Parts 3 & 4 of the South Africa arc. The White Wolf Original Air Date: 3.2.25 In 1989, four Afrikaner nationalists and one German mercenary killed a security guard at a United Nations outpost in Namibia. After escaping from custody, they fled home to South Africa. A possibly non-existent group called The White Wolves took credit for the wave of bombings that followed. Sources: Du Preez, M. (2010). Pale native: Memories of a Renegade reporter. Zebra Press. Rotberg, Robert (1988). The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Enigma of Power. Oxford University Press. Falkof, Nicky. The End of Whiteness: Satanism and Family Murder in Late Apartheid South Africa. Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2016. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-09-09-bruce-and-leonard-a-sad-african-immigrant-tale-of-injustice/ https://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/19/world/outjo-journal-un-namibia-team-makes-some-unlikely-friends.html https://web.archive.org/web/20010429091808/http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/spec/aress14-1.htm https://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZASCA/1999/72.html https://www.upi.com/Archives/1989/08/11/Gunmen-attacked-a-UN-peace-keeping-force-adminstrative-headquarters-and/6550618811200/ https://ctc.westpoint.edu/the-nexus-between-far-right-extremists-in-the-united-states-and-ukraine/ https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1043&context=ncitereportsresearch https://web.archive.org/web/20181118212149/https://www.iol.co.za/pretoria-news/the-day-wit-wolf-turned-pretoria-red-with-blood-18125595 https://www.jordanharbinger.com/bradley-steyn-undercover-with-mandelas-spies-part-one/ https://theafricancriminologyjournal.wordpress.com/2022/02/04/south-africa-the-strijdom-square-massacre/ https://www.iol.co.za/news/world/us-wit-wolf-slaughter-1873433 https://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/what-became-of-the-big-wit-wolf-424408 ---- White Guns for Hire Original Air Date: 3.27.25 In 1994, a second group of mercenaries arrived at the airport in Johannesburg... but no one was there to pick them up. Their host had been arrested days earlier, after the last group of mercenaries she'd hosted got into a deadly shootout with the South African police. But how did all these Germans end up in South Africa in the first place? Sources: Simonelli, F. J. (1999). American Führer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party. University of Illinois Press. Krott, R. (2008). Save the last bullet for yourself: A soldier of fortune in the Balkans and Somalia. Casemate. Eisenberg, D. (1967). The Reemergence of Fascism. Barnes. https://balkans.aljazeera.net/news/balkan/2017/11/29/slobodan-praljak-umro-u-bolnici Bartholomäus Grill: German right-wing radicals shoot in South Africa: License plate D. In: Die Zeit . No. 13 , 25 March 1994 Antifaschistisches Autorenkollektiv: Drahtzieher im braunen Netz : Ein aktueller Überblick über den Neonazi-Untergrund in Deutschland und Österreich. Konkret Literatur Verlag, 1996, https://etd.library.emory.edu/concern/etds/jm214q33q?locale=it https://js.emory.edu/news/news-stories-container/Using%20South%20African%20Archives%20to%20Study%20PostWorld%20War%20Two%20Antisemitism%20and%20White%20Supremacist%20Networks.html https://scholar.ufs.ac.za/server/api/core/bitstreams/c7f1b03d-343d-4abf-bcb3-e508f43dbc90/content https://antifainfoblatt.de/aib99/dressed-kill Searchlight Magazine, issues July, August, September 1996See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
I think what makes Gentleman's Cut different is me being a part of, you know, developing the profile of this beautiful finished product.
With every sip, you get a little something different.
Visit gentleman's cutbourbon.com or your nearest Total Wines or Besmo.
This message is intended for audiences 21 and older.
Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky.
For more on Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, please visit gentleman'scutbourbin.com.
Please enjoy responsibly.
Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers?
Who catfishes a city?
Is it even safe to snort human remains?
Is that the plot of Footloose?
I'm comedian Roy Scoville, and I'm here to tell you Josh Dean and I have a new podcast that celebrates the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals.
It's called Crimeless, a true crime comedy podcast.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm investigative journalist Melissa Geltson.
My new podcast, What Happened in Nashville, tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.
It doesn't matter how much I fight, doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this, it doesn't matter how much justice we get.
None of it's going to get me pregnant.
Listen to what happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I know he has a reputation, but it's going to catch up to him.
Gabe Ortiz is a cop.
His brother Larry, a mystery Gabe didn't want to solve until it was too late.
He was the head of this gang.
Took us under his wing and showed us the game, as they call it.
When Larry's killed, Gabe must untangle a dangerous past, one that could destroy everything he thought he knew.
Listen to the Brothers Ortiz on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Call Zone Media.
Hello, everyone.
Molly here.
Welcome back to the second of four installments of the holiday reruns here on Weird Little Guys.
Since Christmas and New Year's Day are both Thursdays this year, I was going to have to run two reruns in a row.
Instead of picking two random reruns, I'm using this opportunity to run my favorite mini-series of the year.
The eight episodes I wrote back in the spring about the international networks of right-wing extremists who were trying to hold on to apartheid in South Africa.
The first two episodes popped up on your feet on Tuesday, making this episodes three and four of that series.
The episodes The White Wolf and White Guns for Hire originally aired on March 20th and March 27th.
For this section of the story, I don't really have an update or a correction, but I do have more clues, more information that sort of hints at possibilities I just can't prove yet.
When I first started digging into Monica Huggett's stone, there was this curious claim that she was a member of the American Ku Klux Klan.
And when I was writing about this back in the spring, I went to great lengths to try to figure out exactly what that might mean.
I found some interesting history involving a South African anti-Semite who claimed to be running a Klan group in South Africa a few years before Monica would have been involved.
And that helped a little bit, give me some context.
But it didn't actually directly connect her to anything.
It didn't explain how she became pen pals with an American Klansman in the late 1970s, when she was helping those Italian terrorists build that bomb in Johannesburg.
But in the months since, someone was kind enough to send me a newspaper clipping.
One I wish I'd had then.
This was a recurring theme throughout the series.
I really had to get creative in finding source material.
It isn't easy to find newspaper archives in another language, from another continent, from decades ago.
I found more than I expected, but there were always gaps in my timeline that I had a good feeling could be filled in if I just had more access to South African newspapers from the time period.
And this clipping is exactly the kind of thing that would have saved me like 20 hours of frustration.
In 1981, Monica's mother told a reporter that Monica had been corresponding with an American pastor for years.
And the pastor's name was one I already know.
It was Robert Miles.
By the mid-1970s, which seems like it may have been when they started writing, Miles no longer publicly claimed Klan membership.
But he had been a grand dragon in the Klan in Michigan in the past.
And even after he transitioned away from publicly identifying as a Klansman, he was still hanging out with Klansmen, plotting to blow up school buses to prevent integration in a very Klan-like fashion, and writing essays that were published in the inter-Klan newsletter.
What I'm saying is he was still involved with the Klan.
So even though his primary focus was his Christian identity church, he could very well have been Monica's American Klan contact.
And if he wasn't, he was almost certainly her introduction to whichever Klansman it was who did mail her that bomb-making manual.
Notably, both Robert Miles and Monica Huggett were connected to the American Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s.
And they both ended up moving on to the Aryan Nations.
Miles died in 1992, but in the 1980s, he was a regional leader in the Aryan Nations.
And you know where this whole story started.
When Monica moved to the United States, she was a leading member of the Aryan Nations group operating out of Louisiana.
So those are interesting parallel tracks.
And it gives me just enough to go on that I'm definitely going to have to keep digging.
I mean, I have to write about Robert Miles eventually anyway.
On August 10th, 1989, around 9.30 p.m., a white sedan pulled up outside the United Nations Transition Assistance Group's administrative headquarters in Aotio, a town in northern Namibia.
It had what appeared to be UN-issued license plates, and the United Nations emblem was painted on the side.
So perhaps it didn't look out of place there, at first.
Initial reports say witnesses saw three men dressed in green camouflage uniforms.
The UN Transition Assistance Group had arrived in Namibia four months earlier, authorized by UN Resolution 435.
The resolution had actually been adopted over a decade earlier, but it took that entire decade to get all parties to come to the table.
The Transition Assistance Group was there to ensure the ceasefire was honored, that South African troops would withdraw from Namibia, and that the upcoming election would be free and fair.
Those first four months had not been without incident, but a ceasefire was re-established over the summer.
The South African military was withdrawing as planned, and UN officials were making progress on disarming and disbanding the citizen militias paid by the South African government.
If things continued on this path, it was looking good for the November elections.
But not everyone was on board with UN Resolution 435.
One small group in particular, calling itself Axi Contra 435, Action Against 435, did just what the name implies.
They took action.
When those men in green camos stepped out of their car outside the UN offices in Aotio that night, they opened fire with automatic weapons.
Hand grenades caused extensive damage to the buildings, both the administrative offices and the sleeping quarters.
A security guard named Michael Hoseg was killed in the attack.
But the men fled into the night without finishing the mission.
The entire cell was arrested fairly quickly, and authorities found a massive arsenal of guns and explosives the group planned to use in future attacks on United Nations targets with the goal of stopping the upcoming elections.
And those men were in custody in November when the elections were held.
But they didn't stay there.
They escaped.
They'd failed to prevent Namibian independence.
But now the fight was in South Africa, and they would do everything in their power to prevent the end of apartheid.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
This is still the story of Monica Huggett Stone, the elderly South African woman who was living in Mandeville, Louisiana, when she organized a series of nationwide Nazi rallies in 2012.
But she isn't in this part of the story, because I can't tell you about the international network of mercenaries she was organizing in 1994 without telling you a little bit more about some of those men, who they were, and what they were up to in the years leading up to that deadly shootout with the police on the eve of the South African elections.
I know I don't have to make excuses for this meandering narrative.
It's my story, and I'll tell it the only way I know how.
I never know where we're going when I start putting my notes together, and I really can't help but chase down this seemingly infinite number of surprisingly deep rabbit holes.
And I'm so fascinated by this international network.
It's come up a bit in other stories.
Dennis Mahon and Tom Metzger had close ties with Heritage Front in Canada.
