White Guns for Hire

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Speaker 19 In early March of 1994, Three men left the Bosnian city of Siroki Brieg.

Speaker 19 German mercenaries Falk Semang and Ralph Marakas Maraquez were eager for a change of scenery.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And Ronald Deuster, 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.

Speaker 19 Before they left, they took a few souvenirs. A couple of AK-47s, one pistol, eight kilos of Semtex, a plastic explosive, and a crate of hand grenades.

Speaker 19 They stashed the stolen weapons under the seats of the old Citro that Doyster was driving.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And he was right.

Speaker 19 After driving nearly 2,000 kilometers, they reached their first destination, the Belgian city of Russolara.

Speaker 19 There, they met with Roger Spinowin, the leader of a Belgian neo-Nazi group called the Order of Flemish Militants.

Speaker 19 He was a bit of a legend in certain circles.

Speaker 19 He was already an old man, but in the 70s 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.

Speaker 19 And on that day in March of 1994, Spinuin paid Deuster 11,000 Deutschmarks for the stolen weapons.

Speaker 19 But he gave him one more thing,

Speaker 19 directions.

Speaker 19 It had been Spinowin 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.

Speaker 19 The aging 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 Vlaams Block.

Speaker 19 But as the world continued to change around him, he hoped to retire one day in in a beautiful white ethnostate in southern Africa.

Speaker 19 Here on the eve of the end of apartheid, though, that dream was starting to look less and less likely.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And this was the task he'd recruited these mercenaries for.

Speaker 19 It wasn't safe to depart directly from Belgium. The authorities there were already a little suspicious.

Speaker 19 Instead, the mercenaries took the ferry across the English Channel to Ramsgate, a seaside town in Kent.

Speaker 19 There, with an introduction from Spinowin, they made their next contacts, members of the British fascist group, the League of St. George.

Speaker 19 They spent a few days there making final preparations for their journey, with the help of their new English friends.

Speaker 19 This was becoming something of a routine for the members of the League of St. George.
Just two months earlier, they'd hosted another batch of German mercenaries making the same trip.

Speaker 19 They didn't know just yet that one of those men was already dead.

Speaker 19 On the evening before Deuster and the Germans were scheduled to fly out of Heathrow, Roger Spiniwin dispatched one of his sons to Ramsgate with one final message for the mercenaries.

Speaker 19 Willie Spinowin handed Ronald Doyster a sealed envelope and passed along his father's order.

Speaker 19 Doyster was to personally hand deliver this envelope to the woman who would meet him at the airport.

Speaker 19 A woman named Monica Huggett.

Speaker 19 I'm Molly Conger,

Speaker 19 and this is Weird Little Guys.

Speaker 19 This is the part of the story where we finally rejoin the woman we started with, Monica Huggett Stone.

Speaker 19 It's been a long, strange journey. We started out a few weeks ago in 2012 in Sacramento, California.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 What an odd sight, those skinheads in their black jackets rallying for the imaginary cause of a white genocide against South African farmers.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And all of them were organized by a short-lived Aryan Nations-affiliated group called the South Africa Project.

Speaker 19 And that group itself was almost certainly really just two people.

Speaker 19 A longtime Aryan Nations member named Morris Goulet

Speaker 19 and a mysterious woman in Louisiana named Monica Stone.

Speaker 19 I'm always surprised by the twists and turns that these stories take.

Speaker 19 Once you start turning over a few rocks, there's always some bizarre new angle that takes us miles from where I thought we were going.

Speaker 19 But this one has been the strangest ride of any weird little guy so far.

Speaker 19 In this chapter of the story, we'll try to trace the paths of these European mercenaries from Bosnia to South Africa.

Speaker 19 It turns out there was an international network to funnel guns for hire from one one conflict to another.

Speaker 19 And as cloak and dagger as all of that sounds, it wasn't really a secret. Not entirely.

Speaker 19 Searchlight magazine had reported on the scheme months before those German mercenaries even bought their plane tickets.

Speaker 19 Every year, for decades now, European neo-Nazis gather in the Belgian city of Dixmude for an international fascist get-together.

Speaker 19 And at the event in 1993, there was a lot of talk about changing their focus about redirecting mercenaries from the Balkans to South Africa.

Speaker 19 And plans were made.

Speaker 19 At least 15 mercenaries were pledged to be dispatched in early 1994 with plans to fight alongside Robert Van Tonder's Borostad party.

Speaker 19 All of this was published in print, in English, in the fall of 1993,

Speaker 19 months before this actually happened.

