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SACRAMENTO — Donald “Popeye” Mazza knew relatively soon after being indicted on racketeering charges that he’d probably end up on a witness stand one day.
This week, the 53-year-old former skinhead gang leader made it official. Seated next to a federal judge, and dressed in a moss green jail jumpsuit, Mazza spent three days recounting his life of crime, his entrance into the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang, his incarceration in California’s toughest prison and the consequences of his decision to drop out and cooperate with federal prosecutors.
“I will be hunted the rest of my life by your client,” Mazza brusquely told an attorney representing one of the Aryan Brotherhood’s three commissioners, during cross-examination.
Mazza was one of the founding members of Public Enemy Number One, or PENI, a skinhead gang founded nearly 40 years ago in Orange County. In the early 2000s, he went to prison for attempted murder, assaulted a sex offender in the same Chino correctional facility where the Aryan Brotherhood formed its original commission decades ago and ended up housed in Pelican Bay’s segregated housing unit, designed to cut off high-ranking gang members’ contact with the outside world.
When Mazza joined the Aryan Brotherhood in 2007, it was seen by law enforcement as a power play for the PENI, turning its members essentially into foot soldiers for incarcerated leaders of the small-yet-powerful prison gang. But when Mazza paroled in the early 2010s, he did so with a new outlook on life, he said, in part because others in the Aryan Brotherhood encouraged him to never return to prison.
Mazza was baptized. He had a racist tattoo removed from his chest. He got involved in the private sector and made friends who were not involved in gang life. But he was well-aware the Aryan Brotherhood had “no retirement plan,” he said.
Caught between his lifelong commitment to the prison gang and his desire to leave that life behind, Mazza said he came up with a new plan. From now on, 90 percent would be dedicated to clean, sober, crime-free living. The other 10 percent is what ultimately landed him back in jail.
“This was something I actually strategized with my (civilian) friends,” Mazza testified, explaining that he hoped to appease Aryan Brotherhood members by sending them commissary funds through an intermediary.
That worked for a time. Then word came down from high up — Mazza needed to commit a murder. The target was one of his closest friends: a fellow Aryan Brotherhood member named Michael “Thumper” Trippe.
The kill order was certainly nothing to sneeze at, but Mazza was aware of an old saying within the Aryan Brotherhood, that if you haven’t been “in the hat” — slang for being marked for death by your own gang — at least once in your career, “you ain’t nobody.” In other words, he hoped he could help his friend get back into the gang’s good graces.
But Mazza knew the stakes. If he killed Trippe, he’d have to live with it for the rest of his life, and maybe go back to prison for life, he said. If he didn’t, he could be next on the chopping block. Desperate for some kind of third option, Mazza took a play out of the Sopranos handbook: He invited Trippe to discuss the matter over dinner at an Italian restaurant, told Trippe he had his back and gave him advice for how to talk his way out of the situation.
But others in Mazza’s gang circle — Samuel Keeton and the late Matthew “Cyco” Hall — were ramping up the pressure on him to complete the task. Eventually, Keeton told him he’d be getting a call from prison and that it would be unwise for him to keep avoiding it, he testified.
The call, Mazza testified, was from Ronald Dean Yandell, a West Contra Costa native who sat on the Aryan Brotherhood’s three-man commission. Their conversation was brief, but in it, Mazza agreed he would kill Trippe, though he now says he was telling a lie, he said on the stand.
“I did agree to it. I never intended to kill Trippe,” Mazza testified. “Agreeing to something and intention are different.”
But not in the eyes of the law. In 2019, it was that very phone call that gave federal prosecutors enough to loop Mazza into a sprawling racketeering indictment. It turned out that while investigating a Vallejo heroin ring, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent discovered one of the dealers was talking to Yandell on a contraband cellphone. That led to a 60-day wiretap, that ran from August to October of 2016, the very same time Mazza and Yandell had spoken.
Prosecutors charged Mazza with conspiracy to murder Trippe. But there was another significant event that look place in Mazza’s life in between the phone call and his eventual arrest.
In October 2016, he was summoned by his parole officer to a secret location in Southern California. Gang investigators were waiting for him. They told him the Aryan Brotherhood was now gunning for him, and the gang had even picked an assassin to do it.
Those events were probably fresh in Mazza’s mind when he entered the Sacramento County Jail with some of the very people he believed were likely behind the order to kill him. He tried to smooth things over with Danny Troxell, an Aryan Brotherhood commissioner who was married to an ex-girlfriend of Mazza, he testified, and talked to his other co-defendants as well.
One of them, William Sylvester, flatly told Mazza he’d had one of Mazza’s friends murdered in prison years earlier. The victim’s name was Devlin “Gazoo” Stringfellow, he testified. The admission soured Mazza to the gang even more.
“I gave the eulogy at (Stringfellow’s) funeral,” Mazza testified.
In 2022, Mazza signed a plea deal admitting to conspiracy to kill Trippe, who is still alive. He also made a deal with federal prosecutors, agreeing to “debrief” and tell them everything he knew, and to later take the stand for this trial.
“I’m not here just to say what the government wants me to say,” Mazza testified. “I’m here to tell the truth.”
The racketeering trial continues Monday and is expected to last months.
Originally published at Nate Gartrell