In the early 90s, Dennis Mahon flew to Germany to show German neo-Nazis a good old-fashioned American Ku Klux Klan crossburning.
And he gave fiery speeches stoking the flames of the anti-immigrant riots that were exploding across Germany at the time.
The week before Dennis started making that bomb that he went to prison for, he'd been hanging out with an Ulster Unionist who'd carried out bombings in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
British Holocaust denier David Irving traveled regularly to the United States to network with American white supremacists.
Frank Sweeney joined the American Nazi Party in New Jersey as a teenager and later joined the Rhodesian Army as a mercenary.
Members of American white supremacist groups like the BASE, Adam Waffen, and the Rise Above movement and its spin-off active clubs have a particular fondness for traveling to Ukraine to fight with far-right groups like the Azov Battalion.
Patriot Front flags have popped up at neo-Nazi marches in Poland, and its members have met with leaders of foreign fascist groups like the Nordic Resistance Movement in Sweden and Casa Pound in Italy.
One of the young men arrested in connection with the Terrogram Collective was taken into custody at the airport before he could board a flight to Ukraine to join the Russian Volunteer Corps.
The fascists, racists, and anti-Semites of the world are obsessed with borders.
But they don't seem to mind crossing them.
So that's what we're exploring here.
And we'll find Monica again in the next chapter of this story when she does a bit of border crossing of her own.
But that's not until 1994.
And right now, it's 1989.
In 1989, South Africa was still five years away from ending apartheid.
Five years away from holding their first election with universal suffrage.
Five years away from electing Nelson Mandela as their first post-apartheid president.
In 1989, Nelson Mandela was still in prison, where he'd been since 1962.
But in 1989, one of South Africa's neighbors was taking the leap into multiracial democracy.
Well, whether or not South Africa considered Namibia to be a neighboring country or a country at all, depends on who you ask.
The present-day nation of Namibia had been a German colony from 1884 until 1915.
During World War I, when everyone was a little preoccupied elsewhere, South Africa captured the colony, known as South West Africa.
In 1966, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution declaring that South Africa no longer had a right to the territory.
But South Africa continued illegally occupying the area that the United Nations now recognized as Namibia.
The conflict lasted over two decades.
The South African border war wasn't just about South Africa's desire to extend apartheid into this colonial territory.
It was inextricably intertwined with other conflicts in the region, things like the Angolan Civil War.
It was a modern consequence of the 19th century scramble for Africa.
It was the unraveling of a century of colonialism.
It was fueled by Cold War anxiety about communist guerrilla forces and Soviet influence.
And it was about white anxiety.
If black Africans were allowed to participate in government, if they were, God forbid, allowed to rule their own nations, what would they do with that power?
The whole world got in on the action, both officially with major powers sending material support to their preferred parties, and unofficially, with independent mercenaries and shadowy state-sponsored operations popping up all over sub-Saharan Africa.
But by 1989, it was finally time.
The border war was over, and Namibia was going to have free and fair elections in November.
In April of that year, peacekeeping forces from the United Nations Transition Assistance Group arrived to oversee the process.
Namibia was going to be an independent nation, one without apartheid.
And this was a frightening prospect for those white South Africans trying desperately to hold on to power in an increasingly unsustainable form of government.
Now, this next part might sound like a conspiracy theory.
I try to tread waters like this with immense care.
I nearly drove myself to madness trying to thread the needle of fact, fiction, and question marks when I talked about the Oklahoma City bombing a while back.
And when I started poking around this particular history, I'll admit I didn't have a lot of context.
I don't know the landscape here.
So sorting fact from speculation and sifting out the lies is a tricky prospect.
And at first, I completely dismissed the idea that these neo-Nazi terrorists could have been acting on government orders.
That's tinfoil hat territory, right?
I saw the idea heavily insinuated in some reporting from the time period.
An article published in 1990 in an issue of Frei Vikblad, a South African newspaper with an anti-apartheid stance, opened with this fairly explosive allegation.
They are fugitives accused of murder.
They come from South Africa, Britain, Namibia, and Zimbabwe.
They have one common characteristic.
They left a trail of destruction, death, and bloodshed in Southern Africa over the past decade, but cannot be prosecuted.
They are among the most wanted men in our neighboring states, but enjoy the protection of the South African government because they have worked or still work for the security forces.
But that's not proof, right?
Think about how often you see similar sentiments expressed when it comes to American far-right groups.
Allegations that this group or that one or whichever prominent white supremacist leader hasn't been prosecuted because they're being protected by the state.
And that's always a possibility.
Sure.
But that doesn't mean it's true.
But some of those men would themselves later claim that they couldn't be prosecuted for murders and bombings because they'd been acting on government orders.
And again, that's not proof.
I've seen that before too.
Sometimes people will say anything to avoid responsibility, and that doesn't necessarily mean it's true.
I'd been chugging along, accumulating sources and taking my notes, translating old newspapers.
I subscribed to several South African genealogical databases.
I was really getting into the weeds here.
All under the assumption that there wasn't really a need to explore that angle.
It could be true, but it wasn't something I'd be able to substantiate, and it's the kind of thing I'm not comfortable exploring without something to hold on to.
I don't want to abuse your trust by speculating wildly and getting reckless with the facts.
But then I realized this is a very unusual set of circumstances.
Normally, a government would never admit to state-sponsored terrorism.
They all do it, but nobody admits it.
And if you ever do prove it, it's nothing short of a miracle.
You need leaked documents and deathbed confessions.
But the South Africa of 1995 wasn't really the same South Africa that had existed until 1994.
This government wasn't admitting to its own crimes.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was an unusually transparent look at the nation's past.
And they admitted it.
There is an entire chapter of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission final report called Secret State Funding.
And according to the report, Axi Contra 435, the group behind the attack at the UN offices in Aotio in 1989, is believed to have been entirely a creation of, funded by, the South African government.
At least one of the men involved was later confirmed to have been an operative of the South African Civil Cooperation Bureau, an odd name for what was essentially government-sponsored death squads.
And I tell you that now, so you can draw your own conclusions later in the story when things get a little murkier.
So just keep that in the back of your mind for now.
It wasn't long after the attack on Aotio that members of AxiContra 435 started getting arrested.
Although the group's name disappears from the conversation pretty quickly.
The men who'd carried out that attack were members of other groups too.
Specifically, they were all members of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, the AWB, led by Eugene Terreblanche.
The first to be arrested were two South African citizens, Arthur Archer and Craig Barker, and a German mercenary named Horst Klens.
South Africans Daryl Stopforth and Leonard Wienendahl were arrested soon after.
By October of 1989, two months after the attack in Aotio, five men had been arrested.
Charges against Craig Barker were dropped early on, and the charges against Arthur Archer were dropped after he agreed to cooperate.
And so in December of 1989, it's just three.
Wienendahl, Klenz, and Stopforth were officially charged with murder in a Namibian court.
The courthouse was a three-hour drive from the prison where the men were being held.
After the hearing, Leonard Wienendahl asked to use the bathroom before they were loaded back into the transport van to return to their cells.
And this is one of those moments where it's useful to bear in mind that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission names Leonard Wienendahl as a known operative of the Civil Cooperation Bureau, those government-sponsored death squads.
And he's named as an operative of the CCB specifically in connection with these events in Namibia.
So with that in mind, Leonard Wienendahl goes to the bathroom of the courthouse.
And he somehow knows to take the top off the tank of a particular toilet.
Someone had left him a gift in there.
A pistol.
And he takes the gun out of the toilet and he tucks it away and he allows himself to be placed back in the van.
About three-quarters of the way through the drive back to the jail, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, the men insisted that they just couldn't hold it any longer.
They needed to stop to go to the bathroom.
And the two Namibian police officers agreed.
They pulled over and they let their three prisoners out to pee on the side of the road.
And then suddenly another vehicle appeared.
It stopped and two men got out.
And Vienedahl produced the pistol from his hiding place and the two officers were overpowered by the three prisoners and their two accomplices.
Constable Ricardo van Wyck was shot in the stomach and later died.
The surviving officer was forced at gunpoint into the back of the van, which the prisoners drove half an hour off the main road before abandoning it.
and then they disappeared in the vehicle driven by their accomplices.
I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltsin.
My new podcast, What Happened in Nashville, tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.
We have some breaking news to tell you about.
Tennessee's Attorney General is suing a Nashville doctor.
In April 2024, a fertility clinic in Nashville shut down overnight and trapped behind locked doors were more than a thousand frozen embryos.
I was terrified.
Out of all of our journey, that was the worst moment ever.
At that point, it didn't occur to me what fight was going to come to follow.
But this story isn't just about a few families' futures.
It's about whether the promise of modern fertility care can be trusted at all.
It doesn't matter how much I fight.
It doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this.
It doesn't matter how much justice we get.
None of it's going to get me pregnant.
Listen to what happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Stephan Curry, and this is Gentleman's Cut.
I think what makes Gentleman's Cut different is me being a part of, you know, developing the profile of this beautiful finished product.
With every sip, you get a little something different.
Visit gentleman's cutbourbin.com or your nearest total wines or bevmo.
This message is intended for audiences 21 and older.
Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky.
For more on Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, please visit gentleman's cutbourbin.com.
Please enjoy responsibly.
Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers?
And what is this?
How is that not a story we all know?
What's this?
Where is that?
Why is it wet?
Boy, do we have a show for you?
From Smartless Media, Campside Media, and big money players comes Crimeless.
Join me, Josh Dean, investigative journalist, and me, Rory Scoville, comedian, as we celebrate the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals.
We'll look into some of the silliest ways folks have broken the laws.
Honestly, it feels more like a high-level prank than a crime.
Who catfishes a city?
And meets some memorable anti-heroes.
There are thousands of angry horny monkeys.
Clap if you think she's a witch and it freaks you out.
He has x-ray vision.
How can I not follow him?
Honestly, I got to follow him.
He can see right through me.
Listen to Crimeless on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Dad had the strong belief that the devil was attacking us.
Two brothers, one devout household, two radically different paths.
