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Now he is involved in promoting intergroup harmony, seeking ways to counter a very active hate movement that targets young people and turns them against Jews and other minorities.

He is not the first anti-Semite in the area to make a 180-degree turn in his life, yet he is a member of a select group, according to Barry Morrison, ADL's regional director.

"Fun" episodes in his past included vandalizing a Jewish day-care center and old synagogues in his South Philadelphia neighborhood. Windows were broken. Neo-Nazi pamphlets were left behind. Swastikas were drawn on the walls with black markers.

The Stars of David on the facades attracted his wrath like iron filings to a magnet, Meeink admits.

He and as many as 60 other local skinheads went on rampages, according to Meeink, beating up Asians and homeless people, then photographing and videotaping their victims. One attack on an Asian woman led to her having a miscarriage.

"That was something that we bragged about," he reports.

Meeink says he and the others hated "everyone who wasn't like us — but [it was directed] more toward Jewish people."

Meeink turned to hate at age 13, rebelling against what he described as "a very bad home life." It was so bad, he recalls, that he wanted to die just to get away from it.

Then, Meeink, who could pass for an altar boy if not for the Nazi-themed tattoos that adorn much of his body — including a portrait of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels on his chest — became enamored by the activities of a cousin from Lancaster, Pa., who was a skinhead.

Meeink saw the group's hate literature and was impressed by the fact that the skinheads were often the subject of news reports.

Among the views he and his followers espoused: "They say Israel runs America," he relates. "Politicians get money for endorsing laws; [they] get money from Jews."

Meeink became a local skinhead leader and recruiter, attending rallies at the Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho; spending a day in Elohim City, Okla., a white supremacist "town" that had been frequented by Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh; and even hosting a regular neo-Nazi skinhead program on Illinois public-access cable television.

By age 18, after spending time in jail on charges related to his skinhead activity, Meeink says the hatred was out of his system. While behind bars, he got to know blacks, Hispanics, Asians and others, he says. He found he had more in common with them than with white supremacists also doing time.

He returned to Philadelphia and resumed hanging out with his skinhead friends, but it was a time, he says, when "life was a big mystery."

Then, Meeink met Cherry Hill, N.J., antiques dealer Keith Brookstein, who offered him a job.

"You could look at him and tell he was Jewish," Meeink says, adding, "he was one of the greatest men I've met in my life."

Even with Meeink's neo-Nazi tattoos and prison record, Brookstein offered him a job and took him under his wing.

"To think I used to seriously wish that he was dead" because of Brookstein's religion, Meeink says shuddering.

He credits Brookstein, and to a larger extent, God, for completing his transformation from hater to helper.

"I think God pulled me through this," Meeink says. "I learned a lot about God in prison. I started hating what I believed in."

The final straw, he says, was the 1996 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. He knew people who felt like McVeigh, he says. It "got to me."

After leaving the neo-Nazi movement, Meeink says he was advised to contact a civil rights group. He chose the ADL.

"People like him are always approached and looked at with a great degree of skepticism," the ADL's Morrison says.

Individuals like Meeink, he continues, have to meet "certain tests over time" to prove they have really changed.

After meeting with ADL officials, Meeink came up with an idea to get white and black youngsters to know one another. While imprisoned, sports was a key ingredient in his turnaround.

"You have to work together" in the sport to win, he says.

Ironically, he chose a sport that is associated with fighting as much as it is with grace: ice hockey.

He told an ADL board member about his idea, and word got to Jay Snider, son of Philadelphia Flyers founder and Jewish communal leader Ed Snider. The Flyers became involved in the project, along with the ADL, the city and corporate sponsors.

Now, each Wednesday, some 20 white and black teens, boys and girls from different neighborhoods, gather at Philadelphia's Simons Recreation Center for "Harmony Through Hockey," which combines hockey and a corresponding classroom program dealing with the evils of stereotyping and scapegoating.

Meeink is hoping to expand the program so that more kids — and society — can benefit.

As for his old compatriots, Meeink says he understands that since his departure from the neo-Nazi movement, skinhead activity in the city has been reduced to "a tiny little bit. They don't show their faces."

He doesn't fear reprisals from former partners in crime.

And he is positive that his desire to associate with them is gone forever. Shortly, the outward symbols of who he once was will be gone, as well.

Some of his tattoos are being removed by Dr. Debra Grossman. A dermatologist and director of the Skin Laser Center at the University of Pennsylvania's dermatology department, Grossman is donating her services. Her great-aunts and great-uncles perished in the Holocaust.

The larger tattoos, Meeink says, will be altered so as not to be offensive.

In the summer, when he wears short-sleeve shirts, Meeink sometimes gets challenged by strangers about his tattoos. The one-time skinhead says to those people, "Meet me for 10 minutes and get to know me," before judging.