In the last episode, we looked at a strange series of rallies held in cities across the United States in 2012 - American neo-nazis were rallying in support of white South African Farmers. But how did they get that idea in their heads? The rallies were put on by a group called The South Africa Project, run by a woman I'd never heard of. Digging into this mysterious South African, I found a lot more than I bargained for - bombings and mercenaries and an international network of fascist terror.Sources:https://www.24sata.hr/news/hsp-as-prisegnuli-na-vjernost-domovini-i-donaldu-trumpu-513281#google_vignette https://balkaninsight.com/2017/02/27/us-condemns-zagreb-neo-nazi-march-for-trump-02-27-2017/ https://www.icty.org/x/cases/naletilic_martinovic/cis/en/cis_naletilic_martinovic_en.pdfhttps://archive.idavox.com/index.php/2012/09/24/the-aryan-nations-show-of-farce-in-dc/https://time.com/3927339/dylann-roof-charleston-shooting-flags/ https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,863800,00.html https://www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/amphtml/1981/0219/021960.html https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hate-watch/anti-genocide-protests-around-nation-were-organized-neo-nazis/Visser, Myda. 1999. University of Pretoria. DIE IDEOLOGIESE GRONDSLAE EN ONlWIKKELING VAN DIE BLANKE FASCISTIESE BEWEGINGS IN SUID-AFRIKA, 1945-1995 Hill, Ray, and Andrew Bell. The Other Face of Terror: Inside Europe’s Neo-Nazi Network. Grafton, 1988. https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/finalreport/volume%202.pdfhttps://www.sahistory.org.za/article/june-16-soweto-youth-uprising https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/apartheid-early-1980s See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
My name is Kyle Tequila, host of the shocking new true crime podcast, Crook County.
I got recruited into the mob when I was 17 years old.
People are dying.
Is he doing this every night?
Kenny was a Chicago firefighter who lived a secret double life as a mafia hitman.
I had a wife and I had two children.
Nobody knew anything.
He was a freaking crazy man.
He was my father, and I had no idea about any of this until now.
Crook County is available now.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Come with me for a moment.
Back to February of 2017. It was just weeks after Donald Trump had been sworn in as president for his first term.
There was a lot of uncertainty.
A lot of fear.
Millions of Americans marched in Washington, D.C. to protest his presidency in its first days.
There was still some hope in those early days that maybe he hadn't meant most of what he'd said.
Maybe it was campaign bluster, hot air, and empty words.
Within a week, though, he'd signed an executive order banning travel to the United States from predominantly Muslim countries.
Sparking a wave of protests at airports and signaling that he intended to follow through on his xenophobic, anti-immigrant campaign promises.
A month into his presidency, tens of thousands of Americans in at least 50 cities around the country rallied for a protest on President's Day, calling it Not My President's Day.
But that same week, half a world away, a very different march was taking place.
In Zagreb's city center, a few dozen men in black uniforms stood in formation, led by Drazin Kaleminek, leader of the Croatian Fascist Party HSP. They chanted the slogans of the Ustasa, the Croatian fascist movement of the 1930s and 40s.
Alongside the Holocaust carried out by Nazi Germany, the Ustasa had undertaken a genocide of their own.
Operating their own concentration camps and slaughtering whole villages of Jews, Roma, and Serbs.
As those marchers assembled in the city square and the brass band finished playing, the men took an oath of allegiance to their Croatian homeland.
And to Donald Trump.
Most of those marchers had empty hands.
Some held brass instruments.
But at the front of the column, several marchers held flags.
The Croatian flag, of course, and an American flag.
To show their support for Donald Trump.
But one man at the very front of the line was carrying the flag of the German ultranationalist party NPD. The march's organizer, Drazen Klemenek, was arrested that day for shouting Zodom Spremni, which is the Croatian equivalent of yelling Sieg Heil in Germany.
But when he did get a chance to speak to the press, he explained the presence of the German NPD flag.
The man who'd been carrying it was Alexander Nidline, a representative from NPD, and he was there to show his party's support for HSP. But that march, in February of 2017, wasn't Alexander Nidline's first visit to the Balkans.
In 1993, Nidline enlisted in the Convicts Battalion, a paramilitary unit of the Croatian Defense Council, made up of prisoners and foreign mercenaries.
