Romantic Violence

by Christian Picciolini

  I was about to turn fourteen years old and start high school. Sitting in class all day would only slow me down.

  I was already learning about things that mattered. Things most people took for granted.

  And I didn’t need a classroom or some double-talking teacher to try and change my mind.

  Christian, 1988

  5

  SKINHEAD PRIDE

  When my freshman year of high school started in August of 1987, despite my vehement protests, my parents enrolled me in Marist High School, a private, all-boys Catholic school on the South Side of Chicago. I’d scored high on my entrance exam and was given a full load of honors classes. Those I could handle, but the last thing I wanted was more God and saints and prayers pounded into my head. It had no relevance to my life. Eight years of Catholic elementary school had been enough.

  Misery loves company, so on the first day when I bumped into Sid and Craig Sargent—the two younger skinhead brothers of Chase Sargent, a close cohort of Clark and Carmine—I was ecstatic. I recalled seeing them drinking beer in the alley on occasion and recognized them right away by their cropped hair and the white laces in their boots. Even if the school did require them to wear a necktie and slacks to cover up their skinhead appearance, they remained identifiable.

  The three of us became fast friends and a few days later, Craig gave me my first very own Skrewdriver cassette with Hail the New Dawn dubbed on side A and two short albums, Boots and Braces and Voice of Britain, on the flipside. While I’d heard Carmine blasting Skrewdriver’s music nearly every day, and I knew enough about them from listening to Scully’s tapes, I didn’t own my own copy. Now I did.

  “This is some sick shit! This band knows what they’re talking about,” Craig said, echoing Carmine’s sentiment. Despite being in the same grade and only a few months older than me, Craig had been mentored for some time by two older brothers who were skins—Sid and Chase—and already knew the ins and outs of recruiting. Craig was tall and imposing and had the routine down pat. “White people are going to be in big trouble if we don’t pay attention to what they’re saying. Just like England, European whites built America and now we’re being pushed aside by the Jews in favor of blacks,” he’d say, “and we’re not going to let that happen.”

  Skrewdriver, and more specifically Ian Stuart, had a real knack for creating music and lyrics that inspired young people to take action. The band had given birth to the white power music genre and with Ian Stuart’s keen ability to identify and deliver what embittered youths wanted before they even knew they wanted it, it was only a matter of time before his politically-infused anthems stood apart from those of his contemporaries in the London punk rock scene and made it to the United States.

  Skrewdriver wrote anthems with relatable directives built in, unlike the whiny punk protest songs I’d become used to. The lyrics gave us the truthful education our schools refused to deliver, for fear we’d see through their manipulated account of history. “White Power.” “Blood & Honour.” “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” “Free My Land.” Songs that filled me with purpose and pride instead of childish, nihilistic impulses like punk music did.

  Armed with my new cassette and a Walkman, I played this Skrewdriver tape over and over and over until I heard the songs in my head even when my player’s batteries had run down. I moved beyond the pounding beats into the heart of the lyrics.

  Walk around the city and you hold your head up high

  The sheep they’ll try and drag you down with their aggression and their lies

  Your life is just a struggle ’cos you’re proud of your country

  But you just keep on fighting, that’s the way it’s got to be

  People try and put you down and stamp you to the ground

  They don’t seem to realize there’s no way you’ll back down

  There is nothing they can do to step on you and me

  ’Cos we’ll just keep on fighting, that’s the way it’s got to be

  The cadence and conviction of this music spoke to me as nothing else ever had, brought me under a spell that sent me craving more information about its message, the culture behind it, skinhead lifestyle, and attitude. I wanted to be part of this. Body, heart, mind, and soul.

  Again, I turned to my immediate surroundings, half hoping to find evidence that hordes of minorities were messing up Blue Island and nearby neighborhoods. Determined to find evidence to support the claims in the music I was listening to, I began seeing strangers who couldn’t even keep their yards clean. Junk cars cluttering up the street. Black men hollering at white women, trashing up our town. Dealing drugs. Mexicans, and their dozens of children, creeping out of their dirty little section of Blue Island over to our side. Bringing their smelly rice and beans along with them. Greasy food not fit for pigs.

