display Confederate symbols everywhere from schools to statehouses". These activists advocated "picketing, aggressive lobbying, issue campaigning, and lawsuits" to prevent "heritage violations", which the group defines as "any attack upon our Confederate heritage, or the flags, monuments, and symbols which represent it". The group's more activist members gained electoral support and were increasingly elected to its leadership positions. Members of the more traditionalist camp alleged that the League of the South had influenced their organization's new direction. Indeed, one ally of the activist wing claimed that thousands of Sons of Confederate Veterans members were also League of the South members. In 2002, members and former members of SCV formed a dissident organization, Save the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Soon "about a hundred or so individuals and groups identified themselves on the Save the Sons of Confederate Veterans web site as supporting Save the SCV", co-founder Walter Charles Hilderman said in 2004; he declined to give more current membership numbers. But most of the dissension had ended by 2003, and most members of SCV agreed with the heritage-preservation activities espoused by the new SCV leaders, Boyd Cathey reported in the Southern Mercury. One of those new SCV leaders, South Carolina politician and investment advisor Ron Wilson, served as Commander-in-Chief from 2002 to 2004. (In 2012, Wilson would be sentenced to prison for running a Ponzi scheme as part of his investment business; among those he defrauded were members of the SCV.) In early 2005, the SCV General Executive Council sued to expel Commander-in-Chief Dennis Sweeney from office. The court initially granted the council temporary control of the organization, but its final decision returned power to Sweeney. Thirteen of the 25 council members were expelled from the council shortly after Sweeney regained control. Nine of the council members expelled were former commanders-in-chief, a status that heretofore had come with a life membership on the council. In February, Cathey wrote in the Southern Mercury that most of the members of SCV had united against the "War on Southern Culture". By the SCV's summer 2005 convention, activists firmly controlled the council. They severed much of the longstanding relationship between SCV and the more traditionalist Military Order of the Stars and Bars (MOSB). The MOSB, founded in 1938, had been closely involved with the SCV, sharing its headquarters since 1992 and co-publishing Southern Mercury. The MOSB's Commander General, Daniel Jones, citing "the continuing political turmoil