Not long ago, Gregory Withrow advocated a race war to cleanse America. He would have bombed and killed to promote his white supremacist philsophy. Now he struggles against the very beliefs he once held dear.
By Marilee Strong
IT'S JULY 1986, another Summer of Hate at the Aryan Nations' compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho, where four hundred of America's leading white supremacists have come together to strike deals with the devil and plan for racial Armageddon. In this twenty-acre bastion of social regression, soldiers train in the latest techniques of guerrilla warfare and urban sabotage.
Founder Richard Butler, a former Lockheed engineer from California, preaches Christian Identity--a religion of hate that justifies bigotry by claiming that Northern European Christians are the true chosen people, that Jews are the children of Satan, and that blacks and other minorities are subhuman "mud people" deserving of slaughter. Three years earlier, a splinter sect known as the Order hatched a bloody plot here to overthrow the United States government and establish a white homeland in the Pacific Northwest. Before it was brought down by federal authorities, the group murdered Jewish talk-show host Alan Berg and several law enforcement officers and netted $4 million in a daring string of bank robberies and armored-car heists to finance its white revolution.
The guard tower and Whites Only sign at the entrance to the compound are enough to discourage all but the most foolhardy of uninvited guests--agents of ZOG (the Zionist Occupation Government, as white supremacists refer to the federal government), race traitors, and nosy "Jewsmedia" types--from eavesdropping on the World Congress of Aryan Nations. Still, most of the leaders who address the gathering keep their comments close to the vest.
Most, but not all.
A cocky twenty-five-year-old from California strides to the pulpit. Five-foot-six, slight of build, red-haired, freckled, Greg Withrow is no Aryan poster boy. But his remarks leave no question where he stands. Unlike the aging movement windbags who drone on and on, Withrow comes right to the point in a four-minute speech--calling for the "total extermination of all subhuman, non-Aryan peoples from the face of the North American continent: men, women, and children, without exception or appeal."
He receives a standing ovation.
"Before I ever learned to hate, I learned to fear, and I learned to fear deeply and darkly," Greg Withrow says today. "I also learned to instill fear, and that is the greatest weapon of the racist movement, just as it is in any pack of animals. I think one of the reasons people feared me in the movement is because I controlled the youth. As Hitler said, `Whoever has the youth, has the future.'"
Withrow, now thirty-four, utters these words without boast or bile. It is hard to believe the thoughtful, intelligent man before me was once a merchant of hate--one of the "hundred little Hitlers" groomed by California's most powerful white supremacist, Tom Metzger, to lead an Aryan revolution. As a Sacramento college student, Withrow founded the White Student Union (later known as the Aryan Youth Movement), a skinhead organization that quickly spread across the country and has been linked to bombings and murder. In 1986, at the height of his power, he was considered one of the movement's rising stars: brash, bright, and brutal.
Today, Withrow lives ensnared by the web of violence he once spun. Gone are the stash of gold and silver, the money coming in from around the globe, the adulation of thousands of skinheads who once held a concert in England in his honor, the "nighthawk," or bodyguard, provided by the Ku Klux Klan for his personal protection. He is, in the eyes of his former brothers, a turncoat, a race traitor, an enemy to be hunted down and killed. They nearly succeeded once when they tied a board across his back, nailed his outstretched palms to it in a ritual crucifixion, slashed his throat, and left him to die.
Withrow's only protection these days are his fists and his feet--honed to brutal perfection through kick-boxing, his current means of livelihood--and his pit bulls, Romulus and Remus. He lives under an assumed name in rural California, in a location he asks be kept confidential, emerging occasionally, at considerable physical and emotional risk, to speak out against the rising tide of hatred in America. He is at once desperate to put the past behind him and driven to the most painful extremes of self-examination and public atonement, anxious to make up in some way for the things he has done. Perhaps it's the need for redemption that drives him to keep reopening his wounds, that gives him the courage to confront the people he hurt and those who would like to hurt him. But the cost is enormous, and I sometimes wonder if he can survive it.
CALIFORNIA, AND THE SAN FRANCISCO Bay Area in particular, has long been considered a haven of tolerance--a place to live and let live and do your own thing. Yet the truth is that the Golden State, strained and increasingly polarized by the worst recession since the Great Depression, has become the capital of intolerance. For three of the last five years, we have led the country in hate murders, most of them committed by teenagers or young men under twenty-five. According to statistics gathered by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, attacks on homosexuals in San Francisco, the capital of alternative lifestyles, reached the rate of one per day in 1993--six times that of New York City. Virtually no Bay Area community, however liberal, affluent, or secure, has been untouched by hate violence over the past several years. From Castro Valley to the Castro District, there have been synagogue fire-bombings and desecrations, gay-bashings and homophobic murders, anti-Asian and anti-Latino harassment and violence, and random attacks directed at blacks and whites, Arabs and Jews.
