10/28/2004

Contact: K.E. Schwab  -- 724-738-2199;  e-mail: karl.schwab@sru.edu

FORMER FBI UNDERCOVER INFORMANT TO DETAIL DANGERS OF HATE, NEO-NAZI RIGHT

              SLIPPERY ROCK, Pa. – Tom Martinez, an FBI undercover informant that helped bring down the radical White Supremacist movement known as “The Order,” will lecture at Slippery Rock University on Nov. 10 telling his powerful story and warning others of the dangers such right-wing groups offer in a visit sponsored by the University Program Board.

          The free lecture, titled “The Brotherhood of Hate,” is open to the public and will be held at 8 p.m. in the University Union. A book signing of Martinez’s “Brotherhood of Murder,” which has been turned into a Showtime film with William Baldwin, Peter Gallagher and Kelly Lynch, will follow the talk.

          Martinez, who grew up in segregated Philadelphia in the 1960s and was influenced in junior high school by the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that is working to bring an end to separate but equal schools for blacks and whites. The lecturer says he was drawn to hate groups and the idea of white supremacy because of a sense of disenfranchisement that affected may of his contemporaries during the turbulent ‘60s. He says in junior high, race became the explosive and defining issue in his life.

           By age 21, Martinez was disillusioned and became seduced by the handsome eloquence of David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan. He says he was attracted to the rhetoric of hate that denounced school bussing and Affirmative Action. He found a mission and purpose in the battle and became an official knight in the Ku Klux Klan. However, by his late twenties, his interest began to wane in such groups as the National Alliance, Christian Identity and even in the popular Bob Matthew’s organization known as “The Order,” then one of the most violent racist societies in the U.S. Matthews drew men and women to an organization that committed crimes of counterfeiting, violent armed robbery, bombings and cold-blooded murder, Martinez explains. In 1984, seeking to right his wrongs, Martinez became an FBI information and ally against White Supremacists, neo-Nazi and the anti-government movement.

          He believes his life remains in jeopardy, but is willing to forego cover of the Witness Protection Program in favor of having his story told as a warning to the dangers of the such extremist groups.

          SRU has used “Brown V. Board of Education: 50 Years of Progress and Struggle” as a semester-long theme marking the celebrated Supreme Court decision.

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