Credits:  Stanley R. Barrett, Is God a Racist?  The Right Wing in Canada, University of Toronto Press, ISBN 0-8020-6673-9 (paperback).  Copyright University of Toronto, 1987; reprinted 1989.
 

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Dominica and Prison

The prospect of ending up in prison was never very far from the thoughts of the white supremacists.  In most cases, however, charges against them rarely concerned racial matters or Canada’s anti-hate laws (the Zundel and Keegstra cases have been the main exceptions).  Instead, the charges involved various illegalities such as theft and assault that were often by-products of their racist orientations.  White supremacists viewed themselves as political prisoners, the victims of a legal order (‘jewdicial’ system) weighted against them.  Yet they sometimes regarded (or rationalized) imprisonment in a positive light.  Andrews claimed that his prison sentence in 1978 was a blessing in disguise.  had he not been put in prison, he said, he still would be locked into a dull job as a health inspector, and living in suburbia.  Whereas prison often is regarded as a levelling mechanism which undermines the social class and racial basis for advantage that prevails in the outside world, the racists claimed otherwise.  Andrews contended that he was a hero in
 

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prison because of his white-supremacist reputation, and that blacks were at the bottom of the totem pole.  Another man who spent several months in jail in the Caribbean said that he had got along well with Rastafarians, who, racists themselves, respected his pride in being a white man.  An article in the Nationalist Report (issue 39) applauded a white prisoner in the United States for shooting four black prisoners, commenting that such action was precisely what was needed to bring about segregated prisons.  McQuirter told me that his main worry about going to prison was that it would curtail his effectiveness as the mover and shaker behind the white nationalist movement.  He added that prison was a real breeding ground for racists, people who would not hesitate to use violence on release, and therefore the authorities would be very hesitant to assign him that fate; as he once said in The Spokesman (vol. 1, no. 1):  ‘If I’m in prison, I’ll recruit an army.’  Nonetheless, by 1983, it was in prison that McQuirter did end up.  He was sentenced to two years for his part in the planned overthrow of the government of Dominica, to eight years for conspiring to commit murder, and to five years for conspiring to force cheques, passports, drivers’ licences, and birth certificates.  The last sentence was to run concurrently with the second, to start after he had served the two-year sentence (Toronto Star, 9 February 1982).

If the Dominica escapade had been the plot of a novel, it might well have been rejected by publishers as totally implausible.  It all began when an American with a history of right-wing activity hit on the idea of establishing a base for white supremacists in the Caribbean.  Mike Perdue was put in touch with Canadian racists, notably Andrews, by David Duke.  Andrews, of course, had previously pointed out the importance of controlling a territory which would serve as a refuge and haven for the movement.  The original target was Grenada, where the Marxist government led by Maurice Bishop had overthrown Sir Eric Gairy.  The plan was to reestablish Gairy as head of state, in return for financial and other gains, but it fell through when he refused to accompany the invading landing party of white supremacists.  Andrews had stressed to Perdue that any mercenary operation launched from Canada or the United States was bound to fail, because of the sophistication of the police and the great number of informers around the movement (Nationalist Report, issue 37).  It was also critical, he argued, if the reaction of the American government was to be avoided, that the target should be a left-wing government.  Andrews’s idea was to launch the invasion on Grenada from the nearby country of Dominica.  When Perdue selected Dominica as the new target, Andrews withdrew from the picture.
 

