A Klansman in Berlin: Dennis Mahon, Pt. 2

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There was a little bit of snow on the ground as Rebecca Williams pulled her rental car up to a padlocked gate at the end of a gravel driveway near Big Sugar Creek State Park in southwest Missouri.

She was already three years into living as Becca Stevens, an undercover informant for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, so she was no stranger to strange conversations with dangerous men.

But she was flying without a net this time.

The ATF agents were sending her in alone.

They were very curious about what was going on at this 200-acre compound in the Ozarks.

Ozarks.

But they couldn't get close.

The area was so remote, they wouldn't even be able to listen in during her visit.

And wearing a wire was out of the question anyway.

She'd be dead before the agents reached that locked gate if she was found out.

Before she left her briefing that morning, an ATF agent clipped a small recording device to her keychain and tied a bright pink ribbon in her hair.

The ribbon was so they could see her on aerial surveillance, they said.

It was January of 2008 when Rebecca visited that Missouri compound owned by Robert Joes.

He chatted idly about bomb-making as he gave her a tour of his property, pointing out hidden entrances to the caves where he stored caches of weapons and survival foods.

He told her that if anybody ever betrayed his confidence, they'd just disappear into one of those caves.

As the ice crunched softly under her boots in the woods, Rebecca wondered if that pink ribbon in her hair was only there to help identify her body.

This was her first of several visits with Robert Joes, a man preaching a dangerous mix of apocalyptic Christianity and sovereign citizen anti-government extremism, from his compound in the Ozarks.

In 1994, one of his followers shot a Missouri state trooper who had arrested Joes on a misdemeanor charge.

In 2004, the morning a bomb went off inside the Office of Diversity and Dialogue in Scottsdale, Arizona, Robert Joes was the first person the bomber called.

And it was that bomber, Dennis Mahon, who had introduced Rebecca to Robert Joes.

As Becca Stevens, she'd developed a close friendship with Dennis Mahon and his twin brother Daniel.

So close, in fact, that Dennis had fallen desperately in love with her.

He begged her to let his twin brother impregnate her.

He was impotent, but He reasoned that if his identical twin got her pregnant, the resulting baby would still be his biological child.

Over the years on this undercover assignment, the brothers had told her on several occasions that if things ever got bad for them, this is where they would go.

They could hole up in those caves where no one would ever find them.

Rebecca Williams was not the first ATF informant that Dennis Mahon had fallen in love with.

It was his relationship with Carol Howe, a Tulsa debutante, turned Nazi, turned informant, turned Nazi again, that inspired ATF agent Tristan Moreland to hire an exotic dancer to woo Mahon into confessing to that 2004 bombing in Arizona.

But unlike Carol Howe's testimony about Mahon's possible ties to the Oklahoma City bombing, Rebecca's work paid off.

She put Dennis Mahon in federal prison for building a bomb.

I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guides.

When we left off last week, it was 1990.

Dennis Mahon was leading a Klan splinter group called the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and he was Tom Metzger's right-hand man in the White Aryan Resistance.

After spending most of the 1980s underground, years he spent by his own account carrying out minor acts of terror for the Klan, bombing federal office buildings, abortion clinics, and synagogues, he'd emerged as a figure of some importance in the Klan.

He'd just won a legal battle against the city council in Kansas City over his right to broadcast a public access television show called Klansas City Cable.

And public access television wasn't the only medium the white knights of the KKK were using to reach people in Missouri.

Mahon's fondness for telephone hotlines will come up again a bit later.

He was known to run a dial erasist operation.

It's not an uncommon tactic, particularly in the pre-internet days.

Someone with a message he wants to get out can set up a voicemail box and pass out flyers or business cards with the phone number on it.

Interested parties call the number and listen to the recording.

It's sort of like a private, on-demand radio show.

The original podcast, I guess.

It came up in the Barry Black episodes back in October, too.

Black's Klan hotline was used for Klan announcements about upcoming events.

But in October of 1990, Dennis Mahon wasn't handing out his Klan hotline number to white guys at bars that he hoped to recruit his organization.

