Former neo-Nazi Leader Charts an Unusual Path

State of MI Archivist 1:33

All right, well, uh, hello. Uh this is Arthur Bush, you're listening to Radio Free Flint. And today I have Ryan Laurie, uh, who is a former uh white nationalist who has uh who grew up in Flint and who's here to talk to us today about his journey and what it was like to grow up in Flint and how he got engaged in uh white nationalist uh um uh uh activities. And we'll also have Ryan talk to us a bit about what his current work is, and and uh I think you'll find it uh quite a fascinating uh interview. So without any further ado, welcome uh Ryan.

SPEAKER_00 2:17

I appreciate it, and it's an honor to be here.

State of MI Archivist 2:20

Well, thank you very much. Now uh Ryan, you grew up in Flint, right?

SPEAKER_00 2:24

Yes, I uh grew up on the east side of Flint, uh Rollingwood. We we used to say it's not the east side, we're our own little neighborhood there, you know, in community, but uh yeah, Rollingwood, which is uh Western and uh Richfield Road area, you know, behind there.

State of MI Archivist 2:37

So you you know that's a rough and tumble area.

SPEAKER_00 2:42

Very rough.

State of MI Archivist 2:43

Tell us about your family a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 2:45

So I really honestly lived like uh I try to say like two lives. So my mom's side of the family, we uh she was a single mother, raised three children on her own, worked a third shift job. Uh so it was very hard to try to hold down a you know a rough neck teenager from the east side. Um on my father's side of the family, he lived in the suburbs, so he actually lived in Kersley schools where I actually went to school at a young age. I didn't have to go to Flint schools. Um, so I would see the suburban life when I was at his house and then come back to my mom's, and all my friends were you know from Flint. And uh, so it was, you know, I like I said, two sides to to how life could be growing up. Uh one side I feel like I had more white privilege, on the other side, uh, not so much. You know, we were really, really poor.

State of MI Archivist 3:29

Did your family have any engagement or involvement in uh white nationalist activity?

SPEAKER_00 3:34

So you know, at a young age, no. My mom's side, I never saw anything. My dad's side was uh, like I said, not it wasn't uncommon to hear the N-word at the dinner table. Now there is some history in my family going back to my great-great-grandfather. Okay, so yeah, he was, yeah, he would have uh, from what we're told, he was buried in his robes. Uh he was a member of the KKK. We actually used to own a building that was on the corner of Leith and uh gosh, Leith and Franklin Road. They actually used to have our family name Larrie up on it and brick, and it was supposed to be uh an old bar or a place for prostitutes, from what I hear in the story. Um, it's a it's been torn down now, it's not even there anymore. And that was where some of the KKK members and different people actually used to meet um and and kind of hang out.

State of MI Archivist 4:23

So your grandpa had a rogue.

SPEAKER_00 4:26

Yeah, my great-great-grandpa, yes. When you grew up, was there were you ever involved in any kind of gang activity, or did you see any kind of so growing up in Rollingwood, I and on the east side, period, I was all over Flint. So I always, I mean, during the 90s, and you know, you were a prosecutor at that time, there was gang activity everywhere um in the city of Flint, especially in Rollingwood where I grew up. Uh, we had uh the Cobras and some Vice Lords and Bloods that uh really had a stronghold in uh the area that I was from there. And so I saw some drive-by shootings. Um, I it wasn't uncommon to see guys committing crimes that were involved with gang activity. Me, myself personally, I was never actually part of a gang, but definitely had friends and people that were affiliated. And so there was a lot of white kids that, you know, they would say racial things. There were definitely some racist uh tension there, um, but never any type of gangs early on in my life that were so I mean I I lived a very I was in an abusive life. My father was very abusive, uh, family that was too as well. So I wasn't uh home as much. I my my mother's boyfriend also was very abusive himself. So I ran the streets a lot and uh found myself into some trouble um early on in my juvenile life. Um, I did face a trial at a very young age. Yep. So I was accused of rape um uh from Kirzley schools. I was a Kirzley Schools student, um, and had five girls that had came out and said on different occasions that something had happened to them. Now, during the trial, a lot came out that um probably should have came out in the beginning before there was ever even a trial, um, where some of them had admitted lying and then eventually was found not guilty um in the courts. Now, because of that, it uh you know, my life kind of went down from there. I started to hang out with people I probably shouldn't have been hanging out with.

State of MI Archivist 6:15

Because of the trial, your life went down, it was because of your behavior.

SPEAKER_00 6:19

Yes, my behavior no b behavior. I I I faced a trial, and then from there I didn't go back to trying to be an A B honor roll student. I was uh stealing things, I was uh totally um creating a monstrous situation for my parents at the time.

State of MI Archivist 6:34

Okay, and so and then and then what then you started getting into trouble, real trouble.

