Duke Admits Bilking Backers

David Duke, the onetime Ku Klux Klansman and politician whose vitriolic crusade for white power and anti-Semitism seared an ill-fated trail through Louisiana government, pleaded guilty Wednesday to mail fraud and filing a false tax return.

The 52-year-old Duke has spent the last two years drumming up support in Russia for activists that he hoped would lead a worldwide wave of white supremacy.

In a plea-bargain with Louisiana prosecutors, he faces up to 15 months in prison and $10,000 in fines for bilking supporters out of hundreds of thousands of dollars and lying about his earnings. For 1998, the New Orleans native told tax collectors that he had earned less than $19,000, according to a federal indictment. In fact, he earned more than $65,000 that year.

From 1993 to 1999, the former state senator signed and mailed pleas for help -- claiming that his home and savings were about to be consumed by a pending lawsuit. But prosecutors say Duke wasn’t in financial trouble. He pocketed the checks and cash that came pouring in, or gambled the money away in Las Vegas, Mississippi and the Bahamas, prosecutor Jim Letten said.

Federal authorities had been investigating Duke since 1999 and negotiating with his lawyer while he traveled overseas. Duke recently returned to the United States to visit his ailing father in New Jersey, then arrived in New Orleans to appear before U.S. District Judge Eldon E. Fallon. He is free until his March sentencing.

Duke’s strange and tumultuous rise began at Louisiana State University, where he draped his room in Nazi memorabilia and gave the first of uncounted speeches about white power and Jewish conspiracy. He eventually softened his Nazi affiliations, joined the ranks of the Klan and became grand wizard in 1975.

Over the years, he became notorious for his outbursts. He smeared his features in blackface and disrupted a 1976 Louisiana legislative ceremony honoring a black Reconstruc- tion-era governor. He ran for the state Senate and lost. He was linked to a riot in Jefferson Parish, and to the disruption of a civil rights march in Georgia.

In 1980, he left the Klan and started the splinter National Assn. for the Advancement of White People. He ran for president in 1988 and lost again.

Duke finally achieved elected office in 1989 as a Republican, when he beat out a complacent incumbent to be elected state senator from the New Orleans suburb of Metairie. As a legislative hand, he was totally ineffective -- not one of his bills ever got out of committee.

The next year, Duke collected 43.5% of the vote in the primary for U.S. Senate but lost anyway. And in 1991, he humiliated the Republican Party and Louisiana liberals alike by beating GOP incumbent Buddy Roemer in the gubernatorial primary, but he went on to lose to Democrat Edwin W. Edwards.

Duke’s campaigns rarely turned on overt intolerance, but relied instead on the coded language that has sprung up in the New South to soften the edges of racism. Duke railed against urban crime rates, welfare dependence and affirmative action.

“In his own way, he was effective in voicing some of the fears and alienations that many white people in the lower and middle classes feel,” said Michael Kurtz, dean of Southeastern Louisiana University’s graduate school.

“He came along, I hate to say it, at the right moment,” Kurtz said.

But after his failed bid for governor, Duke faded from the state’s political landscape.

In 1999, he began a tour of Eastern Europe, where he stumped for white power and worked on a pair of books -- “The Ultimate Supremacism: An Examination of the Jewish Question” and “For the Love of My People.”

Behind the lectern, he rallied support for “racially aware” parties that he hoped would set off a “domino effect that would cascade throughout the whole world,” according to an essay posted on the Web site of the National Organization for European American Rights, a group led by Duke.

The manifesto issues somber warnings on the perils of racially mixed marriages, the “Jewish-dominated news and entertainment media” and lower white birthrates.

“Our race faces a worldwide genetic catastrophe,” Duke writes. “Anyone who truly understands this must shoulder the immense responsibility associated with this impending catastrophe.... Our race will survive, and together we shall go to the stars!”