Racist group to inherit $1M from Canadian
A U.S. racist group that has been linked to assassinations and bombings is poised to inherit an estate worth as much as $1-million from a late Canadian coin collector, the Southern Poverty Law Center said Thursday.
Before he died in Saint John, N.B., in 2004, Robert McCorkell bequeathed his assets to the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi group that waged a three-decade campaign of racist violence in the United States, the SLPC said.
While the National Alliance is now basically defunct, Mr. McCorkell’s estate, which the SLPC said is about to be settled, could help revive what at one point was the dominant force of the American neo-Nazi movement.
“The concern is that the most dangerous neo-Nazi group in America will be very much brought back to life,” said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Alabama-based civil rights group and a top expert on hate and extremist groups.
The SPLC has hired Ottawa lawyer Pam Maceachern to examine what can be done to stop the Alliance from inheriting Mr. McCorkell’s estate. She found two cases suggesting that might be halted through the courts.
“At this point we’re really not sure what we’re going to do next, if anything. But certainly we felt it was important that Canadians knew about this in particular,” Mr. Potok said. “It’s very rare. This is a movement that very rarely sees hundreds of thousands of dollars. Typically these people have no money at all.”
Mr. McCorkell began collecting rare coins and artifacts in the 1970s, according a 1997 article on the website of the university of Saskatchewan, where his ancient Greek and roman coins were exhibited at the Museum of Antiquities.
The article described him as a “well-travelled collector who now resides in Saskatoon” and a “retired chemist who spent time at MIT and the Smithsonian Institution.” It said the coins had been authenticated, analyzed and identified, and that “there is certainly not another collection like this in Saskatchewan.”
The collection was displayed for several years but is no longer there. Mr. McCorkell apparently moved next to Ottawa. Mr. Potok said Mr. McCorkell was recruited into the National Alliance in 1998.
The author of The Turner Diaries, a fictional account of a u.S. race war and the apparent inspiration for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Mr. Pierce advocated the creation of a whites-only homeland through the eradication of Jews and other races.
After his death in 2002, the National Alliance splintered, but the SPLC said while the group’s membership had dwindled, it continued to sell manuals on explosives, booby-traps, incendiary devices and guerrilla warfare.
Although it has been nine years since Mr. McCorkell’s death, his estate, which was reported to include gold that has increased substantially in value, remains in probate, the Law Center said, citing Moncton lawyer John Hughes who could not be reached for comment.
“I think it’s possible to challenge the bequest legally,” said richard Warman, an Ottawa lawyer and anti-racist activist. He said he hoped either the family or interest groups would step forward to do so.
The basis of such a challenge could be that the will goes against public policy as well as Canada’s international legal obligations, which require Ottawa to prevent the financing of groups espousing racial hatred, he said.