Christian Picciolini was a skinhead. Then he became a dad. Now, he's on a mission.
hirty years ago, Christian Picciolini was an angry, disillusioned 14-year-old smoking a joint in an alley and admiring a Firebird driven by Clark Martell, the founder of the Chicago Area Skinheads (CASH). Martell, one of the prominent Neo-Nazis in America, noticed. ‘Don’t you know the communists and Jews want you to smoke weed to keep you docile?’ he asked. Picciolini didn’t, but he was willing to listen and then, for five years, he was willing to surrender his personal identity — what had formed of it anyway — to CASH. By age 16, he was the group’s leader and by age 19 he was headed to Germany with his white power band to play for thousands of skinheads. He had quickly built a career in hate and aspired to more.
Then he held his son for the first time.