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With the greatest affection, this book is dedicated to my teacher and friend, Prof. John DiGiovanni. John was the first teacher who ever took an interest in me during my first semester at Hunter College. He encouraged me to major in Communications, which is how I come to write these words to honor him. John was one of the six Americans who lost their lives when the World Trade Center was first blown up in 1994.

Crunching snow under his Doc Martens, Benny, with his soft, doughy, innocent adolescent features, trolled over to wait by the driveway. A minute later, the front door burst open, and David ran from the house.

And he’d changed. No more blood on his clothes. Benny looked down at his own jeans for any blood. When Benny looked up again, Bryan was in the doorway.

Confused, Bryan looked around, listening. Save for the distant sound of the whimpering dog inside the house, he heard nothing. Making sure all the lights were out, he pulled the front door shut.

There were three vehicles in the driveway. Bryan and David’s father’s van blocked the first of the two cars. Bryan started up the van. After the engine caught, he turned on the rear windshield wiper to clear the rear window of snow so he could see to back out of the driveway. He double-parked, went back, and started up the first car.

After the car was out on the street, David got in on the passenger side. Bryan then drove the van back up onto the driveway, hopped out, and went back behind the wheel of the car Benny pulled out. Bryan followed him through the silent, snow covered streets of Allentown, Pennsylvania. When they got to his house, Benny parked and got in the back seat of the other car.

Bryan rattled his pockets. He patted them for a moment, feeling not only a lot of change, but piles of crumpled bills that filled them to bursting.

“I don’t know,” Bryan said. “We’ll probably just go up to Michigan and meet those guys.”

He headed north on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Inside of ninety minutes, they had reached Interstate 80, heading west. Bryan drove carefully, obeying the speed limit.

They made a few pit stops, but by 8:30 A.M. the next morning, they had traveled 388 miles and were across the state line, outside of Youngstown, Ohio. Fearful that the police might be after them, they decided it would be a good idea if they lay low during the day.

“How about that place?” David asked, pointing at a motel coming up on their right.

Jesse Capece was behind the desk of the Truck World Motor Inn in Hubbard, Ohio, when the three walked in. Each was over six feet tall and weighed well over 200 pounds. They weren’t men, really, but teenagers in the body of men. They wore combat boots and jackets. And their heads were shaved clean.

When they came over to the counter to register, Jesse noticed the tattoos on their shaved heads.

Two of the boys had the word “berserker” tattooed near their hairline. The third boy, who was younger but bigger, had his forehead tattooed with the Nazi slogan, “Sieg heil.”

The boy who filled out the registration card signed in as “Benny Birdwell.” He listed the license plate number as “LMN 2291, Pennsylvania.”

Bryan dug into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a bunch of crushed fives. He counted out thirteen of the bills. Jesse gave them the key to the room. After they were gone, Jesse went outside to check out their car. It was a Pontiac, all right, with a Pennsylvania tag. But the number on the plate was different than the one they had given.”

When seventeen-year-old Samuel Ehrgott set out on his paper route at dawn, Salisbury Township looked like a Norman Rockwell painting.

In a place like Salisbury, an Allentown suburb, snow doesn’t turn to slush quickly because there just isn’t enough traffic. The streets stay quiet and soft and nice, the houses peaceful and warm under the snow-white covering. Like a scene out of White Christmas.

Sam rode his bike up and down the streets of his development. Methodically, he stopped to put a paper on the porch of each subscriber.

Though they lived next door to him, the Freemans were actually one of the last families on his route. As he did every morning, he got to their place at 5:45 A.M. Today, though, Sam knew something was different.

Mr. Freeman would always be coming down the stairs at that hour, or already warming up his truck. Not today, though. His van was parked on the driveway. That was strange. Mr. Freeman was never late. And he never took a day off. Something was wrong.

A few hours later at school, when his homeroom teacher took attendance, Sam noticed that Bryan Freeman was missing. They shared the same homeroom. Where was he? Then Sam remembered what Bryan Freeman had said a few days ago.

