Far right, not Islam, drives most extremist violence in region and elsewhere

VERONA – Beaten and bloody, Daniel Delfin thrashed in the back seat of the gray Hyundai Sonata as his kidnappers continually hit him with fists and a metal bar.

When the car stopped at the end of a remote one-lane road, he pried the door open in a desperate attempt to escape. 

He failed.

One of Delfin's attackers knocked him unconscious, slashed his throat and shoved a knife so far up his rib cage it pierced his heart.

The three men tied Delfin’s body with a rope, rolled it down a hill off the road and hid it in some brush. Then they left to clean up.

Over the next several days, the killers returned to the end of the Boone County lane to dismember the body. They threw some parts in a landfill and tossed others in white trash bags into a Dumpster behind a Super 8 on Dream Street in Florence.

Authorities never recovered Delfin’s head, arms or feet despite searching a nearby landfill for a full day. They could only identify him with DNA testing and from the image of a mushroom tattooed on his shoulder.

A drug deal gone bad? A personal grudge?

No. Two of Delfin's murderers were white supremacists acting on the beliefs of a far-right movement.

It may be tempting to dismiss Northern Kentucky native James Fields Jr., accused of killing a woman by driving his car into a crowd in Charlottesville, as an anomaly. The same goes for Daniel Borden, the teen formerly from Mason who has been charged in a brutal attack on a black man caught on camera during the same protests.

But the Verona murder was only the most gruesome of many acts of political extremism committed in Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky since 2000. The incidents track national statistics that show the majority of such acts have been sparked by far-right ideologies, although there have been some inspired by extremist Islamic views.

These include the destruction of a mixed-race couple's rental house last year in East Price Hill by a former tenant, who spray-painted epithets and swastikas on the inside walls. 

The shooting of a Muslim woman by an unknown assailant in Columbus.

The ISIS-inspired plot by a Green Township man to blow up the U.S. Capitol.

The burning of a cross in the yard of an African-American family's home, also in Boone County.

Cases like the Delfin murder aren't routinely publicized or prosecuted as extremist or hate crimes because they aren't connected to Islamic terrorist plots, say experts such as Mike German, a fellow at the legal think tank The Brennan Group.

That means the public may be getting just a glimpse of what's happening in this region and around the country.

“It’s a matter of the government not paying enough attention to these crimes over time,” said German, who went undercover with white supremacist groups while serving as an FBI agent.

Hate crime laws are rarely used and such acts are usually prosecuted as normal crimes, although the recent East Price Hill vandalization is being pursued as a federal hate crime and the suspects in the cross burning were convicted under federal hate crime laws.

“If you are alt-right or neo-Nazi, that in and of itself is not a crime,” said Ben Glassman, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio. “That’s not even something we would investigate. Just being hateful or being a part of a hateful group – any attempt to criminalize that would run into the First Amendment.”

Whitesupremacists following their "mission"

Several small homes sit interspersed with large barns and fields of cattle, corn and tobacco along Messmer Lane in rural Verona.

On a warm and damp January night nearly five years ago, Daniel Delfin died outside one of these barns at the hands of Jeffrey Allen and his co-conspirators, Anthony Baumgartner and Stephen Harkness.

The trio plotted to at least kidnap and torture Delfin at least a week ahead of time, detectives said.

But while the details of the gruesome crime were well publicized, the motive wasn’t as well known.

In an interview with The Enquirer, Boone County Commonwealth Attorney Linda Tally Smith confirmed that Baumgartner and Harkness were avowed members of the white supremacist National Socialist Movement.

The movement pledges to rid the U.S. of all nonwhite races, but another stated goal is “the ruthless prosecution” of criminals including rapists, pedophiles and drug dealers. 

Tally Smith also said detectives found white supremacist and anti-drug-dealer postings by both men on private internet chat sites.

“I went into that black hole just to see for myself. And there are some scary places on the internet,” she said.

