US: Alleged to be vicious murderers and racists, the Aryan Brotherhood may be smashed for racketeering, writes Sonya Geis in Santa Ana, California
The largest capital murder case in US history has opened in California as federal prosecutors aim to dismantle the Aryan Brotherhood, a prison gang of white supremacists linked to dozens of killings.
Prosecutors have charged 40 people affiliated with the Aryan Brotherhood with crimes that include conspiracy to commit murder, fomenting a race war with black inmates, smuggling heroin into prisons, and murders inside of prison and out. Eight gang members now face the death penalty, and prosecutors may seek death for eight more. Nineteen others have already pleaded guilty, and one has died.
"This case is fundamentally about power and control of the nation's prison population," assistant US attorney Michael Emmick told the jury on Tuesday, in the first of a series of trials using racketeering statutes to target the gang's leaders. Although there are only about 100 members of the gang, he said, "what distinguishes the Aryan Brotherhood is that its members are particularly violent, disciplined, fearless, and committed to controlling and dominating the prison population through murder, threats and intimidation".
Prosecutors paint the brotherhood as a cunning and well-organised network of convicts more concerned with earning hundreds of thousands of dollars from gambling, drug sales and prostitution than with racial superiority.
The gang sought unsuccessfully to carry out a hit for Mafia don John Gotti, and once executed the father of a man who testified against them, according to the indictment and declassified FBI documents.
Gang members communicated between maximum security prisons by using elaborately coded messages and notes written in invisible ink made from lemon juice or urine, prosecutors said.
Tyler "The Hulk" Bingham and Barry "The Baron" Mills, previously convicted of stabbing a fellow inmate to death in 1979, are among four gang members on trial. Bingham and Mills are accused of setting up and running a three-member "commission" to oversee the workings of the gang inside the penal system. They allegedly authorised more than a dozen killings and orchestrated the murders of two black Pennsylvanian inmates.
Dean Steward, Mills's attorney, said in an interview that different gangs control gambling and drugs within all prisons. He said the prosecution's case is built on informants who were housed together for two years, "getting their stories straight", who will be rewarded with freedom and privileges. Moreover, prosecutors are exaggerating the money, Mr Steward said. "These guys are about a bag of chips and a bar of soap."
He said that when the group formed in the 1960s it aimed to protect white inmates. "Federal prisons are violent and dangerous places, period, for anybody who's in them," he said. "These guys are just trying to protect themselves."
In the courtroom, Bingham, Mills and co-defendants Christopher Gibson and Edgar Hevle sat facing jurors at a special desk designed to hide shackles that chained them to the floor. Each wore button-down shirts, heavy moustaches and glasses.
Mills, his bald head gleaming, peered through bifocals as prosecutors described the details of 15 murders he allegedly ordered, authorised or carried out. Gibson is accused of serving as head of the gang's "department of security", and Hevle is said to have sat on a lower governing body.
The trial is expected to take nine months, and prosecutors plan to call dozens of witnesses, including at least 12 former gang members. Eleven more members will go on trial in October in Los Angeles.