He was targeting children.

According to a statement from the director of the Kansas City YWCA, Students at area elementary and middle schools were given a number to call to hear a message from the host of a popular children's television show.

Nothing I could find elaborated on that at all.

It's unclear if flyers had been posted at or near schools or playgrounds, or if someone had actually physically approached elementary schoolers with this material.

Either possibility is unsettling.

But however, they got it, The children called a number to hear a message from the host of Mr.

Rogers' neighborhood, Mr.

Rogers himself.

After a tinny rendition of the theme song from the TV show, the children did not hear the warm, familiar voice of Fred Rogers.

Instead, it was a Klansman imitating his voice and mannerisms, delivering a foul message of bigotry.

In one message, this false Mr.

Rogers mocks gay people, calling AIDS divine retribution from God to punish them.

In another, the voice tells a story about a young black boy on a playground.

The message is riddled with racial slurs and racist stereotypes, and the story ends with a description of the little boy being lynched.

It's a horrifying thought that a child would hear that at all.

But if you're old enough to have watched Mr.

Rogers' neighborhood on TV when you were a kid, you know that adds a whole extra layer to this.

The show ran for over 30 years, from the late 60s until 2001.

Generations of kids loved and trusted Mr.

Rogers.

The show talked to kids like they were people, tackling difficult subjects gently and in a way that was appropriate for preschoolers and older kids alike.

Often through song, Mr.

Rogers talked to kids about divorce, death, anger, grief, and friendship.

And even if you've never seen the show, you've surely heard one of his more enduring lessons.

To look for the helpers.

Telling kids in uncertain times, when I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, look for the helpers.

You'll always find people who are helping.

And he wasn't afraid to make waves in his own gentle way.

In 1969, when public swimming pools in much of the country were still segregated, in practice, if not by law, Mr.

Rogers shared a waiting pool with Francois Clemens, one of the first African-American actors to have a recurring role on a children's TV show.

Oh, there's Officer Clemens.

Hi, Officer Clemens.

Come in.

Rogers, how are you?

Fine, won't you sit down?

Oh, sure, just for a moment.

It's so warm, I was just putting some water on my feet.

Oh, it sure is.

Would you like to join me?

It looks awfully enjoyable, but I don't have a towel or anything.

Oh, you share mine.

Okay, sure.

Come on.

I'll put some more water in here.

Oh.

Without mentioning race or segregation at all, Fred Rogers showed kids that there was nothing unusual about cooling off on a hot day with a friend whose skin isn't the same color as yours.

The episode aired shortly after the show began filming in color, and the camera zooms in close on their bare feet, black and white, side by side in the blue waiting pool.

It doesn't sound like much now, but it was a significant barrier to break on TV in 1969.

All that to say, Fred Rogers was probably very upset when he heard children were hearing hateful words in his voice.

Within days of the story reaching the media, Mr.

Rogers himself had filed a lawsuit against the Klan.

There was a press conference in Kansas City on a Friday afternoon with local civil rights groups and faith leaders condemning the messages.

And by Monday morning, an army of entertainment lawyers had descended on the federal courthouse in Kansas City.

The ACLU didn't rush to the Klan's defense this time.

They were on their own.

Had the Klan not used the theme song from Mr.

Rogers' neighborhood, this may have dragged on and become another battle over free speech.

But the suit wasn't about the vile and offensive content of the messages.

It was about copyright infringement.

You can trick children into hearing violent, racist propaganda.

But you can't mess with a corporation's intellectual property.

Klansmen Edward Stevens IV, Adam Troy Mercer, and Michael Brooks settled almost immediately.

Dennis Mahon wasn't sued by name, but he signed the settlement agreement as the representative for the White Knights.

The court ordered the men to destroy all copies of the tapes they'd used to record and disseminate the messages.

Not long after making that trip to the federal courthouse in Kansas City to sign the paperwork, Dennis Mahon appeared again in federal court, but this time it was in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and it wasn't for his own case.

