District Attorney Jason Anderson believes his office has been “pushed to extremity” on a “puffed up” case members of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department pursued in an ultimately futile stab at aggrandizement and “cheap publicity” involving one of their colleagues, an 18-year veteran of the department, who has been demonized over his connection with the Mongols outlaw motorcycle club. The district attorney’s office last year was cozened into elevating that personalized demonization of Deputy Christopher Bingham into no fewer than 13 felony charges against him.  Just short of nine months after Bingham’s arrest, there has been little prosecutorial movement beyond what has now proven out to be a problematic showing of evidence in the defendant’s preliminary hearing in the weeks following his arrest, Anderson is now reported to be resentful at being inveigled into a dead-end case and growing impatient over the inability to find a graceful and face-saving exodus from the situation.
Bingham enlisted in the U.S. Marines at the age of 19 in 1998, serving with distinction as a rifleman during two separate overseas assignment. He was honorably discharged after four years of service in 2002. He did not migrate much further than Twentynine Palms, where the base he was last stationed at while with the 1st Battalion 7th Marines, is located. He hired on with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department in 2005, where among other assignments, he worked motorcycle patrol. In 2015, whichle he was yet employed with the department, Bingham registered O’Three Tactical, a limited liability company in which he was the sole owner, with California Secretary of State. Located at 73749 29 Palms Highway in Twentynine Palms, O’Three Tactical was a gun shop, housed within a shop next to a Mexican restaurant east of Adobe Road in the downtown section of Twentynine Palms on Highway 62, also known at that point as 29 Palms Highway. O’Three Tactical dealt in standard firearm sales as well as obtaining for its customers specialized equipment and hardware prized by gun aficionados, particularly ones looking to replicate the actuality or mystique of military firepower. It became known for the ability to track down and deliver specialized firearms, as well as for providing servicing and augmenting equipment to those products, along with, as the shop’s name implied, all order of tactical gear, including knives, bulletproof wear and helmets, ammunition, magazines, cartridges, powders, primers, sights and scopes and all order of other accessories.
As an ex-military, command-presence-asserting law-enforcement, gun-toting, all-around macho-type, Bingham was also attracted to motorbiking. Despite the Hells Angels and the Devils Diciples motorcycle clubs having originated in San Bernardino County – Fontana, to be precise – over the last four decades or so, the Mongols and Vagos have claimed Southern California as their territory and have moved into the role of the dominant outlaw motorcycle gangs of the reason. For that reason, Bingham gravitated to the Mongols, with whom, on occasion, he would ride.
While there are indicators that at this point do not rise to the level of actual proof that the sheriff’s department, or at least elements within it, were making use of Bingham’s entrée with members of the Mongols or those elements of the community who, for whatever reasons legitimate or illegitimate were arming themselves for investigative purposes such that his higher-ups in the department have long known about Bingham’s associations, the department and the district attorney’s office have officially maintained that Bingham’s interaction with the Mongols is a secret he kept to himself.
That official line is contradicted, at least in part by certain known facts.
O’Three Tactical dealt, legally insofar as the sheriff’s department certified, in some weaponry and equipment that was banned or outlawed in California, such as certain types of firearms and silencers, devices that in some other states can be purchased or possessed legally. Bingham maintained, however, and the sheriff’s department for years appeared to accept, that such items were being sold, as Bingham stated publicly on-line, to “individual California law enforcement officers properly licensed and permitted to carry them or out of state buyers.” Bingham fastidiously adhered to the law with regard to regulations about whom guns can be sold to. At one point, in 2019, the sheriff’s department’s internal affairs division, referred to as professional standards, initiated an investigation into Bingham when it was alleged that he was improperly using the CLETS – California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System – the data base available to California law enforcement agencies that, among other things, catalogs the arrest histories and criminal convictions of the state’s residents. That investigation came to nothing, however, when it was determined that Bingham was merely delving into whether he could make gun sales to certain individuals seeking to purchase firearms whom he had legitimate grounds to believe might actually be felons who could not legally purchase, own or possess firearms as a consequence of their convictions. The department ended that investigation without taking any action against him.
