On Friday, three members of the Aryan brotherhood were found guilty of racketeering in a trial which revealed that five murders in the streets of the County of Los Angeles were orchestrated from behind bars.
After having deliberated for three days, a federal jury in Fresno condemned Kenneth Johnson, 63, Francis Clement, 58 of life and death on white detainees in the Californian penitentiary system.
“They are the elite,” said Stephanie Stokman, an American assistant prosecutor, in his closing argument. “They govern on fear and power.”
In addition to the accusation of racketeering, Clement and Johnson were found guilty of having commanded the murders of Allan Roshanski and Ruslan Magomedgadzhiev, who were slaughtered in Lomita on October 4, 2020.
Johnson’s lawyer said she would call on the verdict but refused to comment more.
Clement was also convicted of having ordered the murders of Michael Brizendine, who was killed in Lancaster on February 22, 2022, and James Yagle Jr. and Ronnie Ennis Jr., who were killed in Pomona on March 8, 2022.
To explain how and why the five men died, the prosecutors called to the witness are a parade of murderers, thieves, crooks and artists from Shakedown, who testified in exchange for mercy in their own cases. They said that the victims had “disrespected” either the Aryan brotherhood or its rules.
According to these witnesses, Roshanski, a condemned pimp, had failed to cut Johnson and Clement on a racket of fraud. His friend Magomedgadzhiev was killed because he had accompanied Roshanski as a backup.
Brizendine was killed by James Field, who testified that he had shot in the head of his friend because he had botched a flight to Hollywood. Field also admitted to having killed Yagle and Ennis two weeks later. They had let two hostages escape an apartment in Bellflower, said Field.
The lawyers of the defendants, who denied being affiliated with the Aryan brotherhood, criticized the prosecutors for having concluded agreements with life criminals.
“These are people who have nothing to exchange in their lives but lies,” said Clement’s lawyer, Jane Fisher-Byrialsen, in her closing argument. “Lies are the only currency they know.”
The jury heard many testimonies on Johnson and Clement, but witnesses mainly offered occasion accounts of the role of Stinson in the gang.
“I sat down at the same trial as you, without hearing the name of John Stinson,” said his lawyer, Kenneth Reed, to the jury in his closing argument. “Not knowing why John Stinson is here.”
A witness testified that Stinson was seated at the “commission” of three men of the Aryan fraternity, which settled internal litigation and sanctioned murders. Pressed how he knew this, the witness replied: “It is not something that someone ever told me. It’s just implicit.
The prosecutors argued that Stinson’s position in the gang was so established that he could isolate himself from the crimes he set in motion. “When you have been in this gang for a long time,” said Stokman, “you don’t make your hands personally.”
The magnitude of Stinson’s crimes, as the prosecutors claims, discussed the murders of two Aryan members of the fraternity who were apparently not injured. He was also accused of having obtained fraudulent unemployment benefits when he was imprisoned.
An investigator of the California Department of Employment said that the State had paid $ 19,000 in Stinson, whose unemployment request declared that it had lost its job as a concierge assistant “during the Pandemic COVID-19.
After the verdict, Reed again questioned the credibility of the cooperators who testified against his client.
“It’s easy to say,” John Stinson told me to do this, John Stinson told me to do it “,” said the lawyer.
Stinson, Johnson and Clement should be sentenced on May 19.
California Daily Newspapers
