Arrested With Gusto, Vindicated in Silence

The strange legal odyssey of Doris Nadal of North Hills, who came for a moment to symbolize the White Supremacist Next Door, ended quietly and without fanfare, quite the opposite of how it began.

In August, a federal appellate court reversed Nadal’s conviction on conspiracy to manufacture, transfer and possess illegal guns, deeming the evidence against her insufficient. After 23 months in federal custody, many thousands of dollars in legal bills, the loss of her house and her job, Doris Nadal went free. Not a single reporter nor news photographer was present when she walked out of prison in Dublin, Calif. Nor, of course, did anyone offer an apology.

How different from the day of her arrest--July 15, 1993--when she found herself in a bull’s-eye of attention--targeted first by FBI agents and cops, who arrested her as she drove to work, then reporters and photographers who had been alerted that cops had nabbed a ring of white supremacists bent on starting race wars in post-riot Los Angeles.

“Are you a skinhead?” cried a reporter as federal agents escorted her from jail.

The 41-year-old accountant, with her shoulder-length blond hair and tasteful diamond studs, in her tidy little white pleated dress with its green-and-white striped jacket, stared in disbelief.

At the time, she says, she had no idea that her arrest was being played in the media as part of a racist conspiracy, no idea that her husband, Christian Nadal, had also been arrested, no idea that the man with whom her husband had been exchanging machine guns, silencers and racist chatter was a paid government informant.

But prosecutors said she was present for some gun transactions, that she knew about them and participated in them. After hearing tapes of conversations in which her husband made ugly racist remarks to the informant, after hearing a prosecutor insist that “Somebody who detests racism would also detest him [her husband],” a jury convicted Nadal of conspiracy in connection with 31 machine guns and five silencers. She was sentenced to 37 months in prison.

Her husband, convicted of 15 counts, got eight years. The appellate court found no grounds on which to overturn his conviction.

I can’t know what is in someone’s heart. Nadal says she is not a racist, but that her husband has “racist feelings.” It may be distasteful, upsetting and disgusting to us, but the fact is, in America, it’s not illegal to hate people. At least it’s not supposed to be.

*

Doris Nadal contacted me a couple of years ago, before her trial started. She was reeling from the charges against her, befuddled by seeing herself identified in national magazines as a white supremacist, lumped in with people who’d been accused of plotting to kill Rodney King and blow up a prominent African American church.

I’d written a column about our pervasive lack of trust in the government, quoting a June 1993 Los Angeles Times poll in which only 2% of respondents said they trust the government to do what is right all the time.

I suppose she thought I’d be sympathetic to her claims of innocence. I wasn’t at the time. I thought, despite my own cynicism about the government, that she was probably guilty. Certain phrases that cropped up in the government’s assertions--white supremacy, skinheads, race wars, machine guns, silencers--pack a potent emotional wallop for most of us.

What makes her story compelling now is that she paid a huge price for what turned out to be nothing: She lost everything. She missed her daughter’s wedding, the birth of her first grandchild, her son’s college graduation. She feels too drained to work and doesn’t qualify for unemployment.

Now it is apparent that she was victimized by two forces--the government and her husband. She has no use for the government but manages to remain upbeat about her marriage.

“I am mad at him,” she says, “but I try to suppress that.”

*

They say that prison hardens you, but what Doris Nadal experienced, oddly enough, was a kind of softening, a blossoming of compassion she had never before experienced.

At the time of her arrest, the Nadals were earning about $100,000 a year. They had nice cars, a boat, a home in North Hills. The fence along one side of the yard was a perfect canvas for local vandals, who defaced it with paint half a dozen times in as many weeks in early 1993.

The Nadals were furious, and scared. After they painted over wet graffiti one night, someone shot out three $900 picture windows in the front of their A-frame house. Cops, she says, advised them to wait a little longer before painting over next time.

“I was like, ‘Why are the mothers letting the children out at night to do this?’ ” Nadal says. “And why are the kids so angry?”

Her friendships in prison, mostly with women convicted on drug charges, gave her a new way of looking at the problem.

“Now I see the other side of it,” she says. “Seeing these people in prison and thinking about their children and how angry their children are, now I understand why the gangs congregate, why they graffiti and trash the cars. There is an anger there and a frustration. That you can’t change the system, that you can’t do anything to help yourself and so they’re fighting back and it’s the only way they know how. Nobody could ever have explained that to me. I was so narrow-minded, I only saw my side of it, my wall.”

She’d like to write a book about her experience; she’d like to help some of the women she befriended in prison, women she has come to think of as victims of Draconian drug laws, overzealous prosecutors, institutionalized racism.

I think she has something to say.

After all, her first thought in jail was this:

“There were so many black people in there that I thought, my God! The government has the gall to say that I’m the white supremacist? Something’s wrong with this picture.”