SACRAMENTO, Calif. — It’s been nearly six years since federal prosecutors here announced the first of two massive prosecutions aimed at removing incarcerated Aryan Brotherhood members from the state prison system with the stated goal of keeping the public safe.
But, after two jury trials and three guilty pleas, none of the nine Aryan Brotherhood members convicted of life-threatening crimes has spent a single day in federal prison.
All of them are still in state prison or county jail cells, where prosecutors claimed at the start of the case that they were able to easily obtain contraband phones and cause havoc inside and outside the prison.
But, according to the US Department of Justice, that is about to change. At a court hearing earlier this month, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Hitt stated that the federal Bureau of Prisons has finally agreed to take on the Aryan Brotherhood members sentenced to life, and that it is only a matter of time before they do so.
There’s just one minor snag: Lawyers from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the federal Bureau of Prisons are negotiating the details and must choose between two options. Hitt told Senior U.S. District Judge Kimberly Mueller that it is a “slower process than you would think,” but it will undoubtedly happen at some point.
“The bottom line is, the wheels are moving,” Hitt stated in court.
If the transfers are completed, it will bring an end to a saga that has lasted more than a year and sparked additional legal drama.
Hitt’s words were of little comfort to Brant “Two Scoops” Daniel, a 50-year-old Aryan Brotherhood member who pleaded guilty in December 2023 because he wants to go to federal prison. Instead, he has been met with “lies” and “excuses,” he told a reporter over the phone from his prison tablet.
“I never expected this kind of criminal behavior from the government,” Daniel told me.
Daniel, who has been imprisoned for life since the age of 19, claims he is fed up with “corruption” in the state system and simply wants a change of scenery. He expected to be on the next bus to a federal prison yard, and prosecutors promised to make that happen. Nearly 18 months later, he remains in the same California State Prison Sacramento module where he has spent the previous years.
Daniel, enraged by the lengthy wait, has directed his lawyers to force the government’s hand by filing court papers to allow him to withdraw from his agreement, claiming that prosecutors violated the terms of his guilty plea by failing to transfer him. Mueller is yet to rule on the motion.
Following Daniel’s guilty plea, two of his co-defendants pleaded guilty. Three more were convicted in April 2024. Five of the six have been officially sentenced to federal prison.
There have been no transfers there. Neither has John “Pops” Stinson, one of three gang members convicted of racketeering and murder last February in a separate racketeering case involving the Aryan Brotherhood.
Stinson, a 70-year-old Aryan Brotherhood leader imprisoned since 1981, went by the nickname “Youngster” in the early 2000s, when he was sentenced to life in federal prison for the first time. His commitment to the BOP, like that of the others, has so far only existed on paper.
In 2019, federal prosecutors in Sacramento announced that they were targeting a group of the state’s “most dangerous” Aryan Brotherhood members — all of whom were already serving state prison sentences for murder — because the gang had figured out how to manipulate the local prison system so easily that it was no longer deterring them from committing crimes.
According to court records, gang leaders were caught with dozens of contraband phones, which they used to run drug rings and order murders, arsons, robberies, and shakedowns across California and elsewhere.
California prisons have had a particularly violent start to 2025. Officials have announced nine homicide investigations, including one alleged Aryan Brotherhood associate who murdered his cellmate in an administrative segregation unit after the two of them killed another person on a prison yard.
These types of stabbings are why federal prosecutors argued in 2019 that the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act — the same law used to prosecute Italian mobsters and outlaw biker gangs — should be used against men who were already almost certainly going to spend the rest of their lives in prison.
Nine convictions followed. Now all that remains is to get them on the plane.
