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5 December 2013 Last updated at 06:51 GMT
Nicky Crane: The secret double life of a gay neo-Nazi
By Jon KellyBBC News Magazine
He was the British extreme right's most feared streetfighter. But almost right up to his death 20 years ago, Nicky Crane led a precarious dual existence - until it fell dramatically apart.
The skinhead gang marched in military formation down the High Street clutching iron bars, knives, staves, pick-axe handles and clubs.
There were at least 100 of them. They had spent two days planning their attack. The date was 28 March 1980.
Soon they reached their target - a queue of mostly black film-goers outside the Odeon cinema in Woolwich, south-east London.
Then the skinheads charged.
Most of them belonged to an extreme far-right group called the British Movement (BM).
This particular "unit" had already acquired a reputation for brutal racist violence thanks to its charismatic young local organiser. Many victims had learned to fear the sight of his 6ft 2in frame, which was covered in Nazi tattoos. His name was Nicky Crane.
But as he led the ambush, Crane was concealing a secret from his enemies and his fascist comrades alike. Crane knew he was gay, but hadn't acted on it. Not yet.
Twelve years later, the same Nicky Crane sat in his Soho bedsit. His room looked out across London's gay village - the bars and nightclubs where he worked as a doorman, where he drank and danced.
Crane flicked through a scrapbook filled with photos and news clippings from his far-right past.
For years he had managed to keep the two worlds entirely separate. But now he wasn't going to pretend any more.
A boy stands in front of a poster featuring Nicky Crane
Nicola Vincenzo Crane was born on 21 May 1958 in a semi-detached house on a leafy street in Bexley, south-east London. One of 10 siblings, he grew up in nearby Crayford, Kent.
As his name suggests, he had an unlikely background for a British nationalist and Aryan warrior. He was of Italian heritage through his mother Dorothy, whose maiden name was D'Ambrosio. His father worked as a structural draughtsman.
But from an early age Crane found a surrogate family in the south-east London skinhead scene.
Continue reading the main story
Skinheads
"When you've come from a tough background, when you get that identity, it's a powerful thing to have," says Gavin Watson, a former skinhead who later got to know Crane.
The south-east London skins also had close connections to the far right. Whereas the original skinheads in the late 1960s had borrowed the fashion of Caribbean immigrants and shared their love of ska and reggae music, a highly visible minority of skins during the movement's revival in the late 1970s were attaching themselves to groups like the resurgent National Front (NF).
In particular the openly neo-Nazi BM, under the leadership of Michael McLaughlin, was actively targeting young, disaffected working-class men from football terraces as well as the punk and skinhead scenes for recruitment.
Crane was an enthusiastic convert to the ideology of National Socialism.
"Adolf Hitler was my God," he said in a 1992 television interview. "He was sort of like my Fuhrer, my leader. And everything I done was, like, for Adolf Hitler."
Within six months of joining the BM, Crane had been made the Kent organiser, responsible for signing up new members and organising attacks on political opponents and minority groups.
He was also inducted into the Leader Guard, which served both as McLaughlin's personal corps of bodyguards and as the party's top fighters. Members wore black uniforms adorned with neo-Nazi symbols and were drilled at paramilitary-style armed training weekends in the countryside.
They were also required to have a Leader Guard tattoo. Each featured the letters L and G on either side of a Celtic cross, the British Movement's answer to the swastika. Crane dutifully had his inked on to his flesh alongside various racist slogans.
By now working as a binman and living in Plumstead, Crane quickly acquired a reputation, even among the ranks of the far right, for exceptionally brutal violence.
A young Crane shows off his tattoos with another skinhead
In May 1978, following a BM meeting, he took part in an assault on a black family at a bus stop in Bishopsgate, east London, using broken bottles and shouting racist slogans. An Old Bailey judge described Crane as "worse than an animal".