“But the restlessness was handed down and it’s getting very hard to stay.”

—Matthew 10:36, King James Bible “Authorized Version,” Cambridge Edition

—Proverbs 11:29, King James Bible “Authorized Version,” Cambridge Edition

Since 1978, Valerie Freeman had lived with her brother and sister-in-law. There was a bottle of twelve-year-old Scotch that Dennis kept hidden, to be opened on the day she got married.

Valerie had no prospective suitors. Still, you never knew. Whatever Jehovah wanted for her would be his will. Thy will be done.

It had been Jehovah’s will that David and Bryan would rebel against their parents and pick on Valerie Freeman by urinating in her shampoo and leaving chicken bones in her bed. Dennis had seen what was happening and knew that Jehovah had chosen him, yet he felt powerless to stop the cruel way his sons were treating his sister.

That was the usual thing with Dennis these days. He just didn’t know what to do.

Not wishing to overstay her welcome and seeing that things had gotten out of hand, Valerie left. Still, she saw the family a lot. Her favorite nephew, Erik, was suffering the most. His brothers didn’t treat him well. They felt that the younger boy, always kissing up to his parents, was spoiled, while they were held in nothing but the utmost contempt.

David and Bryan picked on Erik, teased him, and chastised him for his religious beliefs. Erik was a devout Jehovah’s Witness. In him rested the one great hope, that the line of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Freeman family would be redeemed. But clearly, Valerie realized, Erik had felt himself in some sort of jeopardy, and though he didn’t say from whom, it was clear that he feared his older, more powerful brothers.

They could be brutes when angered, and with the cruel use of their strength and size, they could inflict tremendous pain.

All this Valerie knew when, at 5 P.M., her hand reached out for the front doorknob. She tried it. It had no give to it. That was unusual. Her sister-in-law, Brenda, always left it unlocked when she was home, and she was home most of the time. Valerie had a key, but before she used it, she decided to step around to the side and try the garage door.

It was also locked. She looked over at Dennis’s truck. It looked like it hadn’t been moved.

Growing alarmed, Valerie went around the side of the house and tried the sliding glass door. Unlocked, it gave easily.

Inside, the house was cold enough to see her breath pluming in the frigid air. It was dark, very dark, and eerily silent. With a growing sense of dread, she climbed the stairs and ran ran down the hallway to Erik’s bedroom. She paused for a moment before the closed door and then pushed it open.

A few minutes later, there was a frantic knock at the Ehrgott house next door. Samuel Ehrgott answered it.

Sam told her what had happened. His mom immediately dialed “911” to report a homicide.

“Proceed to Ehrgott residence on Gale Avenue. See a woman there about a homicide. Body of a young boy has been found.”

When he got to the residence, Pochran saw that people had already gathered outside the Ehrgott home. They motioned him across the way. The officer followed their direction and parked his cruiser.

“It’s Freeman,” said a small, mousy woman, who stepped forward. She wore tortoise-shell eyeglasses that distorted the shape of her eyes.

“Through the back door,” she answered between sobs. “It was open. But I have a key, too.”

Officer Pochran walked slowly up the snow-covered driveway. He noticed that today’s paper was still on the porch. In the driveway were two vehicles: a car and, parked behind that, a van. The rear window of the van bore the tracks of a windshield wiper, though the van looked like it hadn’t been moved.

As Valerie had said, the front door was locked. He went to the back, where he found the sliding glass doors open, exactly as Valerie had left them. He returned back to the front and waited for backup.

When Officer Michael Reddings arrived, they used Valerie’s key to gain entrance through the front door. Their flashlights cut through the interior darkness. Halfway up the stairs, the flashlight beams picked out blood on the stairway carpet. At the top of the landing, they looked down and flashed their beams again,.

