The Quiet Zone Read online

  “When Dr. Pierce was alive and running the operation, it was pretty quiet,” said Jeff Barlow, who became county sheriff in 2017 and was a state police trooper based in Marlinton for twenty years before that. “If someone from the organization got in trouble, they came down, paid the fines, and Pierce sent them out of here. He didn’t want trouble.”

  It was all a facade. In reality, Pierce was essentially running a criminal organization out of Pocahontas County. “The fact is, it was a gangster operation which produced an enormous number of murderers, bank robbers, and people who engaged in similar activities,” said Mark Potok, the former editor-in-chief of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s quarterly Intelligence Report. “This was essentially a nexus of criminal activity along with a healthy dose of really vile fascist ideology.”

  To wit, in 1996, white supremacists robbed $20,000 from a Connecticut bank and then hand-delivered a portion of the money to Pierce at the compound. Hardly a “gentleman,” Pierce was a misogynist who consumed pornography “in a huge way” and spent the remainder of his time calling for genocide against the many people he hated, according to Potok. In 1990, Pierce was arrested for beating up his bookkeeper, which fit into a pattern of abuse against his own family. His son Kelvin Pierce has written an autobiography called Sins of My Father that reveals in brutal detail the merciless beatings his dad exacted with a belt, an electric razor cord, and a two-by-four. Prone to fits of volcanic rage, Pierce killed the family’s two cats, snapping the neck of one and slamming the other against a wall. He hid bomb-making materials and weapons in the family’s Virginia home, only narrowly escaping detection from FBI agents. He taught Kelvin how to make a pipe bomb and attempted to indoctrinate him into denying the Holocaust and admiring Hitler. When Kelvin was in high school, his father walked out on the family for West Virginia.

  In Pocahontas, Pierce established a community of like-minded hate. To be invited to his compound was to enter into the company of an elite cadre of the white supremacist movement. “We did have a sense of community there that, really before the internet and social media took off, was lacking for a lot of white nationalists in terms of having the opportunity to socialize and to have the echo chambers where their political views were reinforced and further radicalized,” according to Billy Roper, who worked at the compound from 2000 to 2002 and was briefly considered a potential successor to Pierce.

  Far Right leaders from around the world journeyed into Appalachia to visit the National Alliance. Members of Germany’s fascist National Democratic Party made the pilgrimage to Pocahontas. The neo-Nazi musician Hendrik Möbus, who served time for murder, hid at the compound for several weeks in 2000 while fleeing an international arrest warrant for violating the terms of his parole. Another visitor was the British expatriate Mark Cotterill, leader of a group called American Friends of the British National Party, which was funneling money to white supremacists in Britain. “The whole network was tightly connected to National Alliance members and to Pierce,” according to Heidi Beirich, who for many years led the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project and did undercover monitoring of Cotterill’s organization.

  Don Black, founder of the white supremacist radio show and web forum Stormfront, recalled a fairly cordial welcome when he visited Pocahontas in February 2002, several months before Pierce died. He made the trip with a British politician named Nick Griffin after they attended an American Renaissance conference in Washington, D.C. Griffin was then leader of the British National Party; he would later become a member of the European Parliament. Black and Griffin stayed at Graham’s Motel, where Pierce met them. “The townsfolk were all friendly,” Black told me.

  Graham’s was the go-to overnight accommodation for white nationalists, as it was the closest lodging to the National Alliance, about five miles away. The organization fully booked its eight rooms two weekends a year for conferences. Local law enforcement, aware of the activities, regularly monitored the motel and took down license plate numbers.

  “When they were having a conference and I knew the conference was coming up, I didn’t take reservations from anyone else,” said Jaynell Graham, who ran Graham’s Motel. “I did not have other people stay there that might be offended by anything they might overhear, because old motels have thin walls.” Graham suggested that Timothy McVeigh may have also stayed at her motel, as her mother believed she recognized him on television after the bombing; Pierce himself repeatedly said he’d never met McVeigh.

  Pringle told me he used to stay at Graham’s “all the time.” (“They had an okay breakfast,” he added.) He also booked the entire Marlinton Motor Inn for National Alliance conferences. A popular hangout was a dive bar in Marlinton where a skinhead’s girlfriend worked. When the National Alliance rented the bar, the owner put out a letter board sign that read “Welcome Nazis.” (A photo of the sign was published in Resistance magazine.) Roper recalled another bar near the compound being a contact point for locals who wanted to learn about the National Alliance. Through the bar, Roper sold KKK patches, “hatecore” CDs, and autographed copies of The Turner Diaries. “The local redneck guys got along reasonably well with the skinheads,” Roper said. “There was a lot of nudge-nudge, wink-wink implicit racial attitude among the locals.”

  I’d heard firsthand about discrimination in the area. Blacks heard whispers behind their backs and felt outright hostility. Puerto Rican migrant workers heard people mutter “fucking Mexican” at them. A fire chief, knowing full well that I was recording our interview, referred to the Obamas as “monkeys.” At first I’d thought I was just encountering the pernicious racism found almost anywhere. But things apparently went deeper. Roper’s impression probably also reflected how most Pocahontas residents never had to worry about being hate targets. The community today is 97 percent white, largely made up of Christian conservatives who overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump. It could be easier for them to be more dismissive of the National Alliance than, say, a Jew, a Black, or an outspoken liberal.

