The Hate Next Door: Undercover within the New Face of White Supremacy

Copyright © 2023, 2024 by Matson Browning

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This book is a memoir. It reflects the author’s present recollections of experiences over a period of time. Some names and characteristics have been changed, some events have been compressed, and some dialogue has been re-created.

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Contents

Introduction

1: American Nazis: Initial Meeting

2: Going Undercover: Challenge Accepted

3: Hate Groups: A Day at the Park

4: A Question of Faith: A Great Multitude

5: Skinbyrds & Dragons: Skinbyrd Charly

6: Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes: The Cadet

7: Hate Crimes: Cole

8: Mr. Hitler Goes to Washington: To Serve…

9: Border Song: The Coyote

10: Small World: SIN

11: Extremism on Main Street

12: Solutions: Lunch with a Monster

Epilogue

Terms and Symbols to Recognize

Note on the Language Used

Reading Group Guide

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Author

Introduction

Six of them had driven 250 miles to start a war with Mexico.

They were mostly quiet and had been since the start of their long trip. No radio. No bragging about the wetback they’d recently sucker punched or some rant about keeping America pure. The only sound was the car’s tires heading south quickly. There were empty McDonald’s bags and soda bottles and cigarette butts on the car floor. In the trunk lay several hunting rifles with scopes, AR-style semi automatics, and one shotgun.

I was still an hour behind them as my truck rattled down I-10 at 90 miles per hour. My Glock pistol lay heavy, and admittedly consoling, on my hip. I’d also snatched my own shotgun, now loaded and resting beside me in the front seat.

I’d gotten the call that afternoon from a buddy in the Department of Public Safety. He’d asked in short breaths if I was familiar with anyone who owned a red four-door Nissan Sentra. I was, and my whole body clenched like a fist. They were actually doing it.

You gotta get down here, the DPS guy said.

A red Sentra had been spotted loaded with a full crew of skinheads heading south. I’d run back into the house to grab my guns, kiss my wife, Tawni, goodbye, and jumped in my truck.

I’d first heard of this road-trip possibility only days before at a downtown meeting of the Arizona branch of the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi organization whose conceptions of White supremacy marched in lockstep with its notions of patriotism. The president of the group—Jerry Harbin, a guy I’d now known for years while working undercover—had been rallying his Mesa-area troops to help out the Minutemen Project, another anti-immigration, keep-things-White type of militia, down on the border. Harbin wanted a carpool to head to the border and help.

I’d gotten curious. Then, I got alarmed as Harbin added, Some of our Unit 88 brothers are going. Unit 88 is the most violent strain of skinheads in the Southwest. They were generally hard for other hate groups to manage and only brought in for muscle and so-called wet work, the spilling of blood. Their newest scheme offered plenty of opportunity for that.

I’d headed straight to my new office at the FBI and began writing a memo. I still have no idea what happened to it once submitted. The Phoenix FBI didn’t have a great reputation for doing much with our intel. Ironically, I shared an office with the same agent who’d written the infamously ignored 9/11 Memo, which had advised the FBI of Bin Laden’s flight plans before the attack.

Four days after I submitted my ignored memo, these six skinheads were heading south. Mathew, Brian, Billy, Cam, AJ, and Wes were not men to mess with. In the past few years working undercover, I’d gotten to know each of them—and I knew what they were capable of. Given any opportunity, these guys were prepared for a racial holy war—a RAHOWA, as they called it. In their minds, it was a prophesied crusade destined to put Whites forever atop the hierarchy of humanity. The U.S.-Mexico border, they also believed, was the perfect setting for such a crusade to begin.

The ranch they were likely heading to was seventy-some acres and owned by a White brother named Casey Nethercott. I knew Nethercott as your typical antigovernment racist. His property on the border was where many of the most influential and hard-core activists often gathered; the price of entry was only hate. If I had any hope of stopping these guys, I’d find them there. Every night, Nethercott’s crew of volunteers went out with rifles with infrared scopes, loaded with expanding all-copper bullets designed for elk and wild boar but intended to shoot at Mexicans and Guatemalans.

Opposite one stretch of Nethercott’s property, which lies directly across the border and marked only by a dirt road and a chain-link fence, was a small outpost of the Mexican Army composed of a dozen soldiers with German G3 assault rifles.

