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Posted: October 18, 2002
Forty members of the Aryan Brotherhood, a white supremacist prison gang, have been charged with racketeering, according to a 10-count indictment unsealed by federal officials in California on October 17.
The release of the indictment, handed down from a grand jury on August 28, coincided with the execution of 80 search warrants on prison cells, offices and homes in California, New York, Louisiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Colorado, Massachusetts, Florida, Washington, Nebraska and Connecticut.
The lengthy indictment alleges that the group tried to control drug trafficking and gambling in the federal and California state prison systems. The defendants were charged under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).
The charges were the culmination of a six-year investigation led by the Los Angeles office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The California state Department of Corrections and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department also assisted the investigation.
Among those arrested were four women in California, accused of passing information on behalf of the gang, and four people in Florida and Louisiana. Thirty other defendants are currently serving prison terms around the country. Two more are listed as fugitives.
Two of the prisoners indicted, Barry Byron Mills and Tyler Davis Bingham, are suspected of being two-thirds of a three-person group that manages Aryan Brotherhood activities in the federal prisons. Both reside at the Florence Correctional Institute, a maximum security federal prison in Florence, Colorado.
Other members charged in the indictment include Richard Lloyd Terflinger, David Allen Chance, and John William Stinson. The three are inmates at Pelican Bay State Prison in California. Six murders at Pelican Bay have been linked to the Aryan Brotherhood since 1996.
Taken as a whole, the gang is charged with many violent attacks on inmates and correctional officers, including 16 murders and 16 attempted murders. If convicted, 23 defendants could be eligible for death penalty trials, while the remaining 17 could receive life sentences without parole.
The Aryan Brotherhood originated in the California Department of Corrections at San Quentin in the mid 1960s. Although primarily a prison-based criminal gang involved in the methamphetamine trade, many members espouse a white supremacist ideology. Some of the charges in the recent indictment, in fact, are related to the killing of black inmates as part of what officials describe as "an Aryan Brotherhood race war."
Racially motivated murders have been perpetrated by the Aryan Brotherhood outside prison walls as well. In October 1994, Aryan Brotherhood member Donald Riley was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a black Marine in Houston who had recently returned from service in the Persian Gulf.
In July 2002, Leo Felton, a member of several white supremacist groups, including the East Coast Aryan Brotherhood, and an associate, Erica Chase, were found guilty of plotting to blow up Jewish and black landmarks in Boston in an attempt to ignite a racial war between blacks and whites.
Among the inmates arrested on October 17 were two members of the Mexican Mafia. They are alleged to have killed an Aryan Brotherhood rival and to have attempted to kill a member of a third group. The Aryan Brotherhood, which operates in prisons throughout the United States, forged an alliance with the Mexican Mafia in the early 1970s in order to control the drug trade to mutual benefit.
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