Revisionists’ Founder Sued for $7.5 Million

History, someone once said, is a collection of recorded facts.

So it’s somewhat ironic that a group of self-proclaimed historical revisionists would end up quarreling over its own history, including a chapter that threatens to tear them apart, or at least keep them in courtrooms for years to come.

The group is the Costa Mesa-based Institute for Historical Review, founded in 1979 by Willis Carto, whom the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and other Jewish organizations have labeled “the No. 1 anti-Semite in America.”

A wiry man of 69, Carto has been called “the spine of the international Holocaust denial movement.”

But at the moment, Carto is a defendant, facing off in San Diego County Superior Court against his former associates, the current brain trust of the Institute for Historical Review, who are suing him for $7.5 million.

The trial is scheduled to begin today in Vista, in northern San Diego County. Carto, who was ousted from the institute in 1993, now lives in nearby Escondido, where he continues to be involved in a variety of controversial causes.

Carto’s estranged colleagues allege he embezzled the millions from the Legion for the Survival of Freedom, the institute’s Houston-based parent company, which was also Carto’s invention.

The litigation, however, doesn’t stop there.

Both sides simply shake their heads when asked the number of lawsuits pending between them. Is it eight? Or 12? No one seems to know. In some, Carto is defendant; in others, he is plaintiff. At the very least, the fine print reads like the messiest of divorces.

Law enforcement has been involved, with an Orange County judge ruling last year that the Costa Mesa Police Department and other agencies were within their rights to seize bank statements, guns and other property--including an autographed portrait of Adolf Hitler--from Carto’s home and that of his chief ally, Henry John Fischer, who plaintiffs say has fled to Italy.

Randall Waier, Carto’s Newport Beach attorney, said his client has never been criminally charged because authorities have no evidence against him.

“This case,” he said, “is nothing more than a power struggle between Carto and the present insiders” of the institute, who include Greg Raven and Mark Weber, his partner and co-plaintiff.

Waier said Carto, who could not be reached for comment, is innocent.

Watching the case with more than passing interest is Morris Casuto, director of the San Diego office of the Anti-Defamation League. Casuto and the league have issued frequent warnings about Carto’s anti-Semitism.

The Anti-Defamation League quotes Carto as having once said, “If Satan himself . . . had tried to create a permanent disintegration of the nations, he could have done no better than to invent the Jews.”

“They call themselves revisionists,” Casuto said, “but they’re not revisionists at all. They’re deniers. They deny the reality of the Holocaust. They are individuals who make excuses for Nazi Germany and who should not only know better but be ashamed of themselves.”

In a recent newsletter, the league said Carto’s “bigotry is hardly limited to the Holocaust” and he also supports the militia movement through his 41-year-old Liberty Lobby and its newspaper, the Spotlight.

The institute’s fighting factions have managed to wound one another, said Raven, the associate editor of the Journal of Historical Review, the institute’s bimonthly newsletter, who noted that the tennis-like volley of suits and countersuits has taken a toll both financially and emotionally, “not to mention the time we’re spending on this.”

Raven said the institute and its founder still share a litany of like-minded views, not the least of which concerns the circumstances surrounding World War II and its millions of victims.

“We do not deny the existence of the Holocaust,” he said. “That’s a lie put forth by our opposition. We do say the claims of the Holocaust have been exaggerated. We believe there was no Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews during World War II. We also believe there were no Nazi gas chambers, and we also believe that 6 million Jewish victims [of the Holocaust] is an irresponsible exaggeration.”

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Deborah E. Lipstadt, a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, studied the institute and its host of imitators in her recent book, “Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.” Lipstadt called such groups “not great in number but extremely pernicious and dangerous.”

It is necessary for “no one” to try to disprove such groups, Lipstadt said, “but the evidence against them is overwhelming. We have the survivors, who are not even our best sources; we have the bystanders, such as the Polish farmers who lived near the camps who saw the scores of trainloads rolling into towns and leaving empty; the Soviet liberators who documented the devastation of the camps in detail; but most importantly, we have the perpetrators themselves, who acknowledged what happened in an endless stream of documents and interviews. Who are these people to come along 50 years later and say, ‘Ah, but we know better’? It’s absurd.”

Casuto said the “fraud” perpetrated by Raven, Carto and others is “so enormous, so grotesque . . . it’s difficult to know where to begin.”

But fraud is precisely the charge that Raven and his colleagues have leveled against Carto, and what they hope to prove in what could be the first many costly trials.

The institute contends the $7.5 million was left to the parent company in 1985 by the estate of Jean Edison-Farrel, who placed the money in four safe deposit boxes in Switzerland, Asia and the United States. (Carto’s court documents say Edison was the grand-niece of inventor Thomas Alva Edison, but Raven contends the information is false.)

Carto’s counsel said that Edison-Farrel had been a friend of Carto’s and his wife, Elisabeth Carto, and that she moved to Switzerland, no longer wanting to pay income taxes in the United States.

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The suit alleges that Carto and Fischer, the onetime chief ally and co-defendant in the case, went to Switzerland to handle the details of Edison-Farrel’s inheritance but that the money never ended up in the coffers of the institute and hasn’t been found.

Waier, Carto’s lawyer, claims his client never pocketed “a single penny” of Edison-Farrel’s money, which he said went entirely to Carto-backed causes that the late Edison-Farrel supported.

But Raven maintains that, when it comes to Carto, one version of history exists before 1993 and another since he and his colleagues had a falling out.

“All of Carto’s statements prior to 1993 indicate the money was always intended for” the Institute for Historical Review, Raven said.

It was only after October 1993, when Carto was ousted because of personal differences, that “he developed a string of novel theories,” Raven said, “about how the money is really his. But he refuses to be specific about where the money is or how it was spent.”

“The burden of proof is on them,” Waier said, noting that $7.5 million is “a misnomer anyway” and that the after-tax figure of the money in question is actually closer to $3.2 million.

But at some point soon, the case will pass out of the hands of Carto and his detractors and be left to a jury in Vista. In seeking to define the panel’s role, Raven spoke with a touch of irony.

“It is the jury’s job,” he said solemnly, “to determine whose version of the facts . . . they truly believe--and then to act.”