Revisiting The Hunger Strikes And The Agreement To End Hostilities
Why the Feds took aim at the Aryan Brotherhood.
Towards the end of the big Aryan Brotherhood RICO Trial in Sacramento, Ronnie Yandell’s defense team submitted a 13-page declaration from UC Irvine Social Ecology Professor Keramet Reiter. The declaration laid out the timeline of the hunger strikes, the Agreement to End Hostilities and the Ashker Settlement that ended indeterminate Security Housing Unit (SHU) terms.
Reiter’s official UC Irvine website bio describes her as follows:
Keramet Reiter studies prisons, prisoners’ rights, and the impact of prison and punishment policy on individuals, communities, and legal systems. She uses a variety of methods in her work — including interviewing, archival and legal analysis, and quantitative data analysis — in order to understand both the history and impact of criminal justice policies, from medical experimentation on prisoners and record clearing programs to gun control laws and the use of long-term solitary confinement in the United States and internationally.
The declaration is insightful in it helps explain the relationship between the State of California’s actions regarding its prison system and the Federal Government’s response.
Hunger Strikes
April 3, 2011, was the day that the “Final Notice: Pelican Bay State Prison SHU D-Corridor Hunger Strike” was issued. Three separate hunger strikes occurred between 2011 and 2013.
Celebrity inmate Todd Ashker told The Guardian (UK) in 2013 that the hunger strikes were inspired by Irish Republican Army icon Bobby Sands’ 66-day hunger strike in 1981 in Northern Ireland’s H Blocks. Ashker and cellmate Danny Troxell had also filed a pro se federal civil rights lawsuit against the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) over indeterminate SHU terms.
Some of the inmates actually refused to eat in protest; however, testimony from the RICO Trial revealed a lot were faking it. Former AB member and Government witness Travis “The Perjurer” Burhop—a burly man who was fat shamed while locked up in Eight West—testified he didn’t eat for the first two days and then hit his secret stash of food on Day 3.
(Side note: Judging by Burhop’s girth, one suspects he made it at most six hours without eating).
The hunger strikes were also politically timed. Governor Jerry Brown had taken office in January 2011 for his second go-around as governor. The four previous governors—Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gray Davis, Pete Wilson, and George Deukmejian—were traditional law and order types who favored capital punishment and denying parole to murderers. With Brown in office—he had appointed anti-death penalty hard-liner Rose Bird to the State Supreme Court during his first go-around as governor—the SHU inmates appeared to calculate his administration would be more receptive to their message.
And their calculation proved correct. Members of the State Legislature were pressuring Brown and CDCR to appease the inmates.
Agreement to End Hostilities
Eighteen months later, the Agreement to End Hostilities was issued on October 10, 2012. Signatories included Aryan Brotherhood members Todd Ashker, Danny Troxell, and Ronnie Yandell, Black Guerilla Family members, Mexican Mafia members, and Nuestra Familia members.
The Big Four prison gangs agreed to end conflict among each other. However, it didn’t cover internal conflict. And a secret provision exempted Black Guerilla Family member Hugo “Yogi” Pinell.
The Agreement to End Hostilities was hailed as a landmark truce between the Big Four. More than a decade later, it has largely held up. The big losers of the Agreement of the End of Hostilities were the Fresno Bulldogs, who continue to find themselves in never ending conflict with other groups because they were not signatories.
Ashker Settlement
The Ashker Settlement, which ended indeterminate SHU terms and directly resulted from the hunger strikes and Agreement to End Hostilities, was officially dated September 1, 2015. It’s hard to ignore the fact that it was reached three weeks after Hugo Pinell was stabbed to death at New Folsom. If one were a cynical person, one might think the Pinell killing sealed the deal, given that both the AB and CDCR despised Yogi.
In anticipation of the Ashker Settlement, CDCR began transferring prison gang members out of the Pelican Bay SHU in the first half of 2015. And that’s how Pinell landed at New Folsom B Facility despite CDCR being warned that he would have “security concerns” if placed there.
A reoccurring Government theme from both the 2019 RICO Indictment and the 2024 RICO Trial was that the hunger strikes, the Agreement to End Hostilities, and subsequent Ashker Settlement were all shams that allowed the heavy hitters slammed down in the SHU to get transferred to General Population yards where they had access to cell phones. It’s certainly hard to dispute that.
The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) investigation that began in 2015 into a Sacramento-area heroin dealer ultimately turned into the big Aryan Brotherhood RICO Indictment. Indeed, one of the big questions of the case is that if it was really a dope investigation, why would the DEA tap Ronnie Yandell’s cell phone? Wouldn’t it make more sense to tap Travis Burhop’s cell phone, since he was upstream of Yandell? It appears the Aryan Brotherhood was the DEA’s target and not their cartel connections.