He took the stand as a character witness at a detention hearing for a friend.

It isn't unusual to have someone testify on your behalf at this sort of thing.

When the government wants to hold someone in custody before they go to trial, all parties involved appear before a judge and make their case.

The government explains why they think pretrial detention is necessary, whether because they believe the defendant will fail to show up for court or because there's a significant chance they'll commit another crime.

And the defendant's lawyer may put on a parent or an employer to vouch for him, offering testimony about their ties to the community, their responsibilities at home and work, and things like that.

I'm not a lawyer.

We've been over that.

So maybe there's a strategy here that I'm just not getting.

But if I were choosing character witnesses to convince a judge that I'm not a danger to the community,

I wouldn't pick a prominent leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

But that's just me, though, because Daniel Roosh did.

When Dennis took the stand in December of 1990, he called Daniel Roosh, quote, the most honorable, nonviolent, decent young man I've ever met in my life.

And he said his friend probably would prefer not to live around minorities, but quote, I don't think he'd hurt them.

Daniel Roosch was one of 15 members of a a Nazi skinhead group arrested in Oklahoma in 1990 on hate crime charges.

For years, the skinheads had been harassing patrons at Club Nitro, a punk club in Tulsa owned by Khaled Rahal, a Lebanese immigrant.

In 1989, they waited in the parking lot until the bar closed and attacked Rahal, beating him with a brick.

A month later, they set fire to the club with Molotov cocktails.

Later that year, Roush and at least a dozen others jumped a patron in the parking lot, kicking him with their steel-toed boots until the teenager lost consciousness.

This particular act, a group assault with a heavy emphasis on kicking the victim in the head, is called a boot party.

And the kind of guy who likes to have a boot party is sometimes called a boot boy.

Which is why Roosh's band was called the Midtown Boot Boys, a name you may remember from last week.

The Midtown Boot Boys were the headline act at Aryan Fest 1988, that racist woodstock that Tom Metzger held on a farm in Oklahoma.

And it turns out that concert in 1988 wasn't a one-off thing.

When I mentioned it last week, it was really just because I saw it in an old issue of Metzger's newsletter and I thought the name was funny.

I didn't expect to spend all week learning about an Oi band from Oklahoma.

But apparently Metzger was a huge supporter of the Midtown Boot Boys.

A year after that inaugural Aryan Fest, Metzger invited them to headline an event he was calling Aryan Woodstock in Napa, California.

The event ended a day early due to poor attendance and cold rain.

And the band played Aryan Fest again a few months later in 1989.

Issues of Metzger's White Aryan Resistance newsletter offered the band's tapes for sale.

In his Cultural History of the Skinhead Movement, Professor Jack Moore describes a 1988 recording of Metzger hawking the tapes in one of his weekly addresses, writing that Metzger sounds hopelessly square when he describes the album as, quote, a hot tape.

It was an unimaginable crime.

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Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime.

My husband comes back outside and he's shaking and he just looks like he's seen a ghost and he's just in shock.

And he said,

your dad's been killed.

This is Hands Tied, a true crime podcast exploring the murder of Jim Melgar.

Liz's mom had just been found shut in a closet.

Her hands and feet tied up, shouting for help.

I was just completely in shock.

Her dad had been stabbed to death.

It didn't feel real at all.

For more than a decade, Liz has been trying to figure out what happened.

There's a lot of guilt, I think, pushing me, and I just, I want answers.

Listen to Hands Tied on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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A local paper in Tulsa noted in 1988 that the Midtown Boot Boys weren't just a punk band.

They were the center of skinhead organizing and recruitment in the Tulsa area.

And the skinheads they rolled with called themselves War Skins, denoting their affiliation with Metzger's White Aryan Resistance.

That article refers to the local skinhead leader as a man named Rip,

which was the pseudonym used by Daniel Roosh.

The Oklahoma Separatist, a racist magazine published by Oklahoma Klansman Joe Grego, named Daniel Roosh Racist of the Month in their July 1988 issue, offering praise for his music, artwork, and propensity for violence.

