The Devil and Sherlock Holmes (36 page)

Unaligned with any of the emerging gangs, he was conspicuous prey for roaming Hispanic and black groups, and several of them soon assaulted him in the yard at a prison in Tracy, California; later, he was sent to Folsom, which, along with San Quentin, was exploding with gang wars. On his first day there, he says, no one spoke to him until a leader of the Black Guerrilla Family, a trim, angular man in shorts and a T-shirt, began to taunt him, telling him to come to the yard “ready” the next day. That night in his cell, Thompson recalled, he looked frantically for a weapon; he broke a piece of steel off his cell door and began to file its edges. It was at least ten inches long, and he sharpened both sides. Before the cell doors opened and the guards searched him, he said, he knew he needed to hide the weapon. He took off his clothes and tried to insert it in his rectum. “I couldn’t,” he recalled. “I was too ashamed.” He tried again and again, until finally he succeeded.

The next morning in the yard, he could see the guards, the tips of their rifles glistening in the sun. The leader of the Black Guerrilla Family circled toward him, flashing a steel blade, and Thompson lay down, trying to extricate his weapon. Eventually, he got it and began to lunge violently at his foe; another gang member came at him and Thompson stabbed him, too. By the time the guards interceded, Thompson was covered in blood, and one of the members of the Black Guerrilla Family lay on the ground, near death.

Not long after this incident, several white convicts approached him in the yard. “They wanted me to join the Brand,” Thompson said. Initially, he hesitated, in part because of the gang’s racism, but he knew that the group offered more than protection. “It was like being let into a sanctuary,” he said. “You were instantly the man—the shot caller.”

To be accepted, according to Thompson and other gang members, each recruit had to “make his bones,” which often meant killing another inmate. (One recruit told authorities in a sworn statement that the rite was intended to “create a lasting bond to the A.B. and also prove that he had what it takes.”) Thompson also recited a “blood in, blood out” oath, in which he vowed not only that he would spill another’s blood to get in but also that he would never leave the gang unless his own blood was fatally spilled. While many new members had a probationary period, which often lasted as long as a year, Thompson, because of his physical strength and his ability with a knife, was voted into the gang almost immediately. He was “branded” with a homemade tattoo gun (which inmates made out of a beard trimmer sold at the commissary, a guitar string, a pen, and a needle stolen from the infirmary). Sometimes members were tattooed with the letters “A.B.” or the numerals 666, symbolizing the beast, a manifestation of evil in the Revelation of St. John. On Thompson’s left hand, just above one of his knuckles, he received the most recognizable symbol: a green shamrock. “All I had to do was show that ’rock and I was in charge,” he said.

He was moved from one state prison to the next, often for disciplinary reasons, but these transfers only helped him garner more influence, and he gradually rose through the Brotherhood’s rarefied ranks. He met Barry Mills, a.k.a. the Baron, who had initially been incarcerated for stealing a car and became the gang’s vanguard member, seemingly concentrating all his energies not on returning to the outside world but on remaining in the inside world, where he was, in the words of Thompson, “the hog with the biggest balls.” And he met T. D. Bingham, a charismatic bank robber who was nearly as wide as he was tall and who could bench-press five hundred pounds. Nicknamed the Hulk and Super Honkey, he spoke in a folksy manner that concealed a burning intelligence, friends say. In photographs from the time, he has a black walrus mustache and a ski hat pulled down over his eyebrows. Part Jewish, he wore a Star of David tattooed on one arm and, without any apparent irony, a swastika on the other. Once, when he testified on behalf of another reputed Aryan Brotherhood inmate, he told the jury, “There’s a code in every segment of society . . . Well, we have a different kind of moral and ethical code.” He later added, “It’s a lot more primordial.” One of his friends, referring to his propensity for violence, told me, “Sometimes he got the urge, you know what I mean? He got the urge.”

Thompson soon became acquainted with the Brotherhood’s inner sanctum. There was Thomas Silverstein, a talented artist with long flowing hair who, a counsellor noted in his prison file, “seems to be easily influenced by these men and is eager to please them.” After shedding an enemy’s blood with a handcrafted knife, he would often retire to his cell and draw elaborate portraits. One ink sketch showed a man in a cell with a claw reaching down toward him. Thompson also met Dallas Scott, a drug addict who once told the reporter Pete Earley, in the 1992 book “The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison,” “In your society I may not be anybody, but in here I am;” and Clifford Smith, who lost an eye after a black-widow spider bit him at San Quentin and who, when asked to carry out his first hit, said, “Yeah, bro, I’ll do the bastard.”

