SACRAMENTO — In a spirited Wednesday court hearing, a commissioner of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang defiantly called the case against him an act of political retaliation and predicted the courts have not seen the last of him.
“I’m still standing, and my life hasn’t changed,” Ronald Dean Yandell said before he and co-defendant William Sylvester were formally sentenced to multiple life terms Wednesday morning. “I ain’t easy to kill, and I’ll be back before this court on appeal.”
For Yandell — a man who spent decades behind bars and climbed the ranks of the Aryan Brotherhood in federal and state prison — Wednesday’s hearing marks the end of a racketeering prosecution that has spanned more than five years. What remains to be seen is whether he will actually be transferred to a federal facility, or remain in the state prison system, where he’s lived since receiving murder and manslaughter convictions in Contra Costa 20 years ago.
Yandell, Sylvester and co-defendant Danny Troxell were convicted of racketeering and murder plots last April, under a government theory that Troxell and Yandell were two of the all-white prison gang’s three commissioners and that Sylvester was a high-ranking member who ordered murders and carried them out.
Federal prosecutors didn’t speak much during Wednesday’s hearing, but they didn’t have to. Both Sylvester and Yandell’s convictions carry mandatory life terms, and the defense didn’t ask for anything less.
The racketeering case was filed in 2019 with the stated goal of moving some of the most violent and influential gangsters in California out of the state prison system, and into the restrictive housing units at the federally-run Bureau of Prisons. Thus far, despite six convictions against incarcerated Aryan Brotherhood members involving murders, drug smuggling, and criminal conspiracies, all of them remain in state prison with no clear timetable of when — if ever — they’ll be transferred.
One of Yandell’s co-defendant’s, Brant Daniel, is even attempting to vacate his guilty plea for a stabbing death in prison, precisely because he expected to go to federal prison and still hasn’t. Daniel pleaded guilty a year ago to fatally stabbing another inmate on a Salinas Valley State Prison yard and told the judge he wanted to go to federal prison and wouldn’t contest it, yet the BOP has not accepted him.
During trial, jurors heard hours of wiretapped calls involving Yandell and co-defendants discussing prison murders and drug smuggling over contraband cellphones. In one, Yandell discussed two most effective ways to kill someone with a prison shank — simply stabbing them in the heart, or to get to the victim’s brain stem through his eye.
When Yandell’s lawyers asked Senior U.S. District Judge Kimberly Mueller when they might expect their client to end up in federal prison, she laughed and simply said, “separation of powers,” meaning she can’t force the federal prison system to accept anyone. When asked by the judge if he wished to provide any clarity to this issue, U.S. Attorney Jason Hitt said he did not.
To Yandell, the entire case was the result of his decision to lead a prisoner hunger strike in the early 2010s, aimed at combating California’s use of solitary confinement in the so-called short corridor security housing unit, or SHU of Pelican Bay State Prison, a maximum security facility near the state’s northern border. The hunger strike — and corresponding intra-gang peace treaty and related litigation — did eventually succeed in the state prisons scaling back the use of solitary under a now-defunct settlement agreement.
“The (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation) and others conspired to suppress the truth,” Yandell said in court Wednesday. “We were targeted the moment we left the SHU.”
Yandell said the peace treaty “saved countless lives across the state” and that the government responded by working to “create division among prisoners, including my co-defendants.” He cited an email by Drug Enforcement Administration Special Agent Brian Nehring — the case agent on this prosecution — which referenced Yandell’s participation in the hunger strike and said “I want to crush (Yandell) so bad my teeth hurt.” Mueller denied a defense motion attempting to overturn Yandell’s convictions over the email.
Most of Yandell’s adult life has been spent behind bars. A native of West Contra Costa, he did a stint in federal prison on the East Coast for possessing methamphetamine precursors, and spent time in the federal prison’s most secure facility in Colorado before being released back to the Bay Area.
Just weeks after his release from prison, in 2001, Yandell was arrested for a double homicide in El Sobrante, and convicted of murder and manslaughter three years later. That ultimately earned him a state prison sentence of 65 years to life, much of which was spent in the Pelican Bay SHU.
More recently, prison officials have accused Yandell of pulling a knife on two guards during a transport for a doctor’s appointment. Yandell said he plans to sue a corrections officer who his attorney said picked up a handcuffed Yandell and “pile-drived him” into the ground, breaking his vertebrae and ripping out part of his jaw.
“Eleven years in solitary confinement, retaliation by prison guards, has produced the man who sits before your honor,” Yandell’s lawyer, Steven Kalar, said.