing in nineteen ninety five, and he had just been quite publicly called before a grand jury on the matter in nineteen ninety eight, just a few months before all of

this is happening. This isn't niche stuff. One hundred and seventy people, including an entire daycare center, were murdered an hour and a half away from where this workplace meeting is happening, and a lot of people thought that Dennis helped make that bomb. Plenty of people were very aware that Dennis Mayhon was fond of telling reporters that he thought Timothy McVay was a very courageous man with tremendous drive and quote, if we had one hundred men like

him in this country, we'd probably change things around. So when the Diversity Advisory Council met to discuss the flyers two weeks after the Diversity Fair, they knew. They knew who Daniel's twin brother was. The minutes from that meeting.

Don't mention either mayhon brother by name, but they save The flyer was developed by individuals believed to have an affiliation with local extremist groups, and they even seemed to indicate a familiarity with some of the particulars of Dennis's publications, noting that quote, some of the comments on the flyer were similar to the rhetoric used by those groups in a racist nature. You know, I have to hand it

to them. It's very clear that they knew what they were looking at, and they understood the importance of nipping it in the bud. And it could have ended there. Nobody was in trouble. A line had been crossed. The company made it clear where that line was, and everybody was just going to take a beat to reflect on the experience. But if there's one thing so many of these weird little guys have in common, it's that they absolutely do not know when to shut the fuck up.

The company made the decision at the end of March nineteen ninety nine to suspend the Caucasian Employee Resource Group just for six months, but it wasn't until the April twentieth, nineteen ninety nine meeting of the Caucasian ERG that some members of management met with the group to explain this decision. Daniel Mahon arrived at the meeting wearing a T shirt printed with the picture of the cover of a book. The cover depicts a man pointing a rifle and a

woman pointing a handgun. You can't see what they're aiming at, but they both clearly have something in their sights above their heads. The text reads The Turner Diaries. This book comes up too often on this show. I never know how thoroughly to rechhread this ground. But this could be your first episode, and how confused must you be? Right now? We're kind of in the middle of a longer story here, But The Turner Diaries is a novel written by the

founder of the neo Nazi group National Alliance. After a few years coming out in a serialized format and a Nazi Now newsletter, it was published as a book in nineteen seventy eight and sold through the mail and ads in Nazi newsletters and at gun shows and cross burnings. The violence in the novel is fictional, of course, but It's been the inspiration for many murderers and domestic terrorists.

When Robert Matthews formed the Order of the Nazi terrorist group whose bank robberies financed paramilitary compounds, he borrowed the name from the book. When Timothy McVeigh was arrested after the Oklahoma City bombing, he had the pages of his favorite passages sitting on the seat in the car next

to him. When John William King chained James Byrd Junior to the back of his truck moments before dragging him to death in Texas in nineteen ninety eight, he joked to his accomplices that we're starting the Turner Diaries early because that's what happens in the Turner Diaries. The day of the rope nationwide mass lynching of black people, Jewish people, journalists, race traders. It's not a good book. It's not well written.

One online review of the book complains that despite all the violence in this novel, there is much tedium meant little conflict, But literary abomination or not, the book has inspired murders all over the world for decades. And that's the shirt that Daniel wore to the meeting about his white pride pamphlets and that was the line. Apparently there were more complaints. The initial decision to just suspend the

group's activities obviously wasn't going to cut it. An investigation was opened into the complaints about Daniel's workplace conduct, and on May tenth, nineteen ninety nine, he was fired. The termination letter says, in addition to other findings in the investigation, wearing that shirt to the meeting created a racially hostile work environment as a member of the Transport Workers Union. He filed a grievance protesting the decision, and it was

ultimately appealed to the Board of Adjustment. In November of nineteen ninety nine, a full hearing was conducted, lasting three days. Daniel Mahon has always claimed that he had no involvement in his brother's activities. At the hearing, the company produced as evidence a clan newsletter naming Daniel m of Tulsa as White Patriot of the Month, quote for his tremendous efforts in financial support of the struggle, and thanking him for his help setting up the cross at a cross