The plot of those in the red Nissan seemed simple enough—they’d meet up with others at the Nethercott ranch and then get one of those Mexican soldiers in their sights. BAM! If all went well, the soldiers would fire back. How could they not? And if one of the skinheads was killed, or even all of them, so be it. True patriots had died for America for three hundred years. And, if America was to have another three hundred years, blood would need to be spilled again. It’d be the biggest event since 9/11, when, they believed, America had finally woken to the wolves at its doors. Their ancestors had once hunted wolves and hung their heads from fortress walls. Now, they believed, America was too weak to even build a wall. The outcome of their attack—Americans murdered at the border by Mexican soldiers—would change all that. The American people would rage, unite, and finally be heard; the wall finally built; illegals rounded up, and then…

But first, they needed to get to the ranch.

I could well imagine Wes turning to Billy, no doubt checking his pistol for the tenth time. God bless America, Wes would say.

* * *

I once thought I knew what hate looked like.

I could easily picture a handful of drunk bumpkins sneaking around at night with pointy hoods on their heads. Maybe some uniformed teenage skinhead spray-painting a poorly drawn swastika on an overpass.

Nothing worse. Not in America. Not today.

(It also hadn’t yet occurred to me that such silly actions were genuine threats to marginalized folk and an easy path to future physical violence.)

I was wrong.

Hate, and its particular rendering of White supremacy, has morphed over the past forty years. The pointy hats became shaved heads, bad tattoos, and shiny Doc Marten boots. Then the boots morphed into camouflage and the idea of protecting our borders. Later the camouflage became guys in khakis and golf shirts carrying torches and shouting about taking America back.

It’s Volksfront, a notorious global White separatist organization, using government money to run a clinic for British veterans with PTSD returning from Afghanistan—a clinic they were using to indoctrinate and recruit young soldiers.

It’s playfully shooting at targets of Black men down at the local gun range or driving down streets with historic Confederate flags while living in places like Arizona or New Jersey.

It’s suburban high schoolers drawing swastikas on their cheeks before the big game as a joke or chanting He can’t read! He can’t read! from the student cheering section whenever the single Black student on the court gets the ball.

Or it’s a single man in body armor covered in graffiti borrowed from the Crusades with two AR-15s entering a mosque in New Zealand.

For twenty years, I was an undercover cop with a front-row seat to all this hate. And even merely pretending to be part of this world almost killed me.

* * *

This book tells the history and hard realities of racial hatred and the many organizations and systems that advocate and support such thinking.

To tell such a huge story, it’s been framed largely within an account of my own career as an undercover detective within these very organizations. With an invented identity, as a churchgoing, suburban father of five (I mistakenly believed at the time that such labels were some kind of counterpoint or antidote), I was able to infiltrate, study, and then even thwart hate groups from the KKK and Unit 88 Skins to several of the various militia groups now flooding to our southern borders and state capitals in America’s heartland.

I won’t pretend it was always perfect. Far from it.

For example, one White supremacist, a man named JT Ready, remained the one who got away. He’d begun as a racist, leaflet-passing loudmouth and become a violent militia member, an elected official, and ultimately a murderer. He’d already allegedly killed several Mexican Americans in self-defense, organized local hate groups, was leading hunting parties on the U.S.-Mexico border, and, with the support of nationally known politicians, even ran for local and state office. He was always one step ahead of me.

If anything, I was the one being destroyed. As a direct result of my work against White supremacy, my entire family was threatened in public (years later, we learned our son slept with knives under his bed for when the bad guys came), our pet butchered with a shotgun, my hard-built reputation vilified in weeks by a methodical smear campaign. Eventually, they even took out contracts on my life while Ready and other local racists systemically dismantled my career. If only they’d known, I was already falling apart anyway.

Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, We are what we pretend to be, so we must be very careful what we pretend to be. Damn, I wish I’d known that quote twenty years ago. Spending all that time with hate-filled men was like walking into a radioactive wasteland. You could only stay for a short time, and even then, the toxic stuff still got into your clothes and hair, eventually under your skin. My thoughts grew violent and filled with hate, and I eventually struggled to define who I was anymore. I even started looking at my Mexican American neighbors…differently. Eventually, for too many long nights, death seemed the only option out for me. I know that revelation may sound extreme, but the FBI won’t let their crew stay undercover for more than two years to protect their mental health; as a Mesa, Arizona detective, I did almost twenty.

Fortunately, I also had my wife of thirty years, Tawni, who kept me sane (mostly) while I worked undercover for decades and over time became a legitimate partner in gathering intel on these people, eventually going so far as to go undercover with me—all in the name of protecting our family and me.

While it was never easy on us—the threats from criminals and even cops alike, the constant need for secrecy, the nonstop exposure to terrible violence, my own eventual suicidal thoughts—we somehow got through it together.

