Leo Vincelette Felton (born 1970, Silver Spring, Maryland) is a former American white supremacist who was convicted of bank robbery and plotting to blow up Jewish and black landmarks around Boston. While the child of an inter-racial couple, Felton, in 2001, wrote a letter in which he criticized his parents and said he is "ever an unrepentant enemy of the multicultural myth."[1]
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Leo Felton's father, Calvin Felton (b. 1930), is a black architect, while his mother, Corinne Vincelette (b. 1931), is a former nun who became involved in the civil rights movement and had a Jewish grandparent.[2] His parents divorced when he was two, and his mother came out as a lesbian and started a relationship with a woman. Felton was institutionalized at age 10 by his mother (both he and his father say this was unnecessary), and thereafter he committed a series of petty thefts. During his middle to late adolescence, Felton spent several years as a so-called 2 Tone non-racist skinhead in the multicultural punk and skinhead underground of Washington, DC; during which time he repeatedly came into conflict with white power skinhead gangs of nearby Baltimore. During this period, Felton had many Jewish and African American friends and associates.
Felton spent 11 years (1990-2001) in prison for the attempted murder of a taxi driver during a road rage incident. According to Felton, his incarceration provided him with an opportunity to observe how different races reacted when integration was enforced and societal stigmas over racism were not in action to civilize conduct. He claims that white people in prison were under a continual state of siege by people of other races, and that he was welcomed by whites. His prison sentence was extended for attacking two black inmates.[3] In prison, he became an organizer for white supremacist groups, organizing book reviews and exercise while obscuring his ancestry. He found inspiration from the White Order of Thule and read Francis Parker Yockey's Imperium, which led him to believe that race was spiritual instead of biological.[1][4]
Out of prison and married, Felton began an affair with a 21 year old white supremacist. Felton robbed a bank with a friend from prison and forged money in order to buy materials to create a fertilizer bomb. It is unclear what the target was to be. An attendant at a donut shop spotted a counterfeit $20 Felton tried to pass him. He alerted an off-duty Boston police officer, who then arrested Felton. Felton was sentenced to 21 years in 2002 for bank robbery, conspiracy to commit bank robbery and other crimes.