Kevin Alfred Strom, a long-time neo-Nazi leader and recent head of the Virginia-based National Vanguard, was arrested in Charlottesville, Virginia, on January 4, 2007, following an indictment on a federal charge of possessing child pornography. In addition, the January 3 indictment also charges Strom with witness tampering for allegedly physically assaulting and mentally intimidating an unnamed witness.
The indictment alleges that from October 2005 through August 2006, Strom knowingly possessed or attempted to possess material containing multiple images of child pornography; it refers to four image files that were allegedly removed from a 40-gigabyte hard drive possessed by Strom.
Strom was known for his obsession with young females. On a Web site he operated, he posted numerous images of idealized white women, including many of young girls. Ironically, in introducing the images, Strom wrote that his tastes, "run to works which exalt Nature and the human body, which give us a glimpse of an ideal world which exists as an archetype in the minds and souls of the men and women of the West, and which predate or transcend the degeneration of our culture which has been accelerating in this century."
Strom, until July 2006 the director of National Vanguard, first gained a name giving speeches on the neo-Nazi National Alliance's American Dissident Voices radio show in the early 1990s. He was a devoted follower of William Pierce, the founder of the Alliance, whom he considered his mentor. In April 2005, Strom and fellow activists were expelled by Pierce's successors for attempting an alleged coup. Strom, who had also been in charge of the Alliance's magazine, National Vanguard, subsequently formed a new organization, which he also named National Vanguard. A number of the Alliance's local chapters followed Strom and it appeared that the new organization would take a leading role in the neo-Nazi movement.
However, some National Vanguard members soon questioned Strom's leadership skills, while others complained about Strom's "domineering" wife. By March 2006, the Tampa and Denver units, two of the largest and most active chapters, left the National Vanguard to form their own organization, the Nationalist Coalition. Strom also had a falling out with Ed Fields, a long-time racist who had joined the National Alliance and then associated himself with the National Vanguard. Fields, who had appointed Strom the managing editor of his white supremacist newspaper The Truth at Last in November 2005, fired him in the spring of 2006, and Strom's situation continued to go downhill from there.
In July 2006, Strom took a "leave of absence" from the National Vanguard, citing "health and family matters" and alluding to unspecified serious mistakes he had made.
