'White supremacists' face death penalty for US prison murders

A white supremacist prison gang known as the Aryan Brotherhood maintains its grip on gambling and drug trafficking both inside and outside the walls of America's penitentiaries, by murdering anyone who gets in its way or dares to cross its leadership, a US prosecutor told a jury this week.

Details of the gang's modus operandi, which included smuggling weapons concealed in genitals and sending messages between prisons with disappearing ink made from urine, were disclosed in closing arguments at a trial of four alleged leaders of the gang in Santa Ana, California.

It is the first of several trials expected in the wake of a federal investigation into the gang that ended in 2002. Forty men were arrested at that time, of whom 16 could face the death penalty, making it one of the biggest capital punishment cases to reach the American courts. Prosecutors allege that over a period of 32 years, the gang was responsible for 30 murders. In the dock in Santa Ana are the now middle-aged men, who prosecutors say were among the most important leaders of the Brotherhood. They are Barry "the Baron" Mills, Tyler "the Hulk" Bingham, Edgar "the Snail" Hevle and Christopher Overton Gibson. After four months of testimony, the case could go to the jury at the end of this week.

"These men ran the Aryan Brotherhood," the US District Attorney Terri Flynn said in closing arguments this week. "They imposed murder when necessary to keep the goals of the Aryan Brotherhood operating as they should."

Experts say that the gang was founded in the late 1950s at the San Quentin penitentiary in California, when white inmates banded together to protect themselves against blacks and Hispanics, who outnumbered them. In the mid-1960s, the group named itself the Aryan Brotherhood, thus formalising its espousal of racism and white supremacy. Its chilling and self-explanatory motto reads: "Kill to get in; die to get out".

Prosecutors have painted a picture of a gang that quickly moved beyond self-protection to the aggressive pursuit of criminal enterprises inside prisons around the country as well as on the outside. Its leaders recruited the most violent inmates to help boost the gang's strength. Murder was the tool used to ensure loyalty and punish betrayal. "Even its own members weren't safe," said Ms Flynn.

Mark Potok, an expert on gangs at the Southern Poverty Law Centre, said that over time criminal profit became more important than racism. "The Aryan Brotherhood is very active in the production and distribution of drugs, especially methamphetamine," he said. Members committed other crimes, including theft, assault and murder.

Gang members released from prison are expected to continue working for the organisation, ensuring that the gang's criminal activities spread far beyond the prison system. Duties are likely to include supplying drugs to comrades still behind bars.

"It is a hard fact that most of the AB will be paroled or discharged at some future date, and in view of members' lifelong commitments, it would be naïve to think [any gang member] would not remain in contact with his brothers," concluded an FBI report on the gang from 1982, released under Freedom of Information laws. "The rule of thumb is that, once on the streets, one must take care of his brothers that are still inside. The penalty for failure to do so is death upon the member's return to the prison system."

Jurors in Santa Ana heard how the four defendants sent messages to gang members in other prisons using the urine-manufactured disappearing ink and used runners - usually the girlfriends of inmates - to bring weapons to the prison, concealed in the anus or vagina. Prosecutors showed membership lists and a code of conduct making it clear that every member should generate income from criminal activities.

In her closing arguments, Ms Flynn also spent several hours describing in detail five of the alleged murders. In one case, she said, the assailant stabbed the dying victim so many times and so violently that his knife left scratch marks on the ground beneath him. When he was done he licked the victim's blood from his hands. The court also watched five prison surveillance videos showing some of the alleged murders being committed.

At the core of Ms Flynn's case has been the assertion that a message sent by two of the men on trial - Barry Mills and Tyler Bingham - to fellow gang members at a prison in Pennsylvania in 1997, contained an order to start a race war. Riots that immediately broke out in the prison resulted in the deaths of two black inmates.