California, the land of fruits and nuts.
Where criminal trials are theater and the players become larger than life in some cases. One such case, you might recall, was that of San Francisco attorneys Robert Noel and Marjorie Knoller.
Those two fine examples of humanity were convicted of crimes related to the death by mauling of Diane Whipple in a hallway of the apartment building where Whipple, Noel and Knoller lived a couple of years ago. Two Presa Canario dogs, being cared for by Noel and Knoller, killed Whipple in a frenzied attack.
What was lost, in some part, during the trial to the national audience were some of the more salient facts. The media focused on the wierdness of Noel and Knoller, on the allegations of bestiality and their strange relationships. The dogs were owned by a fellow named Paul Schneider and his "room mate" Dale Betchess. Mr. Schneider was a client of attorney's Noel and Knoller. The animals were being trained to be fighting or guard dogs and the female was eventually to be bred to produce dogs that could be sold. One particularly unsavory potential customer for the dogs were members of the Mexican Mafia gang. The two honorable counselors apparently thought so much of Mr. Schneider that they adopted him as their son, in very convenient fashion shortly after the attack on Whipple..
Mr. Schneider, who also goes by the name of "Cornfed" was at the time, and still is, in the care and custody of the California Department of Corrections. He has long been housed, along with his "room mate" at Pelican Bay State Prison, the toughest institution in the system. Mr. Schneider is serving life plus 11 years for armed robbery and the attempted murders of a correctional officer and his previous attorney.
Mr. Schneider is also a rather big wheel in the Aryan Brotherhood, an extremely violent prison gang with many interests outside the correctional system; selling drugs, extortion, robbery and murder. A number of them, Mr. Schneider included, have reportedly ordered hits on the Director of the Department of Correcitons and other staff members and have sued to get the systems policy of segregating gang members in prison populations.
As the investigation into Diane Whipple's death unfolded, detectives learned that one of the ways Mr. Schneider wanted to make money to help further Aryan Brotherhood business was through the Presa Canario dogs. Noel and Knoller, his attorneys at the time, were apparently helping to facilitate that scheme, among other "favors" they rendered Mr. Schneider.
On March 29, 1995, Sonoma County Sheriff's Deputy Frank V. Trejo was murdered. Trejo had approached a car late in the night in the parking lot of a bar west of Santa Rosa, not more than fifteen miles from my home. He found a man and a woman in the car... the man had a shotgun. Robert Scully, a known member of the Aryan Brotherhood paroled from Pelican Bay just three days before, got the drop on the lawman and robbed him of his gunbelt and walkie talkie before putting him on his knees and blowing the back of his head off with the shotgun. It was learned during the investigation that Scully and his girlfriend were preparing to rob the bar and its patrons when Deputy Trejo contacted them. Scully was arrested later that day after a standoff with police. He was convicted and sentenced to death.
Fast forward a few weeks later to the quiet city of Sonoma. A career bank robber and Aryan Brotherhood member calmly walked up behind an armored car guard in front of the Bank of America just off the town plaza.... the plaza where the Bear Flag Revolt that caused California to be created had originated. This career criminal shot the guard in the back of the head, killing him instantly, without warning. He then grabbed a couple of big money bags from the open truck and walked to his getaway car, which was parked at the curb and driven by a female accomplice. His mistake was turning his back on the armored car, because the murdered guard's partner shot the bad guy dead as he got into the getaway ride.
Later investigation revealed that this robbery was staged to obtain money to use in the cause of breaking another Aryan Brotherhood bigwig out of the Sacramento County jail.
Fast forward to today... I was leafing through the on line edition of the local fishwrapper; better known as the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, an NYT newspaper, and happened across a story that caught my eye. It seems that Paul "Cornfed" Schneider is back in the news. As I read the story, and relived the anxious days of early 1995, I gained a new perspective of what a joke our prison system is.
Mr. Schneider, who is still serving life plus 11 at Pelican Bay, appearred in United States District Court in San Francsico today. He was there to enter a guilty plea to RICO charges stemming from his activities as a leader of the Aryan Brotherhood.
With his plea, Mr. Schneider conceded that Deputy Frank Trejo was shot and killed as a result of Schneider’s orders to to raise money by committing robberies. Presumably, the abortive robbery in Sonoma which resulted in two deaths was part of the larger scheme. Certainly, the killing of Diane Whipple by Mr. Schneider's dogs, which were ostensibly to be bred and future dogs sold to outfits such as the Mexican Mafia, was a sad and pointless sidebar of the larger criminal enterprise.
The amazing thing... every one of the schemes that Cornfed Schneider copped out to was being run from within the walls of the toughest and highest security prison in the state. Pelican Bay is California's answer to Alcatraz. Located on a remote stretch of coast just south of the Oregon border, it houses the worst of the worst. Prison gang leaders are segregated there. Inmates who assault staff or other inmates repeatedly are sent there. All the rottenest of the rotten eggs are in one cold, concrete and concertina wire wrapped basket.
And yet, some of them can construct and run sophisticated criminal enterprises, with a little help from their friends, on the outside. The tangled web of sex, deceit and death that enveloped Noel and Knoller is but one example. Pelican Bay inmates can obtain narcotics, sex and just about all the comforts of home if they choose. They can and do order killings both inside and outside the prison system. While we strive to rehabilitate, those who can't be reformed we try to punish but then we can't be too harsh, can we? Those convicts have rights, you know.
Its not right, too many innocents have died because of the likes of Cornfed Schneider, his Aryan Brotherhood homeys and fellow travellers like Robert Noel and Marjorie Knoller. It cries out for action and yet I doubt that most of you who will read this had much of an idea that any of this sort of thing goes on all the time.
And not just in California's prisons.........
