Word: leyden
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Leyden worked as a telephone installer. By night, he claims, Nicole was pulling him deeper into the skinhead world. She introduced him to such key characters as Metzger, his son John and skinhead martyr Geremi Rineman, who was paralyzed during a racial gunfight. Neo-Nazis generally agree that the Metzgers set the standard for inventive recruiting when John insulted Roy Innis of the Congress of Racial Equality during a 1988 Geraldo Rivera show and started a slugfest. Rivera got a broken nose in the ensuing brawl, and White Aryan Resistance's telephone lines lit up with new members. "After that...
...Leyden took similar tactics to southern California schools, papering junior high campuses with hate material to provoke fighting between white and nonwhite kids. Days after a fight, he would ask white students, "Shouldn't there be a group for you?" Affectionately known as "Grandpa" because of his advanced age, Leyden led younger skinheads on recruiting drives, tossing White Aryan Resistance leaflets on doorsteps and giving racial comics to young teenagers on their way home from school...
Beneath the energy and drama of his extremist life, though, discomfort began to gnaw at Leyden. For starters he was finding his social life to be cloyingly ingrown. "We usually stayed home to avoid contact with other races," Leyden explains. And as discontent seeped in, so did conflict. Leyden's brother is a policeman, and skinhead jokes about killing cops started to seem less than funny. His mother, who had polio as a child, has a slight limp, while Leyden's closest friends were busy calling disabled people "surplus whites...
...grew away from the movement, his wife remained loyal, Leyden says, spending more and more time with hard-core skinheads, some of whom Leyden thought were involved with guns and drugs. Following Nicole's wishes, the couple had left California for the "whiter" environment of St. George, Utah, and when he lost his job there, to Hailey, Idaho. (Nicole declined to comment for this story.) The marriage began to fall apart, and Leyden says he reached a torturous emotional crossroad: he even contemplated striking out to locate remnants of the Order, the near extinct racist commando units smashed by federal...
...sexual preference. They'll go to jail, maybe die. My kids will be sacrificed. The idea hurt." Last fall he left Nicole, with whom he is now engaged in a bitter custody battle, and returned to California to live with his mother. It took some time, but with Sharon Leyden's encouragement he found the courage to contact the people at the Wiesenthal Center, a place his mother had heard about on TV news. "I'd spent years praying that hate would be removed from this family," she said recently. "I'm proud of my son." He had finally come...