Damien Patton, who helped launch and now leads the secretive startup Banjo, was part of the Dixie Knights of the Ku Klux Klan as a 17-year-old and joined a leader of the group in a drive-by shooting of a synagogue in a Nashville suburb, according to a report by the online outlet OneZero, citing transcripts of courtroom testimony, sworn statements and more than 1,000 pages of records produced from a federal hate crime prosecution.
Utah officials in 2018 had awarded Patton’s company a sole-source, $750,000 contract to provide massive real-time surveillance of 911 calls, social media and traffic cameras. The company has also signed a $20.7 million contract with the state.