Gabe Ortiz became one of the highest-ranking law enforcement officers in Texas.
32 years, total law enforcement experience.
But his brother Larry, he stayed behind and built an entirely different legacy.
He was the head of this gang, and nobody was going to tell him what to do.
You gonna push that line for the calls.
Took us under his wing and showed us the game, as they call it.
When Larry is murdered, Gabe is forced to confront the past he tried to leave behind and uncover secrets he never saw coming.
My dad had a whole nother life that we never knew about.
Like my mom started screaming my dad's name and I just heard one gunshot.
The Brothers Ortiz is a gripping true story about faith, family, and how two lives can drift so far apart and collide in the most devastating way.
Listen to The Brothers Ortiz on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And they really did disappear.
Daryl Stopforth, Leonard Fienendahl, and Horst Klens had murdered a UN security guard and a Namibian police officer.
They were supposed to have gone on trial in Namibia, but they vanished.
For a little while, anyway.
Just a few short months later, both Leonard Fienendahl and Daryl Stopforth came out of hiding.
They were home in South Africa.
And South Africa had no extradition treaty with the newly independent nation of Namibia.
There were warrants for their arrest there, but there was nothing anyone could really do.
Wienendal said in a public statement a few months after his escape, I have now returned to my family and I'm going to devote myself full-time to the cause as the revolution is here.
A photo of Wienendahl taken around that time shows him wearing his AWB uniform and holding his newborn son.
He'd named the boy Daryl, presumably to honor Daryl Stopforth, the man he'd just committed two murders with.
And there's an odd thing I keep seeing these guys do as I'm researching this story.
They have this strange fondness for giving interviews when they're supposed to be in hiding, on the run from the law.
When it was announced in September of 1989, a month after the attack in Aotio, that Leonard Wienendahl had been arrested, a reporter in South Africa came forward with a pretty wild story.
While Wienendahl had been on the run, he'd taken the time to sit down for a two-hour interview with a reporter.
And in that interview, he spoke openly about his membership in the AWB.
That fact alone wasn't really a secret.
He was Eugene Terreblanche's personal bodyguard, and he was the leader of the Johannesburg branch of the group.
But he also claimed there had been a split within Aquila, the militant arm of AWB, with some members openly declaring their willingness and intent to die for the cause, forming a sort of kamikaze unit that planned to carry out high-profile assassinations.
He also showed the reporter a small circular placard of sorts with a picture of a wolf.
The reporter, Yuhan Fuz, just looked at it with disbelief and he said, there's no such thing as the white wolves.
And Vienna smiled at him and replied, believe me, they exist.
The white wolves probably didn't exist.
Not really, not then, anyway, not in any way that really means anything.
I guess they kind of did in the sense that if someone were to carry out a series of bombings and then call the newspaper to say that the white wolves did it, you sort of retroactively created the idea of a group that could be imagined to exist.
Because Wienendahl would later be connected to an attempt to do just that.
But by most accounts, the White Wolves wasn't a terrorist organization that actually existed.
But in September of 1989, as he's sitting there with this reporter from the Sunday Times, everyone in South Africa had heard of the white wolf, at least in the singular.
Earlier that year, a former policeman who called himself the White Wolf had been sentenced to death.
He was a former policeman because he'd been dismissed a year earlier after posing for a photo holding the severed head of a black man who had died in a gruesome car accident.
He tried to submit the photo for publication in a police magazine, but they declined to publish it.
He'd joined AWB at just 16 with his father's support and encouragement.
He'd been sentenced to die for something he did in November of 1988.
One afternoon, a 23-year-old named Baron Stridem put on his custom belt buckle engraved with the words white wolf in Afrikaans.
He parked his car near a busy city square in downtown Pretoria and he got out and he started walking.
And then he started shooting.
On the day of the massacre, he just walked for several blocks, just shooting black people at random.
He murdered eight people and wounded 16 others.
And every survivor says the same thing.
He smiled the entire time.
Bradley Stein was just 17 years old that day, and he was on his way home from rugby practice when he saw Stridem.
He didn't understand at first what he was looking at.
This man with a gun must be a police officer.
He must be trying to catch a bad guy.
But then he saw Stridem walk up to an old woman carrying groceries.
And without saying a word, Stridem shot her in the head.
At that moment, a black teenager called out to Stein, beckoning him over to the bench he was hiding behind.
And the two teens hid behind the bench together, but Stridem found them.
He shot the black boy.
As Stein, who's white, cradled this bleeding stranger in his lap, he looked up at Stridem and asked him, why?
Then I turned up to him and I said, Why are you doing this?
And he said, I dundat feritukums for watseitafrikaners, which means I'm doing this for the future of white South Africans.
Stridem never fired at a white person.
The shooting only stopped when a black taxi driver, a man named Simon Mukondele, tapped Stridem on the shoulder while he was reloading.
He must have caught the killer off guard because as Stridem turned around, Mukondele was able to grab the gun out of his hands.
As I was reading about Stridem's murders, it felt so familiar to me.
I've read accounts of a lot of mass shootings.
I've seen videos I wish I could forget.
I've wasted countless hours reading manifestos.
And there are plenty of similarities between white supremacist mass shootings.
There are a lot of common denominators when it comes to a young white man who carries out a racist mass shooting.
But this felt so terribly, eerily familiar to me.
It was inescapable.
It felt just like the Charleston church shooting.
It felt like Dylan Roof.
And back in 2015, several South African journalists covering that story, that American shooting, referred to Dylan Roof as America's white wolf.
So I guess I'm not alone in that feeling.
We talked briefly last week about the apartheid era South African flag patch in photos of Roof taken shortly before he murdered nine people at the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015.
So we know he had a fondness for apartheid.
But I wonder if he was familiar with the white wolf.
So when Wienendel is sitting there with this reporter, showing him this little picture of a wolf, this is what he's talking about.
He's telling the reporter that he's a member of this extremely militant, violent arm of the AWB, that they're planning to get a race war going before Christmas.
And he really wants the paper to run a story that will convince people that there are hundreds more barren stridems out there lying in wait.
And the reason the reporter didn't believe him is because it had been discussed extensively during Stridem's trial just a few months earlier.
There was no reason to believe any actual group called the White Wolves existed.
He was a member of AWB, that was fairly certain.
But when it came to the white wolves, it appeared to just be a pack of one.
Vienendal was maybe just planting seeds of propaganda.
He was trying to capitalize on this intense fear and trauma surrounding Stridem's murders by convincing people it could happen again at any time.
But Leonard Wienendahl had been telling the truth about at least one thing when he spoke to that reporter before his arrest.
There had been some splintering within the Afrikaner resistance movement.
Members of AWB had started forming increasingly violent breakaway groups.
Groups like the Order Vandidude, which translates to the Order of Death, and the Order Boerfolk, the Order of the Boer people.
And that name might sound familiar.
A violent fascist group calling itself the Order?
We've heard that one before.
Its founder would later say that he'd never actually heard of Robert J. Matthews, the American neo-Nazi who founded a group called the Order in 1983.
It seems both men arrived at the name independently, but for the exact same reason.
It was the name of the fictional white supremacist organization in William Luther Pierce's novel, The Turner Diaries.
And you might remember the name of the man who founded the South African version of the Order.
Remember last week we were talking about the trial of Massimo Bolo and Fabio Miriello, the Italian fascist convicted of the Vitcommando bombings in 1980.
As the two men were led into the courtroom on the first day of their trial, one man in the gallery stood up and applauded for the bombers.
And that man was Pretoria City Councillor Pete Rudolph.
And so by this point in our timeline, Rudolph is a high-ranking member of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, the AWB.
And Pete Rudolph maintains to this day that he founded the Order in 1989 with the knowledge and blessing of AWB's leader, Eugene Terreblanche, specifically so that AWB members could engage in more violent resistance without risking AWB itself being sanctioned or banned.
And if that's true, it's actually quite similar in that respect to the group of the same name in the United States.
When Robert Matthews founded the Order, he did so with the knowledge and blessing of William Luther Pierce, announcing the formation of the group in a speech at the annual meeting of Pierce's National Alliance.
And National Alliance benefited ideologically and financially from the Order's crimes, but they had the plausible deniability of having no formal affiliation with the group.
Just like Pierce and National Alliance, Terre Blanche and the AWB could sit back and enjoy the political benefit of their order's act of terror without the risk of appearing to have authorized them.
The Order Borofolk was definitely founded and led by Pete Rudolph.
But press clippings over the years occasionally name other men as the group's leader.
At one point, Nick Strydem, the father of mass murderer Baron Stridem, is quoted as the head of the Order.
In 1994, a South African TV news program aired an interview with a man claiming to be the leader of the Order.
I was perhaps as surprised as Pete Rudolph was to see Leonard Wienendahl staring back at me from the screen.
Rudolph would later tell the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Wienendahl had appointed himself as chief of staff of the Order without his permission and that such a position didn't even exist.
And he called Wienendahl, quote, a man fond of publicity with strong national socialist inclinations.
And he scoffed at the very idea that he would have let Wienendahl lead anything.
Disparagingly referring to Wienendahl's habit of appearing in public in a khaki uniform, saying, I despise a khaki uniform, let me tell you, because khaki is the color of the British.
But I guess the fashion police unit of the Nazi terror squad is really neither here nor there.
No one denies Wienendahl was a member of the Order.
In fact, when Wienendahl, Clennam, and Stopforth had escaped from custody in Namibia, it had been the order who picked them up on the side of the road, there next to the still bleeding policeman.
The man driving their getaway car was Rudolph's chief deputy, Hank Bradenhan.
Rudolph claims the order was formally established in October of 1989, but they didn't announce their presence to the world until February of 1990, when a small group of quote suspicious-looking white men vandalized the British embassy in Pretoria.
Witnesses saw them walk up to the embassy gates and spray paint in Afrikaans.
The struggle begins.
And they signed the statement, Order Borafolk.
Police looked at the graffiti and said they'd never heard of the group.
One member spoke anonymously with the press and said they were allied with the White Wolves.
I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltsin.
My new podcast, What Happened in Nashville, tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.
