The Frank Collin Incident

[This is an excerpt from A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement in America, published circa 2007, if memory serves. - HAC]

In 1979 a man named Francis Joseph Collin was head of the National Socialist Party of America based in Chicago. The NSPA was one of only two significant spin-offs from Koehl’s NSWPP that survived much beyond their first year, the second being Allen Vincent’s National Socialist White Worker’s Party. Vincent, a hopeless alcoholic, remained mired in Rockwell’s Phase One until he finally sank out of sight in a sea of whole grain in the early 1980s, and died in obscurity in the late 90s.

Frank Collin had a lot of strong points, in that he was energetic and dynamic and personally fearless, but it was obvious to anyone who attempted to work with him that he also had a lot of personal and leadership problems. His first Deputy Leader, Richard Tedor, eventually resigned, and in 1978 his position was taken by North Carolina NSPA unit leader Harold Covington. (Among other duties Covington became membership secretary and in that capacity signed would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley’s NSPA membership card.) But at the end of the day, the fact remained that other than the loathsome Matt Koehl, Collin was the only other NS game in town for the “orthodox Nazi” set who still wanted to wear the costume. Years later, Covington would write: “Bear in mind this was when we were all wearing the costume and pretending it was the 1930s in Europe, myself included. We had a sense of history and destiny which, as misplaced as it was, I would give a lot to recover.”

In the autumn of 1979, an NSPA member named Mike Whalen discovered incontrovertible proof that Collin was buggering little boys in the Nazi headquarters building in Marquette Park and elsewhere. This consisted of sexually-oriented photographs of young boys in various poses which were taken in Collin’s room at the headquarters, including some with the children posing with headquarters firearms. Whalen notified Covington who in turn notified a group of other Party officers such as Gerhard Lauck, Richard Tedor, and Ray Zidarich. The Chicago comrades conducted a thorough search of the HQ building in Collin’s absence and eventually accumulated a mass of evidence including more photos and cassette tapes (Collin actually recorded his perversions, if you can believe that, this being before the days of videocams and digital cell phones.) This evidence was kept in something called “the dirt box.”

An informal group was convened to consider what to do, rather similar to the medieval Fehmegericht. The conspirators acquired the means physically to eject Collin from the Party and the headquarters because Covington spent the last of his wealthy family inheritance to buy the building out from under Collin from the bank that held the mortgage note. (Collin hadn’t paid the mortgage in months, apparently spending more and more NSPA funds on his debaucheries, and the Party was facing foreclosure before Covington stepped in.) It should be recalled that this was in the days before “Movement modernization” and the present attitude of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” a time when homosexuality and paedophilia was still unacceptable among old-fashioned White Nationalists. Nick Griffin, Martin Webster, Pym Fortuyn, “Frances” Spivak, and the time when Kevin Alfred Strom would be defended by dozens of people on Stormfront and VNN were still decades in the future.

The choices confronting Covington and his men boiled down to two, to quote a document of the time directly: “kill the son of a bitch or turn him in to the police.” Covington vetoed the death penalty because, despite a surfeit of volunteers for the job, he knew that the White Nationalist Movement simply is not yet capable of carrying out an execution with sufficient competence to keep it from blowing up in our faces. So they turned Collin in to the police, along with the evidence in the “dirt box,” and he ended up doing seven years in Joliet and Menard for homosexual child molestation, to which he pleaded guilty.

As an aside, it should be noted that this is the only occasion in recorded Movement history when the Movement itself has successfully cleaned its own house, and dealt firmly and decisively with revolting misbehavior on the part of a so-called “Great White Leader,” and the Movement has never forgiven Harold Covington for it. One of the reasons Covington seems to be so feared and reviled by the Movement’s bogus “leadership” is that he has the rep of having taken down several fairly big Movement fish for their misbehavior, including Frank Collin and Benny Klassen, whom he allegedly drove to suicide with his acid-tongued articles and commentaries. Not to mention his Movement stock rising precipitately when it turned out that Covington alone correctly sounded the warning on the loathsome Kevin Alfred Strom years ago, kind of like Babe Ruth calling his shots. Movement “leaders” hate and fear Covington, because they have so many skeletons in their closet, and Covington tends to set all those skeletons dancing out of the closet like some kind of weird Pied Piper of the Movement.

Frank Collin did his time in Joliet, got out, went to live with his parents in Olympia Fields, Illinois. Using the name of Frank Joseph, he formed some sort of weird nut cult revolving around Atlantis which presumably involves Klassen-esque rituals with little boys. He also used to spend a lot of time making heckling phone calls to a short-wave evangelist in South Carolina calling himself Brother Stair.

Nowadays, of course, what with “modernization” and the Movement’s apparent abandonment of any ethical principles whatsoever, a guilty plea to child molestation would mean nothing. It is always possible that Frank Collin could even yet attempt a Glenn Miller-like resurrection in the Movement--and do so successfully, if Miller’s reception on VNN is any guide.