Civil Suit Seeks to Bring Down Metzger Empire

Civil rights organizations have repeatedly failed to silence Tom Metzger, but a seldom-used legal tactic now threatens to financially ruin the white supremacist and bring down the organization he has been building for three decades.

The new tactic--a civil lawsuit filed against Metzger; his son, John, and their national White Aryan Resistance empire--relies on evidence that links the Fallbrook man to three skinheads who, in 1988, murdered a young black man in Portland, Ore., according to previously unpublished documents reviewed by The Times.

No one claims that Metzger wielded the bat that killed the victim of an apparently random racial attack, and no criminal charges are pending against him. But the suit seeks to hold the Metzgers responsible for the slaying because of their alleged role in organizing and encouraging the skinheads and to turn over their financial assets--up to $10 million--to the victim’s family. No trial has been set.

Although Tom Metzger expresses nonchalance over the lawsuit, he is quietly liquidating assets. He no longer owns his house and is negotiating the sale of his television repair company.

In court papers, he claims to have lost thousands of dollars in work because of the lawsuit. He recently stood alone for two hours, invoking the Fifth Amendment during a legal deposition for the case.

John Metzger, head of the Aryan Youth Movement, has filed for protection under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code in San Diego. He claims more than $2,000 in arrears and lists $10 million in potential losses from the civil case as a pending debt.

The American Civil Liberties Union rejected a plea for legal assistance from the Metzgers. So they are defending themselves against allegations that their encouragement played a role in the murder of Mulugeta Seraw, an Ethiopian immigrant living in Portland.

Key evidence shows that the Metzgers were deeply involved in Portland skinhead activities, sending organizers from California to teach young white recruits “how we work.”

Three former members of the Metzger organization, including the ex-vice president of the skinhead faction, are in hiding, apparently to ensure their safety until they can testify that the Metzgers dispatched them to Portland to spread racial hatred.

Despite the suit, Tom Metzger exuded self-confidence during a recent two-hour interview at his Fallbrook home, which is decorated with wall photographs and medals cataloguing his travels in the John Birch Society, the California Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and as a 1980 congressional candidate.

“He ain’t going to beat me,” he said of Morris S. Dees, the Alabama civil rights attorney who is trying to make Metzger pay for Seraw’s death.

“He don’t understand me. I’m a fanatic. It wouldn’t make any difference if I did lose everything, because I wouldn’t lose my fanaticism. And I would be back in business some way, three days after he got a victory.”

Metzger, 51, said he is liquidating his assets in preparation for retirement. However, if he should lose the lawsuit, the move would give him fewer recorded assets to be awarded to the victim’s family.

Dees has patterned the Metzger suit after one against the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama. In that case, he won a $7-million judgment against Klan members after the murder of a black teen-ager in Mobile. Dees successfully argued that the Klan, by encouraging violence and racism, helped bring about the killing.

Although the Klan branch did not have nearly that much money, the victim’s mother was awarded a percentage of its leaders’ future wages, a portion of their real estate and the deed to the group’s headquarters.

Dees declined to discuss the specifics of the Metzger case, saying only, “We intend to prove what we claim in our court papers.”

The lawsuit, filed in October, contends that the Metzgers “intentionally, wantonly and in utter disregard of their societal obligations” deprived Seraw of his civil right to life, and that $10 million in punitive damages would deter “future outrageous conduct of this kind.”

Metzger said the Klan lost because it did not fight hard enough, something he vows to do.

“This is not the Klan, and this is not Alabama,” he said. “Morris Dees may be a big boy in Montgomery, Ala., but out here he ain’t jack.

“And, when I knock this guy out of the saddle, it’ll make me the biggest thing in the country. I’m going to cost this guy so much money he’s going to wish he never came out here. He’s going to get bogged down like the Germans did in Russia. You’ve got another Stalingrad here.”

And, if Metzger loses?

“There’s no money,” Metzger said. “I’ve got a ’72 Chevy station wagon. Oh, and I’ve got a ’79 Datsun truck that’s rusting out in the back.”