Speaker 19 That same publication, Searchlight Magazine, would eventually uncover more of the details about what went on at Dixmude in 1993.

Speaker 19 It was at this summit that Roger Spinuin recruited Ronald Deuster to return to Bosnia to recruit more mercenaries for South Africa.

Speaker 19 And, according to another source, it was also sometime in late late 1993 that Roger Spinuin paid a visit to South Africa himself at the invitation of Monica Hugget.

Speaker 19 I mentioned a few weeks ago that the first step in tracking this Monica Stone, the one who organized those rallies in 2012, back to her home country of South Africa, was figuring out her maiden name, which is Hugget.

Speaker 19 And I did that by digging up old corporate filings for a Christian identity church called the New Christian Crusade Church.

Speaker 19 And the New Christian Crusade Church was run by a man named James K. Warner.

Speaker 19 I don't think Warner necessarily qualifies as a big name, but he shows up in a lot of big stories.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And in his Klan days, he was a very close friend of David Duke.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 I should have caught that, but to be honest with you, I'm recording this at 1 in the morning, and this is early by my usual standards. I'm always a little down to the wire.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Warner, and he did use his brother's name on the deeds to some of the church property.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 How on earth did a woman in South Africa manage to join the Ku Klux Klan?

Speaker 19 If you recall the story in the episode two weeks ago, Monica Huggett was arrested in 1981 in connection with a series of pro-apartheid bombings by a group that called itself the Vid Commando.

Speaker 19 And after her arrest, She agreed to testify against the Italian fascists that she'd helped carry out those bombings.

Speaker 19 During the trial, she said she was a member of the American Ku Klux Klan.

Speaker 19 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 Klan contacts.

Speaker 19 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 Klan in the United States.

Speaker 19 Because there is a big difference there.

Speaker 19 There have been groups in other countries that have adopted the aesthetic and the ideology of the clan without necessarily maintaining meaningful contact with the group they're modeling themselves after.

Speaker 19 In other examples, what looks like a foreign iteration of the clan is actually just an American who happens to be living overseas.

Speaker 19 In the 1980s, there was an American serviceman stationed in Germany who claimed that he was leading an active Klan group in Bavaria.

Speaker 19 And in the Dennis Mahon story, we saw an American Klansman who traveled internationally, trying to spark an interest in American Klan aesthetics and ideology, but with relatively little success.

Speaker 19 So what Monica's talking about here is something a little different.

Speaker 19 And I was stumped, truly.

Speaker 19 As we'll get to later on in the story, I can absolutely connect Monica Huggett Stone to the American Ku Klux Klan by the 1990s. I've got the Federal Election Commission filings to prove that.

Speaker 19 That's easy.

Speaker 19 But I still have no answers when it comes to the question of Klansmen in South Africa in the late 1970s.

Speaker 19 Not in any concrete way.

Speaker 19 But I do have a theory.

Speaker 19 One of the sources I've relied on heavily throughout this series is a 1999 thesis by Maida Maida Visser on the white fascist movements in South Africa in the 20th century.

Speaker 19 And she sort of hints at this idea. She writes, quote, the activities of the Klan in South Africa are obscure.

Speaker 19 Although the police had no concrete evidence that the movement was active in South Africa, there were claims in the press in the late 70s that branches existed in the country.

Speaker 19 And so in Visser's thesis, she gives a couple of examples that are definitely evidence of that aesthetic copycat behavior I'm talking about.

Speaker 19 So when the Vit Commando took credit for those bombings in 1980, the letters they sent to the press had a symbol in the letterhead that was almost identical to the logo used by American Klan groups.

Speaker 19 And in 1990, when two members of the Order of Death went on trial for murder, their supporters packed the courtroom and they were all wearing little clan lapel pens.

Speaker 19 And one of them even told a reporter, the order is long gone. It's the Ku Klux Klan now.

Speaker 19 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 going to need for this story when side characters start to look really familiar.

Speaker 19 When I was reading that anecdote about the Order of Death trial in 1990, I recognized the names of the murderers.

Speaker 19 Cornelius Laudering and Faney Gusen were two of the ten members of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement who were arrested in the summer of 1990.

Speaker 19 So when they scooped up Leonard Wienendahl and Horst Klens,

Speaker 19 Laudering and Gusen were in that bunch.

Speaker 19 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 Laudering and Guzen.

Speaker 19 So I guess they found them again because they did get convicted of murder.

