Except for the pimple-faced neo-Nazis putting together Molotov cocktails, the alley was empty. It was too dark that February evening in east Phoenix to see the shaved head of the youngest, an awkward sixteen-year-old with freckles and tattoos. One tattoo especially would have stood out had there been more light: Taking up most of the nape of his neck was a pair of crossed hammers--the bizarre brand of the Arizona Hammer Skins, a local white-supremacist skinhead gang with ties to the Ku Klux Klan and the White Aryan Resistance near San Diego.
A row of middle-class condominiums with neatly fenced patios backed up to the alley. Inside the bedroom of one condo, an older couple slept. Suddenly there was a thud, and then an explosion. The old people woke up in terror to see flames leaping up in their patio, just outside their bedroom window.
To this day, the man, a 71-year-old cancer victim, and his 69-year-old wife are convinced they were spared incineration because the bomb hit the window screen and bounced away.
What astonishes them most, though, is that their attackers had fire-bombed the wrong condo.
The intended victim was "Fishbone," a seventeen-year-old skinhead from a rival gang. When the attack occurred, Fishbone was asleep in his mother's condo just a few doors down from the terrified old people.
The fire-bombing marked the beginning of a three-month, Valley-wide rampage of brutal crimes by a teenager named Jimmy Miller, Chandler and Phoenix police say. After the February fire-bombing, according to police testimony at a juvenile court hearing last month, Jimmy went after a rival skinhead named Warbaby. With friends helping him, Jimmy allegedly lured Warbaby out of his grandparents' home, beat him, kicked him and pinned him down. Then one of the skinheads sliced off Warbaby's tattoos with an X-acto knife.
Six days after the assault on Warbaby, Jimmy allegedly stalked Kaipo Stant, a fifteen-year-old rival gang member, and stole his boots, $100 Doc Martens steel-toes, a skinhead status symbol. Jimmy was packing a gun, Stant says.
Jimmy ended the crime spree in May, when with his friends he fire-bombed yet another apartment, the detectives testified. And this time he chose the right unit, where members of a rival MD120 Col 1, Depth P54.02 I9.03 gang called the Sharp Skins were sleeping. Fortunately, the two youths were awakened by the sound of their window shattering, and were able to race out of the apartment just before the room exploded in flame. This scenario was detailed in Maricopa County Juvenile Court earlier this month by investigators from the Phoenix Fire Department, Phoenix police and Chandler police. They were testifying at a hearing to determine whether sixteen-year-old Jimmy Miller, arrested this summer along with friends Case Colcord and Chris Bindulski, should be tried as an adult for the fire-bombing and other crimes.
None of the three will talk about their alleged involvement in the events police describe as gang warfare between the racist Hammer Skins and their nonracist rivals the Sharp Skins.
Although Jimmy is only sixteen, the crimes he is accused of are premeditated, and so brutal that Judge Barry Silverman ruled on September 7 that he should be tried as an adult.
Meet Jimmy Miller, accused criminal and proud white supremacist. At odds with his family, Jimmy was mysteriously attracted to steel-toe boots, violence and racist rock 'n' roll. Within the closed world of the Hammer Skins, this high school dropout finally achieved success, rising quickly to leadership within the group.
Why, exactly, did he choose to join a Nazi hate club instead of the soccer team? or the Dead Heads? The answer, in part, lies with a highly skilled pied piper of hate, a middle-aged television repairman and former KKK Grand Dragon from the San Diego area. His name is Tom Metzger.
The founder of the White Aryan Resistance, or WAR, Metzger is a white supremacist revolutionary who is accused of recruiting skinheads to act as front-line warriors for his cause. Chandler police say Metzger is the "main propaganda spreader" in the Valley's skinhead underworld, and they know that Metzger and his local skinhead apostles shot tin cans out in the desert in 1989. One of those apostles is a former skinhead compadre of Jimmy's.
In a way, Jimmy is fortunate. He's more fortunate than one disciple of Metzger, a young skinhead in Oregon serving a twenty-year prison term for beating an Ethiopian man to death. The victim's family is suing Metzger and his son John, contending Metzger's agents indoctrinated the Portland skinheads Col 3, Depth P54.10 I9.14 "When somebody asks why I dislike blacks, I throw back statistics, you know. Like they populate so much of our state and they populate this much of our prison system," he says, rocking back on his plastic chair in the jail visiting room.