In addition, Bingham had not kept his affiliation with the Mongols a secret, as he had openly plastered the door of his work locker located in the deputies’ locker room at the sheriff’s department’s Central Jail in San Bernardino with Mongols stickers and other indicia of the motorcycle club.
At a yet undisclosed point within the last two years, some of Bingham’s colleagues in the department grew concerned about his association and/or comportment, extending to his handling of the department’s firearms inventory and association with the Mongols.
As it is not publicly known whether Bingham was on a “special” assignment in which he was seeking to insinuate himself into the fabric of the Mongols’ hierarchy or was acting on his own accord, it is equally unclear whether there were individuals lower down, at mid-level, the managerial stratum or among the department’s command echelon who were kept in the dark about his efforts to penetrate the Mongols and it is therefore opaque whether those whose suspicions were aroused were reacting to the effectiveness with which Bingham donned his undercover persona.
What is known is that the Mongols utilize a protracted initiation ritual in which they vet those eventually deemed qualified to join their rank. In this way, the Mongols tolerate or indulge those they catalog as a “hangaround,” someone who expresses a desire to join the motorcycle club but has yet been given official status a member. In this way, the would-be member is permitted to attend club rallies and events, is allowed to join with the club on certain rides. While yet considered a hangaround, the applicant is expected to take up a place of the least prestige in the caravan of cyclists during a ride and is expected to be the first to pull over and submit to ticketing by the Highway Patrol or other law enforcement agencies if such official intervention by the authorities takes place on the freeway, highways or streets. Moreover, hangarounds are also given custody of any contraband that is being transported, such that he can show his loyalty to the Mongols by being subject to arrest and prosecution instead of having such a burden fall on the club’s existing members in good standing. It is only after serving obediently in the lesser role of a hangaround for such a duration and under such conditions as the Mongols’ leadership deems appropriate that the hangaround is granted membership into the Mongols and given full-fledged status. San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Sergeant Josh Guerry has since testified that Bingham had not progressed beyond the level of a  hangaround when his arrest in March 2024 by law enforcement authorities while he and other Mongols members were en route to a Mongol event in Irwindale occurred.
It is known that among the concerns that members of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department had about Bingham was that he had inappropriately, improperly or illegally appropriated for his own use firearms that belonged to the department. That suspicion, however, is itself highly suspect in that Bingham had, as a consequence of his ownership of O’Three Tactical, arms and armament rivaling or surpassing the guns and firepower in the possession of the department, rendering any allegations that he coveted department property and had misappropriated it to be so unbelievable and implausible as to be nonsensical. Indeed, what some have come to believe at this point is that some department members either mistakenly assumed that some of the guns Bingham had in his personal possession belonged to the department or, worse, that Bingham had loaned, at no cost, weapons in his possession to the department to be used for training purposes, which led to the misinterpretation, when he retook possession of his firearms, that he was stealing them.
The suspicions around Bingham had resulted, at least as early as the winter of 2023/24 if not earlier, in members of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department surveilling Bingham, both while he was at work and off the clock.
On March 23, Bingham was off duty. That morning, San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Deputy Robert Stucki had been detailed to follow him. It is believed, but has not yet been entirely established, that some order of a tracking device had been affixed to Bingham’s Harley Davidson. Stucki followed Bigham, who was wearing a dark jacket, at a safe distance to ensure that Bingham did not know he was being followed. In Yucca Valley, near the intersection of Onaga Trail and Elk Trail, Bingham met up with two Mongols, likewise on their Harley Davidsons and both sporting Mongols vests, known as “cuts.” One of the other bikers was known among the Mongols as “Nightmare Berdoo.”
When Bingham the two other cyclists headed further south on Highway 62, Stucki followed them to the I-10 Freeway, where they headed west.
Once on the straightway 10 Freeway, all three bikers accelerated to a speed that put more distance between them and the following Stucki than had been the case on the sometimes undulating and slightly curving Highway 62. With his quarry moving well beyond his visual fix, Stucki recognized he would not be able to catch up and that they were exceeding he speed limit. He contacted the California Highway Patrol dispatch center for assistance. As Bingham and his two companions were approaching Highland Springs Road in Beaumont, they were spotted by two CHP officers – Sergeant Scott Beauchene and Officer Teodora Blanco – who had been alerted to be on the lookout for them. The trio were pulled over.
