TEEN BIGOT’S
White supremacist his 1st inspiration
LIKE A LOT of aimless adolescents, Christian Picciolini wanted only to belong.
Other kids found comfort in sports teams, school clubs or church. At 13, Picciolini found his sweet spot in violent hate groups. By the age of 16, he was even running one — Hammerskin Nation.
Now 44, Picciolini has renounced his racist past. He runs the nonprofit Life After Hate and has written “White American Youth: My Descent into America’s Most Violent Hate Movement — and How I Got Out.”
Early on, his pain was apparent to “I Love Rock and Roll” rocker Joan Jett. Picciolini’s punk band, Random55, opened for the singer during a 1996 tour, and she recalled approaching him backstage.
“I sensed that Christian had been like me as a struggling teenager, in a dark place, searching for identity and belonging — acceptance,” she writes in the book’s foreword. “He needed someone to believe in him.”
Unfortunately, the first person to believe in Picciolini was white supremacist Clark Martell.
They met in an alley when Martell slapped a joint out of Picciolini’s hand.
“Don’t you know that’s exactly what the Communists and Jews want you to do, so they can keep you docile?” snapped Martell.
Picciolini was heading into high school. He didn’t know the meaning of “docile,” much less what a Communist or a Jew was.
But he connected with Martell, an older guy with a shaved head, combat boots and a pal with a ’69 Firebird. And that’s what mattered.
On the face of it, Picciolini was any American kid. That’s the most shocking part of his story — how an adorable boy and aspiring artist could transform into a steel-booted thug leading crowds in “Heil Hitler” salutes.
It began in the heartland. A first-generation American, Picciolini was the son of Italian immigrants. His parents were hardworking hairdressers who left their son to be mostly raised by his grandparents.
Picciolini resented that, and he resented them. He also hated the Chicago suburbs where the family moved, and the schools where he never fit in.
Things changed the first time the school bully came after him. Picciolini felled the huge kid with a lucky punch, and no one would mess with him again. It gave him new status at the school. It also gave him his first taste of blood. Picciolini finally found something he excelled at — fighting. It got him He had always felt isolated, bounced out of a series of alienated. When Martell took schools, but Picciolini didn’t an interest in him, he responded. care. He was a punk kid with a That was all it took, this foul mouth and a bad attitude, man who told him to be proud of cocky enough to taunt a school his Italian heritage and scribbled guard with racial slurs. the word “centurion” on the back
The guard later wound up of a flyer advertising a hard-core as the town’s chief of police. punk band. Picciolini researched Picciolini, by then on a mission to both, taking a bus to the mall save himself, offered an apology. and shoplifting a book about
But there were years of skinheads. heinous acts in between. Although Martell was only
Reflecting on how he got 21, he became the primary adult there, Picciolini notes he had in Picciolini’s life, telling him not few friends and zero outside interests. to smoke weed, and doling out discipline and praise.
Martell soon had him running errands, making copies of hate tracts and taking them to the post office. When the kid did a good job, Martell rewarded him with a pair of boots, a T-shirt of a neoNazi band and music cassettes.
He also gave him a dog-eared copy of “The Turner Diaries,” a novel about the violent overthrow of the government and a race war. Race wars consumed Picciolini, and he was angling for battles at every opportunity.
The more he read, the more confirmed he became in his hateful views. Still, as furious as he was with the world, he remained smart enough to skate by in school. His native intelligence always had him figuring out the angles, organizing others.
And his immigrant ignored his new ideas.
“My parents weren’t concerned,” he writes. “They shrugged me off and changed the subject. That only seemed to make it clear to me how brainwashed into indifference the world had become at the hands family of the Jewish-controlled media.”
These were his views at 13. From there, Picciolini only turned more racist.
He shaved his head and started hanging out with Skinheads in Chicago. He listened only to white power music. He attended white supremacist parties and rallies, stealing his mom’s car to drive when still too young to have a license.
He also moved into an apartment on his parents’ property — never asking permission, just taking it over and