Anonymous Submission in Collaboration with Sunlight161.noblogs.org
S14, officially known as Storm Division, is a tristate (NJ, PA, NY) area neo nazi group that has been very active over the past few months. They have been busy doing pop-up propaganda demos, trying to recruit virtual and in-person members, mass stickering and putting up fascist graffiti in the region, specifically in the Philadelphia area and NJ. They have also been pushing a united front amongst the far right in the area and openly hold multiple different memberships within groups like NJEHA, Embrace Struggle Active Club, WLM, Atlantic Nationalist Club, and the Garden State Nationalists.
Their activity has been increasingly organized with some of their most recent actions making local media headlines. Despite their high level of organization and escalating actions, S14 and their members have gotten sloppy with their own security.
Due to lapses in S14’s security, antifascists have been able to identify their two leaders, “commandant Joachim Peiper” and his “wife”, as Mark A. Kauffman and Sara Sheaffer respectively.
Kauffman and Sheaffer are engaged to be married and are both originally from Massachusetts, having lived in different parts of the state. According to Kauffman, they bounced around a bit in MA and settled in Philadelphia several years ago. Antifascists were able to independently verify Kauffman’s account and confirmed that as of now he and Sheaffer live in North Philadelphia on East Wishart Street. Kauffman also supposedly owns property in the south, “on the Mason Dixon line”.
Kauffman works in construction and puts in long hours at his job. Prior to moving to Philadelphia, Kauffman was in the US Army for several years and completed two combat tours in the Middle East. At that point he was already a nazi, as he stated in a public message on S14’s telegram channel.
After his time in the Army, Kauffman was homeless in MA for some time, at one point staying at an NGO that provides assistance to homeless veterans. During this time he and Sheaffer were also using hard drugs and in 2018, Kauffman was brought up on drug trafficking and weapons possession charges in MA. Kauffman reportedly had several ounces of meth and illegal firearms in a storage unit.
There was no media follow up on how the case against Kauffman turned out and nothing was publicized. It’s not clear exactly when Kauffman and Sheaffer got clean and moved to Philadelphia, but it is suspected to be around the 2018/2019 time frame.
Kauffman’s white nationalist activities prior to 2022 are hazy, but it seems that Kauffman decided to publicly organize and establish ties with other fascists during 2022 on Gab. He was then connected with a fellow white nationalist, going by the alias Stephen Quest, who was recruiting members and leadership within a neo nazi organization called the National Socialist Youth Alliance (NSYA).
Kauffman officially launched S14 in March 2023, when he and others split from the NSYA. Upon starting this new nazi organization, Kauffman, with the help of Sheaffer, instituted new organizational security and logistical guidelines and started recruiting efforts both online and in-person. Kauffman made a serious effort to create a nazi safe space on telegram, shying away from infighting and trying to build camaraderie among members.
He also increased the rate of in-person actions within his tristate area crew encouraging pop-up style protests during the day and night time propaganda dissemination actions.
In addition, Kauffman implemented different security guidelines for the public S14 Telegram chat like not discussing illegal activity, not giving out personal info or personal phone numbers to other group members, no infighting, and no glorification of white nationalists who have committed mass shootings. Kauffman has thus far strictly enforced his group’s code, often banning members for breaking these rules.
Ironically though, Kauffman does not hold himself to the same high standard. Kauffman’s first major mistake was providing a detailed background of his life in public Telegram chats which enabled antifascists to construct a profile on him. This included his time in the military, prior life in New England, veiled details about his day job, and the fact he currently lives in North Philly.
His second major mistake was providing information about the level of his fiance’s involvement and unintentionally revealing his fiance’s identity on the S14 public telegram channel.
At the time, Kauffman likely didn’t think too much about mentioning his fiances legal name, because he was using it to try and recruit more women to his crew. Fascist and white nationalist groups are well known to have an absence of women for a variety of reasons, so leveraging female membership is something that would have been valuable to Kauffman and S14 as a whole.
Unfortunately for him, Kauffman’s revelation is the only reason that antifascists were able to find Sheaffer and confirm her identity. Kauffman took basic steps to erase information about himself on the internet, removing many links that could potentially expose him. This coupled with the fact that he and Sheaffer are not legally married added another layer of removal, functionally creating a situation where Sheaffer would be very difficult to identify without her legal name. Because antifascists had her first name they were eventually able to definitively identify and link Sheaffer to Kauffman and S14.
Other white supremacist activity in the area, the source of which has not been able to be identified until now, can also be ascribed to Sheaffer. A female member of Atlantic Nationalist Club has been trolling Philadelphia area antifascists on Telegram for a period of time throwing up racist stickers across the city.
The individual in the Atlantic Nationalist Club video is a white female wearing an engagement ring who quickly puts up a sticker on a utility poll. Given Sheaffer’s background info and the shooting style of the video, the likelihood of this being anyone but her is incredibly low.
S14 has prided themselves themselves on their anonymity, security culture, and ability to do things anonymously for months from behind the comfort of a mask. That time is now over. Kauffman and Sheaffer must be exposed for the nazis that they are.
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