The following year he led a mob of 200 skinheads in an attack on Asians in nearby Brick Lane. Crane later told a newspaper how "we rampaged down the Lane turning over stalls, kicking and punching Pakistanis".
The Woolwich Odeon attack of 1980 was described by a prosecutor at the Old Bailey as a "serious, organised and premeditated riot". After their intended victims fled inside, the skinheads drilled by Crane began smashing the cinema's doors and windows, the court was told. A Pakistani man was knocked unconscious in the melee and the windows of a nearby pub were shattered with a pick-axe handle.
In 1981 Crane was jailed for his part in an ambush on black youths at Woolwich Arsenal station. As the judge handed down a four-year sentence, an acolyte standing alongside Crane stiffened his arm into a Nazi salute and shouted "sieg heil" from the dock.
Crane's three jail terms failed to temper his violence. During one stretch, he launched an attack on several prison officers with a metal tray. A six-month sentence following a fracas on a London Tube train was served entirely at the top-security Isle of Wight prison - a sign of just how dangerous he was regarded as by the authorities.
Newspaper cutting about Nicholas (sic) Crane
All this may have horrified most people, but it made Crane a hugely respected and admired figure across the far right.
He was neither an orator nor a conversationalist. His vocabulary was sparse at best. But he managed to exude a powerful charisma.
"I knew him, I liked him. He was friendly," says Joseph Pearce, who was leader of the Young National Front during the early 1980s before turning his back on extremist politics.
"He was not the most articulate of people. It would be yes or no. It was difficult to have anything but the most superficial conversation with him."
In the aftermath of a violent march through racially mixed Lewisham in 1977, much of the UK's extreme right had concluded the path to power lay in controlling the streets and destabilising the multicultural society rather than through the ballot box.
The NF's march through Lewisham in 1977 was a watershed moment for the far right
At the same time, groups like the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) and, later, Anti-Fascist Action (AFA) were becoming more and more confrontational.
"The opposition were very, very combative," Pearce says. "Their strategy was to smash the nationalist movement. It was a necessity to have a street presence that had muscle. Someone like Nicky Crane was a powerful physical but also symbolic presence."
This was a description with which even Crane's enemies concurred.
"By appearance and reputation he was the epitome of right-wing idealism - fascist icon and poster boy," writes Sean Birchall in his book Beating The Fascists, a history of AFA.
Unbeknown to his comrades, however, a very different side to Nicky Crane was emerging.
It was a Thursday night at Heaven, a gay nightclub below London's Charing Cross station. Underneath the venue's arched roof stood a young man, up from Brighton for the evening. A garrulous character, he was universally known by his full title of John G Byrne.
Since 1969, when he discovered reggae music as a 13-year-old, Byrne had been a skinhead. As he looked across the dancefloor, he caught sight of a man he'd never seen before.
The stranger was tall, shaven-headed and covered in tattoos. Byrne introduced himself.
It was Nicky Crane, fresh out of prison.
"He stood out quite a lot," says Byrne. "A lot of people used to be quite keen on him because he was a very butch-looking geezer."
Years later, Crane said he hadn't had sex with a man until after he turned 26 in 1984. But now he was becoming a regular at places like Heaven.
"I just used to chat to him," Byrne adds. "Nicky was quite a friendly person. He was quite quiet, really. He was the opposite of what he looked like."
He appears to have thrown himself enthusiastically into the gay scene around this time. His imposing frame meant he easily found work as a doorman at gay venues through a security firm.
But if the neo-Nazi world would have abhorred his sexuality, the vast majority of London's gay scene would have been equally horrified to learn that he was a neo-Nazi.
Among the leadership of the largely liberal-left gay rights movement that was growing in London during the 1980s, fascist symbolism was an obvious and outrageous taboo - a reminder of the persecution that lesbians and gay men had suffered.
According to feminist scholar Sheila Jeffreys' book The Lesbian Heresy, a commotion unfolded in 1984 when a group of gay skinheads turned up at a gay bar in London's King's Cross and began seig heiling. She also records that a well-known far right youth organiser was thrown out of the same pub after taking off his jacket to reveal swastika tattoos.
