Deep inside a hushed fortress at the edge of the Colorado Rockies, behind razor-wire coils and reinforced steel doors, one of America's most feared inmates was being carefully watched.
There was little that T.D. "The Hulk" Bingham could do that escaped the attention of intelligence agents at the Supermax federal prison, the nation's tightest lockup.
They feared that Bingham, believed to be one of the walrus-mustached warlords of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang, might launch his soldiers into a bloody race war. They monitored his visitors, tapped his phone calls, studied his mail.
But in August 1997, an alleged order slipped out of Bingham's cell in "the Alcatraz of the Rockies," sneaked past impregnable walls and gun towers, foiled a network of cameras and surveillance lasers, and unleashed carnage at another high-security compound 1,700 miles away. At the federal prison in Lewisburg, Pa., Brotherhood members armed themselves with shivs and charged black inmates, slaying two.
Against high-tech scrutiny, prosecutors say, Bingham had employed a decidedly low-tech method, one used by spies in George Washington's Revolutionary Army but which dates to the first century, when the Roman writer Pliny the Elder recorded its use: invisible ink. Prisoners make it from urine or citrus juice.
The Aryan Brotherhood's arsenal of cloaked communication is central to the trial underway at U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, which started in March and is the first of several murder and racketeering trials targeting the gang's alleged leadership.
To run their barbed-wire empire of terror, drugs and extortion, the government says, Brotherhood bosses improvised methods of smuggling messages while under constant surveillance in some of the tightest cages ever built.
They shouted through the pipes of drained toilets. They wadded up notes and slipped them into mop handles. They possessed an eclectic system of codes and cryptograms, and the gift of time to perfect them.
Federal prosecutors have introduced stacks of coded documents in the current case against alleged kingpins Bingham, Barry "The Baron" Mills and two lesser figures. The evidence includes a gang membership list encoded in a dual-alphabet cipher devised by Sir Francis Bacon and a call to arms embedded in the text of a library book on Napoleon Bonaparte.
