Mongols Motorcycle Club says that its leader was informant for federal agent
For more than two decades, federal law enforcement authorities pursued the Mongols, a notorious motorcycle club whose members had a long history of murder, assault, drug dealing and robbery.
In 2018, the government scored a victory of sorts. Prosecutors convinced a jury in California that these crimes were not just the result of individual bikers behaving badly but the work of an organized criminal enterprise that had participated in a campaign of mayhem. The club was ordered to pay a $500,000 fine in what prosecutors hoped would be a down payment on putting it out of business.
But the group that was once the most powerful biker organization in the West other than its archrivals, the Hells Angels, is returning to court this week, hoping to set aside the racketeering and conspiracy convictions based on what it says is new evidence about its previous leader, David Santillan. The Mongols are now claiming that throughout their attempt to defend the club in the long-running criminal case, their own leader was secretly talking to the government.
A petition for a new trial and reversal of the $500,000 fine, which is scheduled for an initial hearing today in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, claims that Santillan, 52, covertly cooperated for years with a special agent from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. In exchange, the club said in its motion, the agent appears to have spared Santillan from serious legal consequences for several offenses since 2011.
The unusual legal imbroglio provides a rare glimpse into the hidden and volatile politics of the outlaw motorcycle club and the degree to which law enforcement and its targets may engage in limited cooperation when it is seen as mutually beneficial.
The ATF and other law enforcement agencies have long gone after biker organizations by co-opting members as informants and infiltrating the groups with their own undercover agents.
The Mongols are relying on an explosive video shared by Santillan's wife, Annie Santillan, who, during a stretch when she was angry with her husband over his infidelity, had her daughter record a conversation in which he appeared to refer to protection he had received from the ATF agent.
She also said in a text message to other Mongols, now filed with the court, that her husband had acted for a time as a confidential government informant. “In other words,” she wrote, “he is a rat.”
David Santillan, a Mongols member for almost 25 years who was voted out of the club in July, and the agent, John Ciccone, who retired in December after 32 years at the ATF, deny that Santillan was acting as an informant during the trial, although Ciccone's sworn declaration does not address whether Santillan had acted as a confidential informant in the past. Both men also rejected the claim that Santillan had revealed privileged defense information to the government while his motorcycle club was on trial.