A huge row erupted the following year at the London Lesbian and Gay Centre in King's Cross when a gay skinhead night was held at the venue.
It's not clear whether Crane was present at any of these incidents. But it appears that, at least initially, he was able to deflect questions about his politics by presenting himself on the gay scene as a skinhead first and foremost.
His friend Byrne, who describes himself as "sort of more a Labour person", had no time for the far-right element that had infiltrated the skinhead movement.
But Byrne was convinced at the time that Crane "wasn't really a Nazi. It was all show". The softly-spoken Nicky he knew was too nice to be an extremist, Byrne believed.
This wasn't as fanciful as it might sound.
By the mid-1980s, a gay skinhead scene was beginning to flourish in London, says Murray Healy, author of Gay Skins: Class, Masculinity and Queer Appropriation.
Gay men had many different reasons for adopting the look, he says. Some had been skinheads before they came out. Others found that, in an era when all gay men were widely assumed to be camp and effeminate, "you were less likely to get picked on if you looked like a queer-basher". There were also "fetish skins", attracted to the "hyper-masculinity" of the subculture.
Against this backdrop, even the swastikas and racist slogans inked on Crane's body could be explained away, at least initially. During the 1980s, says Healy, "gay Nazis were assumed to be left-wing even if they had Nazi tattoos".
"People refused to read these tattoos politically. People thought it was part of the authenticity ritual. People thought he was just playing a part."
And indeed it wasn't just gay skins who flirted with the iconography of fascism. While "redskins" and "Sharps" - an acronym for Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice - confronted those with links to the far right, many heterosexual skinheads who were apolitical also adopted fascist garb, says Byrne.
"A lot of skinheads that weren't right-wing used to wear Skrewdriver T-shirts," Byrne adds. "It was about the fashion of being a skinhead."
But Crane wasn't just playing with the imagery of Nazism. He was living it. His decision to start frequenting venues such as Heaven wasn't the only thing that had changed since before his sentence.
During the years 1981 to 1984, which he mostly spent incarcerated, his fame had grown far beyond the narrow confines of the far right.
In 1981, the journalist Garry Bushell helped put together a compilation album of tracks by bands from the burgeoning Oi! scene.
Oi!, a cheerfully crude sub-genre of punk, was popular with skinheads. Its politics were fairly broad - while there were right-wingers within its ranks, some of its most prominent acts, including the Angelic Upstarts, were avowed socialists. Others, such as the 4-Skins, condemned political extremism of all kinds.
That was to count for little after Bushell, desperate for a cover image after a photoshoot fell through, seized on a Christmas card which he believed showed a scene from the film The Wanderers. In fact, it was a picture of Crane.
Continue reading the main story
Oi!
"It was a monumentally, cataclysmically stupid decision," he says. The title of the compilation was Strength Thru Oi! - which Bushell says was intended as a pun on Strength Through Joy, the title of a recent EP by punk act The Skids, but which in turn was borrowed from a Nazi slogan.
The Daily Mail seized upon the title and the connection with Crane, condemning the "highly controversial" record as "evil".
According to Bushell, who had only recently left the Socialist Workers Party and still regarded himself at the time as a left-winger, the story was a "tissue of lies". But as a result of the coverage, the hitherto obscure Oi! scene became associated by many with the far right - to the chagrin of acts featured on the album, such as the socialist poet Gary Johnson.
Crane's musical background had hitherto extended to starting fights at ska and punk gigs, plus a short-lived stint singing in a punk band called The Afflicted.
The notoriety, however, transformed him into a skinhead icon. The Strength Thru Oi! cover image - featuring a topless, muscle-bound Crane snarling and raising his boot - was widely reproduced in the wake of the row.
