White supremacist billboard quickly jettisoned

An official of the advertising company says the content did not meet company standards.

[Times photo: Ken Helle] This billboard at Florida and Fowler avenues in Tampa was sponsored by the National Alliance, a white supremacy group.

By AMY HERDY, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published December 18, 2001

TAMPA -- The advertising company thought the client wanted to display a tribute to the victims of the World Trade Center attack.

Instead, the Lamar billboard rented near Florida and Fowler avenues contained a different message.

"WTC, R.I.P. Stop immigration," it read, and gave the Web site address to the National Alliance, a white supremacy group.

Shortly before 5 p.m. Monday, a Lamar official told the St. Petersburg Times his company was not aware of the billboard's content until contacted by a reporter, and that displaying the message was a mistake.

"I would never have allowed that board to go up had I known it said that," said Jim Maskas, general manager for Lamar Advertising in Lakeland.

By 8 p.m., the billboard was bare.

The billboard's existence -- and removal -- has embarrassed Lamar, incensed the director of a bay area human rights organization and left the leader of the National Alliance wondering about any legal recourse against the ad agency.

"To exploit that tragedy, it's just reprehensible," said H. Roy Kaplan, executive director for the National Conference for Community and Justice.

Kaplan described members of the National Alliance as "racist, anti-Semitic white supremacists."

"They are nothing more than a hate industry, trying to capitalize on the fear industry," he said.

William Pierce, who founded the National Alliance in 1974, said his group was merely trying to raise awareness that the immigration laws in the United States need to be changed.

"If we had any sort of control over people that come into this country, I doubt very much the attacks on Sept. 11 would have taken place," Pierce, 68, said from his home in Hillsboro, W.Va.

The fact that Lamar objected to the billboard showed they were afraid of being politically incorrect, Pierce said, and his organization would be examining the situation to see if it could enforce the contract with the ad agency.

Maskas of Lamar didn't know the details of the contract but he said his company had the right to reject any copy it found objectionable.

"We don't condone that (message)," he said. "We thought it was a tribute to the World Trade Center. We have the right to refuse copy we don't feel is appropriate."

Members of the National Alliance in Tampa and St. Petersburg "made the billboard a project of theirs," Pierce said, and it was the only one of its kind in the country so far.

"It's not a terribly controversial message," he said. "There's an awful lot of people who share our view."

As for allegations the National Alliance is racist?

"We're concerned about race and the changing demographics in the United States," Pierce said. "At the rate things are going now, whites will be a minority by the middle of this century."

While his organization had no plans for any more billboards, Pierce said, they own a record label, have a weekly radio address, and have written books and pamphlets.

At least four times since October, someone has distributed anti-Semitic and racist fliers in northeast St. Petersburg neighborhoods. The fliers bear the logo and address of the National Alliance.

"You're not dealing with your garden variety Ku Klux Klan members, wearing hoods," he said. "These guys wear jackets and ties."

Pierce is a Rice University graduate and former physics professor at Oregon State University who wrote the notorious Turner Diaries, thought to be the inspiration for such figures as Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and Robert Jay Mathews, leader of the Order, a violent 1980s white supremacist group.

The alliance earned some of its reputation as a violent organization in 1997, when Orlando-area member Todd Vanbiber planned to start a race war by planting a series of bombs along Interstate 4.

The scheme went awry when, according to court testimony, a pipe bomb Vanbiber was building exploded in his face in 1997.

-- Researcher John Martin contributed to this report. Amy Herdy can be reached at 226-3386 or herdy@sptimes.com

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