Vallejo’s Secret Mafia and the Murders Behind It
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There was Kobe Phillips, the son of a methamphetamine manufacturer named Donnie Phillips.
Two brothers, Jason and Matty Boy Donaghhue, whose father, Big Matt, had already made headlines for beating a murder case in Valo during his early 20s, and whose mother, Marty, would go on to become a part of one of the biggest racketeering cases in United States history.
Others in their large circle included names like Blair Guthrie, the so-called Julia Child of Meth in Contracasta County, Joanne Guthrie, who’d come to be known as the secretary for the Aryan Brotherhood godfather Barry the Baron Mills, and Wendell Blue Norris, a storied AB member linked to several daring murder plots, escapes, and a failed takeover of the gang.
and Raymond Ray Ray Folks, a longtime Hell’s Angel president widely believed to have kicked off the infamous Riverrun biker gang riots of 2002.
And that’s just a small sampling of the community these three young men and their friends grew up in.
There were two older brothers in this circle as well, Timothy Cvy and his younger brother Thomas, who went by Bubba and would come to live at the Donahghue household on Garrettson Avenue for long periods of time.
Bubba, the Donahghue brothers, and Kobe are widely credited with forming the family affiliated Irish mafia or fame with Kobe having made connections with the Aryan Brotherhood inside San Quentin.
The Donahghue brothers forming a reputation for themselves on the streets and Bubba more or less a hangar on whose loyalty to the group was never questioned.
Timothy Cvy more or less stayed away from the others until one day when he had to do a jail stint and requested a fame tattoo to make things easier for himself.
Others from the West Contraosta area quickly gravitated to this new fame thing that was coming together, including another kid from around the way named Joseph Verduchi, who called himself Ruthless or Joe Rue.
To the outside world, fame was a drug trafficking ring formed by young men who had grown up around experienced drug traffickers and knew that world like the back of their hand.
Bubba sported a tattoo that said, “Fame till I die.
” Blissfully unaware that one day he’d stare down the barrel of a gun held by another fame member.
To the criminal world in the 1980s, ’90s, and early 2000s, Contraosta County in California grew from a burgeoning to a flourishing meth market.
Initially cornered by homegrown suppliers like Blair Guthrie or Donnie Phillips, then taken over by Mexican cartels when the DEA during the Clinton administration leaned on pharmaceutical companies to stop the wholesale supply of precursor chemicals.
This arguably necessary move had an unwitting negative effect of opening a huge international supply chain as the same type of restrictions on precursors didn’t exist in Mexico and cartels south of the border had already become experts in smuggling drugs during the Pablo Escobar era as the United States rolled out anti-rack publicity campaigns.
This is your brain on drugs.
The drug of choice for the back alleys of America slowly shifted to methamphetamine, causing addiction rates to spike nationwide.
This was especially true of densely populated regions like the San Francisco Bay area, where wholesale meth suppliers could easily make a killing simply by selling to a few select middlemen drug dealers, who would take on most of the risk and in turn be too scared or too proud to snitch on their suppliers when they got caught.
It was against this backdrop that the family affiliated Irish mafia went from a small group of teens to a local gang that was widely believed to be at the top of the food chain.
Its leaders were professional drug dealers.
And as Kobe and Matty Boy began catching felony cases and ending up in prison, they would then expand the gang and make inroads with more ruthless prison gangs such as the Aryan Brotherhood.
It certainly didn’t hurt that Matty Boy’s mother and father were personal friends of Barry Mills, the man widely considered to be the godfather of the Aryan Brotherhood, who was still able to control the gang from his maximum security federal prison cell.
While Kobe Phillips and Matty Boy were in and out of prison, Jason Donahghue and Bubba were largely able to avoid serious legal repercussions.
Kobe, by contrast, caught a stabbing case as a young man, expressed excitement at the idea of a life sentence, admitted to stabbing a man he believed was a child molester during his trial, and still won an acquitt.
Inside San Quentin, he was validated as an AB member based on his association with Curtis Price, a gang hitman who had killed two people in Humbult and Southern California.
As the ‘9s rolled on, Kobe’s life consisted of year-long stints in prison, followed by shorter periods of freedom.
One time, an institutional gang investigations prison squad followed him from San Quentin to his grandparents house in San Pablo, watched him drive to Rodeo, and arrested him as he walked across the street with an alleged fame member, and took him back to prison on a parole violation, all in the same day.
But the 2000s were a different story.
Kobe had fallen in love and settled down with a childhood friend named Stacy.
Adopting her two kids and having a son of their own, named after the three other founders of fame.
They moved to the nearby suburbs of Salano County, ending up in a Stuckco home next to dentists and insurance salesmen.