burning event. He also provided the tent, the sound system, and the portable generator. The newsletter goes on to describe his large collection of Clan and National Socialist white power merchandise and praise him for supplying many white power groups with T shirts over the years. He would ultimately admit that yes, he is Daniel M of Tulsa, but he really downplayed the praise that's being heaped upon him here. He was just helping his brother out. He wasn't at

the cross burning. He just gave his brother a ride there. The company called an expert witness to present evidence of the Mayhun Brothers white supremacist activities, including that clan newsletter naming Daniel White Patriot of the Month. The expert also explained the significance of the language and the capitalization used

in the flyer. The board's opinion doesn't name this expert witness, but I'm willing to risk five dollars betting that it was Daniel Levatas if I'd managed my time better this week, I would have written and asked him. But that's my guess.

Over the course of three days, witness after witness was called, and the official reason for the termination had been the incident with the Turner Diary's T shirt, but it came out in this hearing that this was far from the first time Daniel Mayhon's white supremacist ties had caused friction at work. His supervisor testified that on Daniel's very first day at American Airlines back in nineteen eighty six, he'd

been complaining loudly about Jews and n words. Two other supervisors testified about two separate incidents where they'd warned him not to bring clan or white Airan resistance materials to work. There had been another complaint about him wearing a KKK hat and belt buckle. Multiple employees had complained about a KKK knife. A supervisor who worked nights as a security guard had been assigned a shift to a local gun show where he saw Daniel Mahon selling merchandise at the

Aryan Nations booth. The supervisor testified that Daniel called him over and tried to give him an Arian Nation's T shirt, but he declined. The same supervisor testified that Daniel had invited him over to his house one night and showed him a racially violent movie and tried to give him white supremacist texts. A Walgreens cashier testified that some time

after Daniel's termination. The brothers came into the drug store to drop off some film to be developed, and a visibly intoxicated Dennis Mayhon was shouting about how if American Airlines didn't give his brother his job back, they were going to see the biggest bomb they ever had. The expert offered evidence that Daniel's grievance with the company was a subject of significant discussion and fundraising in white supremacist newsletters and broadcasts, which undermines his claim that he had

no connection to those groups. Daniel Mayhon's union representative advised him not to test on his own behalf, but they did put on several witnesses who testified that he was a model employee, that he had been kind to them, or that they personally had not been offended by the flyers. Linda Dill and Craig Nichols, the employees who actually led the Caucasian Employee Resource Group, testified that it was not true that Daniel had explicitly told the group that his

brother would help him make the flyers. The board was unconvinced, writing in their final opinion in March of two thousand, clearly he holds white supremacist beliefs and has ties to and involvement in such organizations. The opinion is clear that he can't be and isn't being disciplined for his brother's conduct or even for his own conduct outside of work. But this background reflects unfavorably on the underlying intent of the flyers and the decision to wear the Turner diary

shirt to work. Their summary of the evidence concludes by saying, the fact that he was technically proficient and nice to some people doesn't outweigh all the other evidence, nor is it directly related to the specific nature of his conduct in this case. The decision to uphold the termination was two to one. Arbitrator Gil Vernon, an American Airlines employee,

Mary Tinsman, agreed with J. C. Brown dissenting. I struggled to pin down who j. C. Brown might have been, but Gil Vernon is kind of a big deal in the world of union arbitration anyway. In nineteen ninety six, President Clinton appointed him to a commission to help resolve a National Railroad labor dispute. President Obama appointed him to a similar body in twenty eleven. He's an arbitrator for Major League Baseball. He was the president of the National

Academy of Arbitrators in twenty ten. And he has also bond Vere's dad. Well, his son is justin Vernon, the frontman of the indie folk band. So next time you hear a Bonnie Vere song, I guess you can think about the time his dad wrote this about a racist. His message was subtle, but in clearly resonant tones, rang

true only to the sad song of racial superiority. Clever equivocation and veiled threats are part and parcel of the grievance ilk and he can't hide behind cleverness at the expense of the security, dignity, and respect of other workers who do not share his race or ethnicity, or his attitudes about racial nobility. Much is debated in this record, However, in the final analysis, something must be said, in plain and simple terms.

