The Louisiana dispatcher who picked up that July 2016 night heard sobs, and screaming.
A woman said her husband had been robbed.
An Evangeline Parish sheriff’s deputy arrived at Chapelle’s Corner Grocery on Cemetery Road and found Clifton Hallmark, 51, blood trickling from a small bullet hole near his right ear. He died hours later.
Hallmark belonged to the Aryan Circle, one of the largest, most widely established white power prison gangs in the United States.
The Aryan Circle is well organized and lethal, ordering hits in and out of prison and running illegal drug and arms trafficking operations. It demands total allegiance and punishes those who stray. It also is a hate group propagating a racist message at a time when white supremacist views have been morphing from fringe ideology to a force in mainstream thought and politics. Law enforcement officials warn that the group’s violence extends beyond prison walls and can harm innocent victims. Like the Ku Klux Klan and other violent hate groups, it has been able to weather law enforcement battles to take it down.
Members cover themselves in tattoos celebrating Nazi iconography and are quick to fight for provocations as small as selling a TV remote to a rival gang.
Hallmark’s death was one of several crimes that led the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to launch a racketeering investigation against the gang. Law enforcement was already pursuing a narcotics investigation against one gang member, but the murder — across state lines — gave agents the opportunity to begin a more wide-ranging probe, which has now extended to at least five states and involves about 20 law enforcement agencies. In October, authorities announced indictments against 24 defendants, including at least nine Aryan Circle gang members, bringing the number of those charged to at least 40. At least 21 people have pleaded guilty — including two earlier this month — court records show. The road to those arrests was complicated and involved years of work.
Hate, born behind bars
The Aryan Circle was born in the 1980s in Texas state prisons. Since then, it has grown to include well over 1,000 members in prisons and the free world, where its members deal drugs, steal cars and commit other crimes.
Like the larger Aryan Brotherhood of Texas (ABT), the Aryan Circle is dangerous enough that the Texas Department of Criminal justice considers it a “Security Threat Group” and places its members in administrative segregation. The group’s origins date back to 1985, when it was founded by several former Aryan Brotherhood members and others rejected for membership by the Brotherhood. For years, it remained relatively small, then began expanding rapidly in the 1990s. Now, it is one of the largest and most entrenched white supremacist gangs within the Texas prison system, experts say.
According to court records, the gang has a “defined, militaristic” structure, with six branches overseen by a five-member “Upper Board.” It demands total loyalty with mottos such as “Silence is Golden, Silence is deadly, Silence is mandatory.” The tattoos or “patches” with Nazi imagery, including the Iron Cross, swastikas, or “SS” style lightning bolts, signal full — and lifelong — gang membership. Perhaps most striking, the gang created a small “task force” to carry out gang-ordered executions and enforce leaders’ orders, and has a far higher percentage of female members than most other prison gangs
The gang grew steadily in the 1990s. Besides Texas, it has members in Colorado, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kentucky, New Jersey and Virginia.
A ruthless code
Aryan Circle is known to be merciless about punishing members who stray. In January 2012, then-30-year-old Brandon Fritts shot and killed a fellow gang member named Jamie Lee Czeck in an alley in Fort Smith, Ark., court records show. Fritts soon landed in cuffs and told investigators that the killing had been a personal matter, not gang-related.
But his girlfriend, Charitie Clawson, told detectives that Fritts became enraged after Czeck said he wanted to “lay down his patch and ride with the Hell’s Angels” — the move that became his death sentence.
A jury ultimately convicted Fritts of murder. He remains behind bars.