Watching cartoons with his two children one Saturday morning last year, Thomas James Leyden Jr. was startled when his elder son, then 3, abruptly turned off the television. "Mom says we can't watch shows with niggers on them," the boy explained. The ugly word--and the sentiment behind it--did not exactly spring unsolicited from the preschooler's head; his dad sports enough neo-Nazi tattoos and credentials to explain the boy's action. But hearing his son talk that way, says Leyden, 30, "hit me like a ton of bricks. I knew I was taking him down a path where he'd end up in jail or dead, remembered for something horrible like the Oklahoma bombing. All of a sudden I didn't want him to be like me."
Until his change of heart, Leyden had given 15 years of his life to brawling and recruiting for neo-Nazi causes. His activities had even landed him on the Klanwatch list compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center. But in June, Leyden walked into the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles and renounced his former life. It was not an easy thing to do: Klanwatch analyst Laurie Wood says Leyden is "asking for trouble" from his former associates.
Those engaged in the fight against bigotry cannot believe their good fortune in finding someone who can shed some light on the shadowy world of neo-Nazis. Wiesenthal staff members, who have held several long debriefing sessions with Leyden, have big plans for him: they have made arrangements for a laser surgeon to remove his tattoos, and this fall they hope to take him on a lecture tour at U.S. military bases, where Defense Department rules permit local commanders to decide whether to tolerate "passive" extremists in uniform. He has also offered to counsel troubled teenagers. "No one like this has ever walked through our doors," says the center's founder and dean, Rabbi Marvin Hier. "He's the real McCoy."
Leyden's journey from normal kid to thug and back again, began when he was a teenager in the blue-collar town of Fontana, California. His parents divorced when he was 15, and he became angry, lonely and, most important to skinhead recruiters, vulnerable. "I needed to lash out," he explains. "They look for young, angry kids who need a family." He dropped out of school and began meeting skinheads hanging around the punk-rock scene. The trappings--bomber jacket, shaved head and steel-toed Dr. Martens boots--and hard-line beliefs soon followed. "These were good guys, I thought," he says now. "I thought I was being patriotic. We would drink and fight, try to clean up America that way." At one party he attacked a white youth who was dating a black girl and who had objected to his neo-Nazi ranting. "I kicked him bloody until somebody pulled me off, then grabbed a beer and joked about it," Leyden recalls. Over the years, he says, hundreds of such fights followed.
His parents, Sharon and Thomas Leyden Sr., who say they raised their son to abhor racism, were horrified by his transformation. But when Sharon confronted him, she says, "it didn't work at all." They finally agreed he would not talk about "those things" at her house or bring his thuggish friends through her door. "He would just be my son," Sharon says. "I told him I believed people always come back to what they really are inside. And I knew what he was inside, and that he would be back."