Original subtitles

Gangs rule their territories through ruthless enterprises, fear, and a strict code.

Deviate from this code, or challenge their power, and retribution soon follows.

Especially at the hands of the deadliest prison

gang in America, the Aryan Brotherhood.

From its beginnings in the California prison system in

the early 1960s to jails all over the country today,

here are three stories that build the Brotherhood's terrifying reputation.

First, one of its most feared members takes on the national leader of a rival gang.

He stabbed him more than 63 times.

Next, the Brotherhood breaks its own code and

takes revenge on one of their former members.

The saying in prison is, snitches get stitches.

Finally, the gang's leadership uses a secret message

to launch an attack on their biggest rival.

He wrote this letter in urine so it was invisible, ordering the war to begin.

These are the stories from inside the Aryan Brotherhood.

This is Gangland Chronicles. 1964.

Marin County, California.

The state's oldest prison, San Quentin, has recently desegregated its population.

White and black inmates are now doing time side by side.

Tensions are running high.

What was happening in the 60s, the black marches, the beatings,

that came into the prison.

It didn't matter who you were.

It was black against white.

There were stabbings just random because of color.

It was out of control.

Both groups formed gangs to protect themselves from the other.

A number of whites who were hardcore,

ruthless killers decided to form the White Protection Organization.

They call themselves the Aryan Brotherhood.

They would only recruit the most ruthless, willing-to-murder convicts.

To join the gang, recruits must commit to a

deadly credo known as blood in, blood out.

Blood in is that you must make a hit on someone to get into the organization.

And blood out is that the only way to get out is to die.

Once a recruit is accepted into the Aryan Brotherhood,

he must be ready to kill for the gang anywhere, anytime, and without question.

They quickly established a reputation for being the most violent gang.

During the 1970s, the Aryan Brotherhood expands

from California to prisons across the U.S.,

eventually setting up a three-man national leadership commission.

And they go from being a prison protection gang to a major money-making enterprise.

The Aaron Brotherhood was mostly concerned about drugs,

because that's where the real money was.

The Brotherhood traffics heroin smuggled in from the outside,

generating huge revenue for the gang.

There have been FBI estimates.

In 1978, the Aryan Brotherhood took $3.5 million out of Old Folsom alone,

primarily because of drugs.

The Aryan Brotherhood also sells deadly weapons

made from whatever they can scrounge.

In the middle of a typewriter is a bar,

and in the middle of that bar is a little piece of metal like an ice pick.

It was actually used to murder an inmate.

For convicts who don't want to get their hands dirty at all,

the Brotherhood offers another service.

The Aryan Brotherhood were hired by other gangs to carry out prison murders.

But prison murders breed retaliation.

And in the early 1980s, one Brotherhood contract killing will escalate.

1982, Williamson County, Illinois.

At this time, the federal penitentiary in Marion

is the most secure prison in the country.

Marion had been built to replace Alcatraz.

So they began sending the worst of the worst to Marion.

Among them is notorious Aryan Brotherhood member Tommy Silverstein.

Tommy Silverstein was an enforcer.

He would kill without hesitancy for the gang.

Silverstein is doing life for the recent contract killing of Robert Chappelle,

a member of the D.C. Blacks, the largest black prison gang in the country.

Chappelle's death isn't sitting well with D.C. Blacks

national leader, Raymond Cadillac Smith.

Cadillac Smith starts calling out Silverstein.

I'm going to kill you.

You're going to be dead.

So it's clear to the officers that one of them is going to kill the other.

September 27, 1982. The federal penitentiary in Marion.

Notorious Aryan Brotherhood enforcer Tommy Silverstein has just

had his life threatened by the national leader of the D.C. Blacks, Cadillac Smith.

Silverstein knows it's now kill or be killed,

but murdering Smith could spark a mass conflict between the two gangs.

In those days, when you're a member of the Aryan Brotherhood,

as long as they weren't killing each other,

they didn't have to get permission to kill someone else.

