The National Alliance even bought a membership list and mailing labels from the Florida Bar Assn. last year so it could send an eight-page recruitment letter -- complete with anti-Semitic cartoons -- to 2,500 criminal defense lawyers.
"If we had the money to advertise during the Super Bowl, we'd try that too," said Shaun Walker, the organization's chief operating officer.
Civil rights monitors consider the National Alliance one of the most virulent neo-Nazi organizations in the country. It was founded in the 1970s by the late William Pierce, who called for herding Jews, homosexuals and "racemixers" into cattle cars and sending them to abandoned coal mines.
Although the group's website says it "does not advocate any illegal activity," National Alliance members have been convicted of violent acts over the last two decades, including armed robberies, bombings and murders. The FBI's senior counterterrorism expert told Congress in 2002 that the National Alliance represented a "terrorist threat."
"They clearly have a track record of encouraging members to take their vision of race war to the streets," said Devin Burghart, who monitors hate groups for the Center for New Community in Chicago.
Potok estimates that the National Alliance has fewer than 700 members, but it's one of the best-financed supremacist groups in the country because it owns a music label, Resistance Records, which long dominated the white-power music scene.
The white supremacist movement encompasses scores of other small -- often feuding -- organizations, with total membership estimated at 100,000. They too are reaching out.
Last fall, residents of Columbia, Mo., awoke to find the Aryan Alternative -- a new tabloid promising "uncensored news for whites" -- next to the Sunday paper on their driveways. In Louisville, Ky., in December, a branch of the Ku Klux Klan sneaked fliers inside copies of the Courier-Journal rolled up for home delivery.
And in a bold bid to recruit youths as young as 13 to the movement, the Panzerfaust record label last fall gave away thousands of CDs packed with hard-driving white-power music, distributing them in schools and malls in numerous states, including California. Sample lyrics: "Do you feel the pride as the skinheads march by? Do you see as I do that our enemies must die?"