Its leader was later convicted of crimes against humanity for his actions during the Bosnian War.
Niedlein didn't stay with the unit for very long.
In the years since, he's taken issue with being called a mercenary, arguing that he never actually got paid.
Because just before Christmas of 1993, Niedlein and two other German mercenaries deserted from the convict's battalion.
They took as many guns as they could carry and disappeared into the night.
A few weeks later, those German mercenaries and those stolen guns turned up 7,000 miles away in South Africa.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
This is a story about Monica Stone.
I think she may be our first Weird Little Guy who happens to be a woman.
There was Dallas Humber, I guess, the voice of Tara Graham.
But she wasn't the central character in that story, just the disembodied voice urging young men to kill.
Weird Little Guy is a gender-neutral term, in my mind.
I haven't been avoiding telling the stories of women in the white power movement.
It's just that, for the most part, the very nature of their beliefs kind of prevents women from taking center stage, even in their own lives.
But this, this is a story of a woman who has dedicated her life to the cause.
And in her case, the cause is apartheid.
Like all my stories, this is really only kind of about...
One weird little guy.
And this might be the widest net I've ever cast, trying to understand one person's life.
The story covers decades and spans continents.
There are bombings and shootouts and murders.
There's international gun smuggling, mercenaries and paramilitaries and war crimes, successful assassinations and foiled terrorist plots.
There are trials and prison breaks and crimes left unpunished.
Some with extradition petitions left pending for decades, with no hope of justice.
There are some familiar landmarks, names of people and organizations I recognize, like David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan and the Turner Diaries.
But there are people and groups in this story that were new to me, characters we haven't met yet and may see again in future episodes exploring these fascist friendships across borders.
But at its core, this is a story about Monica Stone.
She isn't in all the parts of the story playing out all around her, but the context matters more than ever.
Because this week we're going to dig into a weighty idea.
The Fascist International.
I haven't forgotten where we started.
Maybe you have, that's understandable.
I left you hanging there for a week while I recovered from a stomach virus, but...
Two weeks ago, we were talking about white genocide.
The story began in Sacramento in 2012. A group of neo-Nazi skinheads was rallying at the state capitol in California to raise awareness of the plight of the white South African farmer.
In that episode, I picked apart this myth, the idea that white farmers are being slaughtered every day in a post-apartheid South Africa.
That white South Africans are in danger of being completely wiped out by a white genocide.
That idea has been quite popular among white supremacists around the world for some time.
Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik devoted a few pages of his 1,500-page manifesto to it.
When Dylan Roof murdered nine people at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015, his Facebook profile photo showed him Glowering at the camera in a black jacket with two patches on the breast, the flag of Rhodesia and the flag of apartheid South Africa.
I come across the idea pretty often in my work.
So many of my weird little guys are obsessed with the idea of a fully segregated society and the state violence against black people that comes with it.
But that's where the idea lived.
It lived on Stormfront and on 4chan and in manifestos and on Nazi podcasts.
Those rallies in 2012 were pretty unique.
The public display of the apartheid-era South African flag at an American political rally was unusual.
It was unusual enough that it was mentioned in news stories three years later when the flag appeared again on Dylann Roof's jacket.
But like so many once-fringe ideas, it's part of the mainstream political discourse now.
I won't retread all of that.
We talked about it in the last episode.
But now the President of the United States is repeating the talking points from the flyers those skinheads printed out in 2012. And I originally set out to just talk about those rallies as a sort of stand-alone story.
Strange incident that seems to have happened in total isolation.
As far as I've been able to find, the group behind it had never put on a public event before, and aside from a poorly attended follow-up in D.C. later that same year, they never did again.
The website has been offline for years, and there's hardly any mention of the group at all.
Anywhere.
A lot of white supremacist groups are short-lived.
So that's not really unusual.
And this group, the South Africa Project, was pretty obviously just two people running a side project out of an Aryan nation's PO box.
But I can't let anything go.
So I started to dig.
And it became clear very quickly that there was a hell of a lot more going on here than I thought.
Back in 2012, when those rallies took place, Both the SPLC and the ADL had stories on their website explaining that those events had been organized by American neo-Nazis.
Both groups zeroed in on Morris Goulet, a longtime Aryan Nations member, and the man who'd given comments to the press as the organization's spokesman.
