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He was ordered, on its termination, to destroy all evidence of the investigation, but it’s typical of Ron’s rebellious nature to have kept the card anyway. At one point in our conversation he opens his wallet to show me a memento: his Klan membership card, issued in 1979. The Klan investigation came out of the blue, four years later – what a gift to a spirited and ambitious young cop. Ron was 21 when he joined the police as a patrol officer – the only black person working in the entire department. He is retired, though still deeply loyal to the police force, and there is a grouchy rebelliousness to him: “I don’t care what they think,” he says calmly when I ask him what his former colleagues, his parents, the KKK, the world make of his surveillance work, or anything else. Ron, now 65, is living a comfortable married life. I tracked Ron Stallworth down in El Paso, Texas, the border town where he’d grown up. Ron was well known for having set up the state’s first Gang Task Force, but when asked to name his most significant career achievement he dropped a bombshell and said: “The year I went undercover with the KKK.” The story went viral. I stumbled across Ron’s story last year in an article written in 2006 in the Deseret News, a Utah newspaper. But funny as it was, it was an investigation that we took seriously – because the Klan’s intent was very serious.” “It was so hilariously funny that this was even taking place. What happened next is the proudest, most off-the-wall moment of his career in law enforcement. “Fortunately the people I was dealing with weren’t the brightest bulbs in the socket,” Ron says. Ken has no way of knowing, for example, that the voice on the other end of the telephone line, fulminating against “slaves” and “mud people” belongs to anyone but what Ken likes to call “an intelligent white man” – like himself. No internet, no smart phones: resurgent underground terrorist organisations have to rely on letter writing and telephone calls for their secret communications. But once you’ve taken account of the state of late 1970s technology, it becomes easier to understand how such an audacious and thrilling police sting could ever have come into being. The story of how a black police officer infiltrated the KKK is at first so hard to wrap your mind around that you may question how it can possibly be true. #Herbal run marijuana collective undercover detective crack#Second – and this never fails to crack Ron up every time he thinks of it – Ron is black. First, Ron is an undercover police officer. Unfortunately for Ken, there are a couple of things about Ron he doesn’t know –and won’t know until 28 years later when Ron reveals them in a newspaper interview. #Herbal run marijuana collective undercover detective full#Indeed, Ken is so impressed by Ron that, over the coming months, he will not only make sure that Ron gains membership and full access to the Klan, but he’ll even tout him as a future leader of the local chapter. Ken, who loathes blacks, Jews, Catholics and any other minority he can think of, sees Ron as a kindred spirit. Before long the two men are in enthusiastic telephone contact. Ron, he says in his letter, wants to “further the cause of the white race” – and to join the Klan. Ken has been sent a letter from a man called Ron Stallworth. It is late October, 1978, in Colorado Springs when Ken O’Dell, a closet member of the newly resurgent Ku Klux Klan, receives an encouraging sign that his strategy of placing ads in the personal section of the local paper for new recruits has met with some success. ![]()
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