Thompson, who had only a high-school education, was being tailored for leadership. He was given many books, a curriculum that formed a kind of world view. He read Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” and Machiavelli’s “The Prince.” He read Nietzsche, memorizing his aphorisms. (“One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.”) And he read Louis L’Amour, whose pulp novels about romantic gunslingers who ride for “the brand” inspired the gang’s nickname. “It was like you went to school,” Thompson said. “You already hate the system, hate the establishment, because you’re in jail, you’re buried, and you start to think of yourself as this noble warrior—and that’s what we called each other, warriors. It was like I was a soldier going out to battle.”

Thompson said that, like other new members, he was trained to kill without blinking, without reservation. One A.B. instruction manual, which was seized by authorities, stated, “The smell of fresh human blood can be overpowering but killing is like having sex. The first time is not so rewarding, but it gets better and better with practice, especially when one remembers that it’s a holy cause.” During a confidential debriefing with prison officials, one Aryan brother described how members studied anatomy texts, so “that when they stab somebody it was a killshot.”

In 1981, according to prison records, Thompson approached one of the gang’s enemies “from behind and began stabbing him,” and “continued” striking his victim “as he lay on the floor.” Thompson once wrote in a letter, “Knife fighting, at its best, is like a dance. Under ideal conditions, the objective is to bleed your opponent—cutting hands, wrist, and arms and as the opponent weakens from blood loss, inflicting further damage to the face (eyes) and torso.”

Inmates were frequently killing each other not because of any actual slight but because of the color of their skin. In one incident, Silverstein and an A.B. associate, Clayton Fountain, who, according to a friend, was eager to “make his bones,” stabbed a leader of the rival gang D.C. Blacks sixty-seven times in the shower, then dragged his bloody corpse through the tiers while other white inmates chanted racial slurs. After Silverstein was charged with murdering another inmate, he boasted in court, “I have walked over dead bodies. I’ve had guts splattered all over my chest from race wars.”

To try to rein the Brand in, prison officials, in desperation, had begun to place its members throughout the correctional system. (No inmate would publicly admit being in the gang, and, when asked under oath, would typically say, “Sir, I will not answer a question like that.”) The dispersal measures, however, only spread the Brand’s reach to penitentiaries in Texas and Illinois and Kansas, and still farther east, to Pennsylvania and Georgia. A once classified 1982 F.B.I. report warned that leaders were “recruiting for the A.B., only now they had the entire country to pick from.” One letter from a gang member, which was obtained by Texas prison sociologists, said, “All members shipped from here last week have written back and it looks like the family is in the process of growing.” Another stated, “We are growing like a cancer.”

Upon entering a new prison, Brand members would often carry out a “demonstration” killing or stabbing, in order to terrorize the inmate population. The Baron reportedly ordered that one foe be “taken out in front of everyone, to let these motherfuckers know we mean business.” Indeed, rather than conceal its murders, the gang flaunted them even in front of the guards, as if to show it had no fear of repercussions, of being shot or sentenced to life without parole. “We wanted people to think we were a little crazy,” Thompson said. “It was a way, like Nietzsche said, of bending space and reality to our will.”

  On a Saturday morning in the fall of 1983, at Marion federal prison, in southern Illinois, Thomas Silverstein waited for guards to take him for a routine shower. Marion, which is about a hundred miles southeast of St. Louis, was opened in 1963, the year that Alcatraz closed, and was designed to cope with the profusion of violent gang members—in particular, men like Silverstein, who by then had been convicted of murdering three inmates and had earned the nickname Terrible Tom (as he often signed his letters, with looping strokes).

Before taking Silverstein to the bathroom, the guards frisked him, to make sure he hadn’t fashioned any weapons. (He often had pens and other sketching tools for his artwork.) They also shackled his wrists. Three guards surrounded him, one of whom was a hard-nosed, nineteen-year veteran with military-style gray hair named Merle Clutts. Clutts, who was to retire in a few months, was perhaps the only guard in the unit who didn’t fear Silverstein; he once reportedly told him, “Hey, I’m running this shit. You ain’t running it.”