"Because of the fact that almanacs list Jewish populations, to me, the way it was printed it didn't look like the Holocaust was possible. I was taught it didn't happen. Maybe they used a few Jewish people for experiments and things, but that was to help the soldiers. At most, from the figures I've seen, only 40,000 Jewish people died." Jimmy says he was "taught" that Jews control the United States government, which he calls "ZOG," for "Zionist Occupation Government." Says Jimmy, "I've been taught that Jews privately own the Federal Reserve. I've seen paperwork on it." He won't say where he got the paperwork, but thoughts like that are contained in Tom Metzger's White Aryan Resistance newspaper, widely distributed in Arizona.
A so-called "Christian Identity" devotee, Jimmy says he believes in a "Christian" interpretation of the Bible: Aryans, not Jews, are the chosen people.
Although his eyes light up when he talks about white supremacy, Jimmy insists he's not a racist anymore. He says he had a change of heart before he was arrested. He says he "outgrew" the skinhead movement. But he also says, "Right now only my mom and my grandmother and my psychologist believe I've really changed."
JIMMY MILLER'S FAN CLUB showed up for his hearing in juvenile court last month to determine whether he should be tried as an adult. His mother Laurie Miller, a waitress from Scottsdale with straight, waist-length bottle-blond hair, fidgeted restlessly and hopped about the hallways like a sparrow. She ended her conversations with a nervous giggle. "I am a wreck, I'm so nervous," she would say, tugging at her hair. She refused several requests for interviews, but repeatedly told anyone who would listen, "Jimmy was a good kid. I never had any trouble from him. He never talked back. It's just that he got mixed up with the wrong crowd."
Jimmy's maternal grandmother Doris Burnett, also from Scottsdale, had a friendly manner as she explained she was there to cheer for her grandson. Burnett seemed to think her freckle-faced grandson had fallen prey to a conspiracy of powers he simply could not battle. "This thing is awful big," she told New Times when she refused an interview. "Somebody's got to fight it but I don't know who will."
Both Laurie Miller and her mother tried to paint a portrait of a happy, normal family--a kind of Leave It to Beaver without Dad--when they testified at Jimmy's hearing. Doris Burnett testified that she often attended Jimmy's Little League and Pop Warner games. She also said Jimmy was kind to the elderly and helped her trim bushes "even after he shaved his head." A couple of family friends also testified on Jimmy's behalf. One woman said Jimmy had been kind to her daughter, who had cerebral palsy. Another said Jimmy was always "very respectful."
But the story of Jimmy Miller's life, pieced together from court testimony and interviews with Jimmy and his friends, is far from the happy picture that Jimmy's family tried so desperately to paint in court.
JIMMY NEVER KNEW HIS FATHER, whom his mother says died when Jimmy was only three months old. "From what I heard, he was a land surveyor," Jimmy says. "I don't know much about him. It hurts my mom so much to ask about him that I really don't ask." His mother never remarried. When Jimmy refers to his "parents," like when he says, "My parents were happy with whatever I was doing," he means his mother and grandmother. When he was a kid, Jimmy and his younger brother Jason, who was born out of wedlock, moved around a lot. "I remember my brother's dad," he says. "We lived with him in Sedona for two years. He and my mom were going to get married but I guess they didn't get along." At one point, during Jimmy's junior high years, Laurie Miller took ill and was bedridden for two years. "They never did find out what it was," she testified, nervously fingering her long blond hair. "They never knew what it was," Jimmy echoes in an interview.
Jimmy moved to Nevada from Arizona twice with his mother, each time with a different boyfriend. They settled in Las Vegas in 1988 with Laurie Miller's then-beau, a fellow named Rick.
Wearing a flowered shirt and Levi's, Rick appeared in juvenile court to testify as a character witness for Jimmy. "He never gave us no trouble. He just did his thing, listening to music and stuff," Rick recalled of the Las Vegas days.
"I never went out, never did anything," Jimmy agrees. "I begged and begged my mom to move from Las Vegas," Jimmy says. "Finally we came back home." The family returned to Scottsdale and grandmother Doris Burnett. At the time, Jimmy was fifteen years old.
Another person joined the family circle sometime later. He is Jimmy's best friend, a seventeen-year-old neo-Nazi skinhead named Chris Dwyer. "He'll move out at the end of the month . . . . He's only seventeen, I can't just throw him out," Laurie Miller told the judge, explaining why she is exposing Jimmy's younger brother Jason, fifteen, to the same influences she says led Jimmy astray.
