Ganging Up : ‘Skinhead’ Groups of White Youths Appear on Rise

It’s called a “jump-in.”

That’s gang vernacular for a handful of gang members jumping on a prospective member and beating him up for 45 seconds.

“But you have to fight back,” said a gang member known as Cornball, an 18-year-old high school senior. “If you don’t fight back, you’re not in.”

“It’s to make sure he’ll back up your friends,” explained another gang member, nicknamed Pee Wee, a 17-year-old high school junior.

“And if somebody messes with him, we’ll back him up,” said Cornball.

“It’s usually not too bad. They don’t wear rings or anything like that,” Pee Wee said.

Jump-ins are the traditional gang initiation rites of Latino and other minority gangs.

But the gang Pee Wee and Cornball belong to, the Huntington Beach Skins, is not a traditional gang.

The Huntington Beach Skins, which was formed over the summer and now boasts up to 25 members, is part of a new trend in Orange County gangdom: gangs predominantly made up of white, middle-class youths called Skinheads.

“It’s like a gang in a barrio, but this isn’t a barrio,” said Stewart Smith, 17, standing among a dozen of his fellow gang members gathered in front of a 7-Eleven store during their lunch break from nearby Edison High School. “We’re American children. We’re not wetbacks or black or nothing like that,” Cornball said, echoing racist sentiments common among Skinheads, but denying that they are a white-supremacist gang.

Known for their shaved heads and their unofficial uniform of flight jackets, shirts buttoned to the neck and black English work boots called Dr. Martens, Skinheads first surfaced in England in the 1970s, the result of social unrest and English working class resentment of immigrant workers.

Influenced by neo-Nazism, the Skinhead movement has become an international phenomenon, with some members espousing white supremacy and racial violence. Others are merely embracing the anti-establishment Skinhead style but not the white power philosophy behind the racist symbols.

Orange County’s Skinhead gangs are so new and loosely organized that many city police departments do not even know the white gangs exist in their communities.

But Deputy Probation Officer Mike Fleager, the white-gang specialist for the county Probation Department’s newly formed Gang Violence Suppression Unit, has identified eight to 10 Skinhead gangs in the county, including the North West Orange County Skins, Los Alamitos Skins, La Habra Skins and Huntington Beach Hard Core. Each gang, he said, claims anywhere from a dozen to 50 members.

“Based on what I see out there, I think what we’re seeing is the Skinhead developing more and more into what we consider a classic gang,” Fleager said. “It’s an absolute trend. I don’t even know if the kids recognize it as a trend, but from an observer’s standpoint, you can’t deny the tendency.”

Jerome Kirk, associate professor of sociology and anthropology at UC Irvine, said, “We may be exaggerating not only the size and scope (of the Skinhead movement), but we may be exaggerating the elaborateness of the ideology.

“I think it’s easy to see the phenomenon--it’s certainly visible, and they say some pretty scary things--but I don’t think (some young people) know what they’re saying. They’ve found some phrases to get some rises out of straight grown-ups. Some of this has the same significance as the swastikas favored by bikers. It’s a symbol, but what’s behind it is much shallower than something like Nazism.”

Still, he added: “I think we should have appropriate fear and respect for the dangerousness of some of the things they have to say. That’s what World War II was about.”

Although Skinheads have had run-ins with the law in several Orange County cities over the last 18 months, authorities do not believe the crimes--ranging from arson to assault--have been racially motivated. Countywide arrest statistics are unavailable.

Fleager maintains, however, that it doesn’t take long for Skinheads’ racist tendencies to surface--at least among those he deals with.

“They may not classify themselves as white supremacists,” he said, “but when you talk to them, their philosophy oozes with it. They’re into the neo-Nazi, they’re doing swastikas. They don’t like Jews specifically. It is a life style: They live it, breathe it, and dress it if they’re hard-core Skinheads.”

Skinhead Violence

In California over the last year, Skinheads’ racist rhetoric has increasingly erupted into violence:

In San Jose, Skinheads terrorized a black woman by making racist threats and denying her access to a park.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, Skinheads threw a teen-age boy through a plate-glass window after he tried to stop them from putting up an anti-Semitic poster.

In Chatsworth, police arrested eight members of the Reich Skins, a Skinhead gang that operated in the western part of the San Fernando Valley. Police said the group was involved in racial terrorism--known as hate crimes--for up to six months before the October arrests.

