How the Aryan Brotherhood used O.C. punk rockers to grow beyond prison walls

Two men lay in a dark street in Pomona.

The gunshot wounds made clear how they died. Their tattoos offered clues about how they lived: Swastikas. Lightning bolts. Iron crosses. The words “Blood and Honor” and “Death Squad.”

The slain men were part of a white supremacist gang called Public Enemy Number 1, or PEN1. Prosecutors say they were killed in 2022 by members of their own crew, acting on orders from the Aryan Brotherhood, a syndicate with vast influence over white inmates in California prisons.

Founded 60 years ago at San Quentin, the Aryan Brotherhood has in recent years sought to evolve beyond a prison gang to take over rackets on the street, where PEN1 has served as its front line, according to testimony and court records reviewed by The Times.

Members of PEN1 have been convicted of robbing, extorting and killing for the Aryan Brotherhood, who are seen as the “superheroes” of the white criminal subculture, a longtime PEN1 member testified.

A group of no more than 35 men, the Aryan Brotherhood’s leaders were held for decades in solitary confinement at Pelican Bay, the maximum-security penitentiary near the Oregon border. Despite the state’s best efforts to isolate them, the gang’s leaders maintained control through coded letters and whispers passed from prisoner to prisoner.

But a decade ago, an inmate-led lawsuit forced California to end its policy of holding alleged gang members in solitary confinement. The Aryan Brotherhood saw an opportunity, according to law enforcement authorities and former gang members.

As the Aryan Brotherhood tried to seize control of a shadowy underworld of skinhead groups, outlaw motorcycle clubs, drug peddlers and fraud artists, a band of neo-Nazi punk rockers from Orange County was at the forefront of its plans.

The birth of Public Enemy Number 1

Dominic Rizzo and Donald Mazza were the “oddballs” of a school in Anaheim that was the last stop for dropouts and kids who’d been expelled elsewhere. They ran with a circle of skateboarders, surfers and punk rockers who in 1982 decided to give themselves a name, Rizzo told The Times.

They were hanging out in a garage when a British band called Rudimentary Peni came up. They liked the group’s dark lyrics and the intricate pen and ink drawings by its singer. Brainstorming for an acronym, someone said it could stand for “Punking Every N— in Sight.”

Others pointed out that this spelled “PENIS,” Rizzo said, so they settled on Public Enemy Number 1.

Around this time, Black families were moving out of Los Angeles and into a county that at times greeted them with hate. A former Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon founded a group called White Aryan Resistance, or WAR, that advocated for whites to live separately from other races. Anaheim was still sometimes called “Klanaheim.”

Rizzo said he and his friends were more interested in selling drugs, stealing cars and going to punk shows than campaigning for a white ethno-state.

“We were just gangsters,” he said.

At the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles, the Doll Hut in Anaheim and the Cuckoo’s Nest in Costa Mesa, they battled SHARPs — “Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice” — who derided them as “Needle Nazis” for using drugs, Rizzo recalled.

Some early PEN1 members were the sons of outlaw bikers and meth cooks, Rizzo said, but he and Mazza were “upper middle class, at least.” Rizzo’s father, a real estate investor, served on the board of a Boys and Girls Club, played in charity golf tournaments and was named Man of the Year by the local Rotary Club, Rizzo said. Mazza’s father was vice president of Hyundai’s North American operations.

As they went in and of prison through the 1990s, Rizzo and Mazza learned about the Aryan Brotherhood. They respected its power even if they didn’t aspire to join.

“That’s not our style, the big mustaches,” Rizzo said.

But when a brutal crime threatened to put them away for life, the two friends ended up on a collision course with the Aryan Brotherhood that would change their gang forever.

One stabbing leads to another

It began hours after Mazza got out of prison in 1999. Stranded at a bus stop, he called Rizzo, who picked him up with a friend and handed him a white Russian cocktail in a Big Gulp cup, Mazza testified in 2024 at a racketeering trial in Sacramento.

Mazza testified they said a man who ran with a white gang called L.A. Death Squad had impregnated their friend’s 16-year-old daughter. They decided to pay him a visit.

In Little Saigon, they bought a knife with brass knuckles for a handle. Then they drove to a trailer park in the city of Stanton where their target was holed up.

