Frank Meeink

SAN DIEGO — Former Skinhead Frank Meeink kept the students of San Diego’s Community Jewish High School entranced for nearly two hours Thursday evening, March 3, as he spoke of being rejected and beaten by substance-abusing parents; accepted and respected by neo-Nazis; feeling adrenaline rushes when other teenagers visibly feared him; ...

What does evil look like? Just ask Frank Meeink, who became a skinhead at age 13, and spent years struggling with the demons inside him—the ones that caused him to pick fights for no reason, sometimes beating his victims senseless. It took incarceration to help him turn his life around.

The persistent myth about ex-neo-Nazi Frank Meeink's memoir, Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead, is that the tale Meeink tells of his violent, racist past was the basis for the 1998 movie American History X.