When the two other Mongols were out of earshot, Bingham informed Beauchene that he was a law enforcement officer and was armed. Beauchene would later testify that given the circumstance and Bingham’s status as a law enforcement officer, he was prepared to simply issue Bingham a citation for speeding along with his two biking partners and allow him to leave. Shortly thereafter, however, Stucki arrived on the scene. Stucki, who was not in uniform, placed Bingham under arrest and entrusted him to the custody of Blanco, who transported him to the Larry D. Smith Correctional Facility in Banning. The other two motorcyclists were cited for speed and allowed to leave. At the Riverside County detention facility in Banning, Bingham was booked on suspicion of being a gang member carrying a loaded firearm. While Bingham was being held, Riverside sheriff’s department custody officers at Beauchene’s behest ran a registration on the handgun he was carrying – a Glock 9 mm – through the State of California Department of Justice’s database. It came up as unregistered. On the strength of Bingham being in the presence of two outlaw motorcycle gang members at the time of his arrest, his arrest on suspicion of being a gang member in possession of a gun, that he was in possession of what was represented to the judge as an unlicensed firearm and other particulars, Stucki and other investigators with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department were able to obtain a search warrant from a San Bernardino County judge to search Bingham’s home on Adobe Road in Twentynine Palms while he was yet at the detention center in Banning, making arrangements for the posting of his bail, which, following a several hours long ordeal, resulted in his being released from the Riverside Sheriff’s Department’s custody later that day.
Before he arrived home, investigators initiated a search of Bingham’s home while his wife was present. They found 157 firearms, including a modified, fully automatic assault rifle with an attached grenade launcher, a customized AR-15 assault rifle with a 12-inch barrel, gun silencers, two explosive projectile devices, and a Remington 870 shotgun that had been altered to shoot nonlethal beanbags. In addition, they found what the department later described as “Mongols paraphernalia,” which included a leather vest with Mongols patches, Mongols T-shirts, stickers and emblems, along with the motorcycle club’s literature and publications.
When the investigators pressed his wife with questions as to whether their home was a meet-up place for Mongols, she told them that no motorcycle gang members had ever been to or inside the house.
Investigators in putting together an arrest warrant for Bingham that was served on April 4, stated that the altered Remington 870 was sheriff’s department property, which Bingham had stolen.
The arrest warrant specified 10 felony counts against him.
He was placed into protective custody inside the sheriff’s department’s West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga, where he was being held in lieu of $500,000 bail. While Bingham had earned $$241,301.44 in total compensation as a deputy in 2023, less than two weeks previously he had staked his house as collateral in getting bailed out of the Larry Smith Detention Center. He had a further financial commitment of retaining attorney Jeff Moore to represent him against the charges that would be thrown at him. Moore set to immediately preparing for Bingham’s preliminary hearing, aggressively filing motions and contesting any of the assertions being made by the prosecutor on the case, Deputy District Attorney Alberto Juan, which were questionably contexted or based.
A major weakness in the case against Bingham, which Juan sought to ignore and distract the court from considering, was that a central element of the justification for Bingham’s arrest – that he was carrying an unregistered firearm – fell apart. At the Larry Smith Detention Center, when the registration number on Bingham’s 9 mm Glock had been checked against the state’s firearm data base, the nomenclature that punctuated the number – US – had been keyed in. Glock pistols manufactured for sale in the United States include “US” as part of the serial number stamped into a metal portion of the guns. The US, however, is not part of the serial number. The inclusion of the nomenclature in the registration search done on March 23, 2024 resulted in the data base’s search mechanism to be overload, such that no match was found. When the number alone was entered into the data base search engine by San Bernardino County investigators, it was determined that the gun had indeed been registered to Bingham.
