The National Alliance was founded by William Luther Pierce, a physics professor who taught at Oregon State University and who was also a member of the American Nazi Party in the early 1970s.
Pierce was best known for authoring the book "The Turner Diaries" under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald in 1978, which was later used as a blueprint for Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing.
The book presents a graphic fictional account of a future race war in the United States. Among accounts of bombing FBI headquarters, one part of the book describes the "Day of Rope" where Aryans across the nation go out and hang "race mixers," or couples of mixed race, from trees.
"Pierce recommended that the Jews of America should be herded into railroad cattle cars and sent into the bottoms of abandoned coal mines," Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said.
Pierce managed to build a sizable following, touting the National Alliance as a group for the Aryan elite. The Southern Poverty Law Center said that by 2002, the group had swelled to more than 1,400 members, which included college professors, police officers and lawyers. It had 17 full-time paid staff members and pulled in massive profits from member dues and proceeds from its record label Resistance Records, which is known for producing punk music popular with neo-Nazi skinheads.
In all, Potok said the National Alliance pulled in about $1 million a year. "It was the premier, most important and most dangerous hate group in America," he said.
Pierce died in July 2002 after he discovered he was in the late stages of kidney and liver cancer. He was 69.
Potok said Pierce's death threw the National Alliance into disarray. After his death, the Southern Poverty Law Center published the recorded speech of Pierce during a secret meeting, in which he called other white-supremacist groups "freaks and weaklings" and "human defectives."
"Pierce was talking in effect to the customers of Resistance Records," Potok said. The result was a boycott of Resistance Records by Aryan groups.
Erich Gliebe, a former boxer from Cleveland who used to fight under the name the "Aryan Barbarian," took over the National Alliance. Potok said Gliebe lacked the smarts Pierce had and soon the National Alliance began to fracture. By the time Gliebe stepped aside, membership was down to about 200, according to the center.
In mid-2005, Utahn Shaun Walker stepped in as head of the National Alliance. From public comments he made, Walker has said he grew up in Salt Lake City as a neo- Nazi skinhead in his teens. He said he served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1986 to 1990 and obtained a bachelor's degree in molecular biology with a history minor from the University of California-San Diego, which the center has been unable to confirm. He has also publicly said that he has worked in construction, as a lab technician and as a research scientist. Walker has been a member of the National Alliance since 1999 and was the former head of the group's Utah branch.
Potok said he isn't surprised that fliers and billboards and signs began to pop up in the Salt Lake City metro area. Walker was desperate to rebuild the ranks of his group.
Given the apparent steady decline of the National Alliance, Potok said his organization is hoping the arrests of Walker and Travis Massey could spell the end of the group.
"This very well could be the final nail in the coffin of the National Alliance. They have been in decline for a number of years," Potok said. "This just could be the bitter end."
E-mail: gfattahi@desnews.com