California has also become a prime headquarters for organized hate, home to dozens of Klan klaverns, neo-Nazi groups, and Metzger himself, arguably the nation's most influential skinhead leader. White supremacists have staked out parts of Contra Costa and southern Alameda counties for recruitment, according to Klanwatch, an Alabama-based group that monitors the radical right. Skinhead groups affiliated with the neo-Nazi White Aryan Resistance (WAR), the virulently anti-Semitic National Alliance, and the Christian Identity movement are based in San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Rosa, San Lorenzo, Castro Valley, Sacramento, and Davis. Radical "Christian patriots," tax resisters, and citizen militia advocates, who ascribe to paranoid conspiracy theories of a "New World Order" of Jewish domination, are arming and training throughout Northern California for what they see as an inevitable confrontation with their own government.
As Tom Metzger once said, "California may not be the mecca of white separatism, but it is the breeding ground."
I FIRST HEARD OF GREG WITHROW when he came out of hiding in late 1993 to testify about hate crimes before a special hearing of the state Senate Judiciary Committee, convened in Oakland. "I was raised for one purpose," Withrow told the stunned panel: "To terminate people like you."
"I hate to say this," responded Oakland Assemblymember Barbara Lee, "but you scare me to death."
Here, I thought later, was someone who could explain how troubled teenagers turn into assassins, someone who could make sense of a world where, increasingly, might makes right. All too often, police, city, and school officials dismiss hate crimes as pranks--isolated acts committed by posturing youths or hot-tempered neighbors. Is hate really so random, so casual? Or are organized extremists waging war in our midst, exploiting the fears and anger of the lost, the lonely, and the dispossessed? Do such groups precipitate tragedies like Oklahoma City, or, at the very least, does their existence create an atmosphere in which individuals like Timothy McVeigh feel justified in venting their personal prejudices? Greg Withrow could answer such questions.
As a reformed Nazi, Withrow had become a powerful voice against the politics of hatred. He also had become a hot commodity on the TV talk-show circuit, but few had probed beyond the tabloid heat. (He turned down an invitation to be on the Geraldo episode that ended with the host's nose being broken in a skinhead melee.) By the time I tracked down his phone number--he has to change it frequently when it falls into the wrong hands--Withrow had sworn off interviews: tired, fed up, emotionally spent. Eventually, he agreed to see me, but warned me over the phone not to get out of my car when I arrived at his home until he could come outside and ensure my safety. "I have a wolf," he explained.
With that image in mind, I recently pulled into Withrow's driveway at the end
of a dead-end dirt road. Immediately, Tyr, Withrow's half-wolf-half-
German
shepherd leaped up to my car window, snarling and barking just inches from my
face. The racket woke up Greg and his wife, Maria, who had confused my messages
and were not expecting me. They rushed to get dressed and let me in, but the
sudden appearance of a stranger while he slept seemed to rattle Greg. For
several minutes, he was literally unable to speak. Shoulders hunched, eyes
averted, breathing deeply, he moved his arms before him martial- arts-style, as
if to steel himself for a journey to the netherworld. Over the next eight
hours, we would travel to even darker places than I had imagined.
Withrow lives a spartan existence. There is no heat, no hot water. We sit cross-legged on the living room floor before a Japanese lantern, burning candles in a feeble attempt at warmth. Rows of books on Zen and Asian culture seem at odds with the collection of medieval arms that decorates the walls--bejeweled swords, a suit of armor, and other fearsome weapons, like relics of his warrior soul. Greg's interest in Chinese medicine is also evident: There are jars of herbs and an acupuncture chart. He also collects odd little phenomena that interest him: ticks pulled off the dogs, ants, shedded skin, bits of fur from his pet tarantula, Zarathustra. Until about halfway through our interview, I didn't even notice the tarantula right behind me in an open-topped terrarium.
A rag tied like an Arab burnoose covers Greg's shoulder blades, the area still sensitive from having seven layers of skin surgically stripped to eradicate his tattoos: a flaming swastika and the word Aryan. The inner scars, however, cannot be erased. Withrow's speech is often formal, abstract, distancing himself from the horror of his own memories. But the body doesn't lie. The poison of the past still courses through him like a virus. Sometimes he cannot sit down. At a particularly painful moment, he goes into his bedroom and turns on the television set, as if to silence the voices inside him. He keeps coming back to the issue of forgiveness, but forgiving himself seems to be his hardest task.
