Today Los Angeles, Tomorrow . . .

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

A group of skinheads in California had a dream, but it was decidedly different from the one imagined by Martin Luther King. Their vision allegedly went like this: a phalanx of skinheads with machine guns would invade the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles. The congregation would be sprayed with bullets, and the pastor, (the Rev.) Cecil Murray, would be murdered. Across the U.S., other blacks were potential targets -- Rodney King, (the Rev.) Al Sharpton, the rap group Public Enemy, perhaps even a baseball player. An all-out race war would be triggered, a final, bloody Ragnarok of the races.

It's a phantasm that won't come true. Last week a coalition of federal and local law-enforcement officials in Los Angeles launched an assault on white supremacists, arresting eight people, including one adult and one unnamed juvenile who were implicated in the plot. Authorities said the suspects were affiliated with three white-power groups: Tom Metzger's White Aryan Resistance (WAR), the Church of the Creator, and a relatively new group called the Fourth Reich Skinheads. Among those taken into custody were Christian Gilbert Nadal, 35, a flight engineer for Continental Airlines and his wife Doris, 41, a real estate agent. Most of the suspects were slapped with various federal weapons charges, but Christopher David Fisher, the 20-year-old leader of the 50-member Fourth Reich Skinheads, was also charged in the plot to attack the A.M.E. church and kill well-known blacks and Jews.

The arrests came just days after the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith released a survey on the growth of the skinhead movement in America. In 1988 there were about 1,500 skinheads in 12 states; today there are about 3,500 in 40 states, and they are responsible for at least 22 killings over the past three years. "The skinheads are today the most violent of all white-supremacy groups," the B'nai B'rith report concluded. "Not even the Ku Klux Klan, so notorious for their use of the rope and the gun, comes close." An FBI source has told TIME that one of the juvenile members of the Fourth Reich Skinheads arrested last week is being charged with a pipe-bomb attack against a member of the "Spur Posse," the gang of teenage boys in Lakewood, California, that won notoriety earlier this year for awarding points among themselves for sexual conquests. According to an affidavit, the Spur Posse member was targeted partly because he was half Asian and half Mexican.

The FBI, whose investigation began 18 months ago, planted an undercover agent inside the white-supremacist community; one of their civilian informants even posed as a minister of the Church of the Creator. The agent was allegedly told by the plotters that killing the pastor of the A.M.E. church would "stir the masses," that "half-assed revolutions" don't work, and that killing black leaders was the way to start the race war. One skinhead said that "an $ average dumb nigger" should be slain so the group could bond with blood. The violent rhetoric seemed at odds with some of the members' backgrounds. Fisher, the skinhead leader, is the son of a grade-school teacher and a computer- science instructor; neighbors say many of his friends are nonwhite. But the relative of another suspect saw trouble coming. "He said he was fed up with Mexicans, blacks," said Rene Nadal of his son Christian. "I tried to convince him not to hate."

When several of the conspirators almost finished assembling a letter bomb to send to a rabbi in Orange County, the FBI decided to make the arrests. "It was a judgment call that they might do something without telling us," said Charlie Parsons, special agent in charge of the FBI's Los Angeles field office. "These people are very unpredictable, and it's been like riding a bucking horse." Announcing the arrests, authorities displayed an array of racist paraphernalia and weaponry taken from the homes of the suspects: pipe bombs, machine guns, a Confederate flag, a Nazi flag and a framed portrait of Adolf Hitler.

"This is one of the most successful infiltrations of white-supremacist groups to date," said Terree Bowers, U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, whose office will prosecute most of those arrested. "We think it will put a severe dent in the skinhead movement in Southern California."

With reporting by Sylvester Monroe/Los Angeles