June 31, 2020 – Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha is seeking a reversal by the state Supreme Court from last summer’s decision at the Superior Court level to exclude DEA wiretap evidence in a pending drug and gun case against alleged Providence Pagan’s Motorcycle Club boss Deric (Big Tuna) McGuire
Last July, Rhode Island Superior Court Judge Netti Vogel ruled wiretapped phone conversations between McGuire and Pagan’s leadership in New York inadmissible because of a faulty state-police warrant. Pleading not guilty, McGuire, 35, was originally denied bond in the case dubbed Operation Patched Out and spent 14 months behind bars before Vogel sprang him in 2019 to await trial from home.
McGuire’s cell phone was bugged for almost a year, throughout most of 2017 and then the first part of 2018. Some of the conversations intercepted were between McGuire and Pagan’s national president Keith (Conan the Barbarian) Richter discussing Richter’s desire for the Pagan’s to take over the entire east coast and Richter tapping McGuire specifically to head his expansion into the Providence area.
“It’s a new age out there brother, it’s the Pagan era now,” Richter is heard telling McGuire on the wire.
According to the Operation Patch Out indictment, McGuire traveled to see Richter in Elizabeth, New Jersey with his Thug Riders biker gang in 2017 and they were subsequently all “patched over” to the Pagan’s. On the group’s return to Rhode Island, McGuire opened up the first Pagan’s chapter in the state in the town of Woonsocket. The muscle-bound Richter is based out of Long Island, New York and one of the nation’s most powerful and feared biker bosses.
Richter, 60, grabbed the reins of the Pagan’s national presidency in 2015. He had previously been the club’s sergeant-at-arms and a chapter boss in Long Island. In the 2000s, he served a prison bid for trying to kill a New York strip club owner dodging extortion payments. Per court records and an internal memo circulated in federal law enforcement during the spring of 2017, shortly after taking over as national president, Richter issued an expansion mandate to the club, ordering the conquering of new territory along the east coast.
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