San Diego

Three young men purported to be members of a Skinhead group were sentenced Wednesday to various terms in jail for assaulting a man they believed was a minority.

The stiffest sentence--six years in state prison--went to Michael Mann, 20, who was convicted in 1988 for a similar racial attack.

Michael DiPaolo, 22, was ordered to undergo a 90-day diagnostic study at Chino State Prison and return to San Diego Superior Court on June 25 for formal sentencing.

Steven Kuntz, 20, was given one year in County Jail and five years of probation. All of the men are San Diego residents.

Judge William Mudd ordered Mann and Kuntz to pay $866 each to the victim, Eric Vaerga, 18, who suffered a concussion, a dislocated right ankle and facial cuts and bruises in the early-morning attack Oct. 21 outside a taco shop in the Mission Bay area.

Vaerga, who comes from an island in the Pacific Ocean, has dark skin, and the defendants mistook him for a black or Latino.

The three defendants yelled white-supremacy slogans and kicked Vaerga with steel-toed boots in what police described as “a hate crime.”

The three pleaded guilty Feb. 13 to felony assault and to civil rights violations.

Mann received a stiffer sentence because he was on probation for a May, 1988, incident in which he battered two Vietnamese people, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Luis Aragon. Mudd denied probation, calling Mann a danger to the community. He also fined him $500 for violating probation.