WSPA has video of these miscreants making threats and attempting to force the police, via intimidation, into charging Gregory Collins with a hate crime. They are helping to organize a march on Newberry which they hope will turn violent:

The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation has released a scathing attack on the NBPP claiming, among other things, that the original Black Panthers “operated on love for black people, not hatred of white people.” Er, sure. The real issue between the two is that the original Black Panthers were Communists/Socialists while the NBPP is a crazy Black Muslim cult … that’s getting pretty popular.

Since the NBPP advocates killing White people their appearance in our state is something we should all be concerned about.

I got a couple of emails from readers who saw Hells Angels gang members flying their colors in various locations around Greenville County. Coincidentally, the Mrs. and I were in Simpsonville a couple of days ago and saw two Hells Angels riding through the downtown like they owned the place. Needless to say we rushed home and I loaded my shotguns.

I did a little digging and the word on the street is this: the recent round up of members of The Outlaws MC by Federal authorities, which included members in both Carolinas, Tennesee and Virginia, has left a vacuum in the south that the Hells Angels believe they can fill while the Outlaws are under the gun. The Angels are especially interested in the new drug market of Greenville, driven by Northeastern transplants who are leery of some of the rougher areas of the Dirty South and do a lot of their buying on the bar circuit and in the clubs. The recent biker fest in Simpsonville was indeed a chance for many 1%er clubs to scout the local area and see what’s what.

The Angels, like the Outlaws, also make money in “prostitution” which in their cases is actually sexual slavery. Women (many times strippers or runaways because they are easy to victimize) are kidnapped, raped and forced to service the club as well as being pimped out for money to outsiders. As I understand it, the “gentleman’s” clubs in the area are not run by people willing or able to stand up to an organization like the Angels, so now is a good time to get out of the business if you’re a dancer.

The Angels run drugs and guns as well, and many groups up north and especially across the southern border would like to get their hands on some good old fashioned South Carolina firepower. The Hells Angels are known to be allied with the Mexican Mafia so it’s likely they will be working as middlemen for Mexican gangs.

Now, this is a big territory and it’s just as likely the Hells Angels will set up shop in one of our neighboring states, putting in the occasional appearance to maintain control of the area. But Greenville, flush with money, drug users and unclaimed territory, is a prize that groups like the Angels can’t afford to pass up.

SLED officers told WSPA that the bust was related to the “growing drug trade’ in the area:

A hostage situation unfolded as SLED agents rushed to the scene.

In the end–more than half a dozen people were taken into custody–in what agents say is part of a growing drug trade in the Upstate.

This all unfolded on Sulfar Springs drive in Berea this afternoon.

News Channel 7 was the only news crew at the scene.

Agents handcuffed 7 people, taking them into custody.

The director of SLED tells us they got word this morning that three people were being held hostage inside the home.

SLED isn’t able to say how they were alerted to the hostage situation.

When swat team members and agents got there–a standoff ensued until the suspects inside surrendered.

Agents are still trying to determine who is who amongst those in the house. And they can’t yet give identities or where the suspects are from.

Significantly, while weapons were found at the house no drugs have been reported. Human smugglers are often also involved in drug smuggling so these thugs may have gotten on to LE radar during drug investigations. It is a common practice for “coyotes” to hold people who contracted with them to hostage for extra cash. It is especially likely when the illegals are young women, who the smuggling gangs force into prostitution.

WSPA has raw video of the arrests.The house was on Sulfar Spring Drive in Berea.

Word on the street is that a bad apple looking for drugs or hookers turned Good Samaritan when he or she saw what was going on.

Also a rumor Dr. Know sent me is that MS-13 has been smuggling illegals into South Carolina for years and have moved into Greenville County. I found a 2006 story from WIS10 which details Richland county’s problems with the gang and they are very active in North Carolina.

But again these are  just rumors for now. We’ll keep digging.

From GreenvilleOnline:

One person was arrested and two teenagers were detained after scattered fights broke out near Falls Park on Saturday night in downtown Greenville.

