Inside a KKK murder plot: Grab him up, take him to the river
Jason Dearen
Palatka, Fla. Joseph Moore breathed heavily, his face slick with nervous sweat. He held a cellphone with a photo of a man splayed on the floor; the man appeared dead, his shirt torn apart and his pants wet.
Puffy dark clouds blocked the sun as Moore greeted another man, who’d pulled up in a metallic blue sedan. They met behind an old fried chicken shack in rural north Florida.
“KIGY, my brother,” Moore said. It was shorthand for “Klansman, I greet you.”
Birds chirped in a tree overhead and traffic whooshed by on a nearby road, muddling the sound of their voices, which were being recorded secretly.
Inside a KKK murder plot: Grab him up, take him to the river
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Inside Florida KKK murder plot: Do you want him 6 feet under?
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Telling the story of a KKK murder plot and FBI investigation
The Associated Press
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The Associated Press reconstructed the story of a failed 2015 murder plot by a Florida branch of the Ku Klux Klan using one-and-a-half hours of recordings made by an undercover FBI informant, thousands of pages of public records, field reporting and interviews.
The FBI confidential informant infiltrated the Florida Traditionalist Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in 2015, and testified about the investigation during a criminal trial in 2017. The FBI tapes were entered as evidence in the trial, and became public record.
All quotes and sensory detail in the scenes of the klansmen plotting the slaying were taken from the video recordings, court transcripts or visits by an AP reporter and photographer to the sites where the action took place.
Inside a KKK murder plot: Grab him up, take him to the river
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