Below was the living room, and beyond that the kitchen, where they could see a silver, aluminum baseball bat, laying against a blue cabinet. The blood covering the barrel of the bat contrasted starkly with the cabinet’s blue.

Still on the landing, they heard a dog barking and followed the sound to a closed bedroom door. Behind it, the dog, of course, sensed their presence and continued barking violently to get out. They didn’t open it. Instead, they entered the master bedroom across the hall.

A man lay sprawled across his bed. His head and face had been struck and smashed repeatedly. So hard had he been hit that his skull had been shattered and his brain had swelled out through the cranium. His throat had throat had been cut.

Down the hall, they entered Erik Freeman’s bedroom. His small, fragile body lay in a lifeless heap on his bed. His face had been beaten into such a bloody pulp, they had no way of knowing that Erik had been a handsome boy.

Their grim footsteps made hollow echoes. They headed down to the basement, searching for Brenda Freeman as they went and fearing what they would find. On the floor in a narrow hallway they found a metal pipe covered with blood.

In the back hallway they found Brenda. She was lying on her side, her nightgown pulled up, exposing a large, fleshy body. There was a bloody knife on the floor next to her.

Brenda Freeman had been stabbed in the back. A pool of dark blood had coagulated underneath her bloated body. Behind her, on the wall, someone had scrawled two swastikas. Is this some kind of hate crime, Pochran wondered. Could the victims be Jewish?

By that time, the rescue squad of the Eastern Salisbury Township Fire Department had responded. Finding that the victims were dead and there was nothing they could do, they milled around the crime scene, careful not to touch anything, lest they contaminate evidence.

“Looks like Bryan Freeman killed his parents and little brother,” said Frank Johnson, one member of the rescue squad, addressing another, Harry Liste.

At 10:30 P.M., Trooper Joseph Vazquez arrived at the Freeman home. With his baby face and dark complexion and hair, he looked more like a movie star than what he was, a seasoned homicide investigator with twelve years of experience.

Wearing surgical gloves to prevent contaminating the crime scene, Vazquez took a look around the house, noting the angles at which the victims were lying in death; type of wound (stabbing, slicing, et al.); and the blunt-force trauma to the heads of Erik and Dennis.

A small army of technicians that accompanies any violent death in a American city worked silently through the house. They dusted for prints, examined and photographed the bodies and crime scene, and eventually, when the detectives gave the OK, moved the bodies to the morgue for autopsy.

Detectives fanned out across Lehigh County to question those who knew the Freeman family. They called in after interviews with Brenda’s sisters, Sandy Lettich and Linda Solivan. Both women said that there was bad blood between David and Bryan Freeman and their parents and little brother. At the crime scene, Valerie Freeman confirmed this.

The police also learned that the family had kept a shotgun in the house. It was missing. Since Bryan and David and one of the family cars were also missing, along with their cousin Benny, and with the antagonism the boys had openly displayed toward their parents, it was a logical theory to conclude that the brothers had killed their parents, their cousin had participated, and they were all on the run.

Tall, slim, and well-dressed, Steinberg was the district attorney of Lehigh County. He also happened to be honest. A hands-on district attorney, he not only prosecuted many of the cases his office handled, he also participated in active investigations.

In one previous case involving a rapist/serial killer, Steinberg had actually discovered the body of a young girl the serial killer had murdered. He was no stranger to helping track down suspected criminals.

Late that night, Steinberg had his warrants and directed the police to contact the National Crime Information Center (NCIC). Fugitives are listed with the NCIC, and local police departments are expected to tap into their files on a regular basis to see who is wanted. Pennsylvania State Trooper Joe Vazquez became the case’s lead investigator.

Soon, the NCIC computers had a complete description of the Freeman brothers and Ben Birdwell, a description of the car they were driving, and the license plate number.

But Lehigh County is just like anyplace else in the United States: You can’t keep a secret very long. The press soon discovered that the Freeman family had been murdered, and that the suspects were their sons and their cousin.

The case was splashed across the front pages of the Reading Eagle and the Allentown Morning Call.

