Racism On Trial -- A Brutal Portland Murder And The Southern Lawyer `Who Broke The Klan': White Supremacy On Trial

CUTLINE: KRAIG SCATTARELLA / OREGONIAN: THESE MEN ARE IN PRISON, CONVICTED OF CLUBBING AND KICKING TO DEATH MULUGETA SERAW IN PORTLAND. FROM LEFT: STEVEN STRASSER, KYLE BREWSTER AND KENNETH MIESKE.

CUTLINE: MULUGETA SERAW, 1960-1988 -- BEFORE HE WAS KILLED ON A PORTLAND STREET TWO YEAR AGO, THE 27-YEAR-OLD HAD BEEN WORKING TO SAVE ENOUGH MONEY TO GO TO COLLEGE.

Race is my religion!'' - Tom Metzger, leader of the White Aryan Resistance and possibly the most powerful figure in the white-supremacist movement today.

``We must fight racism wherever we find it in America.'' - Morris Dees, head of the Southern Poverty Law Center and widely known as ``the man who broke the Klan.''

The diametrically opposed views of Metzger and Dees will clash at the trial of a civil lawsuit in Portland's aging Multnomah County Courthouse early next month.

The stakes are high.

Dees, 53, wants nothing more than to financially ruin Metzger and his 22-year-old son, John, by linking them to a brutal racist murder on Portland's streets two years ago.

Metzger, 52, is fighting to preserve an organization that distributes taped white-supremacist broadcasts and a racist newspaper (WAR), and sends out lieutenants to recruit true believers, including neo-Nazi skinheads.

Seeds for the courtroom drama were sown when Mulugeta Seraw, a 27-year-old Ethiopian, was clubbed and kicked to death by three members of Portland's East Side White Pride skinheads in the early morning hours of Nov. 13, 1988.

The motivation for killing Seraw, whom the skinheads had never seen before, was quite simple, his attackers said.

He was black. They were white.

The three are now in prison. Kenneth Mieske, 23, who headed a ``death-metal'' rock band called Machine and liked to call himself ``Ken Death'' and ``Batman,'' was sentenced to life for first-degree murder. Kyle Brewster, 19, and Steven Strasser, 21, are serving up to 20 years for first-degree manslaughter.

But the case didn't end there.

A ``wrongful death and racial intimidation'' civil lawsuit, growing out of Seraw's death, was filed by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith and the Southern Poverty Law Center. It asks $10 million in punitive damages and an unspecified amount in general damages.

Named in the suit were Mieske and Brewster, who participated in the murder of Seraw, and Tom and John Metzger, accused of sending their troops to Portland to racially inflame the skinheads.

The lawsuit, scheduled for trial Oct. 8, will be heard by Multnomah County Circuit Judge Ancer Haggerty, 45, the most decorated black marine in Vietnam. Haggerty lettered as a football lineman for the University of Oregon Ducks and played in the '63 Sun Bowl.

Haggerty, who earned his law degree at Hastings College of Law in California, was in private practice until his appointment to the circuit court last year. He later won election to the bench.

The judge will preside over a plaintiff's attorney and a defendant both regarded as spellbinders.

Metzger is the heir apparent to a host of white-supremacist leaders who either died, went to prison or are aging and no longer up to the fight. Two years ago, his son and several skinhead friends engaged in a highly publicized free-for-all on Geraldo Rivera's show that left the TV personality with a broken nose.

Dees became known as ``the man who broke the Klan'' when he won a $7 million judgment against the United Klans of America in a similar wrongful-death suit. That case grew out of the Klan-inspired lynching of a young black man, Michael Donald, in Mobile, Ala., in 1981.

The Klan couldn't come up with the $7 million a jury awarded to the victim's mother, Beulah Mae Donald. After taking every cent in the Klan's treasury, Mrs. Donald was awarded the keys and deed to the Klan's national headquarters, the house and farm of the Klan leader who ordered the lynching and a significant portion of the wages some Klansmen will earn the rest of their lives.

The trial in Portland is expected to last about three weeks. For Seraw's side to win, nine of the 12 jurors must vote for the plaintiff.

Engedaw Berhanu, Seraw's uncle and personal representative for his estate, will sit at the plaintiff's table with Dees and a prominent Portland civil-rights attorney, Elden Rosenthal.

