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[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kOqQMGaneA"]YouTube - Michael Parrish and Conrad Jankowski were brought back to Pennsylvania on Thursday, July 9, 2009.[/ame]

By Dan Berrett
Pocono Record Writer
July 11, 2009
The symbols of Michael John Parrish's white supremacist ideology are mapped out in intricate detail on his arms and neck, two organizations that monitor hate groups say.

Parrish, 23, was arrested on charges of murdering his girlfriend and their 18-month-old son Monday at the Effort apartment where they lived. Prosecutors will seek the death penalty.

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About 15 of those on Parrish's arms and neck carried some sort of racist or white pride message, though not all of them are necessarily racist if worn in isolation, the groups said.

One of Parrish's tattoos, a black band with the number 22 above his right elbow, stands for Firm 22, a group within the Vinlanders Social Club, which is a skinhead gang.

Parrish, a Monroe County Correctional Facility corrections officer, may have been a probate, or aspiring inductee, into the Vinlanders.

"He knew a bunch of the Vinlander Social Club guys and hung out with them," concluded Mark Pitcavage, director of investigative research for the ADL, which has been tracking the group's activity online and elsewhere.

Pitcavage said that the Vinlanders "have a presence in Pennsylvania," and overlap with another group, the Keystone Skinheads.

Skinhead groups are also described as autonomous, and as not liking to associate with the Ku Klux Klan or more formal, top-down neo-Nazi groups. Groups like the Vinlanders also tend to attract younger members.

"They don't like authority," said Joe Roy, chief investigator for the Intelligence Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The Vinlanders were once ascendant in the realm of loosely affiliated skinhead groups, but it has been beset by internal squabbling. According to its Web site, it recently separated itself from other racist groups. But the gang also bemoans "forced integration and the decline of our towns and neighborhoods based on racial make-up."

Locally, though, authorities have seen little activity from the gang, or from skinheads, until now.

"We haven't dealt with any skinhead groups around here," said Detective Manny Varkanis of the Monroe County District Attorney's Office and the county's gang task force. "There have been a few in the jail coming and out. Maybe some white supremacists, but they really haven't been a big deal in our jail."

Other images that Parrish had etched into his flesh borrowed from Norse and Celtic mythology. Skinhead and neo-Nazi groups often refer back to pre-Christian, pagan or Norse symbols. They are meant to harken to a racially "pure," Aryan era.

Parrish, who dubbed himself the "greasy leprechaun" on his MySpace page, also gravitated to Irish and Italian symbols within the iconography of skinheads.

Images include Celtic crosses that have been appropriated by the skinheads, and the crest of an Italian division of the Waffen SS in Nazi Germany.