A squad of 15 to 20 police officers brought the crowd under control near 11 p.m.

The two teenagers were detained shortly after the 10 p.m. curfew, when anyone younger than 18 and unaccompanied by an adult must be off the streets in the downtown area.

Greenville Police Lt. Mike Hudson said one woman was arrested.

Hudson said he ordered every officer who “wasn’t on a (911) call” into the area.

15-20 officers aren’t needed to “bring a crowd under control” due to “scattered fights” and a few rowdies in a downtown don’t usually prompt whoever is in charge that evening to order every cop not dealing with an emergency to flood an area. Sorry Mr. Walton, but I’m thinking this incident was more serious than you’re making it out to be.

Being a homebody I’m rarely downtown these days, but I’m told that there’s a rough element out and about. Falls Park is popular at night for both the atmosphere and the drugs. The plaza next to Spill the Beans is known to be a “corner” for dealers and the park itself provides plenty of unlit areas where kids like to get high among other things. Parents are apparently still in the habit of dropping off their spoiled brats with a wad of cash in the downtown on the weekends, and frankly we should be charging them for the damage those kids are causing.

At the very least the parents of the children involved should be forced to pay for the hours our police weren’t able to deal with other crimes while babysitting their ill-spawn brood.

Organizer Beth Brown (also known as Throttle Fox) decided to hold the first annual Southern Throttle Motorcycle Rally in Heritage Park because of Myrtle Beach’s new ordinances targeting bikers. From the Tribune-Times:

When Beth Brown rides her Harley Davidson motorcycle through Simpsonville or Greenville or the nearby mountains, she envisions the Upstate as a destination for motorcycle riders from across the Southeast.

Now she wants to bring those riders here.

She expects more than 3,000 bikers to cruise into Simpsonville June 4-5 for a new two-day rally at Heritage Park. Others have told her to expect 5,000-10,000 bikers, she said.

The Southern Throttle Motorcycle Rally is being organized by Greenville event-management company Epic Events. Brown, the event’s organizer, hopes the rally will become an annual draw.

Which may be good news for the city of  Simpsonville and Greenville County, specially since the the Simpsonville City Council recently expanded the alcohol ordinance to allow sales at public events. Like biker rallies.

The bad news? Over the years several 1%er clubs have been active in South Carolina including The Hell’s Angels, The Pagans, and The Warlocks but as far as I know there is no one gang whose territory is Greenville. So out of the few thousand that show up to this rally we can expect some gangs who are rivals. Despite assurances to the contrary, the outlaw biker culture is still very active, very dangerous and very attracted to rallies like this.

Strippers and other “adult workers” should be especially careful during this rally as many gangs make money through the extortion and abuse of these women. The Breed were caught doing this in 2000 and that case is typical of how 1%er gangs operate.

But the murder of White Nationalist Richard Barrett by Vice Lord Vincent McGee has some people nervous, some curious and a few amused. While I find gang violence leading to homicide unamusing no matter how degenerate the victim (and as we’ll see Barrett could only be described as a degenerate in the most literal sense) I do understand the lack of sympathy for Barrett decent people will feel. After all, he ran a (now defunct) White Supremacist organization which mysteriously has no media presence, Internet or otherwise, yet he was known to raise funds by staging publicity stunts. As a lawyer he represented many neo-Nazis and claimed to hold their cause as his own. His long history of being a Klansman caricature is detailed here.

His life was ended by a felon who was just out of prison, a member of the Vice Lords who in fact had contact with Barrett before and who had a history of violence. Some claim his motive was Barrett’s racist views, but here’s where the story breaks down. Barrett, known racist and separatist, was paying McGee for yard work. From the Clarion-Ledger:

While McGee is African American, authorities have not said Barrett’s racial beliefs were a motive in his slaying.

McGee had performed yard work for Barrett, Pennington said.