SPEAKER_00 6:40

Yeah, yeah. I uh actually was, like you said, hanging out with some people in gangs, but not um doing anything specifically for a gang. But I uh was stealing things to smoke cannabis. Um, we you know, doing different stuff to have money to you know put shoes on my feet, the kind of shoes that I wanted, not what my mom could necessarily afford. Yeah, so I had um actually stole my stepmother's vehicle, actually going to get my uh teenage girlfriend at the time a pregnancy test. She said she was pregnant. And on my way to actually pick her up to go do all these things, I actually crashed into a parked car at the time and then I took off from the scene. I was uh put on probation. Uh Kent McVitie uh was my probation officer at the time. Served on some probation for a short period of time before I ended up finding myself in some more trouble from stealing some things and doing other stuff where I was I ran away. I was just out on the street, so I wasn't checking in um with probation or my parents.

State of MI Archivist 7:35

So it it sort of got to be a lifestyle for you.

SPEAKER_00 7:39

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it I don't know if there was the adrenaline rush there for some of the stuff that we were doing or what it was, but it was just more of uh not wanting to be home and wanting to get into trouble, you know.

State of MI Archivist 7:50

And uh so I mean it wasn't it one of these things where just one day you decided, you know, I want to take uh you know a bottle of pop out of the cooler at the store and see if I can get out the door. I mean, you woke up in the morning and kind of organized your day around doing shit, right?

SPEAKER_00 8:06

Yeah, I mean, we were always looking to see what kind of trouble we could get into, especially going to Peril. Most of the kids there, we all did drugs.

State of MI Archivist 8:13

Uh, you know, so we we so so we got that established that you were heading down the road of being a real criminal.

SPEAKER_00 8:20

Yeah.

State of MI Archivist 8:21

And then you met judge Duncan Beagle.

SPEAKER_00 8:24

Yeah, and Judge Beagle actually wrote uh a huge letter to me. Um, and I wrote him a couple of letters too, um, and decided that Glenn Mill schools was going to be the best program for me to um get my life straight and to stop hanging out with the people that I was hanging out with.

State of MI Archivist 8:41

Judge Beagle wrote you a letter.

SPEAKER_00 8:44

Yeah, yeah. He was uh I was really heavy into sports, um, basketball, uh football, wrestling, different things. And uh Judge Beagle's always been involved in sports here locally, and so um I think he took a keen eye to you know who I was, and um he was my trial judge as well. So he I think he really got to see a lot of my backstory of my life.

State of MI Archivist 9:05

And uh so he were you on probation to Judge Beagle?

SPEAKER_00 9:09

Yes, yes, I was on probation. That's when I was I was actually violated uh from stealing some things and from running away, not checking in for probation. And when they violated me, that was when Judge Beagle said, um, you know, if you continue down this road, you're gonna end up either dead or in prison, you know, make make a major mistake. Let's uh try Glenn Mills all.

State of MI Archivist 9:28

So he he sent you to Glenn Mills, basically, which Glenn Mills is a boys' school. Yep. It's a place for troubled kids.

SPEAKER_00 9:39

Yes, very troubled kids.

State of MI Archivist 9:41

And it's located a long ways from Flint, right?

SPEAKER_00 9:44

Yeah, it's in uh Concordville, Pennsylvania. So Glen Mills uh school is Pennsylvania, it's um just outside of Philadelphia.

State of MI Archivist 9:53

All right, so you got your first big adventure outside of Flint, but it was to Glenn Mills where the court sent you, and then of course you were you were under the jurisdiction of the probate court at that point.

SPEAKER_00 10:07

Yep. Honestly, a lot of self-discipline. Um, I wish there would have been more of a mentorship program after we left, but um, I can't blame that on anybody but myself for the mistakes I made. But Glenn Mills was great. I mean, to be honest with you, I got my education that I needed because I was able to focus um on school. Um, I actually earned a lot of leadership there by following the program and doing what they told you to do.

State of MI Archivist 10:30

So did they have the structure you were lacking and at home enrolling with?

SPEAKER_00 10:34

Yes, definitely.

State of MI Archivist 10:36

Okay, so then you graduated from Glenn Mills. Did you come back to Flint after that?

SPEAKER_00 10:41

So I joined the military. I came back to Flint for about two months before I shipped off again and was gone.

State of MI Archivist 10:47

And you had a lot of structure in the army, I assume. Yes, yes, at a point in time when you can't be out picking up cars and no, no, I'm fucking dope. No you got out of the eventually you served in the army for how long?

SPEAKER_00 11:03

Uh for four years. Um came back home uh during the housing crash. So it would have been right around 2007-2008. I was home on some leave actually for a short period of time and found myself actually getting into trouble. So I was still kind of in the military process there, but I'd never been convicted of a crime or anything, you know, while I was in the military.

State of MI Archivist 11:22

So I was able to ETS, um, come home and you got out of and then you came back home, and that probably wasn't your best move, right?

SPEAKER_00 11:31

No, I should have stayed in. I still to my well, you know, life has its ups and downs, but everything happens for a reason the way I look at it. But definitely I wish I would have stayed in and retired.

