Caution: This story refers to racist and homophobic language.
It’s a recent Monday afternoon and Paul Nicholas Miller is doing the same thing he’s been doing almost every day for months.
Dressed head-to-toe as the Joker, wearing a full face of makeup and bright reflective sunglasses, Miller is cruising the online chatting website Omegle, which lets complete strangers video chat with each other at random.
Miller’s face lights up every time he is coupled with a Black person, or somebody of Latin descent. Anybody who is non-white breaks his face into a grotesque grin, accentuated by the creepy makeup.
He will crow the N-word into the camera whenever a Black person comes on screen.
If he can engage his prey, Miller – who goes by the moniker “Gypsy Crusader” online and has amassed a following of thousands – will shout spurious statistics at them. He’ll rant about Black crime rates or how Jewish people control the economy. He’ll shout at anybody — from adults to young children — about how non-white and LGBTQ people have ruined America. He’ll lean sideways and unfurl the swastika flag that serves as his backdrop.
Miller punctuates his onslaughts by “firing” a toy gun that reveals a red-and-black flag with racial slurs. When he meets a fellow neo-Nazi online — and many of them crowd onto Omegle when they know there’s a Gypsy Crusader session happening — he’ll greet them with a Nazi salute and shout “white power.” His fanboys often giggle, before showing off their own swastika flags or Nazi artifacts.
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Miller isn’t that different from countless trolls who have created their own racist gimmicks to sell merchandise and cultivate attention from a legion of online fans.
Except for one thing: Miller waged his campaign of hate while in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Miller, who is 34, was convicted of aggravated assault and drug possession in 2007 in New Jersey. He was arrested again in March 2021 on charges of illegally possessing firearms after the FBI raided his home in Florida. He was sentenced later that year to serve 41 months in federal prison, but was released in January after spending less than two years locked up.
He then entered a gray area of “incarceration” under the banner of the federal Residential Reentry Management (RRM) network — essentially a system of halfway houses and home confinement monitored by regional RRM offices.
The Bureau of Prisons wouldn’t divulge Miller’s whereabouts when USA TODAY first inquired about him in mid-April. Citing inmate privacy rules, the Bureau only said the convicted felon was under the supervision of an RRM office in Philadelphia.
But after USA TODAY sent officials a list of questions about Miller’s access to the internet while in federal custody, and his racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic activity online, the BOP acted swiftly.
Within days, Miller was on his way back to an actual prison.
“Out of an abundance of caution and in response to information recently received, Paul Miller was removed from community confinement and placed back into a secure facility awaiting transport to the custody of the Bureau of Prisons,” reads a statement from a BOP spokesman.
His last post online was on April 27.
A business built on hateful trolling
In addition to his hateful confrontations on Omegle, Miller spent the months he was out of prison building an online business selling his merchandise — signed posters featuring his image; joker “patches” that can be sewn onto clothing; baseball caps featuring a swastika. He says he’s working on selling versions of the toy guys he fires on his webcasts.
Throughout the spring, Miller posted incessantly across the extremist far-right internet. His account on Gab, a social media service popular with extremists, has more than 10,000 followers. His hundreds of posts, going back to Miller’s release in January, are mostly videos of his racist and harassing webcasts, interspersed with ads for merch.
Miller was perhaps most active on Telegram, however. On at least two accounts, he posted videos and appeals for donations. He shared clips of Black people looting stores or getting into fights. His posts had recently become obsessed with LGBTQ issues, particularly stories about people transitioning genders, which he made clear he found abhorrent.
In between were short videos of Miller showing off his merch and asking for donations, which have been coming in.
Megan Squire, deputy director for data analytics at the Southern Poverty Law Center, tracked Miller’s cryptocurrency donations over the months he was out of prison. She tallied total donations of $5,218 up to the day Miller was again locked up.
“He just did like 500 withdrawals, one after the other, it was kind of nuts,” Squire said. “ It was many, many hundreds of dollars.“
And cryptocurrency is just one way Miller collects money from his followers. He also said he accepts payments on the app CashApp, as well as cash and checks.
In the last few weeks, Miller also resurrected an effort he first organized on Telegram in 2021 to harass and “dox” people of color, LGBTQ people and people of Jewish descent.
The Telegram channel “Project Mayhem,” which functions similarly to a Twitter account, has amassed more than 1,500 followers who assist in organized “raids” promoted on the channel. Usually, the target is identified by their social media accounts, but in recent weeks the channel has taken to fully “doxing” its targets: providing full names, addresses, phone numbers and emails of people, then encouraging followers to target them with offensive messages and images.
Squire said these “raids” are a way for Miller to attract more followers and also to build a sense of community with his fans.
“They don’t have the Klan clubhouses in the woods any more, right? Everybody’s online, so they have to create some kind of way that they can all get together and, I guess, engage in mayhem, like the title says,” Squire said.
Telegram did not respond to a request for comment.
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Under the watch of the Bureau of Prisons
Miller has been engaged in all this activity while still, technically, serving time for the crimes he committed in 2021.
But because he wasn’t physically in a prison, Miller had far more unfettered access to the internet, and could get away with a wide variety of activities that might be contrary to his parole, said Kimora, an expert in probation and a professor at the John Jay School of Justice in New York.
It’s not clear whether federal authorities knew the details of the harassment “raids” that were happening before Miller’s arrest, but they knew he was an online threat. The U.S. Attorney’s Office, in an announcement about Miller’s sentencing, noted that he “had made hundreds of internet posts publicizing his animosity towards various minority groups and his support for the initiation of a race-based civil war in the United States.”
Kimora, who only uses one name, said regardless of whether Miller is physically in a prison, federal authorities have a duty to oversee his incarceration, especially since he has a history of using the internet for ill purposes.
“This guy needs supervision, for crying out loud!” Kimora said. “The federal government is obligated through the Department of Justice, the Bureau of Prisons, to monitor these people extremely closely, so how the heck is this guy getting all over the place and doing all this stuff?
A spokesperson wrote in a statement to USA TODAY that “the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) takes seriously our duty to protect the individuals entrusted in our custody, as well as maintain the safety of correctional staff and the community.”
Asked if Miller had violated the terms of his incarceration with his posts, the spokesperson sent a link to internal BOP rules and wrote:
“While we do not discuss whether a particular inmate is the subject of allegations, investigations, or sanctions, we can tell you all inmates under the supervision of the BOP who are found to be in violation of the Inmate Discipline Program policy are subject to sanctions and may even lead to a possible transfer.”
The next day, a bureau spokesperson said, Miller was on his way back to prison.
