A Confederate statue stands outside the Putnam County Courthouse in Palatka, Fla., Tuesday, April 13, 2021. (AP Photo/David Goldman)
Inside a KKK murder plot: Grab him up, take him to the river
PALATKA, Fla. (AP) — Joseph Moore breathed heavily, his face slick with nervous sweat. He held a cellphone with a photo of a man splayed on the floor; the man appeared dead, his shirt torn apart and his pants wet.
Puffy dark clouds blocked the sun as Moore greeted another man, who’d pulled up in a metallic blue sedan. They met behind an old fried chicken shack in rural north Florida.
“KIGY, my brother,” Moore said. It was shorthand for “Klansman, I greet you.”
Birds chirped in a tree overhead and traffic whooshed by on a nearby road, muddling the sound of their voices, which were being recorded secretly.
Moore brought the phone to David “Sarge” Moran, who wore a camouflage-print baseball hat emblazoned with a Confederate flag patch and a metal cross. His arms and hands were covered in tattoos.
A nervous, giddy chuckle escaped Moran’s mouth.
“Oh, shit. I love it,” he said. “Motherf—– pissed on himself. Good job.”
“Is that what y’all wanted?”
“Yes, hell yeah,” Moran said, his voice pitched high.
It was 11:30 a.m. on March 19, 2015, and the klansmen were celebrating what they thought was a successful murder in Florida.
But the FBI had gotten wind of the murder plot. A confidential informant had infiltrated the group, and his recordings provide a rare, detailed look at the inner workings of a modern klan cell and a domestic terrorism probe.
That investigation would unearth another secret: An unknown number of klansmen were working inside the Florida Department of Corrections, with significant power over inmates, Black and white.
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Thomas Driver took a pull off a cigarette, and exhaled the smoke at Warren Williams. Driver, a white prison guard, and Williams, a Black inmate, faced each other.
It was a humid August day in 2013, about a year and a half before the clandestine murder photo reveal.
The two men stood in a sweltering prison dorm room in rural north Florida’s Reception and Medical Center, a barbed wire-encircled complex built among farmland an hour south of the Georgia state line. The RMC is the state’s prison hospital where new inmates are processed.
Williams, a quiet, 6-foot-1, 210-pound inmate, suffered from severe anxiety and depression. He was serving a year, records show, for striking a police officer. Williams agreed to plead no contest in exchange for a reduced sentence, and an order to receive a mental health evaluation and treatment under county supervision.
He found himself in front of Driver after he lost his identification badge, a prison infraction.
Williams told Driver to stop blowing smoke at him, he’d report later. Driver blew more, and Williams told him to stop again.
When Driver continued, Williams jumped him and they hit the ground. As they struggled, Williams bit Driver and gained an advantage, according to both men’s accounts of the fight.
A group of guards responded, and beat Williams so badly that he required hospitalization, his mother and lawyer said.
Driver, in turn, needed a battery of precautionary tests for HIV and hepatitis C because of the bite. They would all be negative, but the ordeal enraged him.
