5 Klansmen Accused of Plot to Steal Military Weapons

A federal grand jury has indicted five Ku Klux Klansmen on charges of conspiring to steal U.S. military weapons, explosives and rockets to equip a white supremacist paramilitary unit, the Justice Department announced Thursday.

The indictment, returned in Raleigh, N.C., signals a continuing crackdown by federal agents on thefts of government munitions by drug dealers, motorcycle gangs and radical groups, authorities said.

The case brings to 28 the number of klan and White Patriot Party members charged with various offenses in North Carolina in the last 18 months.

Key Defendant Seized

The indictment, which was returned secretly on Wednesday but unsealed Thursday with the arrest of a key defendant, Stephen Samuel Miller, charged that the klansmen also made plans to kill a veteran civil rights lawyer, Morris Dees of Montgomery, Ala., and that they intended to rob a fast-food restaurant to obtain money to buy weapons.

“We are pleased with the Justice Department and the FBI in bringing down these indictments,” Dees said in Montgomery, where he heads the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“It’s a great relief to know that at least five of the people who want to kill you are behind bars. As long as the rank-and-file klan people get the message that the FBI and the Justice Department are not going to sit on their hands, it lessens the threat we have.”

However, Miller and the others named in the indictment were not specifically charged with attempted murder because that would be a state crime, not a federal crime, officials said. The five, who included Robert Eugene Jackson, Anthony Todd Wydra, Wendell Lee Lane and Simeon Davis--all identified as members of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan or a successor organization, the White Patriot Party--were charged with conspiring to obtain government munitions, an offense punishable by a maximum five-year prison term and $10,000 fine.

Charged Separately

Miller, who investigators said was a leader of the group, was charged separately with two firearms offenses.

The investigation was developed by the Justice Department’s civil rights division with assistance from Treasury agents, Army investigators and police in Fayetteville, N.C., where all five defendants live.

It grew out of a lawsuit Dees brought against the Carolina Knights two years ago, charging that they were harassing and intimidating blacks and were recruiting active-duty Army personnel to help secure U.S. military weapons.

Although the klan settled the lawsuit through a court-approved consent decree in which it agreed to halt any illegal activities, the group was found in civil contempt last July for continuing its actions under a new name, the White Patriot Party.

Alleged Slaying Plot

Authorities said the members subsequently plotted to murder Dees, who is white, and to buy explosives to blow up the Southern Poverty Law Center. Last September, two group members traveled to Alabama for the assassination, authorities said, but no attempt on Dees’ life was made.

The indictment said the group plotted to steal Army missiles, rockets, plastic explosives and M-16 rifles from the U.S. Armory at Wadesboro, N.C., “by whatever means necessary . . . to maintain, train and equip a paramilitary armed force and to further the goals of the white supremacist movement.”

According to the indictment, part of the weapons scheme was discovered in July, 1985, when Wydra approached a man he believed had access to military explosives and equipment but the contact, in fact, was an undercover Fayetteville, N.C., police officer.

Burial of Supplies

A few days later, Wydra and others buried some stolen military supplies in a patch of woods outside Fayetteville, the indictment said.

Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.), who chaired Senate hearings last year into the problem of stolen military munitions, said enforcement efforts should be stepped up to prevent military equipment from “falling into the hands of domestic terrorists or other extremist groups.”