LAST DAYS OF A BONEHEAD: MARTIN COX IS CHECKING OUT

This guy has been around for over 30 years, and that is 30 years too long. In recent years fate apparently started to agree, and he may be nearing the end of his short life because he has a bad heart. Apparently fate’s got jokes as well.

One People’s Project

Over the weekend, a show was held at a bar called McGuire’s Pub in Mahanoy City, PA a town just 13 miles outside of Hazelton and 50 miles from Reading. Neo-Nazi musicians came together to perform at a fundraiser for one of their own, a fellow musician who performed in several Hammerskin-associated bands It is almost ironic that Martin Cox is dying because he has a failing heart.

Cox, a native of Orange County, CA, has been around since the early 1980s. A disciple of Tom Metzger of White Aryan Resistance he was there when Metzger visited the Oprah Winfrey Show as Metzger’s son John participated in a 1987 on skinheads. He gained a little bit of noteriety for starting a ruckus on the set minutes after he said that “It’s a proven fact” that Winfrey and another black women were monkeys and eventually was thrown out of the studio, prompting all of his fellow neo-Nazis to walk out of the studio in protest. But he was better known as a member of hate bands such as Final War, White Knuckle Driver, Youngland and others.

Cox played in Youngland with Wade Michael Page, the Hammerskin who shot and killed six people in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin before taking his own life. In 2003 Keystone State “Skinheads” hosted a show near Harrisburg that featured Youngland, and the organizer of that show Steve Smith, who is now a Republican Committeman in Pittston, PA, was at the benefit for Cox last weekend. Cox also hosted internet radio programs, and even there he would find himself working with eventual murderers. In 2009 he was hosting the show 88 Degrees with Jeremy Moody, a member of Crew 38, a Hammerskin support group. On one particular show, Cox and Moody threatened Gustavo Arellano, a reporter for the alternative publication OC Weekly, because of a story that he wrote about his friend Bret Hicks, who along with other neo-Nazis went to a Mexican neighborhood in Huntingdon Beach, CA with a plan to attack a Mexican homeless person, only to get beaten down by neighborhood residents and eventually sent to jail. “I know who he is, where he works,” Cox said on the program. I know everything about this dude, We have his home address. We have everything we need to know about that dude.” The reporter was never harmed, but four years later, Moody and his wife Christine will murder a convicted sex offender and his wife in South Carolina and are now spending the rest of their lives in prison. In 2007 however, he was no longer in Orange County, having fled his longtime home because according to a report – ironically by the reporter he threatened – Mexicans had taken over. That was also the year when he started having health problems and things have only gotten worse. One recent report notes that only 18 percent of his heart is functioning and he almost died a few times, suffering two heart attacks. When Arellano wrote about his health issues he made an observation: “(M)aybe if Marty cut down on the hate, his ticker wouldn’t be so bad?”

The fundraiser at McGuire’s Pub was one of many efforts by Cox’s Nazi collegues in the past few years to pay for a heart transplant, an expensive and lofty goal considering the recipient, to say the least. Heart transplants average over $600,000 in costs, and if the Facebook page promoting the event is any indication, the show might have fallen way short of those goals, witih only 29 persons committing to going. It was put on by a fairly new outfit called New Nation Productions, whose own Facebook page says it “specializes in organizing rock events aimed at anti-communist and right wing political movement.” On Oct. 4, these same promoters will hold another fundraiser, but is has not been said specifically what the benefit is for. It is also not known if McGuire’s Pub knows the nature of the shows that are being hosted at their establishment.

It looks as though Cox has not been online since May, but his supporters still keep people up to date on his progress. Four days ago, it was posted on one fundraiser page that an infection reportedly had him going into heart failure. If this is indeed his last go around, he leaves this earth where pretty much everyone he has ever attacked is not only still around but stronger than ever. While it is ironic he needs a new heart, it is even more ironic that Oprah Winfrey, the woman he insulted 27 years ago by calling her a monkey, could today buy that heart hundreds of times over while he begs for the cash to do so.