The Klansman's Twin: Dennis Mahon, Pt. 3

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media, Hello, and happy New Year, everybody. I
think twenty twenty five is going to be a banner
year for weird little guys, and I don't mean the
show Unfortunately. They're just making newer, weirder guys all the

(00:22):
time lately, and I can hardly keep up. And as
time marches on, I'm stuck in the past, connecting the
dots on decades old stories of the weird little guys
who came before the right wing terrorists of today. I
hope you're having a peaceful and cheerful holiday season, whatever
that looks like for you. I had every intention of

(00:45):
using that week of relative downtime to get caught up,
maybe even get ahead. It probably won't surprise you to
hear that absolutely did not happen. Something about the twinkle
of Christmas lights pulled me away from my maniacal sprawling
notes about Oklahoma City bombing conspiracy theories. I can't explain it,

(01:07):
And as I was chipping away at the next chapter
of Dennis Mayhon's life, I realized there was a strange
little side story that I was going to have to cut.
It just didn't fit in the narrative flow, and it
wasn't one hundred percent relevant to the story arc I
was plotting out, so I was prepared to scrap it.
It certainly wouldn't be the first time, and I know

(01:28):
it won't be the last. I love a little side story,
but I'm starting to get the feel for the kinds
of side stories that will take us off course for
an interesting few minutes and the ones that are going
to derail the whole episode. And this was the latter.
But then I remembered this is my show. I'm the

(01:48):
captain of this ship, and for me, getting to the
point has never been the point. We're on a journey here,
and I never really know where I'm taking making us
until I get there. We'll get back to Dennis Mahon
in Eloheim City and the bomb he mailed to a
public library in Arizona for the next episode, I promise.

(02:11):
But this week we're going on a side quest because
I just couldn't bear to cut the story of one
of my favorite kinds of things to find in a
weird little guy's past, a lawsuit about anti white discrimination.
So if you'll indulge me, here's the story of our
convicted bomber's twin brother getting fired because he wouldn't stop

(02:35):
wearing the Nazi T shirt he bought it a gun show.
I'm Molly Conker and this is weird, Little guys. The

(03:01):
last few episodes have been about Dennis May. We've talked
about the first few decades of his life. He was
born in a small community in northern Illinois nineteen fifty.
He served in the army after high school and trained
as an aircraft mechanic. In the late seventies, he joined
the Ku Klux Klan and then the neo Nazi group
National Alliance. In interviews with journalists over the years, he's

(03:25):
often claimed his belief in the importance of racial separatism
arose from his experience in the Florida National Guard, when
his unit was deployed in May of nineteen eighty to
assist in transporting Cuban refugees during the Mariial boat lift crisis.
I don't doubt that he was there, or that having
to interact with asylum seekers deepened his hatred of people
who aren't white, but the record does seem to indicate

(03:48):
that he'd already joined the clan before the first boat
arrived in Miami that month. From there, Dennis disappeared for
a few years. It claims to have been underground carrying
out clan bombings in Florida, Michigan, and Oklahoma, targeting synagogues,

(04:08):
government office buildings, and abortion clinics. He re emerged in
Kansas City in nineteen eighty seven and as a regional
organizer for the clan. I won't retread the entirety of
those last two episodes, but we've been following Dennis all
over the country the world, even from Kansas City to Canada,
from Tulsa to Berlin. He won a lawsuit over his

(04:32):
right to broadcast to race his public access TV show.
He lost a lawsuit to Fred Rogers, he got banned
from Canada. He tried to revive the clan in Germany,
and he absolutely loved talking to reporters. As far as
mid level hate group organizers go, he's a little unusual

(04:52):
in that respect. So there's ample record of where he was,
what he was up to, who his friends were, and
the narrative about himself that he wanted you to believe.
But all this time we've been talking about Dennis Mayhan,
and there's been someone else in the story that we

(05:13):
haven't talked much about. He's been there. He's always there,
but he's much quieter. He keeps his name out of things.
But Dennis Mayhan's identical twin brother, Daniel Mayhan, was there
all along. As I mentioned in the last episode, Daniel

(05:36):
Mayhon has never been convicted of a crime. He was
indicted alongside his brother in two thousand and nine saga
will cover next week, but unlike his brother, who is
serving a forty year sentence in terre hate, Daniel wasn't convicted.
And if you ask Daniel, he'd tell you that he
was never a member of any of those groups his

(05:57):
brother was mixed up in. I mean I didn't ask him.
I guess I could have tried to reach him for comment,
but I think he'd tell me the same thing. He
told an attorney for American Airlines during a deposition in
two thousand and three that he was never what he
called a card carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan
or White Arian Resistance or National Alliance. So, just for

(06:20):
the record here at the top, I'll make no allegations
that haven't been made in sworn statements by agents of
the FBI or the ATF. Daniel Mahon isn't guilty of
any crimes. A matching set of genes doesn't necessarily mean
you carry a matching set of beliefs. But I read
a few hundred pages of his own sworn testimony that

(06:43):
left me with the impression that these identical twins share
a little bit more than their DNA. With Denis occupying
the spotlight, the record on Daniel is actually pretty sparse.
A lot of what I can say about him with
any degree of certainty came out of his own mouth
in this deposition he sat for on October twenty ninth,

(07:05):
two thousand and three. He was three years into a
lawsuit against his former employer, American Airlines over his termination
in May of nineteen ninety nine. For nine hours, he
answered questions about his involvement in the company's Caucasian employee
resource group. But even a side story has to start

(07:26):
before the beginning. So before we get to the strange
revelations in that conference room in Tulsa, I want to
set the scene a little bit with some history about
the concept of employee resource groups. If you've ever worked
for almost any big corporation these days, you've probably seen
a flyer in the break room for something like this,

(07:48):
they might be called employee resource groups ergs, employee affinity groups,
business network groups, or some other mishmash of corporate buzzwords
about mentorship and networking. Ergs are, according to a continuing
education module for corporate lawyers that I found, quote, organize

