Aryan Brotherhood on trial: Prison gang leaders ordered 5 L.A. County murders, feds say
- Prosecutors say they have traced seven homicides — two behind bars, five on the streets of Los Angeles County — to three alleged leaders of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang.
- The case has been cloaked in secrecy, but at a trial beginning Wednesday, prosecutors are expected to reveal how murders were plotted from behind prison walls.
They died inside and out of prison, stabbed beneath the sweltering Central Valley sun and gunned down on darkened streets in Pomona, Lomita and Lancaster.
One was a pimp, another an extortionist with ties to Israeli organized crime. Two victims were members of a white supremacist gang. An imprisoned robber was killed by his cellmate. Another man was found dead in a stolen truck.
What they had in common, authorities say, was that they’d run afoul of three reputed members of the Aryan Brotherhood.
Kenneth Johnson, Francis Clement and John Stinson will stand trial beginning Wednesday on charges of racketeering and murder. The defendants have pleaded not guilty and denied being affiliated with the Aryan Brotherhood, a gang formed nearly 60 years ago by white inmates at San Quentin.
Using contraband cellphones and women that he called his ‘wives,’ a California prisoner oversaw a sprawling drug ring that spread death and addiction to the most remote corners of Alaska, prosecutors say.
Prosecutors say they have traced seven homicides — two behind bars, five on the streets of Los Angeles County — to Johnson, Clement and Stinson. The case has been cloaked in secrecy. Prosecutors have not even publicly named the victims; The Times identified them through public records and law enforcement sources.
The defendants are state prisoners already serving life sentences. Each followed a strange and twisting path to the Fresno courtroom where the government will at last reveal its account of how murders were plotted from behind prison walls.
Defendants from a ‘homicidal society’
Johnson, 63, has been serving a life sentence since 1996 for attempting to murder a Madera County sheriff’s deputy.
Nicknamed “Kenwood,” Johnson was born in Covina and raised in San Jose, according to parole records. He served 14 months in a boys ranch for burglary, escaping twice, prison records show.
As an adult, Johnson was imprisoned for robbery, assault and possessing guns as a felon. Released in 1994, Johnson had been out of custody for four months when a Madera County deputy responded to a report of a suspicious man armed with a knife, according to testimony at Johnson’s parole hearings.
Johnson fired four shots at the deputy, who wasn’t hit. The deputy shot back, striking Johnson in the arm.
Sentenced to a life term, Johnson was sent to Pelican Bay, the maximum-security prison in Northern California where all of the state’s alleged prison gang leaders were then being held.
Samuel Villalba became a member of the Mexican Mafia in the 1980s. Police found him shot to death in a homeless camp in 2021 and recently arrested one suspected gunman.
At parole hearings, Johnson denied belonging to the Aryan Brotherhood and attributed his disciplinary record — which included stabbings and rioting — to the “homicidal society” behind prison walls.
“Violence is part of the environment, like it or not,” Johnson said. “And even if you don’t want to be involved in it, it’ll find you one way or another.”
***
Clement, 58, has been locked up since committing a murder on his 18th birthday.
A native of Springfield, Ore., Clement was headed to Las Vegas to celebrate when he checked into a Sacramento motel with a friend and two teenage girls, according to testimony at his parole hearings.
After spending an evening drinking Jack Daniels and swimming in the motel’s pool, Clement returned to their room and found his friend raping one of the girls, he said at a parole hearing. Clement took out a pocket knife and cut his friend’s throat.
Convicted of second-degree murder, Clement was sent to the state prison in Vacaville, where he and two other inmates trussed a suspected informant to his bed before Clement cut out part of his tongue.
Prison authorities alleged Clement joined the Aryan Brotherhood in 1995, which he denied.
“I’m no part of no gang,” Clement told the parole board, “and I don’t plan on ever being part of no gang.”
***
Stinson, 70, is something of an enigma, according to law enforcement officials.
Quieter and more guarded than Johnson and Clement, Stinson stepped down from the Aryan Brotherhood’s three-man ruling “commission” after a federal jury in Los Angeles convicted him of murder and racketeering in 2007, a witness testified at a recent trial.
Ralph Rocha made secret tapes documenting his tenure as an informant. Were they an insurance policy? A way to blow off steam? An early stab at a screenplay?
Stinson had already been serving a life sentence for murdering a drug dealer in 1979. According to testimony at parole hearings for his co-defendant, Stinson and Daniel “Cuate” Grajeda forced their way into the Long Beach home of Alfredo Armijo.
Grajeda, a reputed member of the Mexican Mafia, fired a gun in the air and told Armijo, “Give up the dope.”
The intruders led Armijo and his girlfriend at gunpoint to a house across the street where they thought the heroin was stashed, a commissioner said at Grajeda’s parole hearing. Armijo and his girlfriend were kneeling in the street when Grajeda warned that the police were coming.
“Should I shoot him?” Stinson asked, holding a .357 magnum to Armijo’s head, according to testimony at the parole hearing.
