By GILLIAN FLACCUS
Associated Press Writer
SANTA ANA, California- A former member of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang testified Thursday that he was told by another inmate that he had killed a prisoner on orders from a gang leader now on trial in one of the largest capital punishment cases in U.S. history.
Kevin Roach, who took the stand with a shaved head and arms covered with tattoos, said he joined the white supremacist gang in 1991 and became a leader in 1996.
Roach testified that inmate John Greshner said he had killed Richard “Rhino” Andreson in 1983 on orders from Barry “The Baron” Mills. Andreson was on the gang’s hit list because he told authorities about a bank robbery, Roach said.
Asked by prosecutors why Greshner would volunteer the information, Roach said, “In prison, murder stories are a part of the getting-to-know each other process. ... It made him semi-famous.”
Roach was expected to testify about many of the 32 murders and attempted murders detailed in the sweeping indictment targeting the violent gang founded in 1964 at California’s San Quentin prison.
Roach, a convicted murderer, left the gang and became a government witness in 1998. He is now in the witness protection program.
Prosecutors hope to dismantle the Aryan Brotherhood _ nicknamed the “Brand” _ in a series of trials. Of the 40 men initially charged, as many as 16 could face the death penalty for crimes going back 30 years.
Prosecutors are pursuing the highly organized gang with a racketeering law originally passed to target Mafia leaders.
The first group of four defendants _ Mills, Tyler “The Hulk” Bingham, Edgar “The Snail” Hevle and Christopher Gibson _ are on trial in Santa Ana. The remaining defendants are scheduled to be tried in Los Angeles beginning in October.
Mills, an alleged gang leader who is already serving two life terms for murder, could face the death penalty in the 1997 deaths of two inmates in a Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, prison.
Attorney H. Dean Steward, who represents Mills, said the defense team will argue that Roach and other informants were coached and promised favorable plea deals, money and better prison housing in exchange for their testimony.
Steward said he would introduce as evidence a May 1998 letter written by Roach to a prison warden to negotiate the terms of his defection from the gang.
Bingham, 58, also faces a possible death penalty for the 1997 inmate killings. He is currently serving time on robbery and drug charges.
Hevle, 54, and Gibson, 46, could face life in prison if convicted.
Earlier Thursday, gang associate Chris Risk testified that he helped pass a message in which Mills ordered a race war with black inmates at the prison in Pennsylvania.
Risk, who is currently serving a 16-year sentence for armed robbery and kidnapping, said that in August 1997 Gibson passed Mills’ message to him by writing it in the margin of a magazine.
Risk said he then slipped the message into a mop handle and told an orderly to take it to Bingham, who then arranged for the message to get to gang members in the Pennsylvania prison where the two black inmates died in the resulting fight.
Risk, who is in protective custody, became a government informant in 1997, shortly after he says he helped pass the message.