Besides the local stations, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and Fox all bannered the story of the murders and the boys’ escape.

Sally Dobbins, a fifteen-year-old student at Salisbury High School, was in her home watching TV when the report of the Freeman murders came on.

“David and Brenda Freeman and their son Erik have been found brutally murdered in their Allentown, Pennsylvania, home. Missing are their other two sons, David and Bryan, and the family car. Police suspect that the missing boys, who are skinheads, are responsible for the crime. An all-points bulletin has been issued for their arrest.”

She couldn’t believe it: They’d actually gone ahead with what they had threatened, and now they were on the run, probably heading for Florida. At least, that’s where they’d said they wanted to run to.

In searching through Bryan’s room, police came upon a picture of a teenage boy. On the back, someone had drawn a swastika. The picture of the boy was immediately identified by rescue squad members as Harry Liste. Liste was a squad member and was one of those who had responded to the emergency at the Freeman home. He was still on the scene.

Vazquez immediately had Officer Pochran and Trooper David Seip drive the teenager down to the Eastern Salisbury Firehouse for an interview. The time was 10:45 P.M. While Liste was being whisked in for questioning, across town in two homes, the grieving was beginning.

Linda Solivan and Sandy Lettich had just finished talking to detectives. They had loved their sister Brenda dearly and were shattered by the news of her violent death. The deaths of Dennis and their nephew Erik made it all that much more difficult to bear. Yet, they were devout Jehovah’s Witnesses.

This was an attack directly from Satan. Only Satan could wreak such havoc on the Freeman household; only Satan could kill them so violently. But Satan could not, would not win, because they were killed as Jesus was. To die for being a Witness is the ultimate joy. As such, their death was not so much a tragedy as an honor. Brenda, David, and Erik were martyred Jehovah’s Witnesses in the same way that the Christians were martyred in the Coliseum and the Jews at Masada.

Trooper Seip, though, was not concerned with affairs on the spiritual plane; his job was to get to the bottom of a triple homicide and get the perpetrators arrested. He began questioning Harry Liste.

“Well, I’m a friend of Bryan’s. We’re regular friends, me and Bryan,” he added.

“About two years, though we hardly ever do anything outside of school. We pal around at school.”

“Yeah. We have some of the same classes, and we both go to Vo-Tech in the afternoon. Bryan’s taking automotive classes.”

“Bryan’s been saying that he wanted to kilt his parents for the past two years. Bryan said that he had beat up his father in the past.”

“No, he never said,” Liste replied. “He also said he hated his little brother, and he would beat him up as well.”

If Liste was right, it meant that Bryan had been a skinhead since he was fourteen-years-old and his brother since he was twelve.”

“Well, he had the word ‘berserker’ tattooed across his forehead. Then there was a swastika made of bones on his neck, and a man, half black and half white, on his right arm. That means something in skinhead lore, but I don’t know what.”

“On Friday. At school. It was in the morning sometime. I said I’d see him between classes and at lunch.”

“He was in trouble, at least on Friday, because he wrote some obscene stuff on a state test he’d been taking. That had gotten him suspended for five days. Bryan told me that he didn’t care if he got into trouble.”

“Bryan seemed pissed off. I saw him trying to scrounge lunch money off somebody. The principal saw him and grabbed Bryan. Bryan pushed him away. That was the last time I saw him.”

“Well, about two weeks ago, Bryan said he was trying to get some money to go to Florida. He wanted to go there because of the mostly white population.”

Seip didn’t tell Liste that Bryan had been misinformed. Florida has a significant Hispanic and African American population.

“Now, Mr. Liste, about that picture we found in the house. It was of you, and on the back there was a swastika.”

“It was about two months ago at the Whitehall Mall. It was me, Bryan, David, Beth, that’s another friend of Bryan’s, and Ben, his cousin. There were about twenty skinheads altogether.”

