Former Kansas City KKK leader indicted in 2004 mail bomb
KANSAS CITY, MO — Never shy about bantering with reporters, former Kansas City area Ku Klux Klan leader Dennis Mahon always seemed to be on the public relations side of the white supremacy movement — a virulent talker, but not a violent doer.
That changed Friday when federal prosecutors in Arizona announced that Mahon, 58, and his twin brother, Daniel, had been indicted in the 2004 mail bombing of a Scottsdale city office that promoted racial and cultural diversity.
“There are few criminal acts as cowardly as a parcel bomb,” said Christopher White of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service in Phoenix.
The Mahons’ arrests Thursday in Illinois coincided with unrelated charges being announced against Robert Joos, a Powell, Mo., man whom Dennis Mahon allegedly called the morning the bomb arrived in Scottsdale.
Authorities charged Joos, 56, with being a felon in possession of firearms.
According to court records, Mahon allegedly sent an undercover federal informant to Joos, who taught him how to make napalm.
Also Thursday, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives searched the Warsaw, Ind., home of Tom Metzger, director of the White Aryan Resistance and an associate of the Mahons.
In a Warsaw newspaper interview Friday, Metzger, said the search was related to the charges against the Mahons. He said that agents took a computer and address books.
Robert M. Fagan, an attorney representing Dennis Mahon, said that the bombing accusations still must be proven.
“He’s a veteran and a contributing member of society,” Fagan said.
Attorney Dennis Ryan, who represents Daniel Mahon, said his client believed he was innocent.
“He’s denied any knowledge or participation in this,” Ryan said. “He believes this is more about his views and his persona. He’s at a loss of how he could have gotten to this point.”
An attorney for Joos could not be reached for comment.
Dennis Mahon is a former Northmoor resident and imperial dragon of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1989, he unsuccessfully ran for a seat on the Northmoor Board of Aldermen, vowing to keep the community “white.”
He also was involved in a skirmish over a public access channel of a Kansas City cable TV company. After a long battle, which included a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of the Klan, his group produced one TV program that aired in 1990.
According to court records, the Mahons long have been suspects in the Feb. 26, 2004, Scottsdale bombing. Prosecutors accused Dennis Mahon of using his brother’s phone to call the Scottsdale office on Sept, 26, 2003, and leave a voice message stating that “the White Aryan Resistance is growing in Scottsdale. There’s a few white people who are standing up.”
Authorities began investigating Joos in 2005, after they noticed that a string of calls was made from Dennis Mahon’s phone on the morning of the bombing, the first to Joos’s cell phone, according to court records.
The Mahons grew up as Illinois farmboys, said Leonard Zeskind, a Kansas City expert on hate groups. In the 1970s, they joined David Duke’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, he said.
They stayed with that group until 1988, when Dennis Mahon created his Missouri White Knights in Kansas City.
When he moved to Tulsa, Okla., he tried to make a living selling Klan paraphernalia at gun shows, Zeskind said. He later set up camp in Arizona among a group of skinheads.