  Scully waded into the skinhead mindset with me. We dubbed and swapped more tapes, listening to more Skrewdriver and expanding our collection to other like-minded English skinhead bands. Brutal Attack. Skullhead. Sudden Impact. No Remorse. I took their lyrics to heart. The music was no longer a solitary beat bringing me to a new level of alive—it was both knowledge and prophecy.

  We pooled together our holiday and birthday money, purchased bank money orders and stamps, and sent away for Ben Sherman and Fred Perry shirts from Shelly’s, a store on London’s Carnaby Street specializing in skinhead couture. By now my body had begun to fill out and grow and I was no longer shorter and smaller than everyone else my age, which meant that Scully and I could swap clothes and essentially double our skinhead wardrobe.

  We set out to find shiny, steel-toed Dr. Martens boots—“Docs”—in obscure Chicago Goth boutiques like Wax Trax and 99th Floor. We wore braces, the thin suspenders Clark wore. I rolled the cuffs of my Levi’s like I’d seen the others do in the alley behind Carmine’s, and I sported a military surplus black nylon bomber jacket purchased from the local flea market, which I adorned with symbolic patches like American and Confederate flags. Standard issue for any skinhead worth his salt. I looked sharp. Tough. Turned heads when I walked down the street. Adults were nervous when I was too close. I liked a look that intimidated without my needing to do a damn thing. And people made assumptions about my willingness to fight rather than take shit from anybody.

  Scully and I shaved each other’s heads in his dingy basement. Concrete floors, exposed pipes, and dangling lightbulbs were the ideal ambiance for us barely-teenage boys taking a stand for white working-class adults everywhere.

  I shaved his head first. Adjusted the guard on the clippers, not meaning to shave him completely bald. But it was my first time using the shears and before I knew it, Scully’s hair was cut down to his scalp.

  He cried. I’m not putting him down for that. I didn’t blame him. A pasty, bald head was not a great look on him, and he’d have to go to school looking like that on Monday. Maybe the girls would avoid him. Laugh at him even. Shit.

  I pulled him to his feet and put the clippers in his hand. Plopping down on the metal folding chair myself, I said, “Go ahead, I messed up your head. Now it’s my turn. Take it off. All of it.”

  So he did.

  When my mom saw my fresh buzz cut later that night, she cried. “Oh my God, Christian, what did you do? Why did you cut off your beautiful hair?” She attempted to caress my head as if the tears welling in her eyes and her pleas to God could magically make it grow back faster. “You look like you’re sick and have cancer,” she said, sobbing, and she pulled me close. “It’s this punk garbage, isn’t it? I knew it. I want my little boy back!”

  I let her grieve, silently reckoning that while I wasn’t the one who was sick, my shaved head meant I was working on the cure to the multiracial cancer that was eating away at our society.

  Gone were the days of my pageboy hairstyle. And my youth.

  Only four months had passed since I’d met Martell, but we were skinheads now. Literally. Officially.

  Politics meant little to Scully. H
e only liked the look and the music.

  So, apparently, did other people.

  With our tough new look and shaved heads, our popularity soared. Girls liked being around us. I met Jessica, a cute Blue Island cheerleader who took to wearing a bomber jacket and Docs, and we both soon proudly shed the “virgin” label.

  I was all of fourteen. Life was good.

  If it hadn’t been for school and my mother—who spied on me and pestered me with constant questions and suspicions—and other signs the white race was about to be annihilated, I would have had no complaints.

  But I lost no sleep over the annihilation part. Clark was building a resistance army. He’d already founded the Chicago Area Skinheads—CASH—in 1985. The first organized white power skinhead crew in the United States. Between CASH and Romantic Violence—CASH’s small-time white power music mail-order operation—Martell now had a regular following of a couple dozen skinheads in Blue Island and around the city. A handful of the original female recruits, like Mandy Krupp—Shane Krupp’s sister—and Kat Armstrong, had been Charles Manson worshippers before becoming skinheads. Now they were Martell devotees.