"The white man has only two ways to get back: money or guns. Let's face it, no other race in their right mind would want to live with us. A white man has never been born who at some point in youth didn't want to be a cop beating heads in. We are natural-born killers."
--TOM METZGER, WAR News and Editorial Line
GREGORY STEVEN WITHROW WAS born and bred to be an Aryan warrior. "My father and mother were first cousins, and my father felt that a son born of first cousins was an act of eugenics," he explains drily. "But I didn't feel more intelligent. I felt confused, and I found myself hurting a lot."
Withrow's male role models were violent, extreme men who visited their sins upon their sons. According to Greg, his father, Albert, spent a year in the brig during World War II for refusing to fight Germans. There he met German prisoners of war who nurtured the racist sentiments he'd inherited from his own father. Albert eventually was turned loose against the Japanese in the Pacific theater; it was there he came to appreciate, as he liked to tell his son, the "joy of killing." When he returned from overseas, he worked for a number of far-right groups, including the John Birch Society and the Tenney Committee, a California legislative committee that engaged in red-baiting and investigated "subversives" in Hollywood, state government, trade unions, and academia during the postwar years.
"From what I understand, my father came back from the war a changed man," says Withrow. "He had more anger than ever. He thought the Jews should never have survived the conflict. He hated what had become of Germany and had a sinking feeling that America was heading down the tubes. He instilled all that depression and anger in me, and at the time, I willingly accepted it. I think if my father had instilled a sense of self-worth in me, I would have accepted that instead. But he didn't have that for me." Rejecting his family's beliefs would have left Greg ostracized at a young age. "Instead, I'm ostracized now by my family," he adds quietly.
Throughout his childhood, Withrow says, his father took him to camps around the state, where he was versed in Nazi ideology and the handling of weapons. Once, he was even forced to fight a dog with a knife. Lessons were conveyed at home as well: Christmas was not celebrated in the Withrow house "because Christ was a Jew, and Jews are evil." And when Greg, at age eight, brought home a black classmate who had given him a toy car at a school Christmas party, Albert smashed the car and ordered his son to "hit that nigger and prove you're a man." When other black kids later beat him up, Greg began to think his father was right.
By age ten, Withrow was thrilling classmates but outraging teachers by drawing swastikas on his schoolbooks. By thirteen, he was abusing drugs and acting out so violently that his mother had him committed to Napa State Hospital. Withrow didn't see her again until he was twenty-seven. He was transferred to another institution, from which he fled, and he lived for several years on the streets, until he was sent to the California Youth Authority, at eighteen, for mugging a decoy cop--one of more than a dozen felonies and two dozen misdemeanors on his rap sheet. At CYA, he received his first recruitment card from the white supremacist movement: "Save Our Land, Join the Klan."
When Withrow was released in 1978, he went back to live with his father, who expected his son to do something with his life. Greg enrolled at Sacramento's American River College and started organizing the White Student Union (WSU). At the height of the debate over the Allan Bakke reverse-discrimination case, his crusade drew headlines: If there were black, Latino, Asian, even gay student clubs, why not a white one?
Withrow made no attempt to hide the fact that while all the other campus groups promoted equality, his promoted inequality. He distributed, for example, cartoons that depicted the skull of a white man, the smaller skull of a monkey, and the still-smaller skull of an African, as if they were scientific proof. When the group was kicked off campus, Withrow garnered even more attention by petitioning for reinstatement, filing a civil rights complaint, and crying discrimination. "It was never our intention to win that battle," he admits. "Had we won, the group probably would have fizzled out."
In Greg's mind, the memories of those years are painfully close to the surface, but the physical record of his rise and fall as a white supremacist is also close at hand. In a dusty corner of a shed behind the house, tucked in back of tools and other mundane gear, are five milk crates full of tapes, scrapbooks, and literature--only a small portion of Withrow's racist output, but enough that we have to wheelbarrow it to the house for me to pore over.
There are three thick black binders of news clippings arranged chronologically from 1980 to 1993, videotapes of Withrow's speech at the Aryan Nations congress and his appearances on talk shows and news broadcasts, and newsletters from other hate-mongers congratulating him on his work. There are pictures of Greg with Tom Metzger, a copy of the WAR newsletter describing Withrow as "known for his courageous views and leadership," and a 1984 Los Angeles Times clip quoting Metzger as saying, "I encourage and support the [White Student Union] 100 percent." There is also a childhood drawing by Greg, of himself and his father standing in a doorway, with the caption "Trip to Fairy Tale Land."
Withrow never looks the same in any two pictures. Here he is in 1981, when the WSU was kicked off the American River campus, looking for all the world like the defiant Hitler Youth, complete with swastika tie clip. And there he is after the crucifixion, holding his bandaged hands before him like a prizefighter fending off a blow, a hunted-animal look on his face. Greg keeps the material out of sight, like a living obituary, because it's too painful a reminder of his past. Yet he hangs onto it, he says, for people like me who want to learn what makes a racist tick.
