Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead (7 page)

A few nights later, the Lancaster County crew gathered in Shawn’s bedroom. They took turns with a pair of electric clippers until my head was shaved clean. Tim Kleinschmidt presented me with an old pair of his Doc Marten combat boots. He explained that they were laced in red to symbolize both the sacred Aryan blood in my veins and the ZOG blood I had spilled in the mosh pit.

I was fourteen, and I was a neo-Nazi skinhead. For the first time in my life, I felt like I mattered.

IN THE LATE 1980S, SKINHEADS WERE THE HOTTEST TOPIC on the talk show circuit thanks to a few show-stopping guest spots by Tom Metzger, head of White Aryan Resistance, and his son, John, the white-power wunderkind. The appearance everybody remembers is the time Johnny Boy went on
Geraldo
. John Metzger faced off center stage with a Jew and a black dude. He wasn’t alone; he had two other young neo-Nazi leaders on stage with him and dozens of skinheads in the audience.

Geraldo kicked things off by introducing a white guy with a black eye who claimed he’d been viciously attacked for no reason on the train by a pack of skinheads in front of his wife and baby, who were sitting next to him on the set. The guy’s story sent the other panelists into overdrive. Before long, Metzger’s comments got the black panelist so riled up he came out of his chair, wrapped his hands around Metzger’s neck, and tried to choke him. That’s when all hell broke loose in Geraldo’s studio. This enormous brawl erupted on stage, in the audience, everywhere. Geraldo’s security guards came flying onto the set, but not quite fast enough to save their boss. One of Metzger’s boys hurled a chair across the stage; it slammed into Geraldo’s face and broke his nose.

I guess none of the adults in my life watched
Geraldo
, because when I returned from Lancaster County, not one of them realized I’d become a skinhead even though my head was shaved clean and I was parading through South Philly in a flight
jacket and combat boots. My dad didn’t say anything about the change in my appearance. When my mom finally saw me, she told me she thought I looked a lot better without long scraggly hair. John was more blunt: “At least now you don’t look like a retard.” His reaction surprised me only because I hadn’t counted on him saying anything. I figured he’d just beat the crap out of me. But he didn’t.

Only other kids understood that my new look was a political statement, not a fashion statement. My first night back in the city, I showed up at Nanny and Pop Bertone’s house for dinner. Uncle Dave, the superstar athlete of the Bertone family, was still home on summer break from college. When I stomped into Nanny’s kitchen in my Doc Martens, Dave looked at me like I’d sprouted a second head. I wondered if that’s how I’d looked when I first saw Shawn in Aunt Catherine’s kitchen. All through dinner, Dave just stared at me. He didn’t say anything in front of Nanny and Pop, but he cornered me once we were alone.

“You’re going to get yourself killed,” he said.

I assured him I would be proud to give my life to protect the survival of the Aryan race. I stared right into my childhood hero’s eyes and saluted, “
Sieg Heil
!”

“Jesus, Frankie – do you even know what that means?”

“God chose me to know,” I replied. “I know exactly what’s going on. I know the fucking kikes and niggers are trying to take over. And I know we’re not going to take it anymore.”

“Who’s telling you this shit?” Dave asked.

“My white brothers.”

“Your white brothers are full of shit.”

“You’re full of shit!” I screamed at my uncle. “You and all the rest of the fucking dupes laying down in front of ZOG. You make me sick.”

I stormed out of the house without even saying goodbye to Nanny and Pop. I headed over to Finnegan’s Park, where I’d always spent my free time in my dad’s neighborhood. I helped myself to a beer and settled in for the night. Since I’d been gone
for nearly two months, the guys wanted to know what I’d been doing. They weren’t too interested in what I had to say about National Socialism, but they liked the story about how the skinheads had carried me into the mosh pit and I’d kicked the “long-hair” in the face. They had me re-tell it every time somebody new joined the crowd. After a while, one of the guys pulled me aside and said, “You ought to meet Louie Lacinzi.”

“Who’s he?” I asked.

“Some kid from St. I’s who’s been around this summer. He’s a skinhead.”

“He’s probably a fucking SHARP from South Street,” I replied.

“A what?”

“A SHARP. A nigger -lover.”

“Trust me, dude, Louie Lacinzi ain’t no nigger-lover.”