The rising profile of racist Skinheads has put an unwanted spotlight on all young people with shaved heads. Many of these do not want to be identified with the Skinheads who are making headlines.

“A huge percentage of shaven-head kids are being taken as racist Skinheads, when they’re not,” complains Dan O’Mahoney, 20, of Huntington Beach, who said the shaved-head look, for him and others, is merely a “non-cosmetic hairdo.”

“I catch a lot of garbage from members of various minorities, due to the media attention on negative Skinheads and the media lumping them all together,” said O’Mahoney, who is a singer with No For An Answer, “a straight-edge band with an awfully large bald following, none of whom are members of skinhead gangs.”

As O’Mahoney defines it, “straight edge” is the antithesis of the stereotypical Skinhead: “It’s a young people’s stance against alcohol and drug abuse, against cheap or casual sex and against just about all forms of violence. I’d say there are as many bald kids walking around that are not white power as there are bald kids that are white power.”

Concern about Skinhead activity, however, prompted the national office of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith in November to issue a special report on the phenomenon. Although estimating the number of hard-core Skinhead activists at no more than several hundred nationwide, the ADL report expressed concern about their racist philosophy and increasingly violent behavior.

The ADL report notes that white power-oriented Skinheads are regarded by neo-Nazi groups as potential recruits and that Skinhead criminal activity has occurred in virtually all the cities where the Skinheads are active. The report warned that the activities of Skinheads require the attention of not only law enforcement agencies but should be of concern to the entire community.

“They’re perpetuating now the same type of activities we’ve monitored with the KKK and other racist groups over the past 75 years,” said Steve Edelman, ADL’s Orange County regional director.

Edelman said Skinheads have been seen passing out racist hate literature in north Orange County shopping malls and are suspected to have distributed neo-Nazi leaflets left on cars parked at several Jewish temples, homes and businesses earlier this year. The white-power leaflets, which bore a swastika and the slogan “Death to Race-mixing,” carried the address of the National Socialist White American Party.

In Orange County, racist and anti-Semitic graffiti is “basically what we’ve run into down here,” Edelman said, adding that much of the graffiti has surfaced in the Huntington Beach area.

Unlike their more notorious counterparts elsewhere, the Huntington Beach Skins deny being racists.

“No one goes around preaching white power,” said Pee Wee, the only Latino in the group gathered in front of the 7-Eleven store.

“We’re not a white-power gang,” agreed Cornball, who sports a tattoo on his arm of an American flag and eagle with the slogan “Standing Proud.” “We formed because we wanted some unity--some real Skinhead unity. We don’t like people invading our territory.”

“When you live in Huntington Beach,” Pee Wee said, “it’s considered more high-class than Long Beach and stuff, and a lot of gangs come down here and want to move in on us. We write our name on a wall, and they cross us out. That’s when it starts.”

Pee Wee said the Huntington Beach Skins haven’t been involved in any fights with rival gangs--”not yet, but it’s coming very close.”

Like the jump-in gang initiation, graffiti is another example of how Skinheads have taken on a more traditional gang structure, deputy probation officer Fleager said.

The graffiti--which once was related mostly to Skinhead music groups and political statements, such as “anarchy”--has now become territorial, with Skinhead gangs claiming geographic names and marking their turf with their gang names. In downtown Huntington Beach, for example, the Huntington Beach Skins vie for wall space with Huntington Beach Hard Core. On one downtown wall, the Huntington Beach Hard Core left its HBHC symbol with the warning: “You’re always welcome in our territory. At your own risk.”

Like their Latino gang counterparts, Fleager said, some Skinheads also come heavily armed. Skinheads who have been processed through the probation department describe gang members packing everything from knives to shotguns. One Skinhead even mentioned an Uzi submachine gun which, Fleager said, “is common gang weaponry these days.”

Hard-Core Drug Use

Fleager said Skinheads usually range in age from 15 to 25 and come from families from across the social-economic spectrum. A common denominator--at least among the Skinheads he supervises--is “hard core (multiple) drug use,” including the use of “heroin, PCP and anything they can inject,” he said.

Fleager said Skinheads do not make up “the biggest part of the population we supervise, but from my caseload and work perspective, we’re taking it very seriously. This causes me concern as a citizen. Who needs another gang?”

