Hard Cell

When Michael McElhiney first walked into Leavenworth federal penitentiary's B block in November 1994, his new cellmates may not have known that he'd been convicted of dealing meth and of conspiracy to commit murder and had been moved from a tougher, more restricted prison in Marion, Illinois.

But they knew what the tall, mustached convict represented. He carried with him a blown-up version of "the brand," a tattooed outline of a shamrock that stretched across his broad, pale chest almost from nipple to nipple.

The tattoo was an ostentatious testament to McElhiney's full membership in a prison gang known as the Aryan Brotherhood.

Keith Segien, a 32-year-old Floridian, was one of about 100 inmates in the lower tier of cellblock B when McElhiney arrived. Segien had been running an ongoing poker game. It soon drew the attention of his new neighbor.

In a Topeka courtroom five years later, Segien testified that McElhiney came to the door of his cell and told him to sit down. Segien said when he declined, McElhiney insisted: "If I wanted to get you killed, you'd have been killed by now."

Segien sat. "What's this you have a problem with the AB's running the poker game?" McElhiney asked.

"It's just been a players' game," Segien explained. "We don't need nobody to run our game and take a 10-percent cut."

"Well, I'm here to make money, and I'm taking over the poker game, the drug business and the football tickets," McElhiney told him. "Have you got a problem with that?"

"No, I don't," Segien responded. "I gave it up that day," he testified.

Segien could hardly be blamed for acquiescing so easily. He knew about McElhiney.

"He [McElhiney] was calling shots for the Aryan Brotherhood," a Leavenworth inmate named Allen Hawley testified during the same proceeding. "He was the boss of our group of people that we hung out with and did business with.... He was the boss of the white people."

The Aryan Brotherhood bossed more than just the white people and controlled more than just Leavenworth. By the time Segien and McElhiney had their chat, the Aryan Brotherhood had spent 30 years building a reputation as one of the most calculatedly violent organizations inside the nation's prisons -- or outside them.

An FBI agent acknowledged under oath in 1999 that the Aryan Brotherhood amounted to only one half of 1 percent of the federal prison population. But its members were responsible for 25 percent of the violence in federal prisons.

Now federal prosecutors want to end the long reign of the Aryan Brotherhood. On August 28, 2002, Assistant U.S. Attorney Gregory Jessner indicted forty people in a California court under the same racketeering statutes that have been used to bring down Mafia bosses. Twenty-three of the defendants could face the death penalty.

"I suspect they may kill more [often] than the Mafia [does]," Jessner told David Grann in a February New Yorker article that laid out the case. "I think they may be the most murderous criminal organization in the United States."

The New Yorker piece describes the surprise roundup in December 2002 of 29 suspected Brotherhood members being housed in prisons and jails from Pelican Bay, California, to Concord, New Hampshire. It charts the evolution of the Brotherhood from a clutch of California state prisoners who united for protection to a hierarchical organization that controlled the nation's maximum-security prisons from the inside. And it tallies scores of murders allegedly ordered by the Aryan Brotherhood leadership -- killings of rival gang members, blacks, homosexuals, child molesters, snitches and inmates who owed them money or stole their drugs, even prison guards.

The effect was to gain the Brotherhood a reputation so vengeful that its 100 or so full members could control thousands of murderers, rapists, drug dealers and robbers.

That control has waned over the past decade as Brotherhood leaders have been further isolated in increasingly secure state and federal institutions. And if Jessner succeeds, it faces the prospect of oblivion.

Some of the seeds of the group's ultimate downfall were sown at the federal prison located about 30 miles northwest of Kansas City. The evolution of the Aryan Brotherhood in Leavenworth -- from an emerging California import to a vulnerable criminal syndicate -- can be seen in hundreds of pages of court documents in the clerk's office at the U.S. District Courthouse in Topeka. The records are an account of the three trials of suspected Brotherhood member Michael McElhiney, who represented himself in court and was ultimately convicted of distributing heroin at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. McElhiney and a colleague, David Sahakian, cranked up a criminal operation inside Leavenworth, only to see it dismantled after the two men reached a little too far, sanctioning the first-ever murder in Leavenworth's "hole."

For Jessner and the other feds seeking to destroy the Brotherhood, the McElhiney cases in Leavenworth turned out to be important steps in the nationwide crackdown of the notorious prison gang, and they will provide key evidence in the California trial. But the difficulties for prosecutors in the cases -- it took three tries to nail McElhiney for his dope ring -- show how tough it is to eradicate a powerful syndicate that has had its way in prisons for decades.