A few nights later I was hanging around by the baseball field drinking and bullshitting about nothing with the guys when I saw Louie Lacinzi for the first time. I tried not to look like I was watching him approach, but I was watching him, just in case he was a SHARP.

“Cool, another skinhead,” he said. “I heard youse were hanging out down here. Thought I’d come see if the rumors were true.”

“What rumors?”

His lips curled into a slight smile. “That there’s finally somebody else around here who’s sick of niggers taking over what’s ours.”

So I wasn’t the only neo-Nazi skinhead in Finnegan’s Park. Louie Lacinzi was a skinhead, too. And by the end of the night, he was my best friend.

Louie and I had only been palling around for a few days when someone told us a group of skinheads hung out most nights in the Wise Potato Chip Company’s parking lot across the street from McCreesh Playground. Since the guy who told us wasn’t a skinhead, I wasn’t sure he knew what he was talking about. The Lancaster County skinheads said there’d been a really hardcore neo-Nazi crew in Philly a few years back, but they
seemed to think it had broken up. So when Louie and I heard about the guys at Wise’s, we were skeptical. We headed over to check them out for ourselves. After we spied on them from a distance to check out their colors and make sure they weren’t actually Sharpies, we decided to introduce ourselves.

Most of the ten or twelve guys in that parking lot were in their early twenties. Most of them weren’t skinheads, but four were. And they were the real deal, the kind of neo-Nazi skinheads I hadn’t met out in Lancaster County. Louie and I didn’t have a freaking clue who we were dealing with that first night. When we asked those older skinheads what they did in Philly, they all sort of shrugged and said it’d been more than a year since they’d done any serious battling. Louie and me were too naïve to realize those guys were stonewalling us because they didn’t trust us yet. And we were too cocky to think we could learn much from our elders. We were polite-they were pretty big dudes-but we basically wrote them off as white power retirees who stood around drinking beer in a parking lot. Of course, we were more than happy to stand around drinking beer with them, especially for free.

When we came back for more free beer the next night, we got our first lesson in East Coast skinhead history. A few years earlier, back when Louie and me were still in grade school, the guys in the Wise’s parking lot had been founding members of The Uprise, the first neo-Nazi skinhead crew in Philly. The Uprise had been really violent, so they were notorious with the Philly cops within a couple of months of organizing. But their leaders, the Windham brothers, hadn’t been content just to be local legends. They formed a white power band and distributed their recordings all over the U.S. and even Europe. In neo-Nazi circles, the guys from The Uprise were celebrities. But having their own band wasn’t the only claim to fame The Uprise veterans had to share with us. They asked us if we’d seen the big skinhead brawl on
Geraldo
.

“You remember that bastard who said he’d been attacked by skinheads on the train?”

Of course, we did. He was the white guy with the black eye. He claimed he’d been minding his own business when a group of skinheads jumped him.

“He wasn’t lying,” an Uprise vet said. “Well, he was lying when he said the skinheads started it, because they didn’t. He did. He was ripped up drunk and started calling them ‘jarheads’ and talking shit. The idiot tried to rub one of their heads. That asshole was praying for an ass kicking; they just answered his prayer.”

“Who did?” we asked all wide-eyed.

The older skinheads exchanged glances like they weren’t sure if they could tell us.

“It doesn’t matter now,” one said to the others. Then he turned to Louie and me and said, “Those were our boys on that train.”

They told us that Scott Windham and another member of The Uprise were still doing time in Rikers Island for that attack. The other Windham brother was in prison, too, as were at least half the members of the original crew. All of them had been sent up for crimes they had committed in the name of The Uprise. The remaining members explained to Louie and me that back when they formed the crew there hadn’t been too many SHARPs in the city, so The Uprise hadn’t had to fight the anti-racists for turf. Instead, they had directed almost all their violence at blacks who’d started moving into their neighborhood.

“The cops don’t give a shit if you roll on some other white kids,” they said. “They don’t know the difference between us and Sharpies. They don’t know who’s who. But you start laying out niggers, and the fucking Jew lawyers’ll come running down off their thrones to make sure you get locked up for good.”

