Nicola Vincenzio "Nicky" Crane was born on May 21 1958. He joined the British Movement in the late 1970s and by 1980 had become its Kent organiser. In 1980 he was convicted of unlawfully fighting and making an affray in an attack on a black family at a bus stop by Liverpool Street Station; he was given a suspended sentence. In 1981 he appeared as the iconic skinhead on the cover photograph of the Oi! album Strength thru Oi! . The same year he was convicted again, this time in connection with an organised BM attack on a group of black youths arriving on a train at Woolwich Arsenal Station in 1980, and jailed for 4 years. Released in 1984, he soon began providing "security" for the white power skinhead band Skrewdriver, and remained associated with the band and its leader, Ian Stuart Donaldson, for the rest of the decade. In 1987 he was instrumental in setting up the neo-nazi network Blood & Honour with Donaldson.

In July 1992, Crane came out as gay on the Channel 4 programme Out. He died of AIDS in 1993.