US army veteran wore wire for FBI to expose KKK members
In nearly 10 years working undercover very recently for the FBI inside Florida’s Ku Klux Klan, Joseph Moore helped foil at least two murder plots, according to court records from a criminal trial for two of the klansmen.
He lived a secret double life. At times the US army veteran donned a white robe and hood as a hit man for the Ku Klux Klan in north Florida. He attended clandestine meetings and participated in cross burnings. He even helped plan the murder of a Black man.
However, Moore wore something else during his years in the klan – a wire for the FBI. He recorded his conversations with klansmen, sometimes even captured video, and shared what he learned with federal agents trying to crack down on white supremacists within Florida law enforcement.
One minor mistake, one tell, he believed, meant a certain, violent death.
“I had to realize that this man would shoot me in the face in a heartbeat,” Moore said. He sat in his living room recently amid twinkling lights on a Christmas tree, remembering a particularly scary meeting in 2015. But it was true of many of his days.
Before such meetings, he would sit alone in his truck, using deep breathing techniques he learned as an armytrained sniper.
The married father of four would help the federal government foil at least two murder plots, according to court records from the criminal trial for two of the klansmen.
He was also an active informant when the FBI exposed klan members working as law enforcement officers in Florida at city, county and state levels.
Today, he and his family live under new names in a Florida subdivision. Apart from testifying in court, the 50year-old has never discussed his undercover work in the KKK publicly.
But he reached out to a reporter after the Associated Press published stories about white supremacists working in Florida’s prisons that were based, in part, on records and recordings detailing his work.
“The FBI wanted me to gather as much information about these individuals and confirm their identities,”
Moore said of law enforcement officers who were active members of or working with the klan.
“From where I sat, with the intelligence laid out, I can tell you that none of these agencies have any control over any of it. It is more prevalent and consequential than any of them are willing to admit.”
The FBI first asked Moore to infiltrate a klan group called the United Northern and Southern Knights of the KKK in rural north Florida in 2007.
At klan gatherings, Moore noted license plate numbers and other identifying information of suspected law enforcement officers who were members.
Moore said he noted connections between the hate group and law enforcement in Florida and Georgia, coming across dozens of police officers, prison guards, sheriff deputies and other law enforcement officers who were involved with the klan and outlaw motorcycle clubs.
While operating inside this first klan group, Moore alerted the feds to a plot to murder a Hispanic truck driver. Then, he says, he pointed the FBI toward a deputy with the Alachua county sheriff’s office, Wayne Ker
schner, who was a member of the same group.
During Moore’s years in the United Northern and Southern Knights, the FBI also identified a member of the klan cell working for the Fruitland Park, Florida, police department. Moore said he’d provided identifying information in that case.
His years as an informant occurred during a critical time for the nation’s domestic terrorism efforts.
In 2006, the FBI circulated an assessment about the klan and other groups trying to infiltrate law enforcement.
“White supremacist groups have historically engaged in strategic efforts to infiltrate and recruit from law enforcement,” the FBI wrote.
The assessment said some in law enforcement were volunteering “professional resources to white supremacist causes with which they sympathize”.
The FBI did not answer a series of questions sent by the AP.
Moore was not a klansman before working for the FBI, he said, and never adopted their racist ideology.
He worked for the FBI in two stints. In 2013 he was asked to infiltrate the Florida chapter of a national group called the Traditionalist American
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
Within a year he’d been named a Grand Knight Hawk of the “klavern” based in rural north central Florida.
It was at a cross-burning ceremony in December 2014 that Charles Newcomb, the “Exalted Cyclops” of the chapter, pulled him aside to discuss a scheme to kill a Black man.
Warren Williams was a former inmate who’d gotten into a fight with one of their klan brothers, a correctional officer named Thomas Driver. Driver, corrections Sgt. sergeant David Moran and Newcomb wanted Williams dead.
Moore alerted the FBI and was approved to make secret recordings. He captured discussions of the murder plot that would lead to criminal convictions for the three klansmen.
Over his decade inside, Moore said his list of other law enforcement officers tied to the klan grew. The links, he said, were commonplace in Florida and Georgia, and easier to identify once he was inside.
Moore said the three current and former prison guards implicated in the murder plot case operated among a group of other officer-klan members at the Reception and Medical Center prison in Lake Butler, Florida, actively recruiting at the prison.
Florida’s department of corrections said that’s not true.
“Every day more than 18,000 correctional officers throughout the state work as public servants, committed to the safety of Florida’s communities. They should not be defamed by the isolated actions of three individuals who committed abhorrent and illegal acts several years prior,” the department said in an emailed statement.Moore asserts he saw evidence of a more pervasive problem than the state is publicly acknowledging.
After testifying in the murder conspiracy case against the klansmen he’d spent years working with, Moore’s work with the FBI ended. He’d been publicly identified, and in 2018 he began life under a new name.