Both outlets identified several local organizers of those assorted rallies, the Golden State skinheads hosted in Sacramento, Billy Roper headlined the rally in Arkansas, rallies in Tennessee and Pennsylvania were hosted by members of Volksfront, and so on.
But in one single line, in a blog post that isn't even on the ADL's website anymore, the events are attributed to a woman named Monica Stone.
In this passing mention, crediting Stone with the idea for the rallies, the post notes that She was a South African immigrant and a longtime member of the Christian Defense League.
The CDL was a Christian identity group that grew out of the same milieu as the Aryan Nations in the 60s, but it never really achieved the same level of influence.
But that's all there is.
Monica in Louisiana.
Monica from South Africa.
Monica speaking at the Aryan Nations World Congress about the need for international solidarity.
Between American neo-Nazis and Afrikaner nationalists.
But Google gives you exactly nothing about this woman before or after this brief moment in time in 2012. And so at this point, I'm locked in.
I have to know more about this woman.
How did she end up in Mandeville, Louisiana?
A town of just 10,000 people that I've only heard of because it's where David Duke lives.
So I started with the information that I have.
A name, hopefully it's her real name, a city, and some potential known associates.
If her longtime membership in the Christian Defense League is the only notable fact about her, maybe that means she was a very important member of the group.
And lucky for me, It turns out she was.
The organization has, or had, I guess, since it's defunct as far as I can tell, been run by a man named Robert K. Warner since the 70s.
And when he took over, he moved its headquarters from California to Louisiana to be closer to his friend David Duke.
And in addition to the Christian Defense League, Warner also ran a Christian identity church called the New Christian Crusade Church.
Corporate filings for the church show Robert K. Warner as an officer of the organization, which I expected.
But in 2011, he filed an amendment, adding someone named Monica Huggett as the church's chief financial officer.
And he changed the address on file to a residential address in Mandeville, Louisiana.
Property records for St. Tammany Parish show that a mortgage was taken out at that address.
By James Stone in 1992. But after he died, the property was sold by his widow.
And on the documents for the sale, she's listed as Monica Huggett Stone.
And that's the kind of concrete paper trail I love to see.
There's no doubt at all here that the Monica Stone behind those 2012 rallies is the Monica Huggett who married James Stone in 2000. And lived in Mandeville, Louisiana, two miles away from David Duke.
So now I have a new name, Monica Huggett.
And this is where I ran into trouble almost immediately.
Everything is in Afrikaans.
Most of the English-language material about someone named Monica Huggett is about the renowned British conductor and Baroque violinist.
But that is an entirely different person who I am almost 100% sure has never helped an Italian terrorist build a bomb.
Violinists have to be very careful with their hands, you know?
But there were a handful of extremely tantalizing clues that convinced me to power through the agony of trying to translate blurry old PDFs.
One of the first English language sources I found referring to a South African named Monica Huggett is the final report of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was authorized by President Nelson Mandela in 1995, and it was chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
The body's goal was exactly what it says in the name, to find the truth about what happened under apartheid and try to find a way to move forward as a nation.
The TRC had three central tasks.
To discover the causes and nature of human rights violations in South Africa between 1960 and 1994. To identify victims with a goal of paying reparations.
And to allow amnesty for those who fully disclosed their involvement in politically motivated human rights violations.
This wasn't a tribunal.
This was a restorative justice process.
They hoped to be able to provide amnesty to people who were honest.
Over the course of three years, the commission heard testimony from over 20,000 people, both victims and perpetrators.
Monica Huggett did not, as far as I can tell, ever testify before the commission.
But her name is in there.
Specifically, it appears in Volume 2. The 700-page portion of the report dealing with, quote, the commission of gross violations of human rights.
And more specifically, it's in Chapter 7, Political Violence in the Era of Negotiations and Transition.
Under the subheading Links with International Right-Wing Groups, the report reads, The first link between ultra-right terrorism and foreign agencies came to light in 1982. When Mr. Fabio Mariello, Mr. Massimo Bolo, and Mr. Eugenio Zopis, all white foreign expatriates known as the White Commando, were convicted of the 1979 bombing of the offices of prominent academic Dr. Jan Lombard.
Originally, Mr. Kuz Vermeulen and Miss Monica Huggett, a foreign right-winger, were arrested with them.
But Huggett turned state witness, and Vermeulen was released after a few days.
