The Blotter
Updates On Extremism and The Law
MAY 10
A senior member of the white supremacist prison gang Aryan Brotherhood of Texas pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering conspiracy. One of 35 defendants, Charles Lee Roberts, 67, of Beaumont, Texas, is the fifth to admit carrying out murders, attempted murders, arsons, assaults, kidnappings, robberies, and drug offenses as part of an enterprise that goes back to at least 1993.
A federal grand jury in Texas indicted Phillip Monroe Ballard, 71, on charges of soliciting the murder of a federal judge. Ballard, an antigovernment “sovereign citizen,” was in a Fort Worth jail awaiting trial for filing false tax returns when he allegedly offered to pay a fellow inmate to kill the judge in his case.
MAY
A federal judge in Seattle sentenced “sovereign citizen” David Carroll Stephenson, 57, of Tacoma, Wash., and Kenneth Wayne Leaming, 57, of Spanaway, Wash., to 10- and 8-year sentences, respectively, for filing false liens against prison officials. The pair were affiliated with the County Rangers, an armed, badge-wearing group of antigovernment extremists who believe they are exempt from most taxes and laws.
MAY
Racist skinhead Charles Gilbert Demar III was sentenced to 75 years to life, plus nine years, by a Sacramento, Calif., Superior Court judge after he was convicted of manufacturing and distributing methamphetamine for the Sacramento Skins, one of the nation’s oldest skinhead gangs. Around the same time, police in Citrus Heights, Calif., said Demar was a “person of interest” in the 2011 slaying of the gang’s leader, David Lynch.
MAY
A Massachusetts Superior Court judge sentenced Keith Luke, 26, to two consecutive life sentences after he was convicted of killing two black people he didn’t know and raping and wounding a third during a violent spree in Brockton the day after President Obama’s 2009 inauguration. Luke, who carved a swastika into his own forehead with a jailhouse razor prior to his first court appearance, told police he acted because he had learned on the Internet that white people were being subjected to “genocide.”
MAY
Dennis James, 47, of San Pablo, Calif., and Jesse Ray Delgado, 47, of Boise, Idaho, became the latest members of the Aryan Knights, a white supremacist gang that operated a major methamphetamine ring, to be sentenced in Idaho to federal prison. All 23 defendants in the drug case have pleaded guilty, and 17 have been sentenced.
MAY
The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis, Mo., upheld the conviction of Chevie Kehoe, the Colville, Wash., founder of the Aryan Peoples Republic terrorist gang who was convicted of the 1999 torture-murder of an Arkansas gun dealer, his wife and her 8-year-old daughter as part of a plot to overthrow the government. Kehoe had argued his lawyer was ineffective because he selected a mostly black jury in the belief that it would be more skeptical of prosecutors’ claims.
JUNE
Two men were arraigned in an Albany, N.Y., federal court on charges of plotting to build a mobile radiation gun to kill Muslims and others. Glendon Scott Crawford, 49, a member of the United Northern and Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan from Galway, N.Y., and Eric J. Feight, 54, of Hudson, were charged with conspiracy to provide material support for terrorism after allegedly trying to sell the weapon to Jewish groups and obtain financing from the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. British authorities informed Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, co-founders of the anti-Muslim hate group Stop Islamization of America, that they may not enter the island nation. The Americans had planned to attend a rally organized by the English Defence League, a thuggish anti-Muslim group whose leader has been denied entry to the U.S. due to his extremism.