I have some breaking news to tell you about.
Tennessee's attorney general is suing a Nashville doctor.
In April 2024, a fertility clinic in Nashville shut down overnight, and trapped behind locked doors were more than a thousand frozen embryos.
I was terrified.
Out of all of our journey, that was the worst moment ever.
At that point, it didn't occur to me what fight was going to come to follow.
But this story isn't just about a few families' futures, it's about whether the promise of modern fertility care can be trusted at all.
It doesn't matter how much I fight, doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this, it doesn't matter how much justice we get.
None of it's going to get me pregnant.
Listen to what happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Stefan Curry, and this is Gentleman's Cut.
I think what makes Gentleman's Cut different is me being a part of, you know, developing the profile of this beautiful finished product.
With every sip, you get a little something different.
Visit gentleman's cutbourbon.com or your nearest Total Wines or Bethmo.
This message is intended for audiences 21 and older.
Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky.
For more on Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, please visit gentleman'scutbourbin.com.
Please enjoy responsibly.
Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers?
And what is this?
How is that not a story we all know?
What's this?
Where is that?
Why is it wet?
Boy, do we have a show for you?
From Smartless Media, Campside Media, and big money players comes Crimeless.
Join me, Josh Dean, investigative journalist, and me, Rory Scoville, comedian, as we celebrate the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals.
We'll look into some of the silliest ways folks have broken the laws.
Honestly, it feels more like a high-level prank than a crime.
Who catfishes a city and meets some memorable anti-heroes?
There are thousands of angry horny monkeys.
Clap if you think she's a witch and it freaks you out.
He has x-ray vision.
How could I not follow her?
Honestly, I gotta follow him.
He can see right through me.
Listen to Crimeless on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Dad had the strong belief that the devil was attacking us.
Two brothers, one devout household, two radically different paths.
Gabe Ortiz became one of the highest-ranking law enforcement officers in Texas.
32 years, total law enforcement experience.
But his brother Larry, he stayed behind and built an entirely different legacy.
He was the head of this gang, and nobody was going to tell him what to do.
Took us under his wing and showed us the game, as they call it.
When Larry is murdered, Gabe is forced to confront the past he tried to leave behind and uncover secrets he never saw coming.
My dad had a whole nother life that we never knew about.
Like my mom started screaming my dad's name and I just heard one gunshot.
The Brothers Ortiz is a gripping true story about faith, family, and how two lives can drift so far apart and collide in the most devastating way.
Listen to The Brothers Ortiz on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In April of 1990, the Order of Boreful took its first big step.
Pete Rudolph organized and led a raid on a South African Air Force base.
Carried out in collaboration with three young AWB sympathizers within the Air Force, Order members, including Leonard Wienendahl, stole a busload of guns and ammunition from the South African Defense Force.
Rudolph called the Pretoria News while on the run to take credit for the heist, saying it was time for war.
Quote, I have now crossed the Rubicon.
The Boer now have a chance to arm themselves.
We are now going for the ANC's throat.
And keep those guns in the back of your mind, too.
I'll remind you.
But one of those guns shows back up.
In June, Rudolph recorded a half-hour long video declaring war against the government.
And he mailed copies to several news outlets as well as other right-wing groups.
I could only find a short clip of it.
I don't know why I looked so hard for the full video.
It wouldn't have done me any good.
It's all in Afrikaans.
But still frames from the video show Rudolph sitting at a desk, flanked by masked men carrying rifles they'd stolen from the military.
And the message was part press release, part warning, part call to action.
He's speaking to a variety of audiences here.
And for his fellow Afrikaner nationalists, his message was pretty simple.
It's not time to talk anymore.
And it is, quote, better to die in glory than to live in disgrace.
Within days of this video's release, the bombs started going off.
In late June and early July of 1990, bombs went off every night.
A bomb went off at a bus terminal in Johannesburg, injuring nearly 30 people.
Bombs went off at both the home and business belonging to Clive Gilbert, a Johannesburg city councilor who was both Jewish and a member of the Democratic Party.
That same week, a synagogue in Johannesburg was bombed and defaced with swastikas and pro-apartheid slogans.
The office of the National Union of Mine Workers, a radical black labor organization, was destroyed by a bomb that went off overnight.
A bomb blew out the windows of the offices of the anti-apartheid weekly newspaper, Freiwijkblad.
And the homes and offices of several members of the ruling National Party were targeted as well, accompanied by warnings that President de Klerk must stop all efforts to adopt moderate reforms.
And then the phone calls came.
Two phone calls to the offices of a pro-government newspaper.
The first caller spoke English, not Afrikaans.
A day later, a second call came in to the same paper.
And this caller spoke Afrikaans, but he used the code word the reporter had given the previous caller to ensure he was speaking with the same group.
Both callers told the newspaper that the white wolves were responsible for the bombings and that the bombings would continue if their demands weren't met.
Their primary demand was pretty straightforward.
They wanted President de Klerk to call an election.
His moves towards reform and concessions and negotiations with the ANC and his recent release of Nelson Mandela, these things were unacceptable, and they wanted the opportunity to elect a better white president.
But the group had two other strangely specific requests.
They wanted the white wolf himself, Baron Stridem, released from prison.
And they wanted the police to call off the manhunt for Pete Rudolph, who was at this time still on the run after claiming responsibility for stealing all those guns from the military and then sending the government a videotaped declaration of war.
But like I said, the white wolves almost certainly didn't exist.
Not in 1990.
Not as an actual organized group, whatever that means.
For a group that didn't exist, though, they were very busy in 1990.
In February, shortly after Nelson Mandela was released from prison, letters threatening to assassinate him were received by newspapers.
And those letters were signed, the white wolves.
In May, when President de Klerk announced another round of apartheid reforms, including the repeal of the law that segregated libraries, the white wolves put out a press release warning the president to watch his back.
In May of 1990, three black activists with the African National Congress were run off the road by two white men.
Prince Makina and Simon Coba were murdered, but Xavier Lakote survived to testify.
He says before one of the white men started shooting at them, he'd asked if they'd heard of the white wolves.
Lakote said he replied that he had.
And just before opening fire, the man looked down at them and said, I'm going to show you just who the white wolves are.
And now in July, the white wolves are claiming responsibility for most, though not all, of the bombs that had been going off every night for a week.
It's possible that some of the other incidents involving people claiming to be the white wolves were just people doing what Leonard Bienendahl had done with that reporter.
They were pretending.
They were acting on their own or in connection with some other group.
But they liked the way it sounded to say they were the white wolves.
They understood the kind of fear it would inspire and the kind of plausible deniability it would give their actual group affiliation for whatever they'd done.
And more importantly, they wanted to honor the white wolf, Baron Stridem.
I see a lot of parallels here between the way Stridhem's murders so quickly achieved this almost religious significance and the way modern Teregram culture canonizes mass shooters.
I didn't realize they'd been doing that for so many decades.
I don't know that it was ever conclusively proven who was actually behind every instance of someone claiming to be the white wolves.
But in at least one of those cases, we know exactly who it was.
The man who murdered Prince Makina and Simon Coba in May of 1990 was Peter Grunewald, son of General Tini Grunwald, South Africa's head of military intelligence.
Peter Grunwald fled the country after the murders and he spent years hiding in Portugal.
When he was finally brought to justice, he testified that at the time of the murders, he had been an employee of the Civil Cooperation Bureau, just like Leonard Wienendahl.
I'm not sure what conclusion to draw here, but the only two people I can say with conclusive proof were telling people that the white wolves were real.
Both turned out to be members of state-sponsored death squads.
But when it comes to those bombings, in July, the police knew it wasn't the white wolves because they knew it was members of the AWB.
And we know, more specifically, that it was members of the closely aligned splinter group, the Order Borofolk.
There are a lot of reasons why we know that to be true, but just in case, here's Pete Rudolph himself saying it in an interview last year.
We blew up National Party offices.
We attacked some of the trade unions.
And it was becoming an open war.
And this was under the flag of the Order Bohrfont under the Order Bohrfolk, which was started on the 10th of October 1889 in connivance and with the assistance of the AWB.
All three of the men who'd bombed those UN offices in Namibia in 1989 had reappeared in South Africa by mid-1990.
And all three were actively involved in the Order's bombing campaign that summer.
And when the police started making arrests in July of 1990, Horst Klens, Daryl Stopforth, and Leonard Wienendal were three of the 10 men detained in connection with the bombings.
All 10 of those men had ties to AWB.
Several would later testify that they'd also been members of the Order of Death, a group that required members to commit a random, unprovoked murder as an act of initiation.
Now, I'm going to be honest with you.
I don't know what happened next.
I tried so hard to sort this out.
I love a day-by-day timeline.
But I think there are a lot of factors complicating things here.
I mean, first of all, it was 35 years ago.
Not every piece of news has been archived and digitized, and there's probably reporting out there that I just can't access.
And there are still the issues I talked about last week when it comes to locating source material in a foreign language with naming conventions and cultural context that I just don't have.
I've noticed a surprisingly casual attitude towards spelling and nicknames.
I mean, it was incredibly common across all of my sources for this story for someone's name to be spelled a handful of different ways pretty interchangeably, sometimes even within the same article.
And it seems like it might be normal in Afrikaans to refer to a particular individual using their full name or just their first and middle initial with their last name or some kind of nickname, even in very formal writing.
Again, totally interchangeably.
It took me a week to realize that Koos is a nickname for Jacobus, and one guy might be written about both ways from sentence to sentence.
I don't know, maybe this is cultural.
I have no idea.
But it really complicates the process of looking for information.
I've also noticed dates are often wrong.
I mean, a lot, like markedly, provably wrong, just not consistent from source to source, sometimes just offering information that isn't possible.
I mentioned last week that some of the dates in the Truth and Reconciliation report are definitely not correct.
Things like the year the Witt Commando trials took place are pretty easy to corroborate with newspaper archives.
And it happens over and over again.
The bombing of the Freiwijkblatt office is widely reported in later sources to have occurred in 1991.
The paper's own editor, Max Dupreez, even puts the date as 1991 in his memoirs, but that's not true.
