FROM HATRED TO HEALING; FORMER NEO-NAZI BECOMES POWERFUL SPOKESMAN AGAINST BIGOTRY.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

In the old days, whenever rage or boredom overcame him, T.J. Leyden always knew exactly what to do. He would go ``beat the hell out of somebody.''

The routine never varied. He and his skinhead pals would get tanked up on cheap beer, sometimes 12 or 13 cases in a single weekend blitzkrieg. Then they'd prowl the streets of Redlands, hoping to spot a mixed-race couple, an effeminate-looking man or maybe just some old bum who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like wolves culling a sheep from the fold, they'd create a pretext for starting a fight, then lay into the guy with fists, bats, bottles, teeth.

``Once, I bit somebody on the side and took a chunk out of 'em,'' recalls the brawny former U.S. Marine, struggling to suppress a crooked grin. ``I think about it sometimes. I think, God, I hope he didn't have AIDS!''

Outside the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, the afternoon sun is scouring the streets with purifying 90-degree intensity.

But Thomas James Leyden, 31 years old, is wearing his customary uniform of Doc Martens, jeans and a long-sleeved gray pullover. That way, his colleagues at the center can't see the swastika, the SS storm trooper's head or any of the other 27 tattoos emblazoned across Leyden's thick, pale body. Although he has been on the Wiesenthal Center payroll for nearly a year, Leyden knows not everyone there is enamored of having an ex-neo-Nazi as a resident scholar.

``I think at first I was kind of like a freak, like a freak of nature,'' Leyden says quietly. ``I think a lot of people here felt that way. I think they still do.''

Today Leyden (pronounced LIE-dun) deals with his anger by pounding a punching bag at his home in the high desert. Or by ``screaming at the top of my lungs.''

But mostly he deals with it by telling a story, the story of a smart, lonely adolescent with a short fuse who became an apostle of hate.

With the moral and financial backing of the Wiesenthal Center, a watchdog group that monitors anti-Semitism and other racist activity, Leyden tells that story several times a week to anyone who'll listen. To churches. Synagogues. High school classes. Juvenile detention centers. Police departments. The honorarium he receives helps him meet a $400 monthly child support payment to his two sons, 5 and 3, who live with his ex-wife.

Speaking in a flat, affectless tone, Leyden describes growing up angry and alienated in the teeming isolation of San Bernardino County. He tells of how his stint in the U.S. Marine Corps, in a psychological twist worthy of ``A Clockwork Orange,'' made him ``a better racist than I ever was before.''

A profile in penance, Leyden speaks of his creeping disenchantment with the white-power movement, culminating in the day when his 2-year-old son switched off a TV program depicting black people.

``Daddy,'' the child reproached Leyden, ``you know we don't watch shows with n------.''

And he speaks, more in sorrow than self-pity, of the long odds against him ever regaining custody of his sons, whose mother is still involved with the movement.

Since renouncing his brutal past, Leyden has testified on white-power recruiting methods to the Pentagon, the FBI and the Westchester County, N.Y., prosecutor's office. He has shocked thousands of listeners with his point-blank admissions of guilt, and alarmed even hard-boiled cops and attorneys with his insider tales of how white supremacists are fomenting an international race war.

Not surprisingly, his true confessions have earned him the epithet ``race traitor,'' plus a slew of e-mail ``flames'' and phone threats, from former comrades. One electronic Web site, the ``Thomas `T.J.' Leyden Is a Dirty Rat Page,'' describes him as ``a low-life rat that is snitching to Jews and authorities about the skinheads that befriended him.'' The author of the page goes on to promise that ``me and others have a BOOT PARTY with your name on it.''

But Leyden's public mea culpas have made believers of his onetime enemies. Rabbi Marvin Hier, the Wiesenthal Center's founder, says he was extremely skeptical two years ago when the young man with the shaved head and the strawberry-blond complexion turned up at the Center with his mother, offering to donate his expertise. It took months of intense interviews and background checks to convince the rabbi of Leyden's good intentions. Last July, he brought Leyden on as a paid consultant to the center's national task force against hate.

``It was a very hard decision for me, and it didn't come lightly,'' Hier says. ``It's very hard to believe on the face of things that, normally speaking, a person could make that dramatic a change and walk away from it.''

What ultimately persuaded him, Hier says, wasn't Leyden's character per se but that of his mother, a born-again Christian who'd been urging her son to make amends.

``I've always believed that if a person's raised a certain way, they'll only go so far,'' says Sharon Leyden, 49. ``T.J. went a long way and I always thought he'd be back. And I prayed that he would.''

Family's strong influence

T.J. Leyden was raised to be tough. It came with the territory in a clannish, male-dominated household. T.J.'s father, a former truck driver also named Thomas James, taught his three sons to stick together. If someone hit you, you hit back. If someone called you a sissy, well, family pride required you to set him straight. One of T.J.'s earliest memories is of losing two front teeth when he fell on his cousin's knee during a brawl.