Speaker 19 But back to the question of the clan.

Speaker 19 I could have left it there, but I think you probably know by now that I didn't.

Speaker 19 Because if you 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 1960s and into the 70s.

Speaker 19 He died in the late 70s.

Speaker 19 His name was Raymond Kirch Rudman.

Speaker 19 And by the time he was trying to get a South African Klan going, he was already pretty old and he was decades into his career as a professional anti-Semite with impressive international connections.

Speaker 19 Aside from his clan activities, Rudman was also the leader of an Afrikaner nationalist group called the Boronasi, originally founded by Maney Meretz.

Speaker 19 Meretz's son, also called Maney Meretz, was a prominent figure in the Afrikaner resistance movement during the same time period as Monica Huggett.

Speaker 19 And Rudman also led a group called the Anglo-Norman Union.

Speaker 19 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?

Speaker 19 But in 1965, Rudman did use the group to join the World Union of National Socialists.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 But when it comes to the Klan, there's not much written, at least not that I was able to find, about the history of the Klan in South Africa.

Speaker 19 But everything that does exist has Ray Rudman's name on it.

Speaker 19 Last year, Dr. William Robert Billops completed his dissertation at Emory University.

Speaker 19 And I know, I know that dissertation has the answers I'm looking for, but it is currently embargoed and not available to read.

Speaker 19 But a write-up about his research tells me I'm on the right track.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 An old mention of Ray Rudman trying to recruit for a Klan group in South Africa in the early 1960s.

Speaker 19 Billops 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.

Speaker 19 Again, unfortunately for me, I can't read Billops' research, but I do have the finding aid for Rudman's papers.

Speaker 19 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

Speaker 19 I would love to get my hands on some of those letters.

Speaker 19 Because listed in that inventory are entries for correspondence between Ray Rudman and the New Christian Crusade Church, dated as early as the 60s and 70s.

Speaker 19 There's also an entry listing correspondence between Ray Rudman and the National States' Rights Party, dated from the 1950s.

Speaker 19 The inventory also lists more than 40 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And Warner's Nazi publishing outfit, the Sons of Liberty Press, also published and sold English-language versions of texts by South African anti-Semite Johann Schumann and Afrikaner nationalist politician Jap Maray.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 James K. Warner visited England in the 70s to speak at a meeting of the League of St.
George.

Speaker 19 In 1980, our Belgian Nazi Roger Spinouin was deported from the United States while he was here visiting members of the National States' Rights Party.

Speaker 19 And our South African Klansman, Ray Rudman, was listed as the South African correspondent in issues of a British fascist magazine in the 1970s.

Speaker 19 All of these guys are connected, going back decades.

Speaker 19 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 1994.

Speaker 19 A few episodes ago, I I told you that one of the first places I found Monica Huggett's name was in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission's final report.

Speaker 19 In Volume 2, the portion of the report that deals with, quote, the Commission of Gross Violations of Human Rights, Chapter 7, Political Violence in the Era of Negotiations and Transition, under the subheading, Links with International Right-Wing Groups.

Speaker 19 The report reads,

Speaker 19 The first first link between ultra-right terrorism and foreign agencies came to light in 1982 when Mr. Fabio Muriello, Mr.
Massimo Bolo, and Mr.

Speaker 19 Eugenio Zopis, all white foreign expatriates known as the White Commando, were convicted of the 1979 bombing of the offices of prominent academic Dr. Jan Lombard.

Speaker 19 Originally, Mr. Kuz Vermoulen and Miss Monica Huggett were arrested with them, but Huggett turned state's witness and Vermoulen was released after a few days.

Speaker 19 Huggett's name was subsequently linked to a shootout in March of 1994 between the South African police and three German right-wingers in the Donkerhoek area. One German right-winger, Mr.

Speaker 19 Stephen Reyes, was arrested, Mr. Thomas Koons was shot dead, and a third, Mr.
Horse Klens, was later arrested. A fourth, Mr.

Speaker 19 Alexander Nydlein, was later charged in the Kullinen Magistrates Court for illegal possession of a firearm.

Speaker 19 And I read that paragraph before.

Speaker 19 You've heard that bit.

Speaker 19 And at this point, you know some of the backstory that paragraph is talking about.

Speaker 19 Two weeks ago, we talked about the Vitcommando bombings in 1980, and we spent most of the last episode talking about one of those men, Horst Klenz.

Speaker 19 Before that shootout in 1994, Klenz had been involved in a 1989 attack on a United Nations outpost in Namibia, killing a security guard and later murdering a police constable.