A game of cat-and-mouse proceeded between Moore and Juan during the preliminary hearing process in April, as Moore made multiple motions intended to bring about disclosures with regard to the department’s suspicions or at least the suspicions of certain members of the department with regard to Bingham, what investigative operations had been carried out and what, explicitly, had been learned as a result. Moore was seeking to expose as many of the categorical propositions of Juan’s syllogism of guilt as either questionable or outright untrue to force the prosecutor to expose as much of the case against Bingham as possible and thereby lock Juan into a narrative that could be shredded at trial. Juan, either resisting Moore’s efforts to divulge the strongest evidence he possessed against Bingham or simply lacking any substantive evidence of actual criminality on Bingham’s part, instead sought, using the testimony of Sergeant Sergeant Josh Guerry, Detective Joshua Gile and Detective Jeremy Spinney to focus the attention of those in the court at Bingham’s preliminary hearing presided over by Judge Alexander Martinez, primarily on Bingham’s undeniable connection with members of the Mongols, essentially a strategy of guilt by association, as in “actively associating with a criminal gang.”
Juan used communications between Bingham and some Mongols members that took place on Bingham’s Instagram account or through text messages that forensic experts had extracted from two cellphones investigators had seized during the search of Bingham’s home on March 23 to drive that point home. In this way, Juan suggested that those exchanges, even though they referenced nothing that was specifically illegal, were yet highly improper. Among the several examples of Bingham’s comportment that did not rise to the level of actual criminality which Juan successfully utilized to assassinate Bingham’s reputation was a text exchange between Bingham and Nightmare Berdoo, who had was riding with Bingham on March 23 and was cited for speeding and released when Bingham had been taken into custody. In that exchange, Bingham opined that the law enforcement profession – meaning police officers and sheriff’s deputies – qualified as being the “biggest gang in California.
Without actually alleging so, Juan hinted that Bingham might be the Mongols’ armorer.
Elliptically, through insinuations that suggested rather than showed or proved Bingham was actively involved in specific acts, the prosecution painted Bingham as a criminal involved in the Mongols’ criminal network, the precise nature of which was never demonstrated either, but merely referenced as “a criminal gang.”
Both the department and Juan made much of Bingham’s fondness for collecting Mongols memorabilia, and emblems and his having donned clothing such as a vest or “cut” adorned with Mongols patches. Members of the department and Juan in making the case for binding him over for trial dwelt upon the consideration that on March 23, under his jacket Bingham was wearing a T-Shirt with two Mongols-related phrases or acronyms: “Fuck The 81,” with 81 meaning HA or Hells Angels, the Mongols’ rivals, and “SYLM,” which translates to “Support Your Local Mongols.” He was also wearing a belt with a buckle that featured a large black M, which was interpreted as referencing the Mongols. He had around his neck at the time a chain with a ring, the signet of which bore a large M. Bingham’s motorcycle helmet sported the number 1312, a code which those associated with the prosecution gleefully stated translated to “all cops are bastards.”
Sheriff Shannon Dicus after Bingham’s arrest put out a statement distancing the department from Bingham and decrying his “unacceptable” relationship with the Mongols. “The actions of this deputy are alarming and inexcusable,” Dicus stated. “He not only tarnishes his badge but also undermines the integrity and credibility of the entire department. Criminal behavior will not be tolerated, and we have placed him on compulsory leave effective immediately.”
According to the department, its members, or at least the command echelon, knew nothing of Bingham’s relationship with the Mongols until January 2024, at which point the department’s narcotics/gang division initiated an investigation of him.
Yet, the mere possession of items referencing the Mongols or utilizing its symbology is not illegal and, at the time of Bingham’s arrest, at least, it was not contrary to the department’s code of conduct.
The sheriff’s department has acknowledged that on March 23, the shirt he was wearing with the Mongol references was beneath a jacket and the ring with the Mongols signet was on a chain around his neck, neither of which was apparent until he was subject to a more exacting search at the Banning incarceration facility.
Sergeant Guerry, under cross examination by Moore, acknowledged that the department had found no evidence that Bingham provided the Mongols with weapons or ammunition.
In a motion to quash the search warrant and suppress the evidence obtained during the search, Moore maintained the warrant was overly broad, left out the crucial fact that Bingham was a sheriff’s deputy and that the arrest, upon which the search warrant was based, was unlawful due to a lack of probable cause and that Stucki, who effectuated taking Bingham into custody as a citizen’s arrest when the Highway Patrol officers at the scene would not do so, not having jurisdiction in Riverside County.