Baumgartner called himself “Stormtrooper First Class” online. He also wrote that “me and a few other boys in my area are starting to clean up area of drugs,” the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based hate-watch group, reported.

Harkness posted that he disliked “people who think Jews deserve our pity” and that he enjoyed reading the works of Adolf Hitler and George Lincoln Rockwell, the former U.S. naval officer who founded the American Nazi Party, the SPLC reported.

Their bodies are covered with Nazi tattoos and sayings in their jail booking photos. One on Harkness’ chest reads “Mein Ehre Seisst Treue” or “my honor is called loyalty” – the motto of the Nazi SS, an elite fighting unit for Hitler during World War II.

Baumgartner’s chest features a swastika tattooed above his heart and his neck bears the insignia of the German SS.

Their victim, Delfin, had been convicted for low-level heroin dealing, collaborating with a Cincinnati Public Schools bus driver and selling the drugs close to schools. He was white but associated with African-Americans, making him a perfect target, Tally Smith said.

“They specifically set this case up and targeted this young man in a way to commit horrible acts of violence against him,” she said.

All three agreed to life sentences or terms of 35 years or more within months of the murder to avoid the possibility of the death penalty from a jury trial.

Because the trio pleaded guilty, Tally Smith was not able to invoke Kentucky’s hate crime statute, considered to be one of the weakest in the country as it only comes into play during sentencing and only impacts parole or probation.

Officials with the Kentucky Department of Corrections denied The Enquirer’s requests to interview Baumgartner, Harkness or Allen, who are all being kept in different prisons around the state.

Harkness and Baumgartner are in segregation because of their extremist Nazi views. 

Allen didn’t hold those same Nazi beliefs, according to Tally Smith, even though he was the one to deliver Delfin’s death strokes.

“He told us that his life hadn’t been going so well, so maybe he would kill someone to get to go to prison for the rest of his life,” Tally Smith said.

Are hate crimes underreported?

The U.S. Government Accounting Office listed the murder as one of 85 incidents of fatal extremist violence that occurred from Sept. 12, 2001, through 2016 in a report to Congress earlier this year. Those attacks resulted in 225 deaths, the report states.

The Delfin killing "was a pretty unique event in terms of the others,” said Steven Chermak, the Michigan State University criminal justice professor who compiles and maintains the database of extremist violence cited by the GAO. “We do have victims on the list with criminal records, but in terms of motive, it is unique to be targeted for your crimes.

“Still, there was no question as to whether to include it on this list. These guys did this crime based on their ideology.”

A recent study by Reveal/Center for Investigative Reporting found that there have been 201 terrorist plots or acts nationwide between 2008 and 2016 – a number that doesn’t include the Verona murder.

That study included the plot to blow up the U.S. Capitol by a Green Township man who had become a follower of Islamic extremists and ISIS.

Christopher Cornell, 22, was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison in January after pleading guilty in August 2016 to the attempted murder of U.S. officials and employees, offering material support to a terrorist organization and a firearms charge.

The report's data did not go back far enough to include the 2004 cross burning in Burlington in Boone County.

Three men were convicted on federal hate crime charges and sentenced to 30 months in prison following that incident. The African-American family moved out of the county within weeks of the incident.

Activity by far-right groups or individuals outnumbered Islamic incidents by a 2-to-1 margin, the Reveal report stated.

None were listed for Kentucky, while Ohio had nine. In addition to Cornell's plot, the report listed the car/knife attack on Ohio State University’s campus by a native of Somalia as well as another Islamic extremist plot in Columbus.

Also listed: five incidents involving far right groups in northern Ohio.

But experts say those numbers may be low.

German pointed to FBI crime statistics that indicate there are fewer than 7,000 hate crimes a year nationally, while a Justice Department report states that there were at least 250,000 complaints by victims who linked crimes to racism or other bias.

“The divergence in those two numbers just shows that the government is not doing anything to put a scope on the problem,” said German.

