A guard banged on the door. “I have to go now,” he said.
As he stood, he pressed his hand against the glass, and I could see something green on his left hand. I looked closer: it was the faint outline of a shamrock. Armed with that tattoo, Thompson had told me, a man could take over an entire United States penitentiary.
In the fall of 1994, a bus filled with prisoners arrived at Leavenworth, Kansas, a maximum-security federal prison built almost a century ago. Out stepped a tall muscular man with a black mustache. His arms were covered with tattoos, and he soon appeared in the yard without a shirt, revealing a large shamrock in the middle of his chest. He was immediately surrounded by a group of white inmates. Many went to the commissary and paid to have their photograph taken with him, which they carried around like passports. “If you… were able to show that picture, it was just like standing next to your favorite pop star,” one prisoner said.
The man’s name was Michael McElhiney, but everyone called him Mac. A reputed A.B. member, he had just come from Marion, where he had been housed with Barry Mills, the notorious Baron. Mills, who later testified in court on McElhiney’s behalf, said, “I look at him like a son.”
McElhiney, a convicted methamphetamine dealer who had conspired to kill a witness, was so charismatic that, according to authorities, a juror once fell in love with him. However, in private letters, which were later confiscated by prison officials, Mac spoke openly of “the beast” inside him and referred to himself proudly as “an angry motherfucker.” An F.B.I. agent at Leavenworth described him as probably “a psychopath,” while a close friend put it this way: “He likes to have everybody know that he’s God.”
An Aryan Brotherhood presence had long existed at Leavenworth, which was known as “the hothouse,” because of its sweltering, catacomb-like cells. But McElhiney was determined to extend the gang’s reach.
Although the Brand maintained remnants of its racist ideology, it had increasingly sought, according to a declassified F.B.I. report, “to launch a cooperative effort of death and fear against staff and other inmates… in order to take over the system.” The Brand aimed, the F.B.I. warned, to control everything from drug trafficking to the sale of “punks”-inmates forced into prostitution-to extortion rackets to murder contracts behind bars. It sought, in short, to become a racketeering enterprise. The council member Clifford Smith had told authorities that the gang was no longer primarily “bent on destroying blacks and the Jews and the minorities of the world, white supremacy and all that shit. It’s a criminal organization, first and foremost.”
Using an array of white associates, who either coveted membership in the gang or needed protection, McElhiney set out to dominate Leavenworth’s underground economy. His men went from tier to tier, demanding a tax from the sale of “pruno”-prison wine that could be brewed out of almost any cafeteria fruit (apples, strawberries, even ketchup). At the time, a man named Keith Segien was running a friendly poker game in the prison’s B unit. One night on his way to his cell, Segien later testified in court, Mac was waiting for him. He told Segien to sit down.
Segien hesitated. “What’s this about?” he asked.
“If I wanted you killed,” Segien recalls him saying, “you’d have been dead by now.” Then Mac added, “Someone told me you don’t want me… to run the poker game, and I’m here to make money. I’m going to run the poker game.” He asked if Segien had a problem with that.
“I said no,” Segien testified. “That was the last day I ran the poker game.”
Mac soon had gambling rackets operating in nearly every unit, on nearly every tier. As with the sale of pruno, inmates say, the guards often turned a blind eye, perhaps to mollify a seething population. Some guards, it seemed, had come to consider the Aryan Brotherhood presence as inevitable, and even used its leaders as surrogate power brokers. In one instance, a guard at Leavenworth went to McElhiney to get the O.K. before he released another prisoner in the yard. One longtime A.B. member compared the illicit operations in maximum-security prisons to bootlegging during Prohibition and to the high-roller tables in Las Vegas.
Currency is not allowed in prison, and inmates typically paid their smaller debts to the Brotherhood by offering free contraband or items from the commissary: cigarettes, candy, stamps, books. At the high-roller tables at Leavenworth, where imprisoned drug lords could place bets in the thousands of dollars, participants were allowed to play for a month on credit. The man in charge of the table kept a tally of wins and losses. At the end of the month, inmates say, Mac’s men would collect the losses; usually, gamblers would pay up by having a relative or a friend send an untraceable money order to a designated A.B. person on the outside. If an indebted inmate didn’t have the money mailed on time, internal prison records show, he was typically “piped”-beaten with a metal rod. McElhiney later acknowledged that he was funnelling the proceeds to his mentor Mills and to other reputed leaders of the Aryan Brotherhood, with whom he had “a pact” to take over the “gambling business.”
McElhiney, who presided over the yard wearing sunglasses, his nails often stained yellow from chewing tobacco, then decided to focus on drug smuggling. In the past, the Brand had sought out almost anyone who could bring in its merchandise. In one instance, several inmates involved in a scheme told me, the gang offered to protect Charles Manson, and even conspired in a failed bid to help him escape; in return, Manson’s cult of women on the outside helped to smuggle dope into prison for them.
According to authorities and court records, Mac now started to canvass the population for the most vulnerable inmates-those who were drug addicts or in debt to the gang or simply scared, and could therefore be forced to serve as “mules.” One such person was Walter Moles, a drug user who was terrified of the gang. His father, who was terminally ill with emphysema, was planning to travel to Leavenworth to celebrate his son’s birthday. According to Moles’s later testimony, Mac instructed him to have his drug contact on the outside send Moles’s father six balloons filled with heroin. Using coded language on the prison’s tape-recorded pay phones, Moles then persuaded his father to transport the package.
Weeks later, when his father arrived, he sat beside Moles in the visiting room, under the guards’ scrutiny. He carried the package in his underwear. Moles instructed his father to go into the bathroom, place two of the balloons in his mouth, then return and spit them into Moles’s cup of coffee. His father said he couldn’t do it. The heroin wasn’t in six balloons. “It’s in one big one,” he said.
“How big?” Moles asked.
“A Ping-Pong ball.”
Eventually, Moles’s father managed to drop the balloon into his son’s coffee cup. Moles tried to swallow it, but it got stuck in his throat.
His father started to panic. “Son, just give it back to me,” he begged. “I’ll send it back to where it came from.”
“No, Dad, I can’t,” he said. He explained that the heroin wasn’t for himself. “These guys I’m bringing it in for want their stuff.”
His father didn’t seem to understand: Who were these people?
Moles saw a guard’s attention wander, and said that he had to say goodbye.
“Is it the end of the visit?” his father asked.
“If I’m going to do it, this is my only chance,” Moles said. While his father distracted the guard, Moles untucked his shirt and forced the drugs into his rectum. After he got past the guards, he said, he gave “the stuff” to one of Mac’s henchmen.
The next morning, Moles waited behind the bleachers in the yard for his cut. Suddenly, he felt something hard against the back of his head, and he collapsed to the ground. “I tried to get up,” Moles later testified, “but I kept getting kicked.”