There was just one hang-up, which was that Kobe was now a major meth dealer, entirely funding his lifestyle on drug trade.
And the landlord of his home was a cartel connected cocaine and meth smuggler named Sergio Vega Robace who owned properties all over Northern California and used a clothing shop as a front for his budding drug empire.
Sergio was full of secrets.
He was a member of a Sureno gang called RST, but had familial connections to the Sinaloa cartel that led to the creation of a Mexican drug pipeline that ended in a small town called Benicia.
In addition to fame, Sergio was supplying black gangs in Richmond, including a local cocaine kingpin known as Peanut.
But perhaps Sergio’s biggest secret was that he was also attempting to stave off possible problems from the DEA and local police by signing up as an informant, turning in other dealers who competed with Sergio for customers and hoping that trained, experienced drug cops would never catch on to his two-faced scheme.
Sergio’s brother, Joseé Carlos Vega Robles, had a more streamlined approach.
simply shoot or kill anyone who got in his way.
Bubba had his own drug customers as well.
By the early 2000s, they were all moving pounds as fast as they could acquire them, raking in cash, racking up spending, and closing in on the ultimate goal of becoming drugdeing millionaires.
Often times they would simply pay the meth importers from Mexico in guns instead of money, telling the local tweakers to go out and burglarize guns in exchange for slivers of crank.
Then it all came crashing down.
Matty boy got busted shipping around 300 lb of cocaine on a drive to Chicago.
And after a traffic stop in Utah, he ended up getting a 10-year prison term in federal prison.
Kobe’s troubles were somehow even worse.
Since late 2004, the Contraosta sheriff had considered him a major suspect in the killing of a childhood friend, an Aryan Brotherhood drug dealer named Daryl Grockett.
And though the police couldn’t prove the murder, they had violated Kobe’s parole for associating with Daryl on the night he was killed.
Adding insult to injury, the exact date of Kobe’s arrest was in November on his 2-year wedding anniversary with Stacy.
Trapped in a prison cell, Kobe seemed closer than ever to getting the life sentence he’d wanted as a young man.
Except now he had a wife and kids who had been relying on him as their criminal breadwinner.
With no other options, he reached out to his childhood friend, Bubba’s older brother, Timmy Cvy, to stay with his family, keep the drug business going with Jose and Sergio, and if need be, protect them from whatever fallout might come from people believing he’d whacked an AB member.
It wasn’t long before Timmy and Stacy began pursuing an extrammarital affair, which by then was the least of Kobe’s worries, as he was certain to be charged with murder any day.
But it didn’t happen.
Kobe was released in 2005 and continued to sell drugs with Sergio while attempting to keep his fractured family together and pursuing his own affairs on the side.
The result was some kind of Sopranosesque interf family drama, only worsened when Bubba began dating Stacy’s younger sister, who by then was still a teenager.
Despite it all, Kobe and Stacy’s marriage weathered the storm, and they left their suburban home together November 30th, 2005 to celebrate their third wedding anniversary.
They made it a couple blocks when the DEA closed in, cuffing the happy couple, dragging them back to their home before searching it with a warrant and carting Kobe off to jail.
For you see, Sergio’s double life had just closed in around him.
The DEA agent he’d been snitching to, Gina Giaeti, had caught wind of his second job as a major drug dealer, in part because he’d showed up to a meeting in a luxury car and admitted to owning about a million dollars in real estate.
And Gina was upset.
She’d initiated a wire tap, which had caught a desperate Sergio arranging cocaine sales while attempting to collect debts from middlemen all over the Bay Area, as he’d perhaps foolishly fronted drugs to Kobe and others while failing to pay off a rather sizable debt to the cartel.
Now, thanks to Sergio’s wiretapped phone calls, his couriers led the DEA to a drug house in Southern California, and he was now legally responsible for about 100 kilos of cocaine.
Kobe had been roped into the case simply for having a couple phone conversations about buying and selling drugs, but it was enough to catch a federal charge and ruin yet another anniversary.
The DEA called all of this Operation Durex, and it did indeed catch a ton of white.
The following year, Kobe was granted a release from jail, moving into a tiny apartment in Valo and worked to scrape out a living with his main drug supplier still in federal custody and friendships falling apart around him.
After learning of Sergio’s status as a DEA informant, Kobe had circulated court records resulting in Sergio being beat up in federal holding.
The federal case against Kobe didn’t amount to much.
But there were other problems.
Kobe and Bubba’s friendship disintegrated quickly with serious consequences for fame.
There were disputes about money and it probably didn’t help that Bubba’s brother had carried on an affair with Kobe’s wife or that Bubba had been with Stacy’s underage sister with allegations of domestic violence to boot.