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Dominica at the time had an interim governmentm which hd replaced Prime Minister Patrick John, who had been involved in a scandal to get rich by leasing part of the island to some Americans.  On a visit to Dominica, Andrews learned of a scheme by the leaders of the interim government to sell passports to wealthy Iranians after the fall of the shah.  He divulged the information to Opposition leader Eugenia Charles (a former student of Bora Laskin at the University of Toronto), who used it to help her subsequent successful campaign for prime minister.  Word later leaked out to her that former prime miinister Patrick John, with the aid of white mercenaries, was planning a coup d’etat.  He and several of his followers were arrested for treason.  Even that did not deter Perdue, McQuirter, and their fellow revolutionaries.  Marion McGuire, a woman who had joined the Western Guard some years earlier, was persuaded to travel to Dominica as a pre-invasion scout.  As incredible as it sounds, a Toronto radio station, CFTR, had been taken into the confidence of the Klan, and provided with a running account of the invasion plans.  McGuire’s report from Dominica was sent to a CFTR news reporter, who passed it on to the Klan.  From that point onwards, things went from bad to worse, for the mercenaries.  The reporter had told an OPP friend about the planned invasion.  The OPP investigated, verified that a plot did exist, and relayed the information to U.S. authorities.  The second leak was even more damaging.  Perdue had arranged to rent a boat in New Orleans.  He confided in the captain that he was leading an attack on Dominica.  The captain, as it materialized, was working for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.  When Perdue and his comrades gathered in New Orleans, they were promptly apprehended.

The arrests took place without a ripple, but the shock waves in the radical right were huge.  The ten people placed under lock and key, all of whom had Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazi connections, included two Canadians.  One was Wolfgang Droege, born near Nuremberg in West Germany, and the principal Canadian Klansman after McQuirter (some radical-right people claimed he was McQuirter’s intellectual superior).  He had told a CFTR reporter before the attempted coup (Globe and Mail, 15 May 1981):  ‘I consider myself a little bit of a rebel in society.  And, like, I’m not content to have a 9-to-5 job.  I want to live a real life.  You know, I want excitement and adventure in my life.’  Droege also said he hoped to become financially secure from the Dominica venture, but all that he ended up with was a prison sentence in the United States.  The other Canadian was a man called Jacklin from Elmira, Ontario, who had previously established a Klan den in the Kitchener area.  This man, who sometimes used an alias, was referred to
 

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in The Spokesman  (vol. 1, no. 5) as Grand Chaplain.  According to one report (Vancouver Province, 12 May 1982), he was beaten and stabbed by blacks while serving his sentence in a U.S. prison.

The invasion attempt cost an estimated $75,000.  While some of the funds apparently came from three American supporters, Perdue testified that Andrews and Weiche had also bankrolled him (both denied the accusation).  Another backer supposedly was a Toronto crime figure, Charles Yanover, who shortly after was charged in a plot to assassinate the president of South Korea (Globe and Mail, 27 June 1981).  Although police authorities took a close, hard look at the radio station, CFTR, which claimed it had fully intended to reveal the existence of the plot before the mercenaries actually landed on the shores of Dominica, apparently nothing concrete was done.  One of the most bizarre consequences concerned the attempt to rescue Marion McGuire, who had been sentenced to three years in a Dominica prison fo rher part in the affair (some reports stated she was the only female prisoner in that country, while others said she was one of three women behind bars there).  McGuire, of Irish origin and with past involvement in the IRA, had a history of alcoholism.  Her estranged husband, whom she had met while undergoing treatment at Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital in Toronto, announced his plan to fly to Dominica to see her.  Siksna, McQuirter’s sidekick, talked about going to the island to rescure McGuire, but he was beaten to it by a man of British origin who used the alias ‘Harry Wood.’  He was eventually arrested by Dominican authorities, and spent four months in prison on the island.  McGuire, in the meantime, was starting to have second thoughts about the right wing.  She said (Toronto Star, 17 May 1981) that McQuirter had set her up as the fall guy in case anything went wrong with the attempted invasion.  There also was a rumour, apparently unfounded, that she had become pregnant by a black person while in Dominica.  Following her release after serving one year of the three-year sentence, she said (Globe and Mail, 13 April 1982):  ‘I’m not just a recovered alcoholic but a rehabilitated racist and a born-again Christian.’  Remarking on her prison sentence, she added:  ‘it was the best thing that ever happened to me.  I think every alcoholic should have to spend a year in jail.’  McGuire, who had been employed as a clerk with the federal Manpower and Immigration department in Toronto, hoped to become a nurse.  When she returned to Toronto, she attended a church, with the intention of building a new life.  But that was not to be.  She withdrew from the church when a guest speaker introduced politics into the pulpit.  She also had ended up in one of Andrews’s rooming houses, which certainly was not the environment to
 

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sustain her new-found stance against racism.  A few months later she apparently was back on the bottle again.