Laurie Miller brought Dwyer and Jason to juvenile court for Jimmy's hearing. While Laurie Miller paced up and down the halls and Jason listened passively to his Walkman, Dwyer sulked. "Sit up straight, don't slouch," Laurie Miller told him. She giggled nervously. "I want you to make a good impression." JIMMY SAYS HE METAMORPHOSED into a neo-Nazi in the fall of 1989, when he attended Scottsdale Alternative School, a place not known for its rigid academics. Jimmy, with an admitted life-long aversion to school, says he chose the place because "the classes were easier and I could graduate on time."
But Jimmy didn't graduate on time. He didn't graduate at all. He dropped out of school that Christmas.
By that time, he was a hard-core skinhead. He says it started with listening to racist music and wearing skinhead fashions. Then he began going to skinhead parties. He befriended Chris Dwyer, who would later move into his house. He was in turn befriended by a skinhead named Thumper. Thumper, skinheads say, is a disciple of Tom Metzger, and knows him personally.
Jimmy began reading white supremacist propaganda, and decorated his room at home. "I had my big American flag hanging across the wall and then the Confederate flag on the other side. It symbolized the part of America that at one time was pretty much the racist ideal. I had my German Nazi battle flag on the other side."
"I didn't like the skinhead stuff," Laurie Miller said in court. "Me and Jimmy got in quite a few arguments about it."
Then either his mother gave in, or Jimmy placated her.
"Parents," Jimmy explains, "don't mind if their kids are involved in the skinhead movement because it is antidrug and for the working class. Parents are always afraid their kids are going to get involved in drugs."
Jimmy and his friends drank beer instead, gallons of it.
His mother let him decorate his room with swastikas. And she didn't put an end to his marching after she discovered that Jimmy, at fifteen, had participated in his first neo-Nazi parade.
He moved deeper into the skinhead movement in November 1989. That's when he met Case Colcord, a former Burger King fry cook and swimming pool maintenance man from Las Vegas. Colcord and Thumper were vying for Metzger's approval, skinheads say.
Jimmy and Colcord met at a neo-Nazi march in front of a local synagogue. Shortly after the November march, Case and his brother Cean, also a skinhead, moved into an apartment in Sunnyslope. Jimmy and Case started hanging around together. They made quite a team. A 1990 Anti-Defamation League report lists Colcord as the leader of the Hammer Skins, and Jimmy as his "lieutenant." Says Joel Breshin of the ADL, "They would go shoot pool at the Sunnyslope Community Center and they would ask to have the names of the Jewish employees." Case Colcord, twenty, is now in jail, charged with the two fire-bombings and the tattoo assault on Warbaby. When he talks, it could be Jimmy. Or Tom Metzger.
"We were told that if we worked and loved our neighbor, the American dream would come true for us," Case says during a conversation at the jail. "It's not true. America is on the decline . . . . It's a multiracial slime pit, basically."
Jimmy and Case became enthusiastic march organizers. Under their leadership, the Hammer Skins marched twice, once on Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday in January, and again in April, to celebrate Adolf Hitler's birthday. Jimmy even contacted Phoenix police, asking for protection during the marches. He identified himself as a leader of the Hammer Skins. When Jimmy is asked why he organized a march on a day so disturbing for Jews, he answers, "The march showed them, `Hey, you're not in control as much as you think you are.' The march was to let them know we're here and we're not going away."
Jimmy and his buddies dressed up for the march in their Doc Martens and bomber jackets. They carried huge flags bearing swastikas. Some sported Nazi military insignia. "SIX MILLION JEWS DEAD," they shouted to the Jewish people who watched them march by. "WHO CARES?"
Jimmy is still pleased that he managed to recruit more and more marchers each time he organized a parade.
"Jimmy was a brainwasher," says Brad, one of the fire-bombing victims. "He would try and fill your head full of shit. It would sound so good you'd want to believe it. He was a recruiter. Hammer Skins believed in recruiting seventh and eighth graders, tempting them with alcohol, giving 'em support."
During Jimmy's hearing, the Maricopa County Attorney's Office showed films of Jimmy marching in skinhead regalia. It was impossible to tell what Jimmy's grandmother thought as she watched footage of her grandson stomping down Central Avenue on Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, yelling "NIGGER, NIGGER, NIGGER--OUT! OUT! OUT!" Her face was impassive, as though she were watching a film in traffic school.
But during a recess following the video, her face broke into a smile as she faced a black court official who had also watched the film. She asked the black man, "When are you going to give me my boy back?"
