US police bust white supremacist gang on drug charges

Dozens of members of a violent white supremacist gang were charged Wednesday with selling drugs in California, in what the US government said was a decisive blow to a neo-Nazi crime organization.

Large quantities of illegal guns and dangerous street drugs, including fentanyl -- a synthetic opioid that is devastating communities around the country -- were seized in coordinated raids targeting the San Fernando Valley Peckerwoods, who operate near Los Angeles.

"The Peckerwoods’ violent white-supremacist ideology and wide-ranging criminal activity pose a grave menace to our community," said United States Attorney Martin Estrada.

"By allegedly engaging in everything from drug-trafficking to firearms offenses to identity theft to COVID fraud, and through their alliance with a neo-Nazi prison gang, the Peckerwoods are a destructive force," Estrada said.

A grand jury indictment unsealed Wednesday charges 68 defendants with a raft of federal crimes including racketeering, drug peddling, fraud and firearms offenses.

The 76-count indictment alleges the Peckerwoods take their orders from the Aryan Brotherhood, California’s dominant prison-based white supremacist gang, and maintain an alliance with the Mexican Mafia prison gang, which controls most Latino street gangs in the state.

The Peckerwoods have Nazi tattoos and iconography that include swastikas, the number "88" -- code used by extremists for "Heil Hitler" -- and images of Nazi aircraft.

"The Justice Department has dealt a decisive blow to the San Fernando Valley Peckerwoods, a violent white supremacist gang that we charge is responsible for trafficking deadly fentanyl and other drugs, committing robberies, and perpetrating financial fraud to fund both their criminal enterprise and that of the Aryan Brotherhood," said Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Fentanyl has been widely prescribed throughout the United States, and widely abused, leading to tens of thousands of cases of addiction and death that have afflicted almost every part of the country.