Rip works diligently in the field of skinhead recruiting.

He is a longtime veteran of the Tulsa streets and is well known for his hard-driving lifestyle.

Rip's support of the KKK, war, and the Aryan nations have been exemplary.

And yes, girls, he is a single man.

We feel that his example is a fine one for others to follow.

This mention in 1988 of Roosh being a skinhead organizer who is also active in the Klan, White Aryan Resistance, and the Aryan Nations is fascinating.

You might just slide right over a description like that.

Lots of guys are in more than one hate group.

What's so special about that?

But this is unique.

This silly little racist of the month column actually captures a turning point in the movement.

Tiffany Travis's history of the American Skinhead Movement notes that skinheads in Tulsa were the first to openly affiliate with paramilitary groups and the Aryan nations.

She doesn't name the Midtown Boot Boys in particular, but she's talking about Tulsa in 1988.

She's talking about Daniel Rouch.

In 1987, Tom Metzger started trying to organize skinheads in California.

The first chapter of War Skins started out there in 1987.

And a year later, we're seeing these local news reports in Oklahoma about Tulsa Skins calling themselves War Skins.

Travis' book credits Metzger as being the first big-name white supremacist to embrace the potential of skinhead culture and welcome them into the movement.

Metzger is quoted saying, I give them guidance on the law to stay out of trouble, and I give them our ideology.

They have their own subculture and tampering with it would destroy it.

Metzger helped skinhead groups set up post office boxes to use for recruitment and networking with other racist organizations, and he set up white Aryan resistance phone lines in their cities.

By the late 80s, leaderless resistance was the name of the game, and Metzger thought he could use racist skinheads to his advantage.

They would spread his message, attract rowdy, youthful audiences he could recruit from,

and they would carry out acts of racist violence that wouldn't trace directly back to him.

He quickly realized he'd made a mistake, though.

In 1988, war skins in Portland murdered Mulageda Seurat.

By 1989, War Skins in California, Texas, and Oklahoma were committing hate crimes at an alarming rate, and the FBI was starting to round them up.

He'd been trying to quietly extricate himself from the skinhead movement when a lawsuit brought by Mulageda Seurat's family took him for everything he had.

A jury in Oregon didn't buy the leaderless resistance defense.

Travis's book attributes this effort to organize skinheads directly to Metzger personally.

And that's fair.

It's accurate.

It was being done at his direction, and when it started in California, he had a personal role in it.

But the person actually directly responsible for organizing the skins in Oklahoma was almost certainly Metzger's Midwest lieutenant, Dennis Mahon.

By 1990, Dennis Mahon had moved to Catoosa, just outside of Tulsa.

And all of a sudden, the local skinheads have ties to the Klan, the Aryan nations, and white Aryan resistance, just like Dennis.

And when Tulsa skinheads got rounded up by the FBI, there's Dennis on the witness stand, testifying that he'd been friends with Daniel Roosh for years.

In his own newsletter later that month, Dennis Mahon said he was organizing local Klansmen to sell their guns to raise money for Roosh's defense.

But there would be no defense, despite Dennis Mahon's confident statements to the press that the case was pure persecution of the skinheads for their beliefs.

Daniel Roosh entered a guilty plea in January 1991 and was sentenced to 42 months.

With time served and good behavior, he was released in November of 1993.

Unfortunately for the Midtown Boot Boys, though, they only got their bassist back.

The band's vocalist, Christopher Jones, received a slightly longer sentence, and he had to serve time for an assault brought by the state of Oklahoma first.

One of the other skinheads sentenced alongside them, a man named Michael Lewis Lawrence, was given nine years,

on top of the four years he was already serving in Texas for a separate hate crimes case involving skinheads in Dallas.

When Lawrence went to trial in Texas, one of his co-conspirators testified that they had been attempting to reenact Kristallnacht on the 50th anniversary of the 1938 pogroms in Germany.

