My Aryan princess

Fateful introductions Drugs fuel a woman’s descent into the world of a violent Brotherhood April 25, 2017 Crystal meth glowed orange, an ember in an ink-black night. Skitz drew in smoke, held it, and then passed the pipe to Carol in the passenger seat, who fired up her own hit. Back and forth, inhale exhale, higher and higher, they settled in for a long night’s drive. Five hours stretched ahead, a straight shot over the oil-rich rim of Odessa’s Permian Basin, across a tumbleweed-flat prairie, into Dallas-Fort Worth. Carol fished a cellphone from her purse and held it up for Skitz to see – then popped off the back, pried out the battery, and dropped the pieces into the center console. “You don’t have to do that,” he said. “No,” Carol replied, “I want you to feel safe.” It was Jan. 21, 2013, a few minutes before 2 a.m., a gray Nissan Sentra droning along an open road. This scene was reported by cross-referencing public records, confidential law enforcement reports, recordings, photographs and interviews.

For example, surveillance photos show the make, model, license plate number and color of the car Skitz drove from Odessa to Fort Worth on Jan. 21, 2013. That information was verified using registration data from the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles and compared against dated field reports filed by federal agents the next morning.

The time frame was established in interviews and reports showing when Carol and Skitz checked into the Quality Inn & Suites in Fort Worth, the time stamp on photographs, and by calculating the distance and approximate speed of the trip from East Texas to Dallas-Fort Worth.

Dialogue between the characters is primarily based on a recorded account Carol provided to federal agents less than 48 hours after arriving in Fort Worth. Her recollection was generally consistent in multiple interviews of several months. Aryan Brotherhood of Texas general James “Skitz” Sampsell, in front of a Corsicana halfway house in 2010, was a high-level target in a federal investigation. James “Skitz” Sampsell was the most powerful man in the nation’s most violent street gang, the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas. But the 50-year-old general knew the feds were closing in. A few months earlier, the U.S. Department of Justice had indicted every other senior officer in the white supremacist gang – 34 generals, majors, captains and many foot soldiers – the biggest blow against organized crime in Texas history. Even so, the feds needed Skitz. His arrest would be the coup de grâce in a six-year investigation, the first time an extremist group’s entire leadership had been decapitated in a single, organized crime indictment. To bag Skitz, the government called on a confidential informant who’d already helped agents put more than a dozen high-profile ABT heads on the wall. But this time, the CI would be both predator and prey. Skitz knew a snitch was close. Most of his advisers were convinced it was Carol Blevins, his old lady, a 34-year-old junkie and longtime ABT loyalist. But Skitz didn’t want to believe it. Carol Blevins worked three years as a federal confidential informant. Her intel led to at least 13 convictions. She returned to the Lost Coyote (above) in the spring of 2016, an Odessa biker bar and favorite haunt of ABT members. (Nathan Hunsinger/Staff Photographer) Carol Blevins worked three years as a federal confidential informant. Her intel led to at least 13 convictions. She returned to The Lost Coyote (above) in the spring of 2016, an Odessa biker and favorite haunt of ABT gang members. (Nathan Hunsinger/Staff Photographer) He loved Carol and treated her like a tempestuous beauty, one given to tantrums and impulse and fury, but worth the trouble because of what a younger woman does for an older man’s ego. Carol knew it, worked it, but understood she could push only so far. She considered Skitz a big sweetheart, but knew he’d kill her without hesitation. Carol lived because he allowed her to live, and there were no guarantees his generosity would hold. They sat in pools of isolation, hypnotized by humming tires as miles fell away on Interstate 20 East. Skitz punctured the silence. “You know we could never really be together,” he said, voice melancholy. “You don’t know that,” she said. “If circumstances were different ...” The talk trickled on, toward easy and comfortable topics. But in the way water seeks its lowest level, the conversation returned to the unanswered question in the darkness. In February 2016, Carol took a ride through Odessa and recounted the harrowing journey she took to and from that West Texas city with Skitz in 2013. (Nathan Hunsinger/Staff Photographer) “Carol, if it came out that you were the snitch, I’d kill you myself,” Skitz said. “I wouldn’t let anybody else do it, because you lied to me. And I’d torture you for hours before I killed you.” Betrayal is the highest crime in the ABT, and the punishment is often macabre – acid dripped on the face, bolt cutters used to snip off fingers, a hot soldering iron inserted in the anus. The lights of Fort Worth blinked in the distance. Carol said, “I believe you.” They arrived at the Quality Inn & Suites and checked into Room 138. Soon after, a text message buzzed on a Homeland Security agent’s phone. “911. They know it’s me.” The Brotherhood The Aryan Brotherhood of Texas is the violent bastard child of the Aryan Brotherhood, a racist prison gang that terrorized the California penal system in the 1960s. The groups are distinct, but share DNA – an ideology pivoting on white purity, a fetish for all things Nazi and a reverence for 14 words written by white supremacist David Lane: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The ABT roared to life in the 1980s after a federal court ordered Texas prisons to desegregate, abolishing a policy from the Jim Crow South that allowed white inmates to act as surrogate guards. Black and Latino gangs — the Mexican Mafia, Mandingo Warriors and others — rushed into the power vacuum, and many once-favored white prisoners consolidated into the ABT. Vulnerable and outnumbered, the Brotherhood followed a script written by its parent gang in California. It turned racial rivalry into a blood sport. The ABT trained its soldiers to gut opponents in the yard, gash their throats and disfigure their faces. Fifty-two Texas inmates died during gang wars from 1983 to 1984. Less than 2 percent of the state’s prisoners were members of the Brotherhood, but the gang committed 32 percent of the murders.

