ABC News Studios
White supremacist movements’ ties to local, state, and national law enforcement is a grave topic that requires more serious investigation than Grand Knighthawk: Infiltrating the KKK (April 27 on Hulu) is capable of undertaking. Nonetheless, as a small-scale portrait of the insidious danger posed by that relationship, it’s a harrowing true-crime tale that puts modern racists’ ugliness on full display, never more starkly than when one of its subjects—in a covert audio recording—says about poor Black Americans, “They’ll have sex with their sisters and they’ll snitch on their own brothers and mothers.”
The speaker in question is David “Sarge” Moran, who, along with his Caucasian friends Charles Newcomb and Thomas Driver, plotted in 2015 to kidnap and murder a Black man named Warren Williams. The reason for this lynching scheme was retaliatory. All three conspirators were colleagues at Florida’s Reception and Medical Center, and it was there that Driver had sparked an altercation with inmate Williams (who was in for a mental illness-instigated fracas with police) by antagonistically blowing smoke in his face. During the ensuing melee, Williams not only got the better of Driver, but bit him. In a subsequent chat with his buddies, Driver admits that he wants Williams assassinated because, “It will make me feel better that he won’t ever try anybody again,” and it will be adequate payback for forcing him to get post-bite medical tests, which left him “worrying that I’m gonna have to catch this shit from this dirty-ass monkey.”
A plan to kill Williams was subsequently hatched by the three pals, who were also colleagues in the Ku Klux Klan, in which Newcomb served as the Exalted Cyclops (i.e., the regional governor). To do their bidding, they enlisted the aid of their Grand Knighthawk, the outfit’s chief security officer, whose functions ranged from ceremonially lighting crosses to acting as a violent enforcer. In this case, that man was Joe Moore, a former army veteran and accomplished sniper who had been with the KKK for four years, and who committed to doing the job on their behalf.