When the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the convictions in the Texas case, the opinion notes that Aryan Fest 88 was a pivotal moment, writing,

After defendants attended an Aryan Fest in June 1988, during which various speakers encouraged skinhead groups to become the backbone and foot soldiers of the white supremacist movement, the group became more determined to use violence to achieve its philosophical objectives.

That speaker was Tom Metzger.

At that hearing in 1990 to determine if Daniel Rouch could be granted bond on charges of racially motivated assault, he admitted to the judge that he had written the lyrics, quote, throw a boot party for the left-wing commie scum,

and quote,

We find a drunken N-word and beat him black and blue.

Lyrics that do describe the crimes he's accused of.

From what I can piece together of the band's discography, the track Tulsa Tonight, which seems to describe the crimes half the band went to prison for, was actually recorded after they served their time.

The streets of those are us tonight!

Shined up, lad,

ready to fight!

Skinny rolling toss it tonight!

I may be a bit prejudiced in my assessment of the band's music, in part because the lyrics are violently racist, but also I'm just not a huge fan of OI music, this particular subgenre of punk.

It all kind of sounds the same to me.

I watched several hours of footage from Aryan Fest 1988 and 1989,

and honestly, I couldn't actually tell which of the acts was the Midtown Boot Boys because they all sound the same to me.

Track listings for their tapes show songs with titles like Blood Will Run and Downright Hateful.

When Hitler's deputy Fuhrer, Rudolf Hess died, they honored him with a song called Sleep Well, Rudolf Hess.

And they praised the crimes of the Nazi terrorist group The Order in their song, Free the Order.

The band had to go on hiatus in 1991 because Daniel Roosch, the bassist, and Christopher Jones, the vocalist, both went to prison after pleading guilty to civil rights violations and hate crimes.

When Roosch got out in 1993, he and the drummer, a man named Stacey, started a metal band called Berserker, playing under that name until getting the Midtown Boot Boys back together when Jones was released in 1996.

It's not completely clear when Stacey became the band's drummer, but it must have been after their previous drummer testified against the skinheads in Texas.

As of 2013, Christopher Jones owed Daniel Roosh's sister more than $16,000 in child support.

And I can't find any information about whether or not her restraining order against Jones impacted the band at all.

It really was was a family affair, though.

Shortly after Daniel Rouche got out of prison, he married Boot Boys guitarist Toni Loretti's sister.

But this is an episode about Dennis Mahon, and I don't think Dennis Mahon was ever in a punk band.

In footage of the Midtown Boot Boys set at Aryan Fest 1989, The camera pans slowly over a solidly middle-aged looking Dennis, bobbing his head, slightly off beat.

I couldn't find the end of this thread, but it seems like Dennis Mahon didn't stay friends with the skinheads forever.

An article published by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1999 makes a passing mention of the time that Dennis Mahon was beaten and stabbed by a group of skinheads in Georgia, but it doesn't say when that happened.

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In 1990, a young racist in Germany wrote Dennis Mahon a letter.

Karsten Szapanski was a 20-year-old skinhead from Berlin.

He was sharing an apartment with Andreas Pohl, a Nazi skinhead who'd spent most of the 80s as the drummer in one of Germany's oldest skinhead bands.

Kraft der Freude.

And by the early 90s, Pohl was leading the German neo-Nazi group Nationalist Front.

It's not clear in any of the sources I could find exactly how Sapansky came to write to Mahon,

but it's possible that Pohl's connections with skinhead bands in Britain and the United States played a part.

Soon after they began exchanging letters, Sapansky began publishing a Klan-style newsletter called Das Feuerkreuz, or The Fiery Cross.

It had a bit of original material, information about immigrants in Germany that would be of interest to a German neo-Nazi, but it was almost entirely just translated articles taken from Dennis Mahon's Klan newsletter called The White Beret.

This wasn't the first time American Klan influence had reached Germany, but most of the earlier hotspots of Klan activity in Germany connect back to American service members stationed at U.S.

military bases there.

In the 1960s, the spokesman for the Klan in Germany was a U.S.

Army officer stationed in Bavaria.

In the early 80s, the leader of the Klan in Germany was an American Air Force sergeant named Murray Kockel.

