CONFESSIONS OF A SKINHEAD

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Beneath the energy and drama of his extremist life, though, discomfort began to gnaw at Leyden. For starters he was finding his social life to be cloyingly ingrown. "We usually stayed home to avoid contact with other races," Leyden explains. And as discontent seeped in, so did conflict. Leyden's brother is a policeman, and skinhead jokes about killing cops started to seem less than funny. His mother, who had polio as a child, has a slight limp, while Leyden's closest friends were busy calling disabled people "surplus whites."

But as he grew away from the movement, his wife remained loyal, Leyden says, spending more and more time with hard-core skinheads, some of whom Leyden thought were involved with guns and drugs. Following Nicole's wishes, the couple had left California for the "whiter" environment of St. George, Utah, and when he lost his job there, to Hailey, Idaho. (Nicole declined to comment for this story.) The marriage began to fall apart, and Leyden says he reached a torturous emotional crossroad: he even contemplated striking out to locate remnants of the Order, the near extinct racist commando units smashed by federal authorities more than a decade ago.

In the end, though, his two boys, now 2 and 4, kept him from the edge. "We have a saying in the movement that you don't want the weekend patriot--you want his kid," he observes. "I took a long look at my two sons. If my oldest is that radical now, he and his brother might be Order members some day. They'll murder people because of their skin color, religion or sexual preference. They'll go to jail, maybe die. My kids will be sacrificed. The idea hurt." Last fall he left Nicole, with whom he is now engaged in a bitter custody battle, and returned to California to live with his mother. It took some time, but with Sharon Leyden's encouragement he found the courage to contact the people at the Wiesenthal Center, a place his mother had heard about on TV news. "I'd spent years praying that hate would be removed from this family," she said recently. "I'm proud of my son." He had finally come home.