Seraw's father, Seraw Tikuneh, may be flown in from Ethiopia to sit in the courtroom.

Aware the case is being watched nationally because of the clash between two high-profile protagonists, Rosenthal says:

``You can be sure Seraw won't be forgotten in all this. He is the reason for the trial. If we win, every penny we collect will go to Seraw's family.''

The Metzgers are defending themselves, saying they lack money to hire an attorney. John Metzger already has filed for bankruptcy.

Security will be tight. Loren Christensen, who heads the Portland Police Department's gang detail and has closely followed the growth of the skinhead movement in the Rose City, says he'll provide the Metzgers with police protection entering and leaving the courthouse.

Metzger says he doesn't want any demonstrations ``by my people.'' But adds that if the courthouse is surrounded by placard-waving anti-WAR protesters, including a contingent of nonracist Portland skinheads known as the SHARPs (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice), he may put out a call for his own followers to demonstrate.

The skinheads drawn to the Metzgers not only shave their heads like their British predecessors, born in the '60s, but wear military-style uniforms and steel-toed boots, the better to kick their victims. Most are school dropouts and losers in the job market.

Although some of the first skinheads in this country welcomed minorities and Jews, others - adopting Nazi swastikas and badges - declared war on them. Many also added gays to their hate list.

Dees will try to prove that Tom and John Metzger, using rhetoric and racially inflammatory literature, plotted to organize Portland's East Side White Pride skinheads into a violent organization.

While Tom Metzger stayed home in California, son John, head of youth recruiting for WAR, journeyed to Portland in the fall of 1988 with Dave Mazzella, vice president of the youth movement, and Mike Barrett, a California skinhead leader.

At the time Seraw was attacked, Mazzella shared an apartment with Strasser, one of the three skinheads convicted of killing Seraw.

The murder was brutal.

At 1:30 a.m. on a dark November night, Seraw - working for a car-rental agency at the Portland Airport to earn money to enroll in Portland State University - got out of a car driven by two black companions outside his apartment in Portland's Laurelhurst district, a quiet neighborhood of older but well-kept homes.

Mieske, Brewster and Strasser, on the prowl for a black man to beat up, spotted Seraw talking to his companions in the car.

The attack began. While Brewster struck Seraw repeatedly with his fists, Mieske, wielding a baseball bat, broke a tail light and window in the car, frightening Seraw's companions into remaining inside.

All three turned on Seraw, beating him savagely with fists and the bat. When Seraw fell to the pavement, they kicked him with steel-toed boots.

Despite the noise from the attack, nobody came to Seraw's rescue. He was dead on arrival at a hospital.

Neither side will talk about possible witnesses in the upcoming trial. But Strasser's name is missing from the lawsuit, leading to speculation that he might testify against his former friends.

Also conspicuously absent from the lawsuit are the names of Mazzella and Barrett, the skinhead organizers.

One of the keys to Dees' success in breaking the Klan was the testimony of a Klan insider.

As good as Dees is, it won't be easy to bring down Metzger, says Leonard Zeskind, a spokesman for the Atlanta-based Center for Democratic Renewal, which battles racism and anti-Semitism.

``Morris Dees easily is the most effective anti-Klan attorney in the country,'' says Zeskind. ``He's quick on his feet in a courtroom and he knows his subject backward and forward.''

But Dees is going to have his hands full with Tom Metzger, who, says Zeskind, is among ``the smartest of the far-right bunch.''

Although Dees and Metzger are close to the same age, that's about their only similarity.

Dees is the son of an Alabama sharecropper - soft Southern voice, 6 feet tall, given to informal dress (no socks much of the time), married and the father of three grown children. He has lived on the same farm since 1964.

Dees says his father only took a belt to him once when he was a boy. That was the time he failed to show respect for a black man. It was a lesson that stuck.

After law school, Dees went into business with a friend, selling mail-order books. By the time Dees was 32, the business was sold for $6 million.

As a young lawyer, Dees became actively involved in defending the civil rights of Alabama citizens as a volunteer American Civil Liberties Union attorney. In 1971, he and his law partner, Joseph J. Levin Jr., founded the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, specializing in cases involving voting rights, employment discrimination, racism and violence, criminal justice and the rights of children and the handicapped.

