Slayings linked to jail gang
New York – The bulletin issued late last year was almost routine: four leaders of a violent prison gang had been charged with a long list of crimes, 30 subordinates had been arrested and charged, and other members of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas might try to retaliate against police and prosecutors.
‘‘It’s a normal reaction that you get when a bunch of people get locked up,’’ said Terry Pelz, a former Texas prison warden who has studied the white supremacist prison gang for 30 years.
‘‘People are being indicted and facing the death penalty. They are going to threaten public officials. It’s not going to scare anyone.’’
A month later Mark Hasse, assistant district attorney in a quiet county east of Dallas, was shot dead as he walked from his car to a courthouse. Mike McLelland, the head of the prosecutor’s office, was given a security detail and told reporters that he now carried a gun at all times, even when walking his dog. He was killed last weekend, along with his wife, in a hail of automatic gunfire at his rural home outside the small town of Forney.
One report from the scene said investigators had found the initials ‘‘AR’’ on the wall of their home, another clue linking the killings with the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas.
The gang is part of a national white supremacist movement founded in a prison in California in 1967 and responsible for numerous killings: often of prison inmates from rival gangs or of gang members who were thought to have betrayed the brotherhood. By the 1980s it had spread to the penitentiaries of Texas: a report by the President’s Commission on Organised Crime in 1986 identified it as one of the largest of 114 prison gangs, placing it alongside groups known as the Mexican Mafia, La Nuestra Familia, the Black Guerrilla Family and the Aryan Syndicate. Members advocated a white supremacist agenda and were said to be involved in drug running, racketeering and extortion.
‘‘I don’t compare them to the Mafia,’’ Malcolm Bales, US attorney for the Eastern District of Texas, told the Houston Chronicle last summer.
‘‘They are too weird and dysfunctional in how they handle their lives – heavy drug use and sociopathic personalities.’’
On the other hand, officials said the gang had a paramilitary structure, with five factions ruling different territories within the state, each run by a ‘‘general’’.
The five generals were said to meet in a committee known as the ‘‘Wheel’’, meetings that apparently took place in an abandoned barn and in a bar in a town north of Houston. Pelz, the former prison warden, encountered hundreds of members of the gang – who were often kept in isolation – and recalls being threatened himself.
‘‘We would disrupt their operations,’’ he said yesterday.
‘‘The next thing you know a hit has been ordered on Warden Pelz.’’
But he is puzzled by the idea that the gang might now be murdering state officials.
‘‘They have never taken out public officials,’’ he said.
He felt the killings bore the hallmarks of one of the Mexican cartels.
‘‘The Aryan Brotherhood make a lot of methamphetamine for the Mexican cartels,’’ he said. ‘‘I think the arrests last year could have interrupted some shipment or operation and the cartels are sending a statement saying: ‘Don’t mess with us’.’’
There has been increased evidence that Mexican cartels are now active in cities such as Chicago.
‘‘They are all over the state of Texas,’’ Pelz said.