Romantic Violence

by Christian Picciolini

  So I called Big Ed from Bound For Glory and told him we’d be going along to Germany. They were getting paid to perform and set up with a place to stay. I let him know we’d fund our own trip and find our own place to bunk, but would be meeting them there. He seemed glad we were going.

  I couldn’t wait to tell Lisa the news. She’d go with me, of course. Spend her eighteenth birthday with me. I wanted to experience this milestone together, even if she’d want no part in the concert itself. She loved to take photographs and sketch architecture and I thought we could travel together and split up when it was time to take care of band business. Germany had an abundance of historic landmarks and breathtaking scenery to keep her busy snapping photos and drawing for weeks. Who cared that the concert was in March and she’d still be in school? I wanted her to be part of that history.

  Getting booked to play in Germany might have been simple, but don’t think for a minute I hadn’t earned the right to be there. I’d been attending rallies, pumping out printed material, and recruiting people for our cause for over five years, much longer than most skins had even been in the movement. Out of everyone I met nationwide, I was often the youngest—but almost always the most active. I’d put together not one, but two, well-known white power bands, knowing being in a band was a sure way to rise up in status and make a lasting impression. What I might have lacked in musical talent I had in guts, and the two bands I put together garnered instant fans. Which translated into more skinheads, more soldiers, and more attention.

  The recruiting tactics for my Hammerskin chapter had shifted focus from printing and distributing flyers to strangers, to producing music and using it as a targeted marketing tool to keep the flooding masses of new recruits—that were now coming in on their own volition—happy and engaged.

  I’d lost almost all interest in throwing fists since I met Lisa, content in simply conducting the chaos like a maestro leading a symphony. Earning the crossed hammers patch for their bomber jacket became an obsession for new recruits and I was the local gatekeeper. There were strict rules like abstaining from drugs and respecting your brothers. A brief probationary period allowed the cream to rise to the top and the wayward most to be skimmed off. I was satisfied with my position at the top of the Illinois Hammerskin pyramid, still leaving enough time for me to focus on the band and my beautiful fiancée.

  A surprising thing about skinheads, though, was that for all the fear the media propagated, membership was actually pretty small. Across the nation, there were probably fewer than five thousand racist skinheads—of which only about five hundred were Hammerskins—yet we were considered a formidable force. From local cops to the FBI, law enforcement soiled their panties thinking of what we might be up to or where we’d pop up next. Minority adults saw a kid with a shaved head, tattoos, and Doc Martens in their town and they were running to realtors and having earnest conversations about pulling their kids out of the local public school.

  While we got the nation’s attention after Marty Cox called Oprah a monkey on national television, we’d cemented the public’s fear and loathing two years later when a skinhead busted Geraldo’s nose on his talk show. We still laughed about it amongst ourselves.

  Every time a skinhead threw a punch or desecrated a synagogue, the media picked up on it and vilified us as extremist right-wing radicals—domestic terrorists. So we didn’t need a whole bunch of us to strike fear into the heart of America. Fifty of us partying together was reason enough to call in the SWAT team, the FBI, and the National Guard. As our numbers grew, so did our violent behavior.

  Back in the summer heat of 1990, two Houston, Texas, skinheads stomped a fifteen-year-old foreigner from Vietnam to death. According to one of the killers, the kid’s last words were, “God forgive me for coming to this country. I’m so sorry.”

  The following year, some other Texas Hammerskins took out a race-mixing nigger in a drive-by shooting. He’d been hanging out with some white traitors.

  A few months later, Aryan National Front skinheads from Birmingham, Alabama, beat a homeless black vagrant to death on Christmas Eve. Shortly after, four other skinheads stabbed and killed another transient waste of life. Cleaning the streets of all the filth, as far as I was concerned.

  And yet, while my skinhead brethren were out patrolling the homeland and taking care of much-needed movement business, I couldn’t help but acknowledge the lurking gratitude that I felt for my hardworking immigrant parents and all that they had fought to accomplish since coming to this country. Though we were hardly together to enjoy the creature comforts that their efforts provided, they consistently put food on our table, a roof over my head, and I was afforded luxuries that were often beyond our financial means. They found ways to give me a leg up in society—a way to rise above the filth—despite the absence of their physical affection. I’d found a proxy to fill the remaining void. And the two halves formed an abundant whole.

  While our numbers weren’t big compared to other street gangs, white power skinheads were spread out far and wide and tucked into every corner of the country. We took turns hosting rallies and fests to get together to exchange information and motivate each other to keep fighting the good fight. Not a whole lot of people would travel long-distance for some boring meeting, but add old friends, aggressive white power music, and beer to the agenda, and it was a guarantee skinhead guys and gals would drive hundreds of miles to get drunk and hear music from the few bands singing their tunes.

  Skinhead gatherings were like white power pep rallies. The energy at these events reignited our weary fires and put us in the right frame of mind to continue battling the enemy. It gave others who came solely to experience the music another chance to join our intrepid efforts to save the white race. It’s pretty damn hard to listen to hours and hours of aggressive music preaching about the need to fight those trying to destroy the people you love and not to come away pissed off, ready to do something about it.

