Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead (15 page)

“You will keep your Nazi friends out of Philadelphia!” he said.

Then the judge turned his attention to my mom. He asked her if she was willing to allow me to be released into her custody during my probation. I held my breath.

“If he changes his ways,” she replied.

“If he doesn’t, ma’am, just let me know,” the judge said. He gave her a telephone number. “If he fails to comply with any of the conditions of his probation, call that number and we’ll come get him.” Then he turned back to me and asked, “Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. I don’t ever want to see you back in my courtroom again.”

“Me either, sir.” I meant it.

I HAD NO CHOICE BUT TO MOVE BACK IN WITH MY MOM and John; it was the primary condition of my probation. John had a freaking field day with me. When I walked through the door, he asked, “So, Jailbird, how’d they treat you up at Sing-Sing?” I knew he didn’t give a damn; he was just fucking with me. But he wouldn’t drop it. All day every day, all I heard from John was “Sing- Sing” this and “Sing-Sing” that until I actually thought it might be worth three years in juvie to get a gun and blow John’s fucking mouth right off his face.

I’d only been back home about a week when the great skinhead high holy day arrived: April 20, Adolf Hitler’s birthday. We threw an enormous bash in an abandoned soap company warehouse on the outskirts of the city. Every skinhead within fifty miles was at that party, drinking to the memory of Adolf. We even had a birthday cake.

Of course, I was drunk long before the skinchicks cut the cake. By midnight, I was too far gone to remember I had a court-ordered curfew, not that remembering would’ve mattered. I was back with my crew. The judge, my mom, and that phone number he gave her could all go fuck themselves. So when Louie pulled me aside and asked, “ Wanna go on a mission?” I didn’t hesitate.

It was my first terror squad ride in four months. From what I can remember, we didn’t actually hurt anybody that night. We just leaned on a few people we didn’t like the look of, including one white guy whose only mistake was walking down the street
carrying a fresh twelve-pack. We gave him some crap about being part of the conspiracy, but it didn’t make sense. We were so tanked Hitler himself wouldn’t have understood what we were talking about. But the guy handed his booze over anyhow. It was like he threw a raw steak to a pack of Dobermans; we didn’t give a crap about the dude once we were sucking on beers. We piled back into the car and returned to the party.

I woke up late the next morning and realized I was lying on Louie’s mom’s basement floor. Skinheads and skinchicks were passed out all around me. I crawled over them to get to the phone.

“Mommy, it’s Frankie,” I said. It wasn’t the first time in my life “Mommy” caught in my throat. I knew the woman on the other end of that telephone line wasn’t going to give me the kind of break I thought a “mommy” would.

“I am so sorry, Mommy. I fell asleep. I swear I just lost track of the time and fell asleep. Please don’t call the cops on me.”

I settled myself into a comfortable position to listen to how I was a brat, an ingrate, a no good piece of shit just like my father.

“I don’t need to call the cops. They’ve already been here. Did you strong-arm rob somebody last night?”

Did I strong-arm rob somebody last night? I was only half hungover because I was still half-drunk. I couldn’t remember more than bits and pieces. Old warehouse. Beer. Super hot little skinchick out in the back alley. Beer. Cake. Beer. Beer. Car ride. Beer. Somebody yelling, “Frankie, get your stupid ass back in the goddamn car!” Beer out of a twelve-pack. Shit.

I returned my focus to the phone, where my mom had started in on how I was a brat, an ingrate, a no good piece of shit like my father.

“What did you tell the cops?”

“Told ’em you weren’t here all night even though you were supposed to be back before midnight.”

Shit. Even if the cops didn’t get me for the robbery, my mom had given me up for a probation violation. I took a deep breath.

“Did you tell them to take me back to Sleighton Farms?” I asked.

“No,” she said. I exhaled. “But I’ll tell them the second you step foot in this house.”

For the first time, I actually felt homeless. Both times before when my mom and John had kicked me out, they’d at least given me a couple of minutes to throw some clothes into a bag. This time, all I had were the clothes on my back. I was worried about the cops, too. I didn’t want to go back to Sleighton Farms. So instead I went back to the Jersey Shore for another summer with Matt Hanson. A lot more Nazis came to visit us that second year. The Axis Skins and our boys from South Street came down almost every weekend. Quite a few guys from the Eastern Nazi Alliance showed up, too.