State of MI Archivist 11:40

So you said that you you you told me earlier in our conversation that you had an uncle that was involved. He said earlier your great-grandfather had been involved in the Ku Klux Klan, but you had a more immediate relative when you got out of the army.

SPEAKER_00 11:56

So my uncle actually had just got out of prison, and um, I had a huge falling out with two of my friends, two black men, that um to this day are still great friends of mine. But at the time we had a big falling out because something was stolen from my house, food actually. Um, understand my uncle also at a very young age molested my cousin and I. Um, he had always been kind of a um a bad influence in my life, and obviously my predator too, at a very young age. Um, growing up, um he was only eight years older than me. So he um, you know, would get into trouble hanging out with some of the same older guys that I was hanging out with.

State of MI Archivist 12:35

He was he into this any of this hate stuff, any of this?

SPEAKER_00 12:39

Yes, he was so when he came out of prison, he had joined the Aryan Brotherhood while he was in prison. And um, because of that, he met quite a few guys. Um it's a it's a white nationalist group. Um most of what we find in America, they're really established themselves in prison. So a lot of the radicalization that they do is in prison itself.

State of MI Archivist 12:57

Um, and they're a white group that believes in not doing drugs, uh, no alcohol, and uh protecting the what the Do you start getting into it because of him, or was what what was it he was teaching you?

SPEAKER_00 13:09

He took me and actually uh so I'd gotten to the fight with my friends I had told you about, and I was very angry. I was angry at the world at the time because I couldn't find a job, and I probably should have been more angry at myself and getting my life together, but I was taking it out on everybody else. Um I actually was introduced to a man named Ron Chadwell that my uncle had actually knew um previous to actually going to prison. Um, and then uh a couple of the guys that he was in prison with that were hanging out with Ron at the time, uh, with the Buick City Boot Boys, who was a skinhead organization in the city of Flint at that time before I had actually even started hanging out with them. Um he took me to introduce me to Ron. Ron was a very charismatic type of, I call him a cult leader. Um, he wasn't your typical what I would expect to see when you see this guy. You I was, you know, my uncle Timmy's taking me to introduce me to these guys that are skinheads, and I'm thinking I'm gonna see this shaved head, big, huge, bulky guy with tattoos. Um, but it was actually a complete opposite. He's a very small little guy missing a finger, um, and just talked real, real low. Um, but all he ever talked about was hate rhetoric, and so he pushed it down everybody's throats as much as possible. And yes, he was from Flint. He was actually murdered um in Flint um a few years back. Um, I'm pretty sure the murder to this day um has still went unsolved. I don't know if it was his past caught up with them um or what happened, but uh he was murdered in his home. Yeah.

State of MI Archivist 14:31

And so this Muweek City Boot Boys, that's a local group of some kind, you know.

SPEAKER_00 14:38

Yeah, they were a skinhead group. They had uh they were on the east side off of uh Oklahoma. They had a swastika burnt into their front yard. Um, they had different several different flags hanging up in the backyard. One of the cases that really put them, I guess what they considered on the map, was where a Jewish man was actually stabbed to death and then drowned in the Flint River um by two of the members. I guess they said that he was a Jewish infiltrator. He tried to infiltrate the group, they found out. Um, and so when that happened, they were the people who did the murder caught? Yes, they both are serving life sentences. They were brothers, actually, both are brothers.

State of MI Archivist 15:16

So were they part of this Buick City group?

SPEAKER_00 15:19

Yeah, they were the it was part of the Buick City group boys. Ron Chadwell was the president at the time. Um, Ron was always good about keeping his nose clean so that nothing ever could get pointed back to him.

State of MI Archivist 15:28

When it comes to this group that you uh start to affiliate with, did they hold regular meetings?

SPEAKER_00 15:36

Yeah, you know, in the beginning it was really unorganized. It was more of uh Ron had a keg over at the house all the time, and there was parties, young people that he would try to bring around. And it wasn't until I actually came in and started to try to organize it more like the military would. And um, we sat down and had some conversations with some people through the National Socialist Movement, who's like the largest uh Nazi organization, they say, in the in the United States.

State of MI Archivist 16:03

So you you because you had been in the military and you had learned certain things about discipline and order and organization, you then were able to apply that. How old was this, Ron?

SPEAKER_00 16:18

Ron Chadwell, oh gosh, he died in his 40s. So yeah, he would have been in his uh late 30s, early 40s. Yeah.

State of MI Archivist 16:27

Were they talking? Um, did they have arms? Did they have, you know, were they collecting guns or weapons?

SPEAKER_00 16:32

Well, actually, one of the first times that I was introduced to these guys, I came to the gate, right? Um, and there was a guy actually with a pistol, um, a firearm on him at the time, and they were doing tattoos in the garage. I seen the pistol on his arm or on his side, and I almost got the uh you know, the fight or flight. Like, I don't know if I should be here, um, but I went ahead and went with it anyways. They they they did have multiple different firearms, most of them was you know, stuff that each person owned individually, but uh Ron did have a decent sized stockpile at his house.