T-shirts featuring the image were sold at The Last Resort, a clothes shop favoured by skinheads in London's Soho. They were a huge hit. Although the album was withdrawn from sale, reproductions of its cover adorned thousands of bedroom walls.
"He was literally a poster boy," says Watson, who at the time was a teenage skin in Buckinghamshire. "Even a 15-year-old was like, 'That's what a skinhead should look like.'
"He just fell into our living rooms. These little kids in High Wycombe - we didn't know anything about the Nazi stuff."
On the surface, the idea of a gay man embracing neo-Nazism might appear baffling and self-defeating. Just as Adolf Hitler's regime had thrown gays and lesbians into death camps, the neo-Nazi movement remained staunchly homophobic.
Continue reading the main story
Gay people and the Nazis
"They'd go out queer-bashing. It's something I never did myself. And I'd never let it happen in front of me, either."
He had, however, chosen fascism long before he had embraced his sexuality, and much of his social life and prestige was bound up with his status as a prominent neo-Nazi activist.
To maintain his cover, Crane would often appear in public with a skinhead girl on his arm. "He often had a so-called girlfriend but they were never around for long," says Pearce. "Nicky had no chemistry with girls."
Certainly, after coming out, Crane always described himself as gay rather than bisexual.
Nonetheless, his relationships with women, coupled with rumours that he had fathered a son, allayed any initial suspicions his comrades might have had. So too did his propensity for racist violence.
Nicky Crane: The secret double life of a gay neo-Nazi
By Jon KellyBBC News Magazine
He was the British extreme right's most feared streetfighter. But almost right up to his death 20 years ago, Nicky Crane led a precarious dual existence - until it fell dramatically apart.
The skinhead gang marched in military formation down the High Street clutching iron bars, knives, staves, pick-axe handles and clubs.
There were at least 100 of them. They had spent two days planning their attack. The date was 28 March 1980.
Soon they reached their target - a queue of mostly black film-goers outside the Odeon cinema in Woolwich, south-east London.
Then the skinheads charged.
Most of them belonged to an extreme far-right group called the British Movement (BM).
This particular "unit" had already acquired a reputation for brutal racist violence thanks to its charismatic young local organiser. Many victims had learned to fear the sight of his 6ft 2in frame, which was covered in Nazi tattoos. His name was Nicky Crane.
But as he led the ambush, Crane was concealing a secret from his enemies and his fascist comrades alike. Crane knew he was gay, but hadn't acted on it. Not yet.
Twelve years later, the same Nicky Crane sat in his Soho bedsit. His room looked out across London's gay village - the bars and nightclubs where he worked as a doorman, where he drank and danced.
Crane flicked through a scrapbook filled with photos and news clippings from his far-right past.
For years he had managed to keep the two worlds entirely separate. But now he wasn't going to pretend any more.
Nicola Vincenzo Crane was born on 21 May 1958 in a semi-detached house on a leafy street in Bexley, south-east London. One of 10 siblings, he grew up in nearby Crayford, Kent.
As his name suggests, he had an unlikely background for a British nationalist and Aryan warrior. He was of Italian heritage through his mother Dorothy, whose maiden name was D'Ambrosio. His father worked as a structural draughtsman.
But from an early age Crane found a surrogate family in the south-east London skinhead scene.
Continue reading the main story
Skinheads
- Started as a non-political movement by working class youths in 1960s London
- Originally influenced by West Indian immigrants - skinheads began by emulating "rude boy" look of pork pie hats and short jeans and listened to soul and reggae
- Faded from popular culture in the 1970s but enjoyed a revival with the introduction of punk rock
- Skinhead clothing included boots (typically Dr Martens) and braces
- Some became associated in the media with inner-city racism in the late 1970s, but there were also Sharps - Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice - and left-wing "redskins"
- Movement spread to Australia, North America, and western Europe - especially Germany in 1970s and 1980s
"When you've come from a tough background, when you get that identity, it's a powerful thing to have," says Gavin Watson, a former skinhead who later got to know Crane.
