The Florida Attorney General’s office has announced the arrest of three prison guards in a murder plot. The guards are identified as Thomas Jordan Driver, 25, David Elliot Moran, 47, and Charles Thomas Newcomb, 42. The men are all members of a Florida chapter of the KKK known as the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
The men were arrested when a confidential FBI informant exposed a plot to kill a former Black inmate. The unidentified inmate and Jordan Driver had a fight at the Department of Corrections Reception and Medical Center in rural north Florida. During the fight, the inmate bit Driver, who suspected the inmate of having HIV and hepatitis. Driver then conspired with Moran and Newcomb to kill the inmate. Through their KKK chapter, the group solicited an assassin to kill the inmate while he was on supervised release in 2014. Unknown to the men, the person they were talking with was a confidential informant for the FBI.
The informant alerted the agency and an investigation and sting operation began. During the course of the operation, numerous conversations were recorded with all three men who indicated that they wanted the inmate dead. The group even talked about methods of killing the man that ranged from a gunshot to an overdose of insulin. The informant, with the help of the FBI, provided the group with a doctored photograph in March 2015 that showed the inmate dead by gunshot. According to the FBI informant, the men celebrated the death and thanked the informant for his help.
All three men were arrested on this past Thursday and each faces one count of conspiracy to commit murder.
