Founded in Montebello in the 1970s, the Mongols are what the ATF has dubbed an “outlaw motorcycle gang.” Though their members claim they are little more than social clubs, authorities say the groups murder one another and deal drugs and guns.
The president of the notorious Mongols motorcycle club promised he’d put his infidelities behind him, get sober and be a better father to their children.“John told me already — I have one year,” Santillan said. “One year, he’s retiring ... and he can’t protect me. He told me. So we have to have an exit strategy.”
Now, here was evidence suggesting that their leader had a secret relationship with the agent who led the investigation.Attorneys for the group asked U.S. District Judge David O. Carter to set aside the jury’s verdict, which had sent no Mongols to prison but cost the club a $500,000 fine. As “a mole in the defense camp,” they claimed, Santillan had shaped the Mongols’ trial strategy in ways that helped prosecutors and passed inside knowledge of it to Ciccone.
A short, well-built man with tattoos that climbed above the neck of the collared shirt and blue suit he wore to court, Santillan, known as “Little Dave,” testified that he joined the Mongols in 1997. A year later, he was admitted to “Mother Chapter,” a governing body within the club. He said he has not mended relationships with his onetime biker brothers, about a dozen of whom sat stonily in the courtroom as Santillan testified. But he has reconciled with his wife; the two have set aside their divorce proceedings and are living together.When federal prosecutors finally managed to put mobster Al Capone behind bars, it wasn’t for murder or bootlegging, but tax evasion.
Much of the hearing hinged on Santillan’s drunken comment to his wife that “John” would no longer be able to “protect” him. The comments, Santillan said, stemmed from a day he went to an ATF building to pick up boxes of Mongols property that were being returned after the trial. He grilled Santillan about an email he’d sent in the lead-up to the trial, in which Santillan demanded that Yanny remove himself and Ciccone from the defense’s list of witnesses.
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