agingrebel.com
More so than any other year in the last decade, 2018 was the year of the rat.
A couple of cases, one state and one federal, related only by an obvious reliance on an evolving federal playbook, illustrate this. Both resulted in murder convictions. In one case, a retired Pagan named Ferdinand Augello was improbably convicted of the murder of a celebrity housewife named April Kauffman in 2010. In the other former Bandidos national officers Jeff Pike and John Portillo were convicted of the murder of a drug dealer named Anthony Benesh.
There was no physical evidence to connect any of the three men to the murders. The accusations were far-fetched. But separate juries convicted these men because prosecutors offered legal favors to a string a witnesses, including the probable actual murderers in both cases, to testify against the defendants.
Justice
Prosecutors in these cases clearly did not act in the interests of justice as most people understand “justice.” That raises the question of what the prosecutors were trying to accomplish. The obvious answer is that they were trying criminalize membership in outlaw motorcycle clubs because they think those clubs represent a threat to some emerging, officially approved idea, like the perfection of America through police enforced social control.
That’s not new. Police, with all the best intentions, have been framing people forever. But up until now that has always involved actually framing people: By falsifying evidence and by having policemen tell their carefully rehearsed lies on the stand. What is new is that prosecutors are negotiating secret deals with actual murderers in order to convict people who the prosecutors think are more dangerous than murderers.
The snitch business twists American criminal justice. The case of a woman named Ann Colomb and her three sons in Louisiana in 2006 is generally regarded as a bell buoy showing prosecutors what they can and cannot get away with. The Colombs were convicted of distributing crack. The evidence against them was the testimony of dozens of informants in a for-profit snitch ring. Prisoners bought and solde information about pending cases in order to offer it to prosecutors for reduced sentences.
The Kauffman and Benesh convictions go beyond that.
Benesh
Bemesh was an Austin drug dealer who was assassinated by a sniper in front of his family outside a pizza parlor on March 18, 2006. Before his murder he had taken to wearing an ersatz Hells Angels vest in order to intimidate his competitors. He was never actually a Hells Angel. Ralph Hubert “Sonny” Barger, who is as informed about the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club as anyone alive, testified to that at trial.
Benesh was most likely murdered by two drug dealers who were, coincidentally, members of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club. They were Johnny and Robert Romo. They admitted they killed Benesh. They probably killed Benesh for the same reason any drug dealer kills another drug dealer – money. The murder almost certainly had nothing to do with either Pike or Portillo. They probably learned about it after the fact, along with the rest of Texas.
But an unscrupulous federal prosecutor named Eric Fuchs told the jury “Benesh was attempting to start a Texas Chapter of the Hell’s Angels OMO in Austin, Texas in 2006. Members of the Bandidos OMO warned Benesh to cease his activities and recruitment, which Benesh ignored.”
The Romos corroborated Fuchs’ lie. They testified that they killed Benesh because he was a Hells Angel and Pike and Portillo told them to do it. The Romos were sentenced to 15 and 18 years in prison.
Their actual legal jeopardy was probably greater than that. There has never been an explanation of why they copped to murder. They can get their sentences reduced again if they continue to cooperate with prosecutors.
That is exactly what Johnny Romo promised to do at his sentencing hearing in October. “I will continue to cooperate with the government if they ever need an expert witness on an outlaw motorcycle gang,” he said.
In September, Portillo was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences, plus twenty years and Pike was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole plus ten years.
Kauffman
Augello was also convicted on the testimony of a confessed accessory to the murder of his alleged victim.
April Kauffman, a pretty, charitable and lovingly remembered doctor’s wife was murdered at the request of her drug dealing husband because the husband, Dr. James Kauffman, thought it would be cheaper to kill her than divorce her. He hired two drug addicts named Joseph and Frank Mulholland to do the job. Joseph was a Pagan and Augello knew everybody except Frank who was the actual trigger man. Frank got the gun from the doctor.
James Kauffman later killed himself. Frank Mulholland died of a drug overdose. There is some evidence that it was an intentional overdose and he got the heroin from Joseph Mulholland.
The case went cold for more than five years. Augello was implicated by another Pagan drug dealer named Andrew Glick. Glick had been caught with lots of drugs, lots of guns and lots of cash and was apparently charming enough to convince the FBI that Augello was a more important Pagan than he was.
Joseph Mulholland and Glick both testified against Augello in return for leniency. They told the jury that April Kauffman’s murder was Augello’s idea.
Glick doesn’t seem to be looking at any jail time at all. Mulholland will probably do less than five years. A parade of witness, all facing drug charges, testified that Augello was a bad character and small time drug dealer. One of those was his ex-wife Beverly Augello and those two had had a fairly rocky breakup.
There was absolutely no physical evidence against Augello. All the evidence of his guilt was anecdotal and offered by people who had good reasons to cooperate with prosecutors. On the advice of his attorney, Augello never testified in his own defense. Last month, a New Jersey judge sentenced him to life in prison plus 30 years.
