Breakup causing breakout?

Colorado’s banishment of 211 Crew’s leaders may be a bad decision

After a 211 Crew parolee killed Colorado prisons chief Tom Clements in 2013, officials began banishing leaders of the white supremacist gang to prisons across the U.S. through an inmate-swapping system in which high-risk prisoners are secretly traded from one state to the next, The Denver Post has learned.

That diaspora of shot callers — those who can order gang murders — is why Benjamin Davis was at the Wyoming State Penitentiary, south of Rawlins, when he killed himself last month. Davis was a founder and leader of the 211 Crew and was suspected of ordering Clements’ assassination.

Clements’ successor, executive director Rick Raemisch, has moved 211 Crew “inner circle” members with a rank of general — all with a vote when it comes time to order hits and beatings — outside Colorado’s prison system to state or federal prisons in Wyoming, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, West Virginia, Kentucky, Colorado and Ohio, according to inmate interviews and prison records reviewed by The Post.

“The Interstate Compact agreement is one of the most influential tools available to us in corrections. It allows the Colorado Department of Corrections and corrections departments across the United States to ensure the safety of their staff, safety of their offender population, and maintain safety and security in their facilities” Raemisch wrote in a prepared statement in response to

questions from The Post.

Raemisch and other DOC officials declined to discuss the whereabouts of the 211 Crew leaders.

Experts on prison gang culture say inmate swapping through the Interstate Corrections Compact is routine and can be effective in disrupting communications between gang leaders and their soldiers and enforcers. But it can also spread gang ideology, particularly for a gang such as 211 Crew, which has name recognition across the country. Charismatic gang leaders spread their racist dogma and internal gang leadership strategies to other prison systems, they say.

“When you move them, they are going to re-create themselves like seeds in another state,” said Damarcus Woods, of D. Woods Consultants, a gang expert who has testified in trials. “What makes this gang so popular was the murder of Tom Clements.”

Their leaders have instant name recognition and respect with convicts wherever they go, he added.

Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, agreed that 211 Crew leaders pose a particular threat of spreading their ideology because “of the murder they committed.”

“That killing,” she said, “was extraordinary.”

Evan Ebel, a 211 Crew member, shot Clements on the doorstep of his Monument home in March 2013. Documents show a spiderweb of phone calls between Ebel and fellow members of 211 Crew in the days before and after Clements’ slaying.

Prison-gang experts also said it is virtually impossible to cut off all communications among criminals regardless of how far away prison officials send them.

Prisoners pass gang orders hidden in prison library books. Davis sent letters, known behind bars as “kites,” to gang leaders using elaborate coding. Last fall, Colorado became the first prison system in the country to approve a policy in which most inmates will have free computer tablets in their cells, allowing them to send emails virtually anywhere.

James “Jimbo” Lohr, also suspected of being involved in the Clements murder conspiracy, said when he was moved to the New Hampshire State Prison for Men, he was effectively cut off from 211 Crew members. In reply to several requests, Lohr called The Post multiple times and gave a lengthy description of gang and prison politics.

“I didn’t retire. We keep our status,” said Lohr, confirming that he keeps his rank of general in the militaristic 211 Crew. “But I don’t have anything to do with (day-to-day) operations anymore. When they moved me to New Hampshire, there was a giant weight that was lifted off of me. I don’t have to worry about what hundreds of guys are doing. … For the most part, I don’t know what is going on right now.”

Lohr also vehemently denied any involvement either by Davis or himself in Clements’ murder, an event he acknowledges was the most significant in the history of 211 Crew.

“(Ebel) did a horrible, evil thing that affected a lot of (211 Crew members). Ebel was a lunatic that did that all on his own. He’s gone. He’s dead. He went out like a lunatic. The Texas Rangers killed him like a lunatic animal,” Lohr said. “If it was an orchestrated thing, don’t you think they would have charged us?”

FBI agents, however, traced many phone calls between Lohr and gang members Thomas Guolee and Chris Middleton, who were in constant contact with Ebel in the days before and after Ebel, wearing a Domino’s pizza uniform, shot Clements on March 19, 2013. Ebel had also kidnapped and killed Nathan Leon, a Commerce City father of three, to get Leon’s pizza uniform. Texas police gunned Ebel down the same week.

A confidential informant who is a 211 Crew member told Texas Rangers that Lohr told him during a phone interview a few days after Clements’ murder that “I had him do that” and asked the informant — identified only as “JR” — to look after Ebel while he was on the run in Texas, Texas investigative records indicate.

