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The CEO of Banjo, a SoftBank-backed neighborhood-watch app, has a hidden neo-Nazi past and once helped a gunman in a drive-by synagogue shooting

* Damien Patton, CEO of real-time alerts app Banjo, was involved in a neo-Nazi group as a teenager and was convicted for assisting a drive-by shooting of a synagogue at age 17. * Patton testified in a 1992 trial that he drove a KKK gunman to a Tennessee synagogue, where his passenger fired at the street-facing windows and broke glass. No one was killed in the shooting. * "We believe that the Blacks and the Jews are taking over America, and it's our job to take America back for the White race," Patton, whose company partners with law enforcement, said in court. * Patton's past, unearthed by OneZero on Tuesday, had largely gone unnoticed because his name was misspelled in court filings related to the crimes. * The CEO apologized for his past and disavowed white supremacist groups on Tuesday, saying that he had acted out as a teen after suffering abuse as a child. * Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. Twenty years before founding buzzy real-time alerts startup Banjo, co-founder and CEO Damien Patton was involved with a Tennessee neo-Nazi group and pled guilty to assisting a drive-by shooting of a synagogue in 1990. Patton's neo-Nazi history, reported in 1992 by The Tennessean and unearthed by OneZero on Tuesday, had largely evaded scrutiny in part because Patton's name was misspelled on two court filings related to the crimes. Patton has been profiled by outlets ranging from The Wall Street Journal to The New York Times in recent years without his past KKK affiliations surfacing. Banjo, which Patton cofounded in 2010, has raised over $120 million from backers including SoftBank for its app that aggregates social media posts to help police predict and respond to potential crimes in real-time. According to newspaper archives and court records obtained by OneZero, Patton was part of a white supremacist movement in central Tennessee as a teenager, which he described in court testimony as "the foot soldiers for groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nations." In 1990, when Patton was 17, he drove a KKK member armed with a pistol to a Nashville synagogue. The KKK member shot out the window of the car, shattering the synagogue's street-facing glass. No one was killed in the shooting, but Patton was charged and pled guilty to "juvenile delinquency" in connection with the crime. "We believe that the Blacks and the Jews are taking over America, and it's our job to take America back for the White race," Patton said at that trial, according to court documents. In a statement to Business Insider on Tuesday, Patton disavowed his past involvement with white supremacists. Patton, who identifies as a person of Jewish heritage, said he suffered abuse as a child that led him to run away from home and seek refuge in white nationalist groups until he joined the US Navy as a young adult. "32 years ago I was a lost, scared, and vulnerable child. I won't go into detail, but the reasons I left home at such a young age are unfortunately not unique; I suffered abuse in every form," Patton said. "I did terrible things and said despicable and hateful things, including to my own Jewish mother, that today I find indefensibly wrong, and feel extreme remorse for. I have spent most of my adult lifetime working to make amends for this shameful period in my life." Banjo currently has a $20.7 million contract with the state of Utah, which was first reported by Motherboard. Banjo can access the state's traffic, CCTV, and public safety cameras, and provides law enforcement with alerts based on social media posts and information from other seemingly-unrelated iOS and Android apps that it owns. The Utah attorney general's office now intends to "fully review" its contract with Banjo in light of Patton's past, which it was not previously aware of, a spokesperson told The Salt Lake Tribune Tuesday. Read OneZero's full report here. Join the conversation about this story » NOW WATCH: Why electric planes haven't taken off yet
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