area bankruptcy attorney named Francis Eugene Huff. Daniel describes him as a conservative type person and a real nice guy, and they'd been friends for about nine years by the time he was deposed in two thousand and three. He doesn't offer up any other facts about Gene, like that he was a member of the Council of Conservative Citizens, or the fact that he may have been too busy to take Daniel's case back then because he was in the middle of representing the Council of Conservative Citizens in

their lawsuits regarding Confederate flags on public property. The questioning about Huff leave me with the impression that the lawyer asking the questions did not believe Daniel when he said that Gene Huff never helped him with his case. Sometime in the summer of two thousand so, after the arbitrator upheld his termination and before he filed his federal lawsuit, Daniel Mayhon sent a letter to the ACLU asking them

to take his case. The letter doesn't read like it was written by Daniel Mayhon, and I don't just mean

diction and spelling, Although those may be dead giveaways. The real tip off is a handwritten note in the margin of the letter that says, Gene, should you print Daniel Mayhon in place of I. So what it sounds like is that Jane wrote the letter pretending to be Daniel, and when Daniel read it, he didn't understand that, and so he was asking why the letter was written in the first person, as though he had written it himself, And for some reason he mailed the letter to the

ACLU like that. He didn't get another copy of it without that strange note in the margin. The letter is also written in cursive that doesn't match the style of cursive in Daniel's signature, and then towards the end of the letter it abruptly switches to print that does more closely match his handwriting. Under oath, he says he wrote

it himself and that Gene didn't help him. The letter itself isn't reproduced in the court record that I could find, but it appears to have been riddled with false claims. The local ACLU was already very familiar with Daniel Mayhon's

brother Dennis. They'd represented him a decade earlier in his lawsuit against Kansas City over the Klan's public access TV show, and it sounds like Daniel was doing his best to try to convince the ACLU that his firing had been a grave injustice, because not only was he nothing like his brother, but his brother wasn't even really so bad.

He would later claim that Dennis only got deported from Canada nineteen ninety three because he was carrying a book by an English author that was illegal in Canada, which is almost certainly a reference to Holocaust denied David Irving, who had himself been banned from Canada in nineteen ninety two. Daniel neglects to mention that the Canadian government was concerned that Dennis would incite violence at a Nazi rally during his visit. The violence at that Nazi rally happened anyway,

but Dennis wasn't there. As for Dennis's trip to Germany, his brother says Dennis didn't even do any Nazi stuff there. He just went to an old church to lay some flowers. But it seems like the ACLU wasn't interested in going to bat for another Mahon because they didn't take the case. The lawyer he ended up hiring to represent him was a man named Robert Eugene Fraser the third, and Fraser was young. He'd only just passed the bar in nineteen ninety nine, the year before he met Daniel in the

summer of two thousand. Daniel says they met when Fraser answered a classified ad in the newspaper about a boat he was selling. Fraser came to look at the boat. The men got to talking. Daniel found out he was a lawyer, and he agreed to take the case. Daniel would claim in that deposition that Dennis had left the clan for good in nineteen ninety because Daniel gave him an ultimatum. Hey said he didn't want that stuff going on in his house, which is where his brother lived.

He outright says that he's actually responsible for getting his brother out of hate group organizing. But when he's pressed on this, he can't explain, why then, does his brother still live with him now ten years later, and that kind of stuff was very much still going on in his house. The brothers both got their mail of the same po box, the one Dennis used for his white power newsletters. The phone line at the house they shared was the same one Dennis used to run his dial

a racist hot line. In this deposition in two thousand three, Daniel claims Dennis hasn't been involved with White Arian Resistance since nineteen ninety five, and then he hasn't really been involved in anything in years. That's just not true. He should have been charged with perjury for that, because just a few weeks before he sat down to answer these questions,

his twin brother was in the news in Arizona. Residents of Mesa had received a flurry of racist flyers, and Dennis has quoted in the paper about it, and the Arizona Republic describes him as the state wide director of White Arian Resistance. In two thousand and one, when Dennis announced that he was moving to Arizona, Governor Jane Hull asked residents to wear a green ribbon to show their

opposition to Dennis, like to Dennis personally. The newspaper quite literally says quote Governor Jane Hull wants Arizonans to wear a green ribbon to show unity against Dennis Mayhon, leader of the White Arian Resistance supremacist group. The headline is go away, mister Mayhon, you can't look a court reporter in her eyes and say, your brother hasn't been involved in racist stuff for years when the actual governor of a whole state is denouncing him by name like that.