State of MI Archivist 17:02

So and did they ever do training with these weapons?

SPEAKER_00 17:07

You know, we didn't do as much as we probably should have. That was something that um was definitely spoke about, stuff that we should start getting into, especially with my training with uh, you know, an M16A2 and some of the M4s. Ron had, I believe his brother actually had an AR-15 at the time. Um, and I think there was an SKS that was brought out, you know, on different occasions.

State of MI Archivist 17:27

And these are all these are all assault rifles you're talking about.

SPEAKER_00 17:31

Right, right.

State of MI Archivist 17:33

Now, I guess the answer to that question was yes. You did you did do things with the guns, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:38

Yeah, we we showed in different ways of you know, dismantling, putting back together, you know, how how you could shoot how you should hold your weapon um when you're doing mount training, things like that. Uh, we also did a lot of hand-to-hand combat too.

State of MI Archivist 17:49

So and did you practice with these guns out in the woods someplace?

SPEAKER_00 17:55

Or no, we had uh there was a couple times on occasion where um we had had people that we knew that threw parties for us that we would uh we actually had a couple of stolen four-wheelers at the time that we had took out to the middle of the woods and kind of had a bunch of tents set up, and so we went out and kind of did target practice um in the woods. No, no, no, no, not at all. Uh, everything we did was mostly about trying to just mainstream hate at the time and and connecting with groups uh around the world and trying to like, I guess, more globalize what we were doing, um, instead of just being some small group from the east side of Florence.

State of MI Archivist 18:31

So you were trying to connect your group to outside organizations that paddled hate.

SPEAKER_00 18:36

Yeah, and we eventually did. I mean, it was something that um Ron's focus, he had to, you know, he had plans for the future of what he wanted this group to become. Um, he said the old times of the skinheads, you know, shaving your heads and um just being destructive, you know, doesn't bring in money, it doesn't bring in the connections that he needed. Um, so we started to we actually connected with the National Socialist Movement. At the time, they were actually housed or their main center headquarters was actually out of Minnesota, and now it's in Detroit.

State of MI Archivist 19:07

But um when you say you connected to them, did you go to their meetings or did they come to your meetings?

SPEAKER_00 19:13

They they came to us. We met with them one time, uh crazy as it is. We took them to the Red Baron in Burton, the bar there, and had a large meeting with them there. We used the bar more as the we used the bar more because the the name, you know, to bring these guys in from outside and kind of take them to this bar. Not that the red baron has anything to do with skinheads, it was just the location that we chose. Um, we had a meeting there where we talked about several rallies and ideas that we could do for this area, how to kind of uh branch out, you know, a little bit.

State of MI Archivist 19:42

Did you ever plot violence as part of this group?

SPEAKER_00 19:45

No, so my was there violence? Yes, there was violence. These guys would go out sometimes um in you know their vehicles and have their flags flying on the side and throw rocks and two leaders and whatever they could out the windows. Um, myself, because I held a leadership position, um, my whole job and um what I was put forth to do was to mostly mainstream us a lot of the internet, what I knew how to do with the internet at the time. So your your job was to be the so social media director of the whatever they were called, the rolling yeah, basically we try to try to set up rolling wood skins, is what we eventually rebranded everything in.

State of MI Archivist 20:23

All right. And so you you were trying to and the reason you're on social media is not only to communicate with others within the group, right, but social media by definition is to interact with others outside your group.

SPEAKER_00 20:38

Yeah, it was to obviously share the rhetoric and um spew hate anywhere we could, but to also try to pick up membership um, you know, at a in a larger scale.

State of MI Archivist 20:48

All right. So these guys are off on frolics where they're doing uh destructing property and so forth. Were they doing any burnings of crosses or not not the group that I was part of?

SPEAKER_00 20:59

It's not to say that there wasn't something like that maybe going on with other groups, but uh we never actually took place in any type of cross burnings.

State of MI Archivist 21:06

That's more of like a KKK model for so your group, what you're trying to tell me, and I I'm not trying to be a comic or anything, but your group was more akin to being evangelists for for hate than it was to be, you know, street fighters for hate.

SPEAKER_00 21:21

Right, exactly. The the old ways of a lot of skinheads were street fighters, go out and just destroy stuff and um you know kill people. Kill people, violence, yes, exactly, and uh the worst of the worst. Um, but Ron's plan when I came in was to create more order and um kind of spread the the message of trying to bring in leadership and and membership.

State of MI Archivist 21:44

Were you ever afraid that that the FBI or or local police would infiltrate your group?

