Over the last two decades, Frank Meeink, 35, has undergone quite a metamorphosis. In 1997, he spent a year having a five-inch swastika tattoo removed from his neck and the words "skin" and "head" lasered off his knuckles. Other racist and offensive tattoos, including a portrait of Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels that was on his chest, gradually were colored over and incorporated into more benign images.
Why this former skinhead gang leader decided to disavow the white supremacy ideology of hate and violence and preach racial harmony (to children, no less) is a tale of transformation that goes way deeper than Meeink's physical appearance and into territory even he couldn't have imagined when he was terrorizing non-whites and gays.
It's a long haul that would take him from his south Philadelphia neighborhood to the Illinois prison system, where he would share some of the most intimate details of his life with black and Hispanic inmates.
"I talked to these guys about my daughter being born and about things I would never tell my Aryan or biker friends (who were also in prison)," Meeink told me while in Chicago last week speaking at events for the Anti-Defamation League. "I cried when my cousin was killed, and it was my friend, a Latin King (gang member) who came over and comforted me. I think about those days now and we were all just kids. I was 17 in an adult prison."
Meeink (pronounced MINK) was introduced to the world of white supremacy when he was 14 and spending a weekend at a cousin's house in rural Pennsylvania. It was a time in his life when he was at his most vulnerable. Having survived beatings from his mother's boyfriend, he was sent to live with his father, whose house was in a white enclave in a neighborhood that was predominately black and poor.
That meant the high school Meeink attended was overwhelmingly black.
"There was just a handful of us white guys, and we would get off the trolley and run as fast as we could through the neighborhood," Meeink said. "I hated going to school. You never knew what was going to happen. It was always, ‘God, I hope somebody doesn't jump me.'"
By the time Meeink was recruited into the skinhead movement, he said he was susceptible to anybody who would take an interest in him and make him feel empowered.
"I was a soda bottle that had been shaken and was ready to explode," he said. "I was just waiting for somebody to take the cap off and direct the explosion. I could have gone in any direction. It just happened I went with skinheads."
For sport, Meeink and his band of brothers got drunk and "did missions," spray-painting synagogues, beating up homeless people, blacks and gays. Once a month, they would attend Klan rallies to reaffirm their separatist beliefs.
He said that when he was 16 he left Philadelphia, because the police were after him, and moved to Springfield, Ill., where he was the host of his own public access talk show, "The Reich." He appeared on national television shows, becoming the face of the young skinhead movement.
Then one evening in Springfield, he and his roommate kidnapped a skinhead adversary and beat him for hours while they videotaped it. Meeink, 17 at the time, was arrested and later sentenced to three years in prison.
While there, he made alliances with black and Hispanic inmates through studying the Bible and playing basketball and football.
"I was good at sports, and they saw that even though I still had the swastika tattoos," Meeink said. "Yes, there were intentional fouls all the time. But I would keep on playing and they respected that."
After a game, it was commonplace for him and fellow players to walk back to their cells, discussing whether their girlfriends would remain faithful without them, or whether their public defenders were capable stewards of their cases.
"At the time, I knew I probably wouldn't want to have anything to do with them on the outside," he said. And, indeed, when he was released from prison, he tried to realign himself with the skinheads.
But by then, his life had changed.
"You begin to look at people as individuals," he said. "And I began to learn about how there was so little difference in DNA between the races. (And yet,) for the longest I said, ‘Blacks, Hispanics and Asians are OK, but there was something different about Jews.'"
Even that sentiment changed when a Jewish antique furniture store owner gave Meeink a job and the two spent long car trips across New Jersey talking and eventually becoming friends.
Now Meeink lives in Iowa and runs a multiracial youth group, Harmony through Hockey (www.harmonyhockey.org). He travels the country speaking about diversity and tolerance, and has a new memoir, "Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead."
"Young skinheads come to my talks and ask me whether I betrayed the family," he said. "I might have been in that gang when I was younger, but now I'm in a gang with my wife and children and setting a much better example."