Neo-Nazi Hate Groups : Violence by Skinheads Spreads Across Nation

It was 1:30 in the morning, and the southeast Portland neighborhood slumbered inside small brick houses and garden apartments. Two friends had just dropped Mulugeta Seraw off in front of his modest building when they heard a sudden commotion. They looked back to see three white youths beating the Ethiopian immigrant with baseball bats.

Leaping from their car, the unarmed friends--fellow Ethiopians--were savagely beaten back as they rushed to Seraw’s aid. A pair of teen-aged girls watched from a nearby car and shouted encouragement to the attackers. “Kick them!” they screamed. “Kill them!”

It was over in about three minutes. Mulugeta Seraw, 28, lay brain dead in the bloody street.

Three Arrested

A few days after the Nov. 13 murder, police arrested three young men and charged them with Seraw’s murder in what investigators believe was an unprovoked, racially motivated attack by skinheads, gangs of young neo-Nazi thugs.

But Seraw’s slaying is not just an ugly, isolated case.

Authorities and civil rights groups say skinheads are responsible for a growing amount of violence around the country, and that they are using computers, bulk mail and guest shots on television talk shows to spread their message of hatred.

And, they say, they are using baseball bats, steel-toed combat boots, brass knuckles, lead pipes, knives and even swords to reinforce it.

Business Cards

Favoring shaved heads and crisp, military-style clothing, skinheads are thought to have doubled their ranks over the last nine months alone to claim an estimated 2,000 to 3,500 hard core members nationwide. Some even carry business cards with their particular gang’s name, post office box number and racist motto.

Now linked to racial and religious crimes in 24 states (compared to 12 last February), the skinheads are no longer clustered in urban areas such as Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas and Atlanta. Today, they crop up in places like Grand Rapids, Mich. and Vancouver, Wash. In Paramus, N.J., they recently have been terrorizing and even attacking shoppers at local malls.

“They really believe in their cause and they will die for it,” said David Simpson, spokesman for the Portland Police Department. “Crips and Bloods deal in drugs. These people deal in hate.”

Law enforcement authorities and civil rights watchdogs worry that the statistics mean the skinheads are becoming not only more violent, but more organized. Evidence suggests that older, more established white supremacy groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Fallbrook, Calif.-based White Aryan Resistance may be deliberately influencing the young neo-Nazis.

Group Issues Warning

The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith recently warned that such groups are trying to enlist the skinheads as “foot soldiers” in a racial revolution to revive their own hate campaigns, weakened by a series of arrests.

“What you have here is not the last, dying remnants of an old problem,” says Lenny Zeskind of the Center for Democratic Renewal. “What we have here is just the embryo of a future problem.”

Seraw’s was the third slaying in 11 months linked to skinheads across the country. The U.S. Attorney’s office in Portland and the FBI are investigating whether Seraw’s murder has any links to people or organizations outside the state.

California, thought to have the largest and most violent concentration of skinheads, is now emerging as a type of national recruiting center for dangerous young racists.

At the forefront is the Aryan Youth Movement, an offshoot of the White Aryan Resistance run by former KKK Grand Dragon Tom Metzger, a Fallbrook television repairman. His 20-year-old son, John, directs the Aryan Youth Movement and recently made headlines by baiting black activist Roy Innis into a free-for-all brawl on the set of entertainer Geraldo Rivera’s television talk show, during which Rivera’s nose was broken.

“Network TV is the most important means for them to get their message out,” complained Irwin Suall, fact-finding director of the Anti-Defamation League. “There’s not the slightest doubt in my mind that the Metzgers and other hate-mongers in this country have had more free air time in 1988 than hate groups have enjoyed in decades.

Receives Many Letters

“Metzger claims he receives hundreds of letters following his appearances on these programs.”

The Metzgers did not return repeated telephone calls by The Times, but John Metzger has publicly admitted he is trying to recruit and organize skinheads nationwide, and his father last year told The Times his group has “friendly contacts” with the skinheads.

The vice president of John Metzger’s group, David Mazzella, moved to Portland in October to organize skinheads and was sharing an apartment with Steven Strasser when the latter allegedly killed Mulugeta Seraw. Mazzella was arrested at the apartment on an outstanding warrant from Salinas, Calif., for disturbing the peace.

Earlier this month, John Metzger was quoted by the Seattle Times as saying that true skinheads--as opposed to look-alike, non-racist punk music fans merely making a fashion statement--eschew drugs and never attack without provocation.

But the younger Metzger also was quoted as saying that “skinheads these days are deadlier than the skinheads of just two years ago. They’re more disciplined.”

Metzger, his father and Richard Butler, head of the Aryan Nations “church” in Hayden Lake, Ida., were the driving force behind a peaceful candlelight vigil for about 60 skinheads on Dec. 12 in Freeland, Wash., to honor a white supremacist killed four years ago in a shoot out with the FBI. Butler, a transplanted Californian, also is reportedly planning a national convention for skinheads in Idaho next spring.

‘Pumps Up Troops’

“The question is whether Tom Metzger is directly issuing the order to do violence,” Zeskind said. “We don’t have any evidence of that directly, but he advocates violence and pumps up the troops to do violence and then treats the people who do the violence as if they were heroes.”

The skinheads first appeared in Britain some 20 years ago in working-class neighborhoods as a countermovement to the hippies. Fans of violent punk music, the skins made a hobby out of “bashing” Third World immigrants and homosexuals. The movement came to America with the music, and the outcast image was flaunted in the names of their bands, names like the Subhumans and Maggot Sandwich.

