The Southern Poverty Law Center indictment, Mark Black, etc.
Posted by Ed Folsom, April 28, 2026.
The SPLC Indictment
This post is about the recent indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), along with a story about a defendant in a criminal case here in Maine, long ago, who had a connection to the SPLC and its founder Morris Dees.
Last week, the Department of Justice announced an eleven-count indictment against the SPLC for wire fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering. The U.S. Government charges that the SPLC was involved in a deceptive scheme that involved using funds it solicited from donors under a promise to “dismantle” violent extremist groups. Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC used more than $3,000,000.00 of donor funds to pay associates of these same groups. The Government alleges that the funds were used, at least in part, to fund extremist activities.
For example, the indictment alleges that one of the informants, referred to as F-37:
“was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ event in Charlottesville, Virginia and attended the event at the direction of the SPLC. F-37 made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees. Between 2015 and 2023, the SPLC secretly paid F-37 more than $270,000.00.”
Another informant, referred to as F-9:
“was affiliated with the neo-Nazi organization, the National Alliance and served as an F for the SPLC for more than 20 years. Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly paid F-9 more than $1,000,000.00.”
By 2012, the National Alliance was down to about 75 members. According to the SPLC, the leader of the National Alliance formally ended its existence as a traditional membership organization in 2013. Yet the SPLC paid F-9 more than $1,000,000.00 of donor money after 2013.
The Wire Fraud Counts
The indictment alleges that the SPLC solicited donations by use of materially false statements and deception regarding what the donated money would be used for. The six wire fraud counts allege specific payments made to specific informants, using the Automated Clearinghouse System to transfer donated funds from SPLC accounts to bank accounts held by particular informants, in furtherance of the scheme.
The Bank Fraud Counts
The four bank fraud counts are charged under 18 U.S.C. section 1014, which prohibits making a false statement on any bank application. Here, the government alleges four instances of the SPLC using its agents to open bank accounts, filling out required forms regarding control of the entities whose names were on the accounts, and declaring that the agent filling out the form was the sole owner of that entity. In fact, the accounts were owned and controlled by the SPLC. The SLPC used these accounts to receive donor money that it transferred from an account it held in its own name. The SPLC then made payments from the nominally third-party accounts to its informants, allegedly to mask that it was paying the informants with donor funds.
The Money Laundering Count
The money laundering count alleges that the SPLC engaged in a conspiracy with others to launder donor money paid to informants through financial transactions “designed to conceal the true nature, source, ownership, and control of fraudulently obtained donated money the SPLC paid to Fs.”
What Might the SPLC Claim In Its Defense?
I expect the SPLC to claim that they didn’t engage in any deception in collecting the donations they used to pay the informants and/or their organizations. They will probably claim that part of the process of dismantling those organizations required infiltrating them, which required paying informants for information that the SPLC could use against them. After all, can anyone really expect the SPLC to tell its donors, up front, all the specific steps it uses to accomplish its goals?
As for the bank fraud counts, the SPLC might claim they weren’t attempting to deceive the bank with the false statements their agents made. They were merely making it appear that funds they paid to their informants did not come from the SPLC because it would be very dangerous to those informants to have an evidence trail showing that the SPLC was paying them directly.
On the other hand, what if the evidence shows that the money the SPLC paid to informants was paid to prop-up white supremacist and neo-Nazi organizations that were already on the verge of collapse, to sustain the organizations that give the SPLC its reason to exist, and to allow the SPLC to continue its very lucrative fundraising business?
The strength or weakness of the case will depend on the evidence presented at trial, and none of us knows what that evidence will be. But paying over $1,000,000.00 to a member of an organization with only a few dozen members that the SPLC used to demonstrate both the need for and the success of its efforts, could be a problem for the SPLC. And paying $270,000.00 to a Unite the Right organizer/informant, while coordinating his racist social media postings and his Unite the Right-related activities, while helping coordinate transportation for other Unite the Right event attendees, then fund-raising massively off the publicity generated by that event, could also be problematic.