There were others who felt the effects of the Dominica affair.  Arnie Polli – the butterfly of the Canadian radical right – came under close scrutiny.  Although generally regarded as a genuine believer in the cause, Polli had a reputation of being able to locate sufficient funds to allow him to indulge his penchant for leisure and pleasure.  It was rumoured tht one sizeable sum of money given to him to purchase a boat for the Dominican attack was exhausted after he had wintered in the sunshine of Florida.  And when he was questioned by the RCMP (Globe and Mail, 30 May 1981), he said that it was ‘only coincidental that his expenses for two trips to Dominica were paid by Michael Perdue.’  For whatever reasons – perhaps he was only regarded as a bit player – Polli slid out of the Dominica débâcle on the skin of his teeth, but McQuirter was not so fortunate.  For some peculiar reason – maybe he saw the episode as another opportunity to promote the Klan’s name, or maybe it was no more than the arrogance of the true believer, who thought he was too clever to be caught – McQuirter openly boasted (Globe and Mail, 13 May 1981) about his participation.  When he later was charged under a relatively new Canadian law that made it illegal to conspire in Canada to overthrow another country, he complained that he had ‘never heard about this crazy law.’

Compared to McQuirter’s other legal problems, however, Dominica was only a mild irritation.  Within a few months he had been charged on various accounts of forgery and on conspiracy to murder his security chief, Gary MacFarlane.  The two charges were not unconnected.  McFarlane, who had killed a man in 1972, but was found not guilty on the grounds of insanity (he was confined until 1979 at the maximum-security mental-health centre at Penetanguishene), had become increasingly disillusioned with the Klan leader.  No doubt that was partly because the latter had won over his common-law wife, Jean MacGarry (the three lived in the same house).  Several months before the murder plot, it became widely known to the movement that MacFarlane had slit the throats of two dogs that McQuirter doted on, leaving their decomposed caracsses in the bathroom.  According to McQuirter, MacFarlane had threatened to kill both the Klan leader and MacGarry.⁸  McQuirter was particularly worried that MacFarlane, who used
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⁸  Although I did not pay much attention to it at the time, Zundel and Andrews several months earlier remarked that they expected MacFarlane would soon try to kill McQuirter, which makes the latter’s story more plausible.
 

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alcohol and drugs excessively, had become a security risk, and might expose the counterfeiting racket to the police.  Yet the latter concern is puzzling.  McQuirter must have strongly suspected that his organization had been infiltrated, and that the police already were aware of what was taking place.  Indeed, in one of my interviews with him, he stated flatly that his membership included police agents.  But that, he said, didn’t worry him, because the Klan was not involved in any illegal activities.  One of the prominent followers told me they were certain that the police had tapped their telephone.  Several months before the forgery schemes were revealed by the media, I had heard all about them from more than one source.  For example, a leading figure in another right-wing organization said that McQuirter was determined to get rich quickly, but the RCMP and other agencies were hot on his tail.  I would venture the guess that almost anyone who was monitoring the radical right closely was perfectly aware of the forgery business long before it became public knowledge. ⁹  The only answer that I can offer for McQuirter’s action, in the face of the probable knowledge possessed by the police, again concerns the right wing’s arrogance, the belief that one is a superhuman, standing above the trials and tribulations of the ignorant masses.  A similar lack of concern governed his conduct leading to his arrest for the murder conspiracy.  Undercover agents pursuing the forgery racket accidentally stumbled on the murder plot when McQuirter asked one of them if he knew someone who could do a ‘hit’.  In the unfolding drama that indirectly involved the United States and countries abroad, a wealthy supporter of the right wing inadvertently introduced McQuirter to a man who activated the chain of contacts leading to McQuirter’s arrest.  I interviewed this well-heeled supporter both before and after the arrest.  On the latter occasion, he was still stunned by the effectiveness of the police operation, and had a peculiar feeling that somehow or other he had been an unwitting participant.