Mazza knocked on the trailer door and called out, “It’s me, Popeye.”

The victim opened up.

“I stabbed him a bunch of times,” Mazza testified.

Charged with attempted murder, Mazza and Rizzo wound up at California Institute for Men in Chino, where the Aryan Brotherhood — also known as “The Brand” — was fending off a revolt by the Nazi Low Riders.

The once-subservient gang had splintered into a rogue faction calling itself FTB, short for “F— the Brand,” Mazza testified. Some of Mazza’s childhood friends had joined the Nazi Low Riders. He saw a chance to prove his gang’s worth to the Aryan Brotherhood. “I don’t think until this time they really even knew who we were,” he said.

The Nazi Low Riders were held in a different cellblock for their own safety. Mazza sweet-talked them through the prison’s air vents. Convinced it was safe to return to general population, the dissidents were promptly stabbed, he testified.

Rizzo and Mazza were on track to be “made,” or inducted into the Aryan Brotherhood, whose leaders recognized that the PEN1 founders had influence among the next generation of white convicts.

“Me and Popeye were the new stars,” Rizzo recalled.

Rizzo said the Aryan Brotherhood tasked him with killing a guard. He had a knife in his hand, ready to stab the first one he saw, when “the best cop on the tier” came around the corner, he said. The man often asked about Rizzo’s children.

Rizzo recalled thinking: “If I do this murder, it’s over. [The Aryan Brotherhood] are going to use me up. So I said, ‘F— it. I’m growing up. I’m not a gang member anymore.’”

Federal prosecutors say Kenneth Johnson, shown in a 2018 photograph, is a member of the Aryan Brotherhood.

(California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation)

He dropped out of PEN1 and remains in prison, serving 25 years to life for attempted murder. Mazza took a plea deal to serve 15 years for the same crime and was shipped off to Pelican Bay — the headquarters of the Aryan Brotherhood.

Unlike Chino, an old-fashioned cellblock where “everyone is yelling and loud and raucous,” Pelican Bay was dead quiet, Mazza testified. Inmates were let out of their cells for just an hour a day to exercise alone in a windowless concrete pen.

One day, a guard unlocked his door and led him to a cell down the hall. It was occupied by Kenneth Johnson, a reputed Aryan Brotherhood member serving a life sentence for trying to murder a sheriff’s deputy.

The guard, who was friendly with Johnson, let the prisoners talk quietly through the grate of the cell door for 30 minutes, Mazza testified.

Years later, Johnson would have big plans for PEN1.

‘260 pounds of your worst nightmare’

Mazza was released from Pelican Bay in 2013. He’d felt pride when he’d been inducted into the Aryan Brotherhood six years earlier. Now, at 43, he was “in a weird way, growing out of it,” he recalled.

Mazza started a successful telemarketing and door-to-door sales business in Orange County, he testified. He sang in a punk band called Dead Friends 46. He was baptized as Christian in 2014.

“I had a good life,” he testified.

But he couldn’t leave the Aryan Brotherhood. Instead, Mazza followed what he called his “90-10 rule.”

“I was 90% a citizen, 10% a brother. So I would essentially live my life 90% of the time like a normal person, and then I’d dip my toe back in when necessary,” he said.

He maintained the balancing act until 2015, when a class-action lawsuit forced the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to transfer prisoners from Pelican Bay to general population yards. With access to smuggled cellphones, prisoners “bombarded” Mazza with calls, he testified. “Suddenly, everything I was building was kind of falling apart.”

Around this time a wrecking ball of a man nicknamed Cyco was paroled from state prison.

Matt “Cyco” Hall, shown in a 2011 photograph, was a member of PEN1 who aspired to join the Aryan Brotherhood.

(California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation)

Six feet 3 inches tall, Matt Hall once described himself in a wiretapped call as “260 pounds of your worst nightmare.” He pledged allegiance to a Nazi flag and wore a black bomber jacket embroidered with swastikas and the words “Cyco PEN1 Death Squad.”

A South Bay native, Hall was a surfer, martial artist, break-dancer and fashion model, according to footage filmed by a Hollywood producer who contracted Hall as an advisor for a movie about prison gangs.

The videos were stored on a USB drive that Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies seized from Hall’s apartment in 2016.