With help from Aryan Brotherhood member Clay Fountain,

Silverstein ambushes Cadillac Smith in the prison showers.

Fountain attacks, but Smith is too fast for him.

Cadillac Smith appears to have Tommy Silverstein cornered.

Silverstein, unarmed, throws himself at Cadillac Smith, knocks him down,

wrestles his shank away from him, and begins plunging it into him.

He stabbed him more than 63 times.

Tommy Silverstein receives yet another life sentence for

the savage murder of the DC Blacks national leader.

But the fallout doesn't end there.

This incident helped set off a war.

These two sides are constantly at war with each other.

Over the next 15 years, the Aryan Brotherhood will kill dozens of members

of the DC Blacks and wound countless more in prisons across America.

Rather than fearing punishment for killing another inmate,

it would move them up in the ranks,

it would give them a lot more cred in the prison,

so actually there's almost sometimes an incentive

for them to commit a violent crime.

As the Aryan Brotherhood wages war against the D.C. Blacks,

The gang will become involved in another explosive

conflict within their own organization,

and it will take their brutality to a new level.

1982, Chino Prison, California.

The Aryan Brotherhood has a problem.

His name is Stephen Barnes.

Stephen Barnes went to prison for murder.

He's a heroin addict.

He was accepted by the Aryan Brotherhood and eventually joined.

And he was a good soldier for a while.

Barnes sees the Aryan Brotherhood's Blinky Griffin and Junior Snyder

suddenly kill another member for bad-mouthing the gang's ally, the Mexican Mafia.

It was a brutal murder.

They cut his throat and his jugular and his windpipe, and they got away with it.

The incident leaves Barnes living in fear of his own gang.

And so he defected from the Aryan Brotherhood.

He agreed to testify against Blinky and Junior.

He was a jailhouse snitch.

In prison, there is nothing inmates hate more than a snitch who

cooperates with the law in exchange for a reduced sentence.

The saying in prison is snitches get stitches.

We're the Aryan Brotherhood, an inmate who snitches deserves death and nothing less.

The only good snitch is a dead snitch.

The Aryan Brotherhood wants Stephen Barnes dead,

but he's already been placed in protective custody.

Determined to exact revenge, the Brotherhood considers an unprecedented move.

And they said, hey, if we can't get Stevie, we'll get his mother and his father,

anybody from his family that we can reach, and we'll kill them.

It's the perfect opportunity to discourage anyone else from snitching on the gang.

The idea is to assassinate family members of individuals

who were testifying against the Aryan Brotherhood.

Stephen Barnes will pay a terrible price for betraying the gang.

1982. The California State Prison in Chino.

The Aryan Brotherhood is considering killing

the family of former member Stephen Barnes,

but killing innocent family members runs against the Brotherhood's code.

You don't harm women. You don't harm elders.

You certainly don't harm children.

It actually shocked me that anyone would even consider that.

The plan is put to a vote.

I was the only individual who voted no.

And ultimately what I got outvoted on was the killing of his father.

February 1983.

The Brotherhood hands the task to recently released member Curtis Price,

who goes to the Los Angeles home of Stephen Barnes's father, Richard.

He went to where Richard Barnes lived.

He hid in his closet, and when Richard Barnes came home,

Curtis Price shot him in the back of the head.

Stevie Barnes's father, who was a completely innocent man, a good man,

In the aftermath, Michael Thompson leaves the Aryan Brotherhood

and begins testifying against the gang.

Curtis Price is convicted for the murder of Richard Barnes in 1986.

He dies on death row in 2021.

Stephen Barnes escapes revenge at the hands of the Aryan Brotherhood.

But he never escapes his heroin addiction.

He simply just could not handle life,

bearing the responsibility in his own mind for his father's death.

Barnes contracts AIDS from sharing needles and dies in 1992.

Snitches aren't the only thing the gang has to worry about.

An old enemy is gaining strength.

And to push back, the Brotherhood must breach America's

highest security prison with a secret message.

August, 1997, Florence, Colorado.

It's home to what is now America's most secure prison, ADX.