The aftermath of McQuirter’s arrest was both bizarre and dramatic.  With Klan members scurrying for cover, Andrews claimed many of them came over to his organization (some, in fact, did so).  During a celebration of Hitler’s birthday, light relief was provided by one Klansman who announced with pleasure that Hitler’s spirit had entered his body.  Mad-
 
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⁹  In the early months of this project, I was always puzzled why the police did not arrest white supremacists who obviously were involved in illegal schemes.  Of course, from the radical left’s point of view, the explanation was simple:  the police were part of the right-wing conspiracy.  Yet as I eventually appreciated, it is one thing to have information about illegal acts, but quite another to have the type of evidence that would stand up in court and result in convictions.
 

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Farland, the murder target, was himself charged the following year (Globe and Mail, 30 March 1983) with the first-degree murder of a Richmond Hill man who was found savagely beaten in a parking lot in Thornhill, Ontario.  Siksna, who was born m Latvia, and brought up in Australia and Canada became implicated m the plot to kill MacFarlane.  Siksna had been acquitted on three earlier occasions for charges of defacing property, stealing a typewriter, and violating anti-hate laws (he was convicted for the fraudulent use of a credit card, receiving an eighteen-month suspended sentence).  This man had previously demonstrated his complete loyalty to his leader, McQuirter (Calgary Herald, 27 September and 17 December 1981) had once been charged with possession of an unregistered and restricted weapon, with possessioon of cocaine for the purpose of trafficking, and driving while his licence was suspended (the drug charge was eventually dropped).  Siksna told police that the gun was his.  In the wake of McQuirter’s arrest, Siksna went to the police and confessed tha the had put up the money fo rthe ‘hit.”  He also said that he would have been prepared to take care of MacFarlane himself, thus saving the Klan the expense of hiring a professional assassin.  Skisna, a former University of Toronto student and computer programmer, and erstwhile member of the Conservative party, who was a dishwasher at the time of his arrest, was sentenced to six years in prison.

Yet another university graduate, Jean MacGarry, the woman caught between the Klan leader and his security chief, became implicated.  This unforunate woman was the Klan’s equivalent of the Nationalist Party’s Bob Smith.  She told me that she had never been political, not even while attending university.  She described her life as an endless line of crises, and wondered if she had become involved in the Klan simply because it constituted for her the equivalent of a religious sect, or whether it was the charismatic personlity of McQuirter that had won her over.  Like Siksna, MacGarry proved herself a loyal subaltern.  Police investigators had provided her with an opportunty to step away from the murder case, but she had refused.  She pleaded guilty (Globe and Mail, 17 May 1983) to conspiring to murder her common-law husband.  Mostly because she suffered from several obscure health problems (including cardiac arrest, malfunctioning kidneys, and lupus), she received a suspended sentence and was placed in custody of the Clarke Psychiatric Institute.  MacGarry represented a peculiar (and poignant) phenomenon in the radical right&nbs;– women who were prepared to do evil for no greater reason than to please the men they admired or loved.  Among these were two women who risked their careers by pilfering sensitive documents for white-supremacist leaders, and another who was given the task of tapping information in the Jewish community.
 

