The Mongol Nation forfeiture verdict last week, in which a dozen ordinary men and women in suburban Los Angeles, were convinced by a pair of scalawag prosecutors to forbid members of the Mongols Motorcycle Club from wearing what they want to wear, was far from the final word on the subject. Given the technical complexity […]
January 16, 2019
Abel Reyna, the former McLennan County District Attorney who is most famous for locking up 177 people and throwing away the key because he didn’t like the symbols that decorated their clothing, has reinvented himself as white collar defense lawyer. Reyna was at the center of a dispute over whether certain symbols are a priori […]
January 15, 2019
Kinfolk Motorcycle Club member Javier Gonzalez began trial this morning in the 34th Judicial District Court in El Paso for the murder of Bandido Motorcycle Club chapter president Juan “Compa” Martinez Jr. in the summer of 2017. After a Kinfolk member named Manuel Gallegos got into a fight on July 30, 2017 with Martinez and […]
January 14, 2019
Pittsburgh Public Radio station WESA is reporting that the city’s police bureau “does not have a written policy governing undercover officers who might drink while on the job.” The radio station had filed a “right to know” request with the city after four, drunk, undercover detectives pepper sprayed, Tased and beat four Pagans Motorcycle Club […]
January 11, 2019
Late this morning, a jury in Orange County, California voted to repeal the First Amendment and strip the Mongols Motorcycle Club and various other identifiers of membership including the club’s name. The jury verdict also repudiated the frequently cited arguments that all crime is personal and that there is no guilt by association. There have […]
January 10, 2019
Joseph Yanny, the attorney for Mongol Nation, filed a 35-page “Motion for a Judgment of Acquittal in the Guilt Phase” late this afternoon in the federal racketeering case United States versus Mongol Nation: An Unincorporated Association. The case was filed in 2013 and is directly descended from another RICO case titled United States versus Cavazos […]
January 10, 2019
The Tampa Bay Times is reporting that “While motorcycle clubs are far from their heyday, they’re still around in the Tampa Bay area. Many may not realize it, but motorcycle gangs actually have a long and dark history in Tampa Bay that includes everything from from prostitution and murders to a shootout with deputies at […]
January 8, 2019
Mongol Nation probably lost the forfeiture phase of its RICO case today. The trial has been going on since Halloween. Everybody lost, just by having to be there. The jury looked like they were there because they violated their parole and this time they weren’t afraid of the guards. I hit the road at 6:30 […]
January 7, 2019
You you can finally preorder the future of motorcycling. It is called the Harley-Davidson LiveWire. This morning at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Harley also put two prototypes on display: The HD Electric Concept 1 (dirt bike) and HD Electric Concept 2 (scooter). Harley claims the LiveWire will accelerate from zero to […]
January 5, 2019
The widely misreported, entirely ridiculous Mongol Nation trial resumes Tuesday in a federal court in Santa Ana, California. On December 13, after listening to Assistant United States Attorneys Steven Reuben Welk and Christopher Michael Brunwin and a parade of prosecution witnesses bloviate, exaggerate and lie for five weeks; and after listening to a parade of […]
January 2, 2019
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 […]
December 18, 2018
Seventy-seven days after retired Pagan Ferdinand “Freddy” Augello was convicted of murdering April Kauffman and 13 days after an Atlantic County, New Jersey judge named Bernard DeLury told Augello to stay locked up until he turned to dust, the prosecutor’s office in neighboring Cape May County has opened an investigation into the death of Francis […]
December 18, 2018
The United States versus Mongol Nation case has quickly devolved into a kind of thought experiment for lawyers. Over the last couple of weeks many distinguished trademark attorneys who have never gotten around to reading the indictment have weighed in on the subject and they have all missed the point. The importance of the case […]
January 16, 2019
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