Consider that the Charlottsville Unite the Right rally took place in August of 2017 and that the SPLC’s revenue increased from $51,000,000 to $133,000,000 in the year following that event. In fact, the SPLC’s total assets rose to $518,000,000 in 2018. That’s over a half-billion dollars. By October of 2024, the SPLC had amassed assets of roughly $787,000,000, enough to run the organization for 6 years without any additional revenue. In that view, the continuing existence of Unite the Right, the National Alliance, et. al., is essential to the SPLC’s great financial success. Without the existence of such entities, there would be no great battle to fight, and without a great battle there would be no money.
Some will cheer the indictment against an organization that has smeared them.
A lot of people have been smeared by the SPLC and its “Hate Watch” and “Extremist” lists: ex-Muslims Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali; commentators like Frank Gaffney and Daniel Pipes; ex-Communist David Horowitz; and others like Ben Carson, Turning Point U.S.A., and the Center for Immigration Studies. The SPLC amassed a fortune while smearing these people, and a lot of people will cheer for the SPLC to get what they believe it has coming to it. But the charges are criminal charges. They will require proof beyond a reasonable doubt for a conviction on each count.
The story of Mark Black and his connection to the SPLC.
Hearing about the indictment against the SPLC caused me to recall a case I was involved in as an assistant district attorney in Portland, Maine, back around 1989 or 1990, that had a connection to the SPLC and its founder, Morris Dees. It was a strange case involving a strange defendant who came to Maine under federal witness protection, named Mark Black. The story illustrates the murky nature of dealings between the SPLC, the people it uses against its targets, and the U.S. Government.
Black first came to my attention when Portland police arrested him, along with a local guy named Fitzsimmons, and brought me police reports seeking criminal complaints. According to the reports, Black had fronted bulk marijuana to a third guy — I’ll call him “Vic” for purposes of the telling — who lived in Portland. Vic failed to pay Black as promised for the fronted marijuana, so Black formed a plan to get paid and recruited Fitzsimmons as muscle. The two of them went to a home, in Portland, where Vic’s brother lived with his wife and kid, and where Vic was also staying.
When Black and Fitzsimmons arrived, Vic wasn’t there so they held and threatened Vic’s brother and his family for hours, waiting for Vic to arrive. When Vic finally arrived, Black and Fitzsimmons beat him up. Because they knew there was an outstanding arrest warrant for Vic, they drove him to the Portland P.D. and instructed him to go inside and turn himself in while they waited outside, telling him that they wanted to be sure to know where he was – in jail.
The police arrested Vic on the warrant and took him to the county jail, at which point Vic told them what Black and Fitzsimmons had done. Vic also told police he was sure Black and Fitzsimmons would show up in court the next day to observe Vic’s initial in-custody appearance on the warrant charge. Detective Bruce Chase and another officer attended the next day’s arraignment session and spotted Black and Fitzsimmons in the courtroom, observing as they had promised they’d do, and arrested the pair outside the courthouse when they left. Both were later indicted for various charges.
Black was missing a hand and part of one arm, replaced with a mechanical prosthetic. The investigating police told me that he had been involved with a white supremacist organization and that he had blown-off part of his arm with explosives, connected to the theft of munitions from a military base in the Carolinas. They also told me that Black had ended up in federal witness protection after providing evidence against other white supremacists, and that the feds had provided him with a new identity: Mark Black. Black had then drifted up to Maine, to grace us with his presence.
Black also had a connection to Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center. I learned this because, at some point after the case had dragged on for a long time with continuances, Black sought yet another continuance of the trial docket call so he could travel to New York City and participate in a daytime television talk show with Morris Dees. They were going to discuss the stuff that got Black placed in witness protection. This is the first time I recall ever hearing about the Southern Poverty Law Center or Morris Dees. Why a guy in witness protection would want to appear on T.V. to talk about his testimony against white supremacists is beyond me, but that’s what he wanted to do.
