Former skinhead recounts road to reform
CALIFORNIA – Frank Meeink has always had a knack for recruitment. During the years he spent as a neo-Nazi skinhead he used to use this intangible skill to convince disillusioned youth to join him in his hatred of blacks, Jews and minorities.
Wanted by the law for a series of hate crimes at the age of 15 in his native South Philadelphia, Meeink fled to Illinois and quickly formed another gang.
His powers of persuasion landed him a cable access show in Chicago and he used the medium to spread the word about the skinhead movement.
“My ‘made in Philly’ tattoo on my head was famous,” Meeink told an auditorium full of students at California University of Pennsylvania.
He said he and his new gang in Illinois kidnapped a rival gang member and nearly beat him to death one Christmas Eve.
Wanted by police for kidnapping and other crimes, Meeink had the foolish audacity to accept an invitation to appear as a guest on another white supremacist’s cable television show.
He sneaked into the studio where the only people waiting to greet him were police officers.
At the age of 17, he began serving a three- to five-year sentence in a maximum-security prison.
Meeink had hit bottom, but it was in the big house where his reform began.
He now spends time with the daughter he had left behind in Philadelphia, gets along with his parents who kicked him out and had the swastika tattoo on his neck and the word ‘skinhead’ on his knuckles removed.
Meeink also talks to college students and Anti-Defamation Leagues across the county about respecting people of all races and religions.
“What goes around comes around,” Meeink told the Cal U audience last week. “Hate comes back to you. When you start showing love and respect, that ‘s all it takes.”
He told the Cal U audience that he grew up in an ethnically divided area of the city where blacks, Italians and Irish Catholics controlled their neighborhoods.
“You don’t go into other neighborhoods,” he said, noting that he lived in the Irish Catholic neighborhood.
But he didn’t like going home either because he said a man who drank heavily and beat him had moved in with him and his mother.
“I used to wish I would get hit by a car walking home from school,” Meeink said.
Eventually, he moved in with his father who made a living selling drugs out of a bar. He said the population at his new school was 85 percent black. High school students would jump the younger students and steal their trolley tokens.
He said he cut the last two months of the school year after walking into a bathroom one day and seeing four black students beating another student.
Meeink’s first encounter with skinheads came that summer, which he spent with his cousin and his family in rural Lancaster County.
The group taught him about neo-Nazism and told him that he could no longer watch any Philadelphia Eagles games because there were blacks on the team and a Jew owned the franchise.
When his freshman year in high school began in the fall, he moved back in with his mother.
He joined a local skinhead gang that regularly clashed with a rival group called “SHARPs,” or skinheads against racial prejudice.
A KKK group that he also ran with believed they were chosen by God to fight for white supremacy.
“I believed it. I wanted to believe it,” Meeink said. “There was no arguing with these dudes. They taught us how to shoot.”
One day they broke into a concert and started a fight. Later, they learned the concert was a benefit for an animal rights group. “It looked bad I guess, so we got thrown out of the Klan.”
Meeink had become notorious in the area and neither of his parents would allow him to live with them.
He started his own gang called “strike force.” One night when he said he wasn’t with them, they threw a cinder block into a car with a pregnant woman inside.
“Everybody knew it was my crew. I wasn’t there that night, but there was a warrant issued for me. I was on the run.”
Police arrested him during another fight, but he was still a juvenile and was sentenced to house arrest.
Again on the run from the law after “whacking” a man in the head and stealing a case of beer he just bought after leaving a party celebrating the anniversary of Hitler’s birthday, Meeink fled to Indianapolis, Ind., where he joined another skinhead gang. He was 16 years old then.
After a failed suicide attempt, police there discovered he was wanted in Pennsylvania so he called the gang and they managed to free him from the psychiatric hospital where he was being held.
The gang dropped him off in Springfield, Ill., where he formed another new gang.
Although he quickly doubled the gang’s membership, he wanted to spread the skinhead message to a larger audience and secured a spot on Chicago’s cable access channel.
On a Christmas Eve, he and his gang kidnapped a SHARPs gang member. They beat his body with the butt of a shotgun and kicked him in face with steel-toed boots. One blow pushed his head into the drywall. They beat him throughout the night, but released him on Christmas morning.
“We didn’t think he’d go to the cops, but he did,” Meeink said.
He was arrested at the television studio and was sent to prison. His ability to communicate served him well as he was “cool” with all the gangs inside the facility.
The book cart rolled by his cell one day and the book he grabbed was the Bible.
A “big black guy” invited him to join a Bible study group in the guy’s cell. When Meeink showed up, the group of men were kneeling in a circle and praying. They took turn reading and discussing passages from the book.
By the time he was released from prison, he had overcome his prejudice against blacks but believed “I’ll always hate the Jews.”
That ended when he returned to Philadelphia and a Jewish antique dealer was the only person willing to hire the swastika tattooed ex-convict.
Since then, he organized and continues to participate in a hockey program for disadvantaged youth with the Philadelphia Flyers.
Responding to a student’s question, Meeink said the skinhead movement flourished in late 1980s and early 1990s as a result of a poor economy and the lack of jobs. While the movement is not completely dead, it is not the force it once was, he said.