For more than two decades, federal law enforcement prosecuted the Mongols, a notorious motorcycle club whose members had a long history of murder, assault, drug trafficking, and theft.
In 2018, the government achieved a kind of victory. Prosecutors convinced a jury in California that these crimes were not just the result of the misbehavior of individual cyclists, but the work of an organized criminal company that had participated in a chaos campaign. The club was ordered to pay a $ 500,000 fine in what prosecutors expected to be an initial payment to keep him out of business.
But the group that was once the most powerful cycling organization in the West, apart from its archrival rivals, the Hells Angels, will return to court next week, hoping to set aside extortion and conspiracy charges. based on what he says is new evidence about his previous ones. leader, David Santillan. The Mongols now claim that throughout their attempt to defend the club in the long criminal case, their own leader was in secret talking to the government.
A petition for a new trial and revocation of the $ 1 million fine, which is scheduled for an initial hearing Monday in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, California, says Mr. Santillan, 52, cooperated in secret for years. with a special agent from the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. In return, the club said in its motion, the agent appears to have spared Mr. Santillan has had serious legal consequences for various crimes since 2011.
The unusual legal scam offers a rare insight into the motorcycle club’s hidden and volatile outlaw policy and the degree to which law enforcement and its targets can engage in limited co-operation when it is deemed to be mutual. beneficial.
The ATF and other law enforcement agencies have long pursued motorist organizations by co-opting members as informants and infiltrating groups with their own undercover agents.
The Mongols rely on an explosive video shared by Mr. Santillan’s wife, Annie Santillan, who, during a stretch in which she was angry with her husband over her infidelity, had her daughter record a conversation in which she appeared to refer to the protection he had. receipt from the ATF agent.
She also said in a text message to other Mongols, now in court, that her husband had acted for a time as a confidential government informant. “In other words,” he wrote, “it’s a rat.”
Both Mr. Santillan, a Mongolian partner for nearly 25 years who was expelled from the club in July, and agent John Ciccone, who retired in December after 32 years in the ATF, deny that Mr. Santillan did of informant. during the trial, although the affidavit of Mr. Ciccone does not address whether Mr. Santillan had acted as a confidential informant in the past. Both men also rejected claims that Mr Santillan had leaked inside information to the government while his motorcycle club was on trial.
The current national leaders of the Mongols said they were convinced that the former president of the club, which controlled the Mongol defense team, had acted incorrectly. “It was clear that Dave had betrayed the club, his oath and everything we consider sacred,” the club said in a statement.
Mr. Santillan has admitted that he spoke frequently with Mr. Ciccone for a period of years, usually in the presence of other Mongolian members. He said they discussed issues such as public safety when the Mongols or other clubs planned motorcycle parties or demonstrations to make sure members stayed in line and rival groups kept their distance.
“Never in my life have I implicated anyone in the club for any nefarious activity. If you’re a rat, you’re the scum of the land,” he said in an interview.
In the video, Ms. Santillan was talking to her husband through a loudspeaker when he told her that Mr. Ciccone was retiring. “He can’t protect me, he told me, so we need to have an exit strategy, he told me,” a seemingly agitated Mr. Santillan told him.
Ms Santillan said she now felt “horrible” about revealing communications and that her husband was not, in fact, an informant.
“The only thing he’s guilty of is talking a lot to John and having some kind of relationship with him,” he said in an interview.
Mr. Santillan said he spoke with the ATF agent over the years because he helped avoid problems. “John not only looked for me, but for the club,” Santillan said. “That’s what I meant by ‘protecting’ the video.”
The Mongols have been the protagonists of the motorcyclist scene since 1969, when the club was founded in Montebello, California. The group has about 1,200 members in the United States, mostly Hispanics, and numerous chapters around the world.
During the nearly 13 years he led the Mongols, Mr. Santillan seemed to distance the organization from his past recruitment of members of Mexican criminal gangs and a culture of “total underworld activity that the feds enjoyed, in terms of prosecution,” William said. Dulaney, a motorcycle group expert who was previously an associate professor of national security at the U.S. Air Force Air Command and Staff College.