Speaker 19 when he and his accomplices escaped from custody.

Speaker 19 And at some point, I teased you a little bit with a story about Alexander Nydlein.

Speaker 19 He was the German neo-Nazi who swore allegiance to Donald Trump at a fascist rally in Croatia in 2017.

Speaker 19 So we know where Horst Klens was in the early 90s. He was in South Africa.
But how did those other three men actually

Speaker 19 get there in 1994?

Speaker 19 Alexander Nydlein, Stephen Reyes, and Thomas Kunst followed the same path as the mercenaries recruited by Ronald Doyster.

Speaker 19 They deserted from the Convicts Battalion, a paramilitary unit of the Croatian Defense Council made up of prisoners and foreign mercenaries, and they left Bosnia with stolen weapons.

Speaker 19 Then, with the help of the League of St. George in England, they made their way down to South Africa.

Speaker 19 And just like Ronald Doyster, they were given the name of a woman who would pick them up from the airport.

Speaker 19 Monica Huggett.

Speaker 2 This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something.

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Speaker 10 OSA is a serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation.

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Speaker 19 And here is another in my research for this story where I found a very unlikely source of information that I just couldn't have gotten anywhere else.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And this week, I have an even more unsavory source to thank, though he isn't around to hear it.

Speaker 26 This is the prosecution's appeal concerning Praliak in all other respects affirms the sentence of 20 years of imprisonment, subject to credit being given under Rule 101 of the rules for the period he has already spent in detention.

Speaker 26 Mr. Praljak, you may be seated.

Speaker 26 Stop, please. Please sit down.

Speaker 19 That audio might not sound familiar, but if you're extremely online, you've seen meme-fied images of this moment used as a reaction gif a thousand times. I know it.

Speaker 19 I'm sure you know the one I'm talking about. It's a white-haired old man in a suit, and he's drinking from a small vial.

Speaker 19 That man is Slobodan Proliak.

Speaker 19 He died by suicide in 2017, and the meme shows the moment that he produced a small vial of cyanide from his pocket, after a judge at The Hague announced that his sentence for war crimes would be upheld.

Speaker 19 I don't speak Croatian, but news reports translated his last words in that video as,

Speaker 19 Judges, Slobodan Prolyak is not a war criminal. With disdain, I reject your verdict.

Speaker 19 And then he knocks back the vial of cyanide.

Speaker 19 We don't have to get into the crimes against humanity that Slobodan Prolyak was convicted of by the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia.

Speaker 19 He doesn't really factor in directly to our story at all.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And that website is actually still online today.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 So buried in this poorly organized series of files on an archived version of this war criminals website, I found something terribly interesting.

Speaker 19 All of the existing reporting that I could find about Alexander Nienlein, Stephen Reyes, and Thomas Kunst and their whereabouts in late 1993

Speaker 19 seems to rely on one of those documents. An arrest warrant signed by their commanding officer, a war criminal named Mladen Nalatilik.

Speaker 19 which I know I've not pronounced correctly, so we'll just call him by his nickname, Tuta. Everyone else did.

Speaker 19 When those three German mercenaries deserted from Tuta's ragtag convicts battalion in the middle of December of 1993,

Speaker 19 he wrote a memo requesting arrest warrants. Translated, it reads,

Speaker 19 On December 16th, 1993, members of the convicts battalion fled from Siroki Brieg to an unknown destination. after spending three to four days in the unit after stealing weapons and ammunition.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 These guys are strangers to him.

Speaker 19 And I guess there's no reason to doubt that.

Speaker 19 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?

Speaker 19 But I think it would be terribly naive to take a war criminal at his word.

Speaker 19 Because he was lying.

Speaker 19 In that chaotic document dump on Slobodan Prolyak's website, I found Tuta's request for the issuance of those arrest warrants and I found the arrest warrants themselves.

Speaker 19 And they were both signed by Tuta.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 But I did find another document bearing the signature of the commander of the Convex Battalion. And this one was dated December 2nd, 1993, a full two weeks before those men deserted.

Speaker 19 And it's a list of soldiers under Tuta's command, and it appears to have been written on a typewriter.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And there, 24 pages into into this list of names, are Alexander Nydline,

Speaker 19 Stephen Reyes, and Thomas Kunst.

Speaker 19 Nydlein and Kunst both have a check mark next to their name, indicating that they'd been paid for the month of November.

Speaker 19 Nydlein 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.