By the time we met, only four of the original twenty or so members of The Uprise crew were still hanging together in the Wise’s parking lot. They were the ones who taught me that the Lancaster County skinheads really didn’t know shit about the
white supremacy movement, at least not about the role skinheads played in the movement. The Uprise had been an incredibly hardcore neo-Nazi crew. They knew the ideology and history of white supremacy inside out. They hadn’t just read pamphlets from groups like Aryan Nations, some of them had gone out to Idaho to train at the Aryan Nations’ compound. The Uprise veterans were like white power Ph.D.s, and after I’d been their student for a couple nights, I realized the Lancaster County skinheads couldn’t have passed a neo-Nazi GED.

In those days, though, I still was thankful to have met the Lancaster County skinheads because they introduced me to the movement and the movement was everything to me. But I was even more thankful to The Uprise veterans for taking me to the next level of my education. In one way, I remain thankful to The Uprise – I figure I owe my life to them. The guys from The Uprise taught me something the Lancaster County skinheads never could have taught me out in Amish country: they taught me what it takes to survive as a skinhead in the gang-infested inner city of Philadelphia. It takes a crew.

Although some vocabulary expert will probably disagree with me on this, back in the late 1980s, most skinhead crews were basically just local gangs. They were a lot more formal than a group like the Third and Jackson boys, but they weren’t networked in the way gangs like the Latin Kings were, gangs with branches all over the country. All that started changing, though, right around the time I joined the movement.

Romantic Violence was the first American neo-Nazi crew. They formed in Chicago in 1984, and other crews started organizing soon after. This was a decade before the internet, so it took a while for everybody to get connected. Still, within a few years, the crew leaders found each other, mostly at white-power concerts or at rallies held by groups like Aryan Nations or the KKK. In time, some of the crew leaders started taking some of their cues from their enemies. Nazi skinheads hated minority gangs like the Latin Kings and the Gangster Disciples but they
couldn’t deny that the structure of those gangs was what was helping them spread so quickly into new turf, including the once all-white neighborhoods the skinheads wanted back. So in the late 1980s, some skinhead crews followed suit. The crew leaders started building the alliances that became national gangs by the mid-1990s.

Even though The Uprise had never had branches in other cities, its remaining members helped Louie and me understand that the world of skinheads was a lot bigger than we’d imagined. According to those guys, there were several thousand actual neo-Nazi skinheads in the United States then, and by “actual” I mean guys who’d gone through formal training and initiation periods with real crews like the Eastern Nazi Alliance. As “freshcuts,” or initiates, they had worn white laces in their Doc Martens to declare that they were willing to fight for the Aryan bloodline. Not until they had spilled the blood of some Sharpie “ZOG dupe” or some minority “mud,” had they graduated to red laces and full rank within their crew.

Louie and I had both been blood red from the start, and we were hell bent on keeping it that way. Before the summer of 1989 rolled to a close, Louie and I came to an understanding about our future together as skinheads. We were going to form our own crew, and our crew was going to blow The Uprise the hell out of the record books. It was our silent pact, because kids who grow up in places like South Philly don’t talk about their goals. They see too many dreamers get burned to set themselves up for public humiliation. In South Philly, dashed dreams are right up there with deformities for getting a guy pegged with an embarrassing nickname for the rest of his life. I could just see myself thirty years into the future if I’d shot my mouth off about my Nazi aspirations then failed to deliver. I’d wind up hanging on some corner bitching about my arthritis to Tommy “Earbow” Petanzi and Mikey “Muffin Ass” McCarthy.

“Shut up about it already, Eva Braun,” they’d say.

That’s when some young corner punk would pipe up and ask, “Why do youse guys call him ‘Eva Braun’?”

“Frankie got fucked by Hitler, too.”

Thankfully, Louie and I didn’t have to talk about our vision for the future to know we totally agreed on what it ought to look like.

Most nights, we scammed beer and history lessons off The Uprise vets for a few hours. When they got bored with us, we’d head over to South Street and scam beer and club passes off the older punks who still remembered me as one of the little skater kids from back when Jimmy and me used to show off our Ollies for the dudes waiting in line to get in the clubs. There were about a dozen SHARPs on South Street then. They thought they owned the place because the skaters and the young punks feared them. Then Louie and I showed up. We didn’t care that the SHARPs had us outnumbered; we got in their faces. That’s when we realized most of those South Street SHARPs commuted in each night from their pretty houses out in the suburbs. Louie and me reeked of South Philly. We weren’t commuters.