Word: leyden
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Leyden's journey from normal kid to thug and back again, began when he was a teenager in the blue-collar town of Fontana, California. His parents divorced when he was 15, and he became angry, lonely and, most important to skinhead recruiters, vulnerable. "I needed to lash out," he explains. "They look for young, angry kids who need a family." He dropped out of school and began meeting skinheads hanging around the punk-rock scene. The trappings--bomber jacket, shaved head and steel-toed Dr. Martens boots--and hard-line beliefs soon followed. "These were good guys, I thought...
...parents, Sharon and Thomas Leyden Sr., who say they raised their son to abhor racism, were horrified by his transformation. But when Sharon confronted him, she says, "it didn't work at all." They finally agreed he would not talk about "those things" at her house or bring his thuggish friends through her door. "He would just be my son," Sharon says. "I told him I believed people always come back to what they really are inside. And I knew what he was inside, and that he would be back...
First, though, she had to watch him go still farther away. When he was 21, Leyden joined the Marines. According to Leyden, for the first two years of his service at the Kaneohe Bay Marine Corps Air Station in Hawaii, his supervisors chose to overlook his extracurricular activities. "Off duty, I'd walk around in a tank top so people could see my tattoos," he says. "I wore my Dr. Martens, kept my hair as short as possible and tucked in my pants the way Nazis used to do. I had a Third Reich battle flag in my locker...
...Leyden was doing more than just collecting paraphernalia; he was developing into a sophisticated neo-Nazi activist. Through a fellow skinhead he came to the attention of Tom Metzger, founder of the White Aryan Resistance, based in California. "Tom wanted more military recruiters," Leyden recalls. "They started sending me literature." And he worked hard for his cause, recruiting at least four fellow travelers, who then went off to other bases. The Marines finally reacted when he had Nazi storm-trooper lightning bolts tattooed on his neck. In a 1990 evaluation his superior officer wrote, "Loyalty is questionable, as he willingly...
Once he returned to the civilian world, the "movement" embraced him. His racist friends even helped him find a wife. "They wrote and asked if I was meeting skinhead girls," Leyden remembers. "When I said it was hard in Hawaii, white-power girls on the mainland started to write." Leyden clicked with Nicole Rodman, who met him at the airport when he returned to California. They had an Aryan wedding two weeks after meeting and were legally married...