HOW I LEFT HATRED BEHIND C P H M
Ex-white supremacist's journet out of anger, violence & delusion
HRISTIAN Picciolini had gone to sleep just after midnight when a noise outside his window woke him up.
The 17-year-old had started many fights and beaten up a lot of black people, anti-racists — pretty much anyone who wasn’t just like him. He had also recently acquired an arsenal, including an AK-47, a 9mm pistol, a rifle and a sawed-off shotgun.
Thinking one of his victims was out for revenge, he grabbed the shotgun.
Taking a deep breath, he put his finger on the trigger, flung open the curtain and found himself pointing the barrel directly into the face of his mother.
“She sank down into the bushes weeping and quivering,” he writes. “‘Why do you have a gun? What life are you living?’ ”
Picciolini was living a life of violence and destruction, he writes in his new memoir, “White American Youth” (Hachette Books), out Tuesday. Between ages 14 and 22, he was first a member, then a leader, of the white-power movement in America, spreading the whitesupremacist and Nazi doctrine, and hurting anyone who disagreed with him. ICCIOLINI was born in Chicago in 1973 and grew up bouncing between the suburb of Oak Forest and the town of Blue Island, Ill. His parents, both hairdressers, were recent immigrants from Italy who worked long hours, leaving him with his grandparents during the day. He would later blame his embrace of hate groups and violence on his feelings of abandonment.
Relentlessly bullied in school, the one bright spot in his childhood was the birth of his brother, Alex, in 1983.
“When my mother came home from the hospital with Alex, my heart swelled with pride,” he writes. “It was as if I’d known him my entire 10-year life. He was a part of me, and I was a part of him.”
The two played together all the time. When Alex was 2, Picciolini gave him a doll called My Buddy. From that day forth, the two called each other “Buddy.”
“Buddy filled a huge void in my life,” he writes. “I felt I had a family member who wanted to spend time with me.”
Picciolini was 14 when he met Clark Martell, the 26-year-old founder of the Chicago Area Skinheads (CASH), the “first organized white-power skinhead crew in the United States.” Picciolini was smoking a joint with a friend when Martell, emerging from a car, stormed over to him, grabbed the joint and stomped it out.
“Don’t you know that’s exactly what the communists and Jews want you to do, so they can keep you docile?” Martell said.
He launched into a speech about Picciolini’s regal ancestry and the greatness of Roman warriors, especially centurions.
He wrote “centurion” on a piece of paper, instructed Picciolini to research it, then told him to “come find me and tell me what you’ve learned about yourself and your glorious people.”
Picciolini saw Martell as the first adult to discipline him for good reason — the first to care. He swore off weed and hung around Martell every chance he got. He absorbed his beliefs as well as his fashion sense, dressing in Doc Marten boots and suspenders and shaving his head.
But in early 1988, Martell was arrested for beating a woman who had left his group. He was sentenced to 11 years in prison. Picciolini never saw his mentor again, but he was lured in even more by the danger of the scene’s criminal element.
As he went to racist rallies and concerts, developing a love of white-supremacist music and its teachings, he noticed Martell’s absence created a void. Without a leader, the gatherings usually erupted into beer-fueled chaos and infighting.
At just 15, Picciolini decided to fill that void. He rented a post-office box and began communicating with skinhead, Nazi and racist groups across the country. When one group sent him a piece of white-power literature, he copied it and sent it to other groups, becoming a conduit for white supremacists nationwide.
“I missed no opportunity,” he writes, “to market the ideology of white supremacy.” E also embraced violence, seeking out fights. In school, when a black student deliberately bumped him, he split open the student’s nose with his fist and slammed his head into the steel doors of the school’s lockers.
After he was expelled, he returned and spray-painted “N- - - -rs Go Home” in white letters across the school’s front doors, he writes in the book.
Life at home, meanwhile, grew tense. His mother started snooping through his things and found a T-shirt emblazoned with a swastika, which led to a horrible screaming match.
His mom brought in Buddy, then 6, to appeal to Picciolini’s warmer side, but Picciolini slammed the door shut. When he heard further knocking, he threw the door open and screamed, “Leave me the f- -k alone, and stay the hell out of here!”
But it wasn’t his mother knocking. It was Buddy. Picciolini tried to comfort him, but Buddy ran away sobbing. As Picciolini burrowed deeper into white supremacy, he distanced himself from his beloved brother, treating him as a nuisance.
A leader in the movement by 17, Picciolini formed a white-power band of his own. First called White American Youth (WAY), then Final Solution, they became the first American white-power band to play in Germany.
That same year, Picciolini met Lisa, a “nice little Irish Catholic girl” and a nonracist, through school friends. Aware of Picciolini’s reputation and disliking his views, she nevertheless fell for the charismatic and good-looking teen.
Making out in his car early on, she noticed the shadow of a swastika etched into the condensation of his car window. “Can I ask you something?” she said. “Of course,” he replied. “Why do you have so much hate inside you?” she asked.
Caught off guard, he lied. “I don’t hate anyone,” he said. “I just love what I stand for so much that I’m willing to protect it from those who want to do it harm.”