Mr. Dulaney said Mr. Santillan “instituted new policies, like no more club-driven drug business, and made it mandatory for members to have a motorcycle and things like a valid driver’s license and registration and a job.”
As for Mr. Ciccone had mastered the job of conducting complex investigations “using everything from covert to informant, from wiretapping to citations and surveillance,” said Frank D’Alesio, a retired ATF agent who infiltrated three biker clubs.
“And he was tireless,” said Mr. D’Alesio. “He was the kind of outsider all the time offering cover support in case something went wrong with the cover-ups.”
In the case that led to the extortion conviction against the Mongols, Mr. Ciccone had acted as an agent in the case. The U.S. Attorney’s Office had tried and failed to force the Mongols to lose their rights to the club’s trademark logo, a drawing of a muscular figure resembling Genghis Khan riding a helicopter while brandishing a sword, a historical case that prosecutors believed would help weaken. the club undermining their visual identity. A jury sided with the prosecution in 2019 and ordered the group to drop the emblem, but Judge David O. Carter dismissed the verdict as a violation of the club’s constitutional rights.
This search to seize the Mongolian patch was part of a criminal case filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in 2013 under the Racketeer Corrupt and Influenced Organizations Act. The indictment did not target any individuals, but alleged that the club itself had been involved in an organized conspiracy of crimes such as murder, attempted murder and drug trafficking. This is the conviction and the fine that the Mongols are now trying to put aside.
“In my opinion, the only reason the government filed this RICO case was to make another execution on the patch, having failed every time in the past,” said George L. Steele, a Mongolian lawyer. which handles a separate appeal to the case. Federal prosecutors have been focusing on the Mongolian logo since 2008.
The government, in its own call, is doing another test on the Mongolian logo, renewing an earlier request for a more limited confiscation order that would remove the club’s right to trademark exclusivity on the emblem. This command would allow anyone to use the image.
The lawyer in charge of the new trial motion, Joseph A. Yanny, said that the Mongols were hoping to prove that an inappropriate relationship between Mr. Santillan and Mr. Ciccone during the 2018 trial allowed the government to hear things he should not have about the Mongols. defense strategy, and even negatively influenced the Mongol presentation of his case.
On one occasion during the trial, Judge Carter expressed his displeasure to lawyers on both sides after a U.S. marshal told him that Mr. Santillan and Mr. Ciccone had been chatting at a Starbucks near the courthouse.
In their petition, the Mongols argue that Mr. Santillan may have been pressured to leak strategy and other information to the government as a result of the indulgent treatment the defense claimed it received during its clashes with the law.
In one of them, according to his court documents, Mr. Santillan crashed his Mercedes in 2017 while driving with a disability, and damaged numerous cars parked on the street. In another case, in 2014, Mr. Santillan and his wife fought with other people on a racing circuit, according to the Mongolian archive.
“There is no way he has escaped these incidents without major legal repercussions unless someone from law enforcement is in the background greasing the slides for him,” Mr. Yanny.
Mr. Santillan said it was “ridiculous” to think that Mr. Ciccone smoothed things out for him. Mr. Santillan provided case records to show that he had been convicted of crimes such as driving under the effects, leaving the scene of an accident and disturbing the peace, and that he had been arrested, fined and placed on probation.
Jonathan Turley, an expert in constitutional law at George Washington University, said that if a federal agent sought confidential information about a criminal defense, it would be “an extraordinary transgression.”
“There could be a particular concern that the defense attorney unwittingly received instructions from someone aligned with the government,” he said.
Both Mr. Ciccone and the U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment on the motion beyond the government’s response to the court, which said the petition for a new trial was “full of allegations. and false and unsupported speculation “.
The judge is likely to consider a number of court cases on Monday, lawyers said, with additional hearings scheduled before any final decision.
Susan …