People interviewed by the producer described Hall’s personality as magnetic. He attracted followers “like a moth in the light,” one said. “He’s the light and the moths came around.”

“If you could bottle Matt Hall’s energy and sell it,” said another, “you’d be a zillionaire.”

A six-year prison stint for assault changed him, according to people interviewed by the producer.

Hall became, in his own words, a “white power, neo-Nazi, national socialist” dedicated to “holding up all the laws that the great Aryan Brotherhood laid down so no good white man would become a victim.”

Hall swore to never go back to prison, threatening in the video to kill any police officer who tried to arrest him. “The hunters are now the f—ing hunted,” he said, brandishing a gun.

Mazza had mixed feelings about Hall, whom he met in prison in 2007.

“There is a side of him that had a big heart,” he testified. But there was also his “Cyco personality” for whom “life was a TV show,” Mazza said.

Hall was working for Johnson, the Aryan Brotherhood member whom Mazza had met a decade earlier at Pelican Bay.

According to prosecutors, Johnson wanted Hall to collect a debt from a drug dealer. The mission would end in disaster and prompt an investigation that revealed how deeply crime and hate were interwoven in Orange County.

‘I will be hunted for the rest of my life’

Daniel “Shakey” Richardson was getting desperate. He’d started “shorting” customers — selling them diluted drugs — and was trying to hock his iPad for cash.

“I have no $ and no dope,” he wrote in a text message to an associate.

Richardson owed Johnson $2,500, according to text messages filed in court. After a PEN1 member, William “Buss” Shoop, tried to intervene on Richardson’s behalf, he got a menacing text.

“Just so you are crystal clear on this, that 2500 fine that was imposed on that dude is AB business, and not you or any other person can undo it or anything else,” Johnson wrote, according to prosecutors. “Cyco will take charge of how to handle it and no one else, got it?”

Daniel Richardson died in a botched robbery at the Akua Motor Inn in Anaheim.

(Orange County Superior Court)

Richardson plotted with Shoop to rob a drug dealer in order to pay off Johnson, prosecutors say. Their target, a small-time pusher named Bryan Goldstein, showed up to the Akua Motor Inn expecting to buy $800 worth of heroin.

When Goldstein knocked on the door of Room 215 the evening of July 13, 2016, Shoop let him in and closed the door behind him. “Dude turns around, puts a gun in my face,” Goldstein told Anaheim detectives, according to a tape of his interview.

When Goldstein refused to empty his pockets, Shoop pistol-whipped him, he told detectives. Goldstein rushed Shoop and was struggling for the gun when someone fired a shot near his head, he said. He ran out the door, ears ringing and blood dripping down his face.

Anaheim police found Shoop holding Richardson, who had died in his arms from a shot in the chest.

On Shoop’s phone, detectives saw the text messages from Johnson. Already imprisoned, the Aryan Brotherhood leader was convicted of extortion and given another life term. Shoop was sentenced to 23 years for conspiracy, attempted robbery and possessing a gun as a felon.

The investigation uncovered links between PEN1 and hate groups, court records show. Deputies searched the home of Shoop’s associate, a member of the Orange County Skins, finding fliers that called for “gay bashing” and mass deportations.

When deputies raided Hall’s apartment, they found Nazi flags and books written by David Lane, a member of a white supremacist group called The Order, whose story was recently turned into a Hollywood film starring Jude Law. In the 1980s, Lane and his associates robbed banks and armored cars in the Pacific Northwest to fund a campaign against their perceived enemies, including a Jewish radio host who was assassinated in Colorado.

William Shoop tattooed himself with “One Eighty Six Point Twenty-Two,” the California penal code for a gang enhancement.

(Orange County Superior Court)

Mazza was at Hall’s apartment the morning the SWAT team showed up. Hall, who had promised to shoot any officer who dared to arrest him, surrendered without a fight, Mazza testified.

A judge dismissed Hall’s case for lack of evidence. Released from jail, he fled a federal racketeering warrant and vanished.

Arrested a year later in Costa Rica, Hall was found hanged in a jail cell on Sept. 28, 2019, according to a death certificate. Authorities ruled it a suicide.

