O.C.-Spawned Hate Group’s Power Growing

A hate group first discovered in Costa Mesa six years ago is now believed to be the fastest-growing white supremacist gang in California and a major player in the methamphetamine drug trade, according to a report released Thursday.

The study--the most extensive to date of the Nazi Lowrider gang--was prepared by the Anti-Defamation League using state and federal crime data. It was presented Thursday in Santa Ana by the sheriffs of Orange and Los Angeles counties.

Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona and Lee Baca, his Los Angeles County counterpart, said the Nazi Lowriders are a rising force in street crime, committing several high-profile hate incidents and also selling drugs.

Carona and Baca consider the gang so dangerous that they have taken the step of segregating Nazi Lowriders in county jails from the rest of the population. The move came after repeated attacks by members on black inmates in Los Angeles.

Members of the hate group allegedly beat a 12-year-old Latino boy with a metal pipe in 1996 at a Mission Viejo video arcade, according to police. Other serious incidents followed in Lancaster, where over the last three years Nazi Lowriders have been accused of beating a black teenager with a baseball bat and stabbing a black man several times in the back.

Carona and Baca also expressed concern that the group might be attempting to unite other white supremacist gangs. “It’s a menace we all have to attack,” said Baca, who added the Nazi Lowriders are now more of a problem in his jails than the notorious Mexican Mafia.

The group first caught the attention of authorities in the early 1990s in Costa Mesa, where members were running a drug ring. Gang membership has grown from 28 in 1996 to an estimated 1,300 members across the nation in 1998, according to the study.

Unlike traditional street gangs, the Nazi Lowriders and other white supremacy groups don’t carve out specific territory, according to hate-crime experts.

“They are not typical of skinhead organizations and not well-defined like the Ku Klux Klan or Aryan Nations,” said Freeman, a research associate for the Atlanta-based Center for Democratic Renewal, which monitors far right-wing groups.

“They are roving gangs,” Freeman added. “ ‘Street soldiers’ is the term used by white supremacists to refer to them. They hit and they leave and they are hard to track and pin down.”

The Anti-Defamation League report said early gang members emerged on the streets of Costa Mesa after first forming the Nazi Lowriders while in the state prison system, possibly as an offshoot to the Aryan Brotherhood. Functioning as middlemen for the brotherhood’s criminal operations, the gang quickly earned a fiercer reputation than their older predecessors, according to the report.

The Nazi Lowriders are “younger and more ruthless,” said Emily Zaiden, an Anti-Defamation League researcher who worked on the study. “It takes a lot less to get them started for racially motivated acts of violence.”

The group has created its own culture, the study found, including hand signals, language and dress codes. Members’ bodies are often tattooed with swastikas, pictures of Adolf Hitler and other Nazi-related imagery, it stated.

Orange County is home to about 186 members, who according to the report frequently congregate in pool halls, bars and video arcades. So far this year, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department has arrested 43 people identified as members, mostly on drugs or weapons charges.

Though the membership is relatively small compared to other gangs in Orange County, Carona said the group commits an extraordinary amount of crime.

“It’s growing, and what it’s done in California is incredible,” Carona said.

Costa Mesa police said they haven’t had any major run-ins with the gang in recent years. But last week, an Anaheim police officer shot and killed an alleged Nazi Lowrider after the suspect drew a weapon during a police stakeout. Police suspect that the same alleged gang member a week earlier was the person who shot at two Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies at a Norwalk trailer park.

Hate crimes have been a special problem in the Antelope Valley. In March, two men who authorities say are affiliated with the Nazi Lowriders were arrested on suspicion of assaulting an African American Wal-Mart worker who approached a white woman in the store’s parking lot.

The victim was rounding up shopping carts at the Lancaster Wal-Mart when he believed he recognized a 20-year-old woman as a former high school classmate, police said. He asked the woman if the two had been classmates--angering her boyfriend and a friend, who allegedly beat the victim.

According to the report, members are typically in their late teens or early 20s. In order to join the gang, they must profess loyalty to the white race. Though they express hatred for Jews, Asians and other minorities, the gang tends to focus its hatred on blacks, it stated. In the prisons, the gang often allies itself with Mexican counterparts in attacks on black inmates.

Tom Leyden, a former neo-Nazi skinhead who is now a consultant for the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said the gang is unique in that it operates under dual philosophies. It combines drug-selling expertise with the primarily hate-based credo of skinhead gangs, he said.

Times staff writer Daniel Yi contributed to this report.