This article was originally published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and is reprinted with permission.
News reports say an American man who has been linked to a neo-Nazi group that allegedly plotted violent attacks in the United States now lives in Russia.
The Guardian newspaper and the BBC reported on January 24 that the leader of the group that calls itself The Base is a man who has used the aliases of Norman Spear and Roman Wolf.
They said the man is in fact named Rinaldo Nazzaro, who moved to St. Petersburg sometime in 2018.
Russian social media and other open source information point to a man living in St. Petersburg who taught English to foreigners there.
There was no response to multiple phone calls made by RFE/RL to a number affiliated with the man’s online advertisement for English lessons. Public records searches and other open source media show a man with the name Rinaldo Nazzaro living in New York, New Jersey, and suburban Washington, D.C. in recent years. He reportedly married a Russian woman in 2012.
A white supremacist group whose members espouse a radical racist ideology calling for a race war to cause anarchy, The Base has been around since 2018, according to U.S. court records.
It gained wide public attention earlier this month when U.S. law enforcement arrested two Americans and one Canadian in Maryland, just days before a major gun-rights rally held in the capital city of the U.S. state of Virginia.
According to documents filed in U.S. federal court, the men were accused of plotting to spark violence at the January 19 rally, which attracted tens of thousands of protesters and ended peacefully with no violence and only a few arrests.
Authorities arrested four other men linked to the group in two other U.S. states.
According to the news reports, Nazarro, using his aliases, was a frequent participant in white supremacist and racist chat rooms, often recruiting people with military backgrounds to join the group.
A company he was affiliated with in the early 2010s was called Omega Solutions International, which said “its associates worked with various government and military agencies, and had “experience conducting intelligence analysis for government agencies, military organizations, and private businesses.”
The website was shuttered sometime after August 19.