Eventually, I quit the force and stopped—well, mostly stopped—doing undercover work. If I was going to fight hate and stay alive, I needed to do it out in the open with Tawni officially beside me. Since then, she and I have built a global information-sharing network for law enforcement called the Skinhead Intelligence Network (SIN) to help educate law enforcement and communities worldwide on White supremacy and become internationally sought-after experts on White supremacist groups and border militias. Originally the Skinhead Intelligence Network, the organization has now evolved in more than simply name to keep up with the changing face of White supremacy.

Through SIN, we’ve lectured all over the U.S., the UK for Scotland Yard, Australia and New Zealand, Germany, and Holland as rhetoric, music, and a sense of belonging continue to lure young, disaffected men—and plenty of women too—into these hate movements across the globe. With worldwide economic strife and an ongoing worldwide immigration crisis, each bringing new waves of anti-immigrant hate, we find ourselves busier than ever.

It’s time to deputize the rest of the world.

For too long, White supremacists were seen as a fringe movement going largely ignored. But the racists are out again: Confederate banners waving, rifles slung over camouflaged shoulders. Emboldened to emerge from the shadows. Marching in capitals across the Western world. And, with the world economy and labor force recently shaken by a global pandemic, you can expect an even greater surge in the years to come.

Quite recently, I got word that two American militias were calling supporters to the southern U.S. border. Bring everything you got, they bragged, referring to weaponry. It’s going to be a bloodbath. It wasn’t the first or last time supremacists were hoping to start an actual war with Mexico.

Worse, these border militias are especially interested in recruiting me, a well-trained police officer, their ranks already swelling with ex-military and active police officers, as law enforcement seeks supporters wherever it can find them following the social consequences and rhetoric of 2020.

After the 2020 presidential election, I worked undercover again at a rally for America in Gilbert, Arizona, attended by the far-right Proud Boys standing side by side with a bunch of the same skinheads I’d known years before—now middle-aged men and women dressed up for suburban America, tattoos hidden. A similar scene played out earlier this year, as Tawni and I worked undercover at a pro-Trump Protest the Vote rally in Phoenix. Most people in attendance were merely disappointed and devoted conservatives, period; but some in the crowd were more than that—White supremacists legitimizing their radical views by joining a larger stage. And there are increasingly more of them every year.

This battle, we fear, is only beginning.

No more than a year ago, I discovered there was a new contract on my life for the recent work we’ve been doing—further proof this threat is escalating, growing more violent, and now morphing into mainstream thought and expression.

This story is written in first person, but in reality, it is told by both Tawni and me, sharing our words, memories, fears, and hopes through my singular narration. It chronicles our time undercover to fully expose these hate groups and the varied profiles of their members, and the geopolitical and psychological dynamics that make them tick, from the racists we locked away to those, like JT Ready, who evaded me, hiding openly within our increasingly fractured and contentious culture.

In telling our story, we hope to fully introduce readers to the dark and complicated world of White supremacy. The who, what, when, and WHY.

A world that, now more than ever, must be exposed.

The supremacists have persevered, and even flourished, for decades because most of us have no idea what a White supremacist looks like, let alone what they actually believe or do. What to look for in our friends, neighbors, and colleagues. I was a detective in an area of the country with a staggering White supremacy problem and, at first, even I didn’t know it existed.

The importance of information and understanding cannot be overstated. It’s everything. The rest—how to tackle the problem—becomes so much easier once you recognize the symptoms and see the issue for what it is: the evolution of racial hate remains an ever-growing threat that has brought us to a fundamental, and frightening, brink.

Maybe close enough now for us all to finally do something about it.

1

American Nazis

Initial Meeting

The first official White supremacist I ever met tried to kill me. It was a fitting start to the next twenty-plus years.

I say official because I suspect I’d encountered such people before in my life but was still oblivious to the fact. That’s part of what helps this particular subculture persist and thrive. If you’re not looking for it, it can exist, invisible, for decades.

Growing up in the suburbs of Phoenix, I had friends and teammates of every shape and color, and from what I could tell, we all got along. So, to me, the possibility that someone would hate another person solely because of their skin color or religion was something I might only see in an After School Special. Never in my own school or front yard.

I was raised a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a Mormon in the common parlance. While serving my two-year mission in Oklahoma, I met a guy who’d—at least, this is what he told me—trained his dog to be racist to Black folk. He’d taught it to bark violently anytime a Black person passed. I was twenty and couldn’t fathom why anyone would do this. He might as well have told me that he’d taught his dog to bark at sneezes. I was a naive kid raised by parents who treated everyone the same and honestly believed we were all brothers. I guess this man was an unofficial supremacist. And those guys at school who sometimes told stupid jokes about Mexican, Jewish, or Black people…I wasn’t sure yet how to categorize them.