``We were just kind of a middle-class family,'' says Sharon Leyden. ``We went to church, and the boys were in Little League. T.J. even took karate.''

A different set of family values was imparted by Leyden's grandfather, who would tell his grandchildren, ``We don't bring darkies into this home.''

When Leyden was 14, his parents went through a nasty divorce. As the eldest child, T.J. took the brunt of it. Once, when his old man showed up at one of T.J.'s high school baseball games, the boy told him to get away.

``I hate you,'' he said, ``You're not my father anymore.''

(Leyden says he still has an up-and-down relationship with his dad, who now lives in Missouri.)

After dropping out of ninth grade Leyden began searching for a place to unleash his rage and pain. He found it in slam-dance pits and punk rock clubs.

Around this time, Leyden began drinking heavily and experimenting with other drugs, including LSD. If his parents noticed their son's erratic behavior, they didn't mention it. As long as T.J. parked his ideology at the door, his beliefs and his dress code went unquestioned.

Marines couldn't help

Ask Leyden why he joined the Marines at 21 and he'll tell you it was to avoid going to prison. His worried mother had other hopes. If anyone could smooth out her son's rough edges, she felt sure the Corps would.

She was wrong. Stationed at Kaneohe Bay Air Station in Hawaii, Leyden kept a copy of ``Mein Kampf'' in his locker, along with a Third Reich battle flag. On the wall next to his bunk he placed the Confederate Stars and Bars.

The Corps proved to be fertile ground for finding new white-power recruits. Leyden would teach promising newcomers about the White Aryan Resistance by showing them videos and playing them music by bands that preached race-based violence. He would pass out copies of ``The Turner Diaries,'' a seminal white-power tract that depicts the overthrow of the U.S. government. He got to know White Aryan Resistance founder Tom Metzger.

But the military had had enough of T.J. Leyden. In 1990, he received an ``other than honorable'' discharge based on his penchant for fighting and his questionable loyalty to the U.S. government.

Aggressive speaker

The crowd trickling into the dimly lit auditorium at the Wiesenthal Center consists mainly of students and retirees. A few are caught off guard when Leyden comes bounding into the room and immediately launches into his talk.

Even in his new confessional mode, Leyden is an aggressive presence who wields words like blunt objects. He gives this same presentation twice a week at the Wiesenthal Center, plus dozens of other venues. Though he loves the work, he admits his spiel can sound overly practiced.

``Sometimes I show emotions, sometimes I break down, but I like to cut to the chase. Sometimes I'll be talking about a certain beating or a certain incident and somebody in the audience kind of looks like one of my victims. And sometimes I wonder if anybody in the audience was one of my victims.''

The crowd of about 35 people listens attentively while Leyden bus-tours them through his convoluted life. At the end, a few ask respectful questions. Others thank him for sharing his message.

A man who has been scribbling notes calls out from a back row: ``So do you think we're going to see a lot more events like Oklahoma City?''

Leyden doesn't hesitate.

``You got it. I guarantee it.''

Later, Leyden gathers his thoughts in the spiraling atrium that connects the 19-year-old Wiesenthal Center to its new sister facility, the Museum of Tolerance. The haunting icon of Anne Frank stares at him from across the room.

``I don't ask for forgiveness,'' Leyden says. ``I am sorry, but my victims will tell me if they forgive me or not.''

Hier agrees that no easy road lies open to the convert.

``There's no absolution that anybody gives in the Jewish tradition. You make your way back to the community by your deeds, not by your rhetoric. Rhetoric is a cheap commodity. Deeds are much tougher.''

At least Leyden won't be making his way alone. Besides paying his honorarium, the Wiesenthal Center also is subsidizing Leyden's visits to a psychotherapist and underwriting his courses at a local college where he hopes one day to earn a degree in sociology.

The center also is paying for laser surgery to remove 28 of Leyden's tattoos. He's keeping the 29th - his Marine Corps bulldog.

Maybe then the long-sleeved pullover - the hair shirt that is T.J. Leyden's past - finally can come off for good.

``People ask, `Do you think you could slip back,' '' Leyden says. ``And I say, `No, because I wake up every morning and there's a Nazi in the mirror.' ''

As he speaks, three men pass through the atrium pushing metal carts. Leyden grins and waves at them, and the men wave back.

``They work in the deli here,'' he explains matter-of-factly. ``It's a good kosher deli.''

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3 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) What turned T.J. Leyden from neo-Nazi skinhead to minority advocate?

(2) Former white supremacist and neo-Nazi Tom Leyden is reflected in the stone wall at the Museum of Tolerance.

(3) T.J. Leyden - who always wears long-sleeved shirts - shows the tattoos he would like removed from his forearms.

Michael Owen Baker/Daily News