Biker gang members face federal charges
Federal prosecutors said they smashed the structure of one of the country’s most ruthless criminal organizations with a racketeering indictment against 23 members of the Vagos Outlaw Motorcycle Gang, who were arrested Friday in Nevada, Hawaii and California.
The 12-count indictment, unsealed in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas, accuses the bikers of a laundry list of violent crimes committed over the past 12 years. It includes the 2011 murder of a rival Hells Angel gang member at the Sparks Nugget Hotel & Casino — a crime described Friday as part of a broader criminal conspiracy that involved a coordinated cover-up and threats of retaliation against gang members who cooperated with law enforcement.
“Today, the rule of law dealt a serious blow to the Vagos Outlaw Motorcycle Gang, a socalled ‘brotherhood’ responsible for drug addiction, death and mayhem in multiple locations, including California, Arizona, Hawaii, Oregon and Nevada,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Blanco.
Vagos, the Spanish term for “lazy,” is a reference to a vagabond. According to the indictment, the biker gang was formed in San Bernardino, California, in the mid-1960s
VAGOS
so they tried him for murder.
Randolph ultimately was acquitted, but he pleaded guilty to tampering with a witness for offering an undercover cop a car title and cash to kill Eric Tarantino, the star witness in the Utah case.
Tarantino told authorities about a year after Gault’s death that Randolph had asked him to kill her. After Tarantino refused, he warned Gault and fled town.
Defense attorneys said Randolph was angry because he knew Tarantino had slept with Gault.
The lyrics to the tune Randolph would hum end with the words: “It was all a very nasty dream.”
But prosecutors said Randolph had the same motive to kill in 2008. He would receive upward of $360,000 after Clausse’s death. A week before she died, Randolph received a letter responding to an inquiry he made about his wife’s life insurance policy.
Bluth pointed to “two stories of two men 20 years apart who never even met each other, yet their stories are the exact same … Their friendship and their job was to kill two women, the wives of Thomas Randolph. And the only reason Mike Miller is dead is because Eric Tarantino lived to tell the story, and Thomas Randolph was not going to make that mistake again.”
Deputy Special Public Defender Randall Pike told jurors that Randolph knew nothing of Miller’s home invasion or plan to kill Clausse. Randolph’s marriage was steady, money wasn’t a problem and the couple talked of buying property in Utah, while fixing up their northwest Las Vegas home before the killings. Randolph married Clausse in 2006, and the couple renewed their vows a year later.
“Things were going good, but they weren’t going good for Mr. Miller,” Pike said. “They had started moving toward the marriage they hoped this was going to be.”
A man who finds wife his shot dead has a “right, an obligation” to make sure the threat is gone, Pike said.
Prosecutors plan to tell jurors two of Randolph’s other wives are dead from apparent illness. Should he be convicted of first-degree murder in the 2008 killings, his two living ex-wives are expected to testify at a penalty phase that he threatened to kill them.
Contact David Ferrara at dferrara@ reviewjournal.com or 702-380-1039. Follow @randompoker on Twitter.