Withrow paws through a pile of hate literature he used to print up by the thousands. "Here was a popular flyer," he says, pulling from the stack a "Start Your Own" kit, instructing students how to found their own WSU chapter. At one point, he even printed fake hundred-dollar bills bearing the slogan "The Holocaust Was a Hoax" in place of "In God We Trust"--until the Treasury Department ordered him to stop. "I can't quite call this one a collector's item," he says, picking up a leaflet that advertised his "Talk to a Live Racist" hotline, "but it certainly belongs in the hall of infamy.
"If it was somebody against us, I'd just sit there and yell at them on the phone. If they were for us, I'd tell them how to start their own group," says Withrow. "I didn't even mind death threats. In fact, I kept a little chart to gauge how we were doing. Ten death threats a day was, in my view, pretty good."
Under Withrow's leadership, the White Student Union grew over a seven-year span from forty supporters on and off campus to an organization with chapters in at least thirty states, capable of blitzing up to two hundred schools a night with hate literature and recruitment posters. "The eventual philosophy was that if we could pamphlet two hundred schools a night, why couldn't we burn down that many?" he recalls.
His connections and support were international. Money flowed in from fans in England, Australia, South Africa. Withrow supplemented his war chest with the proceeds of street crime. He stole cars, dealt drugs, robbed Japanese tourists, fenced stolen goods. In the Machiavellian ethos of the white-power movement, he explains, crime is good as long as it's done for the race. That included "bashing and clashing"--beating up anyone deemed the enemy.
At one point, Withrow says, he was recruited to assist a white supremacist group in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. The group, he was told, was gathering C-4 explosives and hoped to obtain radioactive material to make a bomb that would spread radioactive dust through the air. The target: the New York Stock Exchange. The goal: to crash the market and create a panic. The plan was never realized, but not for lack of commitment. "It probably sounds as absurd as saying you're going to store up a lot of fertilizer and fuel oil to blow up a federal building," Withrow says now.
Withrow had clearly found his calling in the hate movement, the perfect home for an angry young man. Worldwide recognition was a heady rush for someone who had grown up without love.
As the WSU grew, Tom Metzger took notice of the ambitious young skinhead. He began funneling money to the group, helping it set up telephone hot lines, printing presses, and a computer system that allowed racists to send each other secret messages. He featured Greg on his cable TV show, Race and Reason. The White Student Union and White Aryan Resistance even shared the same post office box.
"It seemed like the best thing in the world to be acknowledged by this great führer," recalls Withrow, fairly glowing at the memory. "He spoke words of praise to me, my father spoke words of praise, and it felt just wonderful, like I was finally doing something right with my life."
"I think of all the young white Aryans who have awakened in the last few years and how they are quietly arming themselves in chemistry, biology, engineering, math, and military science. They walk through the halls of education surrounded by a sea of racial strangers, all the time smiling and pretending as they prepare for Armageddon. A new breed of Aryan, not bound by failed right-wing crap, not wearing uniforms or even cutting their hair, not carrying membership cards and not being big mouths, not bound by Jew ethics and Judeo morality, bound only by logic and necessity."
--TOM METZGER, WAR News and Editorial Line
TOM METZGER, LIKE ALBERT WITHROW, had passed his legacy of hate on to his son, John. Greg Withrow bristles at my pop psychologizing, but it seems clear that in Tom, Greg found a father figure, and in Greg, Tom found another son. Even the young John seemed to think of Greg as a big brother. As a teenager, John Metzger began communicating with Greg and founded, at his Fallbrook, California, high school, the second chapter of the WSU. "Greg inspired me," John would later testify in court, recounting his entrée into activism. With the rise of the skinhead movement, the WSU allied itself with WAR and took on the more militant-sounding name Aryan Youth Movement. Withrow appointed John vice president, to run the organization in Southern California under his father's tutelage. "I thought he'd be an excellent prodigy," says Withrow.
Metzger the elder was the person most responsible for bringing young, violent skinheads into the radical right. A television repairman by trade, he revolutionized the movement technologically, bringing his message of hate to cable access, daytime talk shows, and, today, the Internet. Metzger evolved from anticommunist John Bircher in the sixties to George Wallace supporter to Grand Dragon of the David Duke wing of the California Klan in the mid seventies. He even followed in Duke's footsteps with a bid for electoral office, winning the 1980 Democratic primary for his northern San Diego County congressional district, and in 1982 capturing an astonishing 75,000 votes statewide in the primary for the US Senate race.