Black’s request for the continuance was denied, but in this time-frame Maine was in a budget crisis that involved state shutdown days, furloughs and ostensible 39-hour work weeks for state employees. The state happened to declare a shutdown day for the date of Black’s docket call, so he got his continuance, de facto. I recall learning that Black did in fact appear on a daytime television talk show with Dees that day, in New York. The alleged victims of his crimes saw it on T.V. and were reportedly not happy at all.
Eventually, Black was convicted and received a sentence to the Maine Department of Corrections. He served at least part of it at the Maine Correctional Center, in Windham. I know because Portland Detective Paul Kelley approached me one day, a year or two later, to inform me that another guy, whom I’ll call J.L., who was convicted after trial of a couple of gunpoint robberies of cab drivers, had escaped from Windham and was still at large. Kelley also told me that a Windham inmate named Mark Black had reached out to the Portland P.D. to tell them that J.L. planned to “blow up” the Portland P.D. Black said J.L. had asked him at some earlier point about information on people J.L. could buy explosives from.
Black also told the police that J.L. intended to obtain “Claymore mines” from a particular source to carry out his plan. It was the first I’d ever heard of Claymore mines, but I now understand that they each contain 1.5 pounds of the explosive C-4.
That’s the last time I heard anything more about Mark Black, sometime back in the early 1990’s.
In fact, J.L. never did attempt to blow up the Portland P.D., with Claymore mines or otherwise. J.L. was captured without explosives and was returned to custody after a couple of residential burglaries and no more than a few days on the lam.
I recalled these strange events (once just another day at the office), upon reading about the SPLC indictment last week. Who was this “Mark Black” character, really, and what exactly did he do to get himself into witness protection? And what could any of it have to do with Morris Dees and the SPLC? Also, how did Black and Dees happen to still be communicating after Black received his new identity and entered witness protection, such that they coordinated an appearance together on a daytime T.V. talk show in New York City?
I’d love to see that old T.V. episode, to get a better idea of what Black did for Dees. But I can’t find any record of it searching information on the most likely culprits: Sally Jessy Raphael’s or Maury Povich’s shows. But I did a little digging into thefts of weapons and munitions from military bases in the 1980’s, and found a connection between military weapons thefts, Dees, and the SPLC.
Was “Mark Black” actually Robert Jones, a dealer in stolen military arms that testified for Dees and the SPLC against Glenn Miller?
An August 6, 1986 UPI story, here, discusses large amounts of “training munitions, including rockets and bulk explosives” that went missing from Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, in 1985. The story also mentions a July, 1986, trial of “White Patriot Party leader Glenn Miller” and a connection between the Ft. Bragg weapons thefts and the Ku Klux Klan, a connection that was established at trial by the testimony of one Robert Jones. Jones is described as a convicted arms dealer who testified that he sold “$50,000 worth of mines, grenades, anti-tank rockets and explosives stolen from Fort Bragg” to the KKK.
In an August 2021 GQ story, authors Peter Keating and Shaun Assael run down Glenn Miller’s life history in a piece that presents the January 6, 2021 capitol rioters as a manifestation of white supremacy; an effort that was very much in vogue and endorsed to the hilt by the powers-that-be when the story was written.
The GQ story discusses Glenn Miller’s 1986 trial, making clear the connection that Morris Dees and the SPLC had to it.
Glenn Miller
Miller was once the leader of the leader of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, CKKKK, which he formed and organized as a paramilitary force around 1981. In 1983, Miller focused the CKKKK’s efforts against a man named Bobby Person, a black prison guard who had complained that white officers blocked him from promotion. The CKKKK burned a cross in front of Person’s home. On another occasion they showed up in force and pointed a gun at him in front of his kids. Other times, they “threw hate mail onto Person’s property and on the grounds of his church, vandalized his father’s house, and tried to drive his wife off the road.”
In 1984, the GQ story tells us, Miller hooked up with the leader of a white supremacist organization called the New Order. The New Order provided Miller with a couple hundred thousand dollars in stolen money, some of which Miller used to buy stolen military-grade munitions for the CKKKK from a guy named Robert Jones.
