Federal prosecutors in Texas have obtained guilty pleas from eight of the 35 members of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas (ABT) charged with racketeering and a host of violent crimes, including murders, arsons, robberies and assaults.

The first guilty pleas in the massive prosecution came just two months after federal charges were filed, suggesting prosecutors have a strong case and are working to strike deals with some of the accused who could get lighter sentences in exchange for cooperation. But some of the guilty pleas include specific language that the defendant isn’t cooperating — so they don’t end up with a “snitch jacket” and protective custody while doing prison time. ( continue to full post… )

Two white supremacists are in custody and two more are being sought in the beating death in Tennessee of a volunteer firefighter who authorities say was affiliated with the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations.

At least one of the four suspects is reportedly a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, a prison-based, “whites-only” gang that is known as one of the most violent of its type in the country. In recent years, felons released from prison have increasingly continued to work for the Aryan Brotherhood, which frequently is involved in drug dealing, in the outside world. ( continue to full post… )

Colorado officials this morning are investigating the possibility that a white supremacist reportedly killed by police after a Thursday shootout and chase in Texas murdered the head of the Colorado Department of Corrections earlier in the week, The Denver Post reports. Tom Clements, executive director of the department, was shot dead on Tuesday after opening the door of his Monument home to a stranger.

The apparent suspect was identified in several reports as Evan Spencer Ebel, a 28-year-old Denver parolee who was shot to death Thursday after first wounding a North Texas sheriff’s deputy and then crashing his car during a chase that reached speeds of over 100 mph. Officials told the Post and other Colorado news outlets that the Cadillac Ebel was driving is similar to a car that was described by witnesses as waiting outside Clements’ home for about a half hour before the official was murdered.

Ebel was identified as a member of the 211 Crew, also known as the Aryan Alliance, a particularly vicious regional white supremacist prison gang whose size has been estimated at somewhere between several hundred and a thousand members, all in Colorado. A major, four-year racketeering investigation of the group culminated in 2005 with the arrests of 32 gang members and associates. One of them was Benjamin Davis, who started the gang in 1995, and was ultimately convicted of racketeering, assault and conspiracy and sentenced to 108 years in prison. ( continue to full post… )

In one of the largest racketeering cases brought this year, the U.S. Department of Justice has just unsealed a 43-page indictment of 34 members of a “violent, whites-only prison-based gang with thousands of members operating” in and out of prisons throughout Texas and elsewhere.

The Aryan Brotherhood of Texas (ABT) is accused of carrying out murders, attempted murders, conspiracies, arsons, assaults, robberies and drug trafficking as part of an enterprise that goes back to at least 1993. Among those charged in the indictment are four senior leaders or “generals” — Terry Ross “Big Terry” Blake, 55; Larry Max “Slick” Bryan, 51; William David “Baby Huey” Maynard, 42, and Charles Lee “Jive” Roberts, 68. ( continue to full post… )