‘It’s Almost Like There Are 2 Sides to Him’ : Racism: Chris Fisher grew up in a home that championed tolerance. So his alleged part in a white supremacist plot has shocked family and friends.

The transformation of Christopher David Fisher began in the chaotic halls of Polytechnic High School in Long Beach, where he decided that someone needed to stick up for white people.

It was there that Fisher, the churchgoing son of liberal educators who espoused racial tolerance, came to view himself as a victim of discrimination. He could not understand why the high school had special days for minorities, from Cinco de Mayo to black pride, but nothing comparable for Anglos.

Fisher debated the subject with his parents, he griped to his friends, and in early 1992, during his first year in college, he founded the White Youth Alliance; four friends joined. The fledgling club was dedicated to white pride.

Four months ago, with his interest in school waning, Fisher established a larger and, authorities say, a more violent group called the Fourth Reich Skinheads.

They met at Central Park in Huntington Beach and at Balboa Island, gathered at the home of a member’s parents in Long Beach and hit the shore for bonfires. But when they set up a white supremacist hot line with racist jokes and slogans, a government informant infiltrated their organization and soon introduced them to an undercover FBI agent.

When the covert operation was over, 20-year-old Chris Fisher allegedly had implicated himself in a plot to bomb a black church in Los Angeles and assassinate a number of prominent African-Americans in an effort to incite a race war.

Fisher had delivered guns, bayonets and pipe bombs, according to a federal court complaint. He also is charged with bombing the Lakewood home of a “Spur Posse” member who is Chinese-American. If convicted, he faces up to 45 years in federal prison.

The skinhead terrorist described in government documents stands sharply at odds with Fisher’s reputation as a soft-spoken, intelligent and sensitive onetime choirboy, Boy Scout and honor student. Friends, classmates and neighbors said he neither smokes nor drinks, easily befriends people of color and attends church with his parents.

Fisher is also very much a boy in a young man’s body, who enjoyed the company of younger teen-agers and their eagerness to accept him as their leader, friends said. Although it annoyed him that his parents still tended to treat him as a child, he appeared to relish the excitement of his secret life with impressive, older strangers in a hide-out that authorities say was filled with guns, racist literature and talk of murder.

“It’s almost like there are two sides to him,” said Ricky Wells, a 21-year-old Vietnamese-American who said Fisher was his best friend. “I didn’t see the other side. . . . There’s a second Chris. I know the first Chris. I don’t hang around the second Chris.”

Fisher is the middle son of Scott and Farah Fisher, who work in the California State University system. Scott Fisher, 47, helps obtain grant funding at the Los Angeles campus. Farah Fisher, 45, is an assistant professor of computer-based education at the Dominguez Hills campus. Chris has two adoptive brothers--one mentally retarded, the other hearing impaired.

The Fishers declined to be interviewed for this story.

The family lives in a racially mixed neighborhood in the placid Wrigley district of Long Beach, with many Filipino-Americans and Cambodian-Americans as neighbors. A sign at the front door speaks to their Norwegian heritage: “Willkommen. The Fishers.” The doorbell chime plays the first eight notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

While living in this home, where racial tolerance and understanding were encouraged, Chris Fisher slowly began to adopt a negative view of the interracial environment at his high school.

Polytechnic High School has prided itself on its diversity. Of 3,700 students, 28% are African-Americans, 24% are Anglos, 19% are Asian-Americans, 15% are Latinos, 9% are Filipino-Americans and nearly 4% are Pacific Islanders.

School officials established special events, such as Pacific Islander Week, to help promote racial understanding. But Fisher and some of his friends felt isolated and neglected because there was no such recognition for Anglos. Similar feelings would lead other Anglo students to create a short-lived Caucasian Ancestry Club the year after Fisher graduated.

“He was more pro-white than he was anti-black,” said former schoolmate Jeremy Collins, 18, of Newport Beach.

Timothy Traster, who later joined Fisher’s White Youth Alliance and the Fourth Reich Skinheads, said: “We felt like we were being pulled apart. I was the only white person in my science class. All the time, we heard about black things and black shows, and after Rodney King was beaten up, it was like they had hate for every white kid.”