Kobe likes to bully Bubba and embarrass him in front of other Fame members, one of whom would later describe in an awkward encounter where Kobe called Bubba and put him on speaker phone in front of others and bered him with fat jokes and other demeaning insults.
During one heated conversation between them, Bubba allegedly said he’d take Kobe’s son, who was a toddler, and smash his head into the wall.
That upped the auntie considerably.
One day, Bubba got himself a gun, took a hit or two of crank, and got in his car along Highway 4, intent on settling the score.
He would later explain that he took the drugs to get courage to commit a shooting.
But Bubba’s driving skills may have been affected by the drugs, or maybe it was the fact that he was driving a stolen GMC.
At any rate, the cops attempted to pull him over in Martinez, California, and he hit the gas.
He got as far as his hometown, Rodeo, within walking distance of the Garrettson household when he crashed near Lefty Gomez Park and made a break for it on foot.
A sheriff’s deputy briefly turned the baseball diamond into a football field with a sliding tackle.
Bubba was booked on felony gun and evasion charges.
On the way in, he mentioned that he had led the police on a high-speed pursuit in Valo just a couple days earlier.
Bubba was released but missed a court appearance in the Valo highspeed chase, generating a $30,000 warrant for his arrest.
Meanwhile, Kobe’s legal troubles began piling up.
He was arrested on New Year’s Day in 2007 for an alleged domestic violence incident where everyone involved was seriously drunk.
The feds used the arrest to keep him jailed indefinitely.
Concerned Bubba would make good on his threat, Kobe told Joseph Ferduchi and others to keep an eye on them while he was away.
Not sure how long it would be.
So, all of this brings us to my office bar on the night of January 14th, 2007, where Bubba and another fame member named Kyle stopped for a couple beers.
Bubba occasionally stepped outside for a cigarette.
And during one of these trips, he saw Stacy’s Impala drive by.
It sparked an idea.
He called her, asking to talk to her sister.
She responded aggressively, asking why he’d been calling as if he hadn’t threatened her son days earlier.
She hung up.
He called back again, again, again with the same result.
Finally, she picked up and gave him some choice words.
Joe Ru’s been off the hook lately.
He ain’t fighting.
Bubba could have left right then and there, but he stayed put.
Stacy’s phone rang again, but this time it was her husband calling from jail.
The two had a tense conversation.
Kobe had a suggestion.
tell Joe Ru to go over to Bubba’s home in Rodeo and quote, “Handle that.
” They exchanged some pleasantries and hung up, and the Salano County Sheriff was recording their every word.
Back at my office bar, Bubba stepped outside again, this time to urinate next to the bar.
When he turned back around, there were Joseph Verduchi and Jose Vega Robles, one with a gun, the other with a knife.
A witness heard someone scream, “Motherfucker!” Just before the shooting started, Bubba made a mad dash for the door, running alongside the front end of the bar as shots rang out, barely staying one step ahead of each bullet.
He barreled through, jumped over the bar, and grabbed a fire extinguisher while Kyle armed himself with an empty whiskey bottle.
As Bubba was doing so, a man to his immediate left was struck in the head.
Bubba saw this innocent bystander fall to the ground.
dead for a bullet that had been meant for him.
It was Jose Corona, a man who’d exchanged a joke with Bubba earlier in the evening.
Tommy, what’s this? I hear about some things that your friends tried to kill you or some [ __ ] What? What are you talking about? Some [ __ ] about the bomb.
They They did.
They tried to take my [ __ ] head, Dad.
The same people Jimmy Timmy are hanging around with the same [ __ ] that Timmy [ __ ] dates right now.
She tried to have me killed.
B, they [ __ ] they blew somebody’s brains out right in front of me.
Yeah.
Had to be all kinds of [ __ ] Well, you had to watch your ass, son.
Yeah, I know.
With your own [ __ ] with your own [ __ ] brother sleeping with the enemy.
What the [ __ ] But for the time being, Joe and Jose Vega Roblace knew none of this.
They returned to their car where Stacy’s little brother and a lady friend of Joe’s were waiting, heading off to the home of Kobe’s mistress in the nearby Valo neighborhood of Glen Cove.
When they got there, Joe was ecstatic.
I got him.
Jose Carlos began dismantling the gun, much to Joe’s disgust.
He pleaded with Jose to stop, saying it was quote his lucky gun.
Indeed, Joe appeared to like the pistol.
He had shot a woman in nearby Panol with it.
Bubba sure recognized his wouldbe killer, but when the cops came, he refused to talk.
They ran his name, booked him for the $30,000 warrant, and interviewed witnesses who hadn’t seen much.
Bubba was determined not to snitch.
He’d already fallen out with Matty Boy over a dispute about an insurance payment that Timmy allegedly stole.
