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Once a member of hate group, ’Brotherhood of Murder’ author now preaches acceptance.
Tom Martinez used to belong to a hate group called The Order, and he’s not proud of that fact.
“I don’t wear it with a badge of honor,” he said in a telephone interview.
But some good did come out of his affiliation, Martinez said. He knows how such groups operate, and he knows the factors that make a person ripe for joining. So he can warn others.
“Education is the answer,” said Martinez, who will address a local crowd today during an Anti-Defamation League dinner.
Martinez, who dropped out of Philadelphia’s Thomas Edison High School as a 10th-grade student about 30 years ago, believes he was short-changed in the formal-education department himself.
Thomas Edison High School was a predominantly black school, he said, and the perception was “if you were white, you were nuts to go there.”
Three days after his friend Bob was fatally stabbed, Martinez said, a student nicknamed “Woogie,” from the Zulu Nations gang, threatened him.
Martinez remembered, “He said, ‘We’re gonna put a homeless sign on your white ass.’ ”
Martinez left the classroom, left the school and never went back.
He joined the service but became disillusioned there, too. A recruiter led him to believe he would be trained as a baker. Instead, he was sent to Missouri to become a combat engineer.
A disappointed Martinez managed to leave the military with an honorable discharge but no benefits. He got a job filling doughnuts at a bakery.
“Then one girl I dated – she’s my wife to this day, we’ve been married 36 years – she tells me she’s pregnant. I’m out of the Army for a few months. She’s only 16 and I’m 18 and in a dead-end job.”
“My life was spiraling out of control.”
Anger, frustration, fear, a sense of hopelessness and a desire to belong somewhere – those were the emotions that led him to join a hate group, Martinez said.
“I get so tired of hearing people say (prejudice) is something you learn at home,” he said.
“We weren’t a half-ass Christian family,” Martinez said. “My father read his Bible. He didn’t curse. He never raised a hand to my mother. I never heard anti-Semitism at home.”
Martinez wanted to get away from his hometown, “from the drugs, the booze. The neighborhood was going to hell.”
He saw David Duke of the Ku Klux Klan speaking on television, and the message resonated with him. Later, he fell in with Robert Matthews, leader of The Order, who also seemed to hold out the idea of an idyllic life free of minorities.
“When you’re out of a job and things are bad,” Martinez said, “it’s very easy to start scapegoating and listening to crackpots.”
Martinez’s involvement in The Order grew, but he became disenchanted after the murder of a radio talk-show host who was Jewish.
“I was running into a lot of nutty guys, violent guys, guys who owned guns and talked about revolutions and wanted to kill blacks and kill Jews,” he said. “I didn’t wake up and ‘kumbaya’ the whole country. I still had a lot of anger more than anything. But the best thing was when I got arrested.”
Martinez became an FBI informant, co-authored a book about his experiences called “Brotherhood of Murder” and now travels the country going to speaking engagements.
He doesn’t reveal where he lives, and his agent doesn’t distribute his photograph. There has been at least one attempt on his life, he said.
But he feels good about being away from The Order for 27 years.
“My life is solid,” he said. “I have good support, great friends. My life has been blessed. I was given a second chance.”
Attorney Harold Levinson, chair of the Anti-Defamation League dinner, said he believes Martinez’s speech will be thought-provoking and offer hope, that even someone enmeshed in a hate group can get out and start a new life.
“We’ve had some issues here in Northeastern Pennsylvania. We’re not immune to the problems of bigotry,” Levinson said. “By reflecting on the words and experiences of Tom Martinez, we can see it’s not helpful to anyone – victims or perpetrators – to be part of that process.”
ADL DINNER
The Anti-Defamation League of Eastern Pennsylvania/Delaware will honor Dr. Susan Sordoni, founder of a medical clinic that benefits the working poor, tonight during a dinner at the Woodlands Inn and Resort in Plains Township. The reservations deadline has passed.