Hate Crimes in Prison

SANTA ANA, Calif. -- Within the Ronald Reagan Federal Building and United States Courthouse is a courtroom called the "Nuremberg room," for its resemblance to the famous chamber in which 22 leaders of the Third Reich were tried in 1945 and 1946 for crimes against humanity.

Both halls of justice have three-tiered docks where multiple high-profile defendants are shackled to anchors in the floor by chains hidden from view, behind tables and podiums. Like the docks in Germany's Palace of Justice 60 years ago, the docks in Santa Ana this year have filled with self-avowed Nazis, Aryan warriors, and followers of Hitler.

But the Nazis standing accused in California are Nazis of a wholly different strain than Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal defendants like Hermann Goering and Rudolf Hess. They are white supremacist pimps, drug dealers and backstabbing shower-stall killers, glorified thugs with swastika tattoos. They covet power and oversee a criminal empire, but they are motivated less by furthering their die-hard racist ideology than satisfying their crude greed. They are the leaders of the Aryan Brotherhood (AB), the most notorious, powerful, and violent prison gang in America. Also known as the Brand or the Rock -- a reference to the Shamrock tattoos AB members favor in addition to Nazi insignia -- the gang in recent years has established criminal networks outside prison walls in cities, small towns, and suburbs across the country.

Their nicknames are worthy of professional wrestlers -- Super Honky, The Baron, Lucifer -- but the blood they have spilt by the bucketful has been all too real. Aryan Brotherhood members make up less than one-tenth of one percent of the nation's prison inmate population, yet the white power gang is responsible for 18% of all prison murders, according to the FBI.

The AB's carnage has spanned four decades. In 1981, two members of the Brotherhood who were incarcerated at the federal prison in Marion, Ill., murdered the leader of a rival gang, the D.C. Blacks, by sneaking up behind him in the shower and then brutally stabbing and slashing him 67 times. They then dragged his bloody, mutilated corpse through a cellblock while white inmates cheered and chanted racial slurs.

"I have walked over dead bodies," one of the AB assassins in that case later boasted in court. "I've had guts splattered all over my chest from the race wars."

The last arrow

Law enforcement authorities and prison officials have until now been unable to destroy the Aryan Brotherhood, mainly because so many top leaders of the gang are serving life or multiple life sentences with no possibility of parole. These men laugh at criminal penalties that only add more time to their already infinite sentences.

Isolating the gang's leaders in solitary confinement hasn't worked either, because they always find way to communicate with each other and to transmit and receive reports, requests, and orders from prison to prison and down through the ranks, whether by bribing guards, subpoenaing each other to appear at court hearings where they employ hand signals and speak in code, or writing letters in a form of invisible ink made with their own urine.

These methods are time consuming. But time is one luxury the leaders of the Aryan Brotherhood possess in abundance. One sure way to stop them is to kill them, which is exactly what the federal government is threatening to do in a sweeping racketeering indictment that has drawn a rogue's gallery of 40 Aryan Brotherhood members and associates, including virtually all of the gang's veteran leaders, or "shot callers," to the Nuremberg room in Santa Ana.

Twenty-one of the defendants are eligible for the death penalty, making the Aryan Brotherhood indictment the largest death penalty case in the history of the American justice system. It is a decapitation attack.