January was a spectacularly bad month for The Base.
A nationwide FBI crackdown dismantled the neo-Nazi terror group, resulting in multiple arrests of its members for things as sinister as assassination plots and plans to shoot up a protest and as peculiar as animal sacrifice and the production of DMT. Then its leader was exposed by the Guardian as a 46-year-old New Jersey native and former private school kid named Rinaldo Nazzarro, who lives in Russia and is a possible Kremlin asset.
The shocking flurry of events catapulted The Base into the pages of the New York Times. Here was a white supremacist terror group that looked more like ISIS than the Klan, operating all over America.
After the arrests, Nazzarro went dark and the organization seemed to all but disappear. While many of its members await trial on charges that could see them serving lengthy prison sentences, or deal with having been outed by the BBC, others have covertly slipped back into society without a trace.
VICE News has obtained a strange, illuminating memoir seeking to explain the appeal of the organization, written in the aftermath of the FBI raids by someone who claims to be a former member. It details some of the very crimes that led to mass arrests. It also describes a bizarre ritual involving slaughtering a ram, drinking its blood, and then dropping acid after a day of paramilitary training. (more...)
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