“I knew my answer was bulls- -t,” he writes. “It was a common practice within the movement to always spin our hateful agenda and wrap it up in a pretty little ‘white pride’ bow for the general public to consume. The truth was, we hated everyone who wasn’t like us.”
Still, Lisa probed deeper. “But then why aren’t you doing anything positive?” she replied. “All you do is say such horrible things and get in horrible fights and hurt people. When you’re with me, you’re so caring and gentle, but all I can wonder is, which one is the real you?”
Over time, Picciolini kept his racist activities out of her sight, and her feelings for him overrode any sense of disgust or confusion.
Picciolini proposed in December 1991, just after his 18th birthday, and they were married the following June. They moved into their own apartment and had two sons in short order, with Picciolini working full time at a pizza place to support the family. EANWHILE, he began to have doubts — “the first rational thoughts I’d allowed myself in years,” he says — about the movement.
In September 1992, he attended a massive white-power rally in Pulaski, Tenn., that drew far more counterprotesters than participants. The protesters reminded him of people from his past, including one friend’s gay brother and some black schoolmates, people who had treated him well.
“I suddenly felt guilty and out of sorts,” he writes. “I was starting to question what this struggle was about.”
In an effort to better support his family, he opened a record store selling whitepower punk. But these bands weren’t plentiful or popular enough to sustain the store, so he also stocked anti-racist punk and other music, as well.
“This was a legitimate business, after all,” he writes. “I needed a diverse inventory that would bring paying customers.”
He was shocked to see the same antiracist punkers he used to feud with enter his store and buy music from him. Some even became loyal customers.
One day a man he called “Black Sammy” came into the store with “three of his minions.” Sammy was the cofounder of a local anti-racist skinhead group called Skinheads of Chicago and the sight of him left Picciolini shaken.
“My blood froze when I saw him in the doorway,” Picciolini writes. “We held
each other’s stares for a territorially awkward 15 seconds.”
Sammy had formed his group in direct opposition to Martell’s.
“I think you might be in the wrong place, Sammy,” Picciolini replied, his hand “hovering behind my back, near my [9mm].”
After an awkward back and forth, Sammy asked about a few bands. Picciolini said he didn’t want trouble. Sammy asked whether he took credit cards, and the tension slowly dissolved when they began discussing the actual music.
Thirty minutes later, Sammy and his friends spent more than $300 on records, making it Picciolini’s largest sale to date.
“Before I knew it, we were shaking hands, and a bizarre smile was forming on my face,” Picciolini writes. “What could I say? The ideological delusions that had led me so far astray were crumbling right before my eyes.”
Over time, his racist beliefs were no match for his everyday reality, which found him interacting with a diverse assortment of people on a daily basis.
He stopped selling white-power music and no longer considered himself an activist for the cause. But a white-power concert in Wisconsin in August 1994 was the final straw.
Less than an hour after it ended, an acquaintance he had spoken to at the show was murdered in “a skirmish with black youths.”
“I could no longer deny my growing disgust with this miserable existence I’d created,” he writes. “This life wasn’t for me anymore.”
Still, certain parts of his life couldn’t survive his past. He and Lisa, fighting constantly, divorced when his second son was 4 months old. He moved to his parents’ basement, but Buddy, now 11, ignored him. The warmth that had been between them was gone. P ICCIOLINI decided to rebuild his life. He got a temp job at IBM, which after a year and a half became a full-time position in marketing and operations. Meanwhile, he used IBM’s tuition assistance program to attend DePaul University, where he got a degree in international business and international relations in 2005.
His IBM colleagues never learned about his past, but he told his story for the first time publicly in 2002 while at DePaul.
“I did it as part of an essay that I read aloud to [a] class,” he wrote in an e-mail to The Post. “I broke down sobbing during it.” He expanded that essay into a graduate thesis, which became the first draft of his book.
In 2009, he co-founded Life After Hate, an organization dedicated to helping people leave white supremacy. He participated in interventions, won an Emmy for a PSA he produced for the group and left the organization this year to focus on “building a global extremist intervention network for all types of extremism.”
He and Lisa remained friends, and he is active in the lives of his sons, now 23 and 25. In 2002, he began a romantic relationship with a woman named Britton who worked in a different division of IBM, and they married in 2005.
He also made peace with his parents, apologizing for the years of trouble and grief he caused them. But one relationship could not be repaired. Buddy grew into an angry teen. He drank, hung out with street gangs and was arrested for marijuana and gun possession around 2001 or 2002. Offered community service, he demanded jail time instead “to prove he was tougher than me,” Picciolini writes.
He tried to talk to Buddy about his choices, but his own actions had removed any authority he might have had.
“Who the f- -k are you to tell me what to do? It’s not like you even remembered I existed until now,” Buddy countered. He added another crushing blow. “My name is Alex,” Buddy said. “I ain’t your buddy.”
A year later, Alex was driving around with a friend one night, looking for weed. The pair was mistaken for members of a local gang’s rivals, and Alex, in the passenger seat, was shot twice, with one bullet severing his femoral artery. Picciolini, now 44, still blames himself. “I felt that his death was divine retribution for all the violence and hate I’d projected into the world,” he writes, “for the pain I’d inflicted on others for the color of their skin, and my misplaced idea that by hurting them, I could save myself.”