May 11, 2025 • 51 mins
[Part 1 of 2] At fourteen years old, Christian Picciolini was lost, confused and looking for guidance. If he’d been approached by a footy coach or a skateboarder - he reckons he would have followed their lead. But instead, he was recruited by the leader of the notorious Chicago area skinheads, and found himself deeply entwined in a violent, racist and dangerous neo-nazi hate group.
Today, however, Christian spends every day of his life trying to undo the harm he caused, and to help other young people disengage from hate groups. So how did Christian go from being the lead propagandist for an extremist organisation to actively working to bring them down?
It’s a story you’ll have to hear to believe - and it’s a story that’s more important today than ever before.
Listen to Part 2 of this conversation here.
You can follow Christian on Instagram here
And learn more about his books and the work he does, here
THE END BITS:
Listen to more No Filter interviews here and follow us on Instagram here.
Discover more Mamamia podcasts here.
Feedback: podcast@mamamia.com.au
Share your story, feedback, or dilemma! Send us a voice message, and one of our Podcast Producers will get back to you ASAP.
Rate or review us on Apple by clicking on the three dots in the top right-hand corner, click Go To Show then scroll down to the bottom of the page, click on the stars at the bottom and write a review
CREDITS:
Host: Kate Langbroek
Guest: Christian Picciolini
Executive Producer: Naima Brown
Senior Producer: Grace Rouvray
Audio Producer: Jacob Round
Mamamia acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Land we have recorded this podcast on, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to their Elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures.
Become a Mamamia subscriber: https://www.mamamia.com.au/subscribe
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
You're listening to a Mother Mia podcast. Mama Maya acknowledges
the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast
is recorded on.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I can tell you this was thirty years ago, and
I can still remember the exact words that I made
her skin crawl. Those were the words that she used
when she left me. And this was somebody that I
was in love with. She was in love with me,
but had gotten so bad that she told me that,
you know, my mere presence made her skin crawl because
(00:40):
of what I was involved in.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
For Christian Pictulini, being a teenager was hard. He was lonely,
he didn't have a lot of friends, he was angry
at the world and his parents, who he kind of
felt abandoned by, and he was vulnerable. At fourteen, he
finally felt seen by someone. It turns out that that
(01:12):
someone was Clark Martel, who at that time was the
leader of the Chicago area Skinheads, a violent, racist, dangerous
neo Nazi hate group. Christian went all in, so far
in that he became the lead propagandist and frontman for
(01:33):
the group and ended up recruiting other young men into
their organization. And now Christian spends his life trying to
undo the damage he's caused. But the story of how
he left the group and its ideology and faced the
reckoning of the incredible harm he'd played a party in,
(01:54):
not just to the victims of hate crimes, but to
his own family and friends, is a long and complicated one,
but it's a really important one because these groups are
alive and strong and recruiting young men into their ranks
every day, something which Christian understands all too well. The
(02:15):
moment that Christian's life was swallowed up by hate and
violence is one he'll never forget. Here is Christian. At
one point, when I was reading your book, very powerful book,
breaking Hate, Thank you, I was reflecting on my own genealogy,
which is my mother is Jamaican American, my dad's Dutch.
(02:39):
There's a lot, it's a real mix up. And I
thought to myself, there was a point in your life
in which you would have hated me, just based on that.
Can you tell me when that point in your life started?
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Yeah, you know, it's kind of tough to pinpoint that
because even though I was involved in a hate movement,
it was it was tough to say when I actually
believed what I believed. But I'll tell you. I'll tell
you the backstory of how I got involved. I was
fourteen years old in nineteen eighty seven when I was
recruited into America's first white supremacist skinhead gang. I spent
(03:22):
eight years until I was about twenty two and a
half years old as part of that hate movement, and
at varying points when I was involved, my ideology fluctuated
because I wasn't raised as a hater. My parents are
Italian immigrants to the United States, so it wasn't something
(03:43):
that I had been raised on. In fact, my parents
were often victims of prejudice when they came to the
United States in the mid nineteen sixties, so it wasn't
really a foundation of who I was. And when I
was first recruited, I wasn't a hater. What I was
was lonely and I didn't have a lot of friends,
and the people who befriended me at that very critical
age of fourteen years old happened to be white powered skinheads.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
All right, So fourteen. I've got a son who's fourteen,
and he's in that transition between walking around with pockets
full of rocks to hanging out with his mates and
going down the pier and trying to fish, Like, how
did you get recruited at fourteen from a pretty solid family?
(04:30):
Where were you and how did that happen?
Speaker 2 (04:33):
I'll paint a picture for you. It was the summer
of nineteen eighty seven. I was a fourteen year old
kind of nobody at the time, who'd been bullied and
have a lot of friends. And I was standing in
an alley. I was smoking a joint and a man
with a shaved head came up to me and he
took the joint out of my mouth hate and he
looked me in the eyes and he said, that's what
(04:54):
the Communists and the Jews want you to do, to
keep your docile. If I'm being completely honest, at fourteen
years old, I didn't know what a Communist was. I
didn't know if i'd met a Jewish person. I didn't
even know what the word docil meant.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
No, you wouldn't have known any of the above. But
what was the connection there?
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Like?
Speaker 1 (05:12):
What what did he say that resonated with you?
Speaker 2 (05:15):
So the next thing he said was really important to me.
He asked me what my name was, And growing up
I was afraid to tell people my name because people
made fun of it. Pi Cellini is not, you know,
a very easy name to pronounce, so people made fun
of me for that name. But he recognized when I
told him eventually what my name was, that it was
an Italian name, and instead of making fun of me,
(05:38):
instead of bullying me because of that name, he put
his arm around me and he said it was a
very important name that I should be proud of. And
I didn't really know anything else at that point but
to be proud of being Italian. So it was something
that he found in me that you know, kind of
pulled me in.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
And this guy, what was his background.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
So the man who recruited me, you know, he was
probably twice my age. His name was Clark Martel, and
he happened to be America's first the Nazi skinhead leader.
You know, it was nineteen eighty seven when I was recruited.
I didn't know what a skinhead was. You know, it
was very new to the United States. So a man
with a shaved head and wearing beans, it was really
(06:21):
foreign to.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Me, right, But he had a look oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Yeah, he had tattoos, and he had a shaved head
and you know, he talked about things that I didn't
quite understand at fourteen years old. But instead of focusing
on politics, what he focused on was my sense of
searching for an identity and a community and a purpose
because I was kind of a lonely kid. You know,
I was ambitious, but I was also very shy, and
(06:47):
I didn't have a lot of self esteem. And he
recognized that right away. He was an amazing recruiter. He
saw the voids in me, you know, what I call
potholes in my book. He saw the potholes that existed
in my life, and belonging and acceptance and a sense
of isolation were my potholes. And he recognized that right away,
and he drew me in and he promised me paradise.
(07:09):
He gave me friends, He delivered very quickly on those
things that were missing in my life. And unfortunately, I,
you know, I bought into that unaware of the politics
really of it all. You know, it was all very
foreigns I mean, but I bought in very very quickly.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
What what happens between that initial conversation with a fourteen
year old boy smoking joint on his own, What what
happens after that? Like is there, Is there a clubhouse?
Is there? A meeting? Is there? How do you how
do you go from that initial meeting to then becoming
embedded and a part of his fledgling movement?
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Yeah, I mean, I guess our clubhouse was just the backstreets,
the alleyways, you know, behind our homes, where we grew up,
where we hung out and where we played as kids.
It was also the place where these skinheads. This this
group of skinheads hung out and drank beer and you know,
and mess around with girls and you know, had fun
(08:09):
and in their own ways. And then it became very political.
But it was kind of a family that I really
didn't have at that point because my parents, while they
were good, amazing people, you know, and I'm so proud
to call them my family, were also busy because they
were immigrants and they were working seven days a week
and they were away fourteen hours a day. So I
(08:30):
really didn't have a family. And this skinhead group became
my family, and the streets kind of became my home.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
So you transitioned into them being your kind of de
facto family. This group of people. How many of them
were they.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
It was a group of about twenty skinheads, both male
and female, you know, ranging and I was the youngest,
but arranging in ages from you know, sixteen or seventeen
years old to their late twenties. And you know, they
were a rough bunch, but there were you know, smart people,
There were funny people. There were kind of what you know,
any group of you know, friends would have. You know,
(09:05):
were all represented as part of this group. And the
only difference was that the thing, the glue that brought
them together was hey, it was racism, it was anti semitism,
it was conspiracy theories that bonded us all together with
each other.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
Fourteen is the age at which boys in particular, well
girls do as well, but they have they can fall
in love with their idols. And you, I imagine were
the youngest was in this in this group, and so
you were kind of a mascot.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
I imagine I was what they called the flunky. You know,
they sent me around to kind of do their bidding.
You know, I bought cigarettes at the store for them
when they were out of cigarettes at that time. You know,
you could you can walk into a store without you know,
being asked for an idea. It was you know, the
eighties was a little bit more lax and Christian, the
(09:57):
good old taste, right. But yeah, you know I became
their mascot. I think that's a really accurate word for
for who I was. And you know, they saw in
me somebody that they can mold, and you know, very quickly,
because I was ambitious, I bought it. You know, I started.
I started to do really awful things to find that acceptance.
I started to get in street fights. I started to
(10:18):
use the language that they used. You know, I was
a mean person very quickly and hardened, you know, from
having rocks in my pockets at thirteen and a half
to suddenly being a street fighter at fourteen years old
and doing things that you know, most adults weren't doing.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
And because your parents were working really hard, as you said,
like your dad was running a hair salon, your mum
was running a restaurant, so long hours. Who else was
at home? What was your sibling situation?
Speaker 2 (10:49):
So I had a brother who we were ten years apart,
so at fourteen years old, he would have been four
years old, and both of us were really raised by
my grandparents and aunts and uncles, people, you know, whoever
was around at the moment, whoever could you know, dedicate
time to watching us. And I was really close to
my brother for the first four years of his life.
(11:13):
And when I, you know, found this new group, it became,
you know, my primary existence. So I really lost track
of both my family and you know, an any the
few friends that I had before then. But yeah, it
really just became my sole dedication and very quickly rose
within the ranks of this group and kind of over
(11:35):
delivered on everything that you know, that I was involved in.