Grajeda said nothing. Stinson squeezed the trigger.
Both Grajeda and Stinson were convicted of murder. Grajeda was sentenced to 29 years to life. Stinson got life without parole.
In prison, Stinson ascended to the Aryan Brotherhood’s “commission,” which had the last word on inducting new members and killing existing ones, according to testimony at his racketeering trial.
John Harper, a former member of the gang, testified that Stinson’s power went unspoken.
“We know who is calling the shots,” he said. “You know who that man is.”
Victims in L.A. County and behind bars
Allan Roshanski and Ruslan Magomedgadzhiev were found shot to death in Lomita on Oct. 4, 2020.
Roshanski, 36, had been released from the California prison system in 2018 after serving a year for pimping women in Hollywood. In exchange for 20-30% of their earnings, Roshanski advertised the women’s services on Backpage, negotiated rates with customers and booked hotel rooms for “dates,” prosecutors wrote in court papers.
Magomedgadzhiev, 40, was born in Chechnya and immigrated to Los Angeles in 2001, according to a letter he wrote to a judge. Seven years later, an Israeli organized crime figure in Tarzana turned to Magomedgadzhiev for help resolving a dispute with a Las Vegas businessman who owned kiosks that sold cosmetics in shopping malls.
Magomedgadzhiev and his brother assaulted the businessman, who pulled a gun and shot Magomedgadzhiev in the buttocks. Magomedgadzhiev pleaded guilty to traveling across state lines in aid of racketeering and spent two years in federal prison.
Justin “Sidetrack” Gray is charged with shooting Roshanski and Magomedgadzhiev on the orders of Johnson and Clement. All three have pleaded not guilty.
Gray was overheard by an informant saying he’d been promised membership in the Aryan Brotherhood after he “got those two Russian guys,” a detective wrote in a search warrant affidavit.
***
James Yagle Jr. and Ronnie Ennis Jr. were gunned down in Pomona the night of March 8, 2022.
Both were members of a white supremacist gang called Public Enemy Number 1, or PEN1, according to a search warrant affidavit.
Their alleged killers — Brandon “Bam Bam” Bannick and Evan “Soldier” Perkins — were also PEN1 members, a detective wrote in the affidavit. Clement is charged with ordering the murders.
Perkins has pleaded not guilty. Bannick last week pleaded guilty to two counts of murder in connection with the homicides of Yagle, Ennis, Roshanki and Magomedgadzhiev.
***
When Michael Brizendine didn’t come home the night of Feb. 22, 2022, his girlfriend tracked his phone to a house in Lancaster, a coroner’s report says.
A stolen Dodge Ram 1500 was parked in the driveway. The driver’s side rear window was shattered. Brizendine lay slumped behind the wheel, shot in the head, according to the coroner’s report.
Brizendine had recently been released from prison after serving six years for assaulting a police officer.
Two months after Brizendine was killed, Los Angeles County prosecutors charged James “Suspect” Field with his murder. They dropped the charges after Field, 34, was indicted in the Fresno case, accused of killing Brizendine on Clement’s orders.
***
Brandon Lowrey was six years into a 10-year sentence for robbery and selling drugs when he was killed by his cellmate at Kern Valley State Prison.
Authorities described the plot to kill Lowrey in prison disciplinary records. Johnson, Clement and a third alleged Aryan Brotherhood member, David Chance, had drawn up a list of all white inmates with drug debts at Kern Valley, an informant told prison officials.
Lowrey, who owed nearly $1,000, was “red-flagged,” meaning no inmates could sell him drugs until he settled his debts, the informant said. Lowrey flouted the order, buying more drugs instead of paying off what he already owed.
Eduardo Escobedo, a convicted drug trafficker affiliated with the Sinaloa cartel, was killed last Thanksgiving in Los Angeles. Now his son is running the family’s restaurant business and learning about his father’s hidden life working with the infamous El Chapo.
Thrasher Holmeyer, a convicted murderer from San Bernardino, volunteered to kill Lowrey, the informant said.
“Watch the news,” he said, according to the source. “I’m going to handle this business right.”
Holmeyer became Lowrey’s cellmate on Jan. 10, 2016, according to prison records. Guards found Lowrey dead in their cell two weeks later.
***
Out of a job and needing money to repay his father for a car loan, Robert Hargrave held up an adult book store in Rubidoux in 1991.
He shot the 23-year-old clerk eight times and stole the cash register, which contained $140, the Riverside Press-Enterprise reported. Convicted of first-degree murder, Hargrave was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole.
He died on the exercise yard at Kern Valley on April 30, 2020, stabbed to death, prosecutors allege, by two inmates acting on orders from Stinson.
According to prosecutors, Hargrave had attacked Andrew “Misfit” Collins, a prisoner with whom Stinson was operating a lucrative scheme to defraud California’s Employment Development Department during the COVID-19 pandemic.
After Hargrave’s death, Collins allegedly boasted: “We dropped that motherf—.”
Sign up for Essential California
The most important California stories and recommendations in your inbox every morning.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
