agingrebel.com
Buried in a footnote, at the bottom of
the third page of the United States’ eight page “Response to Motion to
Reopen” a detention hearing for Vagos Motorcycle Club president Pastor
Fausto “Ta Ta” Palafox, is a clue to why the case is being adjudicated
in Vegas. The response was filed last June 29. The note reads:
“In August 2010, Homeland Security
Investigation (HSI) in Riverside, California began a TIII wiretap
investigation targeting the Vagos involving numerous telephones over a
nine-month period. Telephones by Defendants Palafox, Lozano, Siemer,
Juarez, and others, were intercepted.”
The footnote elaborates the government’s
assertion that “The evidence against Palafox includes but is not
limited to witness testimony, Title III intercepts,1 and video
surveillance.”
Hello Officer
Palafox wasn’t the only guy whose phone
was tapped. Two million conversations involving 44,000 people were
authorized by a single Riverside County, California judge named Helios
Hernandez. Federal investigators usually prefer to have state courts
authorize wiretaps because the local judges are less worried about
Constitutional technicalities. Federal judges usually view wiretaps as a
last resort. The wiretaps authorized by Hernandez remain mostly sealed
and the ones pertinent to the Vagos case have not yet been shown to
defense attorneys.
The indictment of 23 Vagos was returned
by a grand jury on September 6, 2016 but the indictment remained sealed
and nobody was arrested until June 16, 2017. The weak and surplusage
filled indictment illustrates the power of prosecutors to punish people
they don’t like by simply accusing them of being criminals.
Conspiracy To Murder
For example, Palafox is accused of
ordering the murder of Jeffrey Pettigrew, president of the Hells Angels
Motorcycle Club’s San Jose charter, who died in a brawl between the two
clubs in John Ascuaga’s Nugget Casino in Sparks, Nevada on September 23,
2011. The accusation was made in a state trial in Reno by an ex-Vago
named Gary “Jabbers” Rudnick. Rudnick was the fellow who actually
started the fight that led to Pettigrew’s death. He was expelled from
the Vagos the next day.
In a signed statement recanting his
testimony, Rudnick later wrote:“There was no conspiracy” to kill
Pettigrew. “It was just a fight between me and him.” Rudnick wrote that
state prosecutor Karl Hall fabricated the conspiracy and offered Rudnick
a lighter sentence for his perjury. “He told me … what he wanted me to
change to lie for him,” Rudnick wrote. “I was looking at 25 years in
prison.”
Answer Is
Many of the accusations in the
indictment are based on investigative reports made by a Los Angeles
County Sheriff and sometime Tactical Field Officer for the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives named Augustino Brancato. In
an associated case that was folded into the current indictment, Brancato
was caught on tape plotting to lie about a defendant.
After Brad Heath and Brett Kelman of USA Today
broke the news about the massive wiretapping expedition in Riverside
County in 2015, federal prosecutors in Los Angeles, where most of the
accused Vagos live, told federal investigators they would no longer
prosecute cases based largely on wiretaps authorized by state court
judges.
And that is why the Vagos case is being prosecuted in Las Vegas.