Rooted in violence The Aryan Brotherhood of Texas is a prison-based, white supremacist street gang with an estimated 3,500 members and a nationwide footprint. Since its founding in the 1980s, government officials say, the Brotherhood is known to have carried out at least 100 murders. The gang’s “blood in, blood out” membership doctrine and “God forgives, Brothers don’t” motto are a reflection of its violent values. Above, ABT member Steve Kenneth Knight was assaulted for not attending gang meetings or paying dues. In September and October 2001, ABT member Mark Anthony Stroman murdered two people and seriously injured a third in “revenge” for the 9/11 terror attacks. Stroman was executed for murder in 2011. (Credit: Daily Mail) The ABT is broken into five Texas regions with a paramilitary command structure. Collectively, the five commanding generals are known as “The Wheel,” a steering committee. Larry “Slick” Bryan, the gang’s current leader, is serving a 25-year sentence in federal prison for racketeering. Membership in the Brotherhood is for life. A prospective member must be sponsored and trained by an ABT officer, sign a “Blind Faith Commitment” oath, and obtain a comprehensive report of his criminal history. The ABT does not accept nonwhite members, women, gays or people convicted of sex crimes. Gang members mutilated and murdered 19-year-old Breanna Taylor in this Mesquite garage for bad-mouthing the ABT. ❮ ❯



The brutality metastasized outside prison walls when the first wave of ABT loyalists made parole. A ghastly example: the 2006 murder of 19-year-old Breanna Taylor in Mesquite. Gang members clipped a battery charger to her genitals and turned on the juice. They poured acid down her throat, cinched zip ties around her neck, and watched for 20-30 minutes as she convulsed on the floor of a garage. Richard Boehning, ATF agent (David Woo/Staff Photographer) Her corpse was dismembered, cemented into a plastic tub and dumped in Lake Ray Hubbard. Soon after, Richard Boehning, a full-bird colonel, former Army Ranger and senior special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, took a call from the Department of Justice. Two weeks later in Houston, Boehning rallied a special prosecutor from Washington, D.C., and 80 federal, state and local officers – from the FBI to the Waller County Sheriff’s Department – to confront the gang. Fanned across Texas, federal agents gathered intel the high-tech way – using satellite uplinks to intercept cellphone calls, dime-size video cameras to record gang meetings, and covert tracking devices to follow key suspects. But prosecutors say inside information won the case. From 2008 to 2013, the feds harvested information from thousands of sources, but only about 15 high-value CIs. Carol Blevins, a former church camp counselor and lifelong heroin addict, was one of them. Dance lessons were a constant throughout Carol’s childhood. Later, she worked as a church camp counselor. But after her introduction to drugs, she started having run-ins with the law.



Arguably, the best of them. She lived with the ABT, gathering information the Cold War way – by sleuthing, connecting dots, memorizing detail. “Human intel is, quite frankly, the best intel,” said Boehning, who led the investigation. “And we had some great people on the inside.” Her spy work offered broad views (the ABT’s strategy for moving meth with Mexican cartels) and small insights (serial numbers on stolen guns). In covert text messages, she pre-empted murders and interrupted robberies. She led police to drug drop houses, snapped photos connecting criminals to unsolved crimes, and prepped police when it came time to arrest men predisposed to violence. One gang member, for example, always opened his door with one hand and held a loaded .38 in the other. Carol’s last mark, Skitz, was arrested after a routine drug deal in a Wal-Mart parking lot. The buyer was an undercover FBI agent. Carol and another CI set Skitz up. In the end, the feds wrapped up 36 ABT members in one case. Carol’s work sealed 13 convictions, contributed key information to at least 16 others, and juiced the careers of her government handlers. This is her story. Continual danger My Aryan Princess is a seat-of-the-pants crime drama, a gritty and voyeuristic journey into drug dens, inner sanctums of power and the ritualistic savagery of avowed racists. This report is anchored by volumes of public records and private medical reports, a dictionary-thick stack of confidential law enforcement documents, sealed court records, and more than two gigabytes of photos, videos and secret audio recordings.


