Three members of the Aryan Brotherhood were found guilty of racketeering Friday in a trial that revealed five murders on the streets of Los Angeles County were orchestrated from behind bars.
After deliberating for three days, a federal jury in Fresno convicted Kenneth Johnson, 63, Francis Clement, 58, and John Stinson, 70. During the month-long trial, witnesses for the prosecution testified that the defendants — already serving life sentences — held the power of life and death over white inmates in the California prison system.
“They are the elite,” Stephanie Stokman, an assistant U.S. attorney, said in her closing argument. “They rule on fear and power.”
In addition to the racketeering charge, Clement and Johnson were found guilty of ordering the murders of Allan Roshanski and Ruslan Magomedgadzhiev, who were shot to death in Lomita on Oct. 4, 2020.
Clement was also convicted of ordering the murders of Michael Brizendine, who was killed in Lancaster on Feb. 22, 2022, and James Yagle Jr. and Ronnie Ennis Jr., who were gunned down in Pomona on March 8, 2022.
To explain how and why the five men died, prosecutors called to the witness stand a parade of admitted murderers, thieves, scammers and shakedown artists, who testified in exchange for leniency in their own cases. They said the victims had either “disrespected” the Aryan Brotherhood or its rules.
According to those witnesses, Roshanski, a convicted pimp, had failed to cut in Johnson and Clement on a fraud racket. His friend Magomedgadzhiev was killed because he’d accompanied Roshanski as backup.
Brizendine was killed by James Field, who testified he fired a bullet into his friend’s head because he’d botched a robbery in Hollywood. Field also admitted killing Yagle and Ennis two weeks later. They had let two hostages escape from a Bellflower apartment, Field testified.
Attorneys for the defendants, who have denied being affiliated with the Aryan Brotherhood, criticized prosecutors for making deals with lifelong criminals.
“These are people who have nothing to trade in their lives but lies,” Clement’s lawyer, Jane Fisher-Byrialsen, said in her closing argument. “Lies are the only currency they know.”
The jury heard ample testimony about Johnson and Clement, but witnesses offered mostly secondhand accounts of Stinson’s role in the gang.
“I sat through the same trial you did, not hearing John Stinson’s name,” his attorney, Kenneth Reed, told the jury in his closing argument. “Not knowing why John Stinson’s here.”
One witness testified that Stinson sat on the Aryan Brotherhood’s three-man “commission,” which settled internal disputes and sanctioned murders. Pressed on how he knew this, the witness answered: “It’s not something somebody ever said to me. It’s just implied.”
Prosecutors argued Stinson’s position in the gang was so established that he could insulate himself from crimes he set in motion. “When you’ve been in this gang this long,” Stokman said, “you’re not getting your hands personally dirty.”
The extent of Stinson’s crimes, as alleged by prosecutors, was discussing the murders of two Aryan Brotherhood members who apparently were not harmed. He was also accused of obtaining fraudulent unemployment benefits while incarcerated.
An investigator for California’s Employment Development Department testified the state paid out $19,000 to Stinson, whose unemployment claim stated he lost his job as a “janitorial assistant” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
After the verdict, Reed again called into question 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 that,’” the attorney said.
Stinson, Johnson and Clement are scheduled to be sentenced May 19.