The south-east London skins also had close connections to the far right. Whereas the original skinheads in the late 1960s had borrowed the fashion of Caribbean immigrants and shared their love of ska and reggae music, a highly visible minority of skins during the movement's revival in the late 1970s were attaching themselves to groups like the resurgent National Front (NF).
In particular the openly neo-Nazi BM, under the leadership of Michael McLaughlin, was actively targeting young, disaffected working-class men from football terraces as well as the punk and skinhead scenes for recruitment.
Crane was an enthusiastic convert to the ideology of National Socialism.
"Adolf Hitler was my God," he said in a 1992 television interview. "He was sort of like my Fuhrer, my leader. And everything I done was, like, for Adolf Hitler."
Within six months of joining the BM, Crane had been made the Kent organiser, responsible for signing up new members and organising attacks on political opponents and minority groups.
He was also inducted into the Leader Guard, which served both as McLaughlin's personal corps of bodyguards and as the party's top fighters. Members wore black uniforms adorned with neo-Nazi symbols and were drilled at paramilitary-style armed training weekends in the countryside.
They were also required to have a Leader Guard tattoo. Each featured the letters L and G on either side of a Celtic cross, the British Movement's answer to the swastika. Crane dutifully had his inked on to his flesh alongside various racist slogans.
By now working as a binman and living in Plumstead, Crane quickly acquired a reputation, even among the ranks of the far right, for exceptionally brutal violence.
In May 1978, following a BM meeting, he took part in an assault on a black family at a bus stop in Bishopsgate, east London, using broken bottles and shouting racist slogans. An Old Bailey judge described Crane as "worse than an animal".
The following year he led a mob of 200 skinheads in an attack on Asians in nearby Brick Lane. Crane later told a newspaper how "we rampaged down the Lane turning over stalls, kicking and punching Pakistanis".
The Woolwich Odeon attack of 1980 was described by a prosecutor at the Old Bailey as a "serious, organised and premeditated riot". After their intended victims fled inside, the skinheads drilled by Crane began smashing the cinema's doors and windows, the court was told. A Pakistani man was knocked unconscious in the melee and the windows of a nearby pub were shattered with a pick-axe handle.
In 1981 Crane was jailed for his part in an ambush on black youths at Woolwich Arsenal station. As the judge handed down a four-year sentence, an acolyte standing alongside Crane stiffened his arm into a Nazi salute and shouted "sieg heil" from the dock.
Crane's three jail terms failed to temper his violence. During one stretch, he launched an attack on several prison officers with a metal tray. A six-month sentence following a fracas on a London Tube train was served entirely at the top-security Isle of Wight prison - a sign of just how dangerous he was regarded as by the authorities.
All this may have horrified most people, but it made Crane a hugely respected and admired figure across the far right.
He was neither an orator nor a conversationalist. His vocabulary was sparse at best. But he managed to exude a powerful charisma.
"I knew him, I liked him. He was friendly," says Joseph Pearce, who was leader of the Young National Front during the early 1980s before turning his back on extremist politics.
"He was not the most articulate of people. It would be yes or no. It was difficult to have anything but the most superficial conversation with him."
In the aftermath of a violent march through racially mixed Lewisham in 1977, much of the UK's extreme right had concluded the path to power lay in controlling the streets and destabilising the multicultural society rather than through the ballot box.
At the same time, groups like the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) and, later, Anti-Fascist Action (AFA) were becoming more and more confrontational.
"The opposition were very, very combative," Pearce says. "Their strategy was to smash the nationalist movement. It was a necessity to have a street presence that had muscle. Someone like Nicky Crane was a powerful physical but also symbolic presence."
This was a description with which even Crane's enemies concurred.
"By appearance and reputation he was the epitome of right-wing idealism - fascist icon and poster boy," writes Sean Birchall in his book Beating The Fascists, a history of AFA.
