Jocelyn Benson’s time as a reporter for the Southern Poverty Law Center, 1998-1999, is an essential part of her origin story.
“There I was,” Benson writes in “The Purposeful Warrior,” “just shy of twenty years old, posing as a freelance journalist, meeting with leaders and members of hate groups to gather information on their activities and plans. I attended rallies and meetings, collecting and writing stories for the SPLC’s Intelligence Report.”
That’s a different tale than Benson used to tell about her time in Alabama. In earlier iterations, including on the CV presented to Wayne Law School, Benson describes herself as an investigative journalist, not someone posing as one.
Benson says her first trip was to Wofford College in South Carolina to meet an “aspiring Hitler (his words)” named Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a student at the school. Hawke founded a Neo-Nazi group called the Knights of Freedom. He hung a Swastika in his dorm room.
“I spent hours with Hawke, listening to and documenting his plans, all the while wondering if and when he would discover my own identity as an undercover investigator for a prominent civil rights think tank,” Benson writes.
Hawke was not shy about participating in media profiles back then. The Associated Press and the Boston Globe ran long features on him. But Benson felt the need to go “undercover.”
This raises an uncomfortable question: What did Jocelyn Benson say or do to gain the trust of a Neo-Nazi?
Intelligence Report, the news arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center, does not run bylines on most of its articles. If Jocelyn Benson had not spent years talking about what she did there, her work would have been harder to track down.
Benson says she “spent hours directly interviewing dozens of leaders and members of organized hate groups,” but the one she mentions by name is Hawke.
But it wasn’t Hawke’s words or deeds that the story focused on. It was Hawke’s true identity.
Before leaving his native Boston for South Carolina, Davis Wolfgang Hawke changed his name. From Andrew Britt Greenbaum.
Benson’s June 1999 story was headlined: “Hyman Greenbaum’s son hard at work with Neo-Nazi group.”
Even though Hawke’s mother was not Jewish, Benson’s goal was to make a Neo-Nazi sound even more absurd by revealing his Jewish heritage.
Benson’s approach to the story reflects an ends-justifies-the-means mentality that should be questioned as she runs for the highest office in Michigan.
Plenty of reporters covered Davis Wolfgang Hawke. They all flashed press badges and stated their intent.
Who did Hawke think Jocelyn Benson was? And why did he think she was there?
What did Undercover Jocelyn say to get an invite to Hawke’s dorm room?
Those questions are beyond answers. Hawke isn’t alive to tell his story, and Benson hasn’t given us the details.
In August 1999, Hawke hosted a white supremacist rally in Washington, D.C., but only four people showed up. They were greatly outnumbered by counter-protesters, the news media, and the police.
As the Washington Post said at the time: “Everybody showed up yesterday. Except for the instigators.”
“I’m not surprised,” Hyman Greenbaum told the Post of the failed protest.
Benson’s story quoted a California Neo-Nazi saying that “if [Hawke] is a Jew, he will have no stature left. People he is involved with will have nothing to do with him.”
With his time in the Neo-Nazi movement ended, Hawke pivoted to email scams and selling fake boner pills online. He was a pioneer of the spam email.
America Online sued Hawke and secured a $13 million judgment owing to his scamwork. At one point, AOL threatened to dig up his parents’ yard in the hopes of finding gold he might have stashed there. Ultimately, that never happened.
Then, around 2006, Hawke fell off the face of the earth. No media profiles, no rallies, no boner pills, no presence at all.
In 2017, a man’s body was found shot up inside a burned-out car in British Columbia.
Three years later, in October 2020, authorities identified the man as Davis Wolfgang Hawke.
James David Dickson is an enjoyer of Michigan. Join him in conversation on X at @downi75.
