When White Makes Right

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

In a concert grounds in Ulysses, Pennsylvania, down a gravel road off Route 49, on property of a white supremacist named "Chip" Kreis, a weekend-long rock concert is about to begin. A rock concert whose spectators do not appreciate the press. Someone says to a TIME reporter, "I want to be smiling, I want to get little dimples in my cheeks when I read that article. 'Cause if I don't, I'm going to come and fing kill you, do you understand? I'm not f ---ing joking, man -- look me in the face -- I'm going to find you and f ---ing kill you." There are hundreds of skinheads gathered here: American Frontists, Confederate Hammerskins, Atlantic City Skins and others from Texas, Colorado, California, North Carolina, Florida, Nebraska, Tennessee and Canada. Their cars, scores of them, are parked around the field; and from the tall antennas wave their banners: in white-and-black, and red, for white supremacists and the neo-Nazis.

At a cafe a few miles away, the waitress looks haggard. "It started at 5:30 this morning," she says. "Groups of eight to 12, 14 at one time. And they're talking they want more real estate . . . and we don't want 'em buying more."

Who are the skinheads? For a time it was difficult to divine how many parts monster they were and how many parts fashion victim. The evidence, however, increasingly suggests that they can no longer be perceived merely as exhibits in the great American freak show, good for throwing a chill into Oprah or obliging another host's ego by breaking Geraldo's nose on camera. Rather, the skins have found their niche in American society. It is a far larger niche than most Americans would like them to have, especially as its inhabitants tend to kill people.

According to the New York-based Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, skinheads have taken 22 victims in the past three years; in 1992 they were responsible for seven deaths, almost a quarter of all bias-related murders in the U.S. The ADL concluded that the punks, who number about 3,500, are now a bigger racist threat than the Ku Klux Klan. The relatively small death toll, points out Portland, Oregon, police officer Loren Christensen, is misleading. "What makes them real dangerous," he says, "is that it doesn't take many to terrorize a community." Or even a metropolis. Three days after the ADL report, the FBI announced that a group called the Fourth Reich Skinheads had "masterminded" a plot to slaughter the congregation of Los Angeles' First African Methodist Episcopal Church, assassinate well-known black figures around the country and letter-bomb a rabbi.

Skinheads have murdered in every corner of the country. In New York in 1990, 29-year-old Julio Rivera was fatally stabbed and beaten with a hammer by three men connected with the Doc Martens Stompers because he was gay. Later that year in Houston, two skinheads conducted a "boot party" with a 15-year-old Vietnamese immigrant named Hung Truong. Just before he was stomped to death, according to a detective on the case, Truong pleaded, "Please stop. I'm sorry I ever came to your country. God forgive me." In Salem, Oregon, in September 1992, three members of the American Front group fire bombed the apartment of a black lesbian named Hattie Cohens and her roommate, a gay white man named Brian Mock, killing both. And a few months earlier in Birmingham, Alabama, three young skins awakened a homeless black man named Benny Rembert and knifed him to death. It was the killers' idea of celebration; they had been drinking in honor of Hitler's birthday. Says Sergeant W.D. McAnally of the Birmingham police department, who helped arrest several local skins: "Hell, the Klan is a bunch of old farts who ride around shooting and cussing, burn a cross and then go home. These little kids will get worked up and go out and kill somebody."

When the movement peaked in England in the 1970s, "skinhead" was more a punk style statement than a racial stance; "Nazi" skins were just a nasty subgroup, devoted to the bullying of immigrants. Both strains crossed the Atlantic, but in the late '80s, propelled in part by youthful embitterment at the recession economy, the Nazi versions of the skinhead strutted through such cultural crossroads as San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury. They attracted immediate attention for their coiffure, dedication to British Oi! music, black Doc Martens boots and a ferocious appetite for violence -- against blacks, gays and Jews. Sometimes the fury turned inward: in August 1987 a California | group nailed its ex-leader to a 6-ft. plank. (He survived.) "To be a skinhead," says one participant from those days, "none of the other skinheads are going to respect you unless you go out and mess somebody up, and if you don't, you get messed up."