(08:10):
based on social identity, shared characteristics, or life experience. Affinity
groups are generally initiated by employees and often involve or
implicate protected classes such as sex, gender, sexual orientation, race,
national origin, disability, and veteran status. Today's employee resource groups
have expanded to include other kinds of shared interests, but

(08:34):
at their core, they allow employees who belong to a
particular group to network, support and mentor one another, and
advocate for themselves within the company. The gules at McKinsey
say that they can be a valuable tool to recruit
and retain a diverse workforce by fostering a sense of inclusion,
and they can provide a ready pool of diverse spaces

(08:56):
to send to panels and recruitment events. I found one
press release praising the efforts of the Hispanic Employee Resource
Group at JP morgan Chase. The group's mentorship program led
to a measurable increase in Hispanic women in management positions.
And for the most part, these groups sound like something
cooked up by an HR department to put in a

(09:18):
shareholder meeting slide show. But there's a history here. The
idea of people who share a particular life experience getting
together to talk about it is obviously not new. That's
not something anyone came up with. You don't have to
invent that. But the employee resource group as it exists

(09:40):
in corporate America today originated with the National Black Employee
Caucus at Xerox in nineteen seventy. All of the human
resources blurbs and business press puff pieces about employee resource
groups kind of just leave the story there they started
at Xerox nineteen teen seventy. But there's always more to

(10:03):
a story than that, And apparently Xerox was up to
some pretty radical diversity, equity and inclusion corporate practice decades
before anyone ever said that phrase out loud. In nineteen
sixty six, the first student at Xerox's International Fellowship program
was a Fulbright scholar from Ethiopia who happened to be

(10:24):
the younger brother of a member of highly Selassie's Cabinet.
In nineteen sixty eight, the company spent a million dollars
to sponsor a television series called of Black America. The
seven part documentary on black history from slavery through the
still ongoing riots that followed the assassination of doctor Martin
Luther King Junior, aired in prime time, and it earned

(10:47):
Xerox threatening letters from the ku Klux Klan and hysterical
letters to the editor in papers across the country from
small business owners swearing they're going to throw out their
copy machines. An op ed in The London Evening Standard
described the program as quote unmistakably hostile to the establishment.
That same year, nineteen sixty eight, Xerox partnered with a

(11:11):
Rochester based civil rights group called FIGHT, which stands for Freedom, Integration, God,
Honor Today. The New York Times called Fight quote a
militant Negro organization and made a pointed note that professional
radical Saul Alinsky had had a hand in it, and

(11:31):
that the press conference announcing this new venture was held
in a room decorated with posters of h Rap Brown,
Stokely Carmichael, and Shay Guevara. But Xerox's partnership with Fight
created the first black run community development corporation in the
United States. Xerox spent millions on manufacturing equipment and job

(11:54):
training in the creation of these black owned manufacturing companies
that employed hundreds of black employees in Rochester. A manager
at Xerox who'd worked on the plan said, my only
question is why didn't we do it sooner? The first
manufacturing plant funded by Xerox through the Fight Partnership opened

(12:16):
at what used to be a boarded up factory, just
a few blocks away from the center of the violence
that had inspired Xerox president Joseph Wilson to pour millions
of dollars into diversifying his workforce the nineteen sixty four
Rochester riots. I know we're a little far afield here.

(12:37):
Daniel Mahon was fourteen years old and living in Davis Junction, Illinois,
in the summer of nineteen sixty four. But sometimes the
way history repeats and rhymes and echoes is just irresistible
to me. Because there is another race riot later in
this story, and it seems irresponsible not to draw the

(12:57):
lines that connect these things. On Friday, July twenty fourth,
nineteen sixty four, in Rochester, New York, the Northeast Mothers
Association had a permit to hold a block party in
Rochester Seventh Ward. They were raising money to build a
playground in the neighborhood. Around two hundred people attended the

(13:18):
event in the early evening, but as the night wore
on and the children went to bed, the streets were
still full of people having a good time. On a
hot summer night, around eleven p m. Two Rochester police
officers confronted a man they said was behaving in an
unruly manner. They moved to arrest twenty year old Randy Manigal.

(13:41):
Bystanders saw the officers using excessive force on a young
black man, and some of them tried to intervene. Within
half an hour, the Rochester Police Department had set dogs
on the neighbors, something they'd promised they wouldn't do again
after prior incidents involving police dogs mauling black residents. By
one a m. The fire hoses were out, the crowd

(14:04):
had swelled to hundreds, and officers were firing tear gas
canisters indiscriminately. When the sun Rose State Police arrived to
a crowd that had grown to the thousands. The violence
continued for a full forty eight hours, but by the
time one thousand National guardsmen arrived on Sunday, it was over.

(14:27):
The county Civil Defense director Robert Abbot was surveying the
scene from a helicopter hours after the riot ended, when
the pilot lost control of the aircraft and crashed into
a house on Clarissa Street. Two occupants of the home
were burned to death. Both the pilot and Robert Abbot
died of their injuries. A later report on the crash
says that alcohol played a role, and no reporting I

(14:50):
could find from the time period named the two black
men who burned to death inside their own home. By
the time the dust settled, five people were dead, hundreds
had been injured, and nearly one thousand people had been arrested.
Initial reporting, as ever, blamed the unrest on outside agitators.

(15:15):
Later analysis of those arrests, however, would show that only
fourteen of the people arrested lived outside of Monroe County.
In the aftermath of the riot, Joseph Wilson asked a
manager at Xerox how many black employees he had. The
answer was six. Determined to change that, he approached local

(15:38):
civil rights leader Reverend Franklin Florence to work out a plan.
One of the barriers the company had to hiring more
black employees was a systemic one. An unemployed black man
in nineteen sixty five was less likely than his white
counterpart to have a high school diploma. The program they
developed was called Operation Step Up. Black men in ages

(16:02):
eighteen to twenty five without high school diplomas would work
half a day on the factory floor and spend half
a day in a classroom with teachers hired by Xerox
to prepare them for a high school equivalency test. By
nineteen sixty six, Xerox was bringing classes of twenty five
men at a time through the program. After finishing their
high school courses, the men became full time union factory employees.