Although many police departments in Orange County have not dealt with Skinhead gangs, the La Habra Police Department has had several run-ins with its resident gang, the La Habra Skins. Although predominately white, the gang has several Latino members.

Detective Jeff Love said the estimated 15 gang members “are pretty much small-time.”

Nevertheless, until the gang was broken up after several of its leaders were jailed on suspicion of arson and drug-related offenses recently, Love said, “patrolmen were making a conscientious effort to keep tabs on them.”

Of all of Orange County’s city law enforcement agencies, the Huntington Beach Police Department may have had the most contact with Skinheads. Huntington Beach is home to at least two white gangs and attracts transient Skinheads from other communities.

“It seems we have the luck of the draw of being a focal point, because a lot of people like to come down here from all over,” said Sgt. Jeff Cope of the Huntington Beach Police. “They were definitely involved in a lot of activity that was related to criminal action down on the beach.”

Over the summer, Skinheads in groups ranging from 10 to 50 members, roamed the beach and on at least two occasions assaulted beachgoers, Cope said. “We had a variety of arrests of them for a variety of things, from possession of dangerous weapons and possession of narcotics to being suspects in burglaries.”

In early October, police broke up a fight among several of an estimated 200 Skinheads attending an annual church festival at Saints Simon & Jude Church on Magnolia Street, a few miles from the beach.

Despite the occasional anti-Semitic and Nazi graffiti that has cropped up throughout the city’s downtown area near the pier, Cope said he doesn’t “see any particular racial element that has been singled out” as a target of the Skinheads.

Gregory Bodenhamer, a former probation officer who founded the Fullerton-based program Back in Control, to help parents deal with incorrigible youths, agrees that many Skinheads do not understand the white power philosophy but merely parrot it.

Believing the Image

“What they believe in more than anything else is the image,” Bodenhamer said. He said youths who long for a sense of belonging are often attracted to Skinhead groups. “That image of the Skinheads--the shaved heads and boots--is emotionally powerful to kids. It gives you immediate identity and immediate power and immediate friends. You can walk onto any campus, and people immediately know who you are.”

Despite their appearance, Skinheads on Orange County high school campuses appear to maintain a relatively low profile, several high school principals said.

James Ryan, principal of Foothill High School in Santa Ana, estimates that the school has a dozen Skinheads on campus. “They like to be noticed, but as far as being rebellious or causing problems, they don’t do that,” he said.

Brian Garland, assistant principal at Edison High School in Huntington Beach, estimates that there are 20 Skinheads on campus.

“It’s really a very small group compared to punk rockers a few years ago,” he said. “As far as having a problem with them, it’s no more than anybody else. They’re just not a negative factor at the school.”

Pushing, Name-Calling

Don Martin, principal of El Modena High School in Orange, said that early in the school year, a white student and a Vietnamese student were involved in a pushing and name-calling incident. A few days later, the Vietnamese student returned with some friends and instigated a fight with several of the white students, two of whom “were really what you could look at and qualify as Skinheads by their dress as well as their haircut,” Martin said.

As a result of the incident, Martin said, three of the Vietnamese students were expelled, and the families of the four white students requested transfers for their sons.

“That just about represented our sum total of Skinheads,” said Martin, who doesn’t think the fight was racially motivated. “I think it was one boy getting in a pushy-shovey with another boy.”

With the exception of the hard-core members of the Skinhead youth movement, the Edelman of the Anti-Defamation League views Skinheads as being “almost like the spinoffs of the mods and rockers of England (during the 1960s): leather jackets, boots, studs, shaved heads, tattoos of SS lighting bolts and swastikas--the type you would hope your daughter never brought home.

“I’d hope most of them are just catching, if you will, the New Wave. The Beatle haircut of the ‘60s, is the Skinhead look of the ‘80s,” Edelman said.

Shannan Walther, 14, one of several female members of the Huntington Beach Skins, said she has been a Skinhead for a year. Except for a fringe of blonde bangs in front and strands of hair falling near her ears, Shannan’s head is shaved.

She said she joined the Huntington Beach Skins “because they’re all my friends and”--she gestured to one gang member--”that’s my boyfriend.”

Shannan, who said members of the gang hang out together and go to parties on the weekends, was asked what their parents think of them being Skinheads.

She shrugged: “Mine don’t care.”

As for his parents, Cornball said, “They don’t like it, but what can they do?”