It actually is a facility where you are in a single cell 23 hours a day.

You get one hour out of your cell.

It is built specifically for the inmates that the prison

realizes they cannot handle in a regular prison setting.

Locked up here are two-thirds of the Aryan Brotherhood's national leadership, T.D.

Bingham and Barry the Red Baron Mills.

Barry Mills, they call him the Red Baron.

Because like the Red Baron of Germany, he had killed a lot of people.

T.D. Bingham is arguably the most dangerous man I've ever met in my life.

And TD was a fighter.

He's a big man.

And I think he probably still goes by the handle The Hulk.

It's been 15 years since Tommy Silverstein sparked the

war between the Aryan Brotherhood and the DC Blacks.

Violence between the two gangs in East Coast prisons has been on the rise,

culminating with the killing of a Brotherhood member at Lewisburg in Pennsylvania,

where the DC gang has strength in numbers.

For the Aryan Brotherhood,

that could not stand because then you have to understand in prison,

it's all about the projection of power.

Back at ADX, Bingham and Mills are fed up with reports about the D.C.

Blacks at Lewisburg and want the Brotherhood

members there to do something about them.

They decide that it's time to take revenge and show the

DC blacks that they're not going to be pushed around.

But how will they send a secret message 1,500 miles from ADX?

To Lewisburg Prison in Pennsylvania.

1997. Aryan Brotherhood leaders jailed in Colorado want to

send a secret message to Lewisburg Prison in Pennsylvania,

ordering the Brotherhood there to launch an attack on the DC Blacks.

T.D. Bingham has a plan to get it past the tight security at both facilities.

He uses his own urine to write in invisible ink on a letter.

Urine, of course, the active ingredient in that is ammonia.

Once that dries, you can hold a flame under that piece of paper.

It acts with the ammonia so that the message comes right out on the paper.

With the invisible ink message complete,

Bingham then writes an everyday personal letter.

There's always been a censoring process of prisoner mail

for anything in it that it's not supposed to have.

Bingham sends the letter via a member working on the outside

to ranking Brotherhood member Big Al Benton at Lewisburg,

who holds it over an open flame.

And what does that letter say when they hold it up against a match?

It says...

With DC blacks.

The Aryan Brotherhood at Lewisburg now has no choice but to

plan a decisive blow to its longtime rival at the prison.

August 28, 1997.

The Brotherhood launches an unprecedented blitz-like

shiv assault on the D.C. Blacks.

Two men enter the cell with knives in three cells.

So that's six assailants entering three cells, two on two.

Six inmates are stabbed, and two are killed in the

most notorious attack of the 15-year conflict.

The incident will spur a nationwide investigation into the Aryan Brotherhood.

Five years after the Lewisburg attack, 40 members, including T.D.

Which means you didn't have to be at a crime, but if you're a gang member,

you were responsible for that crime, just like a mafia kingpin.

Prosecutors seek death sentences for the ringleaders.

Since all the leadership of the Aryan Brotherhood

are all doing life without possibility of parole,

If they got another life, that would mean nothing to them.

So we were hoping for the death penalty.

In the end, the California jury returns with 30 convictions,

but the gang's leaders avoid the death penalty.

It didn't take the head off the snake, which is Barry Mills, the Hulk Bingham,

and other key members of the gang.

Mills dies in prison in 2018. T.D.

Bingham remains incarcerated in ADX.

Today, led by Bingham, the Aryan Brotherhood continues

to inspire fear throughout American prisons,

with an estimated 20,000 members nationwide.

There are very few prisons that don't have some kind of Aryan Brotherhood affiliate.

They're well organized, and they're extremely dangerous.

According to the FBI, Aryan Brotherhood members make up less than

one-tenth of one percent of the nation's prison inmate population.

Yes, they are responsible for 18 percent of all prison murders.

They're responsible for hundreds, hundreds of deaths.

And they're still committing crimes.

It's imperative both for the safety of correction officers and the safety

of other inmates to keep the Aryan Brotherhood under control.