Mazza was arrested that same year. The inmates who had “bombarded” him with calls after getting out of Pelican Bay had been using phones that were tapped by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Charged with racketeering, Mazza was held in a Sacramento jail with William Sylvester, an Aryan Brotherhood member who was accused of ordering several murders — including the killing of Mazza’s close friend.

An early member of PEN1, Devlin Stringfellow was stabbed to death at California State Prison, Sacramento, on Jan. 10, 2018. Federal prosecutors said he had been accused of pocketing money owed to the Aryan Brotherhood.

According to Mazza, Sylvester explained how a prisoner knocked Stringfellow unconscious with a rock before a second inmate drove a knife through his eye socket. He didn’t seem to notice the effect of what he was saying on Mazza, who had delivered the eulogy at Stringfellow’s funeral.

“He thought it was cool,” Mazza said.

Mazza decided to defect. In exchange for a guilty plea and his testimony, Mazza was sentenced to 90 days in addition to the five years he’d already spent in jail. He was released in 2024 and is believed to be living under witness protection. His attorney didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Because he turned on the Aryan Brotherhood, Mazza testified, “I will be hunted for the rest of my life.”

A new generation kills for the Aryan Brotherhood

By 2020, PEN1’s founders were gone, dead or had dropped out, but a new generation would bring the gang even closer to the Aryan Brotherhood.

Before he joined PEN1, Brandon “Bam Bam” Bannick whiled away his days surfing and skateboarding while living on a boat docked off Redondo Beach.

“Bam was, in one word, lost,” said Det. Louie Aguilera of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, who investigated Bannick’s role in a double homicide. “I don’t think he had a mind of his own.”

Testifying this year at a racketeering trial in Fresno, Bannick said Hall, whom he considered an “older brother,” brought him into PEN1 in 2019. Before fleeing to Costa Rica, Hall had introduced him to Johnson and another Aryan Brotherhood member, Francis Clement.

On Clement’s orders, Bannick testified, he kidnapped two men: a gangster called “Shifty,” who wasn’t kicking up a cut from his drug sales, and an Aryan Brotherhood member who’d fallen out of favor with the syndicate.

Tortured for four days in a Bellflower apartment, the hostages got hold of a gun and escaped amid a shootout, Bannick testified. According to Bannick, Clement blamed two PEN1 members, James “Jimbo” Yagle and Ronnie Ennis, who were supposed to be guarding the men. The pair had also taken two duffel bags from the hostages that Clement said belonged to the Aryan Brotherhood, Bannick testified.

James Yagle, shown in an undated photograph, was killed in Pomona on March 8, 2022.

(California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation)

Ronnie Ennis, shown in a 2012 photograph, was killed in Pomona on March 8, 2022.

(California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation)

On March 8, 2022, Bannick rounded up a crew — two other PEN1 members and an ex-con from San Diego, James “Suspect” Field — to get the bags from Yagle’s house in Lakewood.

Clement wanted them to kill Yagle and Ennis at the house, Field testified at the racketeering trial in Fresno, but Yagle’s children and girlfriend were there. Over Signal, an encrypted messaging app, Clement told Field to take the men to Pomona.

“Find a dark quiet place now,” Clement wrote to Field, according to Signal messages shown in court.

Field testified he lulled Yagle into thinking he’d be spared if he killed his friend Ennis. “I’ll do Jim first,” he wrote to Clement.

They stopped on a stretch of road with no streetlights. Field handed Yagle a gun.

But as Yagle got out of the car, Field shot him in the chest.

Ennis ran. Bannick testified that another PEN1 member, Evan “Soldier” Perkins, shot Ennis until his gun jammed. Bannick then fired three more shots into Ennis, who writhed in the dirt, screaming, he testified.

Later that night, Bannick said, he took the guns to Redondo Beach and threw them off the break wall into the sea.

Clement was convicted of ordering the killings of Yagle and Ennis. Perkins has pleaded not guilty; no trial date has been set. Bannick and Field both admitted killing Yagle and Ennis, among other crimes. In exchange for their cooperation, they testified they hope to one day be allowed to leave prison.

Bannick said his decision wasn’t just based on self-preservation. After spending two years in jail with members of the Aryan Brotherhood, he said he came to a realization: “I’m not anything like these guys.”