But his treatment by Democratic Party officials, who scrambled to defeat their own candidate, seemed to extinguish any thoughts he may have had of working within the system. Now he wanted to tear it down. By 1983, when he founded the White Aryan Resistance, he was an extremist even among Nazis, seeing "all-out total war"--a popular WAR slogan--against minorities and the government as the only solution. He led skinheads in weapons-training sessions in the desert and is widely rumored to have been among the white supremacist leaders to receive some of the unrecovered millions stolen by the Order.
A 1989 jury found Metzger and his son liable for inciting a group of Portland skinheads to violence that resulted in the murder of an Ethiopian student. The $12.5 million judgment--and the discovery that Metzger had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in WAR funds on personal expenses, including his toupees--temporarily derailed WAR in the early nineties. But the man who long decried the welfare system went on the dole, and today all WAR donations are directed to his son, who was only on the hook for $1 million of the Portland judgment.
Metzger, along with Aryan Nations ambassador Louis Beam and National Alliance leader William Pierce, is the leading proponent of "leaderless resistance," a strategy in which a loose confederacy of small terrorist groups operates independently toward common goals, thus shielding top leaders like Metzger from responsibility and making it harder for police to detect and infiltrate group activities. Pierce's apocalyptic 1978 novel, The Turner Diaries, about a race war won by an underground resistance group known as the Order, was used as a virtual blueprint by the real-life group it inspired. (The book also contains a pivotal incident virtually identical to the recent bombing in Oklahoma City.)
The "hundred little Hitlers" policy that Withrow and Metzger envisioned was the embodiment of a loose confederacy. "If it's too centralized, if it's all based on me or Tom or John Metzger, then the organization dies should something happen to us," Withrow explains. Each group was designed to reach out to a specific audience of potential recruits. "The White Student Union was geared to catch students from elementary school on up through college," says Withrow. "The Aryan Youth Movement was more of an elite officer corps. And the skinhead movement directly recruited people off the street--gangsters really, highly visible and very violent."
Withrow's own recruitment technique was cravenly manipulative, offering simple answers to complex questions: What God do you believe in? Any that serves the white race. What are your politics? Any that serve the white race. Do you talk to people of other races? No. "There wasn't any of this--like Tom Metzger would say--`Yes, I do have black friends, and we work together toward separation.' Or David Duke saying, `We just want equal rights for whites.' How are you going to get a white homeland without wiping some people out? Our motto was `Knives, guns, and clubs.' You have a problem? Knives, guns, and clubs was the answer."
The job of the leader, explains Withrow, was to incite people, especially young people, to go out and commit violence to bring recognition to the group. Literature, hotline messages, speeches, and talk-show appearances were all worded to inflame.
"It was simply about reaching people's emotions and having them go out and commit whatever atrocities they saw fit in the name of the white race," he says, his voice eerily deadpan. "Those atrocities could range from the minimum--vandalism--to murder. It was my place to instigate, and I instigated well."
Withrow's baby, in fact, was turning into a beast. Whatever illusions he may have harbored about advancing a noble cause quickly dissolved as he saw violence by WSU members begin spinning out of control.
In 1983, Perry "Red" Warthan, a forty-two-year-old self-proclaimed Nazi who headed the WSU chapter in Oroville, pumped eight bullets into the back of the head of seventeen-year-old Joe Hoover, a group member. Hoover's crime: ratting to police that Warthan had directed the leafleting of a local high school to protest an antiracism march.
On Easter Sunday, 1987, John Warman, president of the Missoula, Montana, chapter of the WSU, bombed a police car. A sophomore at the University of Montana, Warman advocated a bloody racial war to establish separate homelands, with interracial contact then limited to diplomatic relations.
But the most chilling item in Withrow's library of hate is a 1983 clipping about the fatal stabbing of seventeen-year-old Davis High School student Thong Hy Huynh by a sixteen-year-old white classmate during a campus fight that followed weeks of racial taunting. Withrow is quoted as calling the slayer "an inspiration to white students everywhere." I ask how he feels, reading those words today.
"I've done some horrible things to people: broken their bones, stabbed them," he says after a moment. "Some of the things I feel most guilty about are the things I had no direct participation in, no knowledge of beforehand, but I feel responsibility as an instigator."
Withrow, aware of racial trouble on the Davis High School campus, had inflamed tensions to the point where violence was inevitable. The WSU papered the campus with vicious hate flyers urging whites to fight Vietnamese students to "keep their school white." Thong Hy Huynh's murderer did not belong to the WSU; he didn't need to.
"The White Student Union was not violent to begin with, but it became violent, as do most white-power groups," says Withrow. "People like Warthan and Metzger and the Nazis got ahold of it, and I went along with it. I sold the soul of the White Student Union for their backing and protection."