“Like I said, they had this uncle they liked, and they also said they liked their grandfather. Me, I think they took off, and they’ll keep going.”

“Bryan has a pocketknife with a blade. David might have a shotgun. Bryan said they’d been shooting the shotgun recently and that they got their shells at the hardware store last week, maybe Thursday or Friday. A kid named Allan Hayward works there and might have sold them the ammo.”

“Bryan used to drive a gray Camaro, but his parents sold it about two weeks ago. He’s been taking the bus since then. I think Bryan’s driving a big, blue Cadillac now.”

“I think David bought it, and Bryan was driving it until David got his license.”

“Did you ever see either brother driving a black Sunbird?” the detective asked.

“No.” On thinking further, Liste recalled, “Oh, yeah. It was a convertible. I only saw Bryan’s mother driving it. I did see Bryan in the car, but only with his mom.”

“About two to three months ago at the Whitehall Mall. I didn’t know him that well. I do know that Bryan and Benny got a job at a Wendy’s on Tilghman Street. They started there last weekend and Bryan had to shave if he wanted to work there.”

“No. And I don’t know how to find him, and even if I did, I don’t think Benny’d talk to you.”

“There were two girls, Maryann Galton and Jennifer Greener. They were skinhead girls who went to school with Bryan. Galton had a shaved head.”

“Tell me something, did you ever hear of Bryan and David, as skinheads, doing any harm to people?”

“Two or three months ago, Bryan told me that he, David, and maybe Benny were driving in Allentown. They hit a black kid walking down the street with an eight-ball in a sock.”

“You said earlier that the last time Bryan said he wanted to kill his parents was Friday?”

The next morning, newspapers across the country, from The New York Times in the east to the Oregonian in the west, had the story on their front pages. And despite all that coverage, despite their pictures being all over the place, no one knew where the boys were. No one knew where they were headed.

At the crime scene, Trooper Vazquez had discovered that the Freeman brothers knew a boy named Marshall Fallon. Thinking that Fallon, like Liste, might have information on their whereabouts, Trooper Seip was dispatched to bring him in.

Fallon lived at a hotel on Hamilton Street. Seip brought the seventeen-year-old to the Salisbury Township police department for questioning.

“Yeah, I’ve known David and Bryan since May of 1994. I’m one of their closest friends,” Fallon bragged.

“Haven’t seen either in the last week or two. I’d tried to get together with them, but ever since their parents sold their cars, we got no way to get together. They used to give me a ride to work.”

Although the legal driving age in Pennsylvania is sixteen, the seventeen-year-old did not have one, which meant he also didn’t have a car he could drive to work.

“They’ve been talking about bizarre things lately. Like two weeks ago, the Freemans were talking to me about robbing a gun store, killing a cop, and splitting down South. That’s what they said, ‘splitting.’”

What were the Freeman brothers, 1960s “beatniks?” The term “splitting” became common in the 1960s. It was almost like their cultural references, because of the way they had been raised, were decades behind the times.

“They also talked all the time about how much they hated their parents, the principal at their high school, and other “skins,” Fallon continued. “They talked about destroying these people and about getting ‘berserker’ tattooed on their forehead.”

“They said that when they had ‘berserker’ tattooed on their forehead, it would be the final straw.”

“That tattoo would mean that they no longer cared about anything, that they would go on a path of destruction,” Fallon eloquently explained.

“Police, yeah, including police. See, in the Skinhead Nazi organization there’s a point system for certain crimes,” Fallon explained. “You receive one point for killing a parent or a family member, killing a cop, and raping and killing a woman.”

One for Dennis, one for Brenda, and one for Erik, even though he was underage. In death, at least, he counted.

“No, but I’m staying at a hotel, and last night into this morning the pay phone in the hall rang all night. I didn’t answer it, but I feel it was probably the Freemasons calling me.”

While everyone was looking for them in the South, the Freeman Brothers and their cousin Ben Birdwell had gone west into the Ohio Valley. The boys had chosen to stay in their room there at the Truck World Motor Inn, but by 10 A.M. they had gotten bored.

