Helping to solve disappearance of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964

If this is true, it rules. A lot. And makes me really happy, picturing some racist piece of shit who thinks he's real tough being reduced to a sobbing pile of fear in minutes.

The notion that Scarpa strong-armed a Klan member into giving up information about one of the most notorious crimes of the civil rights era has been talked about in mob circles for years.

It supposedly happened during the search for civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, who were beaten and shot by a gang of Klansmen and buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Miss. The case was famously dramatized in the movie “Mississippi Burning.”

Investigators struggled for answers in the early days of the case, stymied by stonewalling Klan members.

In 1994, the New York Daily News, citing unidentified federal law enforcement officials, reported that a frustrated J. Edgar Hoover turned to Scarpa to extract information. The Daily News said the New York mobster terrorized an appliance salesman and Klansman already under suspicion in the case and got him to reveal the location of the bodies.

Schiro testified Monday that she and Scarpa traveled to Mississippi in 1964 after he was recruited by the FBI. She said they walked into the hotel where the FBI had gathered during the investigation, and the gangster winked at a group of agents. She said an agent later showed up in their room and handed Scarpa a gun.

She said Scarpa helped find the volunteers’ bodies by “putting a gun in the guy’s mouth and threatening him.” She said an unidentified agent later returned to the room, gave Scarpa a wad of cash, and took back the weapon.

By any means necessary.

Fuck Nazi Sympathy

I've been thinking about this subject since yesterday and I figured I'd post a few things.

The first is the lyrics to Aus Rotten's song "Fuck Nazi Sympathy." These are beautiful for their simplicity and truth:

Don't respect something that has no respect

Don't sympathize with something that has no sympathy

Don't understand something that has no understanding

Don't give them freedom cause they're not gonna give you yours

Fuck Nazi sympathy

Next is a quote from Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) on his extensive work with the black freedom struggle in the 1960s, from being a Freedom Rider to his work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Council, particularly working in Mississippi's Freedom Summer and organizing the oppressed, exploited and terrorized black population of Alabama's Lowndes County (known as "Bloody Lowndes" for the astonishing levels of violence that white people maintained to keep black people down and afraid), to his fresh-out-of-jail for the twenty-seventh time (really) proclamation of Black Power during James Meredith's March against Fear:

I never saw my responsibility to be the moral and spiritual reclamation of some racist thug. I would settle for changing his behavior, period. Moral suasion, legal proscription, or even force of arms, whatever it ultimately took, that's what I'd be for.

It's so right on. I don't romanticize or relish the idea of violence. But these Nazis, that's how they make it. You have to meet force with force. And in this case, you have to prevent their highly likely future applications of force (once again, these are people who embrace the Holocaust, there is nothing peaceful or rhetorical about them) with force. Unfortunate but real.