  To some people, the white supremacists were just another clientele. “It wasn’t a big deal because they kept to themselves,” said Graham. Their ideology didn’t really matter.

  She pointed to the former Ku Klux Klan member Robert C. Byrd, the state’s longtime senator. “That would not fly now,” Graham said of Byrd’s controversial background. (Byrd called his early involvement in the KKK his “greatest mistake.”)

  And unlike skiers who stayed at Graham’s Motel during trips to Snowshoe, the National Alliance folks were always tidy. “They never even left their fingerprints,” she said.

  Listening to Graham talk, it was easy to think of Pierce and his ilk as polite and harmless, which only underscored their subtle threat. “Overt displays of hate could be countered, prevented, or ignored,” as the journalist Seyward Darby notes in the book Sisters in Hate, which profiled women in the white power movement. It’s harder to fight “white nationalism’s quotidian allure.” I later learned that a National Alliance leader had violently assaulted his girlfriend in a room at Graham’s Motel.

  As the National Alliance grew in infamy, Pocahontas acquired a reputation. “People would say, ‘You’re the ones that have the Nazis!’” recalled Allen Johnson, director of the county’s public libraries from 2001 to 2012. An activist at heart, Johnson saw the libraries as an avenue for engaging and strengthening the community, “which meant getting outside the walls and not just hoping somebody comes in to check out a book,” he told me. It also meant using the library as a platform to publicly confront the National Alliance.

  To be sure, Pocahontas County had not invited the white supremacists, and Pierce would likely have thrived in any remote location despite any amount of denouncing from the local population. But Johnson felt compelled to at least speak up.

  “The community’s attitude was to live and let live,” Johnson said. “And I’m not that kind of guy.”

  JOHNSON GREETED ME on his porch with a big smile, blood under his fingernails and
animal guts on his jeans. He’d just slaughtered fourteen of his wife’s rabbits for their meat. Six-foot-one with a white beard, Johnson wore a yellow T-shirt and rubber Crocs with socks. He led me across the muddy yard to a tree where, after breaking each bunny’s spine with a twist of the neck, he pinned their hind legs to two nails, beheaded them, then skinned and gutted them. Blood pooled at the bottom of the tree.

  “You actually have some meat on your pants there, Allen,” his wife, Debora, said. “It’s probably a piece of fat.”

  He flicked it off and showed me around the yard, which was dominated by a pond stocked with largemouth bass, bluegill, and channel catfish; muskrat and snapping turtles also found their way in. Surrounding the pond were gardens of vegetables, flowers, and berries, hedged in by national forest. Johnson and his four sons had fished in, swam in, and skated on the pond, which had an island with a small wooden duck house. A few years earlier, Johnson had decided he didn’t want ducks pooping and shedding feathers around his yard anymore, so he gave them away. Then geese moved onto the island and started eating all his vegetables, so Johnson and his golden retriever, Maggie, chased them away. It was a persistence he’d also deployed against the neo-Nazis.

  “I’ve still got some rabbits to cut up,” Johnson said, as I followed him inside. The kitchen table held a bucket of still-warm rabbit meat alongside a jackknife, a butcher knife, and a wood block. He demonstrated how he severed the hind legs, then the forelegs, then the neck and tailbone.

  The slicing and dicing continued into the evening as Johnson told me how he and Debora—both from Indiana—had moved to Pocahontas in 1976, when Debora took a teaching job in the county. Soon they attended New Hope Church of the Brethren, led by David Rittenhouse. They found the service so welcoming that they purchased nine acres next door.

  Not a decade later, the neo-Nazis also moved into the county, and the Johnsons watched as the National Alliance grew into the largest and most influential white supremacist organization in the country. At a local gas station, you might bump into young men wearing combat boots and swastika armbands, part of the more overt neo-Nazism associated with Resistance Records. Getting change at the store, a dollar bill might be stamped with the organization’s website address. Coming out of a restaurant, a National Alliance brochure or CD might be tucked under the car windshield wiper. Homes displayed the tricolor national flag of the Third Reich. Parents would go on playdates and discover other parents displayed swastikas in the house. Kids dared each other to call the National Alliance during sleepovers, a way of freaking themselves out. Some local youths were recruited into the organization.

  The neo-Nazis also became a presence at the county’s public libraries. Johnson recalled how Roper—dubbed “the uncensored voice of violent neo-Nazism” by the Southern Poverty Law Center—used the public computers in Marlinton’s library in 2002 to create a website called White Revolution. Johnson felt he couldn’t stop Roper from using a public facility, but he did tell Sheriff Jerry Dale where to find Roper’s internet browsing history.

  For more than a decade, Dale had worked with the FBI and other national agencies to keep tabs on Pierce, developing informants within the National Alliance and conducting periodic stakeouts. Once, when Pierce met with several dozen associates at a restaurant in Marlinton, Dale set up a camera in a nearby window to get photos of attendees and their vehicles. In a 2000 article about Pierce and his acquisition of Resistance Records, Rolling Stone described Dale as “Pierce’s official hometown nemesis.” Pierce, in his newsletter, accused the sheriff of “grandstanding for the Jewish media.”

