Over a two-year period, from 2021 to 2023, agents seized an estimated 223 pounds of methamphetamine, 830,000 fentanyl pills, 5.5 pounds of fentanyl powder, 3.5 pounds of heroin, five pounds of cocaine, $338,000 of suspected drug proceeds and 48 firearms from members of the conspiracy.
Then, in March 2023, after two years of investigation, law enforcement caught up with and arrested 24 members of the same drug trafficking organization, seizing an additional 22 pounds of methamphetamine, 26 pounds of fentanyl, six pounds of heroin, more than $330,000 of suspected drug proceeds and 177 additional firearms.
Their real priority is crime on a grand scale: drug trafficking, robbery, identity theft, murder, all hand in glove with hate crime.
Jacob D. Galvan, acting special agent in charge of the DEA Seattle Field Division, was shocked at the sheer volume of deadly substances. “The fentanyl seized in this operation contained enough lethal doses to kill everyone who lives in Tacoma and Seattle, with enough lethal doses left over to poison another half a million people,” he said.
Aryan Circle, Aryan Brotherhood, Nazi Low Riders, New Aryan Empire, Brothers of White Warriors, White Aryan Resistance, European Kindred, Ghost Face Gangsters—their names are all variations on a single theme: the fancied superiority of one race over all others.
They’re called white supremacist prison gangs. They are organized, some with military hierarchies and ranks like “soldier,” “captain” and “lieutenant.” They operate with constitutions or bylaws and their own vicious justice systems.
Many refer to each other as “brothers” and expect the same unwavering loyalty from one another as would members of a family, hence their mottos and sworn oaths: “Loyalty, Love, Honor, Respect, Honesty, Faithfulness, Understanding” (Ghost Face Gangsters), “Brothers Forever, Forever Brothers” (Brothers of White Warriors), “My Honor Is Called Loyalty” (Aryan Circle), “Death Before Dishonor” (Family Values—yes, that’s really the group’s name).
These prison gangs represent one of the primary and most vicious branches of the ideology of hate. But hatred is simply the glue that holds the groups—more than 75 at last count, some with memberships of a thousand or more—together. Their real priority is crime on a grand scale: drug trafficking, robbery, identity theft, murder, all hand in glove with hate crime.
It began in California’s San Quentin State Prison in the 1960s, when desegregation mixed prisoners of all races together, and the Aryan Brotherhood, the first gang of its kind, sprang up as a reaction to the new policy, establishing a model for future white supremacist prison gangs. As desegregation continued over the decades, more and more sprang up until, by the 1980s, an entire subculture of hate flourished behind bars and under the average citizen’s radar—including a vast inter-gang and inter-prison network.
By giving and receiving orders in messages passed via wives, sisters, mothers and friends, such gangs are able to exert their influence beyond prison walls. While neither incarcerated nor allowed membership into the gang, members of this extended network foster communication, publish and distribute newsletters and even engage directly in criminal activities—smuggling contraband into prisons, assisting in prison escapes and even carrying out gang murders.
By way of example, in 2019, Renee Jonson-Fritz forwarded a message from her husband, an incarcerated leader of the Kansas Aryan Brotherhood, to a fellow gang member at another prison—an order to murder another prisoner. The order was passed and acted on, with the victim stabbed more than 20 times.
Prison gangs also align with street gangs, even sharing their criminal profits, possibly in exchange for the promise of protection if and when the street gang’s own members are incarcerated.
Such is the power of the white supremacist prison gangs.
Nearly every state in the US now has at least one, which is typically larger than its counterpart white supremacist group on the outside. Between 2015 and 2018 in Texas, the gangs—including Aryan Circle, Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, the Peckerwoods, Soldiers of Aryan Culture and the Dirty White Boys—trafficked dozens of firearms, heroin and cocaine, and more than 1,600 kilos of methamphetamine before law enforcement finally caught up with them, resulting in the arrest and conviction of over 150 gang members. They received a grand total of 1,820 years in federal prison.
Awareness is the first step toward solving this spreading cancer.
Right on their heels came the Ghost Face Gangsters who, expanding their reach from their home in Georgia outward to Tennessee and South Carolina, were the subject of the Peach State’s largest ever gang investigation—resulting in 77 indictments for attempted murder, drug trafficking and distribution, kidnapping, aggravated assault, illegal firearms possession, human trafficking and extortion.
Then came the 2023 busts, resulting in Carver’s December 16 sentencing.
Make no mistake: Law enforcement has burned the midnight oil for years to put an end to each of these operations. In this latest Northwest bust, for example, federal, state and local partners—along with the FBI—coordinated the takedowns magnificently. It took 10 swat teams and more than 350 law enforcement officers to put an end to Carver and Bailey’s operation, after two years of investigative work.
But the crime wave continues. After all, what do you do with a prison gang member who orders the execution of a rival or who traffics drugs and firearms in industrial quantities? Try him, convict him and send him to prison? He’s already there. Sending him to another one might just expand the base of his criminal operations.
As the Anti-Defamation League points out, “Despite these and numerous other successful racketeering prosecutions of white supremacist prison gangs around the country, often accompanied by optimistic claims of damage to the groups prosecuted, no such effort has resulted in the destruction of any major gang. Using this type of prosecution, authorities have only been able to temporarily disrupt or hinder [their] activities.”
Awareness is the first step toward solving this spreading cancer. We must confront the existence of a sinister underworld thriving within our prisons and see its members for precisely what they are—for beneath the screams of ideology and zealot passion, beneath the waving banners of Loyalty, Love and Brotherhood, and even beneath the religion of hate itself, is the truth.
As specialized as their trappings and slogans are, that truth is a universal truth, because when you hold up the mirror to any hater or bigot anywhere, you’ll see the same thing: the face of a common thug.