(16:27):
Wilson worked closely with Reverend Florence to bridge cultural gaps.
Assembly line foremen received additional training on race relations, clergy
were hired to assist in classroom management and guidance, and
hundreds of young men got high school diplomas and good
union jobs. When I first read that Wilson started the

(16:49):
Black Employee Resource Group in nineteen seventy in response to
those riots in nineteen sixty four. I didn't understand why
there were six years in between the inciting incident and
the actual formation of the group, But this is why
there weren't any black employees in nineteen sixty four. He

(17:11):
spent that time investing in the community and building a
more diverse workforce. Today's HR guidance talks about how ergs
can attract a diverse workforce, but the very first one
only existed at all because work was done to address
the systemic problems facing those employees. The formation of the

(17:33):
National Black Employee Caucus in nineteen seventy is the only
part of this work that seems to get remembered in
human resources industry newsletters about workplace diversity. I'm not sure
why Corporate America isn't interested in celebrating his financial support
of black radicals. But that's the story of how we

(17:53):
got employee resource groups, which brings us back to Daniel
Mayhuntsman's brother making flyers for a Caucasian Employee Resource Group
at the American Airlines Diversity Fair nineteen ninety nine. Daniel
Mahon did not start the Caucasian Employee Resource Group, but

(18:15):
the American Airlines Maintenance and Engineering facility in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
By his account, he wasn't even interested in being a
member and didn't attend a meeting of the group at
all in its first few months, and the fact of
the group's existence wasn't even the issue here. Nowhere in
the procedural history of the lawsuit that follows does anyone

(18:38):
even say that there should not have been an affinity
group for white people. In fact, the Diversity Advisory Council
said that they were quote saddened by the need to
suspend the group for six months over Daniel's actions, and
they called the group a valuable member of the Diversity
Advisory Council family. There was inexplicably no problem at all

(19:03):
with the Caucasian Employee Resource Group until Daniel Mayhon showed
up in a Turner Diaries T shirt at a meeting
to discuss the racist pamphlets he made for the diversity fair.
Everyone agrees that Daniel Mayhon wasn't fired just because he
was a member of the white employee group, but Daniel

(19:24):
went to court claiming that he was fired just for
being white. On March eleventh, nineteen ninety nine, there was

(19:47):
a diversity fair at the American Airlines maintenance and engineering
base in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The company had, as a part
of their corporate diversity program, encouraged the formation of a
variety of employee recas groups. There was an African American ERG,
an Asian Culture Association, one for women in aviation, a
Jewish ERG and Employees with Disabilities ERG, a Gay, Lesbian,

(20:11):
Bisexual and Transgender ERG, Christian, Muslim, Latin, Indian, Native American
one for employees over forty one for people interested in
improving their work life balance, and of course there was
the Caucasian Employee Resource Group. There may have been others
later on, but these are the ones that were listed

(20:32):
in a company pamphlet about the program that was written
in nineteen ninety nine, and just as an aside, I
was kind of struck by the inclusion of the T
in the LGBT group in nineteen ninety nine. You forget
sometimes that it wasn't always the lightning rod that it
is today. I guess for a long time, everybody just

(20:55):
hated all queer people the same. It's hard to feel
like it's progress to get assimilation for some at the
cost of heightened demonization of part of our community. But nevertheless,
shout out to the trans Aircraft Mechanics in Oklahoma in
nineteen ninety nine. I know you were going through it.

(21:16):
The Diversity Fair was an opportunity for every Employee Resource
group to set up a booth and talk to their
fellow employees about the group and hand out flyers and network.
It's a nice idea. You don't have to be a
member of a particular group to show an interest in
the work being done by their ERG, and this kind
of thing might provide an employee with a chance to

(21:37):
find out about something like the Disability erg's advocacy around
company policies that impact disabled customers. To be honest, I
imagine you probably didn't have to clock out to take
an hour to walk around the Diversity Fair. So even
if you got nothing out of it, maybe you wasted
a little time at work. You know, everybody wins, but

(22:00):
it's always ruined the fun. Dando Mahon wasn't there that day,
but the pamphlets he made were Other members of the
Caucasian Employee Resource Group handed out a flyer celebrating aviation pioneers.
It's pretty amateur stuff. This was before people really had
access to computers. Computers existed. Obviously, the nineties weren't the

(22:23):
stone ages. I personally was spending hours coloring in shapes
on kid picks. But we were pretty lucky to have
a computer at home in the nineties, So this wasn't photoshop, right.
He cut out pictures of famous aviators and glued them
to a piece of paper, and then he ran that
sheet through a manual typewriter to type the captions onto it,

(22:48):
and then he took the resulting Frankenflyer to a Kinko's
and ran copies. So it's not a high quality product
even before we get to the racism, and it's got
some of the historical aviators you're probably imagining. A picture
of Amelia Earhart is captioned pioneer woman aviator Wilbur Wright

(23:09):
gets first powered flight. Chuck Yeger is captioned first to
break the sound barrier. Nothing weird here. Charles Lindbergh was
a Nazi sympathizer and a virulent anti Semite, and Verner
von Braun was literally a Nazi. But yeah, I guess
technically personal lives aside to the extent that being a

(23:33):
member of the SS is your personal life. They do
fit the bill here as pioneers in aviation. The problem
with the flyers becomes apparent when you get to the back,
because underneath a cut and pasted picture of a cartoon airplane,
it says, these famous men and women who made aviation

(23:55):
history all have one thing in common. They are members
of the white race, race of explorers, discoverers, scientists, and philosophers.
We are proud of the accomplishments of our noble race
in the past, present, and future. Several of these heroes
of aviation have their names misspelled. He's missing the H

(24:16):
and Varner von Braun, and I swear it looks like
he spelled Braun with a W instead of a U.
But to be fair, that could be a photocopyr artifact.
World War One fighter pilot Edward Rickenbacker is missing the
last two letters of his last name. Italian aviator Francesco
brack Papa is captioned as Francisco, and Francisco isn't even

(24:40):
spelled right. And in the little racist blurb on the back,
the word philosopher doesn't have an L in it. I'm
not just pointing this out to clown on a working
class man who can't spell it's okay if you can't spell,
that doesn't make you a bad person, because in the
interest of fairness, I do want to say that the