A person who was known to demand Black Americans “go back to Africa” was paying a man with gang tattoos on his face to mow his lawn? But the story gets odder:

Witnesses told investigators Barrett had gone to McGee’s home around 7:30 p.m. Wednesday to pay him for yard work.

Around 8 a.m. Thursday, one of Barrett’s neighbors called firefighters after smoke was spotted at Barrett’s home at 227 E. Petros Road east of the Monterey community near Pearl.

So, a White Supremacist who hates and fears Black people went over to a young Black felon’s house in the late evening to “pay him for yard work” and they both ended up back at his house? This is some piss poor bigotry. But the Clarion-Ledger unwittingly puts some of the pieces together for you:

But Barrett was more of a showman than a significant leader, said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project, which monitors hate groups as part of the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center.

“He was a white supremacist gadfly who flitted from cause to cause. He never assembled a group that amounted to more than a few young men,” Potok said.

“Very frequently in the ’80s he would invite young skinhead men to his home on weekends.“

Mark Potak, who has a history of making up facts to “sex up” his S.P.L.C. reports (including this recent one on everyone to the right of Stalin being a terrorist or something) as a fund raising tool, goes on in that interview to claim Barrett had pull with the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan disagrees:

Told of Barrett’s death, Klan leader Jordan Gollub of Jackson said, “It’s tragic that something happened to him.

“We discussed historical and political issues together. But I can’t say I agreed with him much,” said Gollub, who heads the Royal Confederate Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

That “much” apparently being whether or not White Nationalism was just a money making scheme. Here’s a telling quote from The Daily Mail:

In 1994, he spearheaded an unsuccessful movement to get then-Gov. Kirk Fordice to pardon Byron de la Beckwith, who was convicted of murdering Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers in 1963.

Evers’ brother, Charles Evers, said Thursday he has long thought that Barrett didn’t really believe the things he said, but used them to entice people to donate money to his cause.

‘I think it was just a way he had to live,’ Evers said. ‘He made a living talking all that racist talk.’

Surprise! Neo-Nazis are marks. Few “news organizations” have pointed out that if Barrett was some big wig bigot he may have been able to find a fellow White bigot to mow his lawn (or since he was apparently an avid bicyclist could have no doubt done it himself) but instead he wanted a violent felon with facial tattoos. Then he wanted to pay him on a slow, sultry evening.

Before you start with the “You’re a homophobe” stuff, everyone knows Rob Taylor is a friend to the LGBT community (and long time supporter of GOProud and The Pink Pistols) but like any good friend I sometimes have to point out that the mainstream gay culture fetishizes dangerous sexual liaisons which can lead to trouble. Such was the case in the George Weber murder, and such will be the case now.

The news is playing coy with this story but the subtext makes things apparent. I believe this was a hook up gone bad and Barrett was a racist who was driven by some odd conflict in his broken psyche to antagonize the objects of his lust. I further believe that despite McGee’s protests he was a hustler, or at least pretended to be one in some scam. It beggars belief that a White supremacist who truly loathed and feared Blacks hired a young thug with gang tattoos on his face to mow his lawn. Even McGee isn’t telling that story:

Official sources who asked not to be identified, tell WLBT, 22-year-old Vincent McGee, in his confession, alleged Barrett made sexual advances to him, apparently sending McGee into a rage, a rage that ended in murder.

We asked Sheriff Pennington about it. He had no comment other than to say the murder was not racially motivated. Rankin-Madison County District Attorney Michael Guest also would not discuss specifics of the case, but he did have this to say.

“I was surprised to hear about this and then as the case unfolded, there were other twists and turns that again were unforeseen in this case,” Guest said.

But it gets creepier:

McGee’s family members told WLBT, Thursday night, that McGee, when he was a teenager, before he went to prison, knew Barrett and had worked for him.