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On the west coast, McQuirter’s various legal problems threw the Klan into turmoil.  David Cook, the Klan’s main organizer, described the attempted coup d’état as a ‘dumb stunt’ (Vancouver Sun, 29 Apri;l 1981), and said the Klan is dead:  ‘I guess I’ll just fold it here … It’s just folded as of now as far as I’m concerned.  I’ve had it.’  His comments didn’t please McQuirter, and before long he was expelled from the Klan.  Yet as one Klansman told me, there had long been plans to shunt this man aside, but they were apprehensive about doing so, because Cook had the Klan membership lists.  His vocal negative reaction to the Dominica affair provided the excuse they had been looking for.  McQuirter told me tha tthe main problem was that Cook would not take orders from him.  Cook confirmed this, observing that his problem with McQuirter was merely a manifestation of the East-West split that conditions Canadian politics in general.  Who, Cook asked me, appointed McQuirter leader in the first place?  Cook thought that McQuirter was too pro-Nazi, and that he was in the Klan just to make money.  This man, a fisherman by trade, who had joined the Klan about 1977, commented that Duke had been wise to get out of the Klan when he did.  He mused that he might start up an NAAWP branch himself, but said that if he did so nobody would know.  Cook told me that he still is a member of the Ku Klux Klan.  When he left McQuirter’s organization, he took several people with him who formed the nucleus of his own small low-profile group.  About the only formal meetings he attended were those of another organization, the Canadian League of Rights.  Gostick’s people, he said, knew who he was, but left him alone.

Another man, who apparently also attended League of Rights meetings, left McQuirter’s organization about the same time as Cook.  According to a high-ranking female member, this other man was even more of a trouble-maker, basically because he was paranoid.  For a while he was involved with a Western separatist group,¹⁰  but they too found him intolerable, which led him to establish his own small separatist organization.  He also had his own church group.  As we shall see later, there exists in the radical right a Christian religious movement known as ‘Identity,’ a spiritual blueprint for the white racist.  It had several adherents in British Columbia.  Closely associated with Identity was an Idaho-based organizaiton called ‘the Aryan Nations’; the reputedly neurotic ex-KKK man started up a branch of that organization in Vancouver.
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¹⁰  Droege earlier said (Vancouver Sun, 2 April 1980) that the Klan might have some members in the Western separatist movement.
 

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When Cook was kicked out of the Klan, he was temporarily replaced by a twenty-six-year-old tradesman who had the title of Grand Titan.  Eventually, however, Hooper emerged as the main BC Klan organizer and spokesman.  For several months plans had been made to move the Klan headquarters from Toronto to Vancouver.  After McQuirter’s arrest, that plan was shelved.  Hooper said he had a half-dozen people ready to run as United Front candidates in upcoming elections, but decided not to go ahead with the idea.  He remarked that the Klan was no longer recruiting new members, and would concentrate on small-arms and survival training in the BC interior (he had access to a ‘hide-out’).  Adding to the Klan’s problems was a split between the armchair intellectuals and the activists (including the motorcycle-gang members).  The person who emerged as McQuirter’s replacement as the Klan’s national director was a university graduate, born in 1946, whose alias was ‘Ann Farmer’; she formerly had been the Grand Chaplain and secretary general for British Columbia.  Blonde, petite, and attractive, but with a hard core characteristic of many of the women and men who aspired to leadership positions in the organization, Farmer had been brought up in South Africa.  Like numerous other white supremacists, she had travelled widely, but the experience solidified rather than softened her racial attitudes (her conversation was laced with terms like ‘Paki’ and ‘nigger’).  She told me that she had always been a racist, and was delighted to discover the Klan organization in Vancouver.  An only child, Farmer considered herself an intellectual (her university professors, which included a fellow South African, apparently did not know about her Klan connection, but should have twigged when she submitted a racist thesis on South African literature).  She said she didn’t respect many people who did not have a university degree; McQuirter was an exception.  She herself was not universally respected in the movement.  More than one person remarked to me that Farmer was scatter-brained or simply stupid (despite her claim that her IQ was 140), a judgment no doubt conditioned partly because she was a woman.  When she emerged as national director, not everyone was willing to accept her.  A splinter group called ‘the Imperial Knights of the Ku Klux Klan’ broke away from the CKKK, led by the man who had departed from McQuirter’s organization at the same time as Cook.