Meanwhile, Morris Dees and the SPLC sued Miller on behalf of Bobby Persons, seeking to have Miller and the CKKKK stop harassing Persons, stop harassing all black people, and cease the CKKKK’s paramilitary activities. In January of 1985, Miller signed a consent decree agreeing to stop the harassment and paramilitary activities. But, within a month of signing the consent decree, he re-formed the CKKKK under a new name, the White Patriot Party.
In 1986, Dees and the SPLC returned to court claiming that Miller was violating his consent decree. This led to Miller being charged with contempt. It was at Miller’s contempt trial that Dees had Robert Jones, the arms dealer, testify that Jones had sold munitions to Morris for the CKKKK while the consent decree was in effect. Morris was found in contempt. He was sentenced to serve 6 months in prison, and he was ultimately driven from his North Carolina stronghold.
Was Mark Black the witness against Glenn Miller who is named in news accounts as Robert Jones? Is that why Black merited a T.V. spot with Dees on a national daytime talk show several years later? According to a contemporaneous New York Times account of Miller’s contempt trial, https://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/25/us/north-carolina-jury-getting-case-against-klan-paramilitary-group.html Robert Norton Jones testified that, at the time of trial, he was serving a 4-year prison sentence for attempting to buy stolen explosives and military weapons from a government agent. He also testified that Miller had paid him $50,000 to deliver munitions to Miller’s militia, by then renamed the White Patriot Party, and that Jones had continued to train White Patriot Party members to use the munitions that were stolen from Fort Bragg and other military facilities, up to the time of his arrest some 6 months after Miller had signed the consent decree.
In an odd twist, artificial intelligence dug up a copy of this same New York Times story, marked as a CIA document bearing the notation, “Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/08/24.” In the CIA document, the following passage is underlined:
“The prosecution, amid an evidentiary parade of guns, hand grenades, and missile launchers has painted a portrait of a group of anti-Semitic racists who were shaped by the Christian Identity movement, joined by active-duty soldiers and marines, and equipped with heavy weapons stolen from Fort Bragg with the help of an Army intelligence officer and a Special Forces supply sergeant.”
Why would the CIA hold this document indicating that the Times story had somehow been “sanitized” for release. The CIA is not supposed to conduct domestic operations. Was there a foreign connection to the whole affair?
I can’t get any further trying to identify Robert Norton Jones or determining whether he’s the same person later known as Mark Black. An A.I. search turns up nothing on Mark Black. An A.I. search of Robert Norton Jones turns up nothing in any public record after the reports on his testimony at Miller’s 1986 contempt trial.
I invite any sleuths out there who might be interested in digging further into who Mark Black really was to have at it. Please pass along anything you find.
In more recent times, in April of 2014, Miller, the founder of the CKKKK and the White Patriot Party, made a big splash when he drove to Overland Park Kansas and shot one person to death at the Jewish Community Center and another at a retirement community, thinking they were Jewish. Neither was Jewish. Miller was convicted of the murders, received the death penalty, and died on death row in May of 2021.
In the meantime between his contempt trial in 1986 and his 2014 shooting spree, Miller was arrested in Missouri, in April of 1987, in possession of a cache of weapons and explosives. He cooperated with the U.S. Government and testified against accused fellow white supremacists in a federal sedition trial in which all defendants were acquitted. For Miller’s assistance in that trial, he spent only three years in federal prison for his own crimes. He was then placed in witness protection and given the identity of Frazier Glenn Cross. He later abandoned that identity and continued to engage in white supremacist rabble rousing, even at one point appearing on the Howard Stern show in 2010. Then he ran out his sordid string in April of 2014.
It’s all murky stuff.
Back to the recent SPLC indictment, consider that with just $200,000 Glenn Miller was able to greatly expand, arm-up, and train his paramilitary CKKKK/White Patriot Party with stolen military munitions in 1985-86. Even accounting for inflation in the meantime, what sort of mischief do you suppose the SPLC’s informers were able to do with the more than $3,000,000.00 in donor funds that the SPLC paid them? It’s murky, murky stuff.