Unbeknown to his comrades, however, a very different side to Nicky Crane was emerging.
It was a Thursday night at Heaven, a gay nightclub below London's Charing Cross station. Underneath the venue's arched roof stood a young man, up from Brighton for the evening. A garrulous character, he was universally known by his full title of John G Byrne.
Since 1969, when he discovered reggae music as a 13-year-old, Byrne had been a skinhead. As he looked across the dancefloor, he caught sight of a man he'd never seen before.
The stranger was tall, shaven-headed and covered in tattoos. Byrne introduced himself.
It was Nicky Crane, fresh out of prison.
"He stood out quite a lot," says Byrne. "A lot of people used to be quite keen on him because he was a very butch-looking geezer."
Years later, Crane said he hadn't had sex with a man until after he turned 26 in 1984. But now he was becoming a regular at places like Heaven.
"I just used to chat to him," Byrne adds. "Nicky was quite a friendly person. He was quite quiet, really. He was the opposite of what he looked like."
He appears to have thrown himself enthusiastically into the gay scene around this time. His imposing frame meant he easily found work as a doorman at gay venues through a security firm.
But if the neo-Nazi world would have abhorred his sexuality, the vast majority of London's gay scene would have been equally horrified to learn that he was a neo-Nazi.
Among the leadership of the largely liberal-left gay rights movement that was growing in London during the 1980s, fascist symbolism was an obvious and outrageous taboo - a reminder of the persecution that lesbians and gay men had suffered.
According to feminist scholar Sheila Jeffreys' book The Lesbian Heresy, a commotion unfolded in 1984 when a group of gay skinheads turned up at a gay bar in London's King's Cross and began seig heiling. She also records that a well-known far right youth organiser was thrown out of the same pub after taking off his jacket to reveal swastika tattoos.
A huge row erupted the following year at the London Lesbian and Gay Centre in King's Cross when a gay skinhead night was held at the venue.
It's not clear whether Crane was present at any of these incidents. But it appears that, at least initially, he was able to deflect questions about his politics by presenting himself on the gay scene as a skinhead first and foremost.
His friend Byrne, who describes himself as "sort of more a Labour person", had no time for the far-right element that had infiltrated the skinhead movement.
But Byrne was convinced at the time that Crane "wasn't really a Nazi. It was all show". The softly-spoken Nicky he knew was too nice to be an extremist, Byrne believed.
This wasn't as fanciful as it might sound.
By the mid-1980s, a gay skinhead scene was beginning to flourish in London, says Murray Healy, author of Gay Skins: Class, Masculinity and Queer Appropriation.
Gay men had many different reasons for adopting the look, he says. Some had been skinheads before they came out. Others found that, in an era when all gay men were widely assumed to be camp and effeminate, "you were less likely to get picked on if you looked like a queer-basher". There were also "fetish skins", attracted to the "hyper-masculinity" of the subculture.
Against this backdrop, even the swastikas and racist slogans inked on Crane's body could be explained away, at least initially. During the 1980s, says Healy, "gay Nazis were assumed to be left-wing even if they had Nazi tattoos".
"People refused to read these tattoos politically. People thought it was part of the authenticity ritual. People thought he was just playing a part."
And indeed it wasn't just gay skins who flirted with the iconography of fascism. While "redskins" and "Sharps" - an acronym for Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice - confronted those with links to the far right, many heterosexual skinheads who were apolitical also adopted fascist garb, says Byrne.
"A lot of skinheads that weren't right-wing used to wear Skrewdriver T-shirts," Byrne adds. "It was about the fashion of being a skinhead."
But Crane wasn't just playing with the imagery of Nazism. He was living it. His decision to start frequenting venues such as Heaven wasn't the only thing that had changed since before his sentence.
During the years 1981 to 1984, which he mostly spent incarcerated, his fame had grown far beyond the narrow confines of the far right.
In 1981, the journalist Garry Bushell helped put together a compilation album of tracks by bands from the burgeoning Oi! scene.