Speaker 19 So this document at least offers some possible rebuttal to that.

Speaker 19 Next to Stephen Ray's name, though, there isn't a checkmark. Instead, there's a little symbol that looks like it might be the letter D.

Speaker 19 I think the soldiers who have died are the ones with the little cross next to their name. And soldiers who are in the hospital either have a B or the word Bolnica, which means hospital, written out.

Speaker 19 And I couldn't find any commonly used word for something like dead, deceased, killed, deserted, quit, captured,

Speaker 19 any words like that. I couldn't find any that would start with D in Croatian.

Speaker 19 But there are some words and phrases related to the concept of authorized leave or a permitted absence

Speaker 19 that do start with D in Croatian.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 But regardless of what these mysterious little symbols mean,

Speaker 19 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.

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Speaker 19 The obvious next question, then, is why would he lie about how long they'd been with the unit?

Speaker 19 The short answer, obviously, is I don't know. I don't think anybody knows.

Speaker 19 But if I had to guess, I would say he was covering his ass.

Speaker 19 The convicts battalion was becoming increasingly unpopular by late 1993.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And they were out of control. A letter sent to a Croatian general signed by another officer that same month, December of 1993, complained about Tuta's convicts running amok.

Speaker 19 They weren't just committing war crimes, but they were killing and raping military and police personnel on their own side.

Speaker 19 And their commanding officer was protecting them.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Other sources I found writing about the actions of mercenaries in the Bosnian War single out the German mercenaries in particular for their brutality.

Speaker 19 Rob Krot, a frequent contributor to Soldier of Fortune magazine, wrote in his book, Save the Last Bullet for Yourself,

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Austrian journalist Christoph Santner co-wrote, Ich ge Jetzt Rambospielen, which translates to, I'm going to play Rambo now.

Speaker 19 with former mercenary Wolfgang Niederreiter.

Speaker 19 And Niederreiter recounts seeing a German mercenary hand a live grenade to a seven-year-old Muslim boy in the Bosnian city of Mostar.

Speaker 19 As a joke of some sort?

Speaker 19 The mercenary told the boy it was a toy, and the child was blown to pieces moments later.

Speaker 19 There was no shortage of violence in the Balkans in the early 90s. There's plenty of blame to go around.

Speaker 19 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,

Speaker 19 that's a little bit too much.

Speaker 19 Now, I hesitate to build a theory on the sand of speculation.

Speaker 19 But if that little D next to Stephen Reyes's name does

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Because again, we know that there was an international effort to recruit mercenaries to travel to South Africa.

Speaker 19 The two men from the beginning of this episode, Fox Amang and Ralph Marajas, were recruited by Ronald Deuster personally when he traveled to Bosnia in early 1994.

Speaker 19 And by all accounts, Nydline, Reyes, and Kunst were recruited by Horst Klenz.

Speaker 19 But how?

Speaker 19 Because remember, Horst Klenz had been in South Africa for years at this point.

Speaker 19 He escaped from custody in Namibia in 1989 and he fled back to South Africa. He was arrested again in the summer of 1990 in connection with the Ordoborofolk bombings.

Speaker 19 And he didn't end up getting charged with anything. But he spent a while while in jail while South African courts tried to figure out if they needed to extradite him to Namibia.

Speaker 19 He was eventually, probably in late 1992, released on bond pending a final decision in the extradition matter.

Speaker 19 And then he disappeared.

Speaker 19 It is possible, I guess, that Klenz could have gone to Bosnia at some point in 1993.

Speaker 19 But I don't think so, because there's a much more likely explanation.

Speaker 19 That probably didn't mean anything to you.

Speaker 19 I speak a little German, but that guy's accent was a little tricky for me. I had to ask a friend who's fluent for some help with this one.

Speaker 19 That's a clip from a segment that aired on a German TV news program. And the man speaking is an unnamed hotel guest.

Speaker 19 Unnamed, probably because the hotel in question was a CD establishment in Hamburg's red light district.

Speaker 19 And the man is recalling for a reporter from Dirspiegel an incident that happened in late October 1993.

Speaker 19 Stephen Reyes was thrown out of the hotel after some kind of loud argument.

Speaker 19 And just Stephen Reyes.

Speaker 19 According to researchers from Germany's anti-fascist Infoblat, Klenz was also spotted in Hamburg in October of 1993.

Speaker 19 And we know Stephen Reyes did go back to Bosnia after he got kicked out of that seedy motel because he deserted in December.

