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Also in the contract was a second deal — to buy the company, including the secret formula. It allowed Big Time to pay a straight-up $5 million fee and then $5 million more in installments. Three winters ago, Big Time called up the widow and announced that it considered its previous payments for the packets to be a kind of layaway deal for the company and that, as far as Big Time was concerned, it now owned the Sea-Monkey franchise.
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That alone might well have been enough to loft Harold von Braunhut into the pantheon of toy inventors, alongside Uncle Milton Levine, D.F. Duncan and George Parker. Except for one almost unimaginable and horrible thing. Harold von Braunhut was a neo-Nazi. Moreover, a Jewish neo-Nazi. He was born Harold Nathan Braunhut, to Jewish parents. He inserted the “von” to sound more Germanic.

Von Braunhut even indulged his dark side with one particular invention — the Kiyoga, a retractable baton for beat-downs also known as the Steel Cobra. When Richard Butler, the head of Aryan Nations, was indicted in the late ’80s, he encouraged his supporters to buy Kiyogas because the “manufacturer had made a pledge of $25 to my defense fund for each one sold to Aryan Nations supporters.” After an Anti-Defamation League report emerged, von Braunhut refused to answer any more questions and was known to simply slam down the phone when any reporter called him.
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Signorelli von Braunhut grew quiet, even sad, when I brought up this subject. There are calculated silences at the heart of any marriage, and this was definitely one. “Harold and I never really talked about things like that,” she told me. “We just really loved each other, and I didn’t question him or interrogate him.