On their way to the mall, they passed Frank Converse, a trucker on his way to Pennsylvania. Gazing down from his eighteen-wheel rig, he noticed the three skinheads. They were hard to miss.

After the mall, the boys came back to their motel room, where Jesse Capece kept a sharp eye on them. They hung out in the lobby for a while, then went back to their room. Since they were paying in cash, a record was kept of their phone calls.

On the other end of the line, Frank Hesse thought back to the last time he’d been in Detroit. It was only a few months before, at a New Year’s Eve concert. He had gone to Detroit to hear a few white supremacist rock bands. That’s where he had met Bryan, he remembered.

“I’m in Ohio,” Bryan continued. “I got a couple of days off from work,” he lied, “and I’m going up to Detroit and thought I’d stop up.”

As John gave the directions to his house, Bryan repeated them and David wrote them down on the hotel room receipt.

It was 7:58 P.M. when they checked out. Jesse watched carefully as they pulled their Sunbird out onto the road.

One state over in Pennsylvania, the police interviews with friends of the Freeman Brothers and their cousin Benny Birdwell were continuing.

“I’ve known Bryan and David Freeman for years,” fifteen-year-old Deborah Thompson told Trooper Archer. Then she revealed something really significant.

“Bryan was an ‘A’ student until about six months ago, when he began drinking alcohol constantly.”

“He seemed to start drinking constantly when his cousin Benny dropped out of school.”

“He got these tattoos, that and the excessive drinking,” Deborah answered. “It had gotten to point where Bryan was drinking beer before he went to school.”

She added that Bryan had spoken of killing his parents around Christmas. He was upset that his parents didn’t believe in giving Christmas gifts. She also remembered that Bryan and David didn’t like their Aunt Valerie. They tormented her by “pissing in her shampoo bottle” and wanted her to leave their home.

As for their skinhead beliefs, Deborah thought that Bryan Freeman was the leader and David and Ben Birdwell were followers. She said they also had a friend named Clark Hessler, who was a skinhead living in Allentown and drove a red Honda XL.

Next up for an interview by police was Joe Johnson, another fifteen-year-old. He immediately informed the detective that he was a skinhead and he had known the Freemans for about three years.

“I got David to become a skinhead two years ago. David got Bryan and Benny Birdwell to be skinheads afterward,” Johnson explained. “David and Bryan hated their parents because they were Jehovah’s Witnesses. Their mother had rules of no smoking or drinking alcohol in her house. Their parents had just sold Bryan’s car recently.”

“David said a couple of times recently, ‘I would like to kill that fat bitch.’ He was talking about his mother.”

“David called his brother ‘a piece of shit.’ Oh, they also had beer in the fridge in their home and their mother would throw it away.”

Johnson related that he had heard a student named Mark Simon received a call from someone who said “Mark” and hung up. He said that Simon believed it could have been the Freemans. He said that the last time he’d spoken to the Freemans had been yesterday.

David had called and said he might stop by the bowling alley where he was going to be. But David never had. Johnson then said that recently he had been at a party at the Acorn Hotel, and the Freemans had jumped him, saying he was Polish and not “pure White.”

He said that the Freemans and another skinhead named Clark Hessler were his enemies.

By midnight, Frank Converse had reached Murray, Pennsylvania. He took a coffee break at a truck stop and bought a newspaper. On the front page, he saw the pictures of the three young men wanted for the murders of Brenda, Dennis, and Erik Freeman. Frank immediately dialed “911.”

The police in Murray, Pennsylvania, immediately called the Salisbury Township Police and told them that a trucker had spotted their suspects at the Truck World Motor Inn in Hubbard, Ohio. When Vazquez called Truck World, he spoke to Jesse Capece.

“Yes, they were here,” Jesse acknowledged over the phone. “I knew there was something wrong with them.”

