SACRAMENTO — Donald “Popeye” Mazza, the co-founder and onetime leader of a Southern California skinhead gang known as Public Enemy Number One, or PEN1, has pleaded guilty to federal racketeering and conspiracy charges, court records show.
Mazza, 51, admitted to conspiring with members of the Aryan Brotherhood and PEN1 to murder a man named Michael “Thumper” Trippe, a fellow gang member whose murder prosecutors contend was ordered by a high-ranking prison gang member. Trippe was never killed, and later wrote a declaration in favor of Mazza’s release from pretrial detention.
As part of the agreement, Mazza signed a document written by the U.S. Attorney’s office that says he agreed to kill Trippe because he was afraid of being murdered by the Aryan Brotherhood, and names several alleged Aryan Brotherhood members as co-conspirators. Prosecutors have agreed to seek a “low end” sentence in exchange for the guilty plea, though the maximum possible sentence is life in federal prison.
On Wednesday morning, Mazza entered guilty pleas to charges of conspiracy to murder Trippe, as well as a general racketeering charge that alleges he is a member of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang. Mazza’s current whereabouts are unknown; he was being held in the Sacramento County jail until September 2021, when he disappeared from the jail’s register, along with another co-defendant, Travis Burhop. Prosecutors have refused to say why or where both men were transferred.
Mazza was indicted in 2019 along with 15 alleged members and associates of the Aryan Brotherhood, including two people suspected of being commissioners for the gang. The leading defendants are set to go on trial in March 2023. So far, only Mazza and one other man have taken plea deals.
Authorities describe Mazza as a notorious Orange County gangster with personal knowledge of dozens of murders. He served time in state prison for the attempted murder of a fellow PEN1 member. He was housed at the Pelican Bay Prison segregated housing unit at the time a solitary confinement module was being used to incarcerate those deemed the most dangerous prisoners in the state.
In his plea agreement, Mazza acknowledged becoming an Aryan Brotherhood member in 2009, when he was incarcerated at Pelican Bay, and names five other co-defendants as Aryan Brotherhood members.
In 2017, the American Defamation League described Mazza as the gang’s most notable leader, who used his status as an Aryan Brotherhood member to bolster PEN1’s credibility and influence in the state prison system.
In 2019, prosecutors charged that Mazza was ordered to murder Trippe by Ronald Dean Yandell, an alleged Aryan Brotherhood commissioner who is the lead defendant in the case. Yandell has countered that the charges against him are a bogus concoction to retaliate for his role in setting up a peace treaty among different racial groups in prison and his participation in a hunger strike that drastically scaled back the prison system’s ability to keep people in solitary confinement.
Prosecutors allege Yandell sought Mazza to kill Trippe after another Aryan Brotherhood member failed to murder him, and used a contraband cellphone to order the killing. Yandell — now represented by three defense attorneys after ending his bid to represent himself — has filed court papers calling the DEA’s wiretap of his cellphone illegal. A judge has yet to make a final ruling on that motion.
Trippe was targeted based on a belief he’d been an informant for law enforcement and that he’d spent money meant for the gang, according to prosecutors.
The third alleged co-conspirator in the Trippe murder plot was Matthew “Cyco” Hall, a former MMA fighter and PEN1 member who reportedly died by suicide after being arrested in Costa Rica in August 2019. Hall was wanted in connection with an Orange County robbery that turned fatal in addition to the pending racketeering charges. He was also the subject of a drug trafficking investigation in Southern California.
Mazza’s plea agreement says that he agreed to murder Trippe despite not wanting to, because he feared the consequences of failing to carry out the order.
“Although Mazza was friends with Trippe and did not want to carry out the murder, Mazza understood that, if he did not carry out the order, he would eventually be targeted by the enterprise for murder because he had not carried out his responsibility as a member of the enterprise,” the plea agreement says. “Thus, in order to maintain his position in the enterprise and avoid the repercussions for not killing Trippe, Mazza agreed to arrange the murder of Trippe.”
In an October 2016 intercepted jail call, Yandell allegedly told a co-defendant, Samuel Keeton, that Mazza might himself be targeted for murder for failing to carry out directives for the Aryan Brotherhood, according to the plea agreement. Keeton is the only other defendant to plead guilty thus far, and is still awaiting sentencing.
After Mazza’s arrest in 2019, he made several failed attempts to get out of jail; his attorneys wrote in one bid that he was a changed man who had found religion and left his gang life behind. The petition included a declaration by Trippe saying he didn’t believe the murder conspiracy charge against him, as well as testimonials from retired Orange County law enforcement officials who vouched for Mazza.
In opposing the release, prosecutors revealed that during the investigation, authorities staked out a concert by the “hardcore straight-edge punk rock group” Dead Friends, of which Mazza was a lead singer. U.S. Attorney Jason Hitt described Mazza as “a leader and a celebrity in the community of white supremacist gangs” whose concerts became gathering places for skinhead gang members.
Another of PEN1’s co-founders, Devlin “Gazoo” Stringfellow, 48, was stabbed to death on a Sacramento State Prison yard in 2018.
Mazza’s sentencing has been set for September 12 at 9 a.m., before U.S. District Judge Kimberly Mueller.
Source: www.mercurynews.com