Speaker 19 So what it looks like to me is that Reyes made contact with Klenz in Hamburg in October. And then he went back to Bosnia and told his friends about this exciting new opportunity.

Speaker 19 All they had to do was steal a bunch of guns and find a way to get to England.

Speaker 19 What we do know for certain is that all three of those mercenaries left Bosnia on December 16th, 1993.

Speaker 19 And on December 30th, they robbed a post office in the German city of Lübeck, making off with around 8,500 Deutschmarks.

Speaker 19 I don't entirely know how to sort out how much money that is.

Speaker 19 In 1993, one US dollar was equal to about 1.6 Deutschmarks. So that would make it a little over $5,000.

Speaker 19 But those are $1993.

Speaker 19 So I guess you could best understand the actual value of this money is around 10,000 US dollars today.

Speaker 19 Don't email me about math.

Speaker 19 And with cash in hand, they traveled from Germany to Ramsgate, that little seaside town in England where members of the League of St. George drove them to the airport.

Speaker 19 And just like the mercenaries that would follow them two months later, they were given a name. Monica Huggett would pick them up from the airport when they got to South Africa.

Speaker 19 They arrived on tourist visas in January of 1994,

Speaker 19 and Monica was there, as promised, to pick them up.

Speaker 19 She sorted out their paperwork and work permits and their mercenary assignments, passing them off to Horst Cleanse.

Speaker 19 They were assigned as armed guards at Radio Praetoria, an illegal radio station that broadcast Afrikaner nationalist propaganda.

Speaker 19 And they participated in military drills led by Willem Rata,

Speaker 19 a former Rhodesian military officer.

Speaker 19 Everything seemed to be going according to plan until March 14th, 1994.

Speaker 19 By the time the next round of mercenaries arrived a few days later, there was no one there at the airport to greet them.

Speaker 19 Thomas Kunst was dead. And Alexander Nydlein, Horst Klens, Stephen Reyes, and Monica Huggett had all been arrested.

Speaker 19 I really do hate to leave you hanging again.

Speaker 19 I promise I'm not dragging this story out on purpose to torment you.

Speaker 19 I was a little preoccupied this past week, and I'll be entirely otherwise occupied during the week you're hearing this.

Speaker 19 If you're listening to this on the day it comes out, I am almost certainly sitting in court right now.

Speaker 19 In October of last year, I did a couple of episodes about Virginia's burning objects law.

Speaker 19 There was a pair of episodes on Barry Black, the Pennsylvania Klansman who challenged Virginia's cross-burning statute and eventually won his case at the Supreme Court.

Speaker 19 And there was a third episode about a man who broke the law Virginia wrote to replace that original cross-burning ban.

Speaker 19 In that episode, I talked a bit about the Nazi torch march that took place here. in my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 11th, 2017.

Speaker 19 The episode was about Tyler Dykes, but he was just one of about a dozen men who've been charged with burning an object with the intent to intimidate.

Speaker 19 That's the law that replaced the old cross-burning statute.

Speaker 19 Well, this week, another one of those men is taking his case to trial.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 I would love to promise you the final chapter of Monica Huggett's story is going to come next week, but if I'm being realistic, it'll be something else.

Speaker 19 I've been planning to do sort of a Q ⁇ A episode, so it might be that.

Speaker 19 You can submit questions for that on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just please don't send them to me anywhere else, like on any other social media platform.
I'll just lose them.

Speaker 19 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

Speaker 19 and depending on how things go during the trial i might have a mini-sode about the defendant basilios pistolis

Speaker 19 If you're curious about Pistolis, I'll include a link in the show notes to the ProPublica article about his discharge from the Marines after he was revealed to be a member of Adam Woffin.

Speaker 19 So, thank you for bearing with me as I tell the story of Monica Stone in these strange little chunks.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Weird Little Guys is a production of CoolZone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Emily Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.

Speaker 19 The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.

Speaker 19 You can email me at WeirdLittleGuyspodcast at gmail.com. I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.

Speaker 19 You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.

Speaker 19 If you have a burning question for me about the show, it's not too late to get over to the subreddit and reply to a thread for an upcoming QA episode. But

Speaker 19 as always,

Speaker 19 just don't post something that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.

Speaker 2 This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something.

Speaker 3 Do you know the symptoms of moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea or OSA in adults with obesity?

Speaker 8 They may be happening to you without you knowing.

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Speaker 10 OSA is a serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation.

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Speaker 7 This information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company.

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