He also said that federal hate crime prosecutions are the exception to the norm, even as such acts are on the rise.

“We’re going to see more violent protests like the one in Charlottesville, for example, and it’s going to be up to law enforcement to figure out what to do about it,” he said.

"There was a lot of hate right there"

Case in point: The U.S. Attorney's Office for Southern Ohio in May filed federal hate crime charges for the first time in 20 years.

The victims were an interracial couple who had already seen their share of racism in Greater Cincinnati.

Joe and Pat Jude remember how neighbors called the cops on them when they were moving into their Loveland home after moving from Florida in 2010 when Pat was relocated for her job.

Soon after, they left a local church over overt racial slights. In 2011, Joe was involved in a scuffle at a local pub over a musical request when one of the band members said, “We don’t play black music.”

Even though witnesses said others started the confrontation, police charged Joe with assault. The charge was later dropped. 

That request was for Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s In the Cradle” – the song about a father’s relationship with his son through the years. The song has emotional significance for Joe Jude.

The Judes' son Jay killed himself in 2010 at the age of 16 after having issues at Loveland High School that his parents feel were connected to his mixed racial background. A quilt with his image sits prominently in the couple’s living room.

Despite the previous issues, Joe Jude stood shocked when he walked into the couple’s East Price Hill rental home last Thanksgiving weekend.

Vandals gutted the inside of the 120-year-old house that the Judes spent years restoring. They tore up floors, smashed walls, broke apart sinks and detached pipes, and turned on the water to flood the home.

They even flushed instant concrete down the toilets and poured it into bathtubs to ruin the house’s plumbing before trying to burn it down.

Symbols of hate were spray-painted all over the broken walls. Huge swastikas glared above racial epithets such as “Die n****r” and “White Power.” Vandals layered one swastika over a spray-painted Jewish Star of David.

“There was a lot of hate right there,” said Pat Jude. “I just cried over the lengths they went to. Every room was destroyed.”

The most chilling message?

“You’re next.”

The Judes take that as a threat to this day. Joe Jude obtained a concealed-carry permit soon after the incident and now wears a 9 mm Smith & Wesson handgun everywhere he goes. A shotgun sits in his pickup truck.

The couple also installed security cameras at their home.

After hearing from local police that they probably would never find the culprit, the Judes took their case public, trying to find anyone who saw something. That, in turn, created a national spotlight on the incident. Neighbors, East Price Hill residents and even Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley apologized for the crime.

It also attracted federal law enforcement.

In May, a federal grand jury indicted Samuel Whitt, 41, on charges of violating the Fair Housing Act by “intimidating” the property owners as well as attempted arson. Those charges include potential sentences of up to 10 years and 20 years in prison, respectively.

Whitt was the Judes’ tenant. He was being evicted for nonpayment of rent when the vandalism occurred, although the couple is convinced Whitt did not work alone.

Glassman declined to comment on why previous U.S. attorneys did not bring hate crime charges in other cases over the last two decades. But he hinted there might be more such prosecutions coming.

“It’s always frustrating a little bit when I’m trying to tell the public about the stuff we’re doing because at the same time I’m prohibited by grand jury secrecy,” he said. “But prosecuting hate crimes federally, if we can, is important and worthy not just for justice … but I think these are crimes that can be deterred.”

The Judes raised $40,000 through GoFundMe to repair the house, and they received thousands of messages of support and sympathy from all over Cincinnati and the world.

The couple said the incident was the last straw for them in Greater Cincinnati. They had initially planned on retiring into the restored East Price Hill home. But now the Judes intend to move out of the area within five years, saying the racial climate has a lot to do with their decision.

“We thought we were moving to a nice area, but this is a very polarized area and that’s well before the current climate" since the last presidential campaign, Joe Jude said. “But in the end, that man changed our lives somewhat, but he changed his life forever if he goes to jail.”