Eventually Withrow saw he had something else to fear: his own people, egged on to the point of explosion by a constant stream of propaganda he helped create. The real enemies, he began to realize, were those closest to him, those who smiled frozen smiles and shook his hand with sweaty palms. They were like hosts whose souls had been eaten away by the virus of hate until there was no more light, no more life. "Their goal was survival of the fittest," says Withrow. "And if they saw me as unfit, I was to be eliminated."
"We're going to take this planet by storm and demand our place in a world that wants to see us gone. We are mobilizing a mighty juggernaut . . . Any revolution begins in the hearts and minds of the most heroic elements of the population. The revolution begins with you . . . Swear an oath on the blood of your ancestors. In your veins lives an army of the undead that will give you hope and strength if you listen to your racial soul." --WAR hotline
A WEEK AFTER HIS TRIUMPHANT SPEECH to the Aryan Nations congress, Greg Withrow had his first treasonous thought. On July 21, 1986, Albert Withrow died of cancer and severe alcoholism--an ignominious death for an Aryan warrior. For one split second, Albert's twenty-five-year-old son realized that he no longer had to do his father's bidding.
"I swept it aside as fast as I thought it," says Withrow. "I was indebted to my race. To think otherwise was to betray my father's life, my people, my nation. And there was still a lot of the warrior left in me, a lot of anger and fear and hatred, and a sense that I must continue because this is all I knew how to do." There was also a practical incentive. Betraying the movement, as the case of Joe Hoover proved, could be a death sentence.
So Withrow continued his movement activities, bringing in cash for the Aryan Youth Movement while earning his own modest living as a shill playing lowball poker at the Nashville West, a Sacramento card club. There he met a waitress named Sylvia. "It was quite startling to have anyone who wasn't in the organization show any amount of interest or attraction toward me," says Greg. "I actually had no intimate desires at all. All my time, money, and energy were devoted to the cause. I was incapable, at that time, of forming any meaningful friendships. Everyone was to be feared or hated, at the very least watched. I had simply lost touch with most of my human feelings."
For her part, Sylvia had good reason to hate someone like Greg. She was a Jew whose parents had fled Nazi Germany, confronting a man who advocated her genocide. "But somewhere Sylvia saw light or a potential for light," Withrow says. "She was one of those rare people who didn't let politics or religion or anything enter into the question of liking a person."
She began questioning his arguments, pointing out the fallacies in his thinking, shaking the young skinhead to his core. "My whole world, everything I believed in, was being attacked," he says. "I'd yell at her in a club full of people and stomp out shouting, `I hate you.' But as time passed, I rethought her arguments. I don't remember her exact words, but I remember the feelings associated with them, and they hit center."
For the first time in his life Greg Withrow began to feel love, an emotion so foreign, so frightening that even now he has difficulty telling the story. As I broach the subject of Sylvia, he pulls away. "I'm getting real deep," he says. "I need to pull back."
We have been talking for hours now, the sun has long since set, and we sit in almost total darkness save for a few flickering candles. He gets up nervously to check the dogs, barking and baying outside at some nighttime passerby. He flips through photo albums for pictures of Sylvia and panics when he can't find them. Ultimately, things didn't work out with Sylvia. She was an alcoholic, and Greg had addictions of his own to overcome. But she was the first to open her heart to him, and in it he saw other things to live for besides racism.
In late June 1987, Withrow traveled to Metzger's headquarters in Fallbrook and told his mentor that he wanted out. Metzger was furious, Greg says, and gave him every incentive to stay, including promises of more money and power. When Greg would not relent, he says, Metzger finally issued a veiled threat, telling Greg that if he left the movement, he would no longer be under Metzger's protection.
On the Fourth of July, three former comrades broke into Withrow's apartment and beat him with baseball bats, breaking his nose and jaw. A month later, on a local television show, he publicly announced he was quitting the movement and threatened to write a book. That night he was ambushed outside the Nashville West by six of his former recruits--including, says Greg, a childhood friend who had vowed always to watch Greg's back. The friend was ordered to shoot Greg, but he refused. Instead, the skinheads slashed Withrow's throat with a straight razor, tied a board across his shoulder blades, and hammered an eight-penny nail through each outstretched palm--warning him not to talk or write anymore, telling him he would die as a Jew.
"I thought they were my friends," says Withrow, his voice choked with emotion. "But I forgot the first rule: Trust no one, fear everyone."
Withrow was able to get to his feet and hobble up the street, like a horrific, Caravaggian version of Christ risen from the dead, blood dripping from his palms. He approached a white woman, then a white couple, who ran in the opposite direction. Finally, a black couple from the casino, Bill and Dottie, came to his aid, then a Mexican-American man, and an English woman who had survived the German blitz.
