Arrests End Rash of ‘Hate Crimes,’ Police Say

When nine officers burst through the door of Michael Casey Martin’s home 10 days ago, police say, the 18-year-old Chatsworth dropout was asleep in his bedroom, comfortably surrounded by the trappings of the youth gang he allegedly founded and led.

Police said they found in Martin’s room a gang photo album and newsletters, a 9-mm handgun and a .22-caliber rifle, a membership roster and a book that described gang rules, dress and tactics.

But the surroundings were not like those the officers had grown to expect of youth gangs in the San Fernando Valley.

Hanging side by side on the wall of Martin’s bedroom were the flag of the Confederacy and the Federal Republic of Germany. On the nightstand next to the bed was a copy of Adolf Hitler’s manifesto, “Mein Kampf,” folded open to the page where Martin apparently had left it. In the photo album, the pictures were of young men wearing Nazi armbands, posing with right arms outstretched as if saluting the Fuehrer.

The newsletters and pamphlets, police said, espoused the philosophy of white supremacy and racial violence. Another book in the room, “Auschwitz: The True Story,” argues that the Holocaust never took place and Auschwitz was the site of a farming community instead of deadly gas chambers, police said.

Martin, who, police said, was known as “Peanut” by other members of the gang he named the Reich Skins, was taken away in handcuffs after the 7 a.m. raid at the two-bedroom Chatsworth home he shared with his mother. In the days following, Los Angeles police arrested seven younger youths purported to be members of the gang. Police said the group, which had operated primarily in the western part of the Valley, was involved in racial terrorism--known as hate crimes--for four to six months before the arrests. Now, they say, the gang has been effectively stamped out.

Born Amid Social Unrest in England

The Reich Skins, detectives said, are a faction of the Skinhead youth movement, identified by its members’ shaved heads, tattoos, black boots and leather jackets. The group began in England more than a decade ago amid social unrest and influenced by punk rock, but now is an international phenomenon largely driven by neo-Nazi philosophy and racism.

The arrests of Martin and other Reich Skins have introduced a new chapter to the book on gangs in Los Angeles, police say. White gangs are not new to police but youth gangs based on the philosophies of Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan are.

“Young people want to feel they belong somewhere,” said Lt. Warren Knowles of the Los Angeles Police Devonshire Division. “But I don’t know exactly how or why that feeling spins into something like this.”

However they arrived at their views, the Reich Skins apparently made no effort to keep a low profile. Swastikas were posted on light poles along three blocks in Chatsworth. A Latino high school boy and his family were threatened in their Granada Hills home by armed intruders chanting “white power.” More swastikas were painted and literature espousing white supremacy was posted at Granada Hills High School as an initiation rite. Graffiti at a Tarzana park says, “Welcome to the New Reich.”

All of those actions and many others have been attributed by police and school officials to the Reich Skins, a Valley group of about 25 youths from 14 to 20 years old.

Authorities say Skinheads also exist in Orange County, particularly in Huntington Beach, where some members have posted racist literature. The Reich Skins, however, are believed to have committed more aggressive acts, leading police to consider them a more immediate threat.

Martin was at the center of a handful of members responsible for most of the Reich Skins’ activities, police said. Surrounding that core were several youths who apparently did not understand what they were involved in, who police said were “sucked in.”

Martin has connections to a number of “white power” groups such as the Klan, White Aryan Resistance, National Socialist White American Party and Aryan Alliance, police said. Some of those groups, police said, provided the literature and stickers used by the Reich Skins.

Police said the Reich Skins also had an affiliation with a national association of Skinhead groups. A recent eight-page newsletter from “Skinheads of America” describes the group’s beliefs this way:

“Skinheads of America, like the dynamic Skinheads in Europe, are working-class Aryan youth. We oppose the capitalist and communist scum that are destroying our race.” It continues with anti-Semitic vitriol.

Anti-Sissy, Anti-Immigrant

Police said similar material was found in Martin’s bedroom. The newsletter also states, “Our heads are shaved for battle.”

According to a report on the Skinheads issued Friday by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, the members’ appearance symbolizes “tough, patriotic, anti-immigrant, working-class attitudes in contrast to the supposedly sissy-ish, pacifist, liberal, middle-class views of the long-hairs.”

The ADL reported those same attitudes made Skinheads attractive to British-based neo-Nazi groups, and the youths became targets of those groups’ recruiting. Eventually, the racist impulse caused a philosophical fissure among the Skinheads.

“This started as a rock ‘n’ roll thing,” Knowles said. “But, eventually, it split into two groups--one part was into white supremacy, the other had believers in racial harmony.”

By the early 1980s the Skinhead movement had come to the United States. According to the ADL report, Skinhead groups have been identified in California in Orange County, San Francisco and San Jose. The largest U. S. group is in Chicago, called Romantic Violence.

Betsy Rosenthal, ADL’s counsel in the West, said the Reich Skins faction had been unknown to the league until Martin’s arrest. She said the group bears careful monitoring.

“The major threat is if this group signifies that there is a possible rise in hate activities among youth,” Rosenthal said.

