SOLEDAD — An alleged member of the Aryan Brotherhood jail gang who admitted to conspiring to sneak medication into Salinas Valley State Jail was sentenced Friday to 21 years and 9 months, after pleading responsible to a federal offense, court docket information present.
Todd “Fox” Morgan, 54, admitted final yr that he labored with others to sneak methamphetamine and heroin into the Soledad jail, the place he and two of his co-defendants have been housed. The September 2020 plan, which failed, concerned directing the would-be smugglers to throw a package deal containing each medication over the jail’s fence, for the conspirators to retrieve the next morning.
Morgan was charged in November 2020 as a part of an enormous investigation aimed on the Aryan Brotherhood and a predominantly white gang often known as the Fresnecks. Although he was one of many lead defendants and dealing with critical fees, he was additionally among the many first to plead responsible. The 262-month sentence was agreed up on by prosecutors and the protection, court docket information present.
In a sentencing memo, prosecutors known as Morgan an Aryan Brotherhood member who gave the “inexperienced mild” for a gang affiliate he’d sponsored, Kenneth Bash, to start the smuggling plot. Utilizing contraband jail cellphones, they mentioned the smuggling plot, together with Marlon “P-Nut” Palmer, who was serving a life sentence at Salinas Valley for murdering a hydroponics retailer employee in 2014, a conviction Palmer is interesting.
On the evening of Sept. 24, 2020, the would-be smuggler, Joseph McWilliams, allegedly tried to throw a package deal of medicine over the jail’s partitions, however received misplaced. The subsequent day, authorities pulled over the suspected smugglers and located a pound of methamphetamine and 4 ounces of heroin, in accordance with prosecutors.
Morgan was serving a jail time period for housebreaking and theft for allegedly attacking a safety guard after breaking into Santa Clara College in 2000. In 2009, he was convicted of assault for attacking one other inmate at Salinas Valley, and in 2014, the Californian, a Salinas-based newspaper, recognized him as a suspect in an incident the place 4 inmates attacked two others with knives, leaving one lifeless and one injured.
Prices towards Bash, Palmer, McWilliams, and a number of different co-defendants in two federal indictments are nonetheless pending.
The circumstances are a results of Operation Fortunate Appeal, a Fresno-based federal and state operation that got here 18 months after federal prosecutors in Sacramento charged almost two dozen alleged Aryan Brotherhood members and associates with jail drug smuggling, homicide, and different offenses. The Sacramento case has a trial date set for March 2023, and subsequent month a choose is about to listen to arguments over a key protection competition — that the Sacramento jail has completely didn't protect the defendants’ proper to confidential conferences with their attorneys.
One of many co-defendants, Brant “Two Scoops” Daniel — who's accused of murdering a fellow inmate with a knife on the similar Salinas Valley yard the place Bash, Morgan, and Palmer have been held — has additionally alleged that officers at California State Jail, Sacramento, have equally invaded his proper to non-public conferences with counsel. His proof, partly, contains signed notes from jail staffers who stated that they might hear his supposedly confidential attorney-client conferences.