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Ex-racist leader shot dead
By TARA BRAUTIGAM

TORONTO (CP) - Wolfgang Droege, the one-time leader of white supremacist group the Heritage Front, was shot dead Wednesday in a normally quiet residential neighbourhood in the east end of Toronto.

Several neighbours said the man killed in the four-storey apartment building was Droege, but police wouldn't immediately confirm the victim's identity. Kimberly Gorman, who was asleep in her home at the time of the shooting, said several officers stood outside the door of Droege's apartment hours after the killing that rattled area residents.

"People are pretty upset and pretty shocked," said Gorman, who has lived in the apartment for 34 years.

"He was a nice man."

The early childhood educator said despite Droege's sordid past, he was always approachable and polite in their casual lobby and hallway encounters.

"He would talk about his vacations . . . he went to Europe a lot. He was a very healthy guy, he would talk a lot about his health and vitamins and what he ate," said Gorman, who lived a floor above Droege.

"I think he was trying to let the past be his past."

Another longtime resident said Droege had lived there for at least 10 years.

"I knew him to see him," said Donna Davis. "Definitely, I'm positive that that's the man who is dead."

The 55-year-old Droege was said to have associated with recently deported Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel.

Droege was born in Germany and moved in the early 1970s to Canada, where he became a citizen.

In 1976, he joined the Ku Klux Klan and tried to start a branch of the organization in Toronto.

Five years later, he helped organize a failed attempt to invade the tiny Caribbean country of Dominica and overthrow its government. The coup failed, and he was sentenced to three years in prison in the United States.

Const. Kristine Bacharach said an arrest was made promptly after the shooting, but that officers had not yet contacted relatives of the victim.

"The family members haven't been notified, and he hasn't been positively identified yet," Bacharach said.

Police rushed to the scene after a receiving a call about gunfire. When officers arrived, they found a man in a second-floor corridor, dead from a gunshot wound. They soon learned that a suspect had barricaded himself in an apartment.

"For a brief period of time, we had a situation that was described as either a barricaded suspect or a hostage situation," Supt. Bob Clarke of Toronto police told reporters.

"There was no hostage situation - it was a barricaded suspect."

Members of the Toronto police emergency task force were called to the scene and spoke with the suspect over the phone before making an arrest.

"I understand there is a brother of the suspect who was also called and came to the scene," Clarke said.

He added that the brother and the suspect spoke during the incident but could not say whether that played a role in the suspect's arrest.

Residents in the immediate area of the shooting were evacuated from their homes, and a nearby school was put in lockdown.

Clarke said it was uncertain if the shooter knew the victim.

In 1985, Droege was arrested in Alabama and charged with cocaine possession and a weapons offence. He was deported to Canada in April 1989 after serving a prison sentence in the United States for those charges.

In October of that year, he set up the now-defunct Heritage Front, a continental network of neo-Nazis.

The Canadian Human Rights Commission obtained a court order to shut down the Heritage Front's hotline, which issued hate messages against minorities and homosexuals.

The group disobeyed the court order, and Droege and two associates were jailed. The Toronto-based hotline was eventually shut down.

Droege had also been convicted of several other crimes, including assault for beating a 22-year-old man with a flashlight in a bloody brawl with anti-racist activists on June 12, 1993 in a Toronto restaurant.

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Originally posted by KharmaDog
I think they mean that he is no longer the leader of a racist orginization, not that he is no longer a racist. Well, now that he's dead, I guess he now is no longer a racist, he's not much of anything now really.

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Originally posted by KharmaDog
I think they mean that he is no longer the leader of a racist orginization, not that he is no longer a racist. Well, now that he's dead, I guess he now is no longer a racist, he's not much of anything now really.

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Originally posted by Afro Cheese
I think Ex-racist leader = used to be a racist leader... now just a racist.

quote: (post)

Originally posted by KharmaDog
make that a recently deceased racist.

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Originally posted by KidRock
Or maybe Ex-racist means he was once a racist but now he is not..

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Originally posted by KharmaDog
I guess this falls under the category of "you reap what you sew". I personally like the comments, "He was a nice man." Yes, I bet he was a real charmer.