Hmmm. Look, as I said before “gay panic” is a load of BS used by people who want to explain their own perverted desire to beat up or kill gays that they have had some sort of sexual encounter with. One caveat may be that if a young guy is fresh out of prison he may be a little sensitive to gay advances. But this looks to me like a rough trick, and given the level of violence (Barrett was smashed in the head and stabbed 35 times in the neck) I’m going to put forward that his previous “relationship” with Barrett was not simply professional.

What demons drove Richard Barrett? Greed clearly. But maybe lust and depravity played into it too. Perhaps Barrett, whose separatism did not work its way into his personal life, was turned on by the homoerotic trappings of White Nationalism with its anger and militancy and the sado-masochistic undertones of racial supremacy. Or maybe he’s just a degenerate who conned suckers out of money to pay for the affection of young men. Neither of these things means he deserved a violent death, but they certainly contributed to the likelihood of him being victimized.

Three other people have been arrested in connection with this murder, all as accessories after the fact. make of that what you will. Since one is the father I put forward that guilt for not protecting his son in that past from something may have driven his involvement.

A few people have forwarded me this story concerned that this heralds some sort of Vice Lord vs neo-Nazi war. I wouldn’t worry. Though the Vice Lords are a “People’s Nation” affiliated gang which includes gangs that are known to be racist (like the Bloods), it also included White gangs like The Gaylords (now almost defunct) and multi-ethnic gangs like The Latin Kings so the Vice Lords (while extremely dangerous) are unlikely to participate in race based warfare and no large White Nationalist group has sufficient respect for Barrett to care.

On an ironic note, the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront has a thread where the scum there (who once celebrated a man who murdered his wife) actually claim they’re happy he died. That thread confirms that Barrett was known in the White Power community as a closeted homosexual.

SPARTANBURG, S.C. — Deputies have charged six teenagers in connection with the gang initiation and beating of a 15-year-old boy on Monday.

Investigators said they were called to a home on Broadway Street in Glendale at about 6 p.m.

Deputies said that when they arrived the boy’s mother said her son was assaulted by members of a gang called “Rolling 60s.” She said that her son was being forced to join the gang and was being “jumped in.” They said that this process involves physically assaulting a prospective gang member as part of an initiation.

Investigators said that after the teens beat the boy they threatened him and the lives of his family members if he refused orders from the gang.

The boy’s mother took him to an area hospital where he was treated for bruises to his chest.

Of the six three are 17 so their identities have been released. They are Michael Johnson,Justin Thigpen,and Elizabeth Weather. Here are their mugshots:

So I guess the orders they were warning the victim to never disobey were to meet them in the food court so that they can head to Hot Topic? Then they’ll buy some K2 and head over to Starbucks.

I’m sorry, I know criminals all start off as some bad kid somewhere but I’m betting we can disband the Rolling 60s with a couple of spankings and three months of being grounded. These kids are going to be eaten alive on the streets if they think they’re really going to claim turf and maybe it’s time for their parents to take away their Gangsta’ rap filled iPods and keep these little morons out of trouble.

There’s plenty of meat in this 140+ page report, but the main takeaway is that while we have relatively low levels of gang crime in the state, what we have is alarmingly violent and on the rise.  Overall, gang violence represented 1 percent of violent crimes reported in 2007.  The full report is embedded below. (Note to email and RSS subscribers: you may have to visit Greenville Dragnet to view the complete report.)

2009 Gang Report South Carolina – how much how bad?

Greer Police were dispatched to 218 Trade Street when a victim reported that his building and Dodge pickup had been spray painted with the letters UTB in black, according to a Greer police report.

A second vehicle that belonged to The Greer Citizen was also marked, and several of the building’s walls were tagged with UTB in the same black spray paint, the report said.

Police spokesman Lt. Jimmy Holcombe said some of the symbols were gang-related but the meaning of UTB is unknown.

Two other buildings, Langley & Associates and Victoria Place, were also spray painted, according to the report.

This act of vandalism should not be written off as mere adolescent antics.  With the Greenville metro area situated on the I-85 corridor between Atlanta and Charlotte, gang activity is on the rise.  Not even the sleepiest community is immune.