Skinhead Life: Consider It a Warning Sign

The same day William Finnegan’s book tour brought him to the San Fernando Valley, back to the suburb of his youth, a young man from the newer suburb of the Antelope Valley was being sent on a different kind of tour.

Danny Edward Williams, 24, a member of the Nazi Low Riders white supremacy gang, was sentenced to nearly five years in federal prison for two separate attacks in 1996.

Williams once said his goal was to “rid the streets of Lancaster of African Americans.”

Danny Williams’ name, as it happens, never appears in Finnegan’s “Cold New World”--only a passing reference to his crimes. The nonlethal stabbing of one black man and the beating of another were just part of the landscape of youthful hate that Finnegan explored from late ’95 to mid-’96 in the Antelope Valley.

Palmdale and Lancaster civic leaders were predictably peeved when Finnegan’s compelling chronicle of the skinhead low life, titled “The Unwanted,” first appeared in the New Yorker last November. They will not be pleased to find a longer version in a collection of journalism that suggests a bleak future for America’s middle-class and lower-class youth. “Cold New World” bears the subtitle “Growing Up in a Harder Country.”

On the day Danny Williams was sentenced to prison, Finnegan sat in a Northridge deli and tried to explain why the richest nation known to history can produce the likes of the Nazi Low Riders (NLR).

“A lot of kids are basically raising themselves,” he says for starters. “. . . They are so desperate for something to believe in.”

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Finnegan got to know dozens of morally adrift young people in his months in the Antelope Valley. Most were involved in a street war between the NLR and the anti-racist skinheads who call themselves Sharps. A young woman named Mindy Turner became his guide, and a young Sharp named Darius Houston became the pivotal figure of the tale.

Mindy was then 17, a high school dropout. As Finnegan reported, she had once flirted with Judaism and became a Mormon before, in the ninth grade, she started using methamphetamines and started to run with the Nazi Low Riders. At various times she’d been girlfriend to different NLRs, but a later friendship with Sharps had her branded by some a “race traitor.”

Darius, whose ancestry is African and European, ultimately committed homicide in a confrontation between Sharps and NLRs. Finnegan describes how Darius, drunk and angry, fatally stabbed NLR member Jeff Malone at a party. Authorities examined the murky details and decided not to press charges. Finnegan, however, was convinced that the Malone family was right to complain that their low social standing and skinhead association got Darius off the hook.

In researching the grim, hopeless skinhead world, Finnegan brings to life some of the dry academic studies that support his thesis that most of America’s young people face a future of downward mobility. “Why,” he asks, “are they so desperate for something to believe in?” The Mindy Turners, Darius Houstons and Jeff Malones, he told me, sense “the economic downdrafts, the chill” of an evolving economy that limits their options.

America may be commonly portrayed as sitting fat and sassy atop a global economy, but Finnegan sees the prosperity as illusory. Yes, Wall Street is booming, and yes, unemployment and inflation are down. But real wages are down, too, he says, and households need two incomes to make ends meet. In many ways, for many reasons, Finnegan suggests, America has abandoned its young.

Dysfunctional families and failing schools are all part of the equation. “There’s a change in the family structure, and a child-care system is failing to keep pace,” he says. Gangs become a surrogate family.

“The economics tell a lot of the story,” Finnegan continues. “How is this country managing its incredible wealth?”

Why, he asks, are America’s retirees wealthier than ever while millions of children live below the poverty line? He rattles off some statistics: “From 1970 to 1995, poverty among the elderly has fallen by 50%. During the same period, poverty among children has increased by 37%.”

And in a growing suburb like the Antelope Valley, the social phenomena collide. Downward mobility of whites meets the upward mobility of minorities, and the results can be violent.

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Finnegan grew up in Woodland Hills, graduating from Taft High in 1970 before attending UC Santa Cruz and embarking on a life in letters. He wrote three novels in his 20s and turned to journalism in travels about the globe. “Crossing the Line: A Year in the Land of Apartheid,” an account of the time he spent teaching in an all-black school in South Africa, led to his job with the New Yorker. He covered wars in Mozambique and Central America before turning his attentions to America’s youth.

“The Unwanted” is the fourth and final section of “Cold New World.” Before he came to the Antelope Valley, he researched the life of urban black youth in New Haven, Conn.; rural blacks in San Augustine, Texas, and second-generation Mexican immigrants in Yakima Valley, Wash.

Finnegan, who lives in New York, said he initially considered studying the social changes in the San Fernando Valley but soon realized the fast-growing Antelope Valley offered a more compelling subject--and a tale became more chilling the sad night Darius Houston stabbed Jeff Malone. Perhaps because no charges were filed, that slaying had escaped the radar of this newspaper.

I wondered what had become of Mindy and Darius. Finnegan says he has tried to stay in touch.

Mindy’s fortunes, he said, seem to change “with each new boyfriend.”

And as for Darius, he’s now living in the South Bay, working as a security guard.

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Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to him at The Times’ Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth, CA 91311, or via e-mail at scott.harris@latimes.com. Please include a phone number.