(25:01):
flyer is full of typographical errors, because he would later
claim to have made another typo. He capitalized the first
letters in the words white race, where they appear in
the middle of a sentence with otherwise standard capitalization, and

(25:21):
this is a standard practice in white supremacist literature. During
the investigation, he maintained that it had no particular meaning.
He was just a bad typist. So, yes, he did
spell a lot of these words wrong, but that's a
combination of this admittedly poor typing and probably just plain

(25:43):
not knowing. But there aren't any other errors in capitalization,
so all things considered, this looks like a style choice,
not a mistake. Within hours of the pamphlets being distributed
at the Diversity fair, there were complaints. Two weeks later,
the Diversity Advisory Council that oversaw the resource groups made

(26:06):
the decision to suspend the Caucasian Employee Resource Group for
a period of six months. No one was really in trouble.
None of the employees involved with the group were being disciplined.
The group wasn't even being banned. They just needed to
take a few months off to reassess their alignment with
the company's policies governing such groups, including requirements that all

(26:28):
employee resource groups support the company's policy on non discrimination
and a harassment free workplace, promoting tolerance and respect for
other employees, and not having any financial or organizational ties
to outside groups. And Daniel's flyer seems to violate all
of these rules. In the earliest meetings that management had

(26:50):
about these flyers, it was clear that everyone knew who
Daniel's brother was. To place us back in Dennis's timeline,
it's nineteen ninety nine. Dennis Mayon was a well known
white supremacist, neo Nazi, and Ku klux Klan organizer. You
didn't have to be in the know about clandestine organizations

(27:13):
to know that it wasn't a secret. He ran for
mayor of Tulsa in nineteen ninety two and again in
nineteen ninety eight. In the mid nineties, he paid to
have a billboard put up in Tulsa honoring Robert Matthews,
the leader of the Nazi bank robbery gang that murdered
Alan Berg. The Nazi skinhead gang that he cultivated for
white Arian resistance shot a little girl in the face

(27:36):
in Tulsa. In the late eighties, he was banned from
entering Canada, the UK, and Germany, And by this point
in the late nineties, Dennis was at the center of
a number of conspiracy theories about the Oklahoma City bombing
in nineteen ninety five, and he had just been quite
publicly called before a grand jury on the matter in

(27:56):
nineteen ninety eight, just a few months before all of
this is happening. This isn't niche stuff. One hundred and
seventy people, including an entire daycare center, were murdered an
hour and a half away from where this workplace meeting
is happening, and a lot of people thought that Dennis
helped make that bomb. Plenty of people were very aware

(28:20):
that Dennis Mayhon was fond of telling reporters that he
thought Timothy McVay was a very courageous man with tremendous
drive and quote, if we had one hundred men like
him in this country, we'd probably change things around. So
when the Diversity Advisory Council met to discuss the flyers

(28:41):
two weeks after the Diversity Fair, they knew. They knew
who Daniel's twin brother was. The minutes from that meeting.
Don't mention either mayhon brother by name, but they save
The flyer was developed by individuals believed to have an
affiliation with local extremist groups, and they even seemed to

(29:02):
indicate a familiarity with some of the particulars of Dennis's publications,
noting that quote, some of the comments on the flyer
were similar to the rhetoric used by those groups in
a racist nature. You know, I have to hand it
to them. It's very clear that they knew what they
were looking at, and they understood the importance of nipping

(29:23):
it in the bud. And it could have ended there.
Nobody was in trouble. A line had been crossed. The
company made it clear where that line was, and everybody
was just going to take a beat to reflect on
the experience. But if there's one thing so many of
these weird little guys have in common, it's that they

(29:45):
absolutely do not know when to shut the fuck up.
The company made the decision at the end of March
nineteen ninety nine to suspend the Caucasian Employee Resource Group
just for six months, but it wasn't until the April twentieth,
nineteen ninety nine meeting of the Caucasian ERG that some
members of management met with the group to explain this decision.

(30:09):
Daniel Mahon arrived at the meeting wearing a T shirt
printed with the picture of the cover of a book.
The cover depicts a man pointing a rifle and a
woman pointing a handgun. You can't see what they're aiming at,
but they both clearly have something in their sights above
their heads. The text reads The Turner Diaries. This book

(30:34):
comes up too often on this show. I never know
how thoroughly to rechhread this ground. But this could be
your first episode, and how confused must you be? Right now?
We're kind of in the middle of a longer story here,
But The Turner Diaries is a novel written by the
founder of the neo Nazi group National Alliance. After a

(30:56):
few years coming out in a serialized format and a
Nazi Now newsletter, it was published as a book in
nineteen seventy eight and sold through the mail and ads
in Nazi newsletters and at gun shows and cross burnings.
The violence in the novel is fictional, of course, but
It's been the inspiration for many murderers and domestic terrorists.

(31:21):
When Robert Matthews formed the Order of the Nazi terrorist
group whose bank robberies financed paramilitary compounds, he borrowed the
name from the book. When Timothy McVeigh was arrested after
the Oklahoma City bombing, he had the pages of his
favorite passages sitting on the seat in the car next
to him. When John William King chained James Byrd Junior

(31:42):
to the back of his truck moments before dragging him
to death in Texas in nineteen ninety eight, he joked
to his accomplices that we're starting the Turner Diaries early
because that's what happens in the Turner Diaries. The day
of the rope nationwide mass lynching of black people, Jewish people, journalists,

(32:04):
race traders. It's not a good book. It's not well written.
One online review of the book complains that despite all
the violence in this novel, there is much tedium meant
little conflict, But literary abomination or not, the book has
inspired murders all over the world for decades. And that's

(32:29):
the shirt that Daniel wore to the meeting about his
white pride pamphlets and that was the line. Apparently there
were more complaints. The initial decision to just suspend the
group's activities obviously wasn't going to cut it. An investigation
was opened into the complaints about Daniel's workplace conduct, and

