SACRAMENTO — Brant “Two Scoops” Daniel spent years fighting his racketeering case until last December, when he pleaded guilty to murdering a man in a Soledad prison yard.
Now his only wish is to leave the state prison yards he’s known for most of his adult life and go behind federal bars.
The 50-year-old Aryan Brotherhood prison gang member has been bugging the government to make good on its 2019 promise to transfer him to federal prison, where prosecutors say he and his fellow gang members can be isolated from the California prison yards where they wield enormous power.
Daniel was one of seven Aryan Brotherhood members already serving life in federal prison to be charged with murder in aid of racketeering for the notorious prison gang. Of the other six, one became a federal informant, while five others either pleaded guilty to murder or were convicted at trial. But thus far, none of them have actually spent a day in federal prison, despite three of the men receiving life sentences, and three others scheduled to receive life in coming weeks.
Unlike his co-defendants, Daniel has said he actually wants to go to federal prison, if for no other reason to escape the “corruption” he says is rampant in the state prison system where he has spent nearly his entire adult life. He expected to be transferred within days of pleading guilty last December, but since that hasn’t happened he’s filing court paperwork to get out of his guilty plea and force the federal government to convict him at trial.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Hitt responded to Daniel’s motion at a Tuesday court hearing, urging a judge to keep Daniel’s plea intact and revealing that the 2019 prosecution was initiated because the U.S. Department of Justice hoped to transfer Daniel and his co-defendants to ADX Florence, a “Supermax” prison in Colorado.
When prosecutors announced the charges against the group back in 2019, they made it clear at a news conference that the goal of the operation was to transfer influential Aryan Brotherhood members far away from the state prison system, where they’d been able to acquire contraband phones, run drug operations and order murders.
Two things needed to happen to get Daniel to federal prison: the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation needed to give up primary jurisdiction of him and the federal Bureau of Prisons needed to agree to take him in.
Only one of those things has occurred, Hitt said.
“(California) has given it up … the Bureau of Prisons has not accepted it,” Hitt said, but he added that the BOP could change course at any time.
Daniel’s lawyer and the federal government have agreed to do nothing until about a week before President-elect Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day. By then, Daniel’s co-defendants, Ronald Yandell, William Sylvester and Danny Troxell, will probably have all received life terms as well. Motions by Yandell and Sylvester to overturn their guilty verdicts were denied by a federal judge this month and they’re set to be sentenced on Nov. 19, records show.
Two others, Pat Brady and Jason Corbett, have also been sentenced to life, but like Daniel, have yet to be transferred.
Further complicating matters is a pending prison transfer within the CDCR system. Daniel says he has been told he is being sent to a protective housing unit in Corcoran prison against his will. Years ago, Daniel said in an interview, his defense team was warned by a corrections officer that guards at the prison had it in for Daniel and would kill him if he was transferred there.
The whistleblower, Kevin Steele, died by suicide amid an ongoing corruption probe. Another whistleblower died of a suspected fentanyl overdose around the same time.
That matter has added to Daniel’s desire to leave the CDCR system. For now, he remains in a single-cell isolation unit in California State Prison, Sacramento, where he’ll remain until at least January, unless the federal prison transfer comes through.