He spoke to a reporter from the London Times about the bombing the day after it happened, in July of 1990.
And Duprez writes in his book that Leonard Wienendahl had confessed to having planted that bomb, which again could not have happened in 1991 because Leonard Wienendahl was in prison in 1991.
And the confession in question is actually very well documented, because Wienendahl would later testify before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that he'd only confessed to that bombing because police interrogators had electrocuted his testicles in July of 1990.
So sorting out a day-by-day timeline, which is, again, my preferred strategy, really just wasn't possible here.
There is no consistently reliable source when it comes to when a particular event actually happened.
And I'm not kidding about that, the bit about Wienendahl claiming to have been tortured.
He applied to testify before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, not as a perpetrator, but as a victim.
He offered testimony about abuse he'd suffered after his arrest in July of 1990.
I then experienced being shot.
Then the current would come through my leg, then through my armpit, then through my gentiles.
Sometimes they would come all three together.
While this was going, he shouted at me, why don't I call my God to release me from the cheek?
That clip comes from one of the weekly hour-long broadcasts that aired every Sunday from 1996 through 1998.
Every week, South Africans could tune in for the Truth and Reconciliation Special Report, a compilation of clips from the hearings that was presented by Max Dupreez, the newspaper editor whose office Wienendahl admitted to bombing.
And Dupreez ends that segment of the show with his own commentary.
I'm looking forward to Mr. Fiennendahl's amnesty application hearing.
And perhaps our departments of justice and foreign affairs owe the public an explanation why he has not been sent back to Namibia to stand trial.
But back to the question of the missing facts.
Perhaps the biggest factor here is that some of this information just isn't there to find.
And I don't mean it's missing from the archives.
I mean it doesn't exist.
These final years of the apartheid regime were chaotic.
Someone might get arrested for terrorism and then there just isn't ever any follow-up.
I may be searching for answers that aren't there because sometimes cops would round up a bunch of guys and put a story in the newspaper and then I don't know they just aren't in jail anymore and there's never any more to the story.
Sometimes people escaped.
Two members of the Ordo Borafolk definitely did.
And sometimes people were quietly released because they secretly worked for the government.
And during this time period especially, the government had a strategy of politically targeted amnesty as part of this effort to cool tensions and advance negotiations.
There were these occasional releases of political prisoners.
They just pick a few guys on both sides of the conflict and let them go.
And unlike the later, more organized and thoughtful process of granting amnesty through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this, at least to me, I could be wrong here, but this looked a little haphazard.
It doesn't look like these early 90s amnesty releases really involved any sort of long process of thoroughly accounting for what actually happened and documenting the specifics and getting statements on the record, getting people to admit what they'd done.
They just sort of let people go.
And one of the more egregious instances of this was the release of Baron Strydem in 1992.
The man who laughed as he shot pedestrians at random had served just four years.
And the release of political prisoners was a part of the ongoing negotiations between the National Party administration and the African National Congress.
Both sides were getting some of their people out of prison and the ANC seemed generally supportive of the strategy.
But not when it came to Baron Stridem.
Cyril Ramaposa, the current president of South Africa, was the ANC general secretary back in 1992 and he issued their statement condemning the decision.
Our prisoners will not go out and commit these acts again, he said.
But there's no guarantee that the prisoners who hate black people will not come out and shoot more black people.
Baron Strydem didn't carry out another mass shooting after his release, not that I'm aware of, but he did continue to support and encourage far-right violence.
Shortly after his release, Australian journalist Alan Hogan interviewed Stridem about the murders.
On camera.
Not in a studio or his living room.
No, the interview took place as the pair walked together along the path that Stridem had taken that day.
And he's pointing out the locations, each spot where he took a human life.
And he's laughing.
And he enthusiastically agrees that, yeah, if you gave me a gun right now, I'd do it again.
Then I say, uh, shut another one here.
That's three so far.
That's free so far.
You see these couple of quicks sitting here now, huh?
Yeah.
Would you like to shoot them?
Another, another times, yes.
All that to say, the early 90s were a little chaotic.
So I'm comfortable saying I just don't know why it looks like no one was ever charged for those bombings in July of 1990.
I can tell you for certain that 10 members of the Order were arrested in the summer of 1990 after that series of bombings.
One was released after he agreed to cooperate.
Two escaped.
And Leonard Wienendahl, Daryl Stopforth, and Horst Klens were in jail, originally held in connection with the bombings for violations of section 29 of the Internal Security Act.
And they seemed to stay in jail for quite a while.
No charges were ever actually filed against them for those bombings in South Africa, but while they were in custody, the newly independent nation of Namibia filed a petition to have them extradited to face trial for those murders in 1989.
The Truth and Reconciliation Report notes, in passing, that they were never interviewed by Namibian authorities during this time period.
It doesn't say why, if they asked and weren't given permission, or if they just never asked.
And I do have articles that were published in 1990 and 1991 that seemed to indicate they remained in continuous custody throughout this time.
But after those first few months, the articles stop mentioning why they'd been arrested in the first place, and they only refer to the fact that they're still being held pending a determination about extradition.
By July of 1991, a year after they were arrested, both Wienendahl and Klens were reportedly dangerously ill from an ongoing hunger strike, along with other incarcerated members of the Order Borofolk.
They were political prisoners, they said.
They'd only carried out the orders of the state.
They can't be prosecuted for that.
And they said they would continue their hunger strike until their demands were met.
News stories show Wienendahl was on a hunger strike as early as January of 91 and as late as August of 92.
So that can't have been continuous because he's still alive.
But for about two years, I can place him in jail and he's going on intermittent hunger strikes to protest this continued detention.
In April of 1992, a South African judge did rule that the Aotio III could be extradited to Namibia.
Stopforth and Wienendahl tried to appeal that ruling, but Horst Klens wasn't really participating.
He just kind of disappeared.
And when they were all released on bond in December of 1992 to await this final ruling, he disappeared entirely.
It would take another four years, but in 1996, the Minister of Justice finally signed the extradition order.
Horst Klens was otherwise engaged by then.
He was serving time for the plot we'll cover next week.
But Daryl Stopforth and Leonard Wienendahl were ordered to surrender themselves for extradition to Namibia.
But they didn't.
I can't figure out where Daryl Stopforth ended up.
I tried.
But I know exactly where Leonard Wienendahl is.
Because just as he was due to present himself to the authorities to be extradited, he stole a car, crossed the border, and flew to the United Kingdom.
Some reporting says he initially entered the United Kingdom using a false passport, probably because he was on Interpol's most wanted list, and that he didn't try to claim asylum until after he was caught.
But it's unclear.
The man that Eugene Terreblanche used to affectionately refer to as my little fanatic settled down with his family in Wisbeck, a town about 100 miles north of London.
He's the chair of the Wisbeck Rugby Club, and his wife Tracy is the treasurer.
The payday loan company he started after moving to England went into liquidation a few years ago.
I'm not really familiar with how anything works in the UK, and I really don't know how you could bankrupt a business that's pure extortionate profit, but that is what the paperwork appears to show.
There have been a handful of articles over the years asking why Leonard Wienendahl was allowed to enter and remain in the United Kingdom.
In 2003, a reporter tracked him down at his home in Wiesbeck.
And Searchlight magazine would later report that Wienendahl allegedly attacked the reporter, grabbing him and slamming him up against a wall, shouting, you're going to find yourself in a very negative position.
Subsequent attempts to write articles about Wienendahl don't contain quotes from him.
He and his wife are South African citizens, born in South Africa.
There's no evidence he actually applied for political asylum.
Corporate filings for his bankrupt payday loan company list his nationality as South African, which, again, knowing nothing about British business, I assume means he did not seek British citizenship.
So the UK is just willingly harboring a man who's still wanted for two murders in Namibia.
International extradition law can be a bit tricky, but ultimately, even if they couldn't or don't want to extradite him to Namibia, why is he still in the UK?
They could deport him back to South Africa.
And presumably, the South African government would finish what they started in 1990 and send him to Namibia.
In February of this year, as Donald Trump started parroting white nationalist talking points about South Africa, Wienendahl made a flurry of online posts praising the American president.
Writing in one post last month, Thank you, President Donald J. Trump, not only for hearing the plight of my people, the Boer Afrikaners, but for boldly stepping up to stand with them in their hour of need and face of adversity.
When Jimmy Carter died in December, Wienendahl posted, he just died, so we're supposed to pretend he's a saint.
But Carter was instrumental in killing the free, prosperous state of Rhodesia.
Like I said, I can't tell you whatever became of Daryl Stopforth.
But we'll pick back up next week with Horst Clannes.
He was released from the South African jail in 1992, pending a decision on whether or not he could be extradited to Namibia.
Unlike Stopforth and Wienendahl, he doesn't seem to have participated in the legal battle to appeal that decision.
He went underground, and he doesn't resurface again until 1994, when he's arrested again.
This time after a shootout with the South African police that left one of his young German mercenaries dead.
And that's where we'll find the woman who sent me down this long, strange path.
It was Monica Huggett, who is graciously playing host for those foreign mercenaries.
I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltsin.
My new podcast, What Happened in Nashville, tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.
We have some breaking news to tell you about.
Tennessee's Attorney General is suing a Nashville doctor.
In April 2024, a fertility clinic in Nashville shut down overnight and trapped behind locked doors were more than a thousand frozen embryos.
I was terrified.
Out of all of our journey, that was the worst moment ever.
At that point, it didn't occur to me what fight was going to come to follow.
But this story isn't just about a few families' futures.
It's about whether the promise of modern fertility care can be trusted at all.
It doesn't matter how much I fight.
It doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this.
It doesn't matter how much justice we get.
None of it's going to get me pregnant.
Listen to what happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Stefan Curry, and this is Gentleman's Cut.
I think what makes Gentleman's Cut different is me being a part of developing the profile of this beautiful finished product.
With every sip, you get a little something different.
Visit gentleman's cutbourbin.com or your nearest total wines or Bevmo.
This message is intended for audiences 21 and older.
Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky.
For more on Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, please visit gentleman's cutbourbin.com.