Occasionally, he said, there were fistfights between minority and Anglo students.

By many measures, Fisher was a successful student. He was accepted into a program reserved for gifted and highly motivated students. He got Bs and still managed to participate in baseball, badminton and a Japanese culture club. He also studied judo for 12 years.

After high school, Fisher attended City College in Long Beach, where he studied psychology. Family friends said he was under pressure to excel. Once, they said, he was afraid to tell his parents he had gotten a C in a course.

Recently, he appeared to lose interest in school. He dropped two classes last semester and took the summer off to work two jobs--one at a Long Beach Subway sandwich shop and another as a security guard for rock concerts. Friends said he wanted to buy a new van.

Fisher also had developed interests outside school that would change his life. In 1992, he and four others formed the White Youth Alliance. At 18, Fisher was the oldest.

His parents did not know that their son was involved in a racist group, Fisher’s friends said. But, they said, Fisher did espouse white pride in dinner table conversations, and his parents tried to make him understand the difference between having pride in one’s race and bigotry. The parents also tried to get him to attend race awareness events, often without success.

“His parents didn’t agree with our beliefs,” said Traster, 15. “Chris said they believe in peace and harmony.”

The Fishers recently shared their concerns about Chris and his friends with the pastor of the church the family has attended for years.

“They understood he was involved in some things they didn’t approve of, but they were trying to work with him,” said Pastor Jonathan Doolittle of the Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Los Alamitos. “They were aware of some of the stuff he was doing, that his friends were changing, (and) some of the people he kept in touch with prior to the past year, he wasn’t (seeing). They weren’t sure where all this was taking him.”

Ricky Wells said he saw a disturbing sign last year. Fisher--who usually was interested in the Dodgers, cars and world events--gave his Vietnamese-American friend a number to call. It was a racist hot line, and the message shocked Wells. “It was not cool,” Wells said.

The subject was never raised again, and they remained friends. “He’s not the person you see on TV, this bad guy,” Wells said. “If you needed a ride somewhere at 3 o’clock in the morning, you’d call him up and he’d come and get you--no questions asked. If you needed to borrow money, and he had it, he’d let you borrow it.”

The change in Fisher cost him at least one friend. Wells shared the racist hot line number with a mutual friend, Carson Matthews, who is half black.

“It was all this crazy-ass racist stuff. It was the White Aryan Resistance,” said Matthews, 20, a former classmate and neighbor of Fisher. Matthews ended the friendship.

Along with Fisher’s new beliefs came a new set of friends and a new look--a white T-shirt, a heavy flight jacket, a pair of Dickies work pants and Doc Martens Army-type boots. He shaved his head and sometimes clipped a ring onto his left ear.

By April, Fisher had launched a new organization, too. The Fourth Reich Skinheads were a cadre of young men and women, most from Long Beach, Westminster and Huntington Beach. Most lived at home with their parents. One, a 16-year-old named Debi from Huntington Beach, was Fisher’s girlfriend.

According to members, they functioned in some ways as a support group, confiding family and personal problems. They tried to stay off drugs and alcohol so they would be fit to fight for their race. And when they had a lapse, the members often sought out Fisher, their role model.

Even the mother of one member turned to Fisher. “I would trust this kid with my life,” said Dee Traster, who said Fisher helped her quit a nine-month crystal methamphetamine habit.

Some members of Fisher’s crew admired Adolf Hitler and wore swastikas and German iron crosses on their clothing, although they apparently had not devoted much study to the Third Reich. Some goose-stepped or greeted each other with a “Sieg Heil.” And they defiantly posed for photos giving the Nazi salute.

The members also fantasized about having their own country, just for the people they knew and liked. “We wanted a country where nobody would bother us and where there would be no problems,” said Debi, who spoke on the condition that her last name not be used. “Where we could all be at peace.”

Fisher and his comrades set up a telephone hot line with their white supremacist message and advertised it in the White Aryan Resistance newsletter. In part for the shock value, they encouraged their non-skinhead friends to listen to the recordings, including one that mimics a black asking: “How many pieces of fried chicken are in a 10-piece bucket?”

