In the summer of 2008, Joe Moore, a former Army sniper, had insinuated himself into the upper ranks of the Ku Klux Klan chapter in Gainesville, Florida, while serving as an undercover FBI informant. Then-U.S. Senator Barack Obama was running for president, and Moore’s KKK brethren let him in on a plot to assassinate the popular Democrat vying to be the nation’s first Black president.
Obama would be coming to nearby Kissimmee in October, and, as Moore told NPR in an interview with host Tonya Mosley this week, “they disclosed to me that they had a plan that included multiple members, vehicles, two anti-materiel rifles, some law enforcement personnel that would be involved to some degree” in a plan to “deliver very powerful firepower in his direction” during Obama’s motorcade and rally.
The Klan was getting inside information on Obama’s visit from police sources and other help from contacts at the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles, who could assist with fake license plate registration information on vehicles to be procured from a local junkyard, said Moore. He had gained the KKK leaders’ confidence as the right man for the mission due to his military background as a marksman and intelligence gatherer, so he was well poised to chime in and foil their plot during a subsequent assassination planning meeting.
“And then I had a light bulb go up in my head,” he told Mosley. “And I said, ‘Hey, what are y’all going to do about the drones?’ And then they looked at me with a shocked face, and they looked at each other and looked back and said, ‘Drones? What drones?’ I said, ‘Well, the Secret Service, you know, now that Obama is the candidate, he has an elevated level of Secret Service protection, and at this level, includes drones.’ I didn’t know it did, but they didn’t either. … I naturally came up with a solution on the spot that stopped it.”
Moore’s riveting account of how he thwarted the attempt to kill Obama, as well as two other murder plots in Florida that led to the conviction of three Klansmen, appear in his new book, “White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing The Evil Among Us,” the story of the several years he spent between 2007 and 2017 living a double life as an informant for the FBI.
In it, he also chronicles how he has witnessed the growing threat of white supremacist extremist groups and his concerns over how their hateful ethos has primed the pump for more recent racial violence and domestic terrorism incidents, including those in Charlottesville, Virginia; Ferguson, Missouri; and in D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021.
In the book, Moore describes Obama’s presidency as lighting the fuse and Ferguson as the powder keg to that fuse, leading to an explosion of far-right extremism in America. He told NPR the killing of Michael Brown and subsequent riots and protests nationwide in 2014 further galvanized the KKK, in part because one of the Klan’s national leaders, Frank Ancona Jr. “lived not far from St. Louis, and he had been in touch with business owners in the area to sort of ask them if they wanted the Klan to come in and provide protection.”
“And the [Klan] membership during the Obama years and the Ferguson riots on top of that sort of brought out people that were already like-minded,” he said. “So these people that perhaps had some white suprem[ac]ist leanings were looking for people to become a part of a group with. So that catapulted the inquiries into the Klan recruiting process.”
Moore said flyers distributed by the KKK during protests in Ferguson and St. Louis, which criticized protesters for disrupting the city and warned they would not tolerate the threatening of police officers, are evidence of “the evolution of their ability to propagandize themselves.” The far-right extremist groups “cultivate fear, and then they pull people in who have that fear, and then they continue to burn that fiery hate within the organization,” he said.
In its annual report on hate and extremism published in June, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) documented 595 hate groups in 2023, an increase of 72 percent over 2022. That included only 10 active KKK groups but a 50 percent increase in white supremacy hate groups in 2023, which grew to 166 from 109 the year before.
“What we’re seeing now should be a wake-up call for all of us,” Margaret Huang, SPLC’s president and CEO, said on a call with reporters, including the Missouri Independent. “Our 2023 report documented more hate and anti-government extremist groups than ever before. With a historic election just months away, these groups are multiplying, mobilizing and making, and in some cases already implementing, plans to undo democracy.”
Florida has long been a hotbed for Klan and white nationalist activity, and Moore learned firsthand just how dangerous their members could be — especially with an assist from local law enforcement.
In his second stint as an FBI informant from 2013 to 2017, Moore infiltrated the Traditionalist American Knights of the KKK in north central Florida, rising to the rank of Grand Knighthawk for the Georgia and Florida realm.
The role made him the top security officer of the region’s Klan and someone to be called upon to engage in violence if needed, according to ABC News, which collaborated with AP on a documentary about Moore’s dangerous work as an informant during this period.
The FBI in Florida had been intercepting threats from domestic terrorism groups since 2006, and Moore said his mission was to “go inside the KKK to identify people that are involved and to forewarn the FBI of any illegal activities.”
He soon caught wind of a plan to murder a Black man named Warren Williams, a former inmate who had gotten into a fight in a prison hospital with a Florida correctional officer named Thomas Driver, who was a Klan member. Williams had bitten Driver during the fight, and Driver was especially angry because he had to undergo testing for communicable diseases such as HIV and Hepatitis-C.
In December 2014, during a cross burning in rural North Florida, three Klansmen, all Florida correctional officers, approached Moore and asked him to murder Williams. Moore informed his FBI handlers, who directed him to wear a wire over the next several months to gather evidence of the plot.
He did just that, and all three men were found guilty of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder in 2017.
The documentary includes compelling audio clips of some of his secret recordings, including a conversation while Moore was driving a car with two KKK hitmen who were casing Williams’ house. One was an active law enforcement officer, and the other was retired from a long career in law enforcement.
They discussed their plan to snatch Williams off the sidewalk, inject him with a lethal dose of insulin, and push him into a river. The Klansmen ended up being scared off that day when one of the officers noticed an unmarked police car following them, but Moore collected enough evidence to convict them.
The Florida Department of Corrections later denied claims of wider connections to white supremacist groups or to a systemic problem beyond “the isolated actions of three individuals who committed abhorrent and illegal acts” in an email to AP.
Moore said during his time as an informant, he discovered dozens of police officers, corrections officers, sheriff’s deputies, and other law enforcement officers who were involved with the Klan and other extremist organizations.
In an investigative series in 2021, AP reporter Jason Dearen documented how Florida prisons were rife with guards and other staff who “openly tout associations with white supremacist groups to intimidate inmates and Black colleagues, a persistent practice that often goes unpunished.”
“The KKK has always desired to take over law enforcement because that’s a mechanism of power that if they can control it, they can grow their power,” Moore said. “I don’t think people realize how dangerous it is to have a single KKK member in the organization because then recruiting takes place, and it ultimately propagates and attracts other people that are perhaps persuadable.”
While the KKK’s membership has sharply declined over the last century, Moore said they’ve made up for lack of membership with deft use of people in high places.
“What I learned … in what I was able to do for the FBI, the truth was so hidden from the public,” Moore declared. “It wasn’t a matter of the KKK necessarily becoming fewer and fewer people. I mean, there’s been that to some degree. The bigger issue was the KKK had become more sneaky, more involved in tradecraft, more involved in how to be effective and less boisterous.”
He said he has concerns over the signals to far-right extremists that former President Donald Trump has sent out since he emerged on the national political scene in 2016, including over issues such as immigration.
“A lot of the things that Donald Trump has said are consistent with the ideology of white supremacy and other like-minded movements,” Moore said. “But in my investigations, I have learned it’s not just what I see that I have to be concerned about. It’s often what I don’t see that I have to be able to recognize.”