(32:52):
on May tenth, nineteen ninety nine, he was fired. The
termination letter says, in addition to other findings in the investigation,
wearing that shirt to the meeting created a racially hostile
work environment as a member of the Transport Workers Union.
He filed a grievance protesting the decision, and it was

(33:13):
ultimately appealed to the Board of Adjustment. In November of
nineteen ninety nine, a full hearing was conducted, lasting three days.
Daniel Mahon has always claimed that he had no involvement
in his brother's activities. At the hearing, the company produced
as evidence a clan newsletter naming Daniel m of Tulsa

(33:35):
as White Patriot of the Month, quote for his tremendous
efforts in financial support of the struggle, and thanking him
for his help setting up the cross at a cross
burning event. He also provided the tent, the sound system,
and the portable generator. The newsletter goes on to describe
his large collection of Clan and National Socialist white power

(33:58):
merchandise and praise him for supplying many white power groups
with T shirts over the years. He would ultimately admit
that yes, he is Daniel M of Tulsa, but he
really downplayed the praise that's being heaped upon him here.
He was just helping his brother out. He wasn't at

(34:18):
the cross burning. He just gave his brother a ride there.
The company called an expert witness to present evidence of
the Mayhun Brothers white supremacist activities, including that clan newsletter
naming Daniel White Patriot of the Month. The expert also
explained the significance of the language and the capitalization used
in the flyer. The board's opinion doesn't name this expert witness,

(34:42):
but I'm willing to risk five dollars betting that it
was Daniel Levatas if I'd managed my time better this week,
I would have written and asked him. But that's my guess.
Over the course of three days, witness after witness was called,
and the official reason for the termination had been the

(35:04):
incident with the Turner Diary's T shirt, but it came
out in this hearing that this was far from the
first time Daniel Mayhon's white supremacist ties had caused friction
at work. His supervisor testified that on Daniel's very first
day at American Airlines back in nineteen eighty six, he'd
been complaining loudly about Jews and n words. Two other

(35:30):
supervisors testified about two separate incidents where they'd warned him
not to bring clan or white Airan resistance materials to work.
There had been another complaint about him wearing a KKK
hat and belt buckle. Multiple employees had complained about a
KKK knife. A supervisor who worked nights as a security

(35:51):
guard had been assigned a shift to a local gun
show where he saw Daniel Mahon selling merchandise at the
Aryan Nations booth. The supervisor testified that Daniel called him
over and tried to give him an Arian Nation's T shirt,
but he declined. The same supervisor testified that Daniel had
invited him over to his house one night and showed

(36:12):
him a racially violent movie and tried to give him
white supremacist texts. A Walgreens cashier testified that some time
after Daniel's termination. The brothers came into the drug store
to drop off some film to be developed, and a
visibly intoxicated Dennis Mayhon was shouting about how if American
Airlines didn't give his brother his job back, they were

(36:35):
going to see the biggest bomb they ever had. The
expert offered evidence that Daniel's grievance with the company was
a subject of significant discussion and fundraising in white supremacist
newsletters and broadcasts, which undermines his claim that he had
no connection to those groups. Daniel Mayhon's union representative advised

(36:59):
him not to test on his own behalf, but they
did put on several witnesses who testified that he was
a model employee, that he had been kind to them,
or that they personally had not been offended by the flyers.
Linda Dill and Craig Nichols, the employees who actually led
the Caucasian Employee Resource Group, testified that it was not

(37:20):
true that Daniel had explicitly told the group that his
brother would help him make the flyers. The board was unconvinced,
writing in their final opinion in March of two thousand,
clearly he holds white supremacist beliefs and has ties to
and involvement in such organizations. The opinion is clear that

(37:42):
he can't be and isn't being disciplined for his brother's
conduct or even for his own conduct outside of work.
But this background reflects unfavorably on the underlying intent of
the flyers and the decision to wear the Turner diary
shirt to work. Their summary of the evidence concludes by saying,

(38:03):
the fact that he was technically proficient and nice to
some people doesn't outweigh all the other evidence, nor is
it directly related to the specific nature of his conduct
in this case. The decision to uphold the termination was
two to one. Arbitrator Gil Vernon, an American Airlines employee,
Mary Tinsman, agreed with J. C. Brown dissenting. I struggled

(38:28):
to pin down who j. C. Brown might have been,
but Gil Vernon is kind of a big deal in
the world of union arbitration anyway. In nineteen ninety six,
President Clinton appointed him to a commission to help resolve
a National Railroad labor dispute. President Obama appointed him to
a similar body in twenty eleven. He's an arbitrator for

(38:52):
Major League Baseball. He was the president of the National
Academy of Arbitrators in twenty ten. And he has also
bond Vere's dad. Well, his son is justin Vernon, the
frontman of the indie folk band. So next time you
hear a Bonnie Vere song, I guess you can think
about the time his dad wrote this about a racist.

(39:15):
His message was subtle, but in clearly resonant tones, rang
true only to the sad song of racial superiority. Clever
equivocation and veiled threats are part and parcel of the
grievance ilk and he can't hide behind cleverness at the
expense of the security, dignity, and respect of other workers
who do not share his race or ethnicity, or his
attitudes about racial nobility. Much is debated in this record, However,

(39:41):
in the final analysis, something must be said, in plain
and simple terms.

Speaker 2 (39:46):
At the root of Grievan's conduct was hate.

