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Skinheads: Members don't call attention to themselves. (Originated from Orange County Register)
Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service; 7/24/1993; Weber, Tracey Tracy
SANTA ANA, Calif. _ He was a smart kid from a churchgoing family, a California teen with his head buried in library books, his feet clinging to a skateboard. His grandfather was a retired Westminster policeman and former Marine.
If Carl ``Dan'' Boese was a little strident about the rights of white people sometimes, his family chalked it up to teen-age rebellion.
Then in March, the Huntington Beach teen-ager was arrested on suspicion of hoisting a Nazi banner up a Huntington Beach high school flagpole and chalking two swastikas on the lawn. Last week, federal agents accused Boese, 17, and some of his ``skinhead'' pals of plotting to machine-gun a church full of black people.
Now he, along with six other alleged supremacists from Los Angeles and Orange counties, face weapons charges and the possibility of landing in history books as the race warriors who plotted to murder Rodney King, a black motorist beaten by Los Angeles police officers.
Boese's family members in Huntington Beach are stunned. They never suspected the small, charismatic teen might have been in so deep.
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``I don't know everything that has gone on,'' said his mother, Gwen Boese. ``Only God knows that.''
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Police say Boese is part of a new breed of white supremacists. They're intelligent. Sophisticated. They blend in. They look like surfers. Skateboarders. Typical teens. Only a few shave their head and sport swastika tattoos.
Some even have their own brand of political correctness. They're careful not to rant and rave too much, or use racial slurs around non-believers.
They are not to be underestimated, police say. Skinhead gangs are blamed in 22 killings nationwide in the past three years, according to the Colorado-based Center for the Study of Racial and Ethnic Violence.
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They are the shock troops of older, more established white supremacist organizations, authorities say.
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``I think they're dangerous because they're not territorially motivated, they're not economically motivated. These guys are politically motivated and that crosses a lot of boundaries,'' said Huntington Beach Police Detective Mike Mello.
Many skinheads _ and wanna-be's who sport the look, but not the hard-core attitudes _ are drawn to the beach city because of its notoriety as a hot spot for white supremacists, Mello said. Often, the youths are alienated, disenfranchised teens from broken homes, and so a skinhead gang is an attractive lure, he said.
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``They say, `You can make a difference in this world _ a difference for white people.'''
But some of the youngsters ``are almost too intelligent for their own good. A little bit of knowledge gets blown out of proportion. They read `Mein Kampf' (Adolf Hitler's autobiography) and think everything in there is true,'' said Mello, a veteran gang investigator.
The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith sees last week's arrests as perhaps signaling a chilling new era among young skinheads.
``In the past, this has really just been a bunch of maladjusted kids and they go out and drink some beer and find someone to harass or beat up,'' said Jonathan Bernstein, the league's regional director.
Bernstein said his group worries that the young skinheads might not be growing out of the movement as they grow older: ``We're trying to keep tabs on what happens to them after they graduate from high school.''
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Skinheads in Orange and Los Angeles counties say they're misunderstood. All they're trying to do is stick up for the white race, they say.
``They can have their black power, but we're not allowed to. It's racist,'' complained Kori Munson, 17, an Orange County teen associated with the Fourth Reich Skins, a skinhead gang tied to alleged plots to kill blacks and Jews.
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Some parents said they were the last to know what their children were up to on nights when they gathered to talk about white power.
``I felt really guilty,'' said Roy Traster, who was surprised when he learned that his son, Tim, 16, was involved in the Fourth Reich.
``I believe all of us mothers and fathers are blind to one degree or another,'' said Traster, 49, of Long Beach. ``Our children take the back seat.''
The youngsters keep their parents in the dark on purpose _ and white supremacist leaders like it that way.
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From his Fallbrook headquarters, Tom Metzger, founder of the White Aryan Resistance, or WAR, said he doesn't push young recruits to parade down Main Street. ``That's counterproductive. We encourage them to dress normally, influence your friends,'' he said.
But in Boese's case, the warning signs were there: The Doc Marten boots with red laces, the black flight jacket with a Confederate flag on the back, the copy of ``Mein Kampf,'' the talk about being a White Patriot, police reports said.
Those signals were mixed with good grades. Boese was an above-average student in several advanced-placement courses and said he tried to look like a skateboarder among non-believers.
Family and friends outside the gang said it was difficult to tell whether Boese's beliefs would turn to violence or whether he was simply a rebellious teen coping with a broken home.
Boese didn't seem to be rebelling against his family's Christian background, said the family's pastor, the Rev. Chuck Leckie at Bethany Bible Fellowship in Westminster.
``We detected he was rebelling against everything,'' he said. ``You throw divorce into the middle of it and the perceived rejection.''
The boy's mother tried to alter her son's path, the pastor said. But, he said, her efforts were like throwing fuel on a smoldering fire.
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``The more she tried to reach him, the more he shut down,'' Leckie said.
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The parental red light went on in March, when Boese was arrested on suspicion of running a Nazi flag up the Oceanview High School flagpole and etching two swastikas in chalk on the school lawn.
When Huntington Beach detectives contacted Gwen Boese, she encouraged officers to investigate, police records show. She even turned over racist fliers she had found among her his belongings, a report said.
Detectives found handwritten essays filled with anti-Semitic statements and ending with the Nazi salute, ``Sieg Heil.''
At the police station, officers read Boese his rights, gave him a Dr. Pepper, they said he started talking. Boese told officers he wrote and distributed white-supremacist recruitment fliers at several places in Huntington Beach. One flier advertised a phone line he said he started to reach like-minded individuals.
Boese told police the seeds of supremacy were sown early _ in the fifth grade. Growing up in Orange County, he said, he felt like a minority and a victim of blacks and Hispanics.
He said he belonged to a cell, a small group of people who ``feel that their mission is to make a statement for the white people,'' the report said. He also said he considered himself a leader among his skinhead peers.
A few weeks after the incident at Oceanview, authorities said, Boese was plotting something far more deadly than vandalism.
Undercover FBI agents said he talked about bombing the First AME Church in Los Angeles, about ``knocking people off'' and about robbing local gun stores, court records show.
``Boese said that they should start with hard training and minor operations, then escalate into more violent acts,'' according to a federal agent's affidavit.
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He allegedly told an undercover agent he could make a bomb and place it under a car axle, but wasn't sure about using explosives because they didn't guarantee death.
Agents said Boese and Chris Fisher, alleged leader of the Fourth Reich, also said they had attached a bomb to the porch of Chinese-Mexican member of Lakewood High School's Spur Posse, a group of teen-agers who reportedly kept score of sexual conquests. The bomb exploded and damaged the house and the car.
His skinhead friends said Boese was a leader.
``Dan is a cool guy. Kind of quiet. Really intelligent,'' Tim Traster said. ``He's really into his race. He's not afraid to tell anybody that. He's never intimidated.
``If a big black guy from prison or a big anybody from any other race said that he's a wimp, he'd be the first one to jump in his face and say, `No, I'm not a wimp.' He stands up for himself and he's a little guy. He's like dynamite.''
For the Boese family, their worst fears may have been realized in the past week.
``The family is simply trying to cope with what they're going to do,'' Leckie said.
He said Boese was able to call the house one day from Eastlake Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles, but got the answering machine and simply left the message: ``I love you.'' Copyright © Streetgangs.com, All RIGHTS RESERVED. Disclaimer
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