Huggett's name was subsequently linked to the shootout in March 1994. And I think you can see why I was willing to invest the effort to
find out more about this.
Because that's a hell of a thing to find under the first rock you turn over.
Italian terrorists bombing university offices in Pretoria in 1979, German mercenaries getting into a deadly shootout with the police in 1994, and there she is, right at the center of two separate acts of pro-apartheid terrorism, 15 years apart.
Now there are some problems here.
First of all, her name is spelled wrong.
Only a little wrong, it's missing one of the T's.
But Alexander Niedlein's name is spelled so incorrectly that you couldn't find this by searching for his name.
The report calls him Alexander Niedneloin, which as far as I can tell is not anyone's name or a real German name at all.
And the bombing of Professor Lombard's offices at the University of Pretoria happened in 1980. Not 1979. It also describes Monica Huggett as a, quote, which really threw me off at first.
I've heard her talk.
She sounds South African.
And she's even said in multiple interviews that she was born and raised there.
The confusion in the report may be because she had publicly identified herself as a member of the American Ku Klux Klan, and that may have been interpreted as Her being American.
And by the time the Commission was starting their work, she had left South Africa and was living in the United States.
They never actually had a chance to speak to her.
I'm willing to cut them some slack on the details here.
They were close enough for government work, as my dad used to say, and they had a lot of work to do.
But as my subsequent research shows beyond a shadow of a doubt, Monica Huggett was born and raised.
South African.
But keep those four Germans in the back of your mind for now.
We'll see them again.
Alexander Niedlein you've already met.
He was the German NPD member swearing allegiance to Donald Trump at a Croatian Nazi rally in 2017. According to blurry old scans of arrest warrants from 1993, Stephen Reyes and Thomas Kunst were the other two German mercenaries he deserted with just before Christmas that year.
And just as an aside, I am admittedly not at all an expert on the Bosnian War, so it took me a minute to parse the letterhead on the warrants.
They were issued by the non-existent country of the Croatian Republic of Herzeg, Bosnia, which explains why Nightline had no problem re-entering Croatia after fleeing as a fugitive all those years ago.
And the fourth man?
Forced cleanse?
He's still wanted for murder in Namibia.
Early on in my search for more information about this mysterious woman at the center of these two terror plots carried out by foreign neo-Nazis, I found a master's thesis submitted by Maida Visser to the University of Pretoria in 1999. It's in Afrikaans, But translated, the title is The Ideological Foundations and Development of the White Fascist Movements in South Africa, 1945 to 1995.
After some truly agonizing trial and error, trying to find a way to translate a 300-page PDF without paying for something, the thesis was immensely useful.
But every clue just raised more questions, and I was running into dead-end after dead-end, trying to track down the primary sources and the footnotes.
I can find a lot of things.
But digitized archives of 40-year-old newspapers published in another language, in another country, that might not even still exist at all, for all I know.
I came up empty.
And I was on the verge of total nervous collapse at the idea that there is information out there that is just not available to me.
When I had another idea.
And I found...
An unlikely ally.
The Central Intelligence Agency.
That's right.
A special shout-out this week goes to the CIA. More specifically, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, which was operated by the CIA until it was renamed the Open Source Center in 2005. Originally called the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service, it was authorized in 1941 by President Roosevelt.
And its original purpose was to record, translate, transcribe, and analyze propaganda radio programs produced by the Axis powers during the war.
Over the years, its mission grew to include peacetime operations, and they eventually added television and print media into the mix, collecting and translating news from around the world and disseminating reports for use by intelligence agencies and diplomatic and military organizations.
It's basically just an international news aggregator for government employees.
And look, maybe all those old South African newspapers do exist somewhere.
I found one, not the one I was looking for, not one with real journalists and investigative reporting like I'd hoped.
No, the only paper I could find a large catalog of digitized archives for was a paper called De Transvaler.
It was an Afrikaner nationalist newspaper.
That paper once unsuccessfully tried to sue another South African newspaper for calling them Nazi propaganda.
But it was such overt Nazi propaganda that the judge dismissed the suit and ruled that the editor of the Transvaller, quote, did make his newspaper a tool of the Nazis in South Africa, and he knew it.
End quote.
So...
The Transballer wasn't exactly the resource I was hoping to find.
