In nearly 10 years working undercover for the FBI, Joseph Moore helped foil at least two murder plots, according to court records.
Today, he and his family live under new names in a Florida subdivision of manicured lawns where his kids play in the street. Geese wander slowly between man-made lakes. Apart from testifying in court, the 50-year-old has never discussed his undercover work in the KKK publicly.
While operating inside this first klan group, Moore alerted the feds to a plot to murder a Hispanic truck driver. Then, he says, he pointed the FBI toward a deputy with theDuring Moore’s years in the United Northern and Southern Knights, the FBI also identified a member of the klan cell working for the Fruitland Park, Florida, police department. Moore said he’d provided identifying information that was useful in that case.
A Ku Klux Klan"blood oath" signed by Joseph Moore, an informant for the FBI, is photographed at the Columbia County Courthouse in Lake City, Fla., Friday, April 16, 2021. On Jan. 30, 2015, less than two years after Moore had signed it, a murder plot with other klansmen was in motion, and he was involved. Moore was not a klansman before working for the FBI, he said. He said he joined because the government approached him, and asked for his help.
“You can’t tell them. And they continue to probe because they want to know what’s going on in your life. So there’s this concern that you have to lie to your own family and I didn’t want to be lying to my family,” he said. It was at a cross-burning ceremony in December 2014 that Charles Newcomb, the “Exalted Cyclops” of the chapter, pulled him aside to discuss a scheme to kill a Black man. Warren Williams was a former inmate who’d gotten into a fight with one of their klan brothers, a correctional officer named Thomas Driver. Driver, corrections Sgt. David Moran and Newcomb wanted Williams dead.
“I was on track to uncover more activity in law enforcement, but the immediate threat to the public with the murder plot was a priority,” Moore said. “And I was only one person. There was only so much I could do.” By then the work had taken an enormous toll on his mental and physical health. He says the character of Joe Moore, Grand Knight Hawk of the KKK, had to develop a kinship and almost familial relations with those he was investigating in order to make it out alive.
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