Oi!, a cheerfully crude sub-genre of punk, was popular with skinheads. Its politics were fairly broad - while there were right-wingers within its ranks, some of its most prominent acts, including the Angelic Upstarts, were avowed socialists. Others, such as the 4-Skins, condemned political extremism of all kinds.
That was to count for little after Bushell, desperate for a cover image after a photoshoot fell through, seized on a Christmas card which he believed showed a scene from the film The Wanderers. In fact, it was a picture of Crane.
Continue reading the main story
Oi!
- Subgenre of punk rock started in UK in late 1970
- Ideology of the original Oi! movement was a rough brand of working-class rebellion
- Lyrical topics included unemployment, workers' rights, harassment by police and other authorities, and oppression by the government
- First Oi! bands were composed mostly of punk rockers and people who fitted neither the skinhead nor punk label
- Six original Oi albums are: Oi! the Album, Strength Thru Oi!, Carry On Oi!, Oi! Oi! That's Yer Lot, Son of Oi!, the Oi! of Sex
"It was a monumentally, cataclysmically stupid decision," he says. The title of the compilation was Strength Thru Oi! - which Bushell says was intended as a pun on Strength Through Joy, the title of a recent EP by punk act The Skids, but which in turn was borrowed from a Nazi slogan.
The Daily Mail seized upon the title and the connection with Crane, condemning the "highly controversial" record as "evil".
According to Bushell, who had only recently left the Socialist Workers Party and still regarded himself at the time as a left-winger, the story was a "tissue of lies". But as a result of the coverage, the hitherto obscure Oi! scene became associated by many with the far right - to the chagrin of acts featured on the album, such as the socialist poet Gary Johnson.
Crane's musical background had hitherto extended to starting fights at ska and punk gigs, plus a short-lived stint singing in a punk band called The Afflicted.
The notoriety, however, transformed him into a skinhead icon. The Strength Thru Oi! cover image - featuring a topless, muscle-bound Crane snarling and raising his boot - was widely reproduced in the wake of the row.
T-shirts featuring the image were sold at The Last Resort, a clothes shop favoured by skinheads in London's Soho. They were a huge hit. Although the album was withdrawn from sale, reproductions of its cover adorned thousands of bedroom walls.
"He was literally a poster boy," says Watson, who at the time was a teenage skin in Buckinghamshire. "Even a 15-year-old was like, 'That's what a skinhead should look like.'
"He just fell into our living rooms. These little kids in High Wycombe - we didn't know anything about the Nazi stuff."
On the surface, the idea of a gay man embracing neo-Nazism might appear baffling and self-defeating. Just as Adolf Hitler's regime had thrown gays and lesbians into death camps, the neo-Nazi movement remained staunchly homophobic.
Continue reading the main story
Gay people and the Nazis
- During Adolf Hitler's regime, 50,000 homosexuals were branded criminals and degenerates and as many as 15,000 died in concentration camps, historians say
- From 1933 gay clubs in Germany were purged, books by gay authors were burned
- SS chief Heinrich Himmler proclaimed that in order to build the Aryan master race "the homosexual must be completely eliminated"
- Gay prisoners were forced to adorn their uniforms with pink triangles - since reclaimed as a symbol of gay liberation
"They'd go out queer-bashing. It's something I never did myself. And I'd never let it happen in front of me, either."
He had, however, chosen fascism long before he had embraced his sexuality, and much of his social life and prestige was bound up with his status as a prominent neo-Nazi activist.
To maintain his cover, Crane would often appear in public with a skinhead girl on his arm. "He often had a so-called girlfriend but they were never around for long," says Pearce. "Nicky had no chemistry with girls."
Certainly, after coming out, Crane always described himself as gay rather than bisexual.
Nonetheless, his relationships with women, coupled with rumours that he had fathered a son, allayed any initial suspicions his comrades might have had. So too did his propensity for racist violence.