Speaker 1 (40:05):
Daniel Mayhon spend the next several months trying to find
a lawyer. He sent a letter to the law firm
of former Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Chirpin, but the firm
turned the case down without even agreeing to meet with him.
He consulted with his friend Jean, but Jean wasn't interested
in the case. Gene in this case is a Tulsa

(40:25):
area bankruptcy attorney named Francis Eugene Huff. Daniel describes him
as a conservative type person and a real nice guy,
and they'd been friends for about nine years by the
time he was deposed in two thousand and three. He
doesn't offer up any other facts about Gene, like that
he was a member of the Council of Conservative Citizens,

(40:46):
or the fact that he may have been too busy
to take Daniel's case back then because he was in
the middle of representing the Council of Conservative Citizens in
their lawsuits regarding Confederate flags on public property. The questioning
about Huff leave me with the impression that the lawyer
asking the questions did not believe Daniel when he said

(41:07):
that Gene Huff never helped him with his case. Sometime
in the summer of two thousand so, after the arbitrator
upheld his termination and before he filed his federal lawsuit,
Daniel Mayhon sent a letter to the ACLU asking them
to take his case. The letter doesn't read like it
was written by Daniel Mayhon, and I don't just mean

(41:29):
diction and spelling, Although those may be dead giveaways. The
real tip off is a handwritten note in the margin
of the letter that says, Gene, should you print Daniel
Mayhon in place of I. So what it sounds like
is that Jane wrote the letter pretending to be Daniel,

(41:52):
and when Daniel read it, he didn't understand that, and
so he was asking why the letter was written in
the first person, as though he had written it himself,
And for some reason he mailed the letter to the
ACLU like that. He didn't get another copy of it
without that strange note in the margin. The letter is

(42:14):
also written in cursive that doesn't match the style of
cursive in Daniel's signature, and then towards the end of
the letter it abruptly switches to print that does more
closely match his handwriting. Under oath, he says he wrote
it himself and that Gene didn't help him. The letter
itself isn't reproduced in the court record that I could find,

(42:36):
but it appears to have been riddled with false claims.
The local ACLU was already very familiar with Daniel Mayhon's
brother Dennis. They'd represented him a decade earlier in his
lawsuit against Kansas City over the Klan's public access TV show,
and it sounds like Daniel was doing his best to

(42:57):
try to convince the ACLU that his firing had been
a grave injustice, because not only was he nothing like
his brother, but his brother wasn't even really so bad.
He would later claim that Dennis only got deported from
Canada nineteen ninety three because he was carrying a book
by an English author that was illegal in Canada, which

(43:21):
is almost certainly a reference to Holocaust denied David Irving,
who had himself been banned from Canada in nineteen ninety two.
Daniel neglects to mention that the Canadian government was concerned
that Dennis would incite violence at a Nazi rally during
his visit. The violence at that Nazi rally happened anyway,
but Dennis wasn't there. As for Dennis's trip to Germany,

(43:45):
his brother says Dennis didn't even do any Nazi stuff there.
He just went to an old church to lay some flowers.
But it seems like the ACLU wasn't interested in going
to bat for another Mahon because they didn't take the case.
The lawyer he ended up hiring to represent him was
a man named Robert Eugene Fraser the third, and Fraser

(44:08):
was young. He'd only just passed the bar in nineteen
ninety nine, the year before he met Daniel in the
summer of two thousand. Daniel says they met when Fraser
answered a classified ad in the newspaper about a boat
he was selling. Fraser came to look at the boat.
The men got to talking. Daniel found out he was
a lawyer, and he agreed to take the case. Daniel

(44:30):
would claim in that deposition that Dennis had left the
clan for good in nineteen ninety because Daniel gave him
an ultimatum. Hey said he didn't want that stuff going
on in his house, which is where his brother lived.
He outright says that he's actually responsible for getting his
brother out of hate group organizing. But when he's pressed

(44:53):
on this, he can't explain, why then, does his brother
still live with him now ten years later, and that
kind of stuff was very much still going on in
his house. The brothers both got their mail of the
same po box, the one Dennis used for his white
power newsletters. The phone line at the house they shared

(45:14):
was the same one Dennis used to run his dial
a racist hot line. In this deposition in two thousand three,
Daniel claims Dennis hasn't been involved with White Arian Resistance
since nineteen ninety five, and then he hasn't really been
involved in anything in years. That's just not true. He

(45:35):
should have been charged with perjury for that, because just
a few weeks before he sat down to answer these questions,
his twin brother was in the news in Arizona. Residents
of Mesa had received a flurry of racist flyers, and
Dennis has quoted in the paper about it, and the
Arizona Republic describes him as the state wide director of

(45:57):
White Arian Resistance. In two thousand and one, when Dennis
announced that he was moving to Arizona, Governor Jane Hull
asked residents to wear a green ribbon to show their
opposition to Dennis, like to Dennis personally. The newspaper quite
literally says quote Governor Jane Hull wants Arizonans to wear

(46:20):
a green ribbon to show unity against Dennis Mayhon, leader
of the White Arian Resistance supremacist group. The headline is
go away, mister Mayhon, you can't look a court reporter
in her eyes and say, your brother hasn't been involved
in racist stuff for years when the actual governor of
a whole state is denouncing him by name like that.

(46:46):
The deposition transcript is a perplexing document. Like I said,
it's the most information I have about Daniel, straight from
his own mouth under oath, but it's riddled with statements
I know aren't true, either because I have a better
source that contradicts him, or because it simply can't be

(47:07):
true due to reality. Now I won't say he's lying,
because I just did before, but lying under oath is
called perjury, and it's a crime when he hasn't been
convicted of a crime. But not everything he said was true,

(47:27):
and that's a fact I now. Some of it is
just dates. He says he married his wife, Myrna, in
nineteen seventy nine, but the marriage licenses nineteen seventy eight. Okay,
a lot of men don't know their anniversary. But he
also consistently refers to Myrna as his wife in the
present tense. But by two thousand and three they'd been

(47:49):
divorced for nineteen years. They split in nineteen eighty four,
and she had since remarried At least twice, and several
times during the proceeding he brings up Mirna's race. They
met when he was in the Navy and he was
stationed in the Philippines, And would a man who is

(48:09):
racist mary a Filipino woman. The answer to that is yes, obviously,
of course he could. It happens all the time. There's
no shortage of white supremacist men with Asian Pacific islander
or Hispanic wives. I once got an elaborate death threat
from a fairly prominent neo Nazi who uses his Latina

(48:32):
wife's name on paperwork for his small business so he
can claim it's a women and minority owned business. It
happens a lot, but a lot of his answers are muddled,
dates that aren't possible, locations that don't match, the kinds
of mistakes you could chalk up to a hazy memory.