Militant Leader

“Tom Metzger is definitely a national figure,” said Leonard Zeskind, research director for the Center for Democratic Renewal, which monitors cults, extremists and groups that espouse racial hatred.

“He is the leader of the most militant wing of the neo-Nazis in the United States. He’s attracted the new young blood out of the skinhead movement. He’s attracted the most militant segments of the Klan factions. He’s building alliances with the folks overseas in Europe who are similar-minded.

“He shouldn’t be taken lightly. People should regard Metzger as the most dangerous of the Klan and Nazi leaders.”

It is that leadership--and specifically Metzger’s alleged encouragement of racial violence--that the lawsuit claims led members of a Portland skinhead group called East Side White Pride to kill Seraw.

Norm Frink, the Multnomah County deputy district attorney who prosecuted the skinheads, said evidence from the criminal case demonstrates that Tom and John Metzger wielded control over the Portland group.

“There is plenty of evidence that their general creed was to assault black people and Jewish people, and that the Metzger organization pressed this belief on East Side White Pride,” Frink said.

Kenneth M. Mieske, Kyle H. Brewster and Steven R. Strasser were young white recruits in the 20-member group, recently formed and newly active in distributing racist literature in Portland’s downtown.

In the early morning on Nov. 13, 1988, Seraw, 28, a driver for a rental-car company, and two black friends by chance encountered three members of East Side White Pride. Both groups had been drinking and, when they clashed on a southeast Portland street, Seraw was clobbered at least three times, suffering head-on blows from a wooden baseball bat.

The skinheads, rallied by their girlfriends’ cries of “Kill him! Kill him!,” fled into the night. Seraw died hours later at a local hospital.

After the killing, two other East Side White Pride members--Dave Mazzella and Michael Barrett--appeared on television to disavow skinhead involvement in the slaying. Police discovered outstanding California arrest warrants against Mazzella and Barrett, and brought them in for questioning.

During lengthy interrogations, the two California skinheads described in detail the life style of East Side White Pride, its organizational efforts and its members’ desire to live the hatred preached by Metzger.

They also named Mieske, Brewster and Strasser as the killers. The three eventually pleaded guilty in the killing and drew minimum prison terms of 9 to 30 years.

Mazzella, then vice president of the Aryan Youth Movement, the official name of the national skinhead organization, served directly under John Metzger. Today, he, Barrett and Gagnon have left Portland and gone into hiding, Frink said.

They have good reason. When Mieske was arrested, he said to police, “Snitches must die! . . . Whoever snitched us off is dead!” Frink said.

Tom Metzger acknowledged that the witnesses were once key members of his white supremacy network, and that he officiated at Mazzella’s wedding. But he said the witnesses were expelled because of involvement with drugs. He said he no longer knows where they are.

“Dave Mazzella went off the screen,” Metzger said. “As they say in radar, he went off the screen.”

Skinhead Recruits

Mazzella arrived in Portland in September, 1988, several skinheads told police, his task to recruit soldiers for the White Aryan Resistance. He was soon infusing East Side White Pride with new passions.

He had a calling card, a handwritten letter from John Metzger to East Side White Pride, mailed one month before the murder and addressed to “Ken Death.” That is the nickname for Mieske, the skinhead whose blows killed Seraw.

“Wanted to drop a line and let you know we would like to open up communication with your group,” the letter said. “You’ll get a feel of how we work when you meet Dave Mazzella and Mike Gagnon. . . .

“We have about a 700 list of supporters, members, etc., and we have 10 chapters around the U.S. We work with any pro-white, anti-drug white group as long as they do not talk.”

Mazzella did not disavow to police his allegiance to the Metzgers. He identified himself as “more or less their spokesman,” a well-placed member of the palace guard for as many as three years, according to documents from the criminal case.

“I’ve been to the house a thousand times,” he said of the Fallbrook Metzger residence, adding that he had talked to the Metzgers “probably about twice a week” since moving to Portland.

He told detectives that Tom and John Metzger provided racist literature and White Aryan Resistance newspapers promoting violence and white power.

“John sends it directly to me,” Mazzella said. “They send me literature, then . . . I give stuff out to my people and my people distribute it.”