Dees has earned the enmity of the Ku Klux Klan and assorted racists by:

-- Winning a court order ending harassment of Vietnamese fishermen along the Texas Gulf Coast by a group of Texas Klansmen headed by Louis Beam, the Texas grand dragon of the KKK.

-- Getting the Defense Department to halt the activities of soldiers and marines involved in Glenn Miller's paramilitary, white supremacist White Patriot Army in North Carolina.

-- Winning a $940,000 judgment against the Southern White Knights of the KKK for beating up civil-rights marchers in 1987.

Dees says he's been put on several ``hit lists.'' Beam challenged him to a duel to the death. The late Robert Mathews, founder of a violent racist splinter group called The Order, marked Dees for death before dying in a fiery shootout with federal agents on Whidbey Island in December 1984.

Civil-rights groups, Common Cause and bar associations have heaped honors on Dees. But he's not without detractors, even among the liberal faithful.

Most complaints have to do with money. The law center has a huge endowment, estimated at $27 million, and a multimillion-dollar annual budget that pays for four full-time lawyers and a staff of assistants.

Some have dubbed Dees' attractive new headquarters the ``Poverty Palace.''

But most concede that for a man of wealth, Dees lives modestly. He draws a salary of $79,600, while paying the attorneys who work at the center substantially more. He drives an '84 Chevrolet and rarely is seen in a tie.

The soft voice and cool manner can be deceptive. Dees plays hardball when he goes after racists.

In mailings to solicit money for his center, he sent out a graphic autopsy photo of Seraw's battered and cracked skull.

In defense of the mailing, Dees says: ``We sent the photograph in a separate envelope and warned people what it contained. I did it because it's one thing to say in a letter that skinheads beat somebody over the head with a baseball bat. It's another thing for people to realize that this is really a human being that got killed.''

As the Metzger case draws near, Dees has become more close-mouthed. ``That's off the record,'' he says, even when providing the scantiest bit of information. ``I don't want to give Metzger anything he can use in court.''

On the other hand, Metzger is easily reachable at his home in Fallbrook, Calif., where a sign outside announces that he's in the TV- and electronics-repair business.

After saying he doesn't want to grant another interview, Metzger talks almost nonstop, for half-an-hour or more.

``I could hardly turn him off,'' says Christensen, who heads the Portland police gang detail.

Metzger, short and stocky, comes across as a good ol' boy who likes a drink of whiskey and a good cigar now and then and doesn't mind an occasional off-color story. He wears a World War II Waffen SS ring, which is marked by a lightning bolt, a viking head and a swastika.

``It's not the same ring worn by Himmler's SS,'' he says. ``I'm also not a Hitler worshipper. I've always said Hitler should have just gotten the Jews out of Germany and Europe instead of killing them.''

Metzger was raised in Indiana in what he describes as a very normal home ``where I never heard a racist view expressed.'' He's been married 27 years, has six children, two of whom are still in public school, and has resided in the same ``modest house'' (critics say it's worth $450,000) for 23 years.

He says he gets along well with neighbors, most of whom are Hispanic, because ``they know what I believe and we treat each other with respect.''

``They bring me their TVs to repair, and I do a good job,'' he says. ``But I'm not invited to their parties, and they're not invited to mine.''

Metzger says he began formulating his right-wing views in the mid-'60s, joining an anti-communist club while employed by Douglas Aircraft, working on Barry Goldwater's '64 presidential campaign and becoming active in the John Birch Society.

During the Vietnam War, he staged what he calls ``my personal tax rebellion,'' refusing to pay his income taxes.

Metzger eventually was hit with a huge bill for back taxes, plus interest. He paid till it hurt. The experience, he says, left him with a ``loathing and contempt for the government,'' which he often refers to as ZOG (Zionist Occupied Government).

In the 1970s, he was the California grand dragon of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

Except for his brush with the IRS, Metzger doesn't cite any specifics about his anti-government, racist views.

``Nobody who's black has ever done anything seriously wrong to me,'' he says matter-of-factly. ``And, until a few years ago, no Jew had. I worked for Jews for a long time, and they treated me very well. But I changed my views.''

The people he hates and distrusts the most, Metzger says, are ``the bureaucrats in Washington, who are the greatest enemy of our race today. In fact, the white people are our greatest enemy. The last time I looked, Bush was very Aryan and most people in Washington were very white.''

Metzger says he finds support on both the left and right.

