Word: skinheads
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...economy--meant very different things to different people. The first free post-communist elections of 1990 had put a conservative party in power, some of whose members expressed openly racist, anti-Semitic views in Parliament and in the press. People began to realize that freedom of expression could mean skinhead demonstrations as well as democratic debate; self-government could mean an ugly strain of nationalism and xenophobia as well as independence; and economic liberalization could mean a "wild" brand of capitalism where a few people got immensely rich while the majority saw their prospects tumble...
...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...
...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...
...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...