  Roper had been trying to build links with other hate groups, including the Creativity Movement, whose founder was friends with Pierce. Soon the Creativity Movement also gained a foothold into Pocahontas County, when a man named Craig Cobb arrived around 2003, moving down the road from the Johnsons and opening a shop called Gray’s Store, Aryan Autographs and 14 Words, L.L.C. It was a reference to a fourteen-word catchphrase of the radical Right: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children.” The shop displayed Cobb’s hate literature and propaganda, which he was known to distribute locally along with “hatecore” music. (Cobb would later attempt to create an Aryan settlement in North Dakota, as documented in the 2015 film Welcome to Leith.)

  A gangly, beady-eyed man with long blond hair, Cobb became a regular presence at the Marlinton and Green Bank libraries. He often carried a video camera, recording his interactions with Johnson and threatening to sue anyone who tried to curb his First Amendment rights to free expression. Parents asked the schools to stop bringing students to the libraries. “They were worried their kids would get proselytized into Nazism,” Johnson said.

  Frustrated with the situation, Johnson launched an educational campaign about the National Alliance. With input from the civil rights division of the state attorney general’s office, he created a library web page that called out the National Alliance as a racist organization and tracked its members’ actions. He hosted informational sessions to raise awareness about the group. He stocked the library with nearly fifty books about the white nationalist movement and organized them all into the Pearl S. Buck E Pluribus Unum Collection, named after the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature and notable as an advocate for minority rights and mixed-race adoption. Buck happened to have been born about five miles from the National Alliance headquarters.

  In January 2003, Johnson organized a “unity march” through Marlinton with several dozen locals carrying a sign that read “Pocahontas County United Against Hate.” In a bulletin that Johnson created for the march, he wrote: “In the past two years many dozens of National Alliance supporters have flowed in and out of the county to work with the self-termed ‘hate core’ music label, Resistance Records . . . The rally seeks to begin a coordinated process to strengthen the resolve of all citizens of good will to treat all people with kindness, respect, and courtesy.”

  In large part because of Johnson’s efforts, Pocahontas in 2003 received one of six National Medals for Museum and Library Service from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services in Washington, D.C. First Lady Laura Bush personally presented the award to Johnson.

  While his work was commendable, what most undermined the National Alliance was the National Alliance itself. Following Pierce’s death, the organization imploded amid a power dispute, mismanagement, and infighting. “As an activist political organization, the National Alliance fell into dysfunction almost immediately after Pierce’s 2002 death,” according to Potok, the hate groups analyst. Graham’s Motel, which used to be fully booked two weekends a year with well-dressed white men attending the National Alliance’s biannual conferences, shut down in 2005. The same year, Jaynell Graham joined the Pocahontas Times as a copy editor, later becoming the editor in chief. She sold her motel’s mattresses and beds to the Old Clark Inn in Marlinton, where Jenna and I once stayed—meaning we’d likely slept in the same bed as a card-carrying neo-Nazi. (The National Alliance still issues physical membership cards.) That we’d gone to Green Bank in search of a peaceful place, only to find ourselves touched by the area’s darker history, underscored the National Alliance’s entwinement with the community.

  “I believe the collapse is because the people rose against it,” Debora Johnson said of the National Alliance. We sat at her kitchen table, her husband still dismembering rabbits. “When people drove by the entrance, they would command the evil to be gone.”

  “It’s like Whac-A-Mole,” Allen Johnson said. “They pop up somewhere else.”

  He now had other fights on his hands. An environmental activist, he had helped form an organization called Christians for the Mountains that protested a form of coal strip-mining called “mountaintop removal.” His hero was Larry Gibson, an anti-mining activist from West Virginia. Johnson himself had been arrested for demonstrating in front of the White House and trespassing during an anti-mining rally near Beckley, West Virginia. His latest
campaign was against a major natural gas project called the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which was to pass within a half mile of his house.

  Whack! Johnson continued chopping through rabbit bones. Maggie the dog waltzed into the kitchen chewing on a discarded rabbit head.

  “Oh, Maggie!” Johnson cried.

  He tried to grab a rabbit ear flopping from Maggie’s jaws. She snarled. He dragged her outside by the collar. I felt nauseated from the sight of it all.

  It was dark when I got back in my car. My headlights illuminated the rear bumper of Johnson’s truck, which had two stickers. One read “I love mountains.” The other said “I love my wife.” Debora had added the second sticker.

  Against a bright sky of stars, the full moon cast shadows into the dark forest. Fog floated over the hayfields. Deer bobbed against my headlights. A dead owl lay in the road. It was hauntingly beautiful.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Murder by WiFi”

  TWO-THIRDS OF POCAHONTAS COUNTY residents had library cards, an indication of how public facilities took on outsized importance in a remote community with minimal social gathering spots. While Allen Johnson was happy as library director to see everyone use the county’s resources, some idiosyncratic characters tested his patience.