But Lohr said the informant was ratting to keep himself out of trouble. No one has ever been arrested directly for Clements’ murder, but a criminal conspiracy investigation continues, El Paso County Sheriff’s spokeswoman Jacqueline Kirby told The Post.

“I never talked to (Ebel) before (he shot Clements) or after that,” Lohr said.

Lohr said Clements’ death directed unwanted attention to 211 Crew, disrupting gang business such as drug deals. Prison intelligence officers threatened 211 Crew leaders with punishment — including solitary confinement — if there was a whiff of trouble caused by their soldiers, he said.

“They told all of us: ‘You get caught doing shot-caller stuff on the yard, we’re going to come down hard. Don’t be murdering people and getting into fights.’ They wanted me to debrief or rat. That’s not my style.” Lohr said. “That’s why they sent us out (to other states). … We’re just like trading cards. They trade us from one facility to the next. Divide and conquer.”

DOC officials immediately placed Davis and Lohr in isolation following Clements’ murder, on the justification they wanted to protect them from backlash from rival gangs, Lohr said.

“They put me in the box. I caught time over it,” he said.

Lohr, who completes his sentence for multiple crimes in 2021, said he has turned to his religious roots, knows the Bible inside and out, and has no intention of trying to indoctrinate New Hampshire prisoners about the 211 Crew’s brand of white supremacist ideology.

But Lohr also readily rattled off a list of names of 211 Crew generals who have all been moved out of Colorado prisons after Clements’ murder, and he knew the states where they had been sent. The same leaders are not on the DOC’s online database offering the locations of thousands of other Colorado prisoners.

DOC spokesman Mark Fairbairn said he could not comment on the 211 Crew leaders.

The Post verified Lohr’s information about the 211 Crew leaders’ whereabouts through federal and state prison records searches. Cop killer Vernon Wayne Templeman is now in West Virigina; convicted killer Raymond Cain is in Pennsylvania; 211 Crew cofounder Danny Shea is in Ohio; and Justin Barkley was first moved to Kentucky but is now at Colorado’s federal Administrative Maximum U.S. Penitentiary in Florence.

In many ways, Lohr followed the same strategy of his close friend and ideological brother, Benjamin Davis, by repeatedly denying any ongoing involvement in 211 Crew. Davis made a public proclamation that he was no longer affiliated with the gang in a 2002 advertisement in the Rocky Mountain News.

But after Davis’ unusual declaration, Denver prosecutors proved in a massive racketeering case against 24 members of the gang in 2006 that Davis effectively orchestrated beatings and murders from solitary confinement cells at various high-security prisons across Colorado and from as far away as the Wisconsin Secure Program Facility in Boscobel.

Sometimes when a gang leader is murdered or dies, gangs disband or divide. There could be a power struggle to replace Davis, Woods said.

After Davis’ suicide, “the question,” Woods said, “is what is going to happen now?”

When George Jackson, a founder of the Black Guerilla Family in California, was killed at San Quentin Prison in 1971, there was rioting in multiple California prisons in a battle for power, Woods said.

“It erupted into a major disturbance,” Woods said. “A lot of people got hurt.”

Woods predicted that 211 Crew members will claim that Davis was actually murdered in Wyoming instead of committing suicide.

“His ideology is cemented in death. That’s not the end of the 211 Crew. They’ll raise him up and exalt him.They’ll not just follow him but put their lives on the line for him. They’re going to make his death into a conspiracy to promote their gang. What they write in their book will be different than what others write in theirs,” Woods said.

Carson County Coroner Paul Zamora said Thursday that Davis died of asphyxiation by hanging in his cell and that the manner of death was suicide. Zamora said Davis had been in the cell alone and his body was found early Aug. 27.

But Lohr, indeed, questioned whether Davis committed suicide, and he said 211 Crew will not crumble after Davis’ death.

“No. Absolutely not,” Lohr said. “People are staying the (expletive) away from us because we are the most respected gang in DOC. (Clements’ shooting) was the biggest murder in Colorado history. We have a hierarchy just like you guys say. … We’ve got a real tight rein.”

He added that 211 Crew has a membership of around 1,000 members, who are in and out of prison across the country. Davis had read textbooks about leadership skills used at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Lohr said. The “crew” is founded on solid, white supremacist ideology, not like many prison gangs that have a “dopescene mentality,” he said. For example, the 211 Crew punishes its own for violations of its bylaws, Lohr said.

“We have a code of honor,” he said. “It’s an ideology. You can’t stop an ideology.”