Such behavior got them on Oprah and Geraldo. It also captured the attention of onetime Klansman Tom Metzger, head of White Aryan Resistance, California's best-known hate group. Metzger, whose well-developed philosophy includes the expulsion of America's Latinos and Asians and the creation of separatist black and white states, recruited successfully among skinhead groups in the West and Midwest. Too successfully, perhaps. On the last night of a visit by a WAR lieutenant, three Portland, Oregon, skins beat an Ethiopian student named Mulugeta Seraw to death. The case drew national attention, and the Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama successfully sued Metzger, winning $12.5 million in damages for Seraw's family.

Metzger pulled back -- he now calls skinheads "a passing phenomenon" and denies influencing the Fourth Reich Skinheads -- but his example heartened other established hate groups such as the Klan, Idaho's Aryan Nations and the Church of the Creator, based in Niceville, Florida. These white supremacists began using skinheads as "front-line troops" in leafletings, recruiting and violent crimes. Says former skin David Mazzella: "The old guys, they were a buncha bench sitters. The skinheads took it to the streets. It was a new resource to rejuvenate these organizations."

Exposed to such a variety of influences, the skins did what they have always done best -- mutated and kept spreading. The movement's accompanying religiosity varies from the Christian Identity's credo about blacks being "mud people" that God made in error on the third day, to Odinism, a worship of the ancient Norse gods. Similarly, the skins adopted white supremacist ideologies, from belief in a "territorial imperative" to be fulfilled by carving out various parts of the continent as all-white enclaves to the expectation of an Armageddon-like racial holy war (often abbreviated to the battle cry "RaHoWa!"). It was RaHoWa that the Fourth Reich Skinheads were allegedly trying to trigger with their assassinations. Explains C.S., a 21-year-old construction worker at the Pennsylvania gathering: "I work with a Dominican guy, and I get along with him better than the white scumbags there, I can tell you that. He knows what my beliefs are -- he knows everything." ; But on Judgment Day, he says, his friend will be wiped out. "He's a decent guy, but when the time comes, that's his problem. If I'm the guy that does the job, that's the way it is. Hopefully I'll be chosen to do the job. Annihilate everyone in our way."

Counter to stereotype, says Danny Welch, director of the SPLC's watchdog group Klanwatch, skinheads include women activists. "Women were in leadership roles from the beginning," he says. "They've been out there with their Doc Martens from the start, stomping people." And while the total skinhead population is small, it is widespread. Locales as divergent as Queens, New York, and Billings (pop. 85,000), Montana, received batches of hate flyers this past year. The town of Hurricane (pop. 3,915), Utah, has its own contingent of skinheads, a group calling itself the Army of Israel, with plans to make the hamlet on the border of Zion National Park a whites-only "homeland."

A new generation, ages 13 and older, is already active, attending boot parties and wearing caps bearing the number 88 (an abbreviation for "Heil Hitler!" based on the fact that H is the eighth letter of the alphabet). Some outgrow the hate; others dress it up. Take Steven McAlpine, 20, a leader of the White Workers Union, which he claims is the fastest-growing skinhead group in the Dallas area. McAlpine has hair. He drives a Mitsubishi and is a political science major at a university in North Texas. He used to belong to a group called the Aryan Defense Force. "It was little young skinheads and stuff," he explains. "As they started maturing and finding out there's more to life than fighting and drinking, as they grew up, they started seeing the political aspects of it, and also the spiritual aspects of it."

McAlpine was a natural for the transition, a political junkie who grew up watching the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour and CNN. His philosophy is the same as ever: a "white sovereign homeland," maybe "all land north of the Rio Grande." "Skinheads grow up," he says simply. "They grow their hair out, they disappear and go into society undetected, and nobody can tell who's who."

More than any of his outrageous colleagues do, he grants an aura of believability to a bit of braggadocio that appeared in the War Ax, a "skinzine" published by the Georgia group SS of America:

"We are everywhere, and we are nowhere.

You fail to see us, but we are here . . .

We are the predators in your urban jungles.

And our time to strike is fast-approaching."

With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/New York, Patrick Dawson/Billings, David S. Jackson/Hayden Lake, Colleen O''Connor/Dallas and Michael Riley/Atlanta