A Man in Good Standing --With a Strange Legacy

Richard J. Cotter Jr. seemed to be a member in good standing of the Boston establishment: Phillips Exeter, Harvard and then Harvard Law, service in World War II, a stint as an assistant state attorney general, then private practice.

At his death, though, it became clear that his politics were way out on the fringe.

Shocking some of those who knew him, the lawyer left more than $650,000 of his $5.4-million estate to white supremacist and anti-Semitic causes and figures, including the author of the book “The Hitler We Loved and Why.”

Robert Leikind, executive director of the Anti-Defamation League in Boston, called the will “a startling legacy.” “These are not groups to be trifled with. They can be extreme, and they can be not only dangerous, but inspire people in the most fundamentally undemocratic principles,” he said.

Cotter’s executor, friend and legal colleague, Donald O. Smith, said he was amazed.

“I think Cotter’s concerns, perhaps with regard to communism, may have led him into a position sympathetic to people with an affiliation for the Nazi regime. Having never discussed any of this with Mr. Cotter, you should probably understand that I’m just speculating,” Smith said.

Kathleen Pyle, who cared for Cotter’s beloved horses for 23 years, said she cannot square his bequests with the man she knew. “He very much loved nature and animals, and that’s where he got most of his happiness. He kept a lot to himself,” she said.

Cotter’s niece, Diana Moran Chabrier, said, however, she was not surprised.

“He was a person who is perhaps an extreme example of a person who showed different faces to different parts of his life. He kept extreme right-wing propaganda on the bookshelves of his house. It was not something he tried to keep secret,” Chabrier said.

Cotter was 81 when he died in March 1999. His only marriage ended in divorce, and he had no children.

The son of a prominent insurance lawyer, Cotter moved comfortably in Boston society. At Harvard he was a friend of John F. Kennedy. He had an unremarkable career in private practice, mostly as a trial lawyer litigating business matters. He left money to care for his horses, to friends and to his niece.

But also among the beneficiaries was William L. Pierce, the white-supremacist author of “The Turner Diaries,” a novel that prosecutors said inspired Timothy J. McVeigh’s 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.

Pierce, who got $25,000 in the will, said he knew Cotter for about 30 years but would give no other details. “Mr. Cotter was a gentleman and a friend, and that’s all I really have to say,” he said in a telephone interview from his West Virginia home.

Cotter left about $500,000 to James K. Warner, leader of the Louisiana-based New Christian Crusade Church. Warner is a founding member of the American Nazi Party who calls Jews “sons of the devil” and is a close friend of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

Cotter also left $100,000 to Ernst Zundel, a Canadian who in the early 1970s wrote pro-Nazi materials under the name Christof Friedrich, including the book “The Hitler We Loved and Why.”