It takes one guy out there to say, who's that f***ing Kyle who thinks he can just get on a f***ing microphone on a podcast and start publicizing this s***?
From iHeart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV comes a new true crime podcast.
Crook County.
I got recruited into the mob when I was 17 years old.
Meet Kenny, an enforcer for the legendary Chicago outfit.
And that was my mission, to snuff the f***ing life out of this guy.
He lived a secret double life as a firefighter paramedic for the Chicago Fire Department.
I had a wife and I had two children.
Nobody knew anything.
People are dying.
Is he doing this every night?
Torn between two worlds.
I'm covering up murders that these cops are doing.
He was a freaking crazy man.
We don't know who he is, really.
He is my father.
And I had no idea about any of this until now.
Welcome to Crook County.
Series premiere February 11th.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
But eventually I gave up trying to find old South African newspapers.
I'm sorry.
And something that was much easier to find.
We're the unclassified daily reports from the sub-Saharan Office of the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service.
So, just this once, I guess, I will give a reluctant nod to the CIA. So now I have some contemporaneous reporting that has been translated into English by someone who is presumably a professional and not a robot, and the pieces are starting to come together.
I can start to see the picture here.
This bombing campaign in 1980 is starting to come into focus.
In August of 1980, a newspaper editor in Pretoria received a letter.
On letterhead bearing a symbol remarkably similar to the cross emblem used by the American Ku Klux Klan.
A group calling themselves the Witkommando, or the White Commandos.
Claimed responsibility for the bombing of Professor Jan Lombard's office at the University of Pretoria.
And the group threatened further attacks, writing that people and organizations working toward integration would be warned first and then eliminated.
The Witt Commando had formed just a few months earlier, in May or June of 1980. Sources vary.
Monica Huggett would later testify that she'd joined the newly formed FIT Commando after meeting Massimo Bolo at a meeting in Pretoria in June of 1980. As described in the memoirs of Ray Hill, a man who ended his lengthy career as a fascist organizer by playing informant for the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight,
the meeting was a summit for leaders of the British fascist group National Front, the Afrikaner nationalist group AWB, The far-right South African political party, HNP, and an Italian fascist group called UNIDO. So even though her involvement with Vit Commando is the first time I can put her on paper involved in a terrorist organization, it was obviously not her first introduction to the idea.
She had to have been deeply involved with at least one of those fascist groups to have even been in the room.
Where Massimo Bolo invited her to join his terrorist cell.
And the group cut started right away.
Just two months after forming the group, the bombing of Lombard's office was already their third big public display.
They'd started a fire at a drive-in theater, and firebombed the Johannesburg headquarters of the Institute for Race Relations.
In December, they claimed responsibility for the bombing of Professor F.A. Maritz's office at the University of South Africa.
And they would carry out at least four more bombings before members started getting arrested.
The first four arrests came in early February of 1981. A government employee in Pretoria named W.G. Van Dyke, the director of the South African National Front, Alan Fotheringham, an Italian fascist named Massimo Bolo, and, as the newspaper put it at the time, Mr. Bolo's girlfriend, Miss M. Huggett of Kempton Park.
Now, that's the only source I could find alleging a romantic relationship between the pair.
It never comes up again, so I don't know.
And in the weeks that followed, police would arrest even more alleged members of the Witt Commando.
Fabio Miriello, an Italian-born South African citizen who'd emigrated four years earlier, Kuz Vermoulin, the leader of the World Apartheid Movement, and an Italian immigrant named Eugenio Zoppis and his wife, Laura Zenenga.
Those are all the names I could find in most of my sources.
I found a few more names in an unlikely place.
Documents released by the Italian government as part of their investigation into the Bologna Massacre, a 1980 bombing of a train station in Italy believed to have been the work of fascist terrorists, do list several additional names of Italians who were in South Africa at the time and believed to have been involved with the Vid Commando.
But there's no mention of those extra Italians in the South African or English-language press, as far as I can find.
As a matter of fact, there's no mention of almost any of those people, ever again.
Only Miriello, Bolo, and Zoppis actually faced charges.
Miriello and Bolo were charged with sabotage, the bombings, and possession of a massive cache of weapons that had been stolen from the South African Defense Force.
Including 50 kilos of plastic explosives, 67 hand grenades, a couple of landmines, 8 rifles, 4 pistols, a machine gun, and 5,000 rounds of ammunition.
