The first article of this series, written by Ken Silva via Headline USA, detailed the FBI’s program to stage neo-Nazi rallies in the mid-2000s for surveillance and recruitment purposes. This led to a broader investigation known as “Primitive Affliction,” where the FBI set up a neo-Nazi motorcycle front group to infiltrate Florida’s right-wing underground.
Former FBI Director Robert Mueller had a personal interest in Primitive Affliction, as he was briefed daily on the operation. Despite the lack of terrorism convictions, this case showcased infiltration and entrapment techniques similar to past investigations against groups like the Aryan Nations.
The Aryan Nations, once a prominent white supremacist group in the 1980s and 90s, had dwindled by the mid-2000s. A leader named August Kreis, working with FBI informant Joshua Caleb Sutter, attempted various publicity stunts to revive the group. When these efforts failed, Kreis enlisted another Aryan Nations member, Robert Killian, who turned out to be an undercover FBI cop, to start a neo-Nazi motorcycle club.
Undercover agent Kelly Boaz, also involved in Primitive Affliction, had a controversial history with the Orange County Sheriff’s Office. Despite his troubled past, Boaz was assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force and played a key role in the investigation. Months later in August 2000, Boaz found himself at the center of another controversy when he shot and killed an unarmed thief at a shopping center. Despite being cleared of wrongdoing in both incidents, his supervisor was reportedly demoted and his racketeering squad was disbanded. A civil lawsuit was filed against him and the Orange County Sheriff’s Office over the December 1999 incident, but the case was eventually dismissed.
Despite his controversial past, the FBI relied on Boaz to build a complex case against a network of white supremacist terrorists. Boaz, who declined an interview request, entered Florida’s neo-Nazi scene sometime after the Orlando neo-Nazi rally organizer, FBI undercover operative David Gletty, had his cover blown in the media.
According to court records, Boaz was introduced to the Outlaw bikers and the 1st SS Kavallerie in 2009 by his colleague, Killian. By then, Boaz had already infiltrated the Black Pistons biker gang and was posing as one of its members, a renegade bomb maker named “Kevin Post.” For nearly the next three years, Boaz and the FBI built their case.
During his investigation, one of his informants purportedly learned about another right-wing group in the area called the American Front. Operation Primitive Affliction eventually expanded to the Russia-linked American Front, which will be the subject of Part 3 of this series.
In both cases, Boaz made extravagant claims of drug deals and terroristic plots he witnessed in his roughly three years as an undercover biker/bomber. He also claimed that his life was threatened when an Outlaw biker put a firearm to his head and accused him of being law enforcement.
A deeper look at the evidence produced in court casts doubt on Boaz’s claims, as well as the FBI’s entire case. “Biker Gangsters Busted after Three-Year Probe,” the Orlando Sentinel reported on March 31, 2012.
Two nights earlier, Boaz and the FBI had rounded up the targets of Primitive Affliction. One of those arrested was a woman named Deborah Plowman, who was at her home near Chicago when more than a dozen armed agents swarmed her on March 29, 2012. According to Boaz, he saw Plowman take pills at an Outlaw bikers party several years earlier.
After spending the night in jail, Plowman was told she needed to travel to Florida to face drug-trafficking charges—or else, she’d face extradition. Baffled, Plowman professed her innocence. She was telling the truth.
On April 19, 2012, Plowman turned herself into law enforcement in Florida to be interviewed by Boaz. It didn’t take long before Boaz realized that he had the wrong person arrested.
“Boaz asked [Plowman] if she has ever used the nickname or has ever been called ‘Sin,’ to which she replied with a ‘no,’” Plowman said in a lawsuit she filed later over the wrongful arrest. “Defendant Boaz immediately began to break out into a sweat upon viewing and questioning [Plowman], realizing he caused the wrong person, [Plowman], to be arrested in his undercover operation, instead of ‘Sin’ [Kristy Pryzbylla].”
It turned out, Plowman was married to someone Boaz had been investigating, and the undercover agent somehow confused her with Pryzbylla. Plowman quickly hired a lawyer, who blasted Boaz in the Orlando Sentinel for his carelessness.
Plowman had her charges dropped in May 2012, and she eventually won $30,000 from Boaz in a civil lawsuit. Boaz’s sloppy police work would continue to rear its ugly head as the fruits of Primitive Affliction moved through the courts.
The other defendants—including the “Fuehrer” Klose, Ronald Cusack, Carlos Eugene Dubose, and Harold Johnson Kinlaw—were initially charged with violent crimes, such as bomb-making and soliciting murder. However, prosecutors later dropped most of the charges related to violence, instead reaching deals with the defendants to plead guilty to drug charges.
Assistant State Attorney Steven Foster reportedly said at the time that prosecutors were willing to strike plea deals with alleged white supremacist extremists because they were following the “Al Capone theory of prosecution”—referencing how federal authorities jailed the notorious mobster for tax evasion instead of his countless violent crimes.
“We decided to strike against the Kavallerie Brigade by bringing these heavy-duty drug charges to shut the active members down,” Foster reportedly said, bragging about shutting down an FBI front group. However, one of the Outlaw biker defendants, Dubose, fought his charges.
It was a good thing he did. A retired U.S. Marine, Dubose’s crime stemmed from when he cracked his skull in a motorcycle accident. Down and out on his luck and looking for cash, Dubose took another blow in life when an FBI informant arranged for him to sell his prescription painkillers to an undercover officer.
Initially charged with selling more than 28 grams of Oxycodone pills, Dubose could have spent the rest of his life in prison. But when he started receiving pre-trial discovery, he noticed something: An FBI report showed he only gave the undercover officer 9 grams of pills—a crime that carried the far lesser max sentence of seven years imprisonment.
After successfully diminishing the severity of his drug charge, Dubose decided to plead guilty to that lone count. But he continued to vociferously deny any involvement in a bomb plot—a charge that stemmed from a conversation he had with Boaz, aka renegade bomb maker “Kevin Post,” nearly three years earlier in 2009. On October 27, 2009, Dubose had a conversation with Boaz/Post that never progressed further over the next three years. In the transcript of the discussion, Dubose carefully chose his words when discussing “hypothetically” building a pipe bomb. He mentioned that they were not looking to do anything unless they started to go to war with somebody.
Florida prosecutors acknowledged that the recorded conversation with Boaz did not contain concrete evidence of bomb plots. However, they claimed that there were other discussions where Dubose made such plans, even though there were no recordings of those conversations and Dubose never attempted to build a bomb. Despite this, the judge accepted Boaz and the government’s narrative, leading to Dubose taking a plea deal.
Boaz’s credibility was further questioned during Dubose’s sentencing hearing in April 21, 2014, when he claimed that Dubose had pointed a gun at his head. Defense attorney Harold Uhrig challenged this claim, pointing out that there was no mention of this incident in the extensive documentation provided by the government. Boaz admitted that he did not have any proof of reporting the incident to the FBI.
Despite some evidence supporting Dubose’s version of events, the judge sentenced him to five years in prison for drug trafficking and bomb solicitation charges. The judge noted that Dubose had discussed having a bomb in the event of a war, leading to the conclusion that he intended to obtain a destructive device for harmful purposes.
Prosecutors faced challenges in securing convictions from the 1st SS Kavallerie investigation, and the American Front case fared even worse due to Boaz’s errors. Strange threats from a neo-Nazi fugitive added to the bizarre developments outside the courtroom as they prepared for trial in 2013.
Ken Silva, a staff writer at Headline USA, has been following these developments closely. Stay tuned for more updates on this ongoing saga.