Links Among O.C. Suspects Still Unclear : Investigation: Authorities know little about them, but friends and relatives say three have ties with hate groups.

Jill M. Scarborough’s arm is tattooed with the blue letters WSP: White Supremacist Power, neighbors said. Scarborough’s fiance, Geremy Rineman is confined to a wheelchair, paralyzed from a 1989 gunfight between his band of skinheads and a trio of Latino and African-American men.

Before his 17th birthday, another Orange County youth had been arrested for scrawling a swastika on a Huntington Beach high school lawn and had bragged of being a White Patriot committed to a total revolution, which would start with the bombing of the First AME Church in Los Angeles and the assassination of Rodney G. King and other black leaders.

And a fourth suspect, Josh D. Lee, said those who knew him, is nearly obsessed with guns.

As sketchy details emerged Friday about the four Orange County residents who were arrested on weapons charges in coordinated FBI raids the day before, it remained unclear how the accused white supremacists had met one another or what kinds of activities they were involved in locally. But relatives and neighbors offered hints that at least three of the suspects had connections to hate groups that date back several years.

A fifth suspect, Christian G. Nadal, 35, of North Hills, was convicted in 1985 on a drunk-driving charge in Orange County. He spent five days in Orange County Jail and paid $351 in fines.

Local authorities said they had little or no information about the four Orange County suspects, but described the White Aryan Resistance--which FBI officials say is behind the plot--as a prominent hate group whose members wear jeans and combat boots, carry white handkerchiefs, and are preparing for an all-out race war.

“They truly believe they are the chosen race, and when Armageddon comes they’re going to be the ones in charge and they’re going to have to keep the race pure,” said Al Valdez, a gang investigator with the Orange County district attorney’s office.

“Overall, they are racist. They will use a term that’s more palatable, white separatist. . . . It’s just a politer way to say racist.”

Asked about WAR’s presence in Orange County, Valdez said: “They’re not running amok, (but) they are present.”

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Scarborough and Rineman, both 22, are active enough in WAR that when Rineman was shot in 1989 he was featured in the Fallbrook, Calif.-based group’s newsletter, complete with large photos, two issues in a row.

“I want to thank everyone for their moral support since (Rineman) has been hospitalized, but now we need financial help,” Scarborough pleaded in one article that appeared next to advertisements headlined “BE A WAR ASSOCIATE” and “Bring ‘Race and Reason’ to your community.”

Rineman, who grew up in Huntington Beach, was the most seriously injured of three men shot outside a Lucky’s supermarket in Van Nuys in October, 1989, just a few months after he graduated from Marina High School. (In the Marina yearbook, he sports a skinhead haircut.)

Neighbors say Rineman’s arms and legs are covered with tattoos, many of Nazi symbols or slogans.

Scarborough, who has a 4-year-old son, has lived in various apartments in Anaheim, Fullerton and La Habra over the past several years, and still owes more than $1,000 from an eviction suit that began this spring.

Acquaintances said Scarborough decorated her apartment with photographs of Adolf Hitler, hung a Nazi flag and often carried racist pamphlets and literature. They added that she often had loud, late-night parties that sometimes brought the police.

A former neighbor, who asked for anonymity, said Scarborough and Rineman listened to music that “talked about smushing black people” and hung around with people who were outspoken racists.

“I will always remember the big picture of Hitler in the hallway,” said the woman, who shared a porch with the couple for about a year and sometimes baby-sat for Scarborough’s son.

“They told me never to let their little kid play with black kids. They told me ‘Don’t go around (blacks), don’t let (blacks) play with my stuff.’ ”

But Ron Wilson, who is black and lived downstairs from Scarborough for about seven months, was shocked to hear of her arrest and alleged involvement in the white supremacist movement.

“I never had any problems with her, she was always nice to me,” said Wilson, 42, shaking his head in disbelief. “I talked to her. I baby-sat her kid once, I can’t believe that. This world has gone crazy. It’s so shocking.”

