Neo Nazis believe potato farmer ‘scary Larry’ is informant who had affair with SPLC boss, was given $1.2M
Neo-Nazis believe a mysterious potato farmer known as “Scary Larry” is the infiltrator who prosecutors say shacked up with Southern Poverty Law Center boss Heidi Beirich.
Former National Alliance member Lawrence W. Myers — an Arabic-speaking, guitar-strumming, “paranoid” man — was even kicked out of the racist group for being a spy, sources said.
Multiple ex-members told The Post they believe Myers is the person labelled with the pseudonym “F-9” in a recent federal indictment, who feds claim was paid $1.2 million from SPLC donor funds.
“Many people, especially [former National Alliance chairman] Erich Gliebe believe that Myers was a federal agent,” one source told The Post.
“[Gliebe] once said he acquired [Myers’s] phone records and he had several calls to the FBI and the SPLC. That’s how [Gliebe] got the smoking gun on Lawrence.”
Myers was, at one time, close to Gliebe within the often paranoid and accusatory world of white power racists and had a particularly menacing side, according to sources.
“I think he was listening to my phone calls. He would know things I talked to other people about on the phone,” one former member of National Alliance told The Post, noting he also had an aggressive demeanor.
“I had an overwhelming feeling of danger [in his presence]. I felt like he could have killed me.” The Post could not find any record of Myers being violent.
In April the SPLC was indicted on charges of wire fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering as Feds alleged the Alabama-based anti-hate nonprofit defrauded donors by secretly using over $4 million in contributions to fuel the groups they were fighting against, embedding informants within white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
In August, Beirich who was a director at the nonprofit, was arrested for her role in the alleged scheme. She had pleaded not guilty and is currently awaiting trial.
The indictment against her claims she was paying the F-9 informant while being involved in a romantic relationship with them — sharing a house and two bank accounts, with $140,000 of donor money used to pay for the couple’s living expenses.
Myers is now said to live a reclusive life on a North Carolina farm just a short drive from a home owned by Beirich, The Post can exclusively reveal. Both he and Beirich could not be reached for comment.
The indictment reveals subtle clues regarding F-9’s identity, among those that they were engaged in “fundraising for the National Alliance.”
“There were few specific fundraising efforts made. The only person who explicitly raised funds was Lawrence Myers, who would run a fundraising meeting segment at every annual leadership conference. He was very good at it,” one National Alliance member told The Post.
The indictment states F-9 had been an informant for the SPLC since at least 2003, and had infiltrated the National Alliance at the instruction of the nonprofit.
Sources described Myers as a ladies’ man who never quite fit in.
“He was a member of some odd Christian religious sect that obeyed all the weird Old Testament laws and festivals. He once said he attended some big meeting called the Feast of Tabernacles every year,” a longtime member told The Post.
That alone put Myers at odds with a core National Alliance belief, as the group’s members reject Christianity due to its “Semitic roots” and largely follow a religion called Cosmotheism, developed by Alliance founder William Pierce.
One reformed ex-member told The Post how Myers, 68, once secretly helped him leave the organization, privately offering advice and financial support while publicly trashing the defector as a traitor.
“He offered to help me. He told me how to keep data on everyone in case they came after me,” the ex-member said. “He’s absolutely an informant. Lawrence is extremely intelligent, probably one of the most intelligent men I have ever met. When I first heard about [F-9], Lawrence was the first person that popped into my head.
Old message board conversations shared with The Post add fuel to the flames.
Gliebe — who, incredibly, also later turned out also to be an SPLC informant —”was mentored by none other than the known FBI informant and SPLC mole, Lawrence Myers,” National Alliance stalwart and maintenance man Fred Streed, who passed away in Feb., claimed in a post to members in 2003.
Gliebe, a former boxer known as the Aryan Barbarian, was unmasked by Fox News in July as being informant F-42, allegedly paid $155,000 by the SPLC between 2016 and 2023.
Gliebe did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.
Bizarrely, just before joining the National Alliance in the early 2000s Myers found himself twice at the center of the biggest news story in the country—the impending Oklahoma City bombing trial.
In 1996 Myers was a reporter for Indiana-based alternative news magazine Media Bypass, which catered to anti-government and right-wing militia groups and was one of only two journalists to land a sit-down interview with bomber Timothy McVeigh as he awaited trial. (McVeigh was later convicted of killing 168 people in the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in US history).
The fawning write-up called McVeigh “neither monster nor madman,” and fawned: “He smiles easily and often […] His sapphire blue eyes are expressive, and when speaking, he looks directly into your eyes.”
Myers then became responsible for getting a juror sympathetic to McVeigh kicked off the grand jury, igniting conspiracy theories he was working for the Feds and had exposed the juror on purpose.
Federal grand juror Hoppy Heidelberg was dismissed in October 1995 after Myers published an interview with the juror alleging government cover-ups and suppressed evidence in the case.
Following the juror saga, Myers was reportedly fired in 1996 due to readers “cancelling subscriptions because of their views on Myers” being a fed, which his bosses said they found no proof of, according to a Nov. 1996 report in Conspiracy Nation.
Sources who were unaware of Myers’s journalistic past told The Post he spoke Arabic and was National Alliance’s staff photographer, regularly bringing his camera to gatherings and photographing members.
Myers also published three books on spying and bomb-making — effectively how-to manuals disguised as “for information only.”
One of them, “Improvised Radio Detonation Techniques,” details how to “modify a cordless or cellular mobile phone… to detonate explosives,” according to the book’s description.
Another, titled “Spycomm: Covert Communication Techniques of the Underground,” tells readers how to “use improvised microfilm, steal phone service, create unbreakable codes and more.”
While The Post couldn’t independently confirm F-9’s identity, clues peppered through the indictment match up with Myers. The indictment reveals that F-9 had a base in North Carolina. Feds also say the informant had a personal bank account with First Citizens Bank, which has a branch in the tiny North Carolina town where Myers lives, pop. 1,608.
Beirich, who never remarried after her English professor husband Kevin Ray Hicks passed away in 2011, owned two properties during the years covered by the indictment, records show: her primary residence in Montgomery, Ala. and a second home 250 miles away in Ellijay, Ga.
Since at least 2008 Myers has lived in a North Carolina border town that’s a one-hour drive from Beirich’s Georgia home. Curiously, records obtained by The Post show Myers, a North Carolina resident, obtained a Georgia fishing license. Although Beirich moved to California in recent years, her Georgia home sat directly on the Coosawattee River, a local hotspot for black bass and trout.
Following her departure from the SPLC in 2019, Beirich returned to her hometown of Palm Springs, where her father, Russ Beirich, had once been mayor.
“The name Beirich is not unknown in Palm Springs” a family friend of Beirich’s told The Post. “Heidi has devoted her whole life to fight for the underdog and people who have been wronged. As a youth she was never one who was mean. She always went and sat next to the unpopular student.”
The SPLC — who did not respond to a request for comment — pleaded not guilty, maintaining confidential field sources were standard investigative tools to monitor extremist threats. The trial is scheduled to begin next month.
“I absolutely love that man. He was sane in a sea of nuts. He was kind,” another reformed ex-National Alliance member told The Post of Myers.
“He went back to farming and growing potatoes. That’s all I know.”