Now, in 1991, Scott Windham and John Cook were still probably the most legendary skinheads on the East Coast, but Joe Morgan was the most popular, bar none. Joe Morgan’s dad owned a beer distributorship. There’s just nothing like free and unlimited access to beer to give a guy social clout among skinheads. But Joe Morgan would have been beloved by skinheads even without the booze connection. I’d met up with him a few times in Philly, and every meeting left me liking him more. In addition to being an all-around good shit, Joe Morgan was one of the highest-ranked members of the Eastern Nazi Alliance and he was starting to become a legend himself within the white supremacy movement. He was the lead singer of a white power band that was starting to get a lot of notice. Thanks to word of mouth and boot-legged tapes, by the summer of 1991, skinheads all over North America were gushing about Joe Morgan. He was the most popular skinhead on the East Coast, if not in the whole country. Other Nazi Alliance skinheads literally would have killed for him. Even skinheads from other crews were intensely loyal to him. I was intensely loyal to him, which suggests I must have been out of my mind when I decided to start fucking one of Joe’s women behind his back.

Adrienne wasn’t Joe’s girlfriend. If I’d fucked Joe Morgan’s actual girlfriend, I wouldn’t have lived through the night. Adrienne was just one of the girls who hung around Joe. I guess, looking back on it, I’d call her a groupie. I didn’t know what their relationship was beyond that, only that I never saw any of the other guys approach Adrienne even though she was really hot. I couldn’t help myself.

I never once thought of Adrienne as my girlfriend. She and I just hooked up sometimes when nobody was looking. I never did figure out what if anything she and Joe had going, but I always respected whatever it was whenever anybody else was anywhere near us. I basically ignored her if anybody else was around. Not one person ever let on that they were onto what we were doing. But about a month or so after our first hookup, I noticed Joe staring at me funny, methodically stroking his trademark goatee as if he were trying to come to a decision about something. After that, whenever I was around him, I felt his eyes on me.

When I wasn’t sneaking around with Adrienne, I was scamming tourist chicks. One cute little blond showed up on the boardwalk with a weird dude in John Lennon glasses who looked like he’d been partying since Woodstock. They invited me to go for a ride in the guy’s Bronco. I invited Louie, Matt, and another skinhead named Kevin to come along, too.

Matt and Louie had enough sense to get out of the truck in Allentown, but not Kevin and me. By this time there were two cute little blonds in the Bronco and we followed our dicks into a shitload of a mess. Turned out the crazy dude had stolen the Bronco from his boss. By the time he told us this, we’d already crossed two state lines in the hot car roadtripping along with him and the chicks to Virginia Beach. We weren’t there more than two days when they ditched us. Kevin and I would’ve hitchhiked back to Philly, but the weather was too sweet to leave.

For a while, Kevin and I slept under a pavilion near the water. But one night, we crashed a party at one of the beachfront hotels and met the foreman of a traveling construction crew. The
guy offered us jobs and even a room in their hotel block. Kevin and I busted our asses siding a new government building. At the end of ten, sometimes twelve hour days in the Southern sun, we were exhausted. Most weeknights, we just laid around our air-conditioned hotel room drinking beer. Kevin was still pretty new to the movement, so I schooled him in Identity. He was an eager student.

 

I HEADED BACK to Philly at summer’s end. It had been almost exactly two years since I’d first returned from Lancaster as a skinhead. In those two years, I’d been at the center of the rebirth of the neo-Nazi movement in Philadelphia. But, except for our in-house code phrase, “terror squad,” our crew had never had a name. We were just the skinheads from Philly. Our only official designation, actually, was with the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan. Over the previous year, Louie, Jimmy, and I had finally convinced most of the other skinheads on South Street to grow some balls and join the Klan, too.

Klansmen young and old turned out for a party John Cook threw in Reading. A few weeks later, Klansmen, young only, showed up for an animal rights fundraiser concert in Pottsgrove where we got into a knock-down, drag-out with some SHARPS in the parking lot. We were on a roll by the time we finally made it inside. The mosh pit was out of control, then it spread up on stage. We destroyed the band’s equipment, then started in on the band. When the local media reported how neo-Nazi skinheads had ruined an animal rights event, they made it sound like we’d stormed the place screaming, “Puppies to the gas chamber!”