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Another suspect, who turns 17 Tuesday, was arrested Thursday at his father’s home in Lake Arrowhead, where he moved in March after his arrest for vandalism at Huntington Beach Union High School. After a swastika was found chalked on the school’s lawn, a Nazi flag flying on its flagpole and some materials burned inside the school, the youth was charged with trespass, vandalism and arson, according to an FBI affidavit.

The teen-ager, whose name is not used here because he is a juvenile, is a voracious reader and skateboarder, who was in honors and advanced placement classes at Marina High School for two months this spring, school officials said.

He lived in Huntington Beach as a baby, then moved to Ontario and returned to Huntington Beach in January.

According to the affidavit, he bragged to undercover FBI agents that he was involved in plots to bomb a member of the Lakewood High School “Spur Posse” and rob a Westminster gun store in addition to the AME church and Rodney King murder plans. Calling himself a “White Patriot,” he allegedly told the FBI he was eager for the race war to begin.

The suspect “said that he wants to get more involved and start ‘knocking people off,’ ” FBI Agent Lawrence A. Bettendorf wrote in the affidavit. The teen-ager “said that they should start with hard training and minor operations, then escalate into more violent acts.”

In April, 1993, the affidavit says, the suspect told FBI agents that “half-assed revolutions do not work” and suggested something “like what happened in South Africa when (anti-apartheid leader) Chris Hanne was killed.”

According to the affidavit, the suspect offered King, the motorist beaten by Los Angeles police officers in March, 1990, as a target for assassination because it would garner media attention. He also said Al Sharpton, local leaders of the Urban League and the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, and “ ‘the guy from the AME church’ . . . would make good targets,” the affidavit says.

In discussing plans for an attack on the AME Church, according to the affidavit, the teen-ager first suggested placing a bomb under a car, but then said he “was not sure about using a bomb because it did not guarantee sure death.” Later, he wrote a list of equipment necessary for the attack and told a group of fellow skinheads that when the Rev. Cecil Murray said “justice will be done” in his sermon, they would “bust in the doors and start ‘popping people,’ ” the affidavit says.

The suspect’s sister admitted that he sees himself as a White Patriot and looks forward to the race war, but would not comment on his involvement with WAR or other hate groups. She described her brother as “definitely a Republican conservative” who “hates (President) Clinton.”

She praised her brother’s intelligence and widespread knowledge, noting that as a boy, he read encyclopedias and that now he never misses a daily newspaper.

“It kills me to see my brother like this. I’m afraid for him,” she said.

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Neighbors and former co-workers said Lee was a gun lover but were shocked to hear of his connection to white supremacist groups. Lee, 23, who lives with his parents in Costa Mesa, graduated in 1988 from Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana.

A woman who answered the door at the Lee residence Friday said: “We have nothing to say.”

He worked for about three years at the Firing Line, an indoor shooting range in Huntington Beach, but quit last fall because “he got a better-paying job,” manager Ron Flett said.

“Unless he made a lot of changes in the last year, I cannot see him as a skinhead, “ Flett said.

Dave Williams, 49, who lives next door to Lee, said he “was just fascinated with guns, he was fascinated with the hardware. I know they (Josh Lee and his father) have lots of guns, but I never saw any machine guns or anything like that. . . . They are really into guns as a hobby.”

Williams and others expressed disbelief that Lee, whose parents are of Chinese and Hawaiian descent, would be involved with a racial hate group.

“To hear that Josh is connected with Nazis is shocking to me. He never has said anything racist or had anything bad to say about any other race,” Williams said. “I never heard Josh talk about anything other than guns or motorcycles.”

Daisy Ross, who is black, lives next door to the Lees and said she has known Josh Lee “since he was a baby.”

“Josh is a nice kid,” she said. “He never gave me any problems. . . . He’d been over to my house, and my kids have been over to his house.”

“It’s hard to believe,” Ross said of Lee’s arrest.