BY THE TIME of the Martin Luther King Jr. march, Jimmy had proved he possessed leadership quality. He was a Hammer Skin lieutenant. He had a commander, Case Colcord, and rules to follow. He had responsibilities. He organized marches and handed out leaflets trumpeting his gang. He "preached" about his "racial values" to anyone who would listen.
He wore his uniform of Doc Martens, a black tee shirt with crossed hammers, tight jeans and suspenders. He had his tattoos, his shaved head, his Nazi flags. He had a girlfriend named Crysti with hair dyed the color of anthracite and flesh a pale, anemic white from a careful avoidance of the sun.
He had a gang of friends who welcomed him in their apartments, ratty though they might be.
Jimmy had a family. Jimmy was a success.
More than anything, Jimmy had access to violence. The Hammer Skins often brawled with their archenemies the Sharp Skins. But these so-called nonracist skinheads loved violence every bit as much as their neo-Nazi counterparts. "Whenever I heard the word `Nazi,' it was like spontaneous. I would be ready to bash their heads in," says one Sharp Skin.
The crime spree Jimmy is charged with began several weeks after the Martin Luther King Jr. march. According to the police, everything Jimmy is charged with--from the fire-bombings to helping slice off a tattoo--was in some way justified by the skinhead ideology he believed in.
The crime spree was part of a larger gang warfare between the Hammer Skins and the Sharp Skins. Jimmy says he heard that a Sharp Skin had kicked a Hammer Skin's girlfriend, causing her to abort her baby. Police are skeptical, and aren't even sure if the girl exists, but they think the hypothetical attack was enough to galvanize Jimmy and his friends into action.
But there were other, more specific, reasons for each attack.
Fishbone, the object of the fire bomb that landed by mistake in the patio of the old people, is half black. "You're a stupid nigger," Fishbone says Jimmy once told him.
Fishbone was also a member of the rival Sharp Skins. And he had clobbered Jimmy's friend Mark with his steel-toed boots one night at a Bad Religion concert.
Jimmy and his friends would wait until Fishbone's classes were out at Central High School and follow him slowly in their car, threatening him with death, Fishbone says.
At Jimmy's hearing, Phoenix Fire Department investigator Art Nunez and Phoenix Police Department detective Al Shearer said an informant reported that Jimmy and his buddies planned the fire-bombing over a few beers at Case's apartment in Sunnyslope. They borrowed a car belonging to Mike Teague, a skinhead who has been arrested for possession of drugs, littering and urinating in public.
Then they bombed the wrong condo.
Fishbone's white mother, a 38-year-old respiratory therapist, says, "Before the fire-bombing, I'd get calls at four o'clock in the morning. The kid on the other end threatened to kill us both.
"He said I had no business creating mongrel children."
These days, Fishbone sleeps with a butcher knife just in case one of Jimmy's friends comes back. "It's pretty hard to go to school when someone has called your mom and said, `We're going to kill your nigger son.'"
Jimmy also had reason to dislike Shawn Cooper, "Warbaby," whose tattoo was sliced off. "Warbaby had ambitions of starting his own gang," says the ADL's Breshin. "That's why they cut out his tattoos. The Hammer Skins felt there was only room for one Nazi leader in town."
It was a crossed hammer tattoo that Jimmy and his friends slashed out of Warbaby's arm with an X-acto knife during an assault on March 21. According to police, Jimmy, Case and a third friend assaulted a skinhead named Russ, and ordered him to show them where Warbaby lived. Jimmy then allegedly lured Warbaby out of his grandparents' house, while the others hid in the bushes. They beat Warbaby, and then Case cut the tattoos out, Chandler police allege.
Warbaby, twenty, has concluded probation for shooting a gun into a home in Chandler in February 1989. He'd been asked to leave a party there after a fellow skinhead was involved in a stabbing. Warbaby refused an interview but says he is no longer a skinhead. Although that attack may have been personal, gang warfare was the reason Jimmy allegedly robbed Kaipo Stant, a fifteen-year-old member of the rival Sharp Skins. Stant says Jimmy called him a "nigger lover," and stalked him near a city park, threatening to assault him. Jimmy then allegedly robbed Stant of his Doc Martens boots. That time, Jimmy was wearing a gun and was accompanied by Chris Dwyer, who was carrying a nightstick, Stant told the cops.
