OFF THE WIRE
agingrebel.com
The good news for the Mongols in the club’s racketeering case titled USA v. Mongols Nation, an Unincorporated Association
is that a judge has been appointed to decide a proposed reassignment of
the case to a judge Mongols’ attorney Joseph Yanny thinks may be more
impartial. The bad news is that the judge who will decide that issue is
90-year-old U.S. District Judge Manuel L. Real.
Real has had a reputation as one of the nation’s most controversial
and ill tempered federal judges for decades. He was appointed by Lyndon
B. Johnson in 1966. Real was chief judge of the Central District of
California from 1982 to 1993. He has been effectively censured eleven
times. In 2006, his 50th year on the bench, House Judiciary Committee
Chairman Jim Sensenbrenner tried to have Real impeached. Eventually,
Sensenbrenner gave up.
Judge Charming
Los Angeles attorneys, speaking anonymously, tell stories about
Real’s reprehensible conduct in open court. One pointed anecdote
concerns the time Real expelled a Sikh from his court for wearing a
turban. As a tenet of their faith, Sikh men must not cut their hair and
must wear a turban. According to a source, Real told the Sikh, “Get that
towel off your head or get out. I don’t let Jews in here with yamakas
and I’m not going to let you wear a towel on your head.”
In recent years Real was formally censured by the Ninth Circuit Court
of Appeals in 2006 and was formally criticized by the Ninth Circuit in
2009.
In August 2009, the Los Angeles Times ran a 1700 word feature titled “Critics want to bench Judge Manuel L. Real.” The Times
characterized Real as “an active judge with a full caseload, stirring
fresh complaints of imperious behavior as well as a high number of
reversals by appellate courts.”
Mongols Nation
USA v. Mongols Nation is a racketeering case that is essentially a recapitulation of 2008’s US v. Cavazos et al.
The government’s primary goal is to strip the Mongols Motorcycle Club
of its name and insignia – a stylized rendering of a medieval Mongol
warrior in bell bottom jeans, sunglasses and boots seated on a rigid
framed motorcycle and brandishing a scimitar.
Last week Yanny, who is the second attorney to represent the Mongols
in this case, moved to disqualify Judge Otis D. Wright II from presiding
over the case. In his motion Yanny wrote, “Mongols Nation Motorcycle
Club, LLC respectfully submits that comments, which have been
memorialized in the public record, unquestionably display Judge Wright’s
bias against the sole defendant in this case, the Mongols Nation
Motorcycle Club, which bias was formed before properly receiving one
shred of evidence in this case, regarding this defendant, as a
consequence of Judge Wright’s prior exposure to the charges, proceedings
and the voluntary guilty pleas of forty separate criminal defendants in
a previous matter over which he presided, entitled US v. Cavazos.”