The deposition transcript is a perplexing document. Like I said, it's the most information I have about Daniel, straight from his own mouth under oath, but it's riddled with statements I know aren't true, either because I have a better source that contradicts him, or because it simply can't be true due to reality. Now I won't say he's lying, because I just did before, but lying under oath is called perjury, and it's a crime when he hasn't been

convicted of a crime. But not everything he said was true, and that's a fact I now. Some of it is just dates. He says he married his wife, Myrna, in nineteen seventy nine, but the marriage licenses nineteen seventy eight. Okay, a lot of men don't know their anniversary. But he also consistently refers to Myrna as his wife in the present tense. But by two thousand and three they'd been

divorced for nineteen years. They split in nineteen eighty four, and she had since remarried At least twice, and several times during the proceeding he brings up Mirna's race. They met when he was in the Navy and he was stationed in the Philippines, And would a man who is racist mary a Filipino woman. The answer to that is yes, obviously, of course he could. It happens all the time. There's no shortage of white supremacist men with Asian Pacific islander

or Hispanic wives. I once got an elaborate death threat from a fairly prominent neo Nazi who uses his Latina wife's name on paperwork for his small business so he can claim it's a women and minority owned business. It happens a lot, but a lot of his answers are muddled, dates that aren't possible, locations that don't match, the kinds of mistakes you could chalk up to a hazy memory. He recollects the time the Secret Service came to his house to talk to Dennis about pissing on Air Force one.

The plane was apparently parked in a Boeing hangar in Wichita, where Dennis was working at the time, and he apparently entered the plane and relieved himself on the president's chair. The deposition transcript describes this as having taken place in the spring of nineteen ninety nine. I think that may be a transcriptionist typographical error, because it has to be eighty nine. Daniel recalls that it was around two years after he and his wife separated, but that's not quite

right either. They separated in eighty four, and the president in question was George Bush. We've had two president Bushes, and Daniel occasionally claims that he and Myrna at some point got back together. I don't know if that's true, but even if it is, none of these combinations of facts produced the possibility for all of these things to have been true at the same time. Based on the description of the plane being in Wichita and Dennis being employed by an airline called Braniff at the time, it

could only have been nineteen eighty nine. That's the only point in time during which Branef Airlines operated at the Wichita airport, and we had a president named Bush. Whether Dennis actually pissed on Air Force one is anybody's guests, but I don't doubt that he told people he did.

He wrote in his own clan newsletter in nineteen ninety one, that he'd urinated on a memorial to Holocaust victims when he visited a concentration camp in Germany, and other important dates in his brother's life are similarly confused in Daniel's testimony. We know. Dennis himself has said that his racial awakening

was in Florida in May of nineteen eighty. When Matthew Kennard interviewed him for his book about white supremacists in the military, he was very clear that his National Guard unit had been deployed that month to assist in transporting Cuban asylum seekers to processing and detention centers. But that wasn't the only thing going on in Miami in May

of nineteen eighty. Dennis's unit was deployed on May third, we know that, But two weeks later, the National Guard was deployed again, this time to put down the Miami riots. I think sometimes this pair of events gets muddled together. It certainly did for Daniel, But the riots had very little to do with the thousands of Cubans arriving by boat.

On May seventeenth, nineteen eighty, an all white male jury returned not guilty verdicts for all four of the Miami police officers who had beaten Arthur mc duffie to death a year earlier. McDuffie had been a United States Marine, but more importantly, in the eyes of the officers who shattered his skull, he was a thirty three year old black man. Three days of rioting followed the verdict. Eighteen people died. On the second day of the riot, the

National Guard was sent in. I honestly couldn't tell you if the units deployed to transport Cuban asylum seekers starting on May third were the same men deployed to the riots on May eighteenth. I can't find any specifics about that. I know the National Guard was transporting those people for a longer period of time than that, but I don't I don't know. Denis never mentioned the riots though when he spoke to Kennar at about that time in his life.