I became the singer of a band at sixteen years old.
You know where I became a mass propagandist. I was
through my lyrics and music and singing on stage who
was delivering the message of our movement and trying to
recruit other young people, other broken young people like me,
(11:56):
because we weren't looking for the best of the best.
We were looking for the most broken, the ones who
were the low hanging fruit, the ones who were easy
to promise paradise too. And if that sounds familiar, this
is also the kind of the theme other terrorist groups
is they really look for people they can they can
promise a better life, even though that better life is
(12:18):
not accurate. It's not a better life it's it's a
broken life and a broken ideology.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
So Christian, the white power group that recruited you, what
was their goal, what was their ideology, what was their aim?
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Well, I think what they told to the outside world
and what they talked about internally were two different things.
I think to the outside world they would profess that
it was just about pride, that it was about being
proud of being white, and that they believed that white
culture was being pushed to the sidelines for the benefit
of other cultures. Internally, I can tell you that it
was about white supremacy. They believed that white people were
(12:55):
more superior to other races, that other races were, you know,
in some cases what they would claim is subhuman, and
that they wanted to build a world in a society
that excluded everybody that was and white, and even more
specifically that wasn't white males, because they believed that white
men were more superior than even white women. So it
(13:17):
was it was completely a culture and an ideology of hate,
of exclusion, and of benefit only to powerful white men.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
And is that the ideology that persiss today even Oh?
Speaker 2 (13:30):
I think it's it's identical to the ideology that persists today,
although maybe some words have been massaged a little bit
and maybe even you know a little bit easier to
swallow or more palatable. You know, white power became white nationalism.
Even that in itself is it's kind of a tone
down version, you know.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
Well, the term patriot, Yeah, the term patriot or even
waving you know, a country's flag now is being used
to hide behind, to cover up the fact that they want.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
To exclude other people. It really, you know, they've gotten
very good at their marketing these days, at the propaganda.
We recognized years ago. I was involved in the movement,
and I called this the move from boots to suits.
Where we stopped shaving our heads, we stopped putting swastika
flags and swastika symbols on our body, We grew our
hair out, and we went to wear suits. We recognized
(14:24):
that if we used those words and those symbols, we
were scaring away even the average white rapist, that those
symbols were even too much for those people. So we
toned it down and we started to you know, change
it from an anti Jewish message to something we called
anti globalism. Right, Even that in itself is a tone
down version of more palatable word for the same thing.
(14:46):
So the marketing message was to break into the mainstream.
You know, there were people who were grand Dragons, leaders
of the ku Klux Klan, who dropped the white suit
and the pointy hat and started to put on a
three piece suit and become politicians in our country. And
by virtue of doing that and the words that they
chose to use, they were able to recruit more people
(15:09):
in mainstream into this ideology of hate.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Which of course is is so effective and so insidious.
So then there's more of an opportunity to embrace the masses.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
Well, they've used things that are hard to argue against
free speech and you know, things that patriotism and nationalism
where people can hide behind these these messages that have
other motives of exclusion and of hatred, you know, and
really of something that's called accelerationism, where they've embraced kind
(15:42):
of burning down society to rebuild it in the image
that they want to build it in, and burning it
down means doing away with all the people that they
would exclude from that society. So I think that's very
much of what's happening in the world today. You know,
maybe even more specifically in the United States, where you know,
we are starting now to elect people who have the
(16:05):
same exact messaging, albeit maybe with slightly different words, in
a different look than what a fourteen year old neo
Nazi skin a Christian Patuli would have done in nineteen
eighty seven. It's the same message, it's the same movement.
It's just a lot better looking to the average person
and easier for them to swallow the same type of bile,
(16:26):
you know, weight supremacy and neo Nazism. You know that
I was a part of at one point.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
A common sort of tray in a lot of religious
sex as well, is looking for those people who were disenfranchised,
who were lonely, who are sad, who are hopeless. Right,
But you were quite extraordinary because you went from being
fourteen and that kid on the street who got recruited
to at sixteen, you were running the outfit when the
(16:57):
leader went to jail, Is that right?
Speaker 2 (16:59):
Yeah? Yeah, Clark and several of the leaders at that
point within our group had gone to prison for a
series of very violent hate crimes that they were involved in,
and you know, anybody else who was left started to
run from the police because they were they were being investigated,
so they moved away and kind of went into hiding.
And at that point all that was left was me.
(17:22):
Uh So here I was sixteen, I'd been indoctrinated now
for two years. I'd fully bought in. I was ambitious.
I had mimicked the you know, the rhetoric I had,
you know, I there was no you know, no other
way to say it. I was in. I was a
true believer at that point. But I was also because
I was ambitious, and maybe it was because my parents
were entrepreneurs. I saw an opportunity, uh to to kind
(17:45):
of restart this group and become a leader myself. So
I started at that point to ramp up the propaganda
and recruit other young people, people that I had gone
to school with, people who had bullied me in the past,
because I knew I saw in them also some brokenness
that that could be used as well. And very quickly
kind of you know, re established this organization and and
(18:10):
merge it with a much larger national Skin had organization
called the Hamletskin Nation at that time.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
So you had gone from being powerless to having this
sense of power. Yeah, andsp sure, but when people are
looking in the microcosm of their life. You know, they
look for something that's going to affirm them as a person.
And that was what you had found when you talk
(18:39):
about the crimes that other members had gone to jail for.
What was the nature of them and what were you
doing at that time? Because to assert yourself and your dominance,
you would have had to prove that you could be
equally violent, equally hate filled.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
Yeah, what they were involved in was you know, a
level of street violence that luckily I never kind of
rose to. I chose a different path, and that was
as a propagandist, uh And I found my power kind
of more in the in the celebrity part of the movement,
where you know, I was a singer on stage. I
was in one of America's earliest uh you know, skinhead
(19:20):
white power bands. So people looked up to me because
of that, you know, quote unquote celebrity. So I was
a spokesperson. But the people that you know came before
me went to prison for for you know, a series
of violent hate crimes against Blacks and Jews were on
the anniversary of Crystal Knocked, which is you know, the
(19:42):
night of Broken Glass that the Nazis uh in Germany
had perpetrated against the Jews. They recreated that and broke
windows of Jewish shops in the Chicago area where I'm from,
uh and and also attacked one of their own members,
a woman who was a skinhead, who was part of
our group, who had started to kind of leave the organization.
(20:04):
She had been seen with with a black man at
a bus stop, and they attacked her. They put you know,
they committed a violent act on her that put her
in the hospital and once prison for that. So you know,
while I, you know, I certainly wasn't any angel. I
was involved in my fair share of street fights, you know,
(20:27):
it never really rose to that level, even though I,
you know, I certainly hurt people, and you know, I
also hurt people because I indoctrinated them, and maybe even
more so, you know, destroyed more lives through the words
that I said.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
And the lyrics that you sang, yeah, and the following
that your band had, which was quite a sort of
a powerful presence in that movement.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
I still think about all the lives of you know,
people who may not have gone down the path of hate,
that that somehow I radicalized through my lyrics, that maybe
their lives would have been different had they not come
across my music.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
So, you know, at home in this period, Chris, and
even though your parents were so busy and your nona
and Nona were looking after you and probably not o
fay with you know, any white supremacist movement, but Italians
are familiar with fascists. So when you were coming home
and looking different, I imagine at that point you'd adopted
(21:29):
the uniform, you'd bought your first pair of Doc Martins.
It was always Doc Martin's. Did you have a tattoo?
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Oh yeah, I got my first tattoo at fifteen years old,
and you know, at fourteen shaved my head and my
first pair of Doc Martins were given to me by
you know, the skinhead leader that recruited me. You know,
I came home wearing you know, a bomber jacket with
patches that were you know, certainly provocative. It's you know,
(21:58):
I think at fourteen and fifteen years old, I probably
did a good job of hiding it from my family,
right because I still wasn't, you know, very self confident.
But you know, very quickly after that, I wasn't ashamed
to show them who I was. And I think once
they recognized what I was involved, and they were horrified,
and they tried to do things. They tried to talk
(22:18):
to me, they tried to sit me down. But at
that point I had already become so bitter against my
family for what I felt was abandonment that I kind
of used it against them to hurt them. You know,
I threw it in their face because I knew that
what I was doing and who I was was an
affront to who they were and how they had raised me,
because I was, you know, as a kid, I'd always
(22:40):
been introduced to two different cultures, you know, as a
young boy. They you know, they had friends who were
you know, from other countries and other religions and other
parts of the world that you know, that were very
different than than how I'd been raised. So you know,
it wasn't who I was. And when they figured out
that that's who I was, that I was this aiter,
(23:00):
I think it horrified them and it hurt them a
great deal. But by then I think it was too late.
You know, it was too late because I had used
it against them to hurt them. But it was also
too late because now I had given up everything in
my life to become part of this movement, and it
was very difficult to imagine letting go of that because
I had wrapped myself up at it so much.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
After the break Christian Chase, how others tried to pull
him away from the cult and how he reacted will
be right back. Was there a moment of whether they
attempted a significant intervention or was it an ongoing thing
because you were still living at home.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
So I had moved out at around fifteen years old.
When I say I moved out, I moved into the
basement apartment of my parent home. It was a multi
story apartment building, but I had commandeered kind of a
basement apartment for myself, so I had my own entrance
in kitchen and everything, and I came and went as
I pleased. So at fifteen years old, I was essentially
(24:04):
on my own. I had a job and I supported
myself at that time. But around sixteen years old is
when they really started to intervene, and it really didn't
stop until I was out, you know, at almost twenty
three years old. They really never gave up on me,
and I'm so grateful for that because it was my
family that, you know, ultimately showed me that that wasn't
(24:25):
who I was or who I wanted to be anymore.
You know, at eighteen years old, I got married. I
met a girl, and I fell in love. At nineteen
years old, we had our first child. At twenty one,
we had our second son. And even during that period
it was very difficult to leave. But I have to
tell you that having those children was probably the most
(24:45):
powerful moment to wake me up to see that there
was another way because for the first time in my life,
I had something to love, and it challenged my sense
of identity, community and purpose. And that was really what
was the most powerful, you know, moment to change me
going forward.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
So you met you met a girl who was outside
the movement? Yeah, how did you meet her?
Speaker 2 (25:11):
You know, she had been at a party we you know,
we had a lot of parties, and we hosted a
lot of parties because they were recruitment uh you know,
events for us. Uh. And we had a lot of
people that came to those parties. And she was somebody
who never bought into the movement, although she didn't come
around through mutual friends to some parties and and uh,
you know, at first, she didn't want anything to do
(25:33):
with me, because she really was kind of ideologically the
polar opposite of who I was. But I think over time,
I don't know if she saw something and maybe that
I couldn't even see myself, but you know, she maybe
saw some promise and eventually gave in when I asked
out on a date and secretly, kind of outside of
this movement, we spent a lot of time together and uh,
(25:56):
and I never you know, when when we got eventually
got married. Uh, it wasn't The movement wasn't something I
ever wanted to bring home in my family, even though
she was very well aware of what I was and
constantly tried to talk me out of it.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Well, that's interesting, isn't it That you never wanted to
bring the movement home to your family, So at some
point you were already alert to the fact that there
was a duality in you and what you were living.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Oh. Yeah, I knew it was dirty. I knew it
was something that I didn't want to expose my children to.
I knew it was something. You know. The way I
looked at it back at that time was it was
something that I could carry on my shoulders outside of
the family. But it wasn't something that I wanted to
burden my family with. I thought that I could do
the dirty work, and I never brought it home. My
wife was very aware of what I was, you know
(26:43):
what I was involved and hated it. But you know,
at the same time, I wasn't brave enough to give
it up because I didn't want to go back to
who I was before I joined the movements. I was
afraid of being a nobody.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
So at that point, because you have had a wedding,
who came to your wedding? Who was at your wedding?
Like this is a lot of Italians in one corner
with their skin in the other corner.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Yeah, that's exactly what it was. I mean, my best
men and my groom's men were all, you know, skinheads
with Doc Martin boots and shaved heads. And all her
bridesmaids were you know, Catholic school preppy girls. Wow. And
at the wedding reception, you know, it was a big
Italian My parents wanted a big Italian wedding, so of
course all the aunts and uncles and cousins and people
(27:31):
you know who I hardly knew who were from the
same time that my parents were from were at the wedding,
but you know, on the other side of the hall
were you know, tables of skinheads from all over the
country who at that point, you know, when my friends
and wanted wanted to support me. It was really looking back,
it was kind of a surreal experiment that, you know,
could have gone wrong in so many more ways than
(27:52):
I did.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
But I must have known because always, I think when
people are in these very insular environments, be they religious
or socio political or whatever, everyone's very attuned to losing
one of their own. Yeah, so they're all predicated on
sort of keeping the outside world outside. So they must
(28:16):
have been aware that when you had your first child
and you'd meet this girl that you'd married, that you'd
fallen in love with, that they were slightly losing you.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Yeah. I think at that point they already knew they
had lost me. You know, by eighteen years old, I
was so entrenched in that movement that I think everybody
had almost given up on the fact that they would
get me back because I was so committed. I was
so dedicated to it. At least it seemed like it
because internally, kid, I got to tell you every day
from the time I was fourteen years old until I
(28:49):
was twenty three, there was an internal struggle inside of
me said, something's not right. Sure, this isn't making sense right.
Every day when I would meet somebody or i'd come across,
you know, a new bit of propaganda, I had to
struggle to swallow it. But I did swallow it because
it provided me with a reward. I think, much like
drugs or alcohol does to people who are addicted to
(29:11):
those things. Uh, you know, they know it's killing them,
they know it's not doing them any good, but it
makes them feel good while they're doing it. And I
think I had very much the same experience. While I
was doing it, I felt powerful, I felt you know, great,
I felt like I had this group of you know,
followers and friends. But I also knew when I saw
the other side of things that it was killing me
(29:33):
and it was hurting the people around me. And you know,
on top of that, I was hurting strangers that you
know that I was you know, intimidating with my looks,
with my words, with my actions. Uh, it was it was.
It was a duality that I was living in and unfortunately,
for eight years, the kind of evil side of that
duality won over because it was more powerful until it
(29:55):
broke me down and it almost left nothing, you know,
left of me.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
What was the moment that broke you down? Was there
a critical defining moment.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
I think it was a lot of moments, but I think,
you know, ultimately, my wife leaving me after four years
of marriage and taking the custody of the children was
when I finally realized that what was good in my
life had had disappeared, had gone, and all that was
left was hate. And it was at that moment I
(30:27):
think that I did the hard work of being self
aware of what I was involved in it at that
time and the pain that I was causing to other people.
And you know, I think a lot of a lot
of things happened. Like I said, it was a struggle
every day. I don't think there was a day where
I wasn't questioning what I was involved in until its snowballed,
(30:49):
you know, to a point where I couldn't ignore the
fact that I was. I was more broken in this
movement than I was on of it.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
What did she say to you, she's opting to leave.
I imagine the only security that she had, which was you,
With the two children. What did she say to you?
Speaker 2 (31:08):
I can tell you this was thirty years ago, and
I can still remember the exact words that I made
her skin crawl. Those were the words that she used
when she left me. And this was, you know, somebody
that I was in love with. She was in love
with me, but had gotten so bad that she told
me that my you know, my mere presence made her
skin crawl because of what I was involved in.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
And was that based on a particular event that had happened.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
No, I think it was four years of her really
trying to hoping that I that she could change me,
that I would eventually see the priorities of my family
and my children and walk away. But the truth was
I wasn't brave enough. I just wasn't courageous or strong
enough at that point in my life to see that
my children and my wife should have been the most
(31:57):
important things to me. Instead, I was afraid of losing
you know, what I built around me to boost my
own ego, and I was so entrenched in it that
I couldn't I couldn't and see what my priorities were,
and my priorities were selfish, until you know, everything kind
of crashed around me.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Which is ironic because in that movement, there's a lot
of talk about bravery, isn't there.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Oh yeah, yeah, I was. Everything that I did was
was painted as this white warrior, this strong, you know,
white man who who was doing everything to protect what
I had, including my family, and everything that I was
doing was the complete opposite. I was destroying everything. H
It was a It was a movement built on lies,
(32:43):
on hate, on deceit, on violence, you know, basically everything
that was toxic instead of everything that was fulfilling or nurturing.
I had bought in.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
So at this moment, your wife has left, she's taken
your children, You're disenfranchised from the movement that you are
still lading.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
At that point, I was not only leading it, I
was kind of a you know, a thought leader as
well as a record store and propaganda leader. So I
had opened a record store at that point because I
had stopped being in the band. One of the concessions
that I had made to my wife at that time
was I would stop being in the band and traveling
to play these shows. But the compromise was that I
(33:33):
was going to open a record store to sell white
power music that I was importing from all over the world,
and I was one of the only people at that
time to physically be selling this racist music that I
was importing from, you know, places like the UK or
even from Australia. There were bands that you know in
the eighties that were very popular within this movement.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
Who were the bands? Who were the bands from Australia?
Can you remember?
Speaker 2 (33:59):
I don't even want to mention them because I don't
want to give them any sort of promotion, but you know,
there were some popular bands from Australia, and there were
groups in Australia at the time that you know, we're propaganda.
It's just like my band was, and and I was.
You know, it was the way I was supporting my
family at the time through this through selling this music
(34:21):
because this was before the internet. Remember that people were
driving in from all over the United States and Canada
to buy this music from my physical store CDs. You know,
it was before m P three's, So you know, I
was really involved and was a major kind of cog
in the machine of radicalizing young people. And at that
(34:46):
point in my life, my wife had left me, she
had taken the kids I had. I had to really
ask myself, you know what I believed in again and
who I was, And I don't know what it was,
but something inside of me made me say it's time
to lead this movement. And I decided I was going
(35:07):
to close my store because I eventually i'd pulled the
racist music from the inventory and it was seventy five
percent of my revenue, so I couldn't sustain the store.
And I used that excuse with my comrades at the time,
you know, my divorce, to say, hey, I need some
time to work on my family. I need to walk
away from this. I'm coming back. You know. I'd always
(35:29):
promised him I would come back, that I was just
stepping away, that I was pausing to focus on my family.
But inside I knew I never wanted to go back.
I wanted to run as fast and as far away
as I could from the movement. But it was a
struggle to do that because at that point I didn't
have my family. I didn't have a job because I
closed my store, I didn't have this ideology. I didn't
(35:50):
have the family that I built around me anymore, and
I didn't know what my identity my community at purpose
were And now I had additional potholes that I was
dealing with that I was navigating around. So for five
years after I left the movement, I had started to
meet people that were of color, are people who were black,
people who were Jewish, who were Muslim, and I had
(36:13):
started to recognize that they were very much like I was,
that we were very similar in a lot of ways.
And in fact, I had more respect for some of
the people that I had met that were outside of
the movement than I did for the people that were
in the move So I had started to have these
very conflicting ideas, and of course I didn't share them
with anybody. It wasn't, you know, something that I would
go to my fellow skin edit and say, hey, I
(36:35):
met this you know, black guy, and we have a
lot in common and I kind of like it. It
wasn't something I could talk about. So I kind of
disappeared from the movement. I ran from it, and and
I could have easily gone sideways into something other, some
other toxic, you know, negative movement. But luckily I wanted
(36:56):
to be a good father, so I focused on being
with my children every weekend when I had custody of them,
and it was I was very lucky to have that
because it allowed me to really, you know, work towards
love than hate, and you know, by sheer luck, in
nineteen ninety nine, my life changed. And it was this
(37:19):
event that caused me to kind of re examine not
only the world around me, but myself and really come
to terms with repairing the harm that I had caused.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
In just a moment, Christian tells me how a mounting
pressure at his brother's funeral attempted to lure him back
to his previous life. Don't go anywhere. What was the event?
Speaker 2 (37:49):
So in nineteen ninety nine, I had already been out
of the movement for about four years. I had left
the movement inteen ninety six, and in nineteen ninety nine,
after four years of kind of not really knowing who
I was, I was in a really dark place. And
one of the few friends that I had, who was
a girl that was not part of the movement, saw
(38:11):
that I was struggling with my life, and you know,
I'd been waking up wishing that I hadn't and she
recognized that and wanted to help. And she had started
a new job and encouraged me to go apply at
this company where she was working, and you know, it
was a technology company, and I didn't know anything about
technology at that time. I didn't even own a computer
(38:32):
at that point in my life. But she encouraged me
to go apply for a job where she was working.
And you know, the company was at a small company.
You may have heard of them called IBM, and of course,
you know I've never heard of them. Yeah, well, I
had that same reaction. I kind of laughed, and she
told me that because I had no experience, I wasn't hireable.
(38:53):
You know, at that point in my life, I didn't
have a resume, I didn't have any job experience. You
know that that would have gotten me a job at IBM.
But I went in for the interview and it was
an entry level position.
Speaker 1 (39:04):
Did you cover your tattoos?
Speaker 2 (39:06):
Oh? Yeah. I didn't tell them who I was. You know.
I went in with long sleep shirts and by that
point my hair was grown out because I had left
the movement. I'd been out for four years, so I
looked different and I thought different. But I didn't really
have any experience whatsoever. And it was an entry level job,
just setting up computers at corporations when they would replace
(39:28):
everybody's desktop. So they would order four hundred computers and
I'd go in and i'd set them up and hook
them up, and then it was pretty entry level. And
I talked my way into the job and they offered
me a job, and I was thrilled because it was
the first time in my life that I had some
promise that something was changing for the better after four
(39:48):
years of really struggling. And I was thrilled until they
told me exactly where I was going to be going
to work my first day. It turns out that I
was going to be for the summer. I was going
to be stationed at my old high school, the same
one I had been kicked out of twice, to set
up their computers and set up their IT system. Suddenly
(40:09):
I was terrified because, you know, and IBM had no
idea they you know, just by coincidence, it was my
old high school that I was going to be working at.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
How long since you'd been at what age did you
leave that high school? And under what circumstances?
Speaker 2 (40:25):
Well, I had been let out in handcuffs the last
day of school there, and I was sixteen years old.
And now you know, in nineteen ninety nine, I was
twenty six Okay, so it was you know, ten years
later since I had been there.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
What had you done that had resulted in you being
let out in handcuffs?
Speaker 2 (40:47):
When you were sixteen, I had gotten in a fistfight
with the black security guard there. And after a protest
that I had staged with several other skinheads that I
had recruited at the school, there was a sit in
in the cafeteria by the whites. They were trying to
form a white student union, and I was brought into
the office by the black security guard to meet with
(41:10):
the principal. And I had gotten in a fist fight
with the black security guard. So, as you can imagine, now,
ten years later, after I'd gotten kicked out of that school,
led away in handcuffs. On that last day here, I
was stationed by IBM to go to work there. So
my first day of work, I was terrified. I knew
that the minute I walked in that somebody was going
(41:31):
to recognize me, somebody was going to say, get him
out of here. You know, he's a Nazi, Get him out,
because you know, I had caused so much damage at
that school, and you know, really kind of you know,
left the mark, a bad mark on that school. But
I knew that they couldn't forget me, so I was terrified,
but I decided, you know, I was going to try
and go to work that day. And of course, within
(41:53):
the first few minutes of me walking into the school
and my first day were who did I run into
but the black security guard. And I didn't know what
to say to him. And I went up to him,
and when I introduced.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
Myself, why he didn't recognize Well, he saw me, but.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
He didn't recognize me straight away. It wasn't until I
introduced myself that he recognized who I was. And when
I did, he took a step back because he was afraid,
and I didn't. I didn't know what to say to
him at that point, except to say that I was
sorry for what I had done. And he looked me
in the eyes and he said, I'll never forget this.
(42:32):
He looked me in the eyes and he said, I'm
sure you feel sorry for it, and I'm sure it
makes you feel good to be sorry for it, but
it doesn't do anything for me.
Speaker 1 (42:39):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (42:41):
But he stuck out his hand and he shook my hand,
and he listened to me, and after talking to him
for a while. He said, it wasn't about just being
sorry for what I had done. I had to repair
the harm that I had caused. I had to dedicate
my life to repairing the damage what I had broken.
I had to fix it. And he put his arms
around me, and he forgave me. And I'll never forget that, because,
(43:05):
you know, for the next twenty five years, here we
are today. He is still my mentor. He's still a
person that I respect immensely, and I am so grateful
to him for forgiving me, because he saved my life.
He taught me what I needed to do to, you know,
repair the harm that I had caused to get to
(43:25):
the point where I am today to work. Not only
can I be forgiven by him, but I can forgive myself.
And it's because of him. His name is mister John Holmes.
It's because of him that I think I'm here today,
because of the work that I've done since leaving that movement.
Because I didn't know what to do, I didn't know
who I was. But suddenly I started to very slowly
(43:46):
figure out that I needed to do the hard work
of earning my forgiveness. It wasn't just about saying that
I was sorry or looking back and saying that I
was wrong. It was about actually proving that I was
sorry and fixing what I had broken. And still to
this day, he's somebody that I turned to, you know,
on a fairly regular basis and respect them mentally.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
Interesting that after these these eight years of you thinking
that you were brave, but in retrospect, do you realize
it was cowardice and it was fear? Oh yeah, Do
you actually had to step into your bravery to go
back to the school that you were at, to face
up to the security guard that you had had a fight?
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Weeth, Yeah, it was terror. I don't know if I
was bravery at that point. I think maybe eventually I
learned how to be a little bit more courageous, but
I think at that point I was. I was just
afraid of being found out. I think I still hadn't
evolved yet to the point where I knew I needed
to do work right. I was just I was. I
was still trying to outrun my path at that point.
(44:53):
But ultimately I think I did have to embrace, you know,
courage to admit what I had done, Courage to face
the people I had hurt en courage to ask them
for help in allowing me to make good on what
I had broken eventually, So again, not only am I
grateful to him, but I'm grateful to the people that
(45:14):
I had wronged.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
At what point did you realize that you were uniquely
placed then to embark on helping extricate other people from
similar movements.
Speaker 2 (45:30):
Yeah, it wasn't for many years until I figured that out.
So in nineteen ninety nine, it's when I really started
doing the work on myself and repairing the harm that
I had caused. And it wasn't really until you know,
years later, maybe twenty twelve or so, that I had
people start to reach out to me based on the
(45:52):
stories that I was telling about myself, and they would say, Hey,
my story is much like yours, and I don't know
what to do. I don't know how to repair the
harm that I caused. I'm you know, I've been married,
I've got kids. They don't know what I was involved
in years ago. I don't know how to make good
on it. What can I do? And I started to
get emails, I started to get phone calls, I started
(46:12):
to get social media messages based on you know, interviews
that I was doing, or a book that I had written,
or you know, talks that I was giving, were people
in the audience, people who were reading these stories started
to recognize that they were a lot like I was.
They were involved in these hate groups. They were either
involved and had left and didn't know how to fix
what they broke, or they were still involved and didn't
(46:33):
know how to get out. And I started to become
flooded with requests from people from all over the world
who were in these hate movements and didn't know how
to move forward from them, but saw success in my
story that they wanted to try and replicate, but they
just didn't know how. So it was a very organic process.
It wasn't I never had set out on the process
(46:55):
of trying to help people escape these movements. I was
just focused on trying to make you know, what I
had done better, And in the process of that, my
story resonated with other folks who saw, you know, possibility
in my story that they that they could maybe replicate themselves.
Speaker 1 (47:13):
He'd also had I think, was it in two thousand
and four that your younger brother died? Yeah, what happened?
Speaker 2 (47:24):
Yeah, that's you know, it's I'm glad you asked about it.
It's not something that I really ever talked about. It
doesn't really come up most times. But I'm happy to
talk about it because it was a really kind of
powerful life changing moment for me.
Speaker 1 (47:37):
Uh huh.
Speaker 2 (47:37):
So, you know, I was ten years older than my brother,
and at fourteen years old when he was four, I
had kind of lost touch with him because I was
now involved with a new family with this movement, so
I had, you know, in essence, abandoned him, much like
I felt like my parents had abandoned me, and he
grew to resent me much like I resented my parents. So,
(48:00):
you know, when I had left the movement, I had
tried to reconnect with my brother, who was now a
teenager himself, and you know, was struggling with his own issues,
and he didn't want anything to do with me at
that point. So for many years after I had left
the move when I really tried to repair the relationship
that I had lost with my brother, and he really
(48:21):
didn't want very much to do with me. And then
one day, just a month before his twenty first birthday,
he was in a car with several of his friends,
much like you know, my radicalization. He was in a
car with his friends trying to buy pot and a
neighborhood that you know, was unfriendly to people like him,
(48:43):
and he was shot and he was killed. And I
never was able to reconcile with my brother. And for
many years after he died, I blamed myself for not
being there for him, for you know, for you know,
setting a bad example for him that maybe he felt
he needed to somehow follow. And I remember at his funeral,
(49:05):
it was it was heartbreaking and mind dwelling to me
because I had been out of the movement now for
several years. But at his funeral and he was killed
by a black gang member. At his funeral, I had
friends and family members come up to me and expect
me to do something against this person, this black man
who had killed my brother. And I have to tell you, Kate,
(49:28):
it was the furthest thing from my mind at that point.
At that point, you know, all I was feeling was
that I had missed my brother, and that I had
been responsive, that I was the one who was responsible
for his death, not anybody else. I wasn't, you know,
I wasn't interested in blaming anybody, especially because of the
color of their skin when I knew it was probably
the same type of ignorance that I was involved in
(49:49):
that that took his life. And at that point, I
just wanted my brother back. I didn't, you know, I
didn't want revenge. And people had come out of the
woodwork to assume and ask for my help for revenge,
people that I never expected, people who were not part
of the movement, people who were family members, And it
was heartbreaking to me because especially at them point, you know,
(50:12):
I was heartbroken over my brother and I didn't really
need more heartbreak at that point.
Speaker 1 (50:18):
How are your parents? How are your parents? Then?
Speaker 2 (50:20):
Oh? It destroyed them. You know. I think I think
my brother's death, more than anything else, you know, has
broken them. I don't think that they've ever really recovered
from it. You know, they're they're good people, they're you know,
they're living their lives. But I think something was missing,
and I think, you know, especially then, it was something
(50:42):
that they couldn't wrap their heads around, and even now,
you know, gosh, twenty years later, it's still not something
that they've been able to find peace with.
Speaker 1 (50:55):
That wasn't the end of my conversation with Christian. We
had so much more to talk about, so there is
a part. Two years after Christian left the organization, his
words and propaganda came back to haunt him when they
surfaced as part of the inspiration for one of the
deadliest and cruelest hate crimes in recent memory, the Charleston
(51:18):
massacre in the church, which claimed nine innocent lives. You
can follow the link to part two in the show notes.
The executive producer of No Filter is Naima Brown and
the senior producer is Grace Rufray. Audio production is by
Jacob Brown and I'm your host, Kate lane Brook. I'll
(51:39):
be back in your years next week.
You're listening to a Mother Mia podcast. Mama Maya acknowledges
the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast
is recorded on.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I can tell you this was thirty years ago, and
I can still remember the exact words that I made
her skin crawl. Those were the words that she used
when she left me. And this was somebody that I
was in love with. She was in love with me,
but had gotten so bad that she told me that,
you know, my mere presence made her skin crawl because
(00:40):
of what I was involved in.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
For Christian Pictulini, being a teenager was hard. He was lonely,
he didn't have a lot of friends, he was angry
at the world and his parents, who he kind of
felt abandoned by, and he was vulnerable. At fourteen, he
finally felt seen by someone. It turns out that that
(01:12):
someone was Clark Martel, who at that time was the
leader of the Chicago area Skinheads, a violent, racist, dangerous
neo Nazi hate group. Christian went all in, so far
in that he became the lead propagandist and frontman for
(01:33):
the group and ended up recruiting other young men into
their organization. And now Christian spends his life trying to
undo the damage he's caused. But the story of how
he left the group and its ideology and faced the
reckoning of the incredible harm he'd played a party in,
(01:54):
not just to the victims of hate crimes, but to
his own family and friends, is a long and complicated one,
but it's a really important one because these groups are
alive and strong and recruiting young men into their ranks
every day, something which Christian understands all too well. The
(02:15):
moment that Christian's life was swallowed up by hate and
violence is one he'll never forget. Here is Christian. At
one point, when I was reading your book, very powerful book,
breaking Hate, Thank you, I was reflecting on my own genealogy,
which is my mother is Jamaican American, my dad's Dutch.
(02:39):
There's a lot, it's a real mix up. And I
thought to myself, there was a point in your life
in which you would have hated me, just based on that.
Can you tell me when that point in your life started?
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Yeah, you know, it's kind of tough to pinpoint that
because even though I was involved in a hate movement,
it was it was tough to say when I actually
believed what I believed. But I'll tell you. I'll tell
you the backstory of how I got involved. I was
fourteen years old in nineteen eighty seven when I was
recruited into America's first white supremacist skinhead gang. I spent
(03:22):
eight years until I was about twenty two and a
half years old as part of that hate movement, and
at varying points when I was involved, my ideology fluctuated
because I wasn't raised as a hater. My parents are
Italian immigrants to the United States, so it wasn't something
(03:43):
that I had been raised on. In fact, my parents
were often victims of prejudice when they came to the
United States in the mid nineteen sixties, so it wasn't
really a foundation of who I was. And when I
was first recruited, I wasn't a hater. What I was
was lonely and I didn't have a lot of friends,
and the people who befriended me at that very critical
age of fourteen years old happened to be white powered skinheads.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
All right, So fourteen. I've got a son who's fourteen,
and he's in that transition between walking around with pockets
full of rocks to hanging out with his mates and
going down the pier and trying to fish, Like, how
did you get recruited at fourteen from a pretty solid family?
(04:30):
Where were you and how did that happen?
Speaker 2 (04:33):
I'll paint a picture for you. It was the summer
of nineteen eighty seven. I was a fourteen year old
kind of nobody at the time, who'd been bullied and
have a lot of friends. And I was standing in
an alley. I was smoking a joint and a man
with a shaved head came up to me and he
took the joint out of my mouth hate and he
looked me in the eyes and he said, that's what
(04:54):
the Communists and the Jews want you to do, to
keep your docile. If I'm being completely honest, at fourteen
years old, I didn't know what a Communist was. I
didn't know if i'd met a Jewish person. I didn't
even know what the word docil meant.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
No, you wouldn't have known any of the above. But
what was the connection there?
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Like?
Speaker 1 (05:12):
What what did he say that resonated with you?
Speaker 2 (05:15):
So the next thing he said was really important to me.
He asked me what my name was, And growing up
I was afraid to tell people my name because people
made fun of it. Pi Cellini is not, you know,
a very easy name to pronounce, so people made fun
of me for that name. But he recognized when I
told him eventually what my name was, that it was
an Italian name, and instead of making fun of me,
(05:38):
instead of bullying me because of that name, he put
his arm around me and he said it was a
very important name that I should be proud of. And
I didn't really know anything else at that point but
to be proud of being Italian. So it was something
that he found in me that you know, kind of
pulled me in.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
And this guy, what was his background.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
So the man who recruited me, you know, he was
probably twice my age. His name was Clark Martel, and
he happened to be America's first the Nazi skinhead leader.
You know, it was nineteen eighty seven when I was recruited.
I didn't know what a skinhead was. You know, it
was very new to the United States. So a man
with a shaved head and wearing beans, it was really
(06:21):
foreign to.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Me, right, But he had a look oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Yeah, he had tattoos, and he had a shaved head
and you know, he talked about things that I didn't
quite understand at fourteen years old. But instead of focusing
on politics, what he focused on was my sense of
searching for an identity and a community and a purpose
because I was kind of a lonely kid. You know,
I was ambitious, but I was also very shy, and
(06:47):
I didn't have a lot of self esteem. And he
recognized that right away. He was an amazing recruiter. He
saw the voids in me, you know, what I call
potholes in my book. He saw the potholes that existed
in my life, and belonging and acceptance and a sense
of isolation were my potholes. And he recognized that right away,
and he drew me in and he promised me paradise.
(07:09):
He gave me friends, He delivered very quickly on those
things that were missing in my life. And unfortunately, I,
you know, I bought into that unaware of the politics
really of it all. You know, it was all very
foreigns I mean, but I bought in very very quickly.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
What what happens between that initial conversation with a fourteen
year old boy smoking joint on his own, What what
happens after that? Like is there, Is there a clubhouse?
Is there? A meeting? Is there? How do you how
do you go from that initial meeting to then becoming
embedded and a part of his fledgling movement?
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Yeah, I mean, I guess our clubhouse was just the backstreets,
the alleyways, you know, behind our homes, where we grew up,
where we hung out and where we played as kids.
It was also the place where these skinheads. This this
group of skinheads hung out and drank beer and you know,
and mess around with girls and you know, had fun
(08:09):
and in their own ways. And then it became very political.
But it was kind of a family that I really
didn't have at that point because my parents, while they
were good, amazing people, you know, and I'm so proud
to call them my family, were also busy because they
were immigrants and they were working seven days a week
and they were away fourteen hours a day. So I
(08:30):
really didn't have a family. And this skinhead group became
my family, and the streets kind of became my home.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
So you transitioned into them being your kind of de
facto family. This group of people. How many of them
were they.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
It was a group of about twenty skinheads, both male
and female, you know, ranging and I was the youngest,
but arranging in ages from you know, sixteen or seventeen
years old to their late twenties. And you know, they
were a rough bunch, but there were you know, smart people,
There were funny people. There were kind of what you know,
any group of you know, friends would have. You know,
(09:05):
were all represented as part of this group. And the
only difference was that the thing, the glue that brought
them together was hey, it was racism, it was anti semitism,
it was conspiracy theories that bonded us all together with
each other.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
Fourteen is the age at which boys in particular, well
girls do as well, but they have they can fall
in love with their idols. And you, I imagine were
the youngest was in this in this group, and so
you were kind of a mascot.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
I imagine I was what they called the flunky. You know,
they sent me around to kind of do their bidding.
You know, I bought cigarettes at the store for them
when they were out of cigarettes at that time. You know,
you could you can walk into a store without you know,
being asked for an idea. It was you know, the
eighties was a little bit more lax and Christian, the
(09:57):
good old taste, right. But yeah, you know I became
their mascot. I think that's a really accurate word for
for who I was. And you know, they saw in
me somebody that they can mold, and you know, very quickly,
because I was ambitious, I bought it. You know, I started.
I started to do really awful things to find that acceptance.
I started to get in street fights. I started to
(10:18):
use the language that they used. You know, I was
a mean person very quickly and hardened, you know, from
having rocks in my pockets at thirteen and a half
to suddenly being a street fighter at fourteen years old
and doing things that you know, most adults weren't doing.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
And because your parents were working really hard, as you said,
like your dad was running a hair salon, your mum
was running a restaurant, so long hours. Who else was
at home? What was your sibling situation?
Speaker 2 (10:49):
So I had a brother who we were ten years apart,
so at fourteen years old, he would have been four
years old, and both of us were really raised by
my grandparents and aunts and uncles, people, you know, whoever
was around at the moment, whoever could you know, dedicate
time to watching us. And I was really close to
my brother for the first four years of his life.
(11:13):
And when I, you know, found this new group, it became,
you know, my primary existence. So I really lost track
of both my family and you know, an any the
few friends that I had before then. But yeah, it
really just became my sole dedication and very quickly rose
within the ranks of this group and kind of over
(11:35):
delivered on everything that you know, that I was involved in.
I became the singer of a band at sixteen years old.
You know where I became a mass propagandist. I was
through my lyrics and music and singing on stage who
was delivering the message of our movement and trying to
recruit other young people, other broken young people like me,
(11:56):
because we weren't looking for the best of the best.
We were looking for the most broken, the ones who
were the low hanging fruit, the ones who were easy
to promise paradise too. And if that sounds familiar, this
is also the kind of the theme other terrorist groups
is they really look for people they can they can
promise a better life, even though that better life is
(12:18):
not accurate. It's not a better life it's it's a
broken life and a broken ideology.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
So Christian, the white power group that recruited you, what
was their goal, what was their ideology, what was their aim?
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Well, I think what they told to the outside world
and what they talked about internally were two different things.
I think to the outside world they would profess that
it was just about pride, that it was about being
proud of being white, and that they believed that white
culture was being pushed to the sidelines for the benefit
of other cultures. Internally, I can tell you that it
was about white supremacy. They believed that white people were
(12:55):
more superior to other races, that other races were, you know,
in some cases what they would claim is subhuman, and
that they wanted to build a world in a society
that excluded everybody that was and white, and even more
specifically that wasn't white males, because they believed that white
men were more superior than even white women. So it
(13:17):
was it was completely a culture and an ideology of hate,
of exclusion, and of benefit only to powerful white men.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
And is that the ideology that persiss today even Oh?
Speaker 2 (13:30):
I think it's it's identical to the ideology that persists today,
although maybe some words have been massaged a little bit
and maybe even you know a little bit easier to
swallow or more palatable. You know, white power became white nationalism.
Even that in itself is it's kind of a tone
down version, you know.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
Well, the term patriot, Yeah, the term patriot or even
waving you know, a country's flag now is being used
to hide behind, to cover up the fact that they want.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
To exclude other people. It really, you know, they've gotten
very good at their marketing these days, at the propaganda.
We recognized years ago. I was involved in the movement,
and I called this the move from boots to suits.
Where we stopped shaving our heads, we stopped putting swastika
flags and swastika symbols on our body, We grew our
hair out, and we went to wear suits. We recognized
(14:24):
that if we used those words and those symbols, we
were scaring away even the average white rapist, that those
symbols were even too much for those people. So we
toned it down and we started to you know, change
it from an anti Jewish message to something we called
anti globalism. Right, Even that in itself is a tone
down version of more palatable word for the same thing.
(14:46):
So the marketing message was to break into the mainstream.
You know, there were people who were grand Dragons, leaders
of the ku Klux Klan, who dropped the white suit
and the pointy hat and started to put on a
three piece suit and become politicians in our country. And
by virtue of doing that and the words that they
chose to use, they were able to recruit more people
(15:09):
in mainstream into this ideology of hate.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Which of course is is so effective and so insidious.
So then there's more of an opportunity to embrace the masses.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
Well, they've used things that are hard to argue against
free speech and you know, things that patriotism and nationalism
where people can hide behind these these messages that have
other motives of exclusion and of hatred, you know, and
really of something that's called accelerationism, where they've embraced kind
(15:42):
of burning down society to rebuild it in the image
that they want to build it in, and burning it
down means doing away with all the people that they
would exclude from that society. So I think that's very
much of what's happening in the world today. You know,
maybe even more specifically in the United States, where you know,
we are starting now to elect people who have the
(16:05):
same exact messaging, albeit maybe with slightly different words, in
a different look than what a fourteen year old neo
Nazi skin a Christian Patuli would have done in nineteen
eighty seven. It's the same message, it's the same movement.
It's just a lot better looking to the average person
and easier for them to swallow the same type of bile,
(16:26):
you know, weight supremacy and neo Nazism. You know that
I was a part of at one point.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
A common sort of tray in a lot of religious
sex as well, is looking for those people who were disenfranchised,
who were lonely, who are sad, who are hopeless. Right,
But you were quite extraordinary because you went from being
fourteen and that kid on the street who got recruited
to at sixteen, you were running the outfit when the
(16:57):
leader went to jail, Is that right?
Speaker 2 (16:59):
Yeah? Yeah, Clark and several of the leaders at that
point within our group had gone to prison for a
series of very violent hate crimes that they were involved in,
and you know, anybody else who was left started to
run from the police because they were they were being investigated,
so they moved away and kind of went into hiding.
And at that point all that was left was me.
(17:22):
Uh So here I was sixteen, I'd been indoctrinated now
for two years. I'd fully bought in. I was ambitious.
I had mimicked the you know, the rhetoric I had,
you know, I there was no you know, no other
way to say it. I was in. I was a
true believer at that point. But I was also because
I was ambitious, and maybe it was because my parents
were entrepreneurs. I saw an opportunity, uh to to kind
(17:45):
of restart this group and become a leader myself. So
I started at that point to ramp up the propaganda
and recruit other young people, people that I had gone
to school with, people who had bullied me in the past,
because I knew I saw in them also some brokenness
that that could be used as well. And very quickly
kind of you know, re established this organization and and
(18:10):
merge it with a much larger national Skin had organization
called the Hamletskin Nation at that time.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
So you had gone from being powerless to having this
sense of power. Yeah, andsp sure, but when people are
looking in the microcosm of their life. You know, they
look for something that's going to affirm them as a person.
And that was what you had found when you talk
(18:39):
about the crimes that other members had gone to jail for.
What was the nature of them and what were you
doing at that time? Because to assert yourself and your dominance,
you would have had to prove that you could be
equally violent, equally hate filled.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
Yeah, what they were involved in was you know, a
level of street violence that luckily I never kind of
rose to. I chose a different path, and that was
as a propagandist, uh And I found my power kind
of more in the in the celebrity part of the movement,
where you know, I was a singer on stage. I
was in one of America's earliest uh you know, skinhead
(19:20):
white power bands. So people looked up to me because
of that, you know, quote unquote celebrity. So I was
a spokesperson. But the people that you know came before
me went to prison for for you know, a series
of violent hate crimes against Blacks and Jews were on
the anniversary of Crystal Knocked, which is you know, the
(19:42):
night of Broken Glass that the Nazis uh in Germany
had perpetrated against the Jews. They recreated that and broke
windows of Jewish shops in the Chicago area where I'm from,
uh and and also attacked one of their own members,
a woman who was a skinhead, who was part of
our group, who had started to kind of leave the organization.
(20:04):
She had been seen with with a black man at
a bus stop, and they attacked her. They put you know,
they committed a violent act on her that put her
in the hospital and once prison for that. So you know,
while I, you know, I certainly wasn't any angel. I
was involved in my fair share of street fights, you know,
(20:27):
it never really rose to that level, even though I,
you know, I certainly hurt people, and you know, I
also hurt people because I indoctrinated them, and maybe even
more so, you know, destroyed more lives through the words
that I said.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
And the lyrics that you sang, yeah, and the following
that your band had, which was quite a sort of
a powerful presence in that movement.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
I still think about all the lives of you know,
people who may not have gone down the path of hate,
that that somehow I radicalized through my lyrics, that maybe
their lives would have been different had they not come
across my music.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
So, you know, at home in this period, Chris, and
even though your parents were so busy and your nona
and Nona were looking after you and probably not o
fay with you know, any white supremacist movement, but Italians
are familiar with fascists. So when you were coming home
and looking different, I imagine at that point you'd adopted
(21:29):
the uniform, you'd bought your first pair of Doc Martins.
It was always Doc Martin's. Did you have a tattoo?
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Oh yeah, I got my first tattoo at fifteen years old,
and you know, at fourteen shaved my head and my
first pair of Doc Martins were given to me by
you know, the skinhead leader that recruited me. You know,
I came home wearing you know, a bomber jacket with
patches that were you know, certainly provocative. It's you know,
(21:58):
I think at fourteen and fifteen years old, I probably
did a good job of hiding it from my family,
right because I still wasn't, you know, very self confident.
But you know, very quickly after that, I wasn't ashamed
to show them who I was. And I think once
they recognized what I was involved, and they were horrified,
and they tried to do things. They tried to talk
(22:18):
to me, they tried to sit me down. But at
that point I had already become so bitter against my
family for what I felt was abandonment that I kind
of used it against them to hurt them. You know,
I threw it in their face because I knew that
what I was doing and who I was was an
affront to who they were and how they had raised me,
because I was, you know, as a kid, I'd always
(22:40):
been introduced to two different cultures, you know, as a
young boy. They you know, they had friends who were
you know, from other countries and other religions and other
parts of the world that you know, that were very
different than than how I'd been raised. So you know,
it wasn't who I was. And when they figured out
that that's who I was, that I was this aiter,
(23:00):
I think it horrified them and it hurt them a
great deal. But by then I think it was too late.
You know, it was too late because I had used
it against them to hurt them. But it was also
too late because now I had given up everything in
my life to become part of this movement, and it
was very difficult to imagine letting go of that because
I had wrapped myself up at it so much.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
After the break Christian Chase, how others tried to pull
him away from the cult and how he reacted will
be right back. Was there a moment of whether they
attempted a significant intervention or was it an ongoing thing
because you were still living at home.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
So I had moved out at around fifteen years old.
When I say I moved out, I moved into the
basement apartment of my parent home. It was a multi
story apartment building, but I had commandeered kind of a
basement apartment for myself, so I had my own entrance
in kitchen and everything, and I came and went as
I pleased. So at fifteen years old, I was essentially
(24:04):
on my own. I had a job and I supported
myself at that time. But around sixteen years old is
when they really started to intervene, and it really didn't
stop until I was out, you know, at almost twenty
three years old. They really never gave up on me,
and I'm so grateful for that because it was my
family that, you know, ultimately showed me that that wasn't
(24:25):
who I was or who I wanted to be anymore.
You know, at eighteen years old, I got married. I
met a girl, and I fell in love. At nineteen
years old, we had our first child. At twenty one,
we had our second son. And even during that period
it was very difficult to leave. But I have to
tell you that having those children was probably the most
(24:45):
powerful moment to wake me up to see that there
was another way because for the first time in my life,
I had something to love, and it challenged my sense
of identity, community and purpose. And that was really what
was the most powerful, you know, moment to change me
going forward.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
So you met you met a girl who was outside
the movement? Yeah, how did you meet her?
Speaker 2 (25:11):
You know, she had been at a party we you know,
we had a lot of parties, and we hosted a
lot of parties because they were recruitment uh you know,
events for us. Uh. And we had a lot of
people that came to those parties. And she was somebody
who never bought into the movement, although she didn't come
around through mutual friends to some parties and and uh,
you know, at first, she didn't want anything to do
(25:33):
with me, because she really was kind of ideologically the
polar opposite of who I was. But I think over time,
I don't know if she saw something and maybe that
I couldn't even see myself, but you know, she maybe
saw some promise and eventually gave in when I asked
out on a date and secretly, kind of outside of
this movement, we spent a lot of time together and uh,
(25:56):
and I never you know, when when we got eventually
got married. Uh, it wasn't The movement wasn't something I
ever wanted to bring home in my family, even though
she was very well aware of what I was and
constantly tried to talk me out of it.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Well, that's interesting, isn't it That you never wanted to
bring the movement home to your family, So at some
point you were already alert to the fact that there
was a duality in you and what you were living.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Oh. Yeah, I knew it was dirty. I knew it
was something that I didn't want to expose my children to.
I knew it was something. You know. The way I
looked at it back at that time was it was
something that I could carry on my shoulders outside of
the family. But it wasn't something that I wanted to
burden my family with. I thought that I could do
the dirty work, and I never brought it home. My
wife was very aware of what I was, you know
(26:43):
what I was involved and hated it. But you know,
at the same time, I wasn't brave enough to give
it up because I didn't want to go back to
who I was before I joined the movements. I was
afraid of being a nobody.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
So at that point, because you have had a wedding,
who came to your wedding? Who was at your wedding?
Like this is a lot of Italians in one corner
with their skin in the other corner.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Yeah, that's exactly what it was. I mean, my best
men and my groom's men were all, you know, skinheads
with Doc Martin boots and shaved heads. And all her
bridesmaids were you know, Catholic school preppy girls. Wow. And
at the wedding reception, you know, it was a big
Italian My parents wanted a big Italian wedding, so of
course all the aunts and uncles and cousins and people
(27:31):
you know who I hardly knew who were from the
same time that my parents were from were at the wedding,
but you know, on the other side of the hall
were you know, tables of skinheads from all over the
country who at that point, you know, when my friends
and wanted wanted to support me. It was really looking back,
it was kind of a surreal experiment that, you know,
could have gone wrong in so many more ways than
(27:52):
I did.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
But I must have known because always, I think when
people are in these very insular environments, be they religious
or socio political or whatever, everyone's very attuned to losing
one of their own. Yeah, so they're all predicated on
sort of keeping the outside world outside. So they must
(28:16):
have been aware that when you had your first child
and you'd meet this girl that you'd married, that you'd
fallen in love with, that they were slightly losing you.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Yeah. I think at that point they already knew they
had lost me. You know, by eighteen years old, I
was so entrenched in that movement that I think everybody
had almost given up on the fact that they would
get me back because I was so committed. I was
so dedicated to it. At least it seemed like it
because internally, kid, I got to tell you every day
from the time I was fourteen years old until I
(28:49):
was twenty three, there was an internal struggle inside of
me said, something's not right. Sure, this isn't making sense right.
Every day when I would meet somebody or i'd come across,
you know, a new bit of propaganda, I had to
struggle to swallow it. But I did swallow it because
it provided me with a reward. I think, much like
drugs or alcohol does to people who are addicted to
(29:11):
those things. Uh, you know, they know it's killing them,
they know it's not doing them any good, but it
makes them feel good while they're doing it. And I
think I had very much the same experience. While I
was doing it, I felt powerful, I felt you know, great,
I felt like I had this group of you know,
followers and friends. But I also knew when I saw
the other side of things that it was killing me
(29:33):
and it was hurting the people around me. And you know,
on top of that, I was hurting strangers that you
know that I was you know, intimidating with my looks,
with my words, with my actions. Uh, it was it was.
It was a duality that I was living in and unfortunately,
for eight years, the kind of evil side of that
duality won over because it was more powerful until it
(29:55):
broke me down and it almost left nothing, you know,
left of me.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
What was the moment that broke you down? Was there
a critical defining moment.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
I think it was a lot of moments, but I think,
you know, ultimately, my wife leaving me after four years
of marriage and taking the custody of the children was
when I finally realized that what was good in my
life had had disappeared, had gone, and all that was
left was hate. And it was at that moment I
(30:27):
think that I did the hard work of being self
aware of what I was involved in it at that
time and the pain that I was causing to other people.
And you know, I think a lot of a lot
of things happened. Like I said, it was a struggle
every day. I don't think there was a day where
I wasn't questioning what I was involved in until its snowballed,
(30:49):
you know, to a point where I couldn't ignore the
fact that I was. I was more broken in this
movement than I was on of it.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
What did she say to you, she's opting to leave.
I imagine the only security that she had, which was you,
With the two children. What did she say to you?
Speaker 2 (31:08):
I can tell you this was thirty years ago, and
I can still remember the exact words that I made
her skin crawl. Those were the words that she used
when she left me. And this was, you know, somebody
that I was in love with. She was in love
with me, but had gotten so bad that she told
me that my you know, my mere presence made her
skin crawl because of what I was involved in.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
And was that based on a particular event that had happened.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
No, I think it was four years of her really
trying to hoping that I that she could change me,
that I would eventually see the priorities of my family
and my children and walk away. But the truth was
I wasn't brave enough. I just wasn't courageous or strong
enough at that point in my life to see that
my children and my wife should have been the most
(31:57):
important things to me. Instead, I was afraid of losing
you know, what I built around me to boost my
own ego, and I was so entrenched in it that
I couldn't I couldn't and see what my priorities were,
and my priorities were selfish, until you know, everything kind
of crashed around me.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Which is ironic because in that movement, there's a lot
of talk about bravery, isn't there.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Oh yeah, yeah, I was. Everything that I did was
was painted as this white warrior, this strong, you know,
white man who who was doing everything to protect what
I had, including my family, and everything that I was
doing was the complete opposite. I was destroying everything. H
It was a It was a movement built on lies,
(32:43):
on hate, on deceit, on violence, you know, basically everything
that was toxic instead of everything that was fulfilling or nurturing.
I had bought in.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
So at this moment, your wife has left, she's taken
your children, You're disenfranchised from the movement that you are
still lading.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
At that point, I was not only leading it, I
was kind of a you know, a thought leader as
well as a record store and propaganda leader. So I
had opened a record store at that point because I
had stopped being in the band. One of the concessions
that I had made to my wife at that time
was I would stop being in the band and traveling
to play these shows. But the compromise was that I
(33:33):
was going to open a record store to sell white
power music that I was importing from all over the world,
and I was one of the only people at that
time to physically be selling this racist music that I
was importing from, you know, places like the UK or
even from Australia. There were bands that you know in
the eighties that were very popular within this movement.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
Who were the bands? Who were the bands from Australia?
Can you remember?
Speaker 2 (33:59):
I don't even want to mention them because I don't
want to give them any sort of promotion, but you know,
there were some popular bands from Australia, and there were
groups in Australia at the time that you know, we're propaganda.
It's just like my band was, and and I was.
You know, it was the way I was supporting my
family at the time through this through selling this music
(34:21):
because this was before the internet. Remember that people were
driving in from all over the United States and Canada
to buy this music from my physical store CDs. You know,
it was before m P three's, So you know, I
was really involved and was a major kind of cog
in the machine of radicalizing young people. And at that
(34:46):
point in my life, my wife had left me, she
had taken the kids I had. I had to really
ask myself, you know what I believed in again and
who I was, And I don't know what it was,
but something inside of me made me say it's time
to lead this movement. And I decided I was going
(35:07):
to close my store because I eventually i'd pulled the
racist music from the inventory and it was seventy five
percent of my revenue, so I couldn't sustain the store.
And I used that excuse with my comrades at the time,
you know, my divorce, to say, hey, I need some
time to work on my family. I need to walk
away from this. I'm coming back. You know. I'd always
(35:29):
promised him I would come back, that I was just
stepping away, that I was pausing to focus on my family.
But inside I knew I never wanted to go back.
I wanted to run as fast and as far away
as I could from the movement. But it was a
struggle to do that because at that point I didn't
have my family. I didn't have a job because I
closed my store, I didn't have this ideology. I didn't
(35:50):
have the family that I built around me anymore, and
I didn't know what my identity my community at purpose
were And now I had additional potholes that I was
dealing with that I was navigating around. So for five
years after I left the movement, I had started to
meet people that were of color, are people who were black,
people who were Jewish, who were Muslim, and I had
(36:13):
started to recognize that they were very much like I was,
that we were very similar in a lot of ways.
And in fact, I had more respect for some of
the people that I had met that were outside of
the movement than I did for the people that were
in the move So I had started to have these
very conflicting ideas, and of course I didn't share them
with anybody. It wasn't, you know, something that I would
go to my fellow skin edit and say, hey, I
(36:35):
met this you know, black guy, and we have a
lot in common and I kind of like it. It
wasn't something I could talk about. So I kind of
disappeared from the movement. I ran from it, and and
I could have easily gone sideways into something other, some
other toxic, you know, negative movement. But luckily I wanted
(36:56):
to be a good father, so I focused on being
with my children every weekend when I had custody of them,
and it was I was very lucky to have that
because it allowed me to really, you know, work towards
love than hate, and you know, by sheer luck, in
nineteen ninety nine, my life changed. And it was this
(37:19):
event that caused me to kind of re examine not
only the world around me, but myself and really come
to terms with repairing the harm that I had caused.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
In just a moment, Christian tells me how a mounting
pressure at his brother's funeral attempted to lure him back
to his previous life. Don't go anywhere. What was the event?
Speaker 2 (37:49):
So in nineteen ninety nine, I had already been out
of the movement for about four years. I had left
the movement inteen ninety six, and in nineteen ninety nine,
after four years of kind of not really knowing who
I was, I was in a really dark place. And
one of the few friends that I had, who was
a girl that was not part of the movement, saw
(38:11):
that I was struggling with my life, and you know,
I'd been waking up wishing that I hadn't and she
recognized that and wanted to help. And she had started
a new job and encouraged me to go apply at
this company where she was working, and you know, it
was a technology company, and I didn't know anything about
technology at that time. I didn't even own a computer
(38:32):
at that point in my life. But she encouraged me
to go apply for a job where she was working.
And you know, the company was at a small company.
You may have heard of them called IBM, and of course,
you know I've never heard of them. Yeah, well, I
had that same reaction. I kind of laughed, and she
told me that because I had no experience, I wasn't hireable.
(38:53):
You know, at that point in my life, I didn't
have a resume, I didn't have any job experience. You
know that that would have gotten me a job at IBM.
But I went in for the interview and it was
an entry level position.
Speaker 1 (39:04):
Did you cover your tattoos?
Speaker 2 (39:06):
Oh? Yeah. I didn't tell them who I was. You know.
I went in with long sleep shirts and by that
point my hair was grown out because I had left
the movement. I'd been out for four years, so I
looked different and I thought different. But I didn't really
have any experience whatsoever. And it was an entry level job,
just setting up computers at corporations when they would replace
(39:28):
everybody's desktop. So they would order four hundred computers and
I'd go in and i'd set them up and hook
them up, and then it was pretty entry level. And
I talked my way into the job and they offered
me a job, and I was thrilled because it was
the first time in my life that I had some
promise that something was changing for the better after four
(39:48):
years of really struggling. And I was thrilled until they
told me exactly where I was going to be going
to work my first day. It turns out that I
was going to be for the summer. I was going
to be stationed at my old high school, the same
one I had been kicked out of twice, to set
up their computers and set up their IT system. Suddenly
(40:09):
I was terrified because, you know, and IBM had no
idea they you know, just by coincidence, it was my
old high school that I was going to be working at.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
How long since you'd been at what age did you
leave that high school? And under what circumstances?
Speaker 2 (40:25):
Well, I had been let out in handcuffs the last
day of school there, and I was sixteen years old.
And now you know, in nineteen ninety nine, I was
twenty six Okay, so it was you know, ten years
later since I had been there.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
What had you done that had resulted in you being
let out in handcuffs?
Speaker 2 (40:47):
When you were sixteen, I had gotten in a fistfight
with the black security guard there. And after a protest
that I had staged with several other skinheads that I
had recruited at the school, there was a sit in
in the cafeteria by the whites. They were trying to
form a white student union, and I was brought into
the office by the black security guard to meet with
(41:10):
the principal. And I had gotten in a fist fight
with the black security guard. So, as you can imagine, now,
ten years later, after I'd gotten kicked out of that school,
led away in handcuffs. On that last day here, I
was stationed by IBM to go to work there. So
my first day of work, I was terrified. I knew
that the minute I walked in that somebody was going
(41:31):
to recognize me, somebody was going to say, get him
out of here. You know, he's a Nazi, Get him out,
because you know, I had caused so much damage at
that school, and you know, really kind of you know,
left the mark, a bad mark on that school. But
I knew that they couldn't forget me, so I was terrified,
but I decided, you know, I was going to try
and go to work that day. And of course, within
(41:53):
the first few minutes of me walking into the school
and my first day were who did I run into
but the black security guard. And I didn't know what
to say to him. And I went up to him,
and when I introduced.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
Myself, why he didn't recognize Well, he saw me, but.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
He didn't recognize me straight away. It wasn't until I
introduced myself that he recognized who I was. And when
I did, he took a step back because he was afraid,
and I didn't. I didn't know what to say to
him at that point, except to say that I was
sorry for what I had done. And he looked me
in the eyes and he said, I'll never forget this.
(42:32):
He looked me in the eyes and he said, I'm
sure you feel sorry for it, and I'm sure it
makes you feel good to be sorry for it, but
it doesn't do anything for me.
Speaker 1 (42:39):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (42:41):
But he stuck out his hand and he shook my hand,
and he listened to me, and after talking to him
for a while. He said, it wasn't about just being
sorry for what I had done. I had to repair
the harm that I had caused. I had to dedicate
my life to repairing the damage what I had broken.
I had to fix it. And he put his arms
around me, and he forgave me. And I'll never forget that, because,
(43:05):
you know, for the next twenty five years, here we
are today. He is still my mentor. He's still a
person that I respect immensely, and I am so grateful
to him for forgiving me, because he saved my life.
He taught me what I needed to do to, you know,
repair the harm that I had caused to get to
(43:25):
the point where I am today to work. Not only
can I be forgiven by him, but I can forgive myself.
And it's because of him. His name is mister John Holmes.
It's because of him that I think I'm here today,
because of the work that I've done since leaving that movement.
Because I didn't know what to do, I didn't know
who I was. But suddenly I started to very slowly
(43:46):
figure out that I needed to do the hard work
of earning my forgiveness. It wasn't just about saying that
I was sorry or looking back and saying that I
was wrong. It was about actually proving that I was
sorry and fixing what I had broken. And still to
this day, he's somebody that I turned to, you know,
on a fairly regular basis and respect them mentally.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
Interesting that after these these eight years of you thinking
that you were brave, but in retrospect, do you realize
it was cowardice and it was fear? Oh yeah, Do
you actually had to step into your bravery to go
back to the school that you were at, to face
up to the security guard that you had had a fight?
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Weeth, Yeah, it was terror. I don't know if I
was bravery at that point. I think maybe eventually I
learned how to be a little bit more courageous, but
I think at that point I was. I was just
afraid of being found out. I think I still hadn't
evolved yet to the point where I knew I needed
to do work right. I was just I was. I
was still trying to outrun my path at that point.
(44:53):
But ultimately I think I did have to embrace, you know,
courage to admit what I had done, Courage to face
the people I had hurt en courage to ask them
for help in allowing me to make good on what
I had broken eventually, So again, not only am I
grateful to him, but I'm grateful to the people that
(45:14):
I had wronged.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
At what point did you realize that you were uniquely
placed then to embark on helping extricate other people from
similar movements.
Speaker 2 (45:30):
Yeah, it wasn't for many years until I figured that out.
So in nineteen ninety nine, it's when I really started
doing the work on myself and repairing the harm that
I had caused. And it wasn't really until you know,
years later, maybe twenty twelve or so, that I had
people start to reach out to me based on the
(45:52):
stories that I was telling about myself, and they would say, Hey,
my story is much like yours, and I don't know
what to do. I don't know how to repair the
harm that I caused. I'm you know, I've been married,
I've got kids. They don't know what I was involved
in years ago. I don't know how to make good
on it. What can I do? And I started to
get emails, I started to get phone calls, I started
(46:12):
to get social media messages based on you know, interviews
that I was doing, or a book that I had written,
or you know, talks that I was giving, were people
in the audience, people who were reading these stories started
to recognize that they were a lot like I was.
They were involved in these hate groups. They were either
involved and had left and didn't know how to fix
what they broke, or they were still involved and didn't
(46:33):
know how to get out. And I started to become
flooded with requests from people from all over the world
who were in these hate movements and didn't know how
to move forward from them, but saw success in my
story that they wanted to try and replicate, but they
just didn't know how. So it was a very organic process.
It wasn't I never had set out on the process
(46:55):
of trying to help people escape these movements. I was
just focused on trying to make you know, what I
had done better, And in the process of that, my
story resonated with other folks who saw, you know, possibility
in my story that they that they could maybe replicate themselves.
Speaker 1 (47:13):
He'd also had I think, was it in two thousand
and four that your younger brother died? Yeah, what happened?
Speaker 2 (47:24):
Yeah, that's you know, it's I'm glad you asked about it.
It's not something that I really ever talked about. It
doesn't really come up most times. But I'm happy to
talk about it because it was a really kind of
powerful life changing moment for me.
Speaker 1 (47:37):
Uh huh.
Speaker 2 (47:37):
So, you know, I was ten years older than my brother,
and at fourteen years old when he was four, I
had kind of lost touch with him because I was
now involved with a new family with this movement, so
I had, you know, in essence, abandoned him, much like
I felt like my parents had abandoned me, and he
grew to resent me much like I resented my parents. So,
(48:00):
you know, when I had left the movement, I had
tried to reconnect with my brother, who was now a
teenager himself, and you know, was struggling with his own issues,
and he didn't want anything to do with me at
that point. So for many years after I had left
the move when I really tried to repair the relationship
that I had lost with my brother, and he really
(48:21):
didn't want very much to do with me. And then
one day, just a month before his twenty first birthday,
he was in a car with several of his friends,
much like you know, my radicalization. He was in a
car with his friends trying to buy pot and a
neighborhood that you know, was unfriendly to people like him,
(48:43):
and he was shot and he was killed. And I
never was able to reconcile with my brother. And for
many years after he died, I blamed myself for not
being there for him, for you know, for you know,
setting a bad example for him that maybe he felt
he needed to somehow follow. And I remember at his funeral,
(49:05):
it was it was heartbreaking and mind dwelling to me
because I had been out of the movement now for
several years. But at his funeral and he was killed
by a black gang member. At his funeral, I had
friends and family members come up to me and expect
me to do something against this person, this black man
who had killed my brother. And I have to tell you, Kate,
(49:28):
it was the furthest thing from my mind at that point.
At that point, you know, all I was feeling was
that I had missed my brother, and that I had
been responsive, that I was the one who was responsible
for his death, not anybody else. I wasn't, you know,
I wasn't interested in blaming anybody, especially because of the
color of their skin when I knew it was probably
the same type of ignorance that I was involved in
(49:49):
that that took his life. And at that point, I
just wanted my brother back. I didn't, you know, I
didn't want revenge. And people had come out of the
woodwork to assume and ask for my help for revenge,
people that I never expected, people who were not part
of the movement, people who were family members, And it
was heartbreaking to me because especially at them point, you know,
(50:12):
I was heartbroken over my brother and I didn't really
need more heartbreak at that point.
Speaker 1 (50:18):
How are your parents? How are your parents? Then?
Speaker 2 (50:20):
Oh? It destroyed them. You know. I think I think
my brother's death, more than anything else, you know, has
broken them. I don't think that they've ever really recovered
from it. You know, they're they're good people, they're you know,
they're living their lives. But I think something was missing,
and I think, you know, especially then, it was something
(50:42):
that they couldn't wrap their heads around, and even now,
you know, gosh, twenty years later, it's still not something
that they've been able to find peace with.
Speaker 1 (50:55):
That wasn't the end of my conversation with Christian. We
had so much more to talk about, so there is
a part. Two years after Christian left the organization, his
words and propaganda came back to haunt him when they
surfaced as part of the inspiration for one of the
deadliest and cruelest hate crimes in recent memory, the Charleston
(51:18):
massacre in the church, which claimed nine innocent lives. You
can follow the link to part two in the show notes.
The executive producer of No Filter is Naima Brown and
the senior producer is Grace Rufray. Audio production is by
Jacob Brown and I'm your host, Kate lane Brook. I'll
(51:39):
be back in your years next week.
Popular Podcasts
Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club
Welcome to Bookmarked by Reese’s Book Club — the podcast where great stories, bold women, and irresistible conversations collide! Hosted by award-winning journalist Danielle Robay, each week new episodes balance thoughtful literary insight with the fervor of buzzy book trends, pop culture and more. Bookmarked brings together celebrities, tastemakers, influencers and authors from Reese's Book Club and beyond to share stories that transcend the page. Pull up a chair. You’re not just listening — you’re part of the conversation.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com