The material, along with hundreds of hours of interviews, provides a rare glimpse into the often opaque world of CIs and their government handlers. The Dallas Morning News spent 18 months researching, writing and fact-checking My Aryan Princess.



In most cases, descriptions and dialogue are based on independent sources – police and court records, transcripts of testimony, verbal and written accounts, private medical records, confidential law enforcement material, multiple interviews with witnesses over a period of months, email, memos and text messages.



Primary sources reviewed excerpts of the stories for accuracy. They did not approve copy or make changes.



Conflicting information was either excluded, resolved by research or attributed.



Quotes were taken from secretly recorded audio obtained by The Dallas Morning News when possible. Examples include phone calls by confidential informants, conversations between inmates and family members, police interrogations and interviews by federal agents.



Key documents and images were vetted by multiple government sources and others to confirm their veracity. The head of the ATF, Thomas E. Brandon, senior officials from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and an attorney from the U.S. Department of Justice approved extensive interviews with The Dallas Morning News. Federal agents released two CDs containing internal law enforcement documents produced during the six-year investigation, and spoke at length about the government’s use of confidential informants. They declined to comment publicly about Carol’s spy work, citing policies that prohibit them from identifying CIs. Kidnapping. They talk about kidnapping between each other Carol’s life today is no more secure or certain than it was inside the Brotherhood. Soon after Skitz’s arrest, federal agents say, the ABT general issued an order to the gang’s 3,500 members across Texas. A “green light.” Find Carol and kill her. She’s afraid of the ABT, but Carol said telling her story doesn’t put her in much additional danger – gang members already know who she is and what she did. "Maybe someone will get something from [the stories] and understand more about the Aryan Brotherhood,” she said. “What they do to people and what I went through with them.” Carol knows she may die any day – by the hand of the ABT, the fist of an online hookup, or the business end of a hypodermic needle. Agents say that would be a shame, a mind like that, one that soaks up license plate and phone numbers as easily as a chamois wicks water from the hood of a car. The feds use most spies like matches – to strike fast, burn hot and flame out. Others fill disposable roles in sting operations, as drug buyers or middlemen who fence stolen property. But agents say the most valuable CIs augur deep inside, where they learn to live in another skin, to lie and believe the lie, to infiltrate silently and investigate invisibly – like a colorless gas filling an empty vessel. Carol was like that. She would do or say or risk anything to gain favor with the feds. Then they cut her loose. The hauntings The voices invade at night. They are faint and far away at first, whispers in a windstorm. Four years after working for the feds, Carol draws knees to chest, making herself small in the elbow of a brown velour couch. Head cocked just so, left ear pitched toward the ceiling, she strains against the silence. She hears laughter — menacing, relentless and getting closer. Carol is a junkie. She spends much of her life drug-addled and paranoid, lurching from find to fix. She lives in a dim and down-market apartment, a place where the metal front door has been kicked in so many times it’s patched with wood putty, where the toilet runs but refuses to flush, where the carpet smells of malt liquor. On this October night, eight amber-colored bottles lie at Carol’s bare feet. Six are empty, a boneyard of antidepressant and antipsychotic prescriptions. The whispers in her head have grown into howls, taunts and threats crashing in her ears. “White bitch, we know what you did! Nasty whore! You’re dead!” Carol leaps off the couch. She’s fighting back, head wagging side to side, the “you want some of this?” posturing of the street. Hands on hips one moment, finger jabbing the air the next, she spits vulgarities, strutting across her living room – two steps, bow up; pivot, back down – a war dance of the delusional. She doesn’t last long, a minute maybe. Winded, sweat collected in the creases of her neck, Carol seems frozen, taking in an imaginary insult from an imaginary opponent. The indignity is too much. Eyes wild, she charges the locked front door: “Bitch, you don’t know who I am!” Medical records suggest Carol suffers from a range of mental illnesses – bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. She’s been committed to psychiatric hospitals at least 20 times in the last decade. Once, police officers tackled Carol after she bolted into her parents’ backyard, hallucinating about ABT assassins. Dr. Erich Swafford at Green Oaks psychiatric hospital in Dallas diagnosed her with “amphetamine dependence” and “substance-induced psychosis.” His treatment notes said her delusions disappear after a night’s sleep, the time it takes for street drugs to clear the system. “Highly unclear,” he wrote, “ if pt [patient] has anything other than a meth addiction.” The girl next door Carol grew up in Murphy, a community of oversized lots and horse trails. She played basketball (point guard), volleyball (setter), and marched on Plano East Senior High School’s varsity drill team. But dancing – ballet, tap, jazz – was her thing, six days a week for a decade. Carol, 38, is still long and lithe, 5 feet 10½ inches, 145 pounds. You can imagine the pirouettes when she slips on pink satin ballet shoes with dirty gray bottoms and holes in the toes. When she cinches them tight, her calf contracts and her foot extends to a point, the muscle memory of a former life. Twenty-five years ago, before heroin and crystal meth and trading her self-respect for them, before she learned to shoot dope while steering with a knee down Mockingbird Lane, before the beatings and three abortions, Carol was a middle-class kid. Your kid. Fresh-scrubbed, whip-smart, blithely entitled to a life of work and reward. Her dad, Ike Blevins, is an old man now, 74, but he can still see “Carabunny” sitting on his workbench, scrawny and full of mischief, keying the mike of an old ham radio. Over and over, she searched for a connection, “CQ, CQ, CQ.” Ike sighs at the memory, a flash bulb in a long life, a moment backlit by pain. “I can barely remember that little girl,” he said. “She’s my baby. I’m so stupid, but I just can’t put her on the street.” An avocado-green phone in the kitchen announced trouble when Carol was 12 years old. A Plano police officer found her and a few friends smoking in an abandoned house across from her middle school. Over the next three years, the girl who had been a church camp counselor turned into the girl with greasy hair and dilated pupils. She lied, stole money, gave up at school. Twenty teenagers overdosed on black-tar heroin in the 1990s, as a cheap and pure supply rippled through placid, suburban Plano. Carol’s dad, Ike Blevins (above), refuses to give up on his youngest child. He’s burned through most of his $50,000 retirement over the last two decades, paying Carol’s attorney and doctor bills, among other expenses. Right, top: Carol celebrates her 6th birthday with family members. Right, below: Ike watches 20-year-old Carol open Christmas gifts at the family’s home in Murphy. Above, top: Carol’s dad, Ike Blevins, refuses to give up on his youngest child. He’s burned through most of his $50,000 retirement over the last two decades, paying Carol’s attorney and doctor bills, among other expenses.



