Burt Colucci (left), an unidentified man center, Jon Minadeo II (right, holding microphone)
On Saturday afternoon, a group of men with the white supremacist group ‘Goyim Defense League’ (GDL) were seen riding around in a rented U-Haul pickup truck and performing Nazi salutes while throwing antisemitic propaganda onto people’s lawns in neighborhoods between Edgewood Drive and Lake Hollingsworth Drive before being stopped by Lakeland police.
Resident Valerie Morrow videotaped some of the neo-Nazi activity on Saturday. She contacted LkldNow and provided the video, saying she was on her way home from work when she got a phone call that masked men in a truck threw antisemitic literature onto lawns in their neighborhood off Edgewood Drive. When they spotted Morrow, they did a Nazi salute after the truck turned onto Crystal Lake Drive and also began videotaping her.
LkldNowwas able to identifie two men in the truck: Burt Colucci and Jon Minadea I.
Colucci, who has lived in Lakeland in the past, identifies himself as the “commander” of a neo-Nazi group called the National Socialist Movement, which is based in Kissimmee – where he told LkldNow last year that he lives. In Saturday’s video, he is seen in the back right of the truck, sitting next to Minadea.
Colucci was arrested twice last year, appearing in court in Arizona in January to answer three charges, including one felony, related to a 2021 incident in which he is accused of pointing a firearm at Black men in a hotel parking lot. Colucci has lived in at least two Lakeland addresses since 1997 but also has a listed residential address in Jonesboro, Ark., and currently claims he lives in Kissimmee, where the NSM has a post office box as its national headquarters.
Another man in the truck on Saturday, dressed in a bright blue suit, is Minadea, the host of Goyim TV, who held a microphone with a “GTV” mic flag on Saturday. Goyim is a Yiddish word Jewish people use to describe non-Jewish people. He has been written about extensively for his neo-Nazi activities in California.
The NGO StopAntisemitism has previously named Jon Minadeo II as their ‘Antisemites of the Week’ multiple times due to his ongoing antisemitic targeting and harassment of the Jewish people.
GDL’s work on Saturday brought them within half a mile of Lakeland’s Temple Emanuel synagogue. Rabbi David Goldstein said he was unaware of the incident, but declined to comment further.
Several people sent LkldNow photos of plastic bags found on their lawns. Those pamphlets contain propaganda deriding Jewish people for owning major media corporations and that “every single aspect of the COVID agenda is Jewish.”
Those bags also contained pellets. It was uncertain if they were pellets for a grill – possibly a subtle reference to the Holocaust, when bodies of Jews were burned in the ovens of concentration camps — or if they were rat poison pellets.
Minadea and another man in a mask got out of the truck bed and approached Morrow, filming her as she filmed them. “You can’t keep following us around like this. You’re harassing us,” the masked man said, showing her his pamphlet. “You know they’re all Jewish, right? They’re all Jewish. And we don’t like it. Gun control, immigration, media, COVID. They’re all Jewish. You’re not helping our cause.”
Then Minadea approached the passenger side of her car.
“Hi – could you stop filming us please? It’s kind of weird,” he said. “We’re exercising our First Amendment. I’m sure you might have a dog in this fight, but if you’re Jewish, we recommend that you just tell on your people. Stopping hiding the truth, OK. Just tell on your Jewish people.”
Jon Minadea II recently moved from Petaluma, CA to Florida and took “the functional headquarters and nerve center of the nation’s most prolific antisemitic propaganda group” with him.
Morrow said she stopped videotaping, called the police and a Lakeland Police officer arrived quickly.
“The officer, a woman, told me, ‘I have this now’ in a very reassuring manner,” Morrow said. “I could hear her tell them, ‘This is a traffic stop now’ and heard the one guy in the blue jacket crying, ‘Why, why?’”
In February 2022, about 20 National Socialist Movement members hung swastika-adorned banners proclaiming “Vax the Jews” and promoting the Goyim Defense League’s GoyimTV platform on an I-4 overpass near an Orlando shopping center. StopAntisemitism reported the rally was live streamed on neo-Nazi websites.
The Orlando Sentinel reported that Colucci and Joshua Terrell of Indiana were charged with “battery evidencing prejudice after video showed the two attacking a Jewish man who confronted them as they shouted antisemitic slurs by Alafaya Trail and Waterford Lakes Parkway. The battery charges, normally first-degree misdemeanors, are being upgraded to third-degree felonies under Florida’s hate crime law.”