“The music introduced the racism here. Before that, it was just another shock outfit,” said Eric Anderson, a Yakima, Wash., anthropologist who wrote a master’s thesis on the skinheads after spending a summer observing them in San Francisco.

“It’s certainly gone a lot farther than I expected and it’s appealing to so many more kids than I expected,” Anderson said.

“Being a skinhead involves the power to invent your own subculture--one that has a deep meaning as a street soldier cleaning up America of unwanted elements. These kids honestly believe white culture is on the decline,” he said.

From Unstable Families

Anderson described the skinheads as aging from 14 to 27, from largely middle-class neighborhoods and broken, unstable families.

“Most are dumber than bricks, but some are real sharp,” Anderson said. “They’re openly trying to recruit all the time, and oftentimes it’s runaway kids or punks who are looking for some family unit. Sometimes the younger kids are attracted by the uniforms--they think they’re cool.”

The Anti-Defamation League has noticed skinheads “cropping up where there has been no evidence of organized racist activity in decades,” according to Suall. “It’s astonishing--places like Grand Rapids, Mich., Reno, Nev., Salem, Ore.”

The Pacific Northwest appears to have become a prime recruiting ground.

Home to four skinhead gangs, Portland has reported at least 40 serious skinhead crimes this year, including 30 major assaults. The three men charged in Seraw’s death--Kenneth Mieske, 23; Kyle Brewster, 19, and Steven Strasser, 20--also are under investigation in connection with an earlier attack on a black security guard stabbed in the lungs when he tried to eject a large group of skinheads from a grocery store. The skinheads were outraged, police said, because the guard was wearing a flag emblem on his shoulder, which skinheads also like to do.

Like other places, Portland’s list of skinhead crimes ranges from swastikas painted on synagogues to vicious ambushes by gangs of up to 20 at a time stomping a lone victim with their combat boots.

Many White Victims

Loren Christensen, gang information officer for the Portland police, said many of the assault victims are white. Police reports do not specify whether they were homosexuals--a favorite skinhead target.

Portland’s skinhead assaults include one by several who beat a Chinese businessman as he left a restaurant with his Caucasian wife, their 2-year-old daughter and another woman. Earlier this month, four skinheads attacked a 12-year-old Asian-American at a bus stop in broad daylight. They hurled racial insults at the boy before leaving him on the sidewalk, his face bloodied and his finger broken.

Christensen also cites evidence that skinheads are “joining forces with the old-line white supremacy groups like the Aryan Resistance.”

“They’re adding their youth and vitality and in return, the organizations feed them with literature and other support,” he said, adding that fliers and stickers from the Metzger organization have shown up even on junior high school campuses in the area.

In nearby Vancouver, Wash., five students were suspended last year after using school equipment to copy reams of racist literature which was stuffed into lockers and distributed on campus at Hudson’s Bay High School.

Much of the propaganda bore the logo and return address of the Metzger organizations.

Criticize Principal

Hudson’s Bay principal, David Halstead, came under fire from the American Civil Liberties Union for violating the five boys’ rights to free speech. The boys also complained that angry classmates harassed them for their racist beliefs. One found the words, “Die Nazis” carved in his desk. Four of the students have since left Hudson’s Bay, and the other is no longer openly involved in any racist group.

“The racists took this to the hilt,” Halstead recalled. “They became media stars. Someone was behind them using them as a mouthpiece.”

Capt. Wayne Inman, whose East Side precinct is the base for one of Portland’s skinhead gangs, said skinheads make “fairly intensive efforts” to recruit junior high and high school students at least once a month, passing out leaflets and engaging youngsters in discussion as they leave campus.

But Inman discounts the skinheads’ ability to muster forces.

“They lack organization and leadership. I haven’t seen them put together any serious effort,” he said. “They have a pack mentality. They’re despicable cowards.”

“I don’t think it’s a major threat to the fabric of society,” Inman added. “These gangs won’t survive because they don’t have an economic base. They’re not dealing drugs like other gangs.”

Prepare for Violence

Not everyone is convinced the skinheads pose little threat, and some are prepared to meet violence with violence.

The militant Jewish Defense Organization offered an unclaimed $10,000 reward for information in the Seraw case, and mailed letters to Portland synagogues imploring them to arm their congregations, learn self-defense, and set up patrols. There is no indication any took the advice.

The group’s leader, Mordechai Levy, said the Jewish Defense Organization has tracked at least 200 incidents involving racial and anti-Semitic violence and abuse by skinheads.

To counter this perceived threat, Levy said, the group has sponsored self-defense camps for Jewish youths in Los Angeles and New York, including firearms courses.

But no one can explain with certainty why such rabid racism has taken root in a generation that grew up with civil rights, affirmative action and integrated schools and neighborhoods.

Suall, of the Anti-Defamation League, points to the disintegration of the American family and the alienation between parents and teen-agers.

Described as Defiance

“To some extent, their racist views are part rebellion,” he said. “Equal rights (and) civil rights have become conventional doctrine in society, so, in order to revolt against conventionality and the Establishment, and their elders, their racism becomes kind of a message of defiance.

“The question of whether this will remain with them . . . has to do to a large extent to whether they link up with old-line hate groups.”

In Portland, the stunned Ethiopian community is talking about organizing neighborhood watches and setting up some type of network to track skinhead violence. Betre Melles, spokesman for the 1,000-member Ethiopian Community Organization, mourns his friend, Mulugeta Seraw. He also grieves for something else lost during those three awful minutes on Southeast 31st Street.

“If peace of mind is taken away from you, you’re robbed of the most important thing of all.”