CONFESSIONS OF A SKINHEAD

By James Willwerth/Los Angeles

Watching cartoons with his two children one Saturday morning last year, Thomas James Leyden Jr. was startled when his elder son, then 3, abruptly turned off the television. "Mom says we can't watch shows with niggers on them," the boy explained. The ugly word--and the sentiment behind it--did not exactly spring unsolicited from the preschooler's head; his dad sports enough neo-Nazi tattoos and credentials to explain the boy's action. But hearing his son talk that way, says Leyden, 30, "hit me like a ton of bricks. I knew I was taking him down a path where he'd end up in jail or dead, remembered for something horrible like the Oklahoma bombing. All of a sudden I didn't want him to be like me."

Until his change of heart, Leyden had given 15 years of his life to brawling and recruiting for neo-Nazi causes. His activities had even landed him on the Klanwatch list compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center. But in June, Leyden walked into the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles and renounced his former life. It was not an easy thing to do: Klanwatch analyst Laurie Wood says Leyden is "asking for trouble" from his former associates.

Those engaged in the fight against bigotry cannot believe their good fortune in finding someone who can shed some light on the shadowy world of neo-Nazis. Wiesenthal staff members, who have held several long debriefing sessions with Leyden, have big plans for him: they have made arrangements for a laser surgeon to remove his tattoos, and this fall they hope to take him on a lecture tour at U.S. military bases, where Defense Department rules permit local commanders to decide whether to tolerate "passive" extremists in uniform. He has also offered to counsel troubled teenagers. "No one like this has ever walked through our doors," says the center's founder and dean, Rabbi Marvin Hier. "He's the real McCoy."

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," he says now. "I thought I was being patriotic. We would drink and fight, try to clean up America that way." At one party he attacked a white youth who was dating a black girl and who had objected to his neo-Nazi ranting. "I kicked him bloody until somebody pulled me off, then grabbed a beer and joked about it," Leyden recalls. Over the years, he says, hundreds of such fights followed.

His 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 and the Confederate Stars and Bars on my wall."

And 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 admits to belonging to a radical group called 'skinheads.'" Leyden then received an "other than honorable" discharge, for what the military dubbed "alcohol-related" misbehavior.

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 in 1992.

By day 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," notes Leyden, "when somebody said he joined in 1988, we knew he was a Geraldo skin."

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."

But as he 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 authorities more than a decade ago.

In the end, though, his two boys, now 2 and 4, kept him from the edge. "We have a saying in the movement that you don't want the weekend patriot--you want his kid," he observes. "I took a long look at my two sons. If my oldest is that radical now, he and his brother might be Order members some day. They'll murder people because of their skin color, religion or 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 home.