Redemption for a Man of Hatred

There’s no trick to hating a stranger. I hate Hitler, of course--he’s easy--and the Dallas Cowboys, every man-jack of them, and Neil Young. But just his singing, not him as a person.

Apart from that, I don’t hate anyone except, smugly, I do hate people who hate people, so I should have despised Tom (T.J.) Leyden.

What’s to like? This man, a Fontana native, did his undergraduate field work in skinhead butt-kicking, with an advanced degree in neo-Nazi propaganda. He shot at a Latino kid in a drive-by--the same kid who had been his best friend in fifth grade. He hung a swastika flag over his newborn son’s crib as a welcome-home from the hospital. His other little boy went to a friend’s birthday party where the pinata was a paper effigy of a black man, hung by a noose from a tree limb, and the little kids took turns with the baseball bat while the parents laughed.

Leyden’s wife Nicole’s birthday was April 19--a holy day on the neo-Nazi calendar: Hitler’s birthday, Waco and, now, Oklahoma City. The morning of the 1995 bombing, a friend called, all excited. Wake up, dude! Nicole got a birthday present.

They turned on the TV and said: “Wow, this is fantastic, this is great, this is unreal.” But then they saw the dead kids, and they thought of their own kids, and the euphoria vanished. If you wanna blow up a building, fine, but call and clear it out first, like the IRA.

A year later, his wife wheedled Leyden into taking her to the Aryan Nation youth conference in Idaho, where they were living, for her birthday. It was not the first time they had gone there, but it would be the last. Within a week, Leyden was driving south, alone, a fugitive from his own vicious past.

*

Not everyone converts like Saul on the road to Damascus--in a lightning flash. The facade can take time to fissure and fall away. T. J. Leyden knows people are disappointed that his epiphany story isn’t one, but that’s not the way it happened.

It’s April 1996, he’s in Idaho and it’s like he’s seeing his comrades with different eyes--and it floors him. “I’m thinking, these are stooges or idiots; they can’t put two and two together in their own heads. And these kids at the conference--they were stupid; every other word out of their mouths was Jew, spic, nigger, kike. I thought, ‘These are pathetic, and this is my kids’ future? Being angry and upset their whole lives?’ ”

It was time, at age 30, after half a life in the business of loathing, to get out. He headed for his mother’s home in Los Angeles.

His wife, whom he’d married under a swastika in an Aryan wedding, refused to join him. She told him she’d keep the kids and move to Washington state. Back to Idaho went Leyden, for his belongings and his boys. He brought them to L.A., too. And in June, when his mom, a born-again Christian and a formidable force in the family, suggested that her son join her on a visit to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, he went.

The master thug was scared; he expected to be cussed out nine ways from Sunday. But he was welcomed, squired around, taken seriously. Ten days later, he was invited back. He gave them his files, his racist CDs, steel-toed boots. Each side, warily, acquired faith in the other.

And that is how T.J. Leyden, defector from hate, came to be a consultant for the National Task Force Against Hate, working out of the Wiesenthal Center, lecturing at military bases and police departments and schools, making converts to the cause of tolerance as he once lured young men into the opposite camp.

He figures he recruited 80 converts to the Nazi flag, so he has pledged to turn 100 kids the other way. He has four so far. He doesn’t tell kids that gang members are bad; everyone says that, and it doesn’t work. He tells them gangs are conniving and slick and playing them for suckers. And he tells their parents and teachers to give these kids something to do after school, not leave them to TV or the Internet and its pedophiles and hundreds of hate Web sites. Because if the good guys don’t, the bad guys will, and he knows, because he was one.

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For the master of a family of the master race, what hurt most was not the death threats from his onetime best friend, nor the sting of the laser burning off his swastika tattoos. It was telling his sons that he was wrong, about black people and brown people and Jews and everyone else.

His wife--his ex-wife now--is trying to come around. His young boys seem untouched by his past. The 6-year-old has a crush on a little Latina.

T.J. Leyden’s war has a “six-inch” battlefield, “the one between our ears,” and he fights it every day, like an addiction, incrementally, with no Racists Anonymous 12-step program to help. If he gets cut off in traffic, the nasty thought may still come, and then he’s ashamed of himself. He is not alone in that. He’s just gone further out than many of us--and has further to come back.