On April 19, someone calling himself the Rev. Joe Allen telephoned the hot line and left a message. When Fisher returned the call, Allen identified himself as a minister in the Church of the Creator, a Florida-based white supremacist group. In fact, Allen was a longtime government informant.

“Chris developed a philosophy of racism out of sheer desperation because he felt the white community was no longer a majority in the Long Beach community and he perceived an enemy,” said Roy Traster, father of skinhead Timothy Traster. “And he made a bad mistake by listening to the wrong people.”

Before long, Fisher and other members of the Fourth Reich Skinheads were paying regular visits a Newport Beach warehouse hideaway that Allen had equipped with gym equipment, a whirlpool and video cameras.

At the warehouse, or “church” as it was called, skinheads were free to lift weights, scan racist literature, peruse a collection of guns or engage in discussions about white supremacy.

One member, Rick Traylor, a 17-year-old Long Beach youth who later would be arrested in the case, wrote a letter to his father three months ago. “I started working out at this gym with my older friend Chris,” he said of Fisher. “He is so clean it’s unbelievable. He hasn’t smoked a cigarette or tried drugs in his life. I finally found a friend that’s worth hanging around with.”

On April 29, the complaint alleges, Fisher sold a pipe bomb filled with BBs and glass fragments to Allen and an undercover FBI agent for $200, and five days later he sold them two other pipe bombs and a grenade for $200.

Meeting with the undercover operatives on June 23, Fisher delivered two .22-caliber rifles, a ski mask, a 7.62-millimeter rifle, two bayonets and a small amount of black powder, authorities said.

Meanwhile, the talk allegedly escalated to become a plot to kill Rodney G. King, the Rev. Cecil Murray and members of Murray’s First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles. An agent quoted Fisher as saying he wanted to “stir the masses.”

Fisher also bragged about two previous pipe bomb attacks, according to the government. One in February damaged the home and car of a member of the Spur Posse, a controversial group of high school boys who collected points for their sexual encounters. The other was a bombing attempt against an African-American in Paramount, which could not be verified by authorities.

Fisher also allegedly said he had tossed a Molotov cocktail at a Westminster synagogue but rain doused it. He and other skinheads also allegedly defaced the synagogue by painting swastikas and “Die Jew Pigs” on a wall.

In early July, Fisher realized that he had said too much to Allen and the undercover FBI agent and that he needed to stay away from the warehouse, according to Fisher’s girlfriend.

“It was like he bragged about (weapons and violence), and when they said, ‘Go do it,’ he got scared,” she said.

Fearing that an attack was imminent, agents last week rounded up Fisher, Traylor and a second juvenile, Dan Boese, 17, of Lake Arrowhead. Boese was charged in a federal complaint that was sealed. Traylor was charged in a state complaint with transportation of an explosive device.

The same day, five adult white supremacists not affiliated with the Fourth Reich Skinheads were arrested on weapons charges.

On Wednesday, a federal judge refused to grant bail to Fisher, who sobbed throughout the hearing and was led away in shackles. There is a probability, the judge said, of danger to the community if Fisher were freed.

Fisher’s friends and work colleagues accused the government of preying on a group of gullible youths, who have changed their group’s name back to White Youth Alliance because of the notoriety. They said Fisher fell into a dangerous trap because he so badly wanted to impress the adult infiltrators.

“He wants to respect people and for people to respect him back,” said his girlfriend. “He really looked up to them. They had power and money.”

A letter Fisher’s parents sent to their next-door neighbor this week gave a glimpse of the family’s struggle to understand what has happened.

“We, as well as all of you, have many questions about what has happened and why,” they wrote. “We are trusting the answers to God and will continue to act by expressing our love to Chris.”

The letter thanked the neighbors for their support and suggested that they write to Chris at the Metropolitan Detention Center: “We ask for your continued prayers for Chris that God will see him through this ordeal.”

Within days of his son’s arrest, Scott Fisher called Murray and apologized for whatever his son might have done, requesting a personal meeting with the minister.

At his son’s bail hearing, the father pleaded for his son’s release.

“This is a case of a young man, who though 20 years of age, is shown to be emotionally immature by the very nature that all of his acquaintances are many years younger than he,” he said in an affidavit. “It is this vulnerability and naivete that has put him here.”