7 February 20-26, 2025 miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com New Times | Contents | Letters | news | night+Day | CuLture | Cafe | MusiC | EMBOLDENED What’s next for Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio? BY ALEX DELUCA O n a Tuesday morning in West Miami, people trickle in and out of Latin American Bakery & Cafe with bags of Cuban pas- tries and Styrofoam cups of cof- fee. The February air is thick and humid. Cars roar down SW 57th Avenue outside the bustling res- taurant, which features a sprawl- ing, shaded outdoor patio and burnt-orange interior walls adorned with colorful framed im- ages of Havana. Enrique Tarrio strolls onto the café’s ter- race, around the corner from his home, around 11:15. The 42-year-old looks at ease, wearing a blue plaid button-down shirt, a matching denim “Team Tarrio” cap, and a large black ring bearing the Proud Boys’ rooster symbol. He’s sporting his signature black Ray-Bans, which he quickly swaps for round-rimmed eyeglasses upon sitting down. Shortly after he settles in, a waitress comes to take our order. Tarrio, speaking in Spanish, orders a Coke, a colada, Cuban bread, and four ham croquetas. “Por ahora,” he tells her. “Gracias.” Once the food arrives at the table, he squeezes a small wedge of lime onto the croqu- etas and pours his Coke into a cup of ice. He then proceeds to check his Apple Watch. “I was released” — Tarrio pauses, looking at the time on the watch’s small screen — “18 minutes ago.” Exactly two weeks prior (almost to the minute), the onetime leader of the far-right Proud Boys was released from federal prison. Tarrio had served less than two years of his 22-year sentence for seditious conspiracy and other charges related to his role in the Janu- ary 6 U.S. Capitol riot when President Donald Trump pardoned him, along with other members and leaders of far-right groups, with the stroke of a pen. In a sit-down interview with New Times, Tarrio discussed his return to Miami, his time in prison, and what he sees as the Proud Boys’ place in America moving forward. He also talked about plans to possibly run for U.S. Congress, and the political aspirations of other Proud Boys. “A Really Good Panic Attack” Tarrio recalls the moment he realized he would likely be seeing freedom. He was lying on the floor of his Louisiana prison cell on No- vember 5, with his ear pressed to the crack of the door, listening carefully to the results of the presidential election being broadcast outside. “Once he won, I had a really good panic at- tack,” Tarrio says. “I was just waiting for the doors to open.” Hit with the longest sentence imposed on any January 6 defendant, Tarrio was not at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Prosecutors nonetheless cast him as the mastermind of the attack, presenting evidence showing he created a special wing of the Proud Boys called the “Ministry of Self Defense,” which coordinated attacks during the insurrection and celebrated them afterward. “Make no mistake...we did this,” Tarrio told senior Proud Boy leadership after the at- tack, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Tarrio, however, has long maintained that the insurrection was neither organized nor planned in advance. At a recent press confer- ence held in Doral days after his return home, Tarrio said he was in Maryland on January 6 watching the news as it unfolded. “There’s absolutely nothing I will apologize for, be- cause I did nothing wrong,” he told reporters during the press conference. “The Proud Boys did nothing wrong, and American patri- ots did nothing wrong.” On this early February morning, he strikes a slightly less brash tone. While seated outside the Cuban restaurant, located just down the street from Miami Inter- national Airport, he describes how he filled more than 15 composition books with plans for his future post release. Most of the plans, he says, involved “con- ventional” means or normal jobs. He con- sidered returning to Miami to work in the security industry again or possibly developing some properties he owns in North Florida. But once he re- turned home on Janu- ary 22, he abandoned all those plans. He says his passion now lies elsewhere: with the Proud Boys. “Most of those ideas that I wrote down were ideas outside of the realm of politics. But now looking at things, I love what I do, so I think I’m gonna continue to do that in some ca- pacity,” Tarrio says. “Is it activism? Is it trying to get elected? I don’t know what it means yet.” Proud Boys at a Crossroads In September 2016, Vice Media cofounder- turned-far-right-provocateur Gavin McInnes founded the Proud Boys as an ostensible “men’s drinking club.” While the group’s members have mar- keted themselves as “Western chauvinists” and “anti-white guilt,” the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit civil-rights advo- cacy organization, has long designated the Proud Boys as a “hate group” for the club’s repeated brawls with leftist protesters at po- litical rallies and ties to white-nationalist and neo-Nazi groups while Tarrio was chairman. Tarrio, a Miami-born Afro-Cuban who took the reins as the Proud Boys’ charismatic leader in 2018, steered the group in a decid- edly political direction, providing security for right-wing political figures and attending ral- lies and protests on hot-button issues, includ- ing COVID-19 mask mandates and the 2020 presidential election. Although his days as Proud Boys leader seemed to have ended in 2021, when he was initially jailed on criminal charges for burn- ing a Black Lives Matter banner stolen from a historic Black church in Washington, D.C., Tarrio has repeatedly emphasized in media interviews since his release from prison that it’s a mistake to label him as the “former” chairman of the Proud Boys. “Moving forward, we’re never going to state the structure, how it works, or any of that,” Tarrio adds, then volunteers without elaborating that most of the Proud Boys sup- port him, an unsubstantiated claim. In Miami, where there are two Proud Boys chapters — Villain City and Vice City — that’s a notable assertion. Tarrio founded the Vice City chapter in 2018. But in 2021, after Re- uters uncovered that he had worked as a “prolific” informant for federal law enforce- ment following his 2012 indictment for his role in a scheme to rebrand and resell stolen diabetic test strips, the chapter disavowed its former leader — and labeled him a “rat.” The infighting, which Tarrio recently described as “high school drama,” led him to form a new chapter, Villain City. Back in 2021, as Tarrio sat in jail, a former Proud Boy told New Times that while the or- ganization was supposed to be a “men’s drinking club” (a common refrain from Tar- rio and McInnes), the Vice City chapter had become a “violent, maverick group that in- serts itself into the political fray at every op- portunity.” “These guys are fucking thugs and vil- lains,” he said. Tarrio says that while he’s been working on uniting the two groups and plans to meet with both factions soon, he suspects a “grand majority” of Vice City’s membership consists of people who joined post-January 6. “After seeing everything that we went through in the investigations and the arrests, and you think it’s a good idea to join the Proud Boys after January 6, I don’t want you,” Tarrio says. “There’s something fucking wrong with you. You know, it’s stupid, it’s retarded, and you get the wrong sets of people.” Further, he says Vice City members have espoused what he calls “quirky, fringe views on things.” Quirky and fringe, as in, possibly anti-Se- mitic? “Yeah, potentially,” he says. “I know that we have some bad apples in the organization, and that’s common, you know” he adds. “We weed them out as they come in and as we see the issues.” Despite the internal strife and increased scrutiny on the group since the insurrection, the Proud Boys have remained active across the nation. They’ve joined protests against the Cuban government in Miami, worked as security for a far-right evangelical pastor outside a Planned Parenthood center in Sa- lem, Oregon, and shown up to school board meetings around the country to protest mask mandates. In the summer of 2022, members of the group stormed a children’s drag queen story hour in California; event attendees said the “extremely aggressive” group “totally freaked out the kids” by shouting homophobic and transphobic slurs. Police reportedly investigated the at- tack as a possible hate crime. Enrique Tarrio, fresh out of prison, arrives in Miami on January 22, 2025. Photo by Michele Eve Sandberg | METRO | “MOVING FORWARD, WE’RE NEVER GOING TO STATE THE STRUCTURE, HOW IT WORKS, OR ANY OF THAT.” >> p8