  This wasn’t some fluke. Clark would have had more followers, but opposing skinhead crews began popping up around Chicago to counter his racist advances, like the Medusa Skins and Bomber Boys, who just liked to party and fight mostly, but didn’t claim a side, and the more outspoken anti-racist factions of skinheads, the Pitbulls and SHOC—Skinheads of Chicago. The “Antis” as I began to call them all—short for anti-racists—somehow managed to lure some wannabe skinheads to their side.

  Skinheads scared people. When a bunch of them were together, fights broke out. Bad shit happened. On the eve of November 9th, 1987, the week of my fourteenth birthday and the 49th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s Kristallnacht, the infamous “Night of Broken Glass,” when SS stormtroopers had raided Jewish stores in 1938, white power skinheads stormed the North Side of Chicago, smashing in windows of shops they suspected to be owned by Jews and painting blood-red swastikas on synagogue walls.

  I hadn’t had anything against Jews before, in fact, I didn’t even know any, but from the lyrics I’d been studying and Martell’s hatred of them, I had come to the conclusion that Jews were indeed evil masterminds trying to undermine unsuspecting American whites into extinction.

  Clark was whispering to two older, long-haired American Nazi Party twin brothers in the alley when I mentioned that it was my birthday. Carmine, who was changing the engine oil on his muscle car, pulled a frosted Old Style can from a Styrofoam cooler in the garage and tossed it to me. “Happy birthday!”

  Clark paused his conversation with the mustached twins to approach me and shake my hand. “I have something important for you,” he said, smiling. “Might be going out of town for a bit to take care of some business. Can I rely on you to check the Romantic Violence post office box and hold the mail for me until I get back?”

  “Yeah, of course! You can count on me, Clark,” I responded, before the question had even fully escaped his lips. With that he handed me a small brass key and returned to hushed conversation with the two jackbooted men.

  I was unaware that Clark didn’t know if he’d be coming back. What was inescapable, though, was the utmost importance of what the three men were discussing. I felt the tiny ridges of the key with my fingers and squeezed it tight in my palm, knowing fully this key would unlock more than a mailbox. I had no idea this would be the last time I’d see Clark Martell.

  Rumor got around that Clark was behind the Kristallnacht rampage and he was arrested, along with a few members of the CASH crew and one of the long-haired American Nazi Party fellows from the alley. It wasn’t the first time the police had been after him, either. It proved what Carmine had told me—the cops, the feds, maybe even the CIA, were watching Clark’s every move.

  It wasn’t only Clark who was being watched. Carmine was, too, and so were Chase Sargent and his brothers Sid and Craig, the Manson-loving skinhead chicks, Shane Krupp, and the other people I’d seen hanging around in the alley. FBI raids of their houses were becoming pretty standard. Their home phones were wiretapped, and they were routinely tailed and photographed by less-than-subtle law enforcement officers. The Romantic Violence mailbox got monitored. Letters were opened and resealed.

  My desire to be part of their group escalated until it consumed me. It was inspiring. Made me feel proud to be a skinhead. This was the stuff of gangster and spy movies. Serious good guys and bad guys in action. And while we good guys were being deceptively portrayed as violent thugs by the Jewish-run media, this was for the good of a cause. An honorable cause. Protecting the white race. Clark had even prophesized it in some lyrics he wrote before going to jail.

  We’re Chicago gangsters in braces and boots

  Bloodthirsty Vikings sticking to our roots

  We’re the Waffen SS going off to war

  White warriors here to even the score.

  “Can you believe it?” I asked Scully when the Chicago Kristallnacht story came out in the news. “Martell’s not just saying he’s going to save the white race. He’s actually doing something about it, like Carmine said.”

