A top Southern Poverty Law Center official is accused of helping funnel $1.2 million in donor money to an informant in the National Alliance white supremacist group — who was also allegedly her lover.
The Department of Justice filed a superseding indictment against the SPLC accusing it of funneling donor cash to hate groups they were then telling donors they were fighting.
One figure, referred to as “Employee-2” in the indictment is described as a “person who would become Director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project.”
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It also describes how “Employee-2” wrote an article based on material stolen from National Alliance headquarters in 2014 and then paid off an informant to take the blame for the robbery.
Based on the details in the June 2 superseding indictment, “Employee-2” is understood to be Heidi Beirich, a 58-year-old fascism expert who was the Director of Intelligence at the Alabama-based anti-extremism nonprofit between 2012 and 2019.
The indictment alleges Beirich was incredibly close to the informant known only as “F-9” who “infiltrated the neo-Nazi organization National Alliance.”
“[Beirich] was also in a romantic relationship with F-9. During this relationship, [Beirich] and F-9 shared a house and two bank accounts,” the indictment alleges.
“Between 2015 and 2021, approximately $140,000 in donors’ money flowed from the SPLC operating account … and was ultimately deposited into the joint bank accounts held by F-9 and [Beirich].
“This amounted to approximately 66% of all money ever deposited into their joint bank accounts. [Beirich] then used donors’ money to pay the couple’s personal living expenses.”
The indictment also claims that while getting paid by the SPLC, the unnamed informant was also raising money for the National Alliance and helping to “carry out its extremist activities.”
The indictment describes how a source broke into National Alliance’s headquarters in West Virginia in 2014 and “stole approximately 25 boxes of documents,” took them over state lines into North Carolina and copied them, before returning the originals.
In 2015 Beirich wrote an article allegedly based on the stolen materials for her group’s “Hatewatch” section of its website. That article, “Chaos at the Compound” is still available.
The indictment then describes how the SPLC then tried to cover up who their informant was by paying a second informant “approximately $6,000” to take responsibility for the burglary.
Beirich and SPLC did not respond to requests for comment from The Post.
“I knew it was that fat, ugly hog Heidi Beirich,” National Alliance chairman William White Williams, 78, told The Post from his home in East Tennessee. He also confirmed the details of the indictment match what happened to the group.
“I think some of those cluckers wanted to get out of the movement and they went to the SPLC for help. But instead of helping them, [the SPLC] said, ‘why don’t you stay in and get paid?’” he added of the informants.
Beirich had joined the SPLC in 1999 and became Director of the Intelligence Project in 2012. She left in 2019 as part of a massive shake-up, when many top brass departed amid accusations of racism and sexual harassment, with the group mainly being run by white people and black people in its lower ranks. Beirich was not publicly implicated in those scandals.
Alabama-based SPLC has been charged with wire fraud, bank fraud and money laundering conspiracy for allegedly engaging “in the active promotion of racist groups at the same time that the SPLC was denouncing the same groups on its website,” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel announced on April 21.
Patel charged that far from using spies to dismantle the hate groups, the SPLC gave them over $4 million to keep promoting their ideologies, thus giving them something to point out and seek donors to fight against. The nonprofit has amassed some $800 million to do so, its publicly released nonprofit accounting shows.
By 2013, the National Alliance had effectively ceased to exist. That year, group then-chairman Erich Gliebe — a former boxer nicknamed the Aryan Barbarian — had sent a letter to followers saying the group was ending its membership program that September, writing they were abandoning dues-paying chapters in favor of a “supporter-based” structure. Membership had collapsed from 1,400 to around 20 in less than a decade.
Despite the internal chaos and decline, the following year the SPLC began bolstering the group’s public profile, writing nearly a dozen articles about the organization.
Tax filings reviewed by The Post show Beirich earned $190,000 a year in salary and benefits from the SPLC before her departure.
Mystery surrounds the identity of the informant F-9, who received $1.2 million in total from the SPLC over 20 years, according to the indictment.
Property records reviewed by The Post reveal during the years covered by the indictment — 2010 to 2023 — Beirich owned a vacation home in Elijay, Georgia, an upscale mountain town north of Atlanta, in addition to her Montgomery, Alabama, residence.
Williams said he, too, was stumped by F-9’s identity.
However, he noted the group were somewhat paranoid and there had been suspicions about various members as who could be a turncoat or potential informant to any number of other groups or law enforcement.
National Alliance was founded by a man named William Pierce in 1974 and had around 2,500 members when he died in 2002.
Williams noted speculation about how the only other person who had access to the office from where the sensitive documents were stolen was National Alliance former business manager Robert DeMarais.
In a biography of Pierce, DeMarais, now 79, is described as a quiet, lonely and childless man who ate Sugar Frosted Flakes alone at his kitchen table each morning and settled in with a microwave TV dinner each night.
SPLC’s Hatewatch profile of DeMarais is light-handed, writing that he is “no ideologue” and “focused on administrative matters.”
Another source questioned if the group’s former chairman, Gliebe, could have ended up being some kind of informant. His messy and public divorce in 2005 from stripper, ex-Playboy model wife Erika Gliebe had hurled the group into chaos, particularly after she published a since-deleted blog post titled “I Married a Freak,” accusing Gliebe of “deviant sexual behavior” involving Catholic schoolgirl uniforms, as well as regular philandering.
Neither DeMarais nor Gliebe could be reached for comment.
The Post can also reveal the source paid to take the fall for stealing the National Alliance’s documents was Randolph Dilloway, described as “F-39” in the indictment, described as a “quirky” nearly-deaf accountant who bounced around six other “hate groups” before landing at National Alliance.
Beirich herself gave his name away in a 2015 article published on the SPLC’s website describing the terrified defector with a goldmine of documents who came running to the SPLC for help after having a gun shoved in his face by Williams.
“For five months, Dilloway organized, examined, and in many cases copied key documents and data files among tens of thousands of pages of sales receipts, donation records and ledgers,” she wrote.
“Dilloway’s reputation in the white racist subculture has always been conflicted […] the quirky accountant has been exploited for his skills by at least a half dozen hate groups since 2004,” the article continued.
The copied materials which formed the basis of Beirich’s article were also later subject of a 2019 lawsuit in Maryland by one of the other people named in the article, lawyer Glen K. Allen, which named Beirich and another member of SPLC, Mark Potok, as defendants.
Allen claimed his name was associated with National Alliance based on privileged and confidential materials and had lost him his job at the Baltimore City Law Department. The case was thrown out in 2021.
In April, The Post exclusively unmasked other informants mentioned in the indictment, including a one-legged Imperial Wizard in the KKK named Bradley Scott Jenkins who took the nonprofit’s money while revitalizing a once-defunct KKK splinter group, and a litter-hating Georgia mom named April Chambers who was a KKK member and runs a home cleaning business.