But in 1991, there was a new Klan in town.

In April of that year, 200 neo-Nazis and skinheads arrived in the German town of Hereford.

They were there to celebrate Hitler's birthday.

A few months later, three teenagers were arrested in Neuenrada for throwing rocks at a building that was home to Turkish and Albanian immigrants.

Police confiscated pistols and Molokov cocktails, and one of them had stickers in his pocket, bearing recruitment information for a Klan chapter in Bielefeld.

The Bielefeld chapter seems to have been under the direction of Bernd Schmidt, but in Berlin, Karsten Sepansky was calling himself the grand dragon of the German white knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

In the fall of 1991, there were more than 200 arson attacks targeting immigrants in Germany, focused mainly on housing facilities for asylum seekers.

The attacks culminated in the Hoerswerde riots in September.

After a group of young neo-Nazis was arrested for attacking a Vietnamese street vendor, the group retaliated by attacking a hostel that housed Mozambican contract workers.

Over the next week, the violence escalated.

An apartment building that housed asylum seekers was bombed.

The German government responded by evacuating all of the asylum seekers in Hoers Verde.

Other immigrants left on their own, no longer feeling safe in the town.

The racists had won.

They declared Hoerswerde Ausländerfrei,

free of foreigners.

The violence was contagious.

It wasn't just happening in Hoerswerde.

In the days that followed, hundreds of Romanians fled Leipzig.

A dozen neo-Nazis were arrested in Hereford after bombing several cars outside of a home for asylum seekers.

A Ghanian man was burned to death in Saar-Louis when his apartment was firebombed.

And that's what was happening in Germany when Dennis Mayhan got off a plane in Frankfurt.

He took a nine-day 25-city tour of Germany at the end of September of 1991 at the invitation of Karsten Sapanski.

After visiting the Reichstag building in Berlin, Dennis said,

It was very inspiring to walk up the same steps that Adolf Hitler walked up.

When Mahan MC'd a crossburning an hour south of Berlin, the Heuerswerde riots were ongoing.

As the cross burned, he told the assembled crowd of a few dozen German neo-Nazis that the violence in Heuerswerde was a great victory for Germany.

He later explained to a reporter that the crossburning, quote, called up the spirits of the Waffen-SS and the Teutonic Knights.

The next day, Carson Sopanski drove Dennis Mahon to Saarbrücken, where they attended a screwdriver concert.

After the show, he met with Ian Stewart Donaldson, the front man of the Nazi punk band, and gave him a white beret, the symbol of Dennis' clan group.

I did find contemporary reporting about this trip from both American and German news outlets.

I read accounts of this trip in several books and tracked down the sources those authors cited read those too.

But the most thorough accounting of Dennis Mahon's trip to Germany was written by Dennis himself.

After an exhaustive effort to locate issues of his newsletter, The White Beret,

I only found one.

I know it was published for years,

from maybe 1989 through at least 1995,

but I only found one issue: the December 1991, January 1992 issue.

And I didn't find it in a university special collection or a library database of old extremist literature.

I didn't find it on the internet archive or in some old ADL special report.

The person who held on to a hard copy of this old Klan newsletter for three decades was Dennis Mahon's twin brother, Daniel Mahon.

And in 2022, this issue was among the archival materials that Daniel Mahon provided to an Adam Waughan splinter group that was trying to digitize and preserve important artifacts of right-wing terrorist history.

Not to spoil the ending, but Daniel Mahon was arrested and charged in connection with that 2004 bombing in Arizona.

But unlike his brother, he was acquitted.

Daniel Mahon is, legally speaking, completely innocent.

He's He's never been convicted of a crime.

So I'm very intrigued by this relatively recent contact he seems to have had with today's aspiring Nazi terrorists.

I wonder how often they talk.

That lone issue of the White Beret that I was able to find goes into great detail about Dennis Mahon's travels in September of 1991.

He describes his visit to the site of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, writing that he, quote, had a real laugh at the wild stories.