His friendship with Kobe was completely dissolved.
All he had left of his childhood was that tattoo on his arm, fame till I die.
And he was determined to keep it.
It would take several months for the police to tie the penol shooting to the Valo shooting, but once they did, it was over for Joe.
During that time, Kobe had been indicted for murder, too, but for killing his childhood friend, Daryl, off of a lonely road in the hills of the sleepy town of Crockett.
He elected to become his own lawyer, giving himself full access to the names of witnesses against him, including a former fame member named Shovelhead.
Kobe’s codefendants included Joseé Vega Roblace, Sergio Vega Roblace, as well as two alleged meth dealers from California’s wine country, and of course, his old pal Bubba, who was charged under the legal theory that by selling meth with killers like Kobe and Jose, Bubba would have to have known that the murder was inevitable.
But before Bubba had been indicted, he’d had a little chat with his father.
His dad called to confront Bubba about being arrested with his dad’s stolen guns.
But what Bubba didn’t know was that his old dear pops had agreed to let the cops record the call.
Tommy, who’s there? It’s your daddy.
What’s up, Dad? What’s up with you, boy? What’s up? I got a question for you, son.
What’s up? Did you come in here and take my guns? No.
Who did? I don’t know, Dad.
Come on, man.
I don’t, Dad.
Then how did you get busted with the one? Cuz I I bought a few of them.
Who’ you buy them from? Man, so the [ __ ] rob me? Yep, I guess.
You guess.
That’s what I’m saying.
Some my house.
They had a bag full of guns.
Death.
And you just happened to buy mine? Yeah.
And why did you need these guns? You got people looking for you or what, man? [ __ ] yeah.
Yeah.
But they also paid Kobe a visit, ostensibly to inform Kobe’s legal defense team, aka himself, about pending charges.
But then they brought up the Valo case, too.
While admittedly Kobe had never told anyone to go shoot up a crowded bar in Valoa where he didn’t even know Bubba was at, police told him that they’d believed he’d called the dogs on Bubba that had resulted in the shooting.
Kobe laughed at the investigators and brushed the whole thing off, even asking detectives to charge him with a death penalty crime.
But his mood changed when they had implied that they’d be charging the mother of his kids with a murder conspiracy, too.
even want her involved with that.
She’s not involved.
She don’t need to be involved.
If you know what I mean, if you’re going to if we want to [ __ ] with me and deal with so they are going for the special circumstances, make me eligible for the death penalty.
I don’t believe so.
No.
But that’s not how things shook out.
One by one, nearly everyone flipped.
Prosecution witnesses at Kobe’s trial included Timmy Stacy, Sergio Vega, Roblace, and a couple other dropout members of fame like Shovelhead.
Bubba was one of the final holdouts, refusing to answer questions in a helpful way.
But when Bubba caught wind that he’d be stabbed if he ever got to prison, he flipped too.
Jose Vega Roblace and Kobe were convicted in separate trials of murdering Daryl Grockett together.
Joe was convicted of killing Joseé Corona on a controversial fourth trial and lashed out in court upon hearing the news.
Bubba would later say he took the whole thing as a sign he needed to make some serious life changes and that the near-death experience and being charged with murder helped him find a bigger purpose.
Sergio, by contrast, became an agent of chaos, claiming he’d been bribing a high-ranking Richmond police sergeant who worked with the DEA agent, Gina Getti.
Included in this was the revelation that Joseé Vega Rob had shot and injured a confidential informant in a failed assassination after learning from Sergio that the man was working for the Richmond Police Department.
As for Matty Boy, being in federal prison probably saved him from catching a conspiracy charge under the same legal theory that they used to charge Bubba.
Instead, he served his sentence and got out in the mid2010s, starting a rap career.
Ironically, his breakout song was entitled White Bricks, the very thing that got him sent to prison for a decade, while also allowing him to steer clear of the legal drama that engulfed the others.
He has commented on social media that he has accomplished more in a few years after prison than the decades he spent selling drugs.
In his music, he occasionally expresses disappointment in Bubba and regret for how all that went down.
They put the on.
Kobe came to the same realization but in a more tragic way.
He’s now incarcerated in San Quentin prison, serving a life term and organizing a fentanel awareness event in light of an epiphany that he described thusly.
I have always thought of drug dealing as a victimless crime.
Looking back, I guess that’s what I wanted to believe.
I victimized my community by importing meth from Mexico.
I victimized the Mexican community by sending large shipments of guns to Mexico.
I think everything in life goes full circle.
The drug circle came complete on May 10th, 2024 when my wife brought me the most devastating news imaginable.
My oldest son, James, had died of a fentanyl overdose.
Did my son die from my transgressions? Was this karma or was this a nightmare? And will I ever wake up?