Above, middle: Carol celebrates her 6th birthday with family members.



Above, last: Ike watches 20-year-old Carol open Christmas gifts at the family’s home in Murphy. Carol was lucky. She snorted her first line at 15 and survived. “After that,” she said, “I never wanted to do anything else.” She washed up at The Fare on Greenville Avenue, as many young junkies do, on a creeping and receding tide of addiction. Carol wobbled up steps to center stage. Eyes of old men, dozens of them, stared through cigarette smoke. Some looked with lust, but most were drawn by the spectacle – a rail-thin 18-year-old, clumsy in five-inch heels, clinging to a dance pole. Carol doesn’t remember much about her first dance, except that she was terrible and terrified. Not a single man slid money into her G-string, but in an act of pity, other dancers filed up to the stage with dollar bills. “It was degrading,” she said, “but I learned to love the attention.” After drugs took hold, Carol (left) spent some time working at a strip club. Lap dances paid $20, but she was so skinny and flat-chested it was tough to drum up business. One old man seemed taken, and Carol was eager to cultivate a repeat customer. Hair tossed, hips undulating, she teased with a grind and naughty-girl grin. When the music stopped, Carol bent down for a standard peck on the cheek. He whispered in her ear, “Wanna hang out?” They settled on $100 an hour. The next day, Carol slid into the front seat of his silver Mercedes. Moments later, they sat on a black leather couch in his townhouse, pretending to watch TV. “Then,” she said, “he just put my hand in his lap.” A future with Crash If he were born during another time, Micheal “Crash” Bianculli figures he would have been a king. But as it turned out, he made his entrance in Grand Prairie in 1968, the child of a 14-year-old street girl, an event that set him on an ignoble trajectory. Crash joined a gang in high school. His first job was blowing up competitors’ meth labs. By the time he reached adulthood, he cooked, cut and sold drugs for himself. By 40, he distributed dope by the pound and pimped prostitutes along the Interstate 35 corridor from Dallas to Denton.

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