American Front (AF) is a skinhead group that was founded by Bob Heick around 1990.   According to some sources, the group was founded in Portland, Oregon, while other sources locate AF's roots in San Francisco, California.  Within a few years, AF had spread across the northwest and beyond.  AF members have been arrested in Napa, San Francisco, Sacramento, Pennsylvania, Florida, Maryland and Washington.  Heick, a high school dropout, first encountered racist skinhead culture in Britain in 1984.  At the time, the racist organization National Front was winning a war with anti-racist skinheads for control of the British skinhead movement.  When Heick returned to the United States, he launched his own skinhead organization, American Front. Membership in American Front is by application only, and the application implies that if a member betrays the organization, the punishment is "death by crucifixion [sic]." (www.cgiaonline.org) This is a common attitude among skinheads, who are most brutal toward those who try to leave the movement. (Ridgeway, 185)<br /><br /><p>AF members have committed heinous crimes.  In 1991, police offers searching a Beaverton, Oregon residence from which AF members had been evicted found a "hit list" of Portland police officers who were to be targeted.  In California and Washington during July of 1993, there was a series of bombings targeting public meeting places for blacks, gays and Jews in California and Washington.  American Front members Wayne Paul Wooten, Jeremiah Gordon Knesal and Mark Kowaalski were convicted of committing two of those attacks: the bombing of the Elite Tavern (a gay club) on July 22, and the bombing of an NAACP meeting hall on July 20.  According to U.S. Attorney Mike Yamaguchi, Wooten, Knesal and Kowaalski were part of a larger conspiracy to incite race war. (Espinosa, 8/14/93)  The bombings seem to have been timed to coincide with the sentencing of the police officers convicted in the Rodney King case, presumably to take advantage of heightened racial tension connected with the case.