The strange case of a half-black white supremacist.

By ROGER FRANKLIN

NEW YORK - There was once a rule in America, an actual law of the land in some states, that said one single, solitary drop of inherited black blood was enough to consign a person to the second-class classification of "negro."

A carrier of those cursed corpuscles might be pale-skinned, fair-haired, even blue-eyed and prone to sunburn. But if a great-great-grandparent was known to have been contaminated by the African gene, a seat at a whites-only lunch counter was forever beyond hope.

These days, as the rhetoric emanating from Bush cabinet members such as Colin Powell never ceases to make clear, skin pigment is no longer a barrier.

In modern America, or so the party line goes, a citizen can be anything he desires - even a person like Leo Felton, the son of a black father who will shortly go on trial in Boston for plotting to ignite a race war.

It is almost a familiar story - the FBI regularly busts cells of self-proclaimed white "patriots" bent on hastening what they regard as the inevitable race war. Except this fanatic comes with an extra twist.

The 30-year-old Felton isn't a Black Panther or some wild-eyed disciple of the Nation of Islam, the sort who make Times Square their pulpit and hand out tracts claiming that Aids was invented by white scientists intent on depopulating Africa. No, the thing that makes Felton different is what he has made of himself in this Land of Opportunity. He has remade himself as a white man.

The tattoo that says "skinhead" and covers much of his shaven scalp proclaims his racial allegiance for all the world to see.

Should anyone miss the point, there are the other tattoos, including one that says "white power" and is garlanded by the twin lighting-bolt runes of Hitler's SS. Those trappings alone would make Felton an oddity, but not entirely unprecedented.

From "Pud'n Head Wilson", Mark Twain's satire of racial proprieties in the Old South to Black Like Me, the stories of those who have slipped across the colour barrier have been grist for peddlers of fact and fiction alike almost since America was born.

What really makes Felton stand out from the pack is that, by every yardstick of enlightened child rearing, he should have grown up to become a credit to his father's black heritage and his mother's white one. Why things didn't turn out that way is still a mystery to his former neighbours in Gaithersburg, Maryland, where he was raised amid all the trappings and indulgences an upper-middle class American childhood can bestow.

There were the top-notch private schools, the sort that black kids seldom get to attend. At home, some of the most charismatic figures of the 60s anti-war movement were regular guests. Pete Seeger and the Berrigan brothers were his babysitters while his mother, Corinne Vincelette, was leading anti-apartheid demonstrations or protecting abortion clinics with other members of the National Organisation of Women.

The kid was bright - a probation report filed after one of his first arrests as an adult puts his IQ at a better-than-genius 150. Although he displayed a sometimes unsettling intensity, family, friends, and teachers were inclined to see that as a reflection of the domestic strain that followed his parents' divorce.

"He was just another one of us. I don't think anybody regarded him as black or anything," a former playmate recently recalled.

On weekends, however, that changed when his mother dropped him off with her ex, a successful architect who had chosen to live in a poor black district of Baltimore as a deliberate expression of his own racial solidarity.

White from Monday to Friday, the young Felton became black on Saturdays and Sundays. Once again, none of his seven much-darker half-brothers and sisters found anything odd about him. "He joked around with us like any other brother," recalled Leslie Felton, his half-sister.

Somewhere on that weekly journey from Black America to White America, something inside Felton was bent permanently out of shape.

As he wrote from the Boston prison, where he is now awaiting trial on charges that could send him away for life: "There is an old Italian saying that, if you try to sit on two chairs at once, you'll fall between them. So I chose my chair, so to speak ... White culture."

He was expelled from one school after the next, and there were run-ins with the law. He rejected his father and the black culture in which that side of his family demonstrated so much pride.

As for his mother, who had now come out of the closet and "married" her lesbian lover, he viewed her as a pervert.

He drifted from one fringe group to the next. This month a pagan, the next an aspiring seminarian in the Greek Orthodox church. The only constants in his life were violence against strangers, arrests, convictions, and increasingly long terms behind bars in prisons from California to New York.

It was in those institutions, at least according to prosecutors, that he buried his blackness once and for all beneath the tattoos and swagger of a member of the Aryan Brotherhood.

His fellow prison gang members didn't know he was black and, by that stage, neither did he.

Prosecutors allege that he was found with bags of nitrogen fertiliser and jerrycans of diesel fuel - the same ingredients Timothy McVeigh put to such destructive effect in Oklahoma City. According to police, Felton and his girlfriend, an Aryan Brotherhood groupie called Erica Chase, intended to spark their longed-for race war by blowing up "black and Jewish landmarks" in and around Boston.

Now, as he awaits his day in court, Felton spends his life in solitary - "protective isolation" in the parlance of his jailers, who say that black and white prison gangs alike have put a price on his head.

For most, it would be a lonely existence, but not, perhaps, for Felton.

After all, he has spent almost his entire life in a prison of his own making.