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The Aryan Brotherhood is a white supremacist prison gang.
It originally was organized as a defensive organization during the prison racial violence of the 1960’s, but now attempts to control drug traffic within the prison system through violent means.
In a drug transaction Marzloff had cheated Tommy Silverstein, an Aryan Brotherhood “commissioner” in another penitentiary. Tommy Silverstein had put out a contract on Marzloff, and that this contract had been communicated to Mills, also an Aryan Brotherhood “commissioner”.
To make the crime comprehensible to a jury it was necessary for the government to show how the Aryan Brotherhood functioned, that Mills was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, that an affront to a fellow member might serve as an adequate motivation for Mills to kill a person whom he barely knew, and that it was possible for a member of the Brotherhood incarcerated in one federal prison to communicate the murder contract to another member in a different prison, despite mail censorship and restrictions on inter-inmate correspondence.
The Aryan Brotherhood is a covert organization within the prison system, a culture strange and foreign to a lay jury even in its most obvious aspects.
Considerable additional evidence was needed to combat the defense theory that the Aryan Brotherhood had ceased to exist in the late 1970’s and the natural question concerning the credibility of government witnesses, who were past or present convicts.
United States of America, Plaintiff-appellee, v. Barry Mills, Defendant-appellant, 704 F.2d 1553 (11th Cir. 1983).
US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit – 704 F.2d 1553 (11th Cir. 1983) May 20, 1983
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