By Mark Gutglueck
In one of the more muddled criminal cases pursued by the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office over the last several decades, prosecutors are on the brink of throwing the case against a deputy accused of frolicking with an outlaw motorcycle out in total or large part in an effort to avoid the deputy’s defense attorney’s demands that the evidence implicating the defendant be produced.
An apparent major issue for the prosecution is the sheriff’s department’s unwillingness to compromise certain means and methodologies employed by the department’s command echelon and the detectives attached to it in surveilling, monitoring and investigation the department’s employees.
Deputy Christopher Bingham last year was charged with 13 felony counts, each of which carries a sentencing enhancement with it, based on what the district attorney’s office maintains is Bingham’s association with the Mongols motorcycle gang. Under the prosecution’s theory, the Mongols are a criminal organization, and Bingham as a law enforcement officer should not be involved with it.
Bingham, who enlisted in the U.S. Marines at the age of 19 in 1998, served as a rifleman during two separate overseas assignments, returning to the United States where he was last with the 1st Battalion 7th Marines stationed at the Twentynine Palms Marine Corps base before being honorably discharged in 2002. After attending the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Academy, he hired on with the sheriff’s department in 2005, where among other assignments, he worked motorcycle patrol. In 2015, while 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 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.
Bingham was also attracted to motorcycling. The Mongols are one of the dominant motorcycle clubs in San Bernardino County, and Bingham gravitated to it, on occasion riding with its members, despite the group having been classified by law enforcement as a criminal motorcycle gang.
There is a degree of mystery as to whether the sheriff’s department, or at least elements within it, were, for investigative purposes, making use of Bingham’s entrée with members of the Mongols or those in the Morongo Valley community who, for whatever reasons legitimate or illegitimate, were arming themselves.
Despite certain indicators or evidence to the contrary, the sheriff’s department and the district attorney’s office have officially maintained since Bingham’s arrest in 2024 that his interaction with the Mongols was 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.
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, and 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.
There appears to be no dispute that by 2023 and more likely by 2022 or perhaps even as early as 2021, Bingham had achieved the status of a hangaround with the Mongols. Available information indicates, however, that he had not yet been fully initiated into the Mongol organization.
At a yet undisclosed point in 2022 or 2023, 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. 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, 2024, 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, Bingham met up with two Mongols, likewise on their Harley Davidsons, one of whom was known among the Mongols as “Nightmare Berdoo.”
Bingham and the two other cyclists headed south on Highway 62 to the I-10 Freeway west, having previously crossed into Riverside County. Stucki 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, ostensibly for exceeding the speed limit. 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 speeding 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, 2024 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 held in lieu of $500,000 bail.
Sheriff Shannon Dicus after Bingham’s arrest put out a statement distancing the department from Bingham and decrying his “unacceptable” relationship with the Mongols.
Bingham, yet in jail, was able to retain attorney Jeff Moore to represent him. Bingham remained jailed throughout his preliminary hearing, which took place over the course of three days in April 2024. Moore aggressively filed motions and contesting all of the questionably contexted or based assertions made by the prosecutor on the case, Deputy District Attorney Alberto Juan.
While Juan came into the preliminary hearing presided over by Judge Alexander Martinez in what to the outside world appeared to be a strong position, with advance publicity demonizing Bingham as a law enforcement officer who was leading a double-life as an outlaw gang member with hundreds of unlicensed and illegal firearms in his possession with which he was acting as an armorer to the criminal underworld, the case against the deputy, when cast in the glare of Moore’s inquiries, showed itself to be embarrassingly thin as to be non-existent. Juan used the testimony of Sergeant Josh Guerry, Detective Joshua Gile and Detective Jeremy Spinney to focus the court’s attention 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 referenced 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. Juan suggested 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 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.”
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.
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 implied that a law enforcement officer, who was sworn to uphold the law, had crossed the line through membership in a known criminal organization.
Multiple shortcomings in the case against Bingham were revealed in the course of the preliminary hearing.
It had been alleged that Bingham was in illegal possession of the 157 firearms found at his domicile, based, at least in part, on the consideration that O’Three Tactical, hit hard by the social distancing and other mandates that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic, had gone out of business in June 2021, and that he was no longer a firearms dealers. In fact, however, while O’Three Tactical was closed, Bingham was yet a licensed firearms dealer.
It had further been alleged that Bingham had stolen from the sheriff’s department a shotgun which had been altered to shoot not buckshot but nonlethal beanbags, as such a gun was among the 157 located at his home. It turned out, however, that what was actually the case was one of two scenarios, both of which were bad for the prosecution and good for Bingham: Either some department members mistakenly assumed that some of the guns Bingham had in his personal possession belonged to the department or 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.