(48:53):
He recollects the time the Secret Service came to his
house to talk to Dennis about pissing on Air Force one.
The plane was apparently parked in a Boeing hangar in Wichita,
where Dennis was working at the time, and he apparently
entered the plane and relieved himself on the president's chair.

(49:14):
The deposition transcript describes this as having taken place in
the spring of nineteen ninety nine. I think that may
be a transcriptionist typographical error, because it has to be
eighty nine. Daniel recalls that it was around two years
after he and his wife separated, but that's not quite

(49:35):
right either. They separated in eighty four, and the president
in question was George Bush. We've had two president Bushes,
and Daniel occasionally claims that he and Myrna at some
point got back together. I don't know if that's true,
but even if it is, none of these combinations of
facts produced the possibility for all of these things to

(49:55):
have been true at the same time. Based on the
description of the plane being in Wichita and Dennis being
employed by an airline called Braniff at the time, it
could only have been nineteen eighty nine. That's the only
point in time during which Branef Airlines operated at the
Wichita airport, and we had a president named Bush. Whether

(50:18):
Dennis actually pissed on Air Force one is anybody's guests,
but I don't doubt that he told people he did.
He wrote in his own clan newsletter in nineteen ninety one,
that he'd urinated on a memorial to Holocaust victims when
he visited a concentration camp in Germany, and other important

(50:39):
dates in his brother's life are similarly confused in Daniel's testimony.
We know. Dennis himself has said that his racial awakening
was in Florida in May of nineteen eighty. When Matthew
Kennard interviewed him for his book about white supremacists in
the military, he was very clear that his National Guard

(51:00):
unit had been deployed that month to assist in transporting
Cuban asylum seekers to processing and detention centers. But that
wasn't the only thing going on in Miami in May
of nineteen eighty. Dennis's unit was deployed on May third,
we know that, But two weeks later, the National Guard

(51:20):
was deployed again, this time to put down the Miami riots.
I think sometimes this pair of events gets muddled together.
It certainly did for Daniel, But the riots had very
little to do with the thousands of Cubans arriving by boat.
On May seventeenth, nineteen eighty, an all white male jury

(51:41):
returned not guilty verdicts for all four of the Miami
police officers who had beaten Arthur mc duffie to death
a year earlier. McDuffie had been a United States Marine,
but more importantly, in the eyes of the officers who
shattered his skull, he was a thirty three year old
black man. Three days of rioting followed the verdict. Eighteen

(52:04):
people died. On the second day of the riot, the
National Guard was sent in. I honestly couldn't tell you
if the units deployed to transport Cuban asylum seekers starting
on May third were the same men deployed to the
riots on May eighteenth. I can't find any specifics about that.
I know the National Guard was transporting those people for

(52:26):
a longer period of time than that, but I don't
I don't know. Denis never mentioned the riots though when
he spoke to Kennar at about that time in his life.
But Daniel is adamant that it was the Miami riots
that changed his brother that month, describing him as having
been right in the thick of it and that it
was a pretty bloody situation. He's mistaken about the dates again.

(52:51):
He says it was May third, and he says eighteen
people died the first night, but he's so specific about it.
He says that Dennis had to use his rifle on
a civilian and that the police officer next to him
had a heart attack and died. A Miami Police Department
after action report confirms at least some of this is

(53:13):
based in fact. On the afternoon of the second day
of the riots, so May eighteenth, Miami Police officer Lieutenant
Edward McDermott was escorting National Guard troops when he suffered
a massive heart attack and died. The report doesn't include
any mention of National guardsmen firing their weapons. It only
outlines the occasions on which Miami police officers did, but

(53:38):
that's because the report is by the Miami Police Department.
I think any information about whether guardsmen had fired their
weapons would be in a report by the National Guard.
I was unable to confirm whether or not any National
guardsman shot a civilian during the riots. But ultimately I
think what happened here is that Daniel thought he was

(54:00):
telling the truth, and it was Dennis who lied to
his brother, because telling people that you became racist because
you killed a man in a race riot sounds more
impressive than the truth, which is that he was a
glorified bus driver for a week, and he hates the
sound of people speaking Spanish. But back on the subject

(54:21):
of his own life, Daniel says he doesn't still have
the Turner Diaries t shirt that he wore to that
meeting because his lady friend threw it away. He says
her name is Lisa, but he can't give her last
name because she's married. He's told that he can say
it off the record, but he does need to provide

(54:42):
it to the court. And then he backtracks. Actually, there
is no Lisa. Her name is Millie and she's not married.
But she has a boyfriend and they aren't having an affair.
Actually there's no relationship. She's just a little old lady
who lives next door and sometimes he helps her out
with repairs. She's more like a mother to him. Now,

(55:03):
Milly does exist. Lisa might exist too, but Milly definitely does.
Because I tracked down the property records of every house
on the block the Mayhon brothers were living on in
nineteen ninety nine, and a woman named Mildred lived three
houses down from them. She was about twenty years their
senior back then, so the like a mother comment kind

(55:26):
of tracks but I don't think she was in his
bedroom throwing away his t shirts. This isn't a misremembered
date or a slip of the tongue. There's no rational
explanation for saying my secret married girlfriend Lisa if there
is no Lisa and you aren't having an affair, and
you actually met your elderly neighbor Mildred, who was like
a mother to you. He also claimed that he'd never

(55:49):
even read the Turner Diaries before he wore that shirt
to work in nineteen ninety nine, so he couldn't have
been sending any kind of message related to the content
of the book because he didn't know what the book
was about. And he only wore the shirt that day
at all because it was the only clean shirt he
could find that morning. And he swears he had no
idea when he got dressed that morning that there would
be a meeting that day with management about his pamphlets,

(56:13):
and he certainly didn't know was Hitler's birthday. I can't
prove that's not true, but it feels untrue in my heart.
It also struck me as odd that a man who
claims to have no real knowledge of or involvement in
the movement, who never even read the book and doesn't
even really know what National Alliance is, consistently refers to

(56:35):
William Luther Pierce as doctor Pierce. Now that's technically correct.
He had a pH d. He was a physicist, and
I often noticed that I do the same thing. I
call him doctor Pierce, and that's because most of the
material I consume about him was written by his acolytes.

