By 1971, Pierce and Carto were openly feuding. Carto accused Pierce of stealing the Liberty Lobby mailing list and sending the individuals listed on it "poison pen" letters that vilified Carto's group. The hostilities between the two men have not abated. Carto currently blames Pierce for a dispute begun in 1993 between Liberty Lobby and another Carto-founded group, the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review.

The 1970's

Since 1974, when the National Alliance dropped the word "Youth" from its name, Pierce has run the group and edited its magazine, National Vanguard (originally titled Attack!), as well as an internal newsletter, National Alliance Bulletin (formerly called Action). The National Alliance also publishes National Vanguard Books, a catalog of racist and anti-Semitic literature. Unsolicited promotional materials about the catalog and extremist publications listing the catalog have been sent to high school and college students across the country. The principal books promoted by the National Alliance have been The Turner Diaries, a novel published in 1978, and Hunter, a second work of fiction published in 1989. (link to sections onThe Turner Diaries and Hunter .)

The 1980's

In 1985, Pierce relocated the National Alliance from Arlington, Virginia, to a 346-acre farm near Mill Point, West Virginia, which he bought for $95,000 in cash. There has been some speculation over the years that at least some of the money used for the purchase had come from the proceeds of bank and armored car robberies committed by The Order (link to info on The Order). Authorities believe that of the $4 million stolen by members of the terrorist band, $750,000 was distributed to various white supremacist allies. Tom Martinez, a one-time associate of Bob Mathews who became an FBI informant, has written that in November 1984, Mathews admitted to him that he had donated some of The Order's loot to William Pierce. That same month, Pierce bought the West Virginia farm. He converted it to a compound and called it the "Cosmotheist Community Church." Pierce then filed for Federal, state and local tax exemptions. But in 1986, the "Church" lost its state tax exemption for all but 60 acres and those buildings being used exclusively for "religious purposes."

Pierce's formation of the "Church" appears to have been a last-ditch effort to avoid paying taxes. Pierce had tried, years earlier, to acquire tax-exempt status for the National Alliance itself by claiming that his organization was "educational." But the Internal Revenue Service denied the application in 1978. While Pierce appealed, the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the IRS's decision in 1983, ruling that the National Alliance did not qualify as an educational organization. (The court's position was supported by amicus curiae briefs filed by ADL, the American Jewish Congress and the NAACP.) The court noted that Pierce's organization "repetitively appeals for action, including violence" to injure members of "named racial, religious, or ethnic groups," and added that National Alliance published materials that "cannot reasonably be considered intellectual exposition."

The 1990's

Meanwhile, Pierce continued to invest in unusual real estate ventures. In 1992, he paid $100,000 to Ben Klassen (who is now deceased), founder of the racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Christian Church of the Creator (COTC), for a 21-acre compound in Macon County, North Carolina. Klassen undersold the property, possibly in an attempt to unload his assets and avoid a civil lawsuit holding his organization vicariously responsible for the murder of an African-American sailor by a COTC member.

Pierce put the North Carolina property up for sale again almost immediately after he bought it from Klassen, with an asking price of nearly three times what he had paid. A buyer unconnected to the white-supremacist movement purchased the land a year later for $185,000. The Southern Poverty Law Center, representing the sailor's family, filed suit against Pierce, arguing that the original sale had been a fraudulent pretext to avoid paying the family damages in their claim against Klassen. On May 19, 1996, a Federal jury ruled against Pierce and ordered that he give the murdered sailor's family the $85,000 profit he made from the land sale.

In 1986, the National Alliance purchased 100 shares of AT&T stock, which enabled the group to place resolutions on the ballot of the corporation's annual shareholders meeting. The first such resolution, proposed in 1987, called for an end to AT&T's minority hiring program, on the grounds that Black people are intellectually inferior to whites. With the explicit condemnation by company officials, the resolution received 8.6 percent of shareholders' votes. The National Alliance resubmitted this proposal over the next three years, with no appreciable change in support. In 1991, the NA group submitted a new resolution calling for AT&T to stop doing all business with Israel. Following a vigorous campaign against the resolution, it was voted down by 96 percent of shareholders. The following year AT&T blocked the National Alliance from resubmitting the anti-Israel proposal; the Securities and Exchange Commission upheld their effort against Pierce's group.