Ex-Klan Leader Says Only He Set Up Cross-Burning
An ex-Ku Klux Klan leader testified Thursday that he was the sole organizer of a 1983 cross-burning in Lake View Terrace, and said he told 20 white supremacists who attended that they would not be arrested.
“It was just our little memorial (for a slain police officer),” Frank Silva testified in the trial of four Ku Klux Klan members charged in connection with the event. Silva, who is serving a 40-year prison term on federal racketeering charges stemming from a nationwide wave of racist violence, told the Los Angeles Superior Court jury that he spent months planning the “Klan ritual cross-lighting.”
To avoid legal problems, Silva said, he obtained fire permits from county and city authorities to have a barbecue. “I felt it was my right as a citizen, if I had a permit, to do whatever I wanted to do on my private property,” he testified.
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