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My Secret Life in the Klan

A voyage into hate groups reveals a lonely existence for those who support all things white.

By Peter Rugg

Published on September 27, 2007

I was already nervous when I saw the woman. There was nothing intimidating about her, just a woman in her mid-30s in a pair of sweatpants and an oversized T-shirt, on an evening hike in early August. Still, when she passed me, I looked away from her. It was my first time distributing KKK fliers, and I didn't want to be noticed.
  • After sending in $30, a Pitch reporter became an official Klansman.
    After sending in $30, a Pitch reporter became an official Klansman.
  • Adrian Trentadue prepares to spread his hate.
    Adrian Trentadue prepares to spread his hate.

Details:

On the night of September 21, Pitch reporter Peter Rugg called Adrian Trentadue -- member of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the National Socialist Movement -- to out himself as an undercover reporter. Trentadue had been using Pitch boxes in Olathe to spread white-supremacist material for several years and believed Rugg to be a fellow Klansman. Double-click below to listen to the phone call:

Subject(s):

Ku Klux Klan, Nazis, Berliner Bear, Buffalo Wild Wings, Chili’s

I'd purposely dressed as anonymously as possible: white shirt and jeans, with an 11-day beard, glasses and a ball cap for a university I never attended. My partner for the evening, Adrian Trentadue, was a bit more noticeable, thanks to his T-shirt with a cartoon gladiator declaring war against the hordes of uncircumcised Edomites (a biblical people who went to war with the Jews). I was clutching a thin stack of fliers. Trentadue had the staple gun in his pocket. At each telephone pole we came to, I would hand Trentadue a flier, and he would post it with a staple in each corner.

The front of the flier gave only half the intended message. Under the heading "Grizzly Bloody Murder" was a description of a young, white Tennessee couple allegedly raped and murdered by a gang of five black men. Walking past it, you might assume that it offered a reward for evidence in the case. The point was on the back side of the page, which was the side against the post. It directed you to a white-power online news broadcast and the national mailing address of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, or the Knights Party.

Trentadue looked back at the woman who had passed. "I don't think she's reading it," he said. "You get a lot of people that just walk right by and don't read it."

Trentadue, 28 years old, father of two, is a fully accredited Knight. Though only two years older than me, he kept calling me a young guy. He had the type of slim, fit physique you often see on farm kids or anyone who has spent his life working outdoors. His scalp was recently shaved, and beneath the dark stubble I could see an S.S. tattoo on one side and what looked like a motorcycle on the other. His only other visible tattoos were the words Italian on one forearm and German on the other — representing his heritage, he explained, from his grandfathers.

After papering utility poles on a few blocks, we went to the other side of the street and headed back toward the car, which we had left in a Walgreens parking lot. We had started distributing literature almost three hours before, and the sun had set. The utility poles were the final bit of the routine. Trentadue always began by putting the fliers in boxes of the Pitch.

"See, if we'd have done this when the sun was out, we'd be dead by now," he explained. "That's why you hit the Pitch boxes first."

I agreed. I was tired, and the initial adrenaline rush was ebbing. I was sweating profusely in the heat, and none of my clothes felt like they fit right anymore.

"They don't understand that I'm not trying to attack their paper," Trentadue said. "I'm just using it to spread the message."

I looked across the street at the woman again. She was walking back, and she paused at one of the fliers. It had been six months since my Knights Party orientation package came in the mail, and I knew that Trentadue had copied the flier off a design sent from the home base.

So you must have them all thinking that there's all these racialists running around Olathe," I said. "They see fliers from all these different groups, and they probably assume that the different groups are putting out each flier. But really, it's just you."

"Well, I have a few other guys that have helped me out once in a while."

Then he paused, and it occurred to me that he had never considered who people think is behind his work.

He laughed. "Yeah, it really is just me." Fliers for white-supremacy groups have been appearing around Olathe for almost five years. They appear erratically, though Martin Luther King Jr. Day seems to bring them out reliably. They lecture on topics from the near-genocide of the Aryan woman to the communist agenda of Rosa Parks.

Based on the fliers, it's easy to assume that there's a secret society of organized racist groups on the Kansas side of the metro. The photocopies promote three hate groups, mostly the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan but sometimes the lesser-known National Socialist Movement.

According to Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, the National Socialist Movement is the largest neo-Nazi group operating in the country, with 81 chapters, including a group in Kansas City, Kansas. The local National Socialist Movement chapter made headlines in May 2005 when it held a meeting at the Berliner Bear, a German restaurant in Waldo that has since closed. The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan regained most of its notoriety back in the late 1980s and early 1990s when founding member David Duke ran twice for president. Today, they're in paltry eighth place, out of 34 Klan organizations, with six chapters, none of which are in Kansas or Missouri. They're headed by an Arkansas preacher named Thomas Robb, who believes that Eve was impregnated by the serpent and gave birth to "the Jewish race."

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