SOLEDAD — An alleged member of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang who admitted to conspiring to sneak drugs into Salinas Valley State Prison was sentenced Friday to 21 years and nine months, after pleading guilty to a federal offense, court records show.
Todd “Fox” Morgan, 54, admitted last year that he worked with others to sneak methamphetamine and heroin into the Soledad prison, where he and two of his co-defendants were housed. The September 2020 plan, which failed, involved directing the would-be smugglers to throw a package containing both drugs over the prison’s fence, for the conspirators to retrieve the following morning.
Morgan was charged in November 2020 as part of a massive investigation aimed at the Aryan Brotherhood and a predominantly white gang known as the Fresnecks. Though he was one of the lead defendants and facing serious charges, he was also among the first to plead guilty. The 262-month sentence was agreed up on by prosecutors and the defense, court records show.
In a sentencing memo, prosecutors called Morgan an Aryan Brotherhood member who gave the “green light” for a gang associate he’d sponsored, Kenneth Bash, to begin the smuggling plot. Using contraband prison cellphones, they discussed the smuggling plot, along with Marlon “P-Nut” Palmer, who was serving a life sentence at Salinas Valley for murdering a hydroponics store worker in 2014, a conviction Palmer is appealing.
On the night of Sept. 24, 2020, the would-be smuggler, Joseph McWilliams, allegedly attempted to throw a package of drugs over the prison’s walls, but got lost. The next day, authorities pulled over the suspected smugglers and found a pound of methamphetamine and four ounces of heroin, according to prosecutors.
Morgan was serving a prison term for burglary and robbery for allegedly attacking a security guard after breaking into Santa Clara University in 2000. In 2009, he was convicted of assault for attacking another inmate at Salinas Valley, and in 2014, the Californian, a Salinas-based newspaper, identified him as a suspect in an incident where four inmates attacked two others with knives, leaving one dead and one injured.
Charges against Bash, Palmer, McWilliams, and a host of other co-defendants in two federal indictments are still pending.
The cases are a result of Operation Lucky Charm, a Fresno-based federal and state operation that came 18 months after federal prosecutors in Sacramento charged nearly two dozen alleged Aryan Brotherhood members and associates with prison drug smuggling, murder, and other offenses. The Sacramento case has a trial date set for March 2023, and next month a judge is set to hear arguments over a key defense contention — that the Sacramento jail has utterly failed to preserve the defendants’ right to confidential meetings with their attorneys.
One of the co-defendants, Brant “Two Scoops” Daniel — who is accused of murdering a fellow inmate with a knife at the same Salinas Valley yard where Bash, Morgan, and Palmer were held — has also alleged that officials at California State Prison, Sacramento, have similarly invaded his right to private meetings with counsel. His evidence, in part, includes signed notes from prison staffers who said that they could hear his supposedly confidential attorney-client meetings.