Tag Archive | "motorcycle clubs"
Six Highwaymen Found Guilty
After a forty-five month long legal assault, the Department of Justice finally convicted six members of the Highwaymen Motorcycle Club in Detroit of racketeering. The convicted men are Aref “Steve” Nagi, Gary “Junior” Ball, Leonard “Dad” Moore, Joseph “Little Joe” Whiting, Anthony “Mad Anthony” Clark and Michael “Cocoa” Cicchetti. Cicchetti was at home when the [...]
Continue reading...RICO’s Greatest Hits
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
The great war of the legal briefs is still unfolding in the Pagans case in Charleston, West Virginia. It is boring so we will try to be brief. But it is important anyway because it is case about whether motorcycle clubs are inherently rackets or fundamentally something else. In particular, it is a case about [...]
Continue reading...The RICO Defense Laboratory
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
The Pagans Motorcycle Club case in Charleston, West Virginia has become a laboratory of ways to defend motorcycle clubs against racketeering prosecutions. A small, hard core of defense lawyers in the case have been fighting the fundamental assumption that underlies these cases: Which is, briefly stated, that police bureaucracies want motorcycle clubs portrayed as criminal [...]
Continue reading...Black Rain Report 430
Monday, March 22, 2010
A memorable example of how low federal police will limbo in order to portray motorcycle clubs as rackets is the great, multi-key, Las Vegas Mongols cocaine deal. One of the prosecutors in the Mongols case, Reema M. El-Amamy, has actually bragged that this entrapment was “street theater;” as if that very curious phrase explains anything. [...]
Continue reading...The Bandido Massacre
Monday, March 15, 2010
Men are saved by motorcycle clubs as they are saved by religion. Many men who have ridden with clubs will understand the comparison. For some men a patch is the first thing they have ever won in their lives and the experience of putting that symbol on their backs is transformative. Those who were weak [...]
Continue reading...Crime And Punishment
Thursday, March 11, 2010
A hard core of defense attorneys in the Pagans Motorcycle Club case in Charleston, West Virginia continues to attack the assumptions that support almost every motorcycle club RICO case. Maybe somebody at the ATF should call Assistant US Attorney Steven Ian Loew and tell him to just give up now before his stupid, inept, harebrained [...]
Continue reading...Mongols Trial Unlikely
Sunday, March 7, 2010
It is beginning to look unlikely that any of the defendants in the Mongols Motorcycle Club case will ever stand trial. The prosecution does not want the case to go to trial. The government has both secrets and promises to keep. A usually informed source has said that on at least one occasion, the government [...]
Continue reading...Sober Requiem
Sunday, February 14, 2010
A year ago, about 11 pm on February 17th 2009, two men named John Lindeman and Brad Lutzow died in the parking of lot of a QuikTrip gas station and convenience store near 19th and Peoria Avenues in Phoenix, Arizona. Lindeman and Lutzow were both members of a clean and sober motorcycle club named the [...]
Continue reading...Indicia Warrant From Hell
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Kevin O’Neill, a member of the American Outlaws Association currently confined to a cage, recently posted a nice piece on Indicia Search Warrants. If you have not yet read it yet you can find O’Neill’s essay at fedsgonebad.blogspot.com. Indicia (pronounced in-DISH-hee-uh) is a legal term that means “signs” or “indications” and it is the pretext [...]
Continue reading...Is The Whole Pagans Case Surplusage
Monday, January 25, 2010
Defense attorneys in the Pagans case last week began filing motions that challenge the prosecution’s basic argument: Which is that motorcycle clubs are criminal enterprises and the way to outlaw them is by using the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization (RICO) statute. Three defendants, Martin Nuss, Christopher T. Brunner and Daniel J. Reilly all sought to [...]
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Thursday, June 3, 2010
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