Please enjoy responsibly.
Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers?
And what is this?
How is that not a story we all know?
What's this?
Where is that?
Why is it wet?
Boy, do we have a show for you?
From Smartless Media, Campside Media, and big money players comes Crimeless.
Join me, Josh Dean, investigative journalist, and me, Rory Scoville, comedian, as we celebrate the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals.
We'll look into some of the silliest ways folks have broken the laws.
Honestly, it feels more like a high-level prank than a crime.
Who catfishes a city and meets some memorable anti-heroes?
There are thousands of angry horny monkeys.
Clap if you think she's a witch and it freaks you out.
He has x-ray vision.
How could I not follow him?
Honestly, I gotta follow him.
He can see right through me.
Listen to Crimeless on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Dad had the strong belief that the devil was attacking us.
Two brothers, one devout household, two radically different paths.
Gabe Ortiz became one of the highest-ranking law enforcement officers in Texas.
32 years, total law enforcement experience.
But his brother Larry, he stayed behind and built an entirely different legacy.
He was the head of this gang, and nobody was going to tell him what to do.
You're going to push that line for the calls.
Took us under his wing and showed us the game, as they call it.
When Larry is murdered, Gabe is forced to confront the past he tried to leave behind and uncover secrets he never saw coming.
My dad had a whole nother life that we never knew about.
Like my mom started screaming my dad's name and I just heard one gunshot.
The Brothers Ortiz is a gripping true story about faith, family, and how two lives can drift so far apart and collide in the most devastating way.
Listen to The Brothers Ortiz on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In early March of 1994, three men left the Bosnian city of Siroki-Brieg.
German mercenaries Falk Semang and Ralph Marajas were eager for a change of scenery.
Not because they had tired of their lives as soldiers of fortune, but because they were in a bit of hot water after murdering two of their fellow mercenaries.
And Ronald Deuster, a Dutch mercenary they'd worked with on his last stint with the Croatian forces, was happy to recruit them to a new mission, one far away from the mess they'd made in the Balkans.
Before they left, they took a few souvenirs.
A couple of AK-47s, one pistol, eight kilos of Semtex, a plastic explosive, and a crate of hand grenades.
They stashed the stolen weapons under the seats of the old Citroen that Doyster was driving.
Doyster was no stranger to committing crimes across borders.
He'd been a soldier for hire for over a decade and had served a bit of time in Ireland for arms smuggling.
He was confident that his expertly forged UN press credentials were all they'd need to ensure a clean getaway without anyone searching the vehicle.
And he was right.
After driving nearly 2,000 kilometers, they reached their first destination, the Belgian city of Russilara.
There, they met with Roger Spinuin, the leader of a Belgian neo-Nazi group called the Order of Flemish Militants.
He was a bit of a legend in certain circles.
He was already an old man, but in the 70s, he'd led a small group of Belgian Nazis in a daring heist of sorts, successfully stealing the corpse of a long-dead Nazi priest from his grave in Austria to be reinterred on his home soil in Belgium.
And on that day in March of 1994, Spinuin paid Deuster 11,000 Deutschmarks for the stolen weapons.
But he gave him one more thing, directions.
It had been Spinuin who'd asked Deuster to return to Bosnia this one last time.
Not as a mercenary this time, but to fetch hardware and recruits for a new mission.
One in South Africa.
The aging neo-Nazi had spent his life fighting for fascism at home in Belgium.
His son John was a member of parliament as a leader in the far-right party of Laams Block.
But as the world continued to change around him, he hoped to retire one day in a beautiful white ethno-state in southern Africa.
Here on the eve of the end of apartheid, though, that dream was starting to look less and less likely.
Unless they could incite enough violence in those final months to convince the white population of South Africa that they needed to secede to form a new, pure white nation.
And this was the task he'd recruited these mercenaries for.
It wasn't safe to depart directly from Belgium.
The authorities there were already a little suspicious.
Instead, the mercenaries took the ferry across the English Channel to Ramsgate, a seaside town in Kent.
There, with an introduction from Spinuin, they made their next contacts, members of the British fascist group, the League of St. George.
They spent a few days there making final preparations for their journey with the help of their new English friends.
This was becoming something of a routine for the members of the League of St. George.
Just two months earlier, they'd hosted another batch of German mercenaries making the same trip.
They didn't know just yet that one of those men was already dead.
On the evening before Deuster and the Germans were scheduled to fly out of Heathrow, Roger Spinuin dispatched one of his sons to Ramsgate with one final message for the mercenaries.
Willie Spinuin handed Ronald Doyster a sealed envelope and passed along his father's order.
Deuster was to personally hand deliver this envelope to the woman who would meet him at the airport.
A woman named Monica Huggett.
i'm molly conger and this is weird little guys this is the part of the story where we finally rejoin the woman we started with monica huggett stone
It's been a long, strange journey.
We started out a few weeks ago in 2012 in Sacramento, California.
American neo-Nazis from the Golden State Skinheads were rallying outside the state capitol, holding the flag of apartheid South Africa, when counter-protesters from a nearby Occupy encampment showed up to heckle them.
What an odd sight, those skinheads in their black jackets rallying for the imaginary cause of a white genocide against South African farmers.
That rally was one of more than a dozen simultaneous rallies across the United States that day, though they were mostly poorly attended and some were barely publicized.
And all of them were organized by a short-lived Aryan nations affiliated group called the South Africa Project.
And that group itself was almost certainly really just two people.
A longtime Aryan Nations member named Morris Goulet and a mysterious woman in Louisiana named Monica Stone.
I'm always surprised by the twists and turns that these stories take.
Once you start turning over a few rocks, there's always some bizarre new angle that takes us miles from where I thought we were going.
But this one has been the strangest ride of any weird little guy so far.
In this chapter of the story, we'll try to trace the paths of these European mercenaries from Bosnia to South Africa.
It turns out there was an international network to funnel guns for hire from one conflict to another.
And as cloak and dagger as all of that sounds, it wasn't really a secret.
Not entirely.
Searchlight magazine had reported on the scheme months before those German mercenaries even bought their plane tickets.
Every year, for decades now, European neo-Nazis gather in the Belgian city of Dixmude for an international fascist get-together.
And at the event in 1993, there was a lot of talk about changing their focus about redirecting mercenaries from the Balkans to South Africa.
And plans were made.
At least 15 mercenaries were pledged to be dispatched in early 1994 with plans to fight alongside Robert Van Tonder's Borostad Party.
All of this was published in print, in English, in the fall of 1993, months before this actually happened.
That same publication, Searchlight Magazine, would eventually uncover more of the details about what went on at Dixmude in 1993.
It was at this summit that Roger Spinuin recruited Ronald Doyster to return to Bosnia to recruit more mercenaries for South Africa.
And, according to another source, it was also sometime in late 1993 that Roger Spinuin paid a visit to South Africa himself at the invitation of Monica Huggett.
I mentioned a few weeks ago that the first step in tracking this Monica Stone, the one who organized those rallies in 2012, back to her home country of South Africa, was figuring out her maiden name, which is Hugget.
And I did that by digging up old corporate filings for a Christian identity church called the New Christian Crusade Church.
And the new Christian Crusade Church was run by a man named James K. Warner.
I don't think Warner necessarily qualifies as a big name, but he shows up in a lot of big stories.
He was an early member of George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party.
He was a leading member of the short-lived National States Rights Party.
And in his Klan days, he was a very close friend of David Duke.
I've left myself a note to come back to James K. Warner.
I think there's some real weird little guy stuff going on here.
And I do have a quick correction to make.
As much as it pains me, I just realized I misspoke in the last episode where I mentioned James K. Warner.
I called him Robert K. Warner.
Careless, honestly, I should have caught that, but to be honest with you, I'm recording this at one in the morning, and this is early by my usual standards.
I'm always a little down to the wire.
But I think what happened there was just a slight mix-up, because in my defense, James Conrad Warner did have a brother named Robert L. Warner.
And he did use his brother's name on the deeds to some of the church property.
But it turns out that Monica's connection to Robert K. Warner may be the answer to a question that's been bothering me for weeks.
How on earth did a woman in South Africa manage to join the Ku Klux Klan?
If you recall the story in the episode two weeks ago, Monica Huggett was arrested in 1981 in connection with a series of pro-apartheid bombings by a group that called itself the Vid Commando.
And after her arrest, she agreed to testify against the Italian fascists that she'd helped carry out those bombings.
During the trial, she said she was a member of the American Ku Klux Klan.
And she told the authorities that the books they'd used as a guide for making those bombs had been sent to her by her American Klan contacts.
So she wasn't just a member of a Ku Klux Klan style group that operated independently in South Africa.
She's saying that she has active contact with the Klan in the United States.
Because there is a big difference there.
There have been groups in other countries that have adopted the aesthetic and the ideology of the Klan without necessarily maintaining meaningful contact with the group they're modeling themselves after.
In other examples, what looks like a foreign iteration of the Klan is actually just an American who happens to be living overseas.
In the 1980s, there was an American serviceman stationed in Germany who claimed that he was leading an active Klan group in Bavaria.
And in the Dennis Mahon story, we saw an American Klansman who traveled internationally, trying to spark an interest in American Klan aesthetics and ideology, but with relatively little success.
So what Monica's talking about here is something a little different.
And I was stumped.
Truly.
As we'll get to later on in the story, I can absolutely connect Monica Huggett Stone to the American Ku Klux Klan by the 1990s.
I've got the Federal Election Commission filings to prove that.
That's easy.
But I still have no answers when it comes to the question of Klansmen in South Africa in the late 1970s.
Not in any concrete way.
But I do have a theory.
One of the sources I've relied on heavily throughout this series is a 1999 thesis by Maida Visser on the white fascist movements in South Africa in the 20th century.
And she sort of hints at this idea.
She writes, quote, the activities of the Klan in South Africa are obscure.
Although the police had no concrete evidence that the movement was active in South Africa, there were claims in the press in the late 70s that branches existed in the country.
And so in Visser's thesis, she gives a couple of examples that are definitely evidence of that aesthetic copycat behavior I'm talking about.