Moore challenged what evidence the prosecution had produced as being nonprobative of what Juan was alleging. Most importantly, Moore argued, Bingham had engaged in no criminal wrongdoing and was being demonized on the basis of his acquaintanceship with members of the Mongols.
After a three-days preliminary hearing, Juan told Judge Martinez not to “overthink” the situation and consign Bingham, whose bail by that point had been reduced to $450,000 but was yet in custody, to trial on the ten criminal charges.
Judge Martinez delayed his decision until April 24, 2024, at which point he sided with Juan.
Quietly in the two weeks thereafter, Bingham was released from custody. He was arraigned before Judge Harold T. Wilson, Jr. on revamped charges on May 10, 2024, which extended to felony engaging in street gang terrorism by being in possession of a machine gun; felony engaging in street gang terrorism by having a short barreled rifle or shotgun; felony engaging in street gang terrorism through grand theft of a firearm; five counts of felony engaging in street gang terrorism through possession of a destructive device in a private habitation; and five counts of felony engaging in street gang terrorism by being in possession of a silencer.
He entered a deny plea to all 13 counts and a not guilty plea to all 13 counts. A deny plea asserts a positive case to counter the prosecution assertion[s] and a not guilty plea constitutes a complete denial of the charges against the defendant. According to Bingham and Moore, Bingham did not only not do what the prosecution alleged he did but the assertions of fact and law by the prosecution in the case are false.
Since that time, the prosecution has made no further progress on the case and Bingham is due back in court on January 31 for a disposition hearing to determine whether the prosecution wants, yet to proceed to trial.
What was celebrated in Bingham’s arrest was his alleged affiliation with the Mongols, which ultimately amounts to no crime. The potential criminality Bingham was involved in extended to the allegedly illegal weapons at his domicile. But Bingham had a federal license to sell firearms and some or all of the devices at his home are legal in other states. In 2021-21 Bingham shutter O’Three Tactical during the downturn in firearm product demand that grew out of the COVID pandemic. His status as a federally licensed gun dealer or former gun dealer who was using his personal property to warehouse his inventory makes a prosecution on the firearms charges dicey at best.
In April 2024, Anderson reflexively moved to protect the sheriff’s department by publicly stating that Bingham was associated with the Mongols. He did so, knowing full well that such associations are not in and of themselves a crime, but believing that the accompanying firearm violation charges would be sustained. Two months previously, Anderson went out on a similar limb in an effort to back one of the law enforcement agencies within his jurisdiction when he equally blindly endorsed the Ontario Police Department when it made a highly publicized claim that it had prevented a mass slaughter by arresting a student at Ontario Christian High School who was preparing to shoot at least five and potentially dozens or scores of his schoolmates. Anderson backed his deputy prosecutors in filing five attempted murder charges against the 18-year-old Villasenor which had to be publicly walked back in a painful process that severely undercut the district attorney’s office’s credibility.
Having self-inflicted another blow to his office’s credibility in the Bingham/Mongols matter, Anderson finds himself in the position of needing a conviction against one of the parties – either Bingham or a member or members of the Mongols, to justify Bingham’s prosecution. With that possibility narrowed, he is back to square one, looking to demonize both the Mongols and Bingham for their association, which is no crime.
The Mongols were never a prosecutorial priority in San Bernardino County. Anderson at his point would love to get something on the motorcycle club, but, ironically, Bingham’s cultivation of some order of insider status with the Mongols represented, now lost forever, Anderson’s best shot at doing that.
The district attorney now finds himself confounded by Stucki’s decision to prematurely arrest Bingham before Bingham, either wittingly or unwittingly, accumulated enough damning information about the Mongols to make a case against the gang or some of its members.
Within three to four months, the Sentinel is reliably infomed, Juan will quietly make a motion to have the charges against Bingham dismissed “in the interest of justice.”
What next remains is a determination as to whether Bingham will be reinstated as a deputy.
-Mark Gutglueck