As the guards escorted Silverstein through the prison, he paused outside the cell of another gang member—who, as planned, suddenly reached between the bars and, with a handcuff key, unlocked Silverstein’s shackles. Silverstein pulled a nearly foot-long knife from his conspirator’s waistband. “This is between me and Clutts,” Silverstein hollered as he rushed toward him.

One of the other guards screamed, “He’s got a shank!” But Clutts was already cornered, without a weapon. He raised his hands while Silverstein stabbed him in the stomach. “He was just sticking Officer Clutts with that knife,” another guard later recalled. “He was just sticking and sticking and sticking.” By the time Silverstein relinquished the knife—“The man disrespected me,” he told the guards. “I had to get him”—Clutts had been stabbed forty times. He died shortly afterward.

A few hours later, Clayton Fountain, Silverstein’s close friend, was being led through the prison when he paused by another inmate’s cell. In an instant, he, too, was free. “You motherfuckers want a piece of this?” he yelled, waving a blade. He stabbed three more guards. One died in the arms of his son, who also worked in the prison. Fountain reportedly said that he didn’t want Silverstein to have a higher body count.

It was the first time in the history of American federal prisons that two guards had been killed on the same day. “You got to understand,” Thompson said. “Here were guys in restraints, locked in the Hole in the most secure prison, and they were still able to get to the guards. It sent a simple message: We can get to you anywhere, anytime.”

  As the gang’s reputation for brutality was growing, so, too, were its ranks. Although the Brand continued to permit only a select few to become “made” members, it had thousands of followers, known as “pecker-woods,” who sought out the perks of being associated with it: permanent protection, free contraband, better prison jobs (which were often dictated by trusty inmates who did whatever the gang demanded). As Thompson put it, “The guards controlled the perimeter of the prison and we controlled what happened inside it.” But as the number of gang members, associates, and hangers-on swelled, managing the organization grew increasingly difficult.

When the Brotherhood was in its infancy, every member had an equal vote on critical matters; by the early eighties, this policy was creating chaos. In a previously undisclosed briefing, Clifford Smith told authorities, “We used to be one man one vote, included damn near everything. I mean, damn near everything. Somebody getting in, whacking somebody . . . You damn near had to have the whole state’s okay. . . . You had to send some kites”—notes—“and runners and lawyers and this and that. It always got tipped off by the time we got back to you and said, ‘Yeah, dump the guy.’ . . . You can’t have someone in the yard that you want to bump and let them be out there for two or three weeks.” Smith said the gang members were becoming “like twelve horses teamed to one wagon, with each of them going in a different direction.” An internal report at the time by the California Department of Corrections went so far as to predict that “the A.B. will probably not propose a serious threat to law enforcement agencies in the future unless it gains a clear and well enforced chain of command.”

Thompson started to push for just that. “I wanted to eliminate the irrationality and make it into a true organized-crime family,” he said. “I wasn’t interested in killing blacks. I was interested in only one thing: power.”

He and other leaders hatched a plan with gang members who were incarcerated at a prison in Chino, in Southern California. These men, who were awaiting trials for the assaults or murders of fellow-inmates, were encouraged to represent themselves as attorneys, thereby allowing them to subpoena their colleagues around the country as witnesses. Each time a Brand member sent out a “writ,” another member would have to be relocated to Chino. For several days, using what one member called “subpoena power unlimited” and exploiting the very legal system that was trying to stop them, most of the Brand was able to meet for hours in the yard, in what amounted to a private convention.

As Smith recalled, “We all get over in the corner one day and say, ‘Damn, man, check this out, we got all the power right here. Let’s take this one step further.’” The Brand’s California leaders decided to establish a chain of command modelled loosely on the structure of the Italian Mafia. A council of about a dozen members would manage gang operations throughout the state prison system. Each council member would be elected by majority vote. He would be responsible for enforcing all of the gang’s policies, which would now be codified; he also could authorize a hit at any moment, as long as it wasn’t on a fellow A.B. member. The council’s actions would be overseen by a three-man commission. Authorities say that Thompson and Smith served on the California council. In the federal prison system, where the gang set up a similar hierarchy in roughly a dozen maximum-security prisons, the Baron and T. D. Bingham allegedly became high commissioners.