A few days later, the elderly Klansmen who’d sworn us into the Invisible Empire called Louie and me up to the camp to tell us they were kicking us out. They said skinheads were giving the Klan a bad name. Getting the boot from the Klan drove our egos over the edge. We were unstoppable after that. Within just a few days, Louie and me and some of the other guys decided that from that point forward, our crew would be called Strike Force.
No more kid stuff. No more dicking around. The time had finally come for us to go big time.

We spread the word about Strike Force to the other major East Coast crews and announced that we were preparing to expand. Guys like John Cook were all over the idea and started encouraging kids in their areas to use the new name, too. Before long, we struck a deal with the Eastern Nazi Alliance. Rather than divide turf geographically, we were going to divide it by age. Joe Morgan and the Nazi Alliance would focus on organizing all the veteran skinheads on the East Coast, the guys in their twenties, and Strike Force would work on the next generation. The plan was for Louie to head up all of Strike Force, spreading it nationwide from our bases in Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey. He would travel around to get other young skinhead groups to affiliate as Strike Force Chapters. My job was to stay home, take the reins of our flagship crew, the Pennsylvania Chapter, and show the whole freaking world just what Strike Force could do.

I did my job well. Too many nights were terror squad nights once I became a Strike Force crew commander. I had as many as forty guys in Southeastern Pennsylvania actually in or at least running with the chapter. Forty skinheads can do an unbelievable amount of damage, and we did. I can’t say with certainty how many people we attacked; it’s not like we kept records. I rarely went more than a week without beating on somebody, whether SHARPs or minorities. The other guys in Strike Force were beating on people, too, some even more so to try to prove themselves and earn rank. I had rank. I didn’t need to prove shit. I was beating the shit out of people because I wanted to. It made me feel good. It made me high. Some kids cut themselves because they only feel alive when they’re bleeding. I cut other people. I felt alive when they bled. I craved the power I felt surging through my veins every time I slammed my boot into some dude’s face.

THE HOST OF an apartment party out in the suburbs was this punk named Donny who had wicked asthma and a bunch of other medical problems. His bathroom was a pharmacy. I went in there to piss and ended up swallowing every pill he had. About an hour and a six-pack later, I almost fell down the stairs. Louie caught me.

“You ain’t that drunk, are you?” he asked.

“Not drunk,” I slurred. “Just medicine.”

“ What’re you talking about? You ain’t sick.”

“Just a little some of Donny’s pills,” I struggled to say. My legs collapsed.

“What the fuck did you do?” Louie screamed at me. Then he screamed for Donny to go check the bathroom and for somebody else to help him carry me to the car. The last thing I remember clearly is Louie asking, “Jesus, why?”

“I really don’t wanna be here.”

I have a vague memory of being in the backseat of a car, thinking that if the pills didn’t take me out, Louie was going to; he damn near slapped me to death before we got to the hospital. He knew what to do. He wouldn’t let me fall asleep, and he brought all the empty bottles along to the emergency room. While the doctors stuck a tube down my throat, Louie filled out my paperwork. Under “Parent,” he wrote, “You can’t get in touch with them. They’re crackheads.” But he called my cousins, and they had sense enough to call Nanny and Pop.

My grandparents were at my bedside when I finally came to.

“Where’s Mommy?” I asked, through the haze.

“She’ll be here soon,” Nanny said, but she didn’t look too sure.

Several times, when I had my eyes shut, I overheard the nurses grilling Nanny and Pop about why my mother hadn’t come in or returned the hospital’s calls.

“I don’t know,” Nanny replied. It sounded like she was crying.

“Can’t we take him home with us?” Pop asked.

But a nurse explained that they couldn’t release me without my mother’s signature because she was my legal guardian.

She finally showed up late the second day, maybe the third. Her first words to me were, “Do you know your idiot friend told them I’m a crackhead?” She sounded like a crackhead the way she went off on me about that. The nurses had a hard time calming her down. Once they finally did, they explained the options: she could either sign me out and take me home with her, or she could sign a form to have me committed to a psychiatric hospital for more intensive observation. My mom picked door number two.