![]() ![]() Attorney’s Office in 2013 under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. That quest to seize the Mongols’ patch was part of a criminal case brought by the U.S. Carter rejected the verdict as an infringement on the club’s constitutional rights. A jury sided with the prosecution in 2019 and ordered the group to give up the emblem, but Judge David O. Attorney’s Office had earlier tried and failed to force the Mongols to forfeit their rights to the club’s trademarked logo, a drawing of a brawny Genghis Khan-like figure riding a chopper while brandishing a sword, a landmark case that prosecutors felt would help weaken the club by undermining its visual identity. In the case that led to the racketeering conviction against the Mongols, Mr. “He was the guy outside all the time providing cover support in case something went wrong with the undercovers.” Ciccone, he had mastered the craft of executing complex investigations “using everything from undercovers to informants to wiretaps to subpoenas and surveillance,” said Frank D’Alesio, a retired A.T.F. Santillan “instituted new policies, like no more club-driven drug business, and made it mandatory that members had to have a motorcycle and things like a valid driver’s license and registration and a job.”Īs for Mr. Air Force’s Air Command and Staff College. Santillan appeared to steer the organization away from its past recruitment of Mexican criminal gang members and a culture of “total underworld activity that the feds feasted on, in terms of prosecutions,” said William Dulaney, an expert on motorcycle groups who was formerly an associate professor of national security at the U.S. Santillan said to her.ĭuring the almost 13 years he led the Mongols, Mr. “He can’t protect me, he told me, so we have to have an exit strategy, he told me,” an apparently agitated Mr. Santillan was talking to her husband on speakerphone when he told her that Mr. ![]() If you’re a rat, you’re the scum of the earth,” he said in an interview. “Never in my life have I ever implicated anybody in the club for some kind of nefarious activity. He said they discussed matters such as public safety when the Mongols or other clubs were planning parties or motorcycle rallies to ensure that members stayed in line and that rival groups kept their distance. Ciccone for a period of years, usually in the presence of other Mongols members. Santillan has acknowledged that he talked often with Mr. “It became clear that Dave had betrayed the club, his oath and everything we hold sacred,” the club said in a statement. The current national leaders of the Mongols said they were convinced that the club’s former president, who controlled the Mongols’ defense team, had acted improperly. Santillan had revealed privileged defense information to the government while his motorcycle club was on trial. Both men also rejected the claim that Mr. Santillan had acted as a confidential informant in the past. Ciccone’s sworn declaration does not address whether Mr. Santillan was acting as an informant during the trial, though Mr. Santillan, a Mongols member for almost 25 years who was voted out of the club in July, and the agent, John Ciccone, who retired in December after 32 years at the A.T.F., deny that Mr. Santillan from serious legal consequences for several offenses since 2011.īoth Mr. In exchange, the club said in its motion, the agent appears to have spared Mr. Santillan, 52, covertly cooperated for years with a special agent from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. ![]() District Court in Santa Ana, Calif., claims that Mr. The Mongols are now claiming that throughout their attempt to defend the club in the long-running criminal case, their own leader was secretly talking to the government.Ī petition for a new trial and reversal of the half-million-dollar fine, which is scheduled for an initial hearing on Monday in the U.S. The club was ordered to pay a $500,000 fine in what prosecutors hoped would be a down payment on putting it out of business.īut the group that was once the most powerful biker organization in the West other than its archrivals, the Hells Angels, is returning to court next week, hoping to set aside the racketeering and conspiracy convictions based on what it says is new evidence about its previous leader, David Santillan. Prosecutors convinced a jury in California that these crimes were not just the result of individual bikers behaving badly, but the work of an organized criminal enterprise that had participated in a campaign of mayhem. In 2018, the government scored a victory of sorts. ![]() For more than two decades, federal law enforcement authorities pursued the Mongols, a notorious motorcycle club whose members had a long history of murder, assault, drug dealing and robbery. ![]()
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