Detective Michael Brandt, who has headed the Reich Skins investigation, said the same split among Skinhead factions that occurred in England is evident in the Valley. He said investigators have identified several “two-tone” Skins factions or clubs--the United Skins, the Mickey Mouse Club, the Mods and the West Coast Front--that operate in the West Valley and adhere to philosophies of racial harmony.

Police said evidence of that could be found in their membership, graffiti and even their shoelaces. The Reich Skins laced their combat boots with white laces, symbolizing white power. The two-tone groups, who have blacks and Latinos in their membership, tied their boots with beige laces.

In recent months, there have been several unreported confrontations, fights and possibly a shooting incident between the Reich Skins and other groups clashing at local parks and shopping malls, police said.

As in England, the various factions in the Valley are believed to have come from a single loose affiliation with the Skinheads.

“They started forming earlier this year,” Brandt said. “There was no real organization. But it was basically one group. But then some started moving toward white pride and then to white power. Others moved away. There was a definite division. Martin formed the Reich Skins. Then some of these other groups formed out of defense against the Reich Skins. When school started this year, it all heated up.”

Police said most of the Reich Skins core group dropped out of high school this year, as Martin had done the year before. Detectives say the group’s activities were believed done almost entirely at the direction of Martin. He is being held in lieu of $100,000 bail at the Los Angeles County Jail on charges of attempted burglary and using unlawful, violent acts to effect political change. The seven juveniles arrested will face lesser charges, officials said.

Declined Comment

Martin, who has pleaded not guilty to the charges, declined to comment on the case. He was described by school officials as an average student who was a loner at Chatsworth High School before dropping out in 1986.

“He kept a low profile here, kept mostly to himself,” said Reno Lorenz, assistant principal. “We knew of no gang affiliation that he had while he was here.

“We don’t believe he was trying to develop any youth association with students. After he left he was no longer involved on campus. He may have come by in early September to say, ‘Hi,’ to friends. That’s about all we know.”

Since Martin’s arrest, police said they identified one of the people posed in a Nazi salute in Martin’s photo album as Philip Rowe, who was charged in the racially motivated attack on a Latino woman abducted from Van Nuys last summer and left for dead with a slashed throat. Police said Martin had nothing to do with the crime, but noted that the photo showed he and Rowe moved in similar circles.

According to police, Martin and the core Reich Skins have associated with Tom Metzger, leader of the White Aryan Resistance and former Klan grand dragon. The ADL report states that WAR has attempted to expand by recruiting Skinheads.

Metzger, who lives in Fallbrook, near San Diego, said he has known Martin about a year, but did not recruit members of the Reich Skins or influence them.

“We did not contact them,” Metzger said. “They contacted me. We have friendly contacts. But they have their own agenda. In no way do we tell them what to do.”

Parents Express Surprise

Asked about violent activities police attribute to the Reich Skins, Metzger said, “I know there has been an awful lot of violence against white kids in the Valley. It looks like some of them got together to do something about it.”

Police said Martin’s mother and other parents of Reich Skins members expressed surprise at accusations leveled against their children. Some parents also told police that they did not know their sons had swastika tattoos.

“None of the parents of these kids realized what their kids were into,” Brandt said. “They just thought their kids were trying to be cool.”

What the parents, school officials and investigators still find puzzling was how and why youths from mostly middle-class Valley families became aligned with such extremist views. Some question whether they truly understood the meaning of their actions.

Perceived Threat

“Knowing high school students, I would say that the affiliation is greater than their beliefs,” said Jim Ball, principal of John F. Kennedy High School in Granada Hills, where officials say some Reich Skins were recruited.

Others suggest that the formation of the group was the youths’ response to a perceived threat from other gangs.

“What could have happened,” Lorenz said, “is these kids might have gotten into a problem with another group, maybe a black group, and that made them think, ‘We have to have our own group.’ Misguided as that approach is, that’s how these things can start.”

Gregory Bodenhamer, a former probation officer who founded the program Back in Control in Southern California to help parents deal with incorrigible youths, said the Skinhead groups are often attractive to youths who long for a sense of belonging.

“That image of the Skinheads--the shaved heads and the boots--is emotionally powerful to kids,” Bodenhamer said. “It gives you immediate identity and immediate power and immediate friends. You can walk onto any campus and people immediately know who you are.”

Police said some of the younger members apparently realized that they erred by joining but were too intimidated or frightened to quit.

“They felt they had to go along,” said Brandt, who noted that one boy lied and said he was not Jewish in order to belong, then ran away from home when he feared members had discovered his background.

Police say the arrests of the core group, particularly of Martin, have ended any threat from the group.

“Martin was the crux of this,” Brandt said. “With him in jail, we’ve buried the Reich Skins for now. The others have secreted themselves back into the woodwork.”

Brandt noted that the graffiti-covered pedestrian tunnel at the Tarzana Recreation Center, once a Skinhead hangout, is a graphic example of the rise and fall of the Reich Skins.

The walls of the tunnel once carried several white power slogans. Today, most of them have been marked over by groups such as the Mickey Mouse Club and United Skins.

The new inscriptions are profane, and leave little doubt that the Reich Skins are held in open contempt by the others. Near one end of the tunnel a large caricature of Mickey Mouse hovers above a humiliated man on his knees. The man has a shaved head and a swastika branded on his scalp. He is labeled “Mike Martin.”