And he says that compared to American prisons, the work camp was closer to a Marriott or a Hilton.

He claims to have urinated on a memorial to Holocaust victims that was placed at the site of the camp's crematorium.

The newsletter also includes an advertisement for Bob Matthews Memorial T-shirts, honoring Robert J.

Matthews, the leader of the order who died in a standoff with the FBI FBI in 1984.

The shirts cost just $15,

payable by money order to a man named Drew in Ontario.

Readers were also told that they could send a money order to a P.O.

box in Hayden Lake, Idaho for some, quote, good news, and they'd receive in return an updated list of celebrities who had contracted HIV.

An announcement towards the end of the newsletter recommends subscribing to a new publication from Canada's Heritage Front.

That's a bit of foreshadowing for Dennis.

In 1993, he would try to visit the publication's author, Wolfgang Droge,

but the Canadian government intercepted him at the airport and deported him.

Not long after Dennis Mahon's tour of Germany, his host, Karsten Sapanski, attacked a school teacher from Nigeria at a nightclub in Brandenburg.

He and nearly a dozen others surrounded the man, kicking and punching him until he lost consciousness.

When a waitress tried to intervene, one of the men said, we'll kill him.

He's not human anyway.

And as the beating escalated, Sepansky reportedly tried to get a chant of, Ku Klux Klan, Ku Klux Klan, going as the punches landed.

They dragged the man outside and tried to set him on fire, but his coat wouldn't catch.

They threw him, unconscious, into a nearby lake instead.

An employee from the nightclub was able to pull him out of the water before he drowned, but the man was in a coma for days.

It was while he was in prison for this attempted murder that Karsten Sapansky became an informant for the German police.

When he was called to testify in 2014 in the trial for the National Socialist Underground murders, he was asked about that crossburning in 1991.

He agreed that the point had been to spread fear.

By 1992, Dennis Mahon was living in Tulsa, and he tried his hand at politics again.

Despite the abject failure to even get any attention when he ran for alderman in Northmore a few years earlier, Dennis was one of nearly 60 people who threw his hat into the ring for the special election after Tulsa Mayor Roger Randall resigned in 1992.

He didn't win, obviously.

The county GOP chair said, the Republican Party will do anything and everything to distance itself from the message this particular candidate has,

adding that it was obvious that Mahon was only running to get a platform to spread his message of Aryan resistance.

He's in the paper a few other times that year, mostly related to his efforts to recruit new members to a Klan chapter in Madison, Wisconsin, of all places.

He set up a dial-a-racist hotline up there to aid in those efforts, and for some reason, the Capitol Times newspaper in Madison published lengthy excerpts from the recorded messages, slurs and all.

He also received a cease and desist letter from an attorney representing the company that owns the rights to the Garfield comic strip after he published an issue of the white beret with the cartoon cat on the cover.

The newspaper doesn't say what Garfield was doing, but I'd be willing to stake at least 10 bucks that it's a picture of Garfield wearing a Klan robe or giving a Nazi salute or something distasteful like that.

Those articles in Wisconsin quote a local man who disputes Dennis' claim that the dialer racist hotline was getting a lot of calls.

You can't really take him at his word, considering he told the paper that he wasn't a member of any hate groups, despite the fact that he was running the Klan hotline out of his home.

But he says he's only received about a dozen calls in total.

which is a far cry from the hundreds per week that Mahon was boasting about.

So maybe the Nylar Racist hotline wasn't a phenomenally effective recruitment tool.

But we do know at least one person whose entire life changed after she called Dennis's hotline.

In 1994, Carol Howe got hurt.

She would later claim that she'd been pushed off a building by a gang of black men.

Other versions of the story have her jumping off a roof to escape, but still she's claiming it's because she was being chased by these mysterious and frightening black men, conjuring the ultimate boogeyman in the mind of the racist, a beautiful white woman coming to harm at the hands of black men.

This is her origin story.

She told this version of events to explain why she became a Nazi.

And this is the version of Carol's story that exists almost everywhere.

