Ex-recruiter for skinhead groups tells of need to eliminate hatred

Twenty-two-year-old Frank Meeink speaks the language of a street-smart kid from "South Philly" who spent four years recruiting and leading Neo-Nazi skinheads as they spread their message of hatred.

Monday Meeink spent the day talking to groups of high school and university students at the request of the Anti-Defamation League of Las Vegas.

The League has been exposing and attempting to stamp out hate groups since it was founded in 1913.

Shelly Katz, director of the local ADL office, invited Meeink to speak to the young people and to tell them how he turned his life around.

Meeink was born in South Philadelphia the year his parents broke up.

"I was 12 or 13 years old, a punk rock skater, when I got involved with skinheads back in '88," Meeink said to a gathering at UNLV's Moyer Student Union.

He spent much of his time in a section of Pennsylvania the FBI called the Nazi Triangle, where some gang members would kill innocent people just to earn the dubious honor of tattooing a spider's web on an elbow.

"Sixty of us joined the Invisible Empire, the Ku Klux Klan," said Meeink.

"The Klan kicked us out because of the bad publicity," Meeink said. "But they helped us form our own group we called the Strike Force.

He said the group became proud of its violent actions, which once included flipping the car of a pregnant woman, causing her to have a miscarriage.

Meeink became a fugitive, traveling the countryside organizing and recruiting and visiting other skinhead groups.

He finally was arrested on a public access television program he produced.

In 1992 he was given a three-to-five year prison sentence in Illinois and served about a year.

In prison, he learned not to hate. Since his release four years ago, he has begun spreading the message of anti-hate among young people -- recruiting them to play hockey instead of joining hate groups.

Meeink is a thin, athletic young man who now covers his tattoos with sleeves and a full head of hair.

Though he can cover the scars on the outside, it is not as easy to cover those on the inside.

But he's working on it, taking the experiences of his teenage years and using them to divert potential skinheads away from lives of hate.

"I learned that what goes around, comes around," Meeink said. "If you constantly dwell on the negative, you are going to get negative. But if you dwell on the positive, you are going to get positive.

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