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He was of Italian heritage through his mother Dorothy, whose maiden name was D'Ambrosio. His father worked as a structural draughtsman. Its members had developed a reputation for violence, starting fights and disrupting gigs by bands such as Sham 69 and Bad Manners. In the late s, gangs like Crane's were widely feared. The south-east London skins also had close connections to the far right. Whereas the original skinheads in the late s 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 s 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.

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 , 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 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 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 pickaxe handle. In 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 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.

He was friendly," says Joseph Pearce, who was leader of the Young National Front during the early s before turning his back on extremist politics. 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 , 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. It was a necessity to have a street presence that had muscle.

Someone like Nicky Crane was a powerful physical but also symbolic presence. 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 , when he discovered reggae music as a year-old, Byrne had been a skinhead. As he looked across the dancefloor, he caught sight of a man he'd never seen before. Years later, Crane said he hadn't had sex with a man until after he turned 26 in But now he was becoming a regular at places like Heaven.

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.

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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 s, 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 when a group of gay skinheads turned up at a gay bar in London's King's Cross and began sieg heiling.

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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.

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 s, says Healy, "gay Nazis were assumed to be left-wing even if they had Nazi tattoos". 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.

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 to , which he mostly spent incarcerated, his fame had grown far beyond the narrow confines of the far right. In , the journalist Garry Bushell helped put together a compilation album of tracks by bands from the burgeoning Oi!

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 says he believed showed a scene from the film The Wanderers.