Nazi Lowriders
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The Nazi Lowriders (NLR) is a white supremacist criminal organization involved in racketeering, drug dealing, drug smuggling, assault and murder. NLR was founded in the late 1970s by John Stinson, an inmate in the California Youth Authority.
Despite being primarily a prison gang, much like its counterparts such as the Aryan Brotherhood, the NLR does have dealings outside of jail. At one point, the NLR has an estimated 1,000 members, mostly in prison in California, Arizona, Nevada, Oklahoma, Utah and Illinois.[citation needed]
Although the gang is primarily a white gang, Stinson has allowed a small number of non-white Hispanics to join the organization. Hispanics not only boosted numbers but performed many less enviable tasks such as drug smuggling. The gang has used Hispanics to traffic methamphetamine in to and out of prisons. The Hispanics in the gang must have at least half-white ancestry, but no African American ancestry.
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[edit] Crimes
In April 2004 NLR members were charged with kidnapping and killing a bisexual man in Salinas. In 1999 two members from Lancaster, California attacked a chinese Wal-Mart employee with a hammer, nearly killing him. A few years earlier in the same town they had assaulted a black youth with a baseball bat.
In 1995 two NLR members in Lancaster beat a homeless man to death behind a McDonalds.
[edit] Crimes inside prison
The NLR is very influential in many southern prisons, particularly in California. David McBride, an officer for the Ontario, California police department, commented that 90% of the NLR's crimes were crimes for gain and the other 10% were hate crimes.
The NLR were accomplished drug dealers in prisons and juvenile correctional facilities, so the Aryan Brotherhood, a gang of 15,000 white supremacists who had been segregated in prison, began using them as junior partners in the drug dealing business.
The AB made clear that the NLR dealers weren't to deal with addicts or users of other races. The AB received most of the profits, but being associated with them was worth it to the NLR because it gave them a credibility in the underworld which they'd previously lacked.
Certain factions of the NLR want to keep the Hispanics working for them and to generate money from narcotics and the other favors following the ideals of Aryan supremacy over making money. The factions are disputing the inclusion of non-Aryans in the gang, i.e. Hispanics.
The NLR has its own junior gang, like the AB has in the form of the NLR, the PEN1, or Public Enemy No.1, who are heavily involved in drug deals and murder-for-hire and number 200 white supremacist members.
[edit] Response
In 1999 in Ontario, California, a town suffering under the crimes of the NLR, a multi-agency Nazi Low Rider Task Force was established to fight their influence in the town. The task force tracked down members and with the help of the FBI, ATF, Department of Corrections and various local police departments they made 200 arrests on state charges and 13 on federal charges.
After four years of preparation the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act was used against several NLR members.
[edit] Trivia
- They were featured in an episode of a series of documentaries by British celebrity Ross Kemp, and were portrayed as a threat to the security of innocent people, particularly in Southern California.
- The name 'Nazi Lowriders' is derived from members' habits of wearing their prison-issue trousers sagging low, Cali-style, around the waist. Contrary to a popular urban legend, this is not a method of signalling sexual availablity; it is usually because prisons have a habit of issuing outsize garments and not issuing belts because very often their lifeless owners are found hanging from them.