Jimmy allegedly went after the Sharp Skins again on May 20, in a fire-bombing that was to be the end of the crime spree. The victims were Tex and Brad, leaders of the Sharp Skins, as well as other members of the gang who used their apartment as a crash pad. This time, there was no window screen to deflect the bombs. Tex remembers waking up to the glass shattering, and managed to awaken his buddies and run out before the apartment exploded. The little unit sustained $50,000 worth of damages.
This string of crimes was the center of the discussion in September, when Judge Barry Silverman decided it was serious enough to warrant Jimmy's trial as an adult.
JIMMY HAD BEEN ARRESTED in June, betrayed by a friend he thought he could trust. Thumper--Richard Allen Moller--had tricked Jimmy into admitting he'd done the fire-bombing of the Sharp Skins, police said. What happened was this: Thumper had landed in prison for numerous probation violations stemming from a 1988 assault charge. Thumper claimed in court papers that he'd been raped by inmates during one of his jailhouse stints. Possibly in hopes of avoiding further incarceration, Thumper cooperated with Phoenix police.
When Thumper called Jimmy from jail, he got Jimmy to admit to the fire-bombing, detectives testified at the hearing. Jimmy says he feels "deceived." He had always considered Thumper a friend, and had even given Thumper the privilege of carving the hammer tattoos on the nape of Jimmy's neck. Jimmy now denies doing the fire-bombing, although he admits he claimed credit for it when he talked to Thumper. The reason he gave for telling Thumper he'd done the fire-bombing is significant.
Jimmy says he did it for "recognition."
One of the kids who was fire-bombed thinks Jimmy might get the same jailhouse treatment Thumper did.
"When they see Jimmy in jail, they won't see a Hammer Skin. They'll just see a little kid running around. He's gonna be someone's cupcake. They're gonna trade him for a pack of cigarettes," says Brad. "He deserves everything he gets."
THERE WERE PLENTY OF REASONS, said Jimmy's lawyer Mike Bresnehan, not to try Jimmy Miller as an adult. A court psychologist wrote that Jimmy was not a "hard-core delinquent."
"He's not your normal gang member, but a kid who's made some very bad decisions," the lawyer said. "He has many basic middle-class values."
Jimmy had a lot of "baggage" in his head about blacks, Jews, and Hispanics that was "amplified" by his contact with skinheads, the lawyer said. "If you send him to prison, any problem he has now will get worse, he won't get counseling and he will join a gang for protection. Get this kid counseling, put him in Adobe Mountain until he's eighteen, and he will learn cause and effect."
Bresnehan pointed out that Jimmy had earned his GED while in custody and had asked to have his tattoos removed. The lawyer emphasized over and over that Jimmy wanted to go straight and make something of his life. Jimmy, the lawyer said, no longer wanted to be a skinhead.
During Bresnehan's speech, Laurie Miller sat next to her son as she had throughout the trial. Jimmy sat rock still. His hands were folded. His manacled feet were crossed at the ankles.
Then Judge Silverman made his ruling. He said it was impossible to tell whether Jimmy's change of heart was sincere. Nor was it his job to decide whether Jimmy should "have the book thrown at him." His job was simply to determine if, given the gravity of the crimes, the public safety would be protected if Jimmy remained in the juvenile system for only a year and a half. He determined that the public safety would be better protected if Jimmy were tried and sentenced as an adult. He would have to be transferred from the juvenile facility to the Madison Street Jail.
When Laurie Miller heard this, she did not look at her son. She did not take his hand. Instead, she let out a bone-chilling shriek and ran out of the courtroom. She could be heard sobbing in the hallway. The judge left the room. The hearing was over.
Jimmy's grandmother went straight for Bresnehan. "You knew this was a done deal," She hissed. "You knew it from the start. You knew it all along."
Jimmy Miller swallowed hard and stared straight ahead.
"Hammer Skins were civilized," Jimmy says. "The first thing they did was make you feel comfortable."
One of the skinheads sliced off Warbaby's tattoos with an X-acto knife.
That same, lonely, loveless quality Jimmy projects is what made him so ripe for indoctrination.
"It didn't look like the Holocaust was possible. I was taught it didn't happen," Jimmy says.
"Parents," Jimmy explains, "don't mind if their kids are involved in the skinhead movement because it is antidrug and for the working class."
More than anything, Jimmy had access to violence.
"The kid on the other end threatened to kill us both. He said I had no business creating mongrel children."
She did not look at her son. She did not take his hand. Instead, she let out a bone-chilling shriek and ran out of the courtroom.