This new organization was just one of several different Klan, or Klan-linked groups, in British Columbia during the past few years.  The ones that I was told about included McQuirter’s CKKK, the Imperial Knights, a branch of Wilkinson’s Klan, a Klan group in Nanaimo, another Klan group in Victoria, Cook’s group (possibly linked with NAAWP), the Aryan

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Nations, an underground Nazi group in Vancouver (possibly another reference to the Aryan Nations), and a small White People’s organization in Victoria.

The reaction to Farmer was similar in Ontario.  Some Klansmen there refused to accept her as leader, again because she was a woman.  A splinter group, the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was established by one of McQuirter’s former lieutenants, who was a commercial diver and truck driver (see Sher 1983:  183).  As the Klan’s fortunes sunk ever deeper, this man and a few others, including a Detroit-based Klansman, were rumoured to be talking about ‘direction action’ i.e., violence.  McQuirter had always said that that optioon would become increasingly attractive if he was put in prison.  One of the biggest surprises was that Beattie’s star began to rise in the wake of McQuirter’s arrest.  For several years, Beattie and Andrews had been on bad terms.  Yet an article written by Beattie appeared in Andrews’s Nationalist Report  (issue 43).  In the article Beattie revealed that discussions were underway to resuscitate the right wing by establishing an umbrella organization to be known as ‘the White Canada Council.’  It was to include the British Canada Party, the Nationalist Party, and the Western Guard (Taylor too saw the downfall of McQuirter as an opportunity to climb back into the radical-right limelight.)

And what about McQuirter, the man who said he would recruit an army if he was put in jail?  His incarceration had brought him few sympathizers within the right-wing movement.  The general reaction was that he had acted opportunistically, motivated by thoughts of fame and glory, and that he had ended up with exactly what he deserved.  In a letter pirnted in the Nationalist Report  (issue 42), written by McQuirter from jail, he dismissed these criticisms as rubbish.  All his acts, he declared, were political.  The real crime, he said, was not to rip off funds from the Zionists or to use the Zionist-controlled media to promote the Aryan’s cause.  In McQuirter’s words:  ‘We are at war!  Do you know this?  Do you think that this is a boy scout meeting?  This is total war!’  From various sources, I learned htat McQuirter had changed his tune somewhat regarding the right-wing potential of the prison population.  As he discovered, most prisoners were more interested in ‘Hockey Night in Canada’ than in the future of the white man.  Nevertheless, he had not lost faith in the cause, and as some people like Farmer remarked, he would emerge from prison as an even more capable white supremacist, since he would have had time to read and write, to increase his knowledge in general (he was, apparently, enrolled in computer courses).  The general drift of messages that came my way was that

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McQuirter was determined when released to pick up where he left off, to lead the troops with even greater vigour.

In case he failed to do so, there was a McQuirter clone waiting in the background.  This young man, still in high school when I met him, already had a sound grasp of the right-wing literature.  Formerly a member of the Young Conservatives, which he had quit in disgust, his first meeting as a Klansman coincided with a celebration of Hitler’s birthday.  Heavy-set, close to six feet tall, of British and German ancestry, this young man, who once had been a sea scout, already was firmly set in his ideas.  Like McQuirter, it was rumoured tha the had some sort of sexual hang-up, although it may have amounted to no more than acute shyness in the company of women.  His brother and sister were a decade older than he was, and his parents were divorced.  In the majority of cases, the families of the members of the radical right strongly oppose their offsprings’ racist beliefes, and that was true of this man’s family.  His father had once taken him to a psychiatrist.  After the latter concluded that he was rather peculiar but nevertheless sane, his father kicked him out of the house; his mother, with whom he went to live, also was oppsoed to his Fascist activity, but he claimed her main worry was that it would get him into trouble and hinder his future political ambitions.  This youthful Hitler enthusiast did not have McQuirter’s looks or charm, but he was intelligent, articulate, single-minded, and already totally committed to the racist cause.  Should McQuirter fail to regain the leadership reins, or prove inadequate for the job, he was ready to step into the traces.

– END OF EXTRACT –

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