A senior Southern Poverty Law Center official carried on a romantic relationship with an informant embedded in a neo-Nazi organization, and together, the pair allegedly siphoned $1.2 million in donor funds through joint bank accounts over two decades, a federal superseding indictment charges.
The June 2 indictment from the Department of Justice lays out an arrangement that reads less like anti-extremism work and more like a self-enrichment scheme dressed in civil-rights clothing. The SPLC, an Alabama-based nonprofit that has built an $800 million war chest by telling donors it fights hate, now stands charged with wire fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering conspiracy.
At the center of the allegations is the woman the indictment calls "Employee-2," described as the "person who would become Director of the SPLC's Intelligence Project." The New York Post reported that the details in the indictment match Heidi Beirich, a 58-year-old fascism expert who directed the SPLC's Intelligence Project from 2012 to 2019 and joined the organization in 1999. Beirich did not respond to the Post's requests for comment. Neither did the SPLC.
The indictment identifies an informant known only as "F-9" who "infiltrated the neo-Nazi organization National Alliance." But the relationship between Employee-2 and F-9 went far beyond handler and source.
The indictment states plainly:
"[Beirich] was also in a romantic relationship with F-9. During this relationship, [Beirich] and F-9 shared a house and two bank accounts."
Between 2015 and 2021, the indictment alleges, approximately $140,000 in donor money flowed from the SPLC's operating account and landed in those joint bank accounts. That $140,000 represented roughly 66 percent of all money ever deposited into the couple's shared accounts. Beirich then allegedly used the funds to cover the couple's personal living expenses.
The total paid to F-9 over twenty years reached approximately $1.2 million, the indictment states. Tax filings reviewed by the Post show Beirich earned $190,000 a year in salary and benefits from the SPLC before her departure. Property records indicate she owned a vacation home in Ellijay, Georgia, in addition to her Montgomery, Alabama, residence during the years covered by the indictment.
The financial arrangement with F-9 was not the only allegation. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel announced the charges on April 21, accusing the SPLC of engaging "in the active promotion of racist groups at the same time that the SPLC was denouncing the same groups on its website."
Patel put it more bluntly. He charged that the SPLC gave hate groups over $4 million to keep promoting their ideologies, "thus giving them something to point out and seek donors to fight against."
Let that sink in. The federal government's charge is that America's most prominent anti-hate organization was bankrolling the very extremism it marketed to donors as the threat justifying their contributions. If the allegations hold, the SPLC wasn't draining the swamp. It was keeping the swamp wet enough to fundraise from.
And while F-9 collected SPLC money, the indictment alleges the informant was simultaneously raising money for the National Alliance and helping "carry out its extremist activities."
The indictment describes another episode that captures the alleged lawlessness of the SPLC's intelligence operation. In 2014, a source broke into National Alliance headquarters in West Virginia and "stole approximately 25 boxes of documents," transported them across state lines into North Carolina, copied them, and returned the originals.
Employee-2 then allegedly used the stolen material to write a 2015 article for the SPLC's "Hatewatch" section. The Post identified a second informant, referred to as "F-39" in the indictment, as Randolph Dilloway, an accountant who had bounced among six other extremist groups before landing at the National Alliance. The SPLC allegedly paid Dilloway approximately $6,000 to take responsibility for the burglary.
Beirich herself named Dilloway in the 2015 article, describing him as a defector who had organized and copied key documents. She wrote that "Dilloway's reputation in the white racist subculture has always been conflicted" and called him a "quirky accountant" who "has been exploited for his skills by at least a half dozen hate groups since 2004."
The stolen documents later became the subject of a 2019 lawsuit in Maryland. Glen K. Allen, a lawyer, claimed his name was associated with the National Alliance based on privileged and confidential materials, and that the exposure cost him his job at the Baltimore City Law Department. Allen named Beirich and another SPLC figure, Mark Potok, as defendants. The case was thrown out in 2021.
The National Alliance was founded by William Pierce in 1974. When Pierce died in 2002, the group had around 2,500 members. It collapsed fast. By 2013, membership had cratered from roughly 1,400 to around 20. Former chairman Erich Gliebe sent a letter to followers that September announcing the group was ending its membership program and abandoning dues-paying chapters.
The National Alliance had, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist.
Yet the SPLC kept writing about it. The organization published nearly a dozen articles about the National Alliance after 2013, according to the Post's review. For an $800 million nonprofit that depends on donor alarm about rising extremism, a defunct hate group with 20 members apparently still made useful copy.
William White Williams, the 78-year-old National Alliance chairman, told the Post from his home in east Tennessee that the indictment's details matched what happened to his group. He said he was stumped by F-9's identity but had no doubts about Employee-2.
Williams speculated about how the SPLC recruited its sources from inside the movement:
"I think some of those cluckers wanted to get out of the movement and they went to the SPLC for help. But instead of helping them, [the SPLC] said, 'Why don't you stay in and get paid?'"
The Beirich allegations are not the only informant scandal to emerge from the SPLC indictment. The Post previously unmasked two other informants named in the filing: Bradley Scott Jenkins, described as a one-legged Imperial Wizard in the KKK who took the nonprofit's money while revitalizing a once-defunct KKK splinter group, and April Chambers, a Georgia mother and KKK member who runs a home cleaning business.
The picture that emerges from the indictment is not one of rogue employees acting alone. It describes a systematic pattern, donor money flowing to extremist informants, those informants sustaining the very groups the SPLC told the public it was dismantling, and the SPLC continuing to raise hundreds of millions of dollars on the strength of its anti-hate brand.
For years, conservatives have warned that the SPLC had become less a civil-rights watchdog and more a political weapon, labeling mainstream conservative and Christian organizations as "hate groups" while sitting on a mountain of cash. Those warnings were dismissed as right-wing grievance.
Now the Department of Justice has put the SPLC's conduct before a federal court. The charges are not about labeling disputes or ideological bias. They are about wire fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering conspiracy. They are about donor dollars allegedly ending up in the joint bank account of a senior official and her lover inside a neo-Nazi organization.
The SPLC has not responded publicly to the superseding indictment. Beirich has not commented. The full identity of F-9 remains unknown. The case has not been tried, and the SPLC is entitled to its day in court.
But the facts already in the public record, an $800 million nonprofit, over $4 million allegedly paid to hate groups, a director allegedly sharing bank accounts with a neo-Nazi informant, and a burglary covered up with a $6,000 payoff, demand answers that silence cannot provide.
Donors who wrote checks to fight hate deserve to know whether their money fed it instead. That question now belongs to a federal courtroom, which is exactly where it should be.
