The other day, trying to answer a reporter's question, I came across someone I hadn't thought of in ages. Today, doing unrelated research in my old Idaho files, I came across my records of him.
Because he's one of the nastiest persons I've encountered, I thought I'd share.
Because he's one of the nastiest persons I've encountered, I thought I'd share.
I'm talking about white supremacist Keith Gilbert and his long, awful extremist career. In the 1960s he served time in California for receiving stolen explosives & for assault with a deadly weapon. He later claimed he had gotten dynamite so he could try to kill MLKjr.
By the 1980s he was a follower of Richard Butler's Aryan Nations, living in Post Falls, Idaho.He later formed his own tiny groups, such as the Social Nationalistic Aryan People's Party and the Restored Church of Jesus Christ Aryan Nations
He occasionally tried to run for local office or contrive publicity stunts. He was a member of the white supremacist Liberty Bell network of computer BBSs.
One of his followers killed three perceived minorities in Cleveland in 1982.
One of his followers killed three perceived minorities in Cleveland in 1982.
In 1983, Gilbert himself was convicted of threatening to kill a multiracial teen; in 1985 he was accused of spitting on a 5-year old mentally disabled black girl (the family decided not to press charges). That year he was also charged on 35 counts of felony welfare fraud.
He was convicted--the jury took only two hours--and sentenced to nine years in prison. The federal government also opened up a civil rights investigation into allegations he had interfered w/an adoption agency for minority children. In 1988 he got an 18-month sentence for that.
After getting out of prison, Keith Gilbert moved to Seattle and generally avoided the public spotlight, though his views hadn't changed (he named his dog after Hitler's dog, for example; years earlier he had named a different dog "N_____ Eater").
In 2005, federal agents raided his property and arrested him for his huge stash of guns--over 70 of them, many of them full auto (and all of them illegal for him, a convicted felon, to have). He also had 20,000 rounds of ammo. It turned out he was part of an illegal gun ring.
He ended up being sentenced to 8 years in prison (he was 66 at the time) on 11 counts of conspiracy, machine gun possession, possession of unregistered firearms, and being a felon in possession of a firearm.
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