SPEAKER_00 21:50

Um yeah, that was talked about all the time. We had security briefings on the weekends, like I did in the military. I told them that I thought that we should have security briefings um where we spoke about who was member. Membership. We did do a lot of vetting of members that came in. Um and a lot of times before you could actually become a member, um, Ron or some of the other guys really got to know who your family members were, what you were doing, who you're hanging out with. But there were several you were you're constantly looking over your back because you, you know, when you're full of hate and you're doing these kind of things, you don't trust anybody. You know, you don't even trust yourself. Have something to where the you know the media or somebody else could use something against us when it comes to like violence, murder, something like that. Um, we the image that we were trying to create in order to go mainstream or take it um further, we we couldn't have that kind of name. Ron didn't want that. So we went over that just like the military would. You know, don't go out drinking and driving, don't do anything to get yourself and caught and in trouble for something else. Um, but we would also talk about how we needed to be very aware that yes, there was law enforcement agencies that we believed was already watching us, which they were. Um, so we had the Flint Police and Genesee County Sheriff's Department, I know for a fact.

State of MI Archivist 22:54

And I know since then, with the work that I do now, that the FBI was starting to and SPLC had some uh members that were trying to kind of keep a keen eye on what we were so you went to uh this group, you were doing these briefings, which you called security briefings, and then did did did the did the FBI or anybody actually infiltrate your group?

SPEAKER_00 23:18

Not that I ever know that we were ever infiltrated. Uh one of the members, um James Travardis at the time.

State of MI Archivist 23:24

Your security briefings, what would they consist of?

SPEAKER_00 23:28

Uh more of just going over why we shouldn't do certain things uh when we're not together. Um don't do anything that's gonna make the organization look but he uh actually had there were some crimes that we were committing to make money on the side, um, stealing some boat motors. Um, as petty as it sounds, we were bringing in a decent amount of money for them. Uh James was actually caught, got greedy, and um stole something that had a tracking system on it. Um, and Genesee County Sheriff's Department was actually able to get him to turn. Um, and then that was when he started to kind of work for the police and uh reporting back, you know, what kind of activity we had going on at the time. Um, and eventually brought, you know, how my arrest came about was because of him.

State of MI Archivist 24:12

All right. So the group didn't start to engage in what I would call entrepreneurial activities. That is, they're trying to make money.

SPEAKER_00 24:20

Yes.

State of MI Archivist 24:20

For yourself or for the group?

SPEAKER_00 24:23

So what we did was mostly um we had some of the cut, obviously, it was the guys that were committing it would get to take some of the cut back to their home. Um, and some of it all went back into the group. A lot of us worked part-time jobs on the side, some of us did, so that money was for your own home, you know, for you to take home. But we did have membership uh dues, and so um, anybody that could you know bring in something.

State of MI Archivist 24:45

How much did it cost to belong to this thing?

SPEAKER_00 24:47

Yeah, so I remember it was really, really cheap in the beginning. It was like ten dollars a month. That got you beer. Um, there was there was a keg that Ron constantly kept refilled all the time, and then that was mostly to bring in the young guys. I didn't necessarily believe in the drinking and the drugs as much, although it did bring girls around, females that were constantly hanging out with us, and so it was just a party life, honestly, until that was mostly just to kind of get you in, you know, give you a taste of something maybe fun, and then um you were introduced to other things that we were doing.

State of MI Archivist 25:17

And how much did cost after that?

SPEAKER_00 25:19

I think we eventually um if I can remember, I think it ended up going right around like 20 or 30 dollars. I mean, we're in the city of Flint. You know, if we had tried to, you know, make a membership 50 to 100 bucks or do something crazy like that, um, which even that's not a lot, but to do something like that in the city of Flint, you're never gonna get people to join. And so we um mostly just made it about doing something for the group rather than you know necessarily bringing in money. A lot of these guys were poor, you know, east side.

State of MI Archivist 25:47

Um what did you do with the money once you collected it?

SPEAKER_00 25:50

A lot of times it went to Ron. So Ron wasn't the actual labeled as the president, he labeled himself as a secretary um of the organization and the treasurer, and so a lot of the money stayed right at his house and the safe that he had there. Um, to be honest with you, I think Ron was going out and spending some of this. You know, we never really sat down and said, hey, let's go over account on the money. Most of everybody just kind of trusted him. Um, but but Ron always had a nicer car than everybody else. So that's fine. So with the hate group, the hate group, we never actually took it to Back to the Bricks. That was the Krim Festival that we took that to. That was when I was with the hate group. Uh Back to the Bricks is in my later years when I actually organized against hate, so it was a completely different side of my life then.

State of MI Archivist 26:28

Okay, well, then let's talk about what you did first when you were for it before you were against it.

SPEAKER_00 26:33

Yeah, yeah. So we we went to the crim festival of races, not uh back to bricks. And when we went to the crim, we did that because, like I said, we wanted to go more mainstream. Most of the groups, like National Socialist Movement, people that you saw getting media attention, and any type of media attention, whether it's negative or positive, was attention focus on the group.

State of MI Archivist 26:51

So you were actually trying to get attention at that point. Most of the time you spent trying not to get attention, right?

SPEAKER_00 26:58

Right. By this time, we had had a decent amount of members. We had about 50 different guys um that were in and out most of the time. We felt like that was a good enough number now, and we had already connected with National Socialist Movement um and felt like we in another group, the Hammerskins out of Canada, that we felt like we had a substantial system set up for us to start kind of uh going to the media.

