LAKE CHARLES, La. — A leader and a member of a prison-based "whites only" gang have been sentenced for being accessories-after-the-fact to a murder.
U.S. Attorney David C. Joseph, in a news release, says 38-year-old David Wayne Williams, of Sulphur, La. was sentenced Tuesday to 157 months in prison, while 47-year-old Richard Alan Smith, of Little Rock got 150 months.
Williams pleaded guilty to accessory-after-the fact to racketeering murder of Clifton Hallmark, another Aryan Circle member, drug trafficking and weapons possession. Smith pleaded guilty in July to the accessory charge.
Prosecutors say both men were at a meeting where Hallmark was shot after a fight broke out in Turkey Creek, La., in 2016.
Authorities say the Aryan Circle began in the Texas prison system and spread throughout rural and suburban Texas, Louisiana and Missouri.