When Bolo and Mariello went to trial later that year, Monica Huggett testified against them.
In exchange, she wasn't charged.
She admitted that she had procured the bomb-making manual for Bolo, books that she'd ordered from her clan contacts in the United States.
I was a little surprised to see a familiar title here.
One of the books she had sent to her from America was called The Poor Man's James Bond, which is the same bomb-making book that Dennis Mahon bought for the ATF informant that he was in love with after she expressed an interest in bomb-making.
What a small world.
Huggett also testified that she'd accompanied Bolo to Professor Lombard's office to scout out the best location to place the bomb.
She explained that Bullough's residence had become unsuitable as a workspace after too many of his friends moved in.
So she rented a property under her own name that he could use to work on his bombs.
On the stand, Huggett explained that she's a political activist.
She's a member of the American Ku Klux Klan.
And the VIT Commando never intended to endanger any human lives.
Now, for what it's worth, not...
To give this woman the benefit of the doubt, but despite the repeated threats to follow up with more violence, to take up arms, to commit actual acts of violence against human beings, no one was ever actually injured by a Vit Commando bomb.
They went off in empty offices.
I think she may have been telling the truth.
They were warnings.
Huggett told the court that their goal was to wake people up to the dangers of integration.
To send a warning that more violence was inevitable if this creeping, incremental, progressive reform that people were talking about were to actually happen.
She swore the group had no intention of actually hurting anyone or trying to overthrow the government.
By the end of 1981, Massimo Bolo had been sentenced to 52 years.
Though 42 of those years would run concurrent with other portions of the sentence, Leaving him with just 10 years to actually serve.
And Fabio Miriello was given 19 years, but same deal, it was effectively just 5. But Bolo didn't even serve those 10. He was released, without any explanation that I can find, after just 4 years in 1985, and immediately deported back to Italy.
I'm not entirely sure what became of Miriello.
But Maida Visser's thesis says he was known to have reconnected with Monica Huggett after his release.
And the pair both got involved with the South African branch of the American neo-Nazi religion, the Church of the Creator.
As for Eugenio Zoppis, the young Italian immigrant was charged only with the theft of the weapons.
He'd been the one to actually steal them from the South African Defense Force.
And he was also sentenced to five years.
And he appealed that sentence to the court.
So the following year, his lawyer was urging a judge to consider the mitigating factors.
He's so young.
He's just 23 years old.
And he was a brand new immigrant at the time, and he didn't speak any English.
He'd been manipulated by the much older Fabio Muriello.
His lawyer went as far as to say that Eugenio Zappes had joined the VIT Commando entirely by accident.
And he'd had no idea of the true nature of the organization until after he was arrested.
The article about the dismissal of his appeal only lays out what his attorney said.
It's not clear from the reporting I can find if anyone contradicted those statements in court.
Because you might have guessed, but it's not true.
I mentioned earlier that the most complete list of names of those Italian fascists who were arrested in South Africa in connection to the Vitcomando bombings was buried somewhere in 2,000 pages of documents released by the Italian government related to the Bologna massacre.
In August of 1980, the same month that the Vitcomando bombing started in South Africa, 85 people were killed when a bomb went off inside the Bologna Central train station in Italy.
It is, to some extent, kind of a mystery still.
There were a number of trials spanning over a decade, and several members of an Italian fascist group were convicted.
But the group itself never accepted responsibility for the bombing.
It is, perhaps, in some ways, akin to the Oklahoma City bombing.
Legally, we found the guy who did it.
But there are a lot of questions we're never going to get answers to, and there are a lot of weird paths you could let your mind go down trying to find them.
So without losing my sanity or dragging you into the incomprehensible depths, suffice it to say, Eugenio Zappas was not an innocent, confused young man when he stole a small arsenal of weapons for the Vit Commando in 1980. In 1976, he was one of 15 members of an Italian fascist group who, Armed with clubs and chains, beat a young communist organizer to death in a small town outside of Rome.
And contrary to his lawyer's claims that he had, by pure coincidence, met and befriended a fellow Italian right after he moved to South Africa, only to be manipulated by this new friend into committing crimes, there is actually evidence that Zoppis had been sent to South Africa specifically to meet with Fabio Mariello.
In the months before Zoppis arrived in South Africa, a member of Italy's Black Order wrote Muriello that he was sending six members down very soon, with more to follow.