"It was more than ironic to have people of another race help me," he says, reading my mind. "I knew Bill and Dottie. I'd insulted them before in the lounge, and they forgave me. I didn't understand that at the time. To me, forgiveness or showing mercy was weakness."
Rather than strengthening his resolve, however, the attack sent Withrow on a downward spiral. "Who wants a bald-headed, swastika-tattooed, hate-filled kid?" he would later tell the Senate Judiciary Committee. His skinhead brothers took his money, his car, even his books, which they considered property of the race. He tried to make a living running drugs to the Bay Area and crashed his car during a police pursuit. The headlines roll by in a numbing sea of gray: "Young Racists Decry Founder's New View," "Former Nazi in Trouble Again." He dropped to less than a hundred pounds, depressed and strung out on methamphetamines. His skinhead brothers denounced him at press conferences, challenged him on talk shows, proclaimed that he deserved to die. He tried to set up a group for recovering haters with Clinton Sipes, a Klan leader from Dublin, California, who shut down his crew after the attack on Greg. But the media reacted with scorn. "Leaving the movement did not suddenly make me a saint," he says with much pain. "I was a criminal, and I'll always be remembered as a criminal. As time passed, though, and I was given some peace to myself, things did get better, and hate no longer ruled me."
On one talk show, Withrow met Richard Hirschhaut, the former western regional director of the Anti-Defamation League. Hirschhaut gave Withrow his card, but it took Greg a full year to gather the courage to call. "So you're the enemy," Hirschhaut said when Greg finally did, and they laughed together, breaking the ice. Hirschhaut invited Greg to speak at synagogues, but Withrow said, "I can't go into your holy places with these tattoos." Hirschhaut persuaded ADL board members to raise the money for three painful rounds of laser surgery. On April 20, 1989--the hundredth anniversary of Hitler's birth and the first day of Passover--the tattoos were removed. When Withrow spoke at the Jewish Community Center in Los Angeles two months later, his scars still covered in bandages, he received the second standing ovation of his life--this time for words of peace, not genocide.
"Question: What's up with that traitor, Greg Withrow? According to our moles, he still hangs out in Northern California. We're not gonna tell you exactly where. But we know. He claims to be into kick-boxing, and our kick-boxing friends can't wait to catch him in the ring."
--TOM METZGER, WAR Question and Answer Line
"THAT IS NOT MY GREG," says Maria Withrow, flipping through the scrapbooks while her husband goes out to feed the dogs. "Greg is a lovable person. He respects me and my child. That is the past, and it will always be the past."
Greg's wife, to my surprise, is Mexican-American, and her daughter by a previous relationship, little Marie, is half-black. Greg has asked Maria to be present at our interview to provide moral support, and although she has known Greg only in his current life, she seems to have a clear understanding of the emotional cost of revisiting, even in memory, the other side. She massages his shoulders when he becomes agitated, coaxes him back into the room when he runs away, and serves as something of a Greek chorus, interpreting his moods and blocks. He is even more solicitous of her, addressing her, in his formal, knightly way, as "m'lady," bringing her blankets and food and tea and medicine. Maria has a bad cold, and for much of our interview she lies between us on the floor, her coughs and sneezes punctuating our conversation.
"Does it seem ironic to you," I can't help but ask her, "that you are married to a man who once hated all people of color?"
"Well, I do have white in me, but my skin is brown, so to all skinheads I should die," she says. "Greg shaved his head, Greg carried weapons and all that. But I asked him when I first got with him if he killed anybody, and he said no, and I believe him."
The answer, of course, is far more complicated than that. Maria, thirty, raven-haired, and friendly, has a childlike naïveté that belies a history of violence and deprivation as painful as Greg's own. They cling to each other in a world of shadows, two souls seeking refuge, each looking for peace and love in lives broken by violence and hate.
Maria's parents divorced when she was six, and Maria, because she resembled her father, bore the brunt of her mother's anger. "I would get hit by a whip, a broomstick, a rake, a hose, a tree branch--anything my mom could grab," she says. Sometimes her brother or sister administered the beatings. When Maria was fourteen, her mother threw her out of the house. She lived on the streets of Hayward for four years, eating out of trash cans, recycling for money. Her first marriage of almost seven years was violent. "He was like the parent, and I was the child," she recalls. "I had to ask permission to go to a friend's house, to go to the store, to have company over." Then she lived for eight months with another man, an alcoholic and drug addict who turned her on to crank. He warned her never to leave him or he would kill himself. When she left, he overdosed on heroin.
