SANTA ANA – The national media have already spread the story of the government’s racketeering and murder case against the Aryan Brotherhood, but this week the case against the notorious prison gang goes to a new audience: a jury of Orange County residents.
The trial, which officials said is part of what may be the biggest capital-murder case in U.S. history, is expected to last up to seven-plus months. It will include more than 120 prosecution witnesses to provide details aimed at proving that the white inmate organization carried out the murders and attempted murders of 32 people over 30 years.
On trial are four reputed leaders of the gang. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against two of the four: Barry Byron Mills, 57, and Tyler Davis Bingham, 58, who are accused in about 20 of the attacks.
It has been more than half a century since a federal defendant was sentenced to death in the federal court’s Central District of California, which includes Orange County.
“What is at stake here is control of prisons across the country,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen G. Wolfe. “The government believes that it should control the prisons, and the Aryan Brotherhood prefers they have control. They think things work better if they can kill whoever they want.”
Defense lawyer Dean Steward of Capistrano Beach, who represents Mills, said the brotherhood is only trying to protect themselves and other whites from attack by blacks and Hispanics who outnumber them in prison.
“They’re just trying to survive in an environment where they are a small minority,” Steward said.
He contended that much of the government’s case is the product of a “snitch school” at the U.S. Bureau of Prisons’ Supermax prison in Florence, Colo. He said that for years informants against the brotherhood have been housed together in protective custody and provided with information and motivation to become government witnesses against his client.
Federal court officials sent summonses to 11,000 Orange County residents for service as jurors in the case and more than 300 were brought to court to be screened last month. U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter questioned potential jurors who were seated in three courtrooms linked by closed-circuit television. In addition to the jury of eight men and four women, 10 alternates were selected because of the length of the case. The names of the jurors are known only to the court because of security concerns.
The case is subject to extraordinary security measures, including metal detectors outside the courtroom to augment metal detectors and X-ray machines at the courthouse entrance.
Extra teams of deputy U.S. marshals have been brought to the courthouse for the trial, and the defendants will be seated during the proceedings on a three-tier set of seats and chained to an anchor positioned below them. The jury will not be able to see that they are chained.
The case, with other trials held elsewhere, including one set for Los Angeles in October, has been profiled on national television and in The New Yorker and Newsweek.
Some of the details alleged in pretrial hearings and court filings could rival the most fanciful crime novel. According to lawyers in the case:
New York Mafia don John Gotti hired the Aryan Brotherhood to kill a black inmate who assaulted him at the federal penitentiary at Marion, Ill.
The gang attempted to arrange the escape of convicted mass murderer and race-war advocate Charles Manson but later canceled the plan when gang leaders concluded Manson was insane.
Two prison guards at the federal prison in Marion, Ill., were killed on the same day by two Aryan Brotherhood leaders, not those on trial in Orange County, in what was believed to be competition to gain favor with gang leaders.
The case was filed by federal prosecutors in October 2002 with 40 defendants named in 32 murders and attempted murders, with victims including inmates who crossed the gang, prison guards and one relative of an inmate whom the gang is accused of attacking because the inmate was too well-protected.
The case was originally assigned to U.S. District Court Judge George King in Los Angeles, but he enlisted U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter to help.
Carter had presided at the 2001 trials of the top leaders of the Mexican Mafia in a similar case. That was the first case where federal prosecutors in Central California had sought the death penalty since the 1950s, against Mariano “Chuy” Martinez, 43, who was convicted of being a leader of the Mexican Mafia. The penalty phase resulted in a hung jury, and under the federal death-penalty law, he was sentenced to life in prison.
Like the Mexican Mafia trial, the Aryan Brotherhood prosecution has resulted in most of the defendants pleading guilty for lighter sentences than they faced at trial. Carter had been scheduled to conduct a trial of 13 of the Aryan Brotherhood defendants last year, but all pleaded guilty. A 14th defendant, Michael Bruce Shepherd, 48, was found hanged in his cell at the Santa Ana City Jail in December 2004. The Orange County district attorney concluded the death was a suicide.
The four who are to go on trial this week are reputed to be top leaders of the prison gang.
Mills and Bingham are accused of being members of the three-member commission that directs gang activities in federal prisons while Edgar Wesley Hevle, 54, is a former member of that commission and Christopher Overton Gibson, 46, is accused of being a member of the council that ran the day-to-day operations of the gang in federal prisons.
The case has very little direct connection with Orange County.
Mills, officially from Santa Rosa, lived for a brief time in Costa Mesa.
Mills is accused of ordering the murder of an Orange County Jail inmate named Richard Andreasen, who was assaulted at the jail in 1983. Andreasen was later murdered at a prison in Kansas, according to the indictment.
Hevle and Gibson could face life terms. If acquitted, Bingham and Hevle could be released within five years, while Gibson is first eligible for release in 2019 and Mills in 2051.
Contact the writer: (714) 796-6743 or jmcdonald@ocregister.com
