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My Secret Life in the Klan

Continued from page 4

Published on September 27, 2007

Trentadue lived in a duplex on a cul-de-sac. I parked around the corner from his address so he wouldn't see the license plate. I was halfway across the street before I remembered to run back and tear the Pitch employee parking tag off the rearview mirror.

  • After sending in $30, a Pitch reporter became an official Klansman.
    After sending in $30, a Pitch reporter became an official Klansman.
  • Adrian Trentadue prepares to spread his hate.
    Adrian Trentadue prepares to spread his hate.

Details:

On the night of September 21, Pitch reporter Peter Rugg called Adrian Trentadue -- member of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the National Socialist Movement -- to out himself as an undercover reporter. Trentadue had been using Pitch boxes in Olathe to spread white-supremacist material for several years and believed Rugg to be a fellow Klansman. Double-click below to listen to the phone call:

Subject(s):

Ku Klux Klan, Nazis, Berliner Bear, Buffalo Wild Wings, Chili’s
There was no way to tell that Trentadue's half of the house was home to the family of a white supremacist; there were no swastikas on the windows, no portrait of Hitler in colored chalk on the sidewalk. The only sign of children was the miniature basketball hoop in the driveway. I rang the bell.

Trentadue had shaved his head since our meeting at Buffalo Wild Wings, and the tattoos on his scalp were now visible. His parents had taken the kids for the evening, and his wife was at work.

He shook my hand, and I followed him inside. There were no Nazi flags on the walls. It was the underwhelming house of any parent of two on the lower end of the economic scale. Stacks of paper stood askew. I could smell the earthy odor that so often accompanies young children, signaling chaos kept only just at bay.

"What size shirt are you?" he asked. "I've got a couple of spare Klan shirts, and I thought you might like them."

He handed me the shirts. One was a white sweatshirt with a Klansman and a Christmas tree and the slogan "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas." The other featured a Knight reared back on a horse. I remembered my Klan training video: Always wear something over your Klan wear when you go to work or out in public. It's better to keep a low profile.

"Thanks, these are great," I said before dropping them onto an armchair.

"We should get going," he said. "It's better to do it when it's light out. People don't really watch you then."

I followed him down to the garage. I was around to the passenger side when he turned back to the house. "I'll be right back. I have to get some staples," he said. He shut the door behind him.

Standing there in the garage by myself, I felt the first creep of suspicion. Had I given myself away somehow? Had he traced my cell-phone number? I hoisted the garage door and let the light in. If he was going to come back waving a gun, at least he'd have to shoot me in public.

He returned holding the staples and a CD case. As we drove away, he asked me if I knew much racialist music. "You should try this," he said. The CD case he handed me, for a band called Day of the Sword, included an illustration of a butchered pig wearing a yarmulke.

Trentadue's methods of literature distribution were simple. At 7:30 p.m., we parked next to a Subway restaurant, and he pointed at a Pitch box. "I'll hit this one," he said. "If you do it in the daytime, no one pays any attention. People normally don't pay attention to things, and you use that." He walked to the box, pulled out every Pitch and walked back to the car in less than 20 seconds. Exactly as he had described, no one even looked at him. The two of us sat in the car and stuffed the issues with Nazi propaganda. Then he reinserted the tainted copies.

Half the time, he would pull the passenger side of the car a foot away from a box. Without any reasonable cause to refuse, I got out and brought back the papers, then replaced them with fliers inserted. We hit five more boxes before Trentadue decided that we should staple the remaining fliers onto utility poles.

During all of this, Trentadue kept a running commentary on the Pitch. If I wasn't being paid to lie to the guy, I'd have thought he was paranoid. All this talk about my employer added to my fear that he somehow knew I worked for the Pitch and was just messing with me for the moment.

At the same time, I had to admit that there was a certain adrenaline rush to it all. During those few seconds walking between the car and the Pitch box, I wondered if anyone was going to ask why I need 50 copies of a newspaper. Trentadue was right. People don't pay attention.

Then again, neither did Trentadue or Turk. Asking me a few questions about myself might have unraveled the whole thing. But for the most part, the Klansmen had been remarkably self-centered. All except for one terrible moment when we parked at the day's last Pitch box.

"What do you do for a living, anyway?" he asked.

"I came into Kansas City on a media communications internship, then that ended. So I'm kind of between things right now." This was all true, but he never asked me which media company.

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