“I don’t know. They just pulled out of here a couple of hours ago. But they did make a call, to someplace in Michigan.”

Vazquez alerted the Michigan State Police that the Freeman Brothers and Ben Birdwell, suspects in a multiple-homicide case, were coming their way. He gave them their Pontiac Sunbird’s tag number. They were to be considered armed and extremely dangerous.

Along with his partner, Salisbury Township Det. Richard Metzler, Vazquez headed out to Allentown Airport and caught the first flight to Michigan. If the cops in the north country caught his suspects alive, he wanted to be there when they were questioned.

Detroit is thought of the world over as “Motor City.” It is here that many of America’s automobile manufacturers are based and produce many of the tens of thousands of automobiles that find their way onto the world market every year.

But to others, Detroit is known in another way, as the beachhead of the White Supremacist movement in the United States. While places like Idaho and Montana garner greater headlines because of much-publicized, though isolated, conflicts with White Supremacists, it is in Detroit where Adolf Hitler’s racist dogma is being disseminated to the White Supremacists’ target audience: America’s disaffected youth. Detroit is the battleground in what White Supremacists describe as “rahowa,” or racial holy war.

Detroit is a city polarized by racial tensions. The city’s infrastructure has crumbled, leaving African Americans and other disenfranchised minorities to live in crime-ridden neighborhoods. And like their parents before them, they turn to music to express their rebellion.

Once it was the Beatles and the Stones; today it is Nordic Thunder and White Terror, hate rock bands.

Ian Stuart was a musician in British punk rock in the ’70s who’d put together a band called Skrewdriver. They signed on with a small label in Britain and opened for a lot of acts, including the Police and Siouxsie and the Banshees. Eventually, the neo-Nazi National Front, a white supremacist group, pushed Stuart to publicize his political thoughts to attract sympathetic fans. Stuart agreed.

In that agreement, the symbiotic relationship between neo-Nazi groups and what would later become known as “skinhead rock” was formed. While organizations that condemned Stuart set up a moratorium on his work, the National Front set up a record label called White Noise.

White Noise’s first CD was also Stuart’s first openly racist recording. Called “White Power,” it became the prototype for similar hate recordings to come. But distributing this type of music to a large audience in America proved daunting, until Resistance Records came along.

Resistance Records is based in Detroit. The company records white power bands, and distributes their CDs. Unlike other companies that have tried to do the same thing, Resistance is not a bunch of fringe-group amateurs. Its owners and founders, George Burdi and Mark Wilson, have come up with a way of marketing these CDs with top-notch promotion and packaging.

George Burdi’s own band, Rahowa, had an album out called “Declaration of War.” The label features a picture of a Nordic warrior, beefed up on steroids, towering over the corpse of a black man. The lyrics are equally concise.

Resistance Records sponsored a skinhead concert that took place in Racine, Wisconsin, on September 30, 1994. Three hundred hate rock fans met in Memorial Hall, a huge, cavernous space wired for sound.

The band members shrieked racial epithets from the stage, and the crowd shouted back in chorus. The concert closed with a selection from “No Remorse” entitled “Farewell, Ian Stuart.” A few of the other acts joined them onstage. Some of the crowd cried in mourning, because Stuart had recently died.

After the concert, while most drifted back to their cars, Joe Rowan, leader of the band Nordic Thunder, and a group of twenty to thirty skinheads decided to go out partying.

Racine is probably best known as the home of the Racine Belles, the first team to win the Women’s Professional Baseball League World Series in 1944, a feat immortalized in Penny Marshall’s film “A League of Their Own.” Its most recent notoriety came from what happened next.

Rowan and the skinheads went into a local convenience store called Starvin’ Marvin’s to buy beer and pretzels. They were on their way to a party in Hartford, about an hour northwest of Racine.

Their adrenaline still pumping from the concert, Rowan and the jackbooted skinheads began to trash the place. The clerk tripped a silent alarm and then went to the back room to wait for the cops to arrive.