In 1984, the newspaper of the Italian Communist Party listed Zoppis among the names of 76 fascist fugitives believed to have fled the country.
Diplomatic records show the Italian government was requesting his extradition from Paraguay by 1986.
And I don't know what happened to him after that.
Crook County.
I got recruited into the mob when I was 17 years old.
Meet Kenny, an enforcer for the legendary Chicago outfit.
And that was my mission, to snuff the f***ing life out of this guy.
He lived a secret double life as a firefighter paramedic for the Chicago Fire Department.
I had a wife and I had two children.
Nobody knew anything.
People are dying.
Is he doing this every night?
Torn between two worlds.
I'm covering up murders that these cops are doing.
He was a f***ing...
He's a freaking crazy man.
We don't know who he is, really.
He is my father.
And I had no idea about any of this.
Until now.
Welcome to Crook County.
Series premiere February 11th.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In what is becoming a constant refrain, I do want to stress that I'm not an expert in South African history.
I'm not a scholar of the apartheid era.
I'm not a historian.
Every week I have to gain some new specialized knowledge to try to give context to the story I'm trying to tell, and there's only so much one person can sort out in a couple of days, so bear with me.
Because I do want to try to give some context here.
This Vit Commando bombing campaign in 1980 didn't come out of nowhere.
When Monica Huggett testified against the men she'd helped carry out those attacks, she said their goal had been to demonstrate that many white South Africans were opposed to the path of gradual concessions being made by the National Party.
And I was confused by that.
It would be another 15 years before apartheid ended, and the National Party loved apartheid.
What is she talking about?
Apartheid is inherently violent.
It is a form of violence in and of itself.
There is no peaceful or kind way to run an apartheid state.
There is no non-violent ethnostate.
And that's obvious.
But the kinds of violence and the visibility of that violence change from year to year.
I don't mean to say that things like the forced removal of Black Africans from their homes and their lands are not violence.
It is.
Every action carried out in service of implementing and maintaining apartheid was an act of violence.
But some years were bloodier than others.
And while the political movement to end apartheid ebbed and flowed too, people have always and will always.
Resist injustice.
But in 1980, when those bombs went off, there was a growing awareness on all sides of the issue that something was going to have to change, whether they liked it or not.
The country was about to experience some of the most violent years of apartheid.
For those committed to maintaining the status quo and holding on to political power, Targeted compromises, and more importantly, doubling down on state repression.
The Soweto uprising had made apartheid a PR problem.
I think for most people, dead school children is more than a PR problem.
But for the National Party, that's what it was.
In 1976, thousands of students walked out of class in protest of a 1974 law requiring the use of Afrikaans in school.
Students sang and held signs as they marched, and they planned to rally at a nearby stadium.
Word spread to other nearby schools, and students poured out into the streets to join the march.
And when they heard the police had blocked their intended route, one of the march organizers urged calm.
Telling the crowd, Brothers and sisters, I appeal to you.
Keep calm and cool.
We have just received a report that the police are coming.
Don't taunt them.
Don't do anything to them.
Be cool and calm.
We are not fighting.
And when they encountered the police for the first time, for a moment, it seemed cooler heads had prevailed on all sides.
But the police weren't actually retreating.
They were waiting for reinforcements.
And just half an hour later, the first tear gas canister was fired into the crowd of children.
And some of them ran.
But most of them stayed.
Facing the police, unmoving.
According to several accounts I found, the children were singing.
When the first shot was fired, the police opened fire with live rounds on the crowd of children.
One of the first children to die that day was a 12-year-old boy named Hector Peterson.
The photo of his tiny, limp body in the arms of an older boy with Hector's sister running beside him was seen around the world.
Black South African photojournalists Sam and Zima had captured the true face of apartheid.
And people were horrified.
The violence spread like wildfire, and the worst of it lasted for three days.
There was an explosion of internal resistance.
White university students marched against the killings.
Black workers went on strike.
Riots broke out in black townships all over the country.
Buildings burned.
And when the dust had settled, hundreds were dead.
The small reforms introduced in the late 70s had nothing to do with the National Party softening its stance on apartheid.
But the apartheid regime saw some advantage to reducing international criticism and disrupting black resistance.
Amidst these tepid reforms, Divisions grew.
