Book Excerpts
Forged in Fury
I was tired of eating dirt and blood. How long had I endured it? How many years of disgust and disappointment were etched upon my father’s face every time I lost? How many times had he called me a sissy? All because I didn’t have the heart to pummel my cousins. It was different when he would unleash me on a neighborhood kid or another kid I didn’t really know. Despite my increasing skills in martial arts, Dad always seemed disturbed by the fact that I didn’t want to prove anything through my strength. Until the day I snapped. Sick of being told to “Suck it up!” and not being able to cry in the face of my uncle’s jeers and my cousins’ triumphant faces . . . biting back the tears on bruised and battered lips that had been busted open again and again . . . I usually just took it.
Until that day…
Hook, Line, and Sucker: Effective Recruiting Tactics
…Some of my new recruits had started wearing white power colors and insignias. I could tell they were going to get jumped. “Nah,” they would say. Just like me at that age, they thought they were invincible. They thought nothing like that would ever happen to them. I just smiled, but I knew what was coming. Sure enough, a few days later several of my recruits were caught, cornered, and beat up. Nursing broken noses and other wounds, they were embarrassed and afraid I would ridicule them and come down hard. Sensing this, I took a different turn, knowing empathy would go a long way in earning their affections. I decided to tell them a story.
“Guys, we all make mistakes,” I said, nodding at their surprised looks. “You’re not alone.”
“Yeah, right,” one of them said. “I bet you never got beat this bad. We should’ve known better.”
“Ah, hell, you guys haven’t heard stupid till you hear this one,” I laughed, nursing their wounded egos. “Long before I got married, I went to this club called Your Place in San Bernardino with Upland Dave and our girlfriends. My girlfriend wanted me to dance to every song, so we were out there shaking it up between every beer. I was already toasted, but I kept laying ’em back. It was getting crowded, and there were these two big black guys who were hip-hopping on the dance floor. We couldn’t get past them. I got pissed off and bumped one guy—hard. He turned around and started to choke me. Dave slugged the guy. I yelled, ‘You’re a dead nigger, I say!’—which was about the stupidest thing I could have said, because the club was filled with 90 percent blacks!”
“Holy shit, what did you do?” they cried.
“Well, we sent the girls out to the car just as we started getting punched and pummeled. I ran this guy’s face down a brick wall, pulling off his skin. Don’t tell Dave I told you, but he was getting hammered by the other guy. This guy slammed the back of Dave’s head into a water faucet, splitting his head wide open. Dave ran outside into the alley, even as people were still kicking and hitting him. The bouncers and I were trying to pull people off of him. Man, it was awful. Finally Dave and I made it to the car and jumped in. The girls took us to the hospital. That was an interesting ride, I’m telling you! I ended up with cracked ribs, and Dave was obviously in worse shape than I was. I can’t tell you how many stitches he got—all because I couldn’t keep my hands to myself or my mouth shut. But I learned my lesson. Now I don’t do stupid shit like that anymore, and you won’t either. You watch your backs all the time and only speak when you know you can make good on your threats. Make sure you’re never outnumbered, create major destruction when you whip it up, and then get the hell out of there, got me?”
“Yeah!” they all roared. They loved me, except when they hated me.
I made sure that situations like this—and every situation, actually—made me appear in their eyes like the man with the knowledge and the power. They started coming to me and asking me questions. That’s when I would throw out my new hook, line, and sinker: “Dude,” I’d say, very seriously, “there’s going to be a race war!” After I had told them the truth so many times, it was easy to give them a half-truth and some propaganda mixed in. They believed it. In fact, they ate it up. And they wanted to be on my side.
As well as I knew how to work the group, I also knew how to work each individual. If a kid liked to fight, I really liked to fight. All my experience as a chameleon gave me the skills to do whatever it was this kid needed to join the Movement. If a kid didn’t like to fight, then of course, I didn’t really like to fight, either. Then I would put them with others that didn’t like to fight but were fabulous in the propaganda group, or in computers and technology. I would have them watch documentaries on white power or read books and teach other kids and suck them in that way. No matter what, I would find where their niche was.