When it rains, it pours. In the immediate aftermath of Bingham’s arrest on March 23, 2024,
Stucki through Beauchene requested that personnel at the Larry Smith Detention Center, where Bingham was jailed temporarily that day, check to see whether the firearm in his possession was registered. 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 overloaded, such that no match was found. Bingham’s possession of an unregistered and unlicensed firearm was that a central element of the justification for Bingham’s arrest and used as well in convincing the San Bernardino County judge to issue as search warrant for Bingham’s home. Subsequently, however, when the serial number on Bingham’s gun was entered into the data base search engine by San Bernardino County investigators in the way it was supposed to be entered, without the US included, it was determined that the gun had indeed been registered to Bingham.
Juan played a game of cat-and-mouse with both Moore and Judge Martinez during the preliminary hearing, doing all he could to distract the court from seeing or examining the major weaknesses in the case against Bingham, such as the misrepresentations that Bingham was carrying an unregistered firearm, the false accusation that he was in illegal possession of over 100 firearms and the wrongful accusation that the deputy had stolen sheriff’s department property.
Judge Martinez, who had been a prosecutor with the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office, on April 24, 2024 ruled there was sufficient grounds to bind Bingham, who was yet in custody, over to stand trial on one count of violating PC32625(A)-F, transporting a machine gun; one count of violating PC33210-F: possession of a short-barreled rifle or shotgun; one count of violating PC487(D)(2)-F, grand theft of a firearm; five counts of violating PC18715(A)(3)-F, possession of destructive device in a private habitation; and five counts of violating PC33410-F: possession of a silencer. Each of the counts brought with it a sentencing enhancement pertaining to the crime in question having been done as an act of street gang terrorism.
Bingham was rearraigned on all 13 of those charges and their accompanying enhancements on May 10, 2024. Between the final day of his preliminary hearing on April 24, 2024 and his May 10, 2024 arraignment, Bingham was quietly released from custody. Thereafter followed four disposition hearings on July 19, August 30 November 19 in 2025 and January 31 of this year, all before Judge Harold T. Wilson, with the proceedings continued in each case. At the January hearing, the disposition hearing was continued until April 11 of this year. It was at the April 11 disposition hearing, before Judge Ronald Christianson that the court record first makes mention of a “possible motion to compel discovery.” The disposition hearing was continued at that time to May 27, once more before Judge Wilson. At that hearing, a “possible motion to compel discovery” was brought up, together with a “possible PC 995 motion.”
A Penal Code 995 motion is a request to dismiss one or more counts because the preliminary hearing judge improperly allowed the case to move forward.
The disposition of the case and the possible motions were deferred to July 25, 2025. At the July 25 hearing, before Judge Wilson, the court record makes no mention of either PC 995 motions nor the motion to compel discovery and the disposition hearing was reset for August 29. At the August hearing before Judge Christianson, the disposition hearing on the case was continued until October 24, at which time a motion to compel discover is to also be heard.
Having continuously waived the right to a speedy trial on behalf of his client, Moore has continued that waiver until December 23 of this year.
Juan is in a difficult position. He is under a set of at least three mutually exclusive orders. One of those is to continue with the case against Bingham until getting a conviction. The other is to avoid exposing what can only be described as an embarrassing compartmentalization of information in the sheriff’s department. The third is to not take the case to trial, lest the overwhelming weaknesses in the case against Bingham be exposed and grounds be supplied for him to not only file and prevail on a civil suit against the department and the county but that he be reinstated as a deputy.
The charges Juan somewhat disingenuously sought to press forward with last year – that Bingham was the armorer for the Mongols – is no longer viable. Further, according to the prosecution, 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. That renders any allegations that he coveted department property and had misappropriated a shotgun it is believed O’Three Tactical had customized for the department for training purposes or actual field use so unbelievable and implausible as to be nonsensical.
What remains is the charge that Bingham was a member of a criminal organization – the Mongols – and that he assumed that role surreptitiously, without informing anyone in the department.
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 appears, at this point, that Juan does not know whether that is the case, either, a fact he should, as the agent of justice pursuing a criminal case against Bingham, have command of. More alarming still is the prospect that Sheriff Dicus, himself, and other members of the department’s managerial stratum or command echelon were kept in the dark about one of his deputy’s efforts to penetrate the Mongols. With Moore pushing for full disclosure on that issue, Juan, along with his ultimate boss, District Attorney Jason Anderson, will need to make a decision on whether to continue with the prosecution or, using the justification of acting in the interest of justice, dismiss the charges against Bingham.