  Adolf Hitler hated Jews because he felt they were destroying his beloved Germany and were the cause of his country’s intense economic struggle after World War I. He saw Jews as parasites that leeched onto healthy nations and destroyed them like a cancer. Now Clark was going after them the same way Hitler did, because he saw the same things happening in America at the hands of Jews who ran the media and banking systems.

  I was awed to imagine Clark doing this level of damage. He and his followers shook people up, had minorities and Jews locking their doors and putting up For Sale signs. I wanted to stand beside him. People were too meek; they needed a leader like Clark Martell.

  I had the same fury running through me, waiting to be unleashed.

  After the news hit that Chicago neo-Nazi skinheads were behind the violence and destruction of Jewish property, the terms “skinhead” and “fear” became synonymous. Some people considered skinheads racial terrorists. Terrorists. I liked the sound of that. The power behind it. But people had it wrong. Skinheads were brave patriots, not terrorists. They were fighting battles other whites talked about but were too complacent to take up.

  Honest, hardworking white people like my parents were being forced to work day and night just to make ends meet to support their families, while the minorities sat back collecting unemployment and pumping out more crack babies to boost their monthly welfare checks. My mom often worked three jobs—in the salon, as a caterer, and in the evenings during election season as a vote tabulator. My dad ran the beauty shop all day and looked after Buddy while my mom was away working at night. And when Buddy grew up he’d have to do the same just to survive. That didn’t sit right with me.

  All the while, Clark said the Jews enjoyed the turmoil they secretly created as they sat in their ivory towers rubbing their greedy hands together, watching whites and minorities finger-pointing at each other while it all unfolded to their benefit. If scaring white people into submission meant that they’d ultimately see the truth behind the Jewish lies, then Clark was well on his way to opening their eyes. It was for their own good.

  Over the last fourteen years when my parents were absent, busy at work trying to make ends meet, I’d been angry with them for not being there for me. Now it had begun to make sense. The Jews were to blame, not my mom and dad.

  In January of my freshman year I found out more of what Carmine’s hushed innuendos concerning Clark’s activities had been about. He and five other CASH skinheads had broken into the apartment of a twenty-year-old woman the previous April.

  Angie Streckler had been a CASH skinhead at one point, but quit the crew abruptly. Clark and the others heard she had a black friend—a totally intolerable behavior for a white power skin. To discipline her, Clark and some of the CASH crew stormed into her place, pistol-whipped her, sprayed
mace in her eyes, and used her own blood to paint a swastika and the words “race traitor” on the walls of her bedroom. She’d never reported it, until the cops somehow caught wind of the attack when the group was arrested for the Kristallnacht episode and pursued additional charges.

  Some other things Clark had done around Chicago before setting up shop in Blue Island in late 1984 came out, too, including physical assaults on six Mexican women, the fire-bombing of a minority’s home, spray-painting swastikas on three other synagogues, and perpetrating numerous incidents of vandalism on various Jewish-owned businesses.

  A fucking legend. That’s what he was to me. He had a clear purpose and put action behind his words. The violence didn’t scare me. It excited me, made my blood lust to participate.

  I hungered to talk to Clark again and schemed ways to meet up with him when he got out, but he failed to make bail. He was sentenced to prison for eleven years.

  About a month later on a cold February afternoon, less than a year after the Angie Streckler incident, I settled in with a six-pack of Old Style to watch black talk-show host Oprah Winfrey, who was having some white power skinheads from California on her show. Dave Mazzella. Marty Cox. Tom and John Metzger, the leaders of WAR—White Aryan Resistance.

  The show’s producers were even able to get Clark on the phone to make some comments from prison. While on the line, not only did Clark put the poser Anti skinheads in their place by calling them out for their cowardly unwillingness to stand behind their race, he was clearly able to communicate that power-hungry rich people—or capitalists as he called them—were the real enemy, plotting every race against each other in the name of the almighty dollar and ultimate global control. Now that was something that made sense. Those of us without any real money or power were all being sold out. It was every race for itself. The only way to fight back was to stick with your own kind or die with the rest.