Even sources that note that you should view this with some skepticism don't offer any alternative explanation for Carol Howe's broken feet.

And those were real.

She was on crutches for most of that year.

In an Audible original miniseries published last year, investigative journalist John Ronson finally solved this mystery.

Carol Howe's ex-husband, Greg, explains to Ronson in an interview that they'd been drinking in a public park around Easter of 1994.

A local Catholic church was putting on their annual passion play in the park, so there was a bit of set dressing set up.

They saw a group of kids climbing the scenery and jumping off of it, and Carol thought it looked fun.

So she tried it.

But she landed badly, breaking bones in both of her feet.

Greg doesn't specify exactly what it was that Carol jumped off of, just that it was something set up in the park for the passion play.

A passion play, if you're not familiar, depicts the story of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I've never been to a live passion play, so I can't tell you with ironclad certainty what the most common pieces of set decoration might be if you were to put one on in a public park.

But the only only thing I can think of that would be big enough to jump off of and hurt yourself like that is the cross itself.

So the question I'm asking myself is, did Carol Howe break her feet drunkenly jumping off of a cross?

Is her racist origin story of white victimhood and martyrdom just a cover for goofing off on a giant cross?

Because that would be very funny.

If you grew up in Tulsa and you ever went to the Easter pageant at Chandler Park, do let me know what you think Carol jumped off of.

After her injury, Carol Howe didn't leave the house for weeks.

She had to have surgery to repair the damage to her feet.

and Greg says her doctors prescribed her any kind of pills she asked for.

So she laid in bed all day taking pain pills and calling in to the dial-a-racist hotline to listen to the messages.

And after a few weeks of doing this, she decided she needed to meet the man whose voice she had been listening to every day.

They spoke on the phone a few times before meeting in a restaurant in Tulsa.

Carol left her husband soon after.

Carol Howe was 20 years younger than Dennis Mahon.

And if you ignore the giant swastika tattoo, she was very beautiful.

She was the daughter of a very wealthy man and had been a debutante in Tulsa.

Dennis Mahon told John Ronson that he really did try not to fall in love with Carol.

He saw a lot of potential in her.

He wanted to mold her into the perfect mouthpiece for the movement.

She was a beautiful and intelligent young woman, educated and well-spoken.

He wanted to get her on TV.

After he showed her how to make bombs, they set some off in the woods together.

Dennis said she was so thrilled by the explosions that they had sex immediately.

But the relationship soured quickly.

In August, just four months after they met, Carol went to the courthouse in Tulsa to take out a restraining order against him.

She'd gone to the police after he raped her, she says.

and then he started leaving her threatening messages, saying if she pulled away from the movement, he'd have to neutralize her.

And he really did leave Carol Howe threatening messages in August of 1994.

John Ronson was able to get access to some of those and they're included in that Audible miniseries.

But two weeks after she filed for the restraining order, she didn't show up to court for the hearing.

So the judge dismissed the petition.

And that was okay with Carol.

She was ready to get close to Dennis again,

but not because she'd forgiven him for sexually assaulting her.

Two days after she reported the assault, she was approached by agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

The next time she saw Dennis,

Carol Howe was an ATF informant.

By this time, Dennis was already a fixture around a little spot out in the country about two hours southeast of the city.

He was still living in Tulsa, but for a few years now, he'd been spending weekends down there in his Airstream trailer.

And in 1994, Dennis Mahon and Carol Howe started spending a lot more time together down in Elohim City.

And that, I'm afraid, is a story you'll have to come back for.

We Little Guys is a production of CoolZone Media and iHeartRadio.

It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.

Special thanks this episode goes to Dr.

Michelle Kahn for pointing me in the direction of Karsten Sapanski.

Most of the material about his relationship with Dennis Mahon was in German, and I would not have been able to find it without his name as a starting point.

So, thank you, Michelle.

Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.

The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.

The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.

You can email me at WeirdLittleGuyspodcast at gmail.com.

I will definitely read it, but I probably will not 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 one of my Weird Little Guys.

This is an iHeart podcast.