Skinhead Who Once Idolized Metzger Testifies Against Him

PORTLAND - White supremacist Tom Metzger was described as ``almost a father figure'' yesterday by the young man sent to Portland to organize East Side White Pride Skinheads shortly before they murdered an Ethiopian in the streets two years ago.

Dave Mazzella, 21, testified that Metzger's son, John, recruited him into the movement when he was only 16. He liked being told that Jews, African Americans and other minorities were responsible for all his problems.

Mazzella learned his lessons so well - at the Metzger home and from Metzger's White Aryan Resistance newspaper and his ``Race and Reason'' television broadcasts - that he went on national TV as a spokesman for the Aryan Youth Movement.

And in the fall of 1988, the 19-year-old Mazzella was sent on the biggest assignment of his life - to heal the rifts between warring skinhead factions in Portland and, especially, to organize East Side White Pride skinheads into a militant force that would create enough violence to gain newspaper headlines and attract disadvantaged youth to the movement.

About a month after Mazzella's arrival in Portland, Mulugeta Seraw, a young Ethiopian, was clubbed and kicked to death by East Side White Pride skinheads.

Now, two years later, Mazella was on the witness stand in open opposition to his old mentor, Tom Metzger, who, along with his son, John, is a defendant in a $10 million ``wrongful death'' civil suit brought by the Seraw family.

Tom Metzger, Mazzella said, never did any of the dirty work himself, but he encouraged others to do violence in subtle ways, such as running in his newspaper violently racist articles and cartoons written by others.

Metzger, he said, had two personas - the public one, where he was always accessible to the media and temperate in his remarks, and the private one, where he spoke in epithets about minorities and strutted around with a gun at his side at the compound where he entertained young recruits.

Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, representing the Seraw family, asked Mazzella if he had kept in touch with the Metzgers after they sent him to Portland.

Mazzella, said he called and wrote regularly to report on progress in organizing the skinheads. He proudly told of black-bashing, of making an Hispanic get down and lick his boots in a park while another skinhead kicked the man with steel-toed boots.

Although Mazzella was with the skinheads the night of the murder, he left in another car before the attack on Seraw. He heard about it a few hours later when Steven Strasser, who was sharing a room with him, came in to say he thought they had killed a black person.

As a recruiter for the Metzgers, Mazzella said, he was paid nothing. Just to be associated with Tom Metzger and his white-supremacy organizations, and to bear the title of ``vice president,'' was enough for Mazzella.

Mazella said he thought so highly of Metzger that he asked him to preside over his wedding in 1988.

It was a strange wedding. Metzger showed a film, ``White Terror,'' to the wedding party the night before the wedding. During the wedding, he had the couple prick their fingers and mingle their blood. After he pronounced a Viking benediction, the newly married couple walked three times through members of the wedding party who raised their fists in a Nazi salute and shouted ``Seig Heil.''

Mazzella said he mailed the Metzgers clippings of racial violence done in the Portland area. Never, he said, was he told he had gone too far, that violence wasn't needed.

The case, which has attracted national interest, will move into its second week on Monday.