``When I was on a talk show recently,'' he says, ``I said I'd been opposed to having our troops in Vietnam, in Nicaragua and now in the Middle East, and most of the people who called to support me were the liberals.''

Metzger has risen to the top of the white-supremacist movement almost by default.

The charismatic David Duke, former grand wizard of the KKK in Alabama, now is doing his best to play middle-of-the-road politics as a Republican representative in that state.

The Rev. Richard Butler of the Church of Jesus Christ Christian Aryan Nation at Hayden Lake, Idaho, is aging and seemingly more interested in the cross-burnings and Aryan posturings at his compound than he is in going into the streets.

The highly literate Robert Miles, former grand dragon of the Michigan KKK and pastor of the white-supremacist Mountain Church in Cohoctah, has been in virtual retirement since his wife became paralyzed.

Both Miles and Butler stop short of saying they wholeheartedly support the Metzgers.

Says Miles: ``It's not a matter of support. We share some common beliefs about . . . keeping the white race alive. Most Americans could (not) care less. Color it green and they'll buy it.''

Says Butler: ``We agree on matters of race. But I don't think they'll take over the movement. We have a theologically based platform and they have an atheistic platform. My standard answer to the difference is that the evolutionist believes we all developed from the same scum on the water that was there 25 million years ago. But we feel we are children of the most high God, and aren't relatives of scum, and our role in this battle is from Him.''

Metzger, who says he'll go right on attacking Judeo-Christianity as well as monopoly capitalism as ``being bad for Aryan people,'' doesn't think the skinhead movement will grow much or be a major factor in bringing about an Aryan state.

``We agree on the race issue,'' he says of the skinheads, ``but not much else.''

Metzger says he's especially turned off by the way skinheads look and dress.

``Hey, I don't need to cut my hair off and wear a uniform to show what I believe,'' he says. ``I say, get your education, get a job, dress normally and you can be more effective for what you believe.''

Metzger is equally critical of Duke, who, he says, has fallen victim to politics and his own ego.

``I will always say that David Duke could have been one of the great leaders in this country,'' says Metzger, his voice tinged with sadness.

``Why, he could have been another Huey Long!''

While Metzger himself has never had the appeal of the late kingpin of old-style Louisiana politics, he says he once almost fell victim to the politician's curse. When running for Congress as a Democrat in 1980 (he was soundly trounced when the Democrats refused to acknowledge him) and for the U.S. Senate in 1982 (another resounding defeat), he discovered ``there's a tendency to moderate your position to get people to shake your hand.''

Now he promotes his views by hosting a TV interview program, ``Race and Reason,'' that he distributes to about 40 cable-television systems, reaching well over 100 cities. He also spreads his message via a WAR Hotline and publishes a White Aryan Resistance newspaper for a limited list of subscribers.

Metzger says he's been the victim of several physical attacks because of his views. Despite that, he says, ``If you visit me, you'll see that I don't live in an armed camp. I'm not a monster. I don't go into the street and hit people. I'm not that way.''

As Metzger begins the fight to keep his movement alive and solvent, there is no doubt that racial awareness in Portland has been heightened since the killing of Mulugeta Seraw.

Five days after he died, Seraw was buried on a hillside overlooking the Willamette River. A large crowd standing in the rain nodded in agreement when a minister said there was no place for racism in Portland.

One year to the day after Seraw's murder, there was an evening memorial candlelight service in the parking lot behind the Eastside Uplift Neighborhood Program, about a mile from where the murder took place.

Eastside Uplift is an agency devoted to improving Portland's neighborhoods and establishing a climate that excludes racism.

Nick Sauvie, an Eastside Uplift official, describes the memorial service as a moving experience, attended by city officials, by those who personally knew Seraw and by those involved in the civil-rights movement.

Near the end of the service, an African-American drummer pounded out Ethiopian rhythms and led a unity song. When the candles were lit, Sauvie says, he felt at one with everyone - black and white.

``And I left wondering how people could still subscribe to a philosophy as discredited as Nazism.''

A few years ago, a joke making the rounds in Portland poked fun at the city's backward ways.

Question: If it's 5 p.m. in New York, what time is it in Portland?

Answer: 1962.

1990 - and big-city problems - came awfully fast.

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MONDAY IN

THE TIMES

-- Since Mulugeta Seraw's death, Portland skinheads have divided against themselves.