$10 Million Sought in White Supremacist Trial

Crusading civil rights lawyer Morris Dees asked a jury Friday to punish San Diego County white supremacist Tom Metzger for allegedly using a brainwashed young racist to incite Oregon skinheads to kill a black man.

During a 75-minute closing argument in the trial of a wrongful-death lawsuit filed on behalf of the dead man’s uncle, Dees told the jury that a large damages award would serve for years as a deterrent to white supremacy groups.

Dees asked for more than $10 million in damages against Metzger, founder of a group called the White Aryan Resistance, and the other defendants: Metzger’s son John, two of the killers and WAR itself.

“The verdict that you are going to render . . . is going to have very far-reaching effects,” Dees said. “We hope that verdict will tell Tom Metzger and all other people who peddle hate and violence that this jury says, ‘No, we’re going to stop you right here.’ ”

But, during a brief closing statement of his own, John Metzger, 22, said he and his father had no control over three Oregon skinheads who fatally beat and kicked Ethiopian student Mulugeta Seraw outside the victim’s Portland apartment in 1988.

John Metzger said the case was a conspiracy by Dees and the government to harass white supremacists.

“You see this conspiracy,” he told the jury. “It’s not something we dream up in our heads. It’s real.”

The elder Metzger, faced with late-afternoon time limits, chose to delay his closing argument until Monday. Elden Rosenthal, Dees’ co-counsel, is expected to rebut the Metzgers’ arguments late Monday before the case is sent to the jury of 10 whites, a Japanese-American and a Hawaiian.

Dees’ Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., and the Anti- Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, filed suit on behalf of Seraw’s uncle.

Dees, famed for winning a $7-million judgment that bankrupted an Alabama Ku Klux Klan group in 1981, said Tom Metzger brainwashed a skinhead named Dave Mazzella and then sent him to Portland to encourage other young racists to attack minorities.

“The baseball bat that was swung and hit Mulugeta Seraw in the head started in Fallbrook, Calif.,” Metzger’s hometown, Dees said in his dramatic Southern drawl.

Repeatedly referring to Metzger, 52, as a “grown man” and to his racist followers as “little skinheads,” Dees sought to portray the former California Ku Klux Klan grand dragon as a cult leader.

Metzger arranged for Mazzella to be married in a secret “Aryan wedding,” in which Mazzella took a lie detector test and in which his bride had to prove her Aryan ancestry, Dees said.

“If that ain’t brainwashing, if that ain’t a cult, I don’t know what is,” Dees said.

He said that, after Mazzella came to Portland in 1988, he taught skinheads how to attack minorities “because Tom (Metzger) had told him that’s what you do.”

Mazzella was Dees’ star witness, testifying that Metzger encouraged him to teach violence to Oregon skinheads. The three skinheads who pleaded guilty to killing Seraw all met with Mazzella in 1988.

Dees also pointed to the testimony of one of the last witnesses, Oregon neo-Nazi Rickey Cooper, who testified Friday that violent attacks on minorities increased in Portland after Mazzella and other skinheads came to the city.

The Alabama lawyer belittled the conspiracy theory put forward repeatedly by the Metzgers.

“His mind--twisted and warped and sick as it is--is paranoid,” Dees said of Tom Metzger.

John Metzger said the trial is “ridiculous.”

“I never sent Dave Mazzella up to Portland one bit,” he said. “That is perjured testimony.”

The younger Metzger told jurors he would neither “bore” them, nor “insult your intelligence” by making a lengthy closing argument.

Earlier in the day, Metzger failed in an effort to force testimony from Dees.

Metzger said he wanted to question Dees about allegations that he has bribed witnesses in other cases. Circuit Judge Ancer Haggerty said that would be inappropriate.

“If we don’t get him here, we’re going to get him somewhere else,” Metzger shouted after Haggerty refused to force Dees to testify.

When Elden Rosenthal, Dees’ co-counsel, asked if Metzger’s remark was a threat, Metzger said, “I’m talking about in court, Mr. Rosenthal.”

Dees, sometimes called the “man who broke the Klan” because of the 1981 judgment, was once targeted for assassination by a Northwest white supremacy group.