Some white South Africans who'd seen those pictures of children's corpses now saw apartheid as what it was, a true evil.
Others were repulsed by the violence, but seemed satisfied with the gestures toward reform.
People like Monica Huggett were worried that these promised reforms, things like repealing the ban on interracial relationships, Would set the country on a road to hell.
In her testimony at the trial for Miriello and Bolo, she laid the blame on her Italian accomplices, but made no apologies for her own motivation, saying on the stand, I was opposed to integration.
I still am.
The week Miriello and Bolo were convicted, American newspapers carried a four-sentence wire story about the trial.
Noting that it was South Africa's first ever prosecution of white terrorists.
As South Africa was entering its bloodiest decade of political violence, someone had finally gone to jail for pro-apartheid terror.
But it's significant that they were only willing to prosecute those Italian men.
There's hardly any mention at all of the South African woman who served as the point of contact for these foreign terrorists.
Many of the stories in South African outlets Stress heavily that the group was foreign in origin, that its members were foreigners, that they didn't even speak Afrikaans, that they had no connection to any South African political organizations.
But that assertion is complicated, a little bit, by an anecdote from Ray Hill's memoirs.
On the first day of the trial, as Bolo and Muriello entered the courtroom, a man in the gallery stood and applauded for them.
That man, Pete Rudolph, was a former police officer, and at the time of the trial in 1981, he was a sitting member of the Pretoria City Council and a member of the far-right party HNP. He would eventually leave party politics behind and form a white supremacist group called the Order Borafolk, or the Order of the Boer People.
He borrowed the name.
From the plot of the Turner Diaries.
After Muriello and Bolo were convicted, the Vic Commando ceased to exist.
It was just one of countless short-lived right-wing organizations in a shifting political landscape.
Groups formed and splintered and disappeared all the time.
Sometimes there was even doubt about the actual existence of some group claiming credit for one attack or another.
A lot of groups had significantly overlapping membership.
But the end of the Vic Commando was not the end of Monica Huggins' involvement in pro-apartheid violence.
Not by a long shot.
Now, in my timeline of events, I lose track of Monica after 1981. I can't say what she was up to for most of the 80s.
But by the time I find her again in the record...
She's a high-ranking member of the Afrikaner nationalist neo-Nazi organization called the Afrikaner Verstandsbewegung, the Afrikaner resistance movement in English, or just AWB for short.
It was founded in 1973 by Eugene Terre Blanche, and the AWB wasn't happy with apartheid.
No, it wouldn't do it all.
Apartheid was too left-wing.
Liberal.
And there was too much risk to bore identity for them to be living in proximity to black Africans, even under apartheid conditions.
They're secessionists.
And they believe the only solution to the problem is a pure white ethnostate.
A Volkstaat, or the white South African.
It's a little bit baffling.
That she was able to resume her activities, retaining a fairly high level of prestige and responsibility, particularly when it came to her international contacts.
After she, you know, turned state's witness against Mariela Mbolo, surely everyone knew she'd sold them out to save herself.
But maybe her colleagues didn't see it that way.
Maybe she was important enough that they were willing to make that sacrifice to keep her on the outside, doing...
Whatever it was she was doing.
I had hoped to get to the end of the 1980s in this episode, but I think we have to leave it here, in the mid-80s.
Our Italian mercenaries were in the wind after serving just a handful of years behind bars.
I can't find Monica, no matter how hard I squint at old TV news B-roll of South African Nazi rallies, but I think she's there somewhere.
And next week, Before we rejoin Monica in her own story, we'll pick up in 1989 with one of our German mercenaries.
Five years before shooting it out with the cops, just days before the 1994 South African election, Horst Klens was trying to prevent a different African nation from holding its first democratic multiracial elections.
He failed both times.
But in 1989, Klens and his South African Nazi terror cell took two lives in a failed attempt to prevent Namibian independence. Klens and his South African Nazi terror cell took two Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at weirdlittleguyspodcast at gmail.com.
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My name is Kyle Tequila, host of the shocking new true crime podcast, Crook County.
I got recruited into the mob when I was 17 years old.
People are dying.
Is he doing this every night?
Kenny was a Chicago firefighter who lived a secret double life as a mafia hitman.
I had a wife and I had two children.
Nobody knew anything.
He was a freaking crazy man.
He was my father, and I had no idea about any of this until now.