State of MI Archivist 27:19

We have this uh road race uh running uh activity that's one of the largest events of its kind in the country, yeah, people from all over the world, and so you decide you're gonna do some kind of an action for this road race.

SPEAKER_00 27:38

Yep. So we were we brought about 15 different guys down to the event and we were passing out flyers. Um now eventually what did the flyers say there was a lot of rhetoric about um why you should protect the white race. Uh we had the 14 words of the white man that was on there, which are um words that were created to uh you know about protecting you know white culture. Um we had the words or the numbers 1488 on there, which the 14 stands for the 14 words of the white man. 88 was the uh eighth letter of the alphabet twice, h h for Hale Hitler. Um, and then just some stuff on there, how they could join, how to find our uh MySpace page, actually at the time, and 4chan um to kind of hook up with us on the Discord server.

State of MI Archivist 28:22

So, what did you do at the at the event itself? You were just passing things out?

SPEAKER_00 28:26

Yeah, we were passing flyers out. Um, every time we went up to somebody said, you know, basically protect your white race, uh white right white culture is under attack, basically launching off some Zionist conspiracy theories that um the Jewish people were gonna take over the United States if we didn't do something about it. At that time, immigration was still a huge hot topic, or it just started to become a real hot topic. And so we used that too, that you know, immigrants were taking our jobs away from us and that you needed to do something now to act now. Um, we did have the police actually stop us. Um, eventually they had to let us go back out again. Um, and they called the prosecutor's office, and the prosecutors actually told them that they had to let us go and do what we were doing. We if we weren't committing violence and all we were doing was passing out flyers that they they couldn't do anything. And I knew a lot about my constitutional rights at the time, so we definitely started spitting out a bunch of constitutional um at some point. You had we had signs and different stuff made up that day at the rally that had uh just different uh white power rhetoric on them.

State of MI Archivist 29:26

Okay, and that then that got you attention, I take it.

SPEAKER_00 29:29

Yeah, the police by that time now were obviously paying attention to us, and then the media also had caught wind of what was going on. And then we met with uh several different organizations, uh one being the main focus who organized the National Socialist Movement up in Cadillac, Michigan at one of their parks there.

State of MI Archivist 29:46

Did did you participate in their rallies nationally, the other cities?

SPEAKER_00 29:51

Um, Detroit um on a couple occasions. Um, they've had some rallies there. I never traveled to you know Minnesota.

State of MI Archivist 29:57

I couldn't afford to your group would your group go to Detroit to participate?

SPEAKER_00 30:01

Yes, yes.

State of MI Archivist 30:02

We went uh on so what I'm asking is the kids from Flint would go down there, men uh down and participate with other people from around other cities.

SPEAKER_00 30:12

Yes, yes. Detroit had a really, really big stronghold for skinhead groups. Um several, there's about three different groups that were there at the time, and still to this day, uh National Socialist Movement, their headquarters, they actually moved to Detroit. Um, and so they would hold uh a lot of times it'd be small marches down a couple of different streets, but it always caught huge media attention every time the National Socialist Movement did something.

State of MI Archivist 30:34

So eventually you get in trouble.

SPEAKER_00 30:36

Yes. Again, yes, as an adult.

State of MI Archivist 30:40

The trouble more than just getting caught casting out pliers.

SPEAKER_00 30:45

Yep. They uh so James Trobarters, who I spoke about earlier, had already been working with the police, um, and they had enough evidence to bring us down for the uh boat motors um and for these two four-wheelers that we had kept um on us that were stolen as well from Lapier. Um, they set up a sting to have guys come in that they told us were just wanting to buy the four-wheelers off of us. James set it up, and they actually were undercover sheriff's officers um at the time, and so my house was raided and um I was arrested.

State of MI Archivist 31:18

Were they interested in the raid and your activities with the skin?

SPEAKER_00 31:22

Yeah, so that was so when I was brought in, obviously, you know, what I the crimes that I committed was the first questioning line of questioning that I received just to see what I would say if I would, you know, basically admit to what I did. And and I did, you know, they had all the evidence they needed in the world to convict. Um, so I you know admitted to what I did. I most defense attorneys would have told me just to keep my mouth shut, but I didn't. I I spoke. I was sick of living the type of life that I was living. Um, and then a lot of times that's uh the times when we find people most vulnerable to actually try to de radicalize. Um, obviously at the time I didn't know anything about de radicalization, you know, or what it even meant.

State of MI Archivist 31:58

If I'd have met you, if I would have met you, Ryan, in that time, you didn't cut your hair off or do other stuff like that, right?

SPEAKER_00 32:06

In the beginning, I did shave my head. A lot of that just came out of the military just having a shorter haircut, you know. But um eventually towards the the uh later years, I started to kind of grow my hair back out.

State of MI Archivist 32:17

So you said you went to this one place on the east side when they were having a meeting or whatever, and they were in the garage giving tattoos to each other.