  Music was usually preceded by speakers. Sometimes I was one of them. We’d get up on stage and set the tone through communicating that our nation was in jeopardy. “Heil Hitler,” we’d say.

  Hands would shoot up with the precision of a well-trained Nazi brigade. “Heil Hitler,” the devotees would shout back.

  “Our goal today is simple. We’re here to listen to a little white power music.”

  Whistles, cheers. Stiff-armed salutes from those who weren’t double-fisting bottles of cheap beer.

  “And we’re here to secure the existence of our race and a future for white children!”

  The response was invariably deafening.

  “I’ll bet you know there are people who don’t want us here today. Who tried to stop this peaceful gathering.”

  More cheers and boot stomping.

  “But they can’t stop us,” the speaker would scream into the microphone. “It is our birthright to assemble here and exercise our right to speak freely. The meddling Jews who run this country and own the media would love nothing more than to shut us up because they know we’re onto their secret ZOG scheme to destroy the white race and rule the world. They know we’ve got their number. We have got the guts and the motive to hunt them down and take them out.

  “The niggers are right alongside them, and they won’t be happy until we are all in chains. If we’d run them out of our country like we should have when slavery was abolished, strung them all up by their filthy necks from the nearest bridges, they wouldn’t be here now to pollute our cities and sell crack to innocent white kids. They wouldn’t be raping our women and living off our hard-earned wages.”

  By that point, it didn’t even matter what the orator had to say. The crowd would be going wild, the words lost in the fervor. Ready for the music.

  The band would start. Guitars deafening. Drums pounding. Nefarious words of faith spewing into the microphone.

  Glory be to the white man and woman.

  But not without a price.

  By the end of the sh
ow, fights would break out all over the place. The skins from Atlantic City against the skins from Buffalo. The old school skinheads feuding with overzealous fresh-cuts. You could bet there’d be a catfight, too. And with an overwhelming ratio of men to women in the movement, you could be sure someone would try and screw your girlfriend and a brawl would ensue.

  It was a drag.

  Pathetic.

  While things in Blue Island couldn’t have been going better for me and my crew, I began to have nagging bouts of rational thought regarding others within the movement. The flawed gamecock mentality—the inherent aggression that skinheads expressed against even their own kind—so often presented itself at these gatherings and didn’t mesh well with my own sensibilities. Unity and respect were paramount back home. Friends helped each other and didn’t dare cross one another. There was a sense of loyalty to your team. From the CASH skins way back to my Eisenhower teammates and even the High Street Boys, we relied on that special bond to move us forward—together. But outside of our tight-knit Chicago bubble, it seemed as though others operated with a complete absence of reason. I wasn’t used to the behavior I witnessed, especially when it was so-called brothers and sisters beating each other’s faces in over trivial things that meant little in the grand scheme of what we were supposedly fighting for.

  I found it harder and harder to convince myself that most of the skinheads I’d met over the years weren’t ignorant, white trash thugs. They weren’t interested in saving the white race as much as guzzling their courage and vomiting words they could never back up without a pack of bloodthirsty attack dogs at their side to overcompensate for their own lack of courage and fighting chops. Stupidity and alcohol inevitably burst into a flash of skinhead fists and fury.

  I’d stand back and watch. Disgusted. How the hell were we going to achieve glory for the white race when we couldn’t even protect ourselves from our own petty insecurities?

  Goddamn, it was going to be an uphill battle.

  I was willing to bet European skinheads had it more together. For one thing, Europe was where the whole skinhead movement began, in the ’60s. They had decades of experience on their side. The time had come for their American counterparts to operate at the same level. I wanted to be part of that. I knew this concert in Germany was going to be an historic event, and no way would I be left out. I’d taken the initiative to make damn sure of that.

  By the time I’d cemented our appearance overseas, Final Solution had already built a decent fan base there. WAY had served its purpose and left its legacy, no doubt about that. My forethought and obsessive work ethic had positioned us legitimately in the top echelon of the founding American skinhead music scene, and we’d made some noise overseas by aligning ourselves with Rock-O-Rama. We’d built our following, playing mostly in basements crammed full of forty, fifty, sometimes a hundred kids. We played a show in Minneapolis with Bound For Glory to standing-room only, a couple hundred skinheads. Again, these numbers might seem trivial, but this was a gathering of some scary people, seen as violent terrorists by the rest of the country. So a few hundred of us together packed a whole lot of weight and caused significant aggravation.

  I was totally hooked on performing and continued to write lyrics while the rest of the band collaborated on the actual music. Final Solution had already played all over the country—Georgia, Tennessee, Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana—at rallies with more than five hundred skins and neo-Nazis, a large number in terms of attendance at skinhead concerts in the U.S., and inevitably spooked everybody in town who were unsure what we were about. It was a guarantee that wherever we played, you’d find FBI and local law enforcement there taking snapshots of the attendees and adding more info to their already overstuffed files.

  One of the more hilarious instances of police harassment occurred when I was pulled over by a state trooper while driving home from a get-together in Atlanta, Georgia. Upon searching my vehicle, behind my driver’s seat, the officer uncovered a wooden coffee table leg with a long, pointy lag bolt sticking out horizontally from its end.