I’d honestly forgotten all about the guy with the racist dog and the jokes until this skinhead almost ended my life.

At this point, I’d been a cop for about four years. It was late one night. My ten-hour shift was over, and I was maybe ten minutes from home. First, however, I’d rolled up to shoot the breeze beside a motorcycle officer I recognized. Tawni and the kids were in Montana with her mom, and I was stag for a few days, driving home to an empty house.

While talking, this officer and I both watched as a white Dodge Dakota ran a red light through Brown Road. My fellow officer smiled, shook his head, and chased after the truck. Staying put, I flicked on my police radio and listened along. I heard the motor officer call in a vehicle pursuit on the truck, almost immediately followed by a foot pursuit of the White male driver. The driver had, apparently, already ditched his truck and was trying to escape by sprinting off into the night.

And, from my position, I could now see the guy running through some backyards. I quickly parked and got out of my car, then headed for a backyard ahead of the driver to see if I could scare him back out into the open. Bingo! As I came around the corner of the first house, he was running my way.

He was in his late teens or early twenties with a shaved head, white T-shirt, and blue jeans, donning big black boots.

My badge was draped around my neck, and I went to pull it free from under my shirt to identify myself as an officer. Even shouted, Mesa Police!

Everything slowed way down. All I need to do is tackle him, turn him over, and handcuff him, I thought. No problem; I’d done it hundreds of times.

But something was different this time, strange. This guy didn’t have that typical look of fear in his eyes most folks get when scanning for any escape or finally realizing they’re about to be arrested. Rather, this guy had the look of I’m going to fuck you up. This guy wasn’t afraid of my police declaration. At all. If anything, he looked thrilled to be encountering a cop and turned directly toward me.

Then, he lifted his shirt, reached into his waistband, and pulled free a gun.

Before I could even flinch, I felt the barrel of a semiautomatic pistol driven into the direct center of my chest as he racked the handgun’s slide to chamber a round. With no time to pull my own gun, I went into total football mode and tackled him. On impact, the gun barrel jammed down from my chest and into my stomach. I couldn’t believe this was happening. It had turned into one of those movie moments where two people are fighting over a gun.

Somehow, I was able to knock it from his hand and into the grass. After, I have no idea how many punches were thrown by either of us or even where they landed. Other officers arrived and had to pull me off the guy. He ended up face down in the dirt with his hands cuffed behind his back.

As I sat nearby catching my breath and replaying the incident in my mind, I realized the gravity of what’d just happened. I’d been in some scrapes those four years and couldn’t count how many people I had taken to jail. The difference? This guy had been trying to kill me. He had no clue who I was, and vice versa, yet he had wanted to end my life—not to avoid arrest; he just wanted to kill a cop.

I drove home trying to figure it out. The adrenaline still coursing through my body, I grew angrier with each passing block and might have taken it out on my steering wheel a couple times. No one on scene had once asked how I was doing. Pointless to get mad about, right? This was my job. No one died. Why should they care? Still, it upset me.

I composed myself and called Tawni. Usually, I’d talk to her while driving home to decompress, and every time I called, she seemed genuinely excited to talk with me. This was no exception. But I wasn’t sure where to start.

After a moment of silence, and a Matt, are you OK? I told her what happened. I’m not sure she truly understood it all, and I desperately needed her to. But I don’t think I’d finished processing it enough yet myself. You’re obviously upset. But you’re OK though, right?

I wasn’t.

Do you need us to come home? she asked.

No, but I need you to stay close, I said. When I got home, I couldn’t hang up. I didn’t want to. I went to bed with the phone and Tawni’s voice on the pillow right there beside me.

Copland

I’d first told Tawni I wanted to be a cop shortly after we had married.

She threatened annulment. So, I went to work in retail, miserable, for six months. Then, I tried to go back to school again before pleading my case to her. I genuinely knew what I wanted to do with my life—it was almost a calling. The notion of law enforcement had never conflicted with my faith-based upbringing; as corny as it might sound, I’d always seen it as an opportunity to help others. But I also wasn’t going to do anything that affected our family at that level without her support.

Tawni’s blessing came with two conditions: (1) I couldn’t work for Phoenix PD and (2) I couldn’t work narcotics. Both deemed too dangerous, she’d concluded. I, admittedly, ended up doing a little of both, but not in a way that—technically, with some serious leniency—ever broke my promise. I did, after all, understand her fears for my safety. Being the spouse of a cop ain’t easy.

