John Jefferson
From left to right: A suspected member of the Peckerwoods gang holds a rifle, a photo of a firearm that one of the suspects posted on Facebook Messenger, and the head of a Peckerwood with Nazi tattoos (U.S. Attorney’s Office).
Sixty-eight members and associates of a Los Angeles-based white supremacist street gang have been indicted in a federal racketeering case alleging years of drug trafficking, firearms possession, and fraud, authorities said.
Twenty-nine of the 68 defendants — some with nicknames such as “Monster,” “Bezerker,” “Sinister,” “Meat,” and “Scumf—,” were arrested on Wednesday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced in a press release. Thirteen were already in custody.
They face a slew of charges, including conspiracy to distribute controlled substances, distribution of controlled substances, bank fraud, conspiracy to commit bank fraud, aggravated identity theft, possession of a firearm in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime, unlawful possession of a firearm and ammunition by a felon, and possession of 15 or more unauthorized access devices. The case carries a statutory maximum life sentence in federal prison.
The details from the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act conspiracy — the same tool used to crack down on organized crime in the 1970s — target the so-called Peckerwoods, a white-supremacist gang based in the suburban San Fernando Valley area of LA.
They got their name from a derogatory term for white people, authorities said. The gang is allied with the Aryan Brotherhood, a neo-Nazi prison gang and the Mexican Mafia prison gang, which controls most Latino street gangs in California.
U.S. Attorney Martín Estrada called the Peckerwoods’ a grave menace to the community.
“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,” he said in the press release. “In prosecuting the members of the Peckerwoods criminal organization, our office is carrying out its mission to protect the public from the most dangerous threats.”
The indictment, unsealed on Wednesday, outlines the allegations from December 2016 to September 2024. Authorities said the Peckerwoods use Nazi tattoos, graffiti, and iconography to indicate their violent white supremacy extremist ideology. These tattoos and iconography include swastikas, the symbol “88,” used by violent white supremacy extremists as code for “Heil Hitler,” and images of Nazi aircraft.
“I wish all the blacks and all the cops would just kill ALL of each other. Our side of the dayroom only! If thats all that was left in the world, that would be awesome,” one member of the gang’s Facebook group wrote during the Black Lives Matter protests over the police killing of George Floyd in June 2020, according to the indictment.
They mailed drugs to customers and used Zelle and CashApp for the transactions, prosecutors said. They signed fraudulent loan applications for people incarcerated in California state prisons and then collected some proceeds from the co-conspirators. In one case in April 2021, one defendant submitted an application claiming he was a self-employed “artist/writer” with a gross income of nearly $250,000 and got a loan that month for $20,833, authorities said.
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