Susan Spencer, a journalist for 48 Hours, once called me a star recruiter for the Skinheads.
“What would distinguish the ones that you could turn from the ones that you couldn’t?” she asked. My answer was simple.
“The ones I didn’t talk to were the ones I couldn’t turn,” I said. It was true.
Rarely did it happen overnight, but I was patient. When I had them, I had them. I could take any average white kid and I could turn him into a Nazi in eighteen months to two years…
Cleansing Ethnic Hatred
…Suddenly Rick wanted to talk to me about everything, and about my involvement in the Movement, how I got out, and what I was doing now. Our “half an hour” ended up taking two and a half weeks!
The Wiesenthal Center had just done an investigation into the ties of neo-Nazis in Germany with neo-Nazis in the United States. They had infiltrated groups on both sides, and Rick was involved in things that were happening in Europe and the United States. Initially he was worried that I might be a spy. As we started talking and I blurted everything, he would be off on a few things here and there, and I would set him straight. Most of it was things he already knew. I didn’t know he was testing me.
Rick and I had experienced many people who had planned to get out of gangs, but they usually got sucked right back in to their old lifestyle. Somehow Rick could tell I was the real thing—that I had been a Skinhead and a very powerful leader and that I had walked away for good. He sensed my sincerity that I was there to purge the past and move on. I was pretty pissed off about the place I was in and the choices that I had made, and I knew there was no way in hell I was ever going back.
Rick informed Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate Dean of the Wiesenthal Center, about our talks. Rabbi Cooper called me ten days later and left a message asking me to meet with him and Rabbi Marvin Hier, the dean and founder of Wiesenthal Center. Reluctantly, I agreed, though I kept thinking, Why? What the hell would these guys want with me?
The thought of that meeting was terrifying to me. I was raised strictly Irish-Catholic. Before I joined the Skins I used to go see a priest every Wednesday to confess a week’s worth of sins. That was bad enough! Now I was supposed to divulge fifteen years of sins to two Jewish rabbis? I was scared to death. I needed reinforcement.
I decided to bring in my big guns—my mommy! It didn’t matter that I was thirty years old, that I had committed a thousand crimes, that I had been able to do drive-bys without even shuddering; I wanted her by my side to help me through this…
180 Degrees—and Hotter
…Like Rabbi Cooper, I took it as a badge of honor when a Marty Cox or a Tom Metzger called me a race traitor. During interviews for the History Channel for the Gangland series, Tom and Marty both suggested that I was the biggest threat to the Movement. Obviously I was doing so much damage that leaders tried to belittle me to solidify their own standing. Dr. William Pierce called me a closet homosexual while others have said I was a U.S. military plant or an FBI plant, used to infiltrate the Skinhead Movement. I laughed at that one, wondering when the FBI started recruiting fifteen-year-olds. Kenneth Alfred Strom was another white supremacy preacher who used to bad-mouth me, but he was convicted of child pornography. When racists call me a Jew-lover or a nigger-lover, I know it’s because I’ve awakened to the beauty that lies in each one of us—and that is the biggest threat to hate.
I started to see the difference I was making with my speaking within just a few months, which was satisfying. I started counting the kids that I knew I had pulled away from gangs, only counting the kids I knew for sure. For example, one girl came up to me in Bakersfield a year after I started. “Do you remember me from last year when you came to speak to our group?” she asked. I nodded. She was easy to remember. “Well, I want you to know you changed my life,” she said. “I’m in with a group of kids that went on to college. That’s where I am now.” I was very pleased and smiled widely at her and congratulated her. Before I could get a big head about it, however, she added, “I figured if a dumb-ass like you could turn your life around, well, surely I could.” That was one comment I will never forget. It continues to keep me humble…