So when the Vit Commando took credit for those bombings in 1980, the letters they sent to the press had a symbol in the letterhead that was almost identical to the logo used by American Klan groups.
And in 1990, when two members of the Order of Death went on trial for murder, their supporters packed the courtroom and they were all wearing little Klan lapel pens.
And one of them even told a reporter, the order is long gone.
It's the Ku Klux Klan now.
In an unrelated side note, just to wrap up a loose end from the last episode, I can tell I've spent too much time digging around for details I'm not going to need for this story when side characters start to look really familiar.
When I was reading that anecdote about the Order of Death trial in 1990, I recognized the names of the murderers.
Cornelius Laudering and Faney Gusen were two of the 10 members of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement who were arrested in the summer of 1990.
So when they scooped up Leonard Wienendahl and Horst Klens, Laudering and Gusen were in that bunch.
And I mentioned in last week's episode that I couldn't exactly tell what became of all 10 of those men, but two of them had escaped from custody.
And those two were Laudering and Gusen.
So I guess they found them again because they did get convicted of murder.
But back to the question of the Klan.
I could have left it there, but I think you probably know by now that I didn't.
Because if you dig just a little bit deeper into the past, there was a man in South Africa who called himself the leader of the South African Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s and into the 70s.
He died in the late 70s.
His name was Raymond Kirch Rudman.
And by the time he was trying to get a South African Klan going, he was already pretty old and he was decades into his career as a professional anti-Semite with impressive international connections.
Aside from his Klan activities, Rudman was also the leader of an Afrikaner nationalist group called the Boronasi, originally founded by Maney Meretz.
Meretz's son, also called Maney Meretz, was a prominent figure in the Afrikaner resistance movement during the same time period as Monica Huggett.
And Rudman also led a group called the Anglo-Norman Union.
I can't find much information about the extent to which that group actually operated in South Africa.
Like, did it actually have real members?
But in 1965, Rudman did use the group to join the World Union of National Socialists.
That was an effort by George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party and Colin Jordan, who was then the head of the National Socialist Movement in the United Kingdom, to form, I guess, exactly what it sounds, a world union of Nazi groups.
But when it comes to the Klan, there's not much written, at least not that I was able to find, about the history of the Klan in South Africa.
But everything that does exist has Ray Rudman's name on it.
Last year, Dr. William Robert Billops completed his dissertation at Emory University, and I know, I know that dissertation has the answers I'm looking for, but it is currently embargoed and not available to read.
But a write-up about his research tells me I'm on the right track.
He was researching anti-Semitic bombings in the United States during the civil rights era when he came across one of the same sources I did.
An old mention of Ray Rudman trying to recruit for a Klan group in South Africa in the early 1960s.
Billops was able to secure grant funding to spend several weeks in South Africa at the University of the Free State, where Rudman's personal papers are held in a special collection.
Again, unfortunately for me, I can't read Billops' research.
But I do have the finding aid for Rudman's papers.
I can't actually see what's written.
The documents aren't digitized.
A finding aid is just an inventory listing the contents of various boxes and folders.
And I would love to get my hands on some of those letters.
Because listed in that inventory are entries for correspondence between Ray Rudman and the New Christian Crusade Church, dated as early as the 60s and 70s.
There's also an entry listing correspondence between Ray Rudman and the National States Rights Party, dated from the 1950s.
The inventory also lists more than 40 books in Rudman's collection that were published by James K. Warner, either through his Sons of Liberty Press or the New Christian Crusade Church.
A similar finding aid for the personal papers of James K. Warner, held by the University of Wyoming, also lists correspondence between James Warner and Ray Rudman.
And Warner's Nazi publishing outfit, the Sons of Liberty Press, also published and sold English language versions of texts by South African anti-Semite Johann Schumann and Afrikaner nationalist politician Jaap Marais.
So I can't tell you exactly how Monica Huggett came to join the Ku Klux Klan.
But there is some really solid connective tissue here.
It doesn't feel as random now.
So when she moved to the United States, she was a close enough associate of James K. Warner that he put her in charge of his new Christian Crusade Church.
And that has to have something to do with the fact that archives show that he was in active communication with the far right in South Africa from his earliest days in the movement.
It looks like I have some more digging to do on the subject of the Fascist International, because the number of connections here is honestly pretty staggering to me.
James K. Warner visited England in the 70s to speak at a meeting of the League of St. George.
In 1980, our Belgian Nazi Roger Spinouin was deported from the United States while he was here visiting members of the National States Rights Party.
And our South African Klansman, Ray Rudman, was listed as the South African correspondent in issues of a British fascist magazine in the 1970s.
All of these guys are connected, going back decades.
But I've been promising to get to this part of the story for weeks now.
The part where a handful of German mercenaries get into a shootout with the South African police in March of 1994.
A few episodes ago, I told you that one of the first places I found Monica Huggett's name was in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission's final report.
In Volume 2, the portion of the report that deals with, quote, the Commission of Gross Violations of Human Rights, 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 Miriello, 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 Vermoulen and Ms. Monica Huggett were arrested with them, but Huggett turned state's witness and Vermoulen was released after a few days.
Huggett's name was subsequently linked to a shootout in March of 1994 between the South African police and three German right-wingers in the Donkerhoe area.
One German right-winger, Mr. Stephen Reyes, was arrested, Mr. Thomas Koons was shot dead, and a third, Mr. Horst Klens, was later arrested.
A fourth, Mr. Alexander Nydlein, was later charged in the Kullinen Magistrates Court for illegal possession of a firearm.
And I read that paragraph before.
You've heard that bit.
And at this point, you know some of the backstory that paragraph is talking about.
Two weeks ago, we talked about the Vitkomando bombings in 1980, and we spent most of the last episode talking about one of those men, Horst Klens.
Before that shootout in 1994, Klenz had been involved in a 1989 attack on a United Nations outpost in Namibia, killing a security guard and later murdering a police constable when he and his accomplices escaped from custody.
And at some point, I teased you a little bit with a story about Alexander Nydline.
He was the German neo-Nazi who swore allegiance to Donald Trump at a fascist rally in Croatia in 2017.
So we know where Horst Klens was in the early 90s.
He was in South Africa.
But how did those other three men actually get there in 1994?
Alexander Nydline, Stephen Reyes, and Thomas Kunst followed the same path as the mercenaries recruited by Ronald Doyster.
They deserted from the Convicts Battalion, a paramilitary unit of the Croatian Defense Council made up of prisoners and foreign mercenaries, and they left Bosnia with stolen weapons.
Then, with the help of the League of St. George in England, they made their way down to South Africa.
And just like Ronald Doyster, they were given the name of a woman who would pick them up from the airport.
Monica Huggett.
And here is another place in my research for this story where I found a very unlikely source of information that I just couldn't have gotten anywhere else.
Two weeks ago, I had to give my begrudging thanks to the Central Intelligence Agency after discovering English translations of South African news stories in archived reports from the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service.
And this week, I have an even more unsavory source to thank.
Though, he isn't around to hear it.
This is the prosecution's appeal concerning Praljak in all other respects affirms the sentence of 20 years of imprisonment, subject to credit being given under Rule 101C of the rules for the period he has already spent in detention.
Mr. Praljak, you may be seated.
Stop, please.
Please sit down.
That audio might not sound familiar, but if you're extremely online, you've seen meme-ified images of this moment used as a reaction gif a thousand times.
I know it.
I'm sure you know the one I'm talking about.
It's a white-haired old man in a suit, and he's drinking from a small vial.
That man is Slobodan Proliak.
He died by suicide in 2017, and the meme shows the moment that he produced a small vial of cyanide from his pocket after a judge at The Hague announced that his sentence for war crimes would be upheld.
I don't speak Croatian, but news reports translated his last words in that video as: Judges, Slobodan Prolyak is not a war criminal.
With disdain, I reject your verdict.
And then he knocks back the vial of cyanide.
We don't have to get into the crimes against humanity that Slobodan Prolyak was convicted of by the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia.
He doesn't really factor in directly to our story at all.
But he did choose to defend himself without an attorney during his war crimes trial.
And as part of that effort, he had a website dedicated to proving his innocence.
And that website is actually still online today.
But the documents that I found most useful in researching this story don't appear to be accessible on the current version of the site.
So buried in this poorly organized series of files on an archived version of this war criminal's website, I found something terribly interesting.
All of the existing reporting that I could find about Alexander Nynlein, Stephen Reyes, and Thomas Kunst and their whereabouts in late 1993 seems to rely on one of those documents.
An arrest warrant signed by their commanding officer, a war criminal named Mladen Nalatilik, which I know I've not pronounced correctly, so we'll just call him by his nickname, Tuta.
Everyone else did.
When those three German mercenaries deserted from Tuta's ragtag convicts battalion in the middle of December of 1993, he wrote a memo requesting arrest warrants.
Translated, it reads, On December 16th, 1993, members of the convicts battalion fled from Siroki Brieg to an unknown destination after spending three to four days in the unit after stealing weapons and ammunition.
The memo goes on to specify that, aside from their names and the fact that they'd been briefly affiliated with the unit, he had no additional information about these three men.
It's possible that a lot is lost in translation here, but it kind of looks like he's really going out of his way to distance himself from these men because he's very explicit that they were only there for a few days and he doesn't know anything about them.
These guys are strangers to him.
And I guess there's no reason to doubt that.
It's what every write-up about the incident says, and who knows, maybe they got all the way there and they realized war isn't very fun and they changed their minds.
That makes plenty of sense, right?
But I think it would be terribly naive to take a war criminal at his word.
Because he was lying.
In that chaotic document dump on Slobodan Prolyak's website, I found Tuta's request for the issuance of those arrest warrants and I found the arrest warrants themselves.
And they were both signed by Tuta.
I clicked through, I don't know, maybe a hundred documents that mostly meant absolutely nothing to me.
I didn't really know what I was looking for or what might even be there for me to find.
But I did find another document bearing the signature of the commander of the Convex Battalion.
And this one was dated December 2nd, 1993, a full two weeks before those men deserted.