SPEAKER_00 32:27

Yeah, so the you know what's weird is they used to have the cobras actually from the east side, a bunch of those guys would actually come in and do the tattoo work for a bunch of skinheads.

State of MI Archivist 32:36

But the idea of the tattoo to make something that related back to your group, or were it just you know, we eventually did.

SPEAKER_00 32:42

We came up with a tattoo that was uh had a swastika that had points um on the swastikas. Actually, the Flint Journal, when they did the story on me, took a picture of the tattoo, and that was what was on the front page of the journal at the time.

State of MI Archivist 32:54

People that were in your group at that time would get a distinctive tattoo that was an insignia for your group.

SPEAKER_00 33:00

Yep, yep. If you had points on a swastika, there was uh points on either end, that means you had some form of leadership. Um, if you didn't, it was just the the swastika.

State of MI Archivist 33:10

So eventually you end up in court in front of a judge.

SPEAKER_00 33:13

Yes.

State of MI Archivist 33:15

You were punished.

SPEAKER_00 33:17

Yep. I served some time in county jail and I was put on probation uh for five years, which is it was after my incarceration. So my incarceration really allowed me to split myself off from the group uh because I did admit to the crimes that I had committed. Uh Ron and those guys um kind of gave cold shoulders to a lot of the different people, and everything kind of got really awkward for everybody at that time because nobody knew if somebody was, you know, snitching on them or if something was going to come down onto them for something they did.

State of MI Archivist 33:46

So did the group break up at that point?

SPEAKER_00 33:48

Some of them all still stayed together, but I was not with that group anymore. My uncle and some of the other guys still continued on until they were. Uh, my uncle actually eventually got in trouble for the same crime as mine. He was a co-defendant and he ended up going to prison for his crimes because he was a habitual offender.

State of MI Archivist 34:04

Does the group exist today?

SPEAKER_00 34:06

No, no, Ron Chadwell, um, who I talked about earlier was murdered.

State of MI Archivist 34:10

You found religion, so to speak, somewhere along the path. And tell us just a little bit about that. We're running short of time here, but just yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:20

No, I I started to look at things more of like an omnius where I tried to find the good in a lot of different things. Ideas I had one of the things I had really started to research and look into was why did I ever get in trouble in the first place? Um, as a juvenile, you know, all the way in growing up. And one of the things that we lacked in the city of Flint was a lot of mentorship. We just didn't have mentorship programs. So one of my main focuses on pulling myself out of trouble, and I was still on probation at the end of this. And one of the reasons the judge was so happy with me and my probation officer was that they'd never had a guy on probation do something like this before. And so I created a program, a mixed martial arts program, to actually help pull kids that were trying to join inner city gangs, trying to help them to de-radicalize, show them a better there is hope, um, and that their life isn't over when they get into trouble.

State of MI Archivist 35:04

What was it about your experience that caused you to want to change directions?

SPEAKER_00 35:11

Um, honestly, it was it was the realization I started seeing a psychologist and a psychiatrist and started to focus on trauma and the trauma that I had um seen in my life or had been part of. It was when I was actually started to kind of uh take care of that subconscious trauma that I had been dealing with my whole life that I realized a lot of what had happened to me in my life um led me to where I had been. And so if I had been through this and plenty of other kids in the city of Flint that joined gangs, then I knew that it was a issue, it was a problem in the city of Flint. And so that's what I started to try to focus on and made that realization that's what I'm getting at is to focus on yourself.

State of MI Archivist 35:49

From there, you uh began to work on gang gang prevention activities, basically.

SPEAKER_00 35:57

Yep. I uh started to work on my own actually, trying to see what I could do to pull uh members out of hate groups and gangs, inner city gangs. By having the mixed martial arts gym, I had started to meet a lot of different people in the community that kind of did something similar. Um, but my focus wanted to be on if I could change in my life, then I could help other people to change and see, you know, the light out of the dark tunnel. And so um that's kind of what I started to do. I pulled uh about 15 different members out of hate groups um before I started to work with the organizations that I work for now.

State of MI Archivist 36:29

You have um moved on to begin to work with a national organization.

SPEAKER_00 36:35

Um, it's labeled off as uh black people are not our friends, but it's made for clickbait. So what we'll do is we flood hate sites with all these different videos in hopes that somebody, even if it's one out of a thousand members, decides to click on that video and it tells them why they shouldn't be part of a hate group or why how I was able to change my life. On top of doing that, we do intervention work. So we have a 24 or 7 hotline through an organization called Parallel Networks that these people can call. If it's a family member that's worried about a person that's involved in some type of hate crime or hate hate in their community, they can call and um we'll actually go in. Um we work with Department of Homeland Security, FBI, um, CIA.

State of MI Archivist 37:13

What's the name of this organization?

SPEAKER_00 37:15

Yep, it's ICSBE, so it's the International Center for Research on Violent Extremism. Um it's based out of Washington, D.C.

