Béla Varga
A winemaker from Healdsburg, California who also owns a notorious Hungarian neo-Nazi site is currently
on the run for threatening a lawyer who tried to serve him with a subpoena related to a lawsuit about the site.
Béla Varga, owner of the kuruc.info domain, is charged with having threatened the life of lawyers who subpoenaed him regarding the hate site. The name of the domain, “kuruc,” has nativist roots, referring to a patriotic nationalist Hungarian movement that opposed the foreign reign of the Hapsburg Dynasty. Its English-language “About Us” page describes it as “a patriotic Hungarian conservative, right-wing nationalist, fact-finding news site.”
Varga allegedly worked at Claar Cellars, “a medium-size Premium winery in the Columbia Valley, as well as Chateau Soverain. According to Patch.com, “Varga said he came to the U.S. in 1988, picking Healdsburg as home because he wanted to establish himself as a winemaker.” However, the exact nature of his employment — as well the degree that qualified him to work at these wineries — has recently come into question.
Specifically, according to Hungarian Spectrum, a blog that watches Hungarian politics, Varga
has engaged in a little bit of resumé fudging; several key facts in his biographies with the American winery where he works and the Hungarian winery that he owns don't check out. It also seems that kuruc.info is funded in a way that almost certainly violates both American and Hungarian tax law.
According to the Athena Institute, an organization that tracks European extremist groups, kuruc.info is "the most active hate group in Hungary." It frequently organizes hate campaigns against Hungary's LGBT and Roma communities, but is best known for churning out anti-Semitic bile. It even claims that the gas chambers where thousands of Jews were killed all at once were really "air defense shelters."
The (Santa Rosa) Press Democrat reports that Varga registered kuruc.info in 2008 after the Hungarian government shut it down for violating Hungary's laws against anti-Semitism. Earlier this year, the Action and Protection Foundation, a Hungarian human rights organization, sued Varga in order to get more information about his ties to the site so criminal and civil actions can be launched against him in Hungary. A federal magistrate in San Francisco issued subpoenas allowing the foundation to question Varga under oath about his ties to the Website, as well as a bank account that he opened for the site in Sonoma County.
The case took a ghastly turn in May when Varga was arrested on state charges that he threatened to kill the foundation's American attorney, Michael Sweet. He was also accused of stalking Sweet over six days in April. He was released on $250,000 bail, but missed two court dates. Last week, a California judge revoked his bail and issued a bench warrant for his arrest. The FBI is also involved as well.
Varga claims his only involvement with kuruc.info was registering the Website and setting up the bank account. But in July 2012, the Jerusalem Post reported that kuruc.info offered 100,000 forints--worth $450 at the time--for information about protesters outside the home of László Csatáry, who was accused of sending 15,700 Jews to Auschwitz while serving as a police official during World War II. It turns out that Varga provided most of the reward money. At the time, Csatáry topped the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of Nazi-era war criminals still at large. He died of pneumonia in 2013.
According to Politics.hu, Varga, his wife and two sons are hiding out in Canada. Varga reportedly trolled the investigators on the Press Democrat Website, saying that the only way he was coming back was if Canada extradited him. The comments have since been deleted.
No word on where exactly he is in Canada, so if you live north of the border, keep a lookout for him.