But Daniel is adamant that it was the Miami riots that changed his brother that month, describing him as having been right in the thick of it and that it was a pretty bloody situation. He's mistaken about the dates again. He says it was May third, and he says eighteen people died the first night, but he's so specific about it. He says that Dennis had to use his rifle on a civilian and that the police officer next to him

had a heart attack and died. A Miami Police Department after action report confirms at least some of this is based in fact. On the afternoon of the second day of the riots, so May eighteenth, Miami Police officer Lieutenant Edward McDermott was escorting National Guard troops when he suffered a massive heart attack and died. The report doesn't include

any mention of National guardsmen firing their weapons. It only outlines the occasions on which Miami police officers did, but that's because the report is by the Miami Police Department. I think any information about whether guardsmen had fired their weapons would be in a report by the National Guard. I was unable to confirm whether or not any National

guardsman shot a civilian during the riots. But ultimately I think what happened here is that Daniel thought he was telling the truth, and it was Dennis who lied to his brother, because telling people that you became racist because you killed a man in a race riot sounds more impressive than the truth, which is that he was a glorified bus driver for a week, and he hates the

sound of people speaking Spanish. But back on the subject of his own life, Daniel says he doesn't still have the Turner Diaries t shirt that he wore to that meeting because his lady friend threw it away. He says her name is Lisa, but he can't give her last name because she's married. He's told that he can say it off the record, but he does need to provide it to the court. And then he backtracks. Actually, there is no Lisa. Her name is Millie and she's not married.

But she has a boyfriend and they aren't having an affair. Actually there's no relationship. She's just a little old lady who lives next door and sometimes he helps her out with repairs. She's more like a mother to him. Now, Milly does exist. Lisa might exist too, but Milly definitely does. Because I tracked down the property records of every house on the block the Mayhon brothers were living on in nineteen ninety nine, and a woman named Mildred lived three

houses down from them. She was about twenty years their senior back then, so the like a mother comment kind of tracks but I don't think she was in his bedroom throwing away his t shirts. This isn't a misremembered date or a slip of the tongue. There's no rational explanation for saying my secret married girlfriend Lisa if there is no Lisa and you aren't having an affair, and you actually met your elderly neighbor Mildred, who was like

a mother to you. He also claimed that he'd never even read the Turner Diaries before he wore that shirt to work in nineteen ninety nine, so he couldn't have been sending any kind of message related to the content of the book because he didn't know what the book was about. And he only wore the shirt that day at all because it was the only clean shirt he

could find that morning. And he swears he had no idea when he got dressed that morning that there would be a meeting that day with management about his pamphlets, and he certainly didn't know was Hitler's birthday. I can't prove that's not true, but it feels untrue in my heart. It also struck me as odd that a man who claims to have no real knowledge of or involvement in the movement, who never even read the book and doesn't even really know what National Alliance is, consistently refers to

William Luther Pierce as doctor Pierce. Now that's technically correct. He had a pH d. He was a physicist, and I often noticed that I do the same thing. I call him doctor Pierce, and that's because most of the material I consume about him was written by his acolytes. Those are the people who call him doctor Pierce. But Daniel says he never met doctor Pierce, but his brother

did once sometime in the mid eighties. And if that's true, that means Dennis Mayhon had contact with William Luther Pearce during his underground years, the years he claims he was conducting a series of bombings. There were more than a few times during that nine hour deposition that his mask slips a little. He tries to maintain this righteous indignation at the implication that he knows anything about the world his brother lives in. You know, he loves his brother,

but they don't share the same views. He doesn't know anything about that stuff. But when the attorney says that Dennis used to be a grand wizard in the clan Daniel's quick to correct him. It's an imperial wizard, not a grand wizard. And when he's asked about the people he chose to feature on his Caucasian Aviator's pamphlet, he corrects the record and says, actually, they aren't all white, because Aileen de Troux is quote mixed Mediterranean and French.