State of MI Archivist 37:23

All right, and you're a program specialist?

SPEAKER_00 37:26

Yes.

State of MI Archivist 37:27

All right, so one of my questions is having left this group and having grown up in the city where you know your pals, many of them were part of this part of this um uh extreme group, have you had any concerns for your personal safety?

SPEAKER_00 37:47

I've had a lot of threats, some that I didn't necessarily take um completely seriously, some I've had to report to the police and to the FBI um that seemed pretty credible, people that were actually part of some pretty uh large organizations.

State of MI Archivist 38:01

But how many um groups in the Flint area that are uh what I would call white nationalists or hate groups?

SPEAKER_00 38:09

So we always know that there's a KKK somewhat organized here. I don't know how organized, and we don't know a lot. They're really secretive when it comes to a lot of the stuff they do. But the main organization that we've been paying a lot of attention to recently, and we've noticed a lot of uh graffiti um and things popping up, is the the folk nation, I believe is how they say it's it's a new group. Um, at least for our area, it's a newer group. Uh SPLC is how I found out um who this group's symbols were because we were seeing the symbols in Flint of uh type of a uh trident pitchfork almost in a way like you would think like folks up or some old gang, but then there was the word the numbers 1488 next to it, and everybody knows that's hate rhetoric. Things have changed a lot from the time when I was part of a hate group to where they are now and way social media works and the way that interaction works between these groups, and it's obviously a lot easier for them to interact now um than it used to be, and then with this past administration, really birthed life too.

State of MI Archivist 39:02

You took a frolic into politics for a few minutes.

SPEAKER_00 39:05

Yeah, so there's actually a big story behind that too, and then that we could get into further, but it was never really an intention that we would I would ever get elected. We knew with my past it was going to get brought up. Yeah, we thought maybe we could uh make some change in policy. That was kind of my idea, and a friend of mine that maybe we could get in and help on uh building some better policy towards race relations and um um police um activity and things and how you know people were being treated. This is before George Floyd.

State of MI Archivist 39:32

So you weren't successful at politics, but you were you went and and put your toe in the water to see how that works.

SPEAKER_00 39:39

Right. Try it out and see how it works. Yeah, all right.

State of MI Archivist 39:42

So uh you said, and now we can come back to this point that we raised earlier, and that was you you said you'd organized over a hundred rallies.

SPEAKER_00 39:52

Yeah, but there was a lot of different um things that had you know maybe happened or um events that we thought maybe somebody should um you know hold an event to bring light to things. Um, the the rise against racism rally that we had at the Back to the Bricks, which was all over the news. Um, we hosted that event because there was a Burton family that was actually attacked. Um a black family, their house was there, they worked for Gender Motors, UAW members. Um, and there was a lot of attention being brought to what was going on there, but people didn't feel like there was a big enough police investigation and just trying to figure out who the uh racially motivated attack on the black family. Yes, yes. They uh threw a Moltoff cocktail bomb at their garage, um, and uh just uh doing different things at night to really just cause chaos.

State of MI Archivist 40:38

So you did rallies in Flint and other places?

SPEAKER_00 40:42

Yeah, I did rallies in Flint. Um, I went down and helped uh do counter rallies in um uh Charlottesville. I also went out to Standing Rock um during the water crisis, so I was in a lot of water crisis. So with what was going on in Flint and being involved in the politics there, um, decided to start kind of getting involved in some of my research is taking me towards how um environmental impacts have a link to extremism um in itself.

State of MI Archivist 41:09

And so and so the lot of a lot of these people get involved in this activity, and then when you know the lights are on or the microphones going, they all are you know for peace and love. How do you find that now? I mean, is that something somebody has a right to be suspicious about you and your past?

SPEAKER_00 41:30

Oh, you always have a right to be suspicious about anybody, and I always tell everybody do your research before you know you make a decision, a decision to judge. Um, you see that with a lot of organizations today that say that they're not a racist organization or they have no attachments to white nationalism, but they actually do when you follow the money. Um, Proud Boys, for instance. Um, one of the reasons why I say not necessarily white nationalism, but they're definitely an accelerationist group. Um, they want the all-out destruction and fall, they're really anti-government rhetoric. Um but the KKK, I mean, come on, you can sit there and they can declare that they're not about violence, but that's all they've ever perpetrated in this country since the 20s and on, um, are violence and fear, is what they use to promote their membership and uh try to take power, you know, in several different areas. Also, the Oath Keepers, who is a new organization that uh they've been around for some time in three percenters, but we're finding that they actually have a lot of different police involvement, a lot of members that are actually uh police officers that are members of the Oath Keepers.

State of MI Archivist 42:33

Well, Ryan Laurie, you're an interesting guy. I've enjoyed talking with you, and uh your story is really quite remarkable.

SPEAKER_00 42:42

Uh I appreciate you having me on, it's been great. And like I said, if you have any questions in the future, just give me a chat.

SPEAKER_03 44:30

That's in a man to make it through the night. It's a good game, Willie. This creek dawn.