  “What’s this for, son? Do you intend to use this as a weapon for your Aryan revolution?”

  “No, sir, officer,” I replied. “I intend to add it to my three-legged coffee table as soon as I get home. I’m tired of it tipping over every time I put my copy of Mein Kampf on it.” Even he couldn’t help but laugh at that.

  We performed in all types of venues—warehouses, anybody’s private property where we could throw up a makeshift stage and plug in our gear. The Detroit Hammerskins had their own private social club and charged five bucks to get in. We played on their stage a number of times. Always a good party. Until the drunken assholes started fighting again.

  Climbing the rungs of the American white power ladder felt as natural as sacking a quarterback or punching someone in the face. And with it came applause, respect, and admiration.

  My life had been a struggle at times. I’d known loneliness and battled with my fractured identity as a kid, but that was in the past. I now had a beautiful fiancée, hundreds of loyal associates, clout, a band about to make history, and I was headed to the land of Adolf Hitler and our National Socialist predecessors to loudly profess our faith and once again march victoriously through their streets.

  Could life possibly get any better than this?

  Eighteen years old and I had the world by the balls.

  Final Solution, Weimar, Germany, 1992

  19

  OPEN YOUR EYES

  Weimar, Germany. I knew little about the place. Had no idea famous writers Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller had lived there. Not a clue that one of history’s greatest pianists, Franz Liszt, had spent part of his life in the city. Didn’t know philosopher Johann Herder had called it home or that Friedrich Nietzsche lived out the final years of his life there. I didn’t even know that artist Paul Klee, who the Nazi party had denounced for creating “degenerate” art, had been a resident of this eastern German town.

  Nor did I know that, nearby, the Nazis had set up a concentration camp—Buchenwald. More than fifty thousand inmates, including Jews, gays, Catholics, criminals, and children, met their deaths in this camp. Conditions were said to be so horrendous that many died of typhoid and starvation. Others were shot in the back of the head. Thousands of inmates were slaughtered by lethal injections and countless others were victims of medical experiments that included the use of the deadly Zyklon B gas.

  The camp displayed human tattooed skin as “modern art” in an area called the “pathological block” after prisoners were skinned alive and their hides tanned like animal pelts.

  Adolf Hitler was a leader I admired, and this was more evidence of his vision to purge the world of inferior races, parasites, perverts, and misfits.

  But I didn’t know a damn thing about Weimar.

  When we arrived, I paid little attention to the people or history of the town. I was oblivious to the fact that in this city of little more than sixty thousand people, there were twenty museums full of art, literature, and music. Some of the finest minds of numerous eras had lived there, created there, thought lofty thoughts, and pondered questions about the nature of human existence.

  What did I care? What the hell did the past have to do with me? With the exception of the proud legacies our Nazi forefathers left behind, only the present and future were important. All that mattered was that white skinhead warriors from all over Europe were getting together for one epic concert in Germany. Hitler’s stomping ground—in more ways than one—and I was going to be an undeniable part of this historic event.

  Despite the swelling support from the thousands in attendance, it felt solitary. I’d be the only remaining original skinhead from back home in Blue Island who’d made it this far, who’d embraced the lasting legacy we created and fought so hard for. Carmine Paterno and Chase Sargent had drifted away. The Manson girls had moved on, likely to idolize some other charismatic leader. The superfluo
us few had vanished. And Clark Martell had lost his mind.

  But I’d found the way. Still inspired by the first words of Clark I’d ever read:

  We must throw ourselves, blood, bone, sinew, and soul, behind the skinhead battering ram as it rolls with the splitting of wood through the gates of power into the evil one’s domain, now ours to reclaim, with the skinhead anthem upon our tongues and the flag in our hearts.

  The Weimar concert was beyond a doubt the most unforgettable experience of my life up to that point. Four thousand racial comrades—assembled from all over Europe—effectively invaded the quaint German burg. Every beer hall, restaurant, and street inundated with white heroes and heroines from far and wide. As if 1930s Nazi Germany had squeezed through a wrinkle in time to the present day. All gathering and descending upon an ancient stone cathedral to celebrate an event that would go down in the history books as the first time an American white power band stepped foot on European soil to play a concert. Rumors flourished that Ian Stuart might even attend and perform some acoustic songs.

  Lisa had stayed behind at the hostel in Munich to wander around and take photographs of the architecture. I’d catch up with her as soon as the concert ended. But for now, my mind was focused. Clear. The buzzing energy was palpable.

  We were second to last on stage that evening—preceded by the most popular German skinhead bands like Radikahl, Wotan, Märtyrer, Kraftschlag, and Störkraft—and the crowd was ready to hear some truth. When our time came, I grabbed the microphone and didn’t waste time on small talk. As soon as our instruments were tuned, our equipment turned on, guitars plugged in, I motioned for the band to start.

  Ear-splitting, stirring beats filled the walls of that once-upon-a-time hallowed church faster than a candle could be lit in effigy for our sins. Or blown out. Any holy souls still lingering among the memories of mass and Christ sensed vengeance was upon them as my voice echoed through the loudspeakers: