Christian Picciolini speaks at the Safe Communities Institute Lecture Forum. (Photo by Tom Queally)
By Matthew Kredell
Christian Picciolini was recruited to America’s first neo-Nazi skinhead gang at 14 years old. He rose to a prominent position in the national white-power organization as a teenager, but after seven years of perpetuating violence and hate, he had a total change of heart and escaped that life at age 22.
Picciolini described the journey, detailed in his new book Romantic Violence: Memoirs of an American Skinhead, to an audience of law enforcement and community leaders on Oct. 9 at the USC Price School of Public Policy’s Safe Communities Institute (SCI) Lecture Forum.
“It’s an incredible story, and the work he’s doing now is so important,” said Erroll Southers, director of homegrown violent extremism studies at SCI. “Much like SCI, his work is based on education, awareness and community and family engagement, because he believes the only way a person reduces the risk of recruitment, radicalization and engagement in extremist violence is if the community and family are on board.”
For two decades, Picciolini has been trying to undo the damage he did in his formative years.
Picciolini was from a lower-middle class Italian neighborhood on the southwest side of Chicago. It was 1987 when he met Clark Martell, America’s first neo-Nazi skinhead leader, and was struck by the presence and charisma of the 26-year-old man with a shaved head and boots.
“I grew up a relatively normal kid,” Picciolini said. “I was full of insecurities. Like a lot of other teenagers, I was bullied. … I went searching for something, and when I found it in [that group] I latched onto it. It became very important to me. When I was with them, I wasn’t picked on anymore. I wasn’t marginalized. I didn’t feel alienated. I felt powerful.”
Martell became his mentor, and when Martell was sent to prison for a string of hate crimes along with others in the organization, Picciolini saw an opportunity. At 16, he began stockpiling guns and recruiting people the way he had been recruited, by finding disaffected youth and blaming other people for the problems that were happening in their lives.
“It was like shooting fish in a barrel,” he said.
Picciolini merged his Chicago-area group into the national skinhead organization, Hammerskin Nation, and eventually became regional director. In 1991, he had the idea to try to reach more young people through music and started a racist skinhead band.
He decided to open a record store selling white-power music he imported from Europe. The store became successful and he decided to add other types of music such as ska, heavy metal and punk, moving the white-power themes behind the counter.
Running the store changed him. African-Americans and Jewish people came in, and for the first time, he started having a real dialogue with the very people he had hated.
“Because I wanted to be a good business person and support my family, I bit my tongue and talked with them,” Picciolini said. “Before I knew it, I started to realize I had more in common with the people coming into my store who I had been alienating than the people I had called family for seven years. The dialogue we had allowed me to humanize them. I started to believe the ideology I had learned had flaws. It didn’t make sense to me anymore.”
There are still 784 active hate groups in the U.S. Since 9/11, there have been more people killed on U.S. soil by white nationalists than al Qaeda, the Taliban and ISIS combined.
After he renounced his allegiance and exited the white supremacy movement, Picciolini wrote his memoir and founded the nonprofit Life After Hate, a prevention program targeted at reducing the number of far-right extremists. It consults with organizations – community groups, higher education, law enforcement, and other nonprofits – to try to teach them the mentality and warning signs for at-risk young people who join these groups. This year, the organization launched the program Exit USA to help people get out of hate groups with job training, educational services, tattoo removal and mental health counseling.
“I wasn’t raised a racist,” Picciolini said. “I was raised to respect people who were different than me, because my parents came to this country in the mid-1960s and were often the victims of prejudice themselves. Racism was something I learned, not something I was born with. And it was something I taught to other people. So it is something that I believe can be unlearned as well.”
Rob Taylor, a lieutenant with the Los Angeles School Police Department who is a student in the Public Safety Leadership Program at SCI, found the talk educational and relevant to his own work.
“What I found interesting is that this happened when he was 14 and he didn’t grow up in that kind of family,” Taylor said. “He said it could have been something positive or negative that grabbed hold of him. As a case officer who works in schools with students that age, it’s profound how important it is to grab onto these kids – especially in troubled areas – at these developmental ages and make sure to surround them with positivity.”