She met Greg in 1990, when he came into the Foster Freeze where she worked. He was still in bandages from the surgery on his tattoos, and Maria recognized him from a TV interview, recalling that he said he wanted love in his life instead of hate. When she called him by name, he instinctively recoiled. But slowly they became friends, and Greg began opening up to her about his past.
"We helped each other and hugged, and I was just amazed," she says. "Here's a person who is supposed to be hating you. Why do I get a hug, you know?"
In September 1993, the Jenny Jones Show invited Greg to appear, and Maria and her daughter traveled with him. Maria recalls the trip reverentially, like the honeymoon they never had--the steak dinner they were treated to, her first plane ride. "I never thought I would be up in the clouds so high," she says dreamily. But it was also frightening. They had to be hustled out of the studio after another guest told Greg, "They should have slit your throat deeper." Later, they were horrified to discover that they had been put up in the same hotel as the skinheads and Klansmen who appeared on the show.
They married in May 1994 in a medieval-style ceremony at Rancho Seco Park in Sacramento--Greg in his suit of armor, Maria in a feathered musketeer hat, signifying their union by jumping over a sword. Neither of their families came. Maria's father, the only relative she remained close to, had died the year before; it had taken three people to pull her off his body at the funeral so that the casket could be closed.
Now, with the marriage a year old, Maria listens to Greg rhapsodize about his first love without the least bit of jealousy. She considers Sylvia a miracle from God. "A woman can change a man, just like a man can change a woman," she says.
"Have you ever met her?" I ask.
"No. But I wish I had, just to thank her for helping Greg."
"I'M NOT A HERO," Withrow says bitterly. "I've done some terrible things. I even harmed my wife one time. I had a lot of dark anger stored up in me, and one day it just exploded."
The revelation surprises me, but it shouldn't. This is not a Disney story with a neat and tidy ending. This is real life, with blacks and whites and grays, and wounds that take a lifetime to heal. Today there is love and light in Greg Withrow's heart, but there is also a deep well of pain. Withrow spent twenty-five years acting out the violence he was raised with, unable to trust anyone, especially those closest to him. Hate became his drug, his way of coping with the world. Controlling that, like any other addiction, is a day-to-day struggle.
Withrow did not mean to confess this episode to me. But once the words are out, there's no taking them back. Maria tells me the rest of the story. Embroiled in a painful custody dispute over little Marie with Maria's ex-husband, Withrow went ballistic at the courthouse and attacked the man. At home, the violence spilled over, and Greg struck his wife, splitting open her forehead. The child managed to call 911, and Greg, realizing he could go to jail, stabbed himself with a knife, making it look as if his wife were the aggressor.
"That was the only time I saw the other side of Greg," Maria admits. Then she adds quietly, "All the men in my life have beaten me, but Greg was the first to draw blood."
Withrow listens from the kitchen with tears in his eyes, his head resting on the table. It's as if the revelation of this incident has washed away his past eight years of penance and progress. He paces the living room like an animal, as if searching for some way to release the pain. He grabs a pair of nunchaku sticks and swings them around above our heads. Then he takes up the sword he and Maria used in their wedding and points and thrusts, as if battling some imaginary enemy.
"I can't justify anything I've done," he says, finally collapsing under the weight of so many lost years. "People can say, `Look how he was raised. He had no choices. He was only a kid.' Well, bull! I'm responsible. I didn't have to walk down every path that was given to me."
"What kind of life do you wish for?" I ask.
"I don't know anymore," he says. "I just want peace. No more anger, no more fighting. But that seems to be my legacy."
After the fight, Maria moved out and served divorce papers on Greg, hoping he would deal with the anger and hate still inside him. Since then, he has been working hard through twelve-step groups and through the church they both attend. Withrow describes it as a "biker" church, a place where people don't wear ties, where most of the congregation has been to hell and back, and says the strength he has found in God enables him to battle the demons that still plague him.
"It's up to each individual to change his own heart," says Withrow. "Do I forgive, do I ask for forgiveness, do I find positive ways to change? There have been people who have changed governments who have never touched a weapon in their life--Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Buddha, Jesus Christ--because they changed the hearts of people.
"One path is dark, the other is light, and everyone has the chance and the privilege to choose the path of the light. It is a daily choice, sometimes an hourly choice. The only solution in my life has been love. Sometimes the days are really long and crazy. But I can handle it because I walk with the light."
Maria came back when Greg agreed to get baptized. She told him it would be like washing away the hatred, the anger, the madness, but Greg was afraid. On the day of the baptism, he looked at the river and said it would be cold. "Not if the spirit of the Lord is there," Maria insisted.
Greg came out of the river with a smile on his face. "Yes," he told Maria, "the water was warm."