Arno Michaelis, seen in August 2011, once knew the white power world of steel-toed boots and swastika jackets that had nurtured and fed Oak Creek shooter Wade Michael Page. Credit: Mike De Sisti

By of the

News of the temple shooting in Oak Creek haunted the man once known as Arno the Barbarian, the tall, former white supremacist who helped found a hate group in Milwaukee in 1987, who sang - or rather shouted - racist lyrics for the band Centurion, who stomped across a stage egging on an audience of skinheads as they gave him straight-armed Nazi salutes.

Arno Michaelis, now 41 and working on the other side for a group called Life After Hate, knew the white power world of steel-toed boots and swastika jackets that had nurtured and fed the Oak Creek shooter Wade Michael Page.

Michaelis had lived in that world. On Sunday night, before the shooter had been identified, a nagging fear drove him to take extra sleeping pills; even then he'd nod off and wake with a start. He kept wondering, he said, "Did I recruit this guy? Is this someone I set loose on the world?"

It was, he admitted, a selfish worry. Even once Page, 40, was identified, and Michaelis realized he did not know the man, the knowledge brought little comfort.

"I was instrumental in creating the environment that created him," Michaelis said. "I have to take responsibility for that."

Listen to the music, sometimes called "hatecore," and you begin to understand its role in building small, violent racist communities of true believers and recruits - people who live a paradoxical existence of swaggering defiance and perpetual fear.

Page was gunned down by police responding to the temple shooting. But those seeking possible motives for his crime might look closely at the music Page played, said Mark S. Hamm, a criminology professor at Indiana State University who interviewed skinheads in the early 1990s, including several in Milwaukee for a book.

"The music scene is part and parcel of (Page's) involvement in a racist movement," Hamm said.

On Monday afternoon, Arno Michaelis put on a pair of headphones and listened to a song by one of Page's bands, a group called 13 Knots (traditionally there are 13 knots in a hangman's noose). The song is an anti-gay screed called "Buckshot." This is what Michaelis heard:

Now I'm on the warpath

Here I go again

Gonna be a bloodbath

Buckshot . . . just for you

Buckshot . . . what you gonna do?

The last line is followed by the sound of two gunshot blasts.

"It's very typical. It sounds a lot like a band I knew back then," Michaelis said. "My first thought is that this would be something a Hollywood producer would come up with. It's so stereotypical. It's just so dumb.

"At the same time, we probably would have loved that back then."

Music central to scene

Few people outside of hate groups and those who track them know much about the white power music scene.

"There is a whole underworld of these white supremacist bands that is virtually unknown to the general public. But it's probably the single most important source of financing for the movement and probably the best source of recruiting," said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center. "The music is incredibly important in terms of bringing young people into the movement."

Potok said Resistance Records, the label that put out Centurion's CDs, was bringing in about $600,000 a year around 2000, a sizable amount for a small operation. Part of the reason is that bands such as Centurion and those Page played for have woven their message into a mainstream tradition: teenage rebellion.

A report on Resistance Records by the Anti-Defamation League said the bands "subtly infiltrate" youth culture by channeling adolescent rebellion "into enmity and fury against non-Aryans."

The music - often lyrics screamed or chanted over thrashed, heavily distorted guitar - generates a physical reaction in its audience, Michaelis said.

"There was an adrenaline rush anytime you'd hear it. Hairs on the back of your neck would stand up. You'd get charged up, ready to attack someone . . .

"We'd be driving around and we'd see Joe Average White Guy on the street, and we didn't like how he looked and we'd go beat him up. Same with Joe Average Black Guy. And throughout all this the soundtrack was white power music."

The Southern Poverty Law Center has two entries for Michaelis, one saying he was involved in a 1989 altercation between racist and non-racist groups in Chicago, another saying he attended a Wisconsin skinhead concert in 1995. Neither entry could be verified, the center said.

The violence of the lyrics, the music, the mosh pits where the skinheads dance and crash into one another - all of it flies in the face of what drives the white supremacist movement - an all-consuming fear, Michaelis said. Although adherents use the label "white power," they believe themselves to be in a constant state of war surrounded by nonwhite people wishing to destroy their race and other whites asleep to the supposed danger.

"I was terrified of the world around me every day," Michaelis said. "Everywhere I looked I saw the work of the enemy. Everyone who wasn't white was the enemy. Everything that was on television was my enemy. They were all out to wipe out my people."

When he went on stage, when he bellowed and saw the crowd throw Nazi salutes his way, power replaced fear.

"It was like crack. It was a rush of adrenaline and power to see that you could whip up people to go out and beat the hell out of each other and beat other people. It was incredibly seductive and addictive, and you'd walk off the stage feeling like a god," he said.

When that high wore off, there was a truth that Michaelis could not square with the message of his music. A friend of his mother's, a Jewish man, hired him to work at his factory making T-shirts. The man insisted Michaelis basically was a good kid despite the swastika-adorned clothing he wore to work. There were the Latino co-workers who were kind to him. There was the black co-worker who once called to him when he was broke and hungry: Hey skinhead, you want a sandwich?

"It got harder and harder to deny this truth that was all around me, that anyone could be kind, anyone had that capacity," he said.

By late 1994 and 1995, Michaelis began the process of leaving the white power skinhead group he'd helped to found (he does not like to name it, believing it will do the group's bidding by providing publicity).

More than a decade later he helped to found the nonprofit group Life After Hate. The group was formally launched on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in 2010.

Today, he uses a word from his past, "warrior," to mean something very different, "someone who is fearless and strong enough to answer aggression with compassion."

Today, his stage is wherever someone asks him to give a talk. His theme is "kindness not weakness."