She's not what you would call aryan or a totally white person. I tried to track down this woman's genealogy. She appears to be thoroughly Flemish, so I don't know what he's talking about here. But regardless of the possible Mediterranean blood, that is a level of race science that just isn't going to come out of the mouth of a normal person. Daniel's lawsuit bounced around the courts for five years. He was dismissed in two thousand and one, just six months after they filed it. So they appealed

to the Tenth Circuit and it was dismissed again. A later decision partially reversed the dismissal in two thousand and three, and so it was remanded back to the lower court judge, who again dismissed the case in two thousand and four, so they filed a second appeal in two thousand and four.

And so in the months between this deposition in late two thousand and three and when they filed the second appeal in two thousand and four, that's the time period during which Dennis Mayhon is building a bomb and mailing it to the diversity office in Scottsdale, Arizona. And by the time the case was finally dismissed for good in two thousand and five, the Mayhon brothers were already very close friends with the ATF informant who'd been assigned to

get them to confess to the bombing. When Daniel filed for bankruptcy in two thousand and six, his petition shows he was still working as an aircraft mechanic, but he seemed to be having trouble keeping a job for very long, because he lists five different employers from two thousand and four to two thousand and six. I don't know why I had it in my head that this was going to be a quick, easy episode to shake off the holiday Hayes. I thought I'd be in and out summarizing

a silly little lawsuit. But even my side stories have side story, and I spent way too long reading white power magazines from the nineties. I'll have to save some of the odd tidbits that I passed over for another time. It turns out the tangent I had to break out into its own episode has tangents that might need their own episodes. Daniel Mahon's attorney, Robert Fraser, was disbarred in two thousand and eight, who was allowed to resign from

the bar during an ongoing investigation into several grievances. Two of them are pretty standard. He accepted payment from clients and then failed to render any services. Unethical, but not crazy. The third one was kind of troubling. He was representing a mother in a child abuse case, and he concealed the fact that he was at the time living in his client's home, which made him a material witness to

the alleged child abuse. He was never charged with perjury, but the judge in that case pretty unequivocally stated on the record occurred that Fraser perjured himself when he was

asked directly about this. I know it's a little different in every jurisdiction, but I was surprised that Fraser was only disbarred in two thousand and eight, because by then he had three convictions for domestic violence, one for simple assault, he served time for contempt after walking out of a hearing during a paternity lawsuit, and he was convicted of a felony for registering to vote immediately after being convicted

of felony domestic violence. Most states would have had his bar card after the first felony, surely after the second one, right, and the timeline on this is kind of incredible. Fraser showed up to oral argument at the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in Daniel's case just days after bonding out of the Tulsa County jail for beating his wife. I'd also sketched out a section in my notes to talk about a lawsuit that this story really reminded me of

a much more recent one. But I'm already running way too long, and I'll have to save that two thousand and two lawsuit filed by an aircraft mechanic who said United Airlines fired him for being white. For another time. Not to spoil it, but he also did not get fired for being white. It had a lot more to do with his habit of referring to a black coworker using the N word. So he didn't win that lawsuit obviously, and his appeal ended up getting dismissed because the white

supremacist lawyer he hired forgot to file it. Now. In his defense, he was very busy at the time. He had just been charged with a felony, and unlike Robert Fraser, he practices law in a state that does disbar attorneys after their first felony. But funny enough, he doesn't seem to have reported that to the bar association yet. But again, the story for another day, because that one's not over yet.

And as for those Turner Diaries t shirts, I'm sure hundreds of people bought one out of Nazi magazines or off a table at a gun show. They sold them for years. But the only other story I could turn up about a guy getting himself into hot water after wearing one in public was a Navy seal. That man has since changed his name and made quite a career for himself as a relationship coach, offering dating advice to his nearly half a million followers. You probably have no

idea who used to be Matt Hale's webmaster. After all, that was a long time ago, back before Matt Hale went to prison for soliciting the murder of a federal judge. Wee Little Guys as a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written and recorded by me Whiley Conger. Special thanks this week goes to Wikipedia editor Tulsa politics fan. I thought I was losing my mind when I googled the subject of the show when I saw that the

record had been updated to reflect my ongoing research. Our executive producers are Sophie Legerman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Diggert. You can email me at weard Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I won't answer it. It's nothing personal. 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 are my Weird Little Guys