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First, though, she had to watch him go still farther away. When he was 21, Leyden joined the Marines. According to Leyden, for the first two years of his service at the Kaneohe Bay Marine Corps Air Station in Hawaii, his supervisors chose to overlook his extracurricular activities. "Off duty, I'd walk around in a tank top so people could see my tattoos," he says. "I wore my Dr. Martens, kept my hair as short as possible and tucked in my pants the way Nazis used to do. I had a Third Reich battle flag in my locker and the Confederate Stars and Bars on my wall."
And Leyden was doing more than just collecting paraphernalia; he was developing into a sophisticated neo-Nazi activist. Through a fellow skinhead he came to the attention of Tom Metzger, founder of the White Aryan Resistance, based in California. "Tom wanted more military recruiters," Leyden recalls. "They started sending me literature." And he worked hard for his cause, recruiting at least four fellow travelers, who then went off to other bases. The Marines finally reacted when he had Nazi storm-trooper lightning bolts tattooed on his neck. In a 1990 evaluation his superior officer wrote, "Loyalty is questionable, as he willingly admits to belonging to a radical group called 'skinheads.'" Leyden then received an "other than honorable" discharge, for what the military dubbed "alcohol-related" misbehavior.
Once he returned to the civilian world, the "movement" embraced him. His racist friends even helped him find a wife. "They wrote and asked if I was meeting skinhead girls," Leyden remembers. "When I said it was hard in Hawaii, white-power girls on the mainland started to write." Leyden clicked with Nicole Rodman, who met him at the airport when he returned to California. They had an Aryan wedding two weeks after meeting and were legally married in 1992.
By day Leyden worked as a telephone installer. By night, he claims, Nicole was pulling him deeper into the skinhead world. She introduced him to such key characters as Metzger, his son John and skinhead martyr Geremi Rineman, who was paralyzed during a racial gunfight. Neo-Nazis generally agree that the Metzgers set the standard for inventive recruiting when John insulted Roy Innis of the Congress of Racial Equality during a 1988 Geraldo Rivera show and started a slugfest. Rivera got a broken nose in the ensuing brawl, and White Aryan Resistance's telephone lines lit up with new members. "After that," notes Leyden, "when somebody said he joined in 1988, we knew he was a Geraldo skin."
Leyden took similar tactics to southern California schools, papering junior high campuses with hate material to provoke fighting between white and nonwhite kids. Days after a fight, he would ask white students, "Shouldn't there be a group for you?" Affectionately known as "Grandpa" because of his advanced age, Leyden led younger skinheads on recruiting drives, tossing White Aryan Resistance leaflets on doorsteps and giving racial comics to young teenagers on their way home from school.