The prosecutor’s file contains literature that bears the Fallbrook address, portrays blacks as inferior human beings and fondly recalls Hitler and Nazi regalia. One bulletin, headlined “JEW DWARFS,” pictures a microwave oven and the caption: “There is an oven in YOUR future!”

According to the prosecutor’s documents, Mazzella told police that his mission was to show the East Side White Pride what the Metzgers “teach about the skinhead way.”

“They were really sloppily organized,” Frink said of the Portland group. “They had their heads on straight, and they were going the right way . . . but they were not what I’m used to, a tight-knit group, you know, real tight group (where they) sit down, everyone knows what to do, and they’re real active.”

Police interviewed several female members of East Side White Pride who spoke reverently of the Metzgers. Deanna Johnson told detectives that the Metzgers contacted East Side White Pride members shortly after the killing.

“Deanna told Detective Neuenschwander that someone named Metsker (sic) had called her from California within the last couple of days and told her not to be afraid of the police, to cooperate,” a police report said.

“These people told her to tell the police what they need to know, and that the charges were phony, and when the truth came out the whole problem would go away.”

WAR Headquarters

Tom Metzger points out that Charles Manson’s followers rose to kill after hearing the Beatles’ “White Album,” but that John Lennon and Paul McCartney were never held accountable for murder.

Likewise, Metzger says, his racist literature espouses change but “has nothing to do with going out and physically killing individual black people on the street corner.”

He dismissed the Portland murder as a mere street fight among drunks. Of the skinheads who pleaded guilty, he said, “We didn’t even know those guys.”

“They all say I send people in to do these things. Baloney,” he said. “If all that was true, I’d have been in prison a long time ago.”

In his Fallbrook home, Metzger pulled several knives out of his pockets, placed them on a shelf, and settled into a worn chair. A White Aryan Resistance flag, skull and crossbones on a black field, hung on the wall. Law books lined a shelf. Out back sat the rusting cars, and the small trailer that houses his TV repair business.

During the interview, John, 20, a computer operator at the San Onofre nuclear plant, came home. He walked swiftly past his father, declining to comment on the pending lawsuit.

Metzger is a small man. He is not gray yet; he is not tired. He believes in what he’s doing, he said, even if it endangers his family.

One recent night, an arrow from a high-powered bow shot through his front window, embedding itself in his living room wall, just 2 feet above his easy-chair. The chair was empty at the time, and Metzger is determined to find the attacker.

“We’ve got our feelers out,” he said. “You know, there’s a regular way, and then there’s the other way. You lay a little bread around, and you get some answers.”

From the ashes of his Klan alliances, Metzger has built his new WAR empire, preaching racial separatism from a street dominated by Latino families. “I was here first,” he said. “It was all-white then.”

His newspaper goes to 30,000 readers, with circulation particularly high among prison inmates and the elderly, he said. He hopes to print a Russian-language edition. “We’re pan-nationalists,” he said. “After all, Caucasians are Caucasians.”

Although growing in number, skinheads represent only 10% of his followers, he said. “Most are businessmen and artisans.”

His telephone hot line, operating in 13 cities, receives about 650 calls a day. On a tape airing last week in Portland, Metzger rails against black gang violence in the city. He threatens to bus “darling Negro Crips and Bloods” from Southern California to foment racial aggression with the white majority there.

“WAR has come to the decision that Portland needs even more cultural enrichment,” he screams on the tape. “Boy! We’re going to colorize Portland!”

For now, though, much of Metzger’s time is spent preparing a legal defense.

“I’m not afraid of these guys,” he said of Dees. “He’s got to kill me. That’s the only way he’s going to physically shut me down.

“Otherwise,” he’s just creating a shrewder, more formidable enemy.”

In Portland, some blacks and whites agree that, if Metzger takes a fall, his legacy as a supremacist will march on.

“It will flame an already volatile situation,” said Sylvester Hendricks, a black radio talk show host in Portland. “His followers, if they haven’t attempted violent acts before, will now. They will think he’s been railroaded.”

Mike Fleming, 19, a skinhead from Southern California who heads the United White Front in Portland, put it this way: “All hell will break loose. A lot of white folks will just go haywire.”