Nonchalant menace. That's the aura that oozed from neo-Nazi Travis Ricci as he was led into Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Connie Contes' courtroom for a recent sentencing hearing.
Ricci flips a sieg heil as Ronnie, using his finger-stache to ape Adolf.
Ricci bald-faced
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Powerfully built, with wide shoulders and a reputation for explosive violence, the 29-year-old racist skinhead seemed oblivious to his leg irons and the handcuffs shackling his hands to his waist.
Gray jailhouse stripes covered most of his tattoos, particularly the swastikas and Nazi lightning bolts on his shoulders.
But plain on his forearms could be seen Gothic script referring to the SS motto: "Meine Ehre Heisst Treue," or "My Honor Is Loyalty," often found inscribed on vintage Nazi daggers.
Only those in the know would notice the mustache inked on the middle finger of his left hand, a tattoo common among those in the white supremacist Vinlanders Social Club gang, of which he is a member. When raised to the lips, it approximates the facial hair of Ricci's führer, Adolf Hitler.
In one photo presented to the court, Ricci, wearing a Ronald Reagan mask, gives a sieg heil with his finger-stache in place. Moronic? Sure. The Vinlanders may be known as one of the most vicious racist gangs in America. But no one's ever accused them of having triple-digit IQs.
On this day, Ricci will be sentenced to 22 years in the state pen for putting his girlfriend's head into a wall at a party and stabbing the two men who came to her aid. One caught a knife in the hand, the other in the neck.
Actually, the jury deadlocked on the count involving the knife in the neck, and Ricci eventually will be retried on that charge. But that's the least of his worries, as Deputy Maricopa County Attorney Vince Goddard will be shooting for the death penalty against Ricci for the heinous 2009 murder of Kelly Ann Jaeger.
Jaeger, a Caucasian, was walking late one October night with Jeffrey Wellmaker, her African-American boyfriend, near Palma Park, in the Sunnyslope area of Phoenix, when they were approached by a muscular, tattooed thug who challenged Wellmaker.
"Hey, nigger, what are you doing with that white woman?" the man asked.
Words were exchanged, according to Phoenix Police Department reports, but it did not escalate to a fight. The man left, and Wellmaker and Jaeger kept walking.
Later, the hooligan caught up with them near Fourth Street and Puget Avenue. He was the passenger in a white four-door sedan. Shotgun blasts rang out, and Jaeger, a mother of two, was hit in the stomach.
Phoenix cops investigating a suicide nearby responded quickly. They found Wellmaker tearful and distraught, imploring his girlfriend to "wake up." An ambulance rushed Jaeger to nearby John C. Lincoln Hospital, where she was declared dead on arrival.
Police wavered at calling the murder a hate crime, despite the obvious racial overtones. Initially, PPD investigators thought the shooting was a drug deal gone bad, and the case quickly went cold.
Prodded by the Anti-Defamation League of Arizona, the PPD's famed Career Criminal Squad took up the case.
Tasked, in part, with targeting violent street gangs such as the Vinlanders, CCS detectives uncovered a web of neo-Nazi activity surrounding Jaeger's slaying. By September, CCS detectives had arrested more than a dozen Vinlanders and Vinlander associates on various charges, crushing the national organization's Arizona contingent ("Skinheads in Stir," September 30).
Two of those collared were Travis Ricci and suspected accomplice Aaron Levi Schmidt, an anti-Semite despite the Jewish origins of his first and middle names. Prosecutors allege Ricci pulled the trigger and Schmidt was at the wheel during the drive-by.
According to court documents, Ricci boasted about the killing and Schmidt and his girlfriend buried the murder weapon in the desert near Tucson. Other Vinlanders visited the homes of those who knew of the incident, which occurred as the skinheads partied at someone's house in Sunnyslope, and warned them not to talk.
The cops' confidential informants feared for their lives.
"All of my sources . . . are terrified of the Vinlanders Social Club finding out whom they are or where they are at," one CCS detective wrote in his report.
They have been terrified for good reason. The VSC, which mostly operates out of the Midwest and Arizona, is one of those racist skinhead groups that other white supremacists regard with dread.
Savage beatings have been meted out to white-power knuckleheads who offered Vinlanders the smallest slight. One such beat-down occurred because a neo-Nazi did not promptly flip the Hitler salute with his peers.
But true to their ideology, their natural targets are minorities. The County Attorney's Office claims Ricci and Schmidt were after Wellmaker but ended up killing Jaeger.
As one CCS detective pointed out to Judge Contes at Ricci's sentencing for aggravated assault, Jaeger's homicide is justified in Ricci's eyes because Jaeger was a "race traitor" for being with a black man.
Incredibly, prosecutor Goddard has revealed in one of his legal filings that while in county awaiting trial, Schmidt practically confessed to involvement in the Jaeger homicide.
"Schmidt has since admitted his participation in the murder in a letter to his wife," Goddard writes. "Schmidt attempts to further the third-party defense idea that Ricci and Schmidt had retrieved the shotgun and looked for the victim couple because unidentified black men were hitting a white woman."