(56:56):
Those are the people who call him doctor Pierce. But
Daniel says he never met doctor Pierce, but his brother
did once sometime in the mid eighties. And if that's true,
that means Dennis Mayhon had contact with William Luther Pearce
during his underground years, the years he claims he was

(57:18):
conducting a series of bombings. There were more than a
few times during that nine hour deposition that his mask
slips a little. He tries to maintain this righteous indignation
at the implication that he knows anything about the world
his brother lives in. You know, he loves his brother,
but they don't share the same views. He doesn't know

(57:38):
anything about that stuff. But when the attorney says that
Dennis used to be a grand wizard in the clan
Daniel's quick to correct him. It's an imperial wizard, not
a grand wizard. And when he's asked about the people
he chose to feature on his Caucasian Aviator's pamphlet, he
corrects the record and says, actually, they aren't all white,

(58:02):
because Aileen de Troux is quote mixed Mediterranean and French.
She's not what you would call aryan or a totally
white person. I tried to track down this woman's genealogy.
She appears to be thoroughly Flemish, so I don't know
what he's talking about here. But regardless of the possible

(58:24):
Mediterranean blood, that is a level of race science that
just isn't going to come out of the mouth of
a normal person. Daniel's lawsuit bounced around the courts for
five years. He was dismissed in two thousand and one,
just six months after they filed it. So they appealed
to the Tenth Circuit and it was dismissed again. A

(58:47):
later decision partially reversed the dismissal in two thousand and three,
and so it was remanded back to the lower court judge,
who again dismissed the case in two thousand and four,
so they filed a second appeal in two thousand and four.
And so in the months between this deposition in late
two thousand and three and when they filed the second
appeal in two thousand and four, that's the time period

(59:09):
during which Dennis Mayhon is building a bomb and mailing
it to the diversity office in Scottsdale, Arizona. And by
the time the case was finally dismissed for good in
two thousand and five, the Mayhon brothers were already very
close friends with the ATF informant who'd been assigned to
get them to confess to the bombing. When Daniel filed

(59:30):
for bankruptcy in two thousand and six, his petition shows
he was still working as an aircraft mechanic, but he
seemed to be having trouble keeping a job for very long,
because he lists five different employers from two thousand and
four to two thousand and six. I don't know why
I had it in my head that this was going
to be a quick, easy episode to shake off the

(59:52):
holiday Hayes. I thought I'd be in and out summarizing
a silly little lawsuit. But even my side stories have
side story, and I spent way too long reading white
power magazines from the nineties. I'll have to save some
of the odd tidbits that I passed over for another time.
It turns out the tangent I had to break out

(01:00:13):
into its own episode has tangents that might need their
own episodes. Daniel Mahon's attorney, Robert Fraser, was disbarred in
two thousand and eight, who was allowed to resign from
the bar during an ongoing investigation into several grievances. Two
of them are pretty standard. He accepted payment from clients
and then failed to render any services. Unethical, but not crazy.

(01:00:38):
The third one was kind of troubling. He was representing
a mother in a child abuse case, and he concealed
the fact that he was at the time living in
his client's home, which made him a material witness to
the alleged child abuse. He was never charged with perjury,
but the judge in that case pretty unequivocally stated on

(01:00:59):
the record occurred that Fraser perjured himself when he was
asked directly about this. I know it's a little different
in every jurisdiction, but I was surprised that Fraser was
only disbarred in two thousand and eight, because by then
he had three convictions for domestic violence, one for simple assault,
he served time for contempt after walking out of a

(01:01:20):
hearing during a paternity lawsuit, and he was convicted of
a felony for registering to vote immediately after being convicted
of felony domestic violence. Most states would have had his
bar card after the first felony, surely after the second one, right,
and the timeline on this is kind of incredible. Fraser

(01:01:41):
showed up to oral argument at the Tenth Circuit Court
of Appeals in Daniel's case just days after bonding out
of the Tulsa County jail for beating his wife. I'd
also sketched out a section in my notes to talk
about a lawsuit that this story really reminded me of
a much more recent one. But I'm already running way

(01:02:02):
too long, and I'll have to save that two thousand
and two lawsuit filed by an aircraft mechanic who said
United Airlines fired him for being white. For another time.
Not to spoil it, but he also did not get
fired for being white. It had a lot more to
do with his habit of referring to a black coworker

(01:02:22):
using the N word. So he didn't win that lawsuit obviously,
and his appeal ended up getting dismissed because the white
supremacist lawyer he hired forgot to file it. Now. In
his defense, he was very busy at the time. He
had just been charged with a felony, and unlike Robert Fraser,
he practices law in a state that does disbar attorneys

(01:02:47):
after their first felony. But funny enough, he doesn't seem
to have reported that to the bar association yet. But again,
the story for another day, because that one's not over yet.
And as for those Turner Diaries t shirts, I'm sure
hundreds of people bought one out of Nazi magazines or

(01:03:08):
off a table at a gun show. They sold them
for years. But the only other story I could turn
up about a guy getting himself into hot water after
wearing one in public was a Navy seal. That man
has since changed his name and made quite a career
for himself as a relationship coach, offering dating advice to

(01:03:29):
his nearly half a million followers. You probably have no
idea who used to be Matt Hale's webmaster. After all,
that was a long time ago, back before Matt Hale
went to prison for soliciting the murder of a federal judge.

(01:03:59):
Wee Little Guys as a production of Cool Zone Media
and iHeartRadio. It's research, written and recorded by me Whiley Conger.
Special thanks this week goes to Wikipedia editor Tulsa politics fan.
I thought I was losing my mind when I googled
the subject of the show when I saw that the
record had been updated to reflect my ongoing research. Our

(01:04:19):
executive producers are Sophie Legerman and Robert Evans. The show
is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme
music was composed by Brad Diggert. You can email me
at weard Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I
will definitely read it, but I won't answer it. It's
nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show
with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just

(01:04:41):
don't post anything that's going to make you are my
Weird Little Guys

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Host

Molly Conger

Popular Podcasts

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Klansman's Twin: Dennis Mahon, Pt. 3