Saturday, October 28, 2017

The Vegas Vagos Case

OFF THE WIRE
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.