A Texas prosecutor and his wife were assassinated in a “targeted act” two months after the murder of one his assistants. Officials now believe that this string of killings may be the doing of the Aryan Brotherhood, a White supremacist prison gang.
Kaufman County, Texas district attorney Mike McLelland, 63, and his wife, Cynthia, 65, were fatally shot at the home March 30. Assistant District Attorney Mark Hasse was shot to death near the courthouse of the small Dallas suburb, and McLelland had publicly announced that he would seek out the “scum” responsible for the murder; no arrests were made, however.
The Kaufman County District Attorney’s Office was part of a community of agencies that have brought charges against the Aryan Brotherhood for racketeering. United States Rep. Lloyd “Ted” Poe (R-Texas) was the first to speculate that the Aryan Brotherhood was involved in the murders.
When questioned about the McLellands, Poe said in an interview with CNN Monday, “I believe it is a group. It could possibly be the Aryan Brotherhood.”
Poe pointed out that only 13 prosecutors have been killed in the United States in the last 30 years. “It seems to me that a scenario may be developing that the district attorney’s office was investigating this gang, or another gang, and they wanted to prevent that investigation,” Poe said.
According to Kaufman County Sheriff David Byrnes, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Texas Rangers and other law enforcement agencies are investigating the deaths. “It’s pretty obvious it’s unnerving,” he said at a press conference on Sunday. “We are striving to assure the community that we are providing public safety.”
In December, the Texas Department of Public Safety issued a statewide bulletin warning that it had “credible information” that the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas was planning to retaliate against state law enforcement following the arrest and indictment of dozens of gang members in Houston.
“High ranking members … are involved in issuing orders to inflict ‘mass casualties or death’ to law enforcement officials who were involved in cases where Aryan Brotherhood of Texas are facing life sentences or the death penalty,” the bulletin stated.
On March 19, Colorado’s Department of Corrections Director Tom Clements was shot dead at his home while answering the doorbell. Authorities have linked Evan Spencer Ebel, a former Colorado inmate and member of the 211s, a White supremacist group, to the death of Clements and the killing of a pizza deliveryman two days prior to Clement’s assassination. Ebel was killed in a shootout with Texas law enforcement immediately outside of Kaufman County.
The Aryan Brotherhood
In California’s notorious San Quentin State Prison in the 1960s, a group of White convicts decided to band together for protection. At the time, San Quentin was recently desegregated, but the prison population still congregated by race. The two primary gangs in the prison at the time were the Black Guerilla Family (BGF) and the Mexican Mafia (Eme). This group of White convicts, mostly Irish bikers, initially, came to calling themselves the Aryan Brotherhood, in reference to Adolf Hitler’s ideology of a “superior race.”
In the beginning, the gang focused itself as being a counterweight and deterrent to the other gangs terrorizing the White prison population. Vetting and joining the gang was simple, relatively speaking: All a new initiate had to do was kill someone that was Black or Latino. The gang had a “no exit” policy; once the initiate shed blood in the name of the Brotherhood, he couldn’t leave the gang except by death.
Before long, the Brotherhood — also known as the Brand, the AB, Alice Baker or the One-Two — spread to every prison in the California penal system and was one of the biggest gangs. They moved into drug trafficking (inside and outside of prison walls), gambling, extortion and protection, and they established race-based laws all White convicts in the California system was expected to follow — despite affiliation. For example, it was expected that all interactions with non-Whites were on a need-basis only and that there were no sharing of consumables outside the race. Violations were met with violence.
In exchange for showing the Brotherhood respect and obeying their rules, they would vouch for and defend any White prisoner in the system. This, of course, changed in the 1980s.
The “blood in, blood out” motto was abolished; it was no longer required that a new initiate kill a non-White. It was only required that the new initiate showed blind faith and obedience to the leadership. The Brotherhood started to work with the Black and Latino gangs and abandoned its protection oath to the White prisoners, targeting them with violence and killings. The Brotherhood raise the violence level of their activities significantly — despite being only 1 percent of the prison population, they are responsible for 20 percent of prison murders.
The California penal system gathered up and separated the Brotherhood’s leadership into solitary confinement in supermaxs at Pelican Bay and Corcoran. The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) followed suit and segregated the Brotherhood leadership in the federal system into high security facilities, such as Marion and Florence ADX. In 1999, the BOP reported that there was only three members of the original Brotherhood still in the general population. Despite this, the Brotherhood still managed to pass messages to agents on the outside to run their criminal enterprises.
The United States v. the ABT
Many of the splinter groups that uses the Aryan Brotherhood brand, such as the Arizona AB, the New Mexico AB, the Texas AB or the Ohio AB are in no way connected to the original Aryan Brotherhood and are, in reality, not White separatist groups, as they do not engage primarily in White separatist activities; they are just gangs that happen to have White separatists as members.
In November, the Justice Department concluded a multi-year sting on the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas (ABT or Texas AB) which resulted in the arrest of 34 suspected members, including four senior leaders. All 34 were indicted by grand jury of participating in a racketeering enterprise.
“[This] takedown represents a devastating blow to the leadership of ABT,” said Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Criminal Division Lanny Breuer. “Four ABT generals, 13 additional alleged ABT leaders and numerous other gang members and associates are named in the indictment. As charged, ABT uses extreme violence and threats of violence to maintain internal discipline and retaliate against those believed to be cooperating with law enforcement. Through violence and intimidation, ABT allegedly exerts control over prison populations and neighborhoods and instills fear in those who come in contact with its members. As [these] operations show, the Criminal Division, working closely with its federal, state and local law enforcement partners, is determined to continue disrupting and dismantling ABT and other violent, criminal gangs.”
“I don’t envision the ABT bringing more heat on themselves by going around killing public officials,” said Terry Pelz, a former prison warden with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice who studies prison gangs. “That doesn’t mean they didn’t do it.”
Previously, the ABT purported a plot to kill Texas District Judge Angus McGinty this year and threatened Bexar County Assistant District Attorney Nicole Thornbro in 2008.