And nights with an almost fatal foot chase didn’t help…

* * *

A couple of days after the incident with a gun jammed into my chest, a fellow cop stopped me outside work, a guy I’d known for years. Heard you got into it with Jason Stafford, he said.

Who? I was honestly trying to sort out who he was talking about. Then, my brain finally pulled it together. The guy who almost killed me…

Yeah. This cop was almost smiling about it; I couldn’t get a read on what his point was. Was he genuinely concerned about me? Was he just breaking my stones? He’d brought Stafford up like we were talking about an old high school pal.

Guess you can say we ‘got into it,’ I said. You know this guy?

I know people who know him, he replied. But that was all.

He crazy or something? I prodded. What’s the story?

He’s a fresh-cut skin is what he is, he said. I had no idea yet what that meant, and my face must have shown it. A skinhead. A new recruit trying to prove himself.

Like ‘Heil Hitler’ and all that White power shit? I confirmed.

I didn’t even know that was still a thing, certainly not in Arizona. Made me think of Europe maybe and the early 1980s. Skinheads? Neo-Nazis? White power? I hadn’t heard those words in Mesa once in four years of police work. We’d spent all our training in the police academy on Latino gangs and learning about rap music to understand the Black gangs better (seriously).

Is this skinhead stuff really a thing here? I asked.

The other cop shrugged. Not a big deal. Mostly White guys beating up other White guys. It was the first of many, many times I would hear this same line.

‘Mostly?’ I said and got another shrug in reply. You know people who say Stafford got into this… stuff? Or, do…you know actual skinheads? There was no easy way to ask this question. I didn’t want it to sound like an accusation, yet…

I’m glad you’re OK, he replied and patted my arm as he walked away.

Seems there was no easy way to answer the question either.

Two months later, Jason Stafford (back on the streets because Maricopa County didn’t have the money to prosecute) shot a Mesa police officer in the back. This cop was a rookie, his sixth day on the job. His bulletproof vest saved his life.

The night we’d tussled, I’d recognized that Stafford wanted to kill a cop, and he’d gotten much closer this second time—as close as you can. He was sentenced to twenty-four years in prison. (He’ll be a free man by the time this book comes out.)

I started asking around about this skinhead scene in Mesa and Phoenix.

I got blank stares from everyone, including the first guy who’d talked to me about Stafford. My then-sergeant wasn’t any help either; there were no state or federal grants or budget for White-boy gangs, so there wasn’t much, in his world view, to talk about. There was not one police whiteboard or chart or plan in the state that included the word skinhead or neo-Nazi or supremacist. The guy who’d deliberately attacked two officers was, officially, just a violent dude who happened to be White with a shaved head. End of story.

And, having not once heard anything about a skinhead problem in town before, I almost believed it myself.

Almost.

* * *

Now, I gotta be completely honest here.

A thirty-year career combating White supremacy began, admittedly, with entirely selfish motives: I wanted out of the van.

After four years working my way up the ladder, I was a detective with the Mesa Gang Unit, a squad that focused almost exclusively on Black and Latino street gangs. As the sole White detective on our team, I wasn’t—as you’d well imagine and understand—often chosen to go undercover among these particular gangs. I’m good at undercover work, but not that good.

Instead, I was usually assigned to sit in the surveillance van. We kept it a block or so away from the real action. My job was to listen to the audio coming in from the undercover guys’ microphones, take some pictures, and provide backup if anything ever went wrong. Nothing ever did. Four years of training and wanting to be a detective had resulted in sitting alone in a van listening to scratchy AM radio and trying not to be seen while eating piles of sunflower seeds in 100-degree-plus Arizona weather sans AC because keeping the van running would be too suspicious. When things were slow, they’d let me pretend to be a john and solicit prostitutes, which whom the team would swoop in and arrest once discussions of this-for-that had been formalized. (Not that they always swooped in; a favorite prank of the guys was to delay the arrest long after the signal had been given, just to see the undercover officer squirm as he ran out of ways to stall the now-hired sex worker.)

Other than providing backup from the inside of a van and upping my improv skills with local streetwalkers, there wasn’t much undercover work for me to do. I’d asked to get more involved in the gang scene, rife with drugs and violence, and they’d shrug, smile, and say, "Yeah… you’re too white. White people think you’re too white."

I’d even come up with simple storylines to explain why a guy who looked like me might be talking to these gangs of color—something involving a biker gang looking to make a partnership or gun purchase, for instance. But it was simply far easier for them to send in one of my Black or Latino counterparts to achieve the same ends.

But now… White power skinheads. I surely wouldn’t be too White for them.