And it's a list of soldiers under Tuta's command, and it appears to have been written on a typewriter.
And next to the name of each soldier who had been paid for their service in the month of November, he had drawn a check mark in pencil.
And there, 24 pages into this list of names, are Alexander Nydline, Stephen Reyes, and Thomas Kunst.
Nydline and Kunst both have a check mark next to their name, indicating that they'd been paid for the month of November.
Nydline has, over the years, taken issue with journalists who characterize him as a mercenary, often arguing that he never actually got paid, so he can't be called a mercenary.
So this document at least offers some possible rebuttal to that.
Next to Stephen Ray's name, though, there isn't a checkmark.
Instead, there's a little symbol that looks like it might be the letter D.
I think the soldiers who have died are the ones with the little cross next to their name.
And soldiers who are in the hospital either have a B or the word bolnica, which means hospital, written out.
And I couldn't find any commonly used word for something like dead, deceased, killed, deserted, quit, captured, any words like that.
I couldn't find any that would start with D in Croatian.
But there are some words and phrases related to the concept of authorized leave or a permitted absence that do start with D in Croatian.
I'm just spitballing here.
I have no idea what it could mean.
I don't know anything about running a mercenary unit to do war crimes and I don't speak Croatian.
I'm just guessing.
But regardless of what these mysterious little symbols mean, here's their commanding officer's signature on a document listing their names two weeks before he says they had only just shown up in the last couple of days.
The obvious next question then is why would he lie about how long they'd been with the unit?
The short answer, obviously, is I don't know.
I don't think anybody knows.
But if I had to guess, I would say he was covering his ass.
The convict's battalion was becoming increasingly unpopular by late 1993.
It was, again, exactly what it sounds like.
It was made up of people who had been in prison for violent crimes, as well as foreign mercenaries who had volunteered to commit violent crimes.
And they were out of control.
A letter sent to a Croatian general signed by another officer that same month, December of 1993, complained about Tuta's convicts running amok.
They weren't just committing war crimes, but they were killing and raping military and police personnel on their own side.
And their commanding officer was protecting them.
So I can only assume that he was trying to distance himself from another embarrassing act of misconduct by this ragtag group of foreign murderers when these three Germans deserted the unit with a bunch of stolen guns and bombs.
Other sources I found writing about the actions of mercenaries in the Bosnian war single out the German mercenaries in particular for their brutality.
Rob Krot, a frequent contributor to Soldier of Fortune magazine, wrote in his book, Save the Last Bullet for Yourself, that the Germans he served with during the Bosnian war had a terrible habit of cutting the ears off the people they killed and keeping them as trophies.
Austrian journalist Christoph Santner co-wrote, Ich Gejetstrambospielen, which translates to, I'm going to play Rambo now, with former mercenary Wolfgang Nideriter.
And Nidereiter recounts seeing a German mercenary hand a live grenade to a seven-year-old Muslim boy in the Bosnian city of Mostar.
As a joke of some sort, the mercenary told the boy it was a toy, and the child was blown to pieces moments later.
There was no shortage of violence in the Balkans in the early 90s.
There's plenty of blame to go around.
So it seems all the more remarkable that even in this context, other actual war criminals, people sentenced to life in prison at The Hague, people who were guns for hire, they were looking at these German mercenaries and saying, that's a little bit too much.
Now, I hesitate to build a theory on the sand of speculation.
But if that little D next to Stephen Reyes' name does happen to mean that he was on leave in November, that does line up with some other sort of hazy details about this time period.
Because again, we know that there was an international effort to recruit mercenaries to travel to South Africa.
The two men from the beginning of this episode, Fox Amang and Ralph Marachas, were recruited by Ronald Deuster personally when he traveled to Bosnia in early 1994.
And by all accounts, Nydline, Reyes, and Kunst were recruited by Horst Klenz.
But how?
Because remember, Horst Klenz had been in South Africa for years at this point.
He escaped from custody in Namibia in 1989 and he fled back to South Africa.
He was arrested again in the summer of 1990 in connection with the Ordo Borofolk bombings.
And he didn't end up getting charged with anything.
But he spent a while in jail while South African courts tried to figure out if they needed to extradite him to Namibia.
He was eventually, probably in late 1992, released on bond pending a final decision in the extradition matter.
And then he disappeared.
It is possible, I guess, that Klenz could have gone to Bosnia at some point in 1993, but I don't think so, because there's a much more likely explanation.
That probably didn't mean anything to you.
I speak a little German, but that guy's accent was a little tricky for me.
I had to ask a friend who's fluent for some help with this one.
That's a clip from a segment that aired on a German TV news program.
And the man speaking is an unnamed hotel guest.
Unnamed, probably because the hotel in question was a seedy establishment in Hamburg's red light district.
And the man is recalling for a reporter from Dirsbiegel an incident that happened in late October 1993.
Stephen Reyes was thrown out of the hotel after some kind of loud argument.
And just Stephen Reyes.
According to researchers from Germany's anti-fascist Infoblat, Klenz was also spotted in Hamburg in October of 1993.
And we know Stephen Reyes did go back to Bosnia after he got kicked out of that seedy motel because he deserted in December.
So what it looks like to me is that Reyes made contact with Klenz in Hamburg in October.
And then he went back to Bosnia and told his friends about this exciting new opportunity.
All they had to do was steal a bunch of guns and find a way to get to England.
What we do know for certain is that all three of those mercenaries left Bosnia on December 16th, 1993.
And on December 30th, they robbed a post office in the German city of Lübeck, making off with around 8,500 Deutschmarks.
I don't entirely know how to sort out how much money that is.
In 1993, one US dollar was equal to about 1.6 Deutschmarks.
So that would make it a little over $5,000.
But those are $1993, so I guess you could best understand the actual value of this money is around $10,000 today.
Don't email me about math.
And with cash in hand, they traveled from Germany to Ramsgate, that little seaside town in England where members of the League of St. George drove them to the airport.
And just like the mercenaries that would follow them two months later, they were given a name.
Monica Huggett would pick them up from the airport when they got to South Africa.
They arrived on tourist visas in January of 1994.
And Monica was there, as promised, to pick them up.
She sorted out their paperwork and work permits and their mercenary assignments, passing them off to Horst Klenz.
They were assigned as armed guards at Radio Praetoria, an illegal radio station that broadcast Afrikaner nationalist propaganda.
And they participated in military drills led by Willem Rata, a former Rhodesian military officer.
Everything seemed to be going according to plan until March 14th, 1994.
By the time the next round of mercenaries arrived a few days later, There was no one there at the airport to greet them.
Thomas Koonst was dead.
And Alexander Nidlein, Horst Klens, Stephen Reyes, and Monica Huggett had all been arrested.
I really do hate to leave you hanging again.
I promise I'm not dragging this story out on purpose to torment you.
I was a little preoccupied this past week, and I'll be entirely otherwise occupied during the week you're hearing this.
If you're listening to this on the day it comes out, I am almost certainly sitting in court right now.
In October of last year, I did a couple of episodes about Virginia's burning objects law.
There was a pair of episodes on Barry Black, the Pennsylvania Klansman who challenged Virginia's cross-burning statute and eventually won his case at the Supreme Court.
And there was a third episode about a man who broke the law Virginia wrote to replace that original cross-burning ban.
In that episode, I talked a bit about the Nazi torch march that took place here in my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia on August 11th, 2017.
The episode was about Tyler Dykes, but he was just one of about a dozen men who've been charged with burning an object with the intent to intimidate.
That's the law that replaced the old crossburning statute.
Well, this week, another one of those men is taking his case to trial.
So I lost a little bit of time this week reviewing the facts so I can be prepared to sit through the trial, and I'm going to lose the entire next week sitting on a wooden bench taking notes by hand.
I would love to promise you the final chapter of Monica Huggett's story is going to come next week, but if I'm being realistic, it'll be something else.
I've been planning to do sort of a Q ⁇ A episode, so it might be that.
You can submit questions for that on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just please don't send them to me anywhere else, like on any other social media platform.
I'll just lose them.
So if you have a question, please post it to the subreddit, or if you absolutely, for some reason, cannot do that, you can email it to me.
But nowhere else, please.
And depending on how things go during the trial, I might have a mini-sode about the defendant, Basilios Pistolis.
If you're curious about Pistolis, I'll include a link in the show notes to the ProPublica article about his discharge from the Marines after he was revealed to be a member of Adam Woffin.
So thank you for bearing with me as I tell the story of Monica Stone in these strange little chunks.
I've really been enjoying how much digging this one has demanded of me.
I just need a little more time to read some very weird, racist prophecies before I'm ready to write the last chapter.
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.
I will definitely read it, but I almost certainly will not answer it.
It's nothing personal.
I don't answer any of my emails.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's gonna make you one of my weird little guys.
I'm Stephen Curry, and this is Gentleman's Cut.
I think what makes Gentleman's Cut different is me being a part of, you know, developing the profile of this beautiful finished product.
With every sip, you get a little something different.
Visit gentleman's cutbourbon.com or your nearest Total Wines or Bethmo.
This message is intended for audiences 21 in order.
Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky.
For more on Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, please visit gentleman's cutbourbon.com.
Please enjoy responsibly.
I'm investigative journalist Melissa Geltson.
My new podcast, What Happened in Nashville, tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.
It doesn't matter how much I fight.
It doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this.
It doesn't matter how much justice we get.
None of it's going to get me pregnant.
Listen to what happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers?
Who catfishes a city?
Is it even safe to snort human remains?
Is that the plot of Footloose?
I'm comedian Roy Scoville, and I'm here to tell you Josh Dean and I have a new podcast that celebrates the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals.
It's called Crimeless, a true crime comedy podcast.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I know he has a reputation, but it's going to catch up to him.
Gabe Ortiz is a cop.
His brother Larry?
A mystery Gabe didn't want to solve until it was too late.
He was the head of this gang.
You're going to push that line for the calls.
Took us under his wing and showed us the game, as they call it.
When Larry's killed, Gabe must untangle a dangerous past, one that could destroy everything he thought he knew.
Listen to the Brothers Ortiz on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.