The 17-year-old had started many fights and beaten up a lot of black people, anti-racists — pretty much anyone who wasn’t just like him. He had also recently acquired an arsenal, including an AK-47, a 9mm pistol, a rifle and a sawed-off shotgun.
Thinking one of his victims was out for revenge, he grabbed the shotgun.
Taking a deep breath, he put his finger on the trigger, flung open the curtain, and found himself pointing the barrel directly into the face of his mother.
“She sank down into the bushes weeping and quivering,” he writes. “‘Why do you have a gun? What life are you living?’”
Piccolini was living a life of violence and destruction, he writes in his new memoir, “White American Youth” (Hachette Books), out Tuesday. Between the ages of 14 and 22, he was first a member, then a leader, of the white power movement in America, spreading the white supremacist and Nazi doctrine, and hurting anyone who disagreed with him.