One of California Attorney General Kamala Harris' (D) staffers was arrested last week and "accused of operating a rogue police force that claimed to exist for more than 3,000 years," The Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday.
Brandon Kiel, deputy director of community affairs at the California Department of Justice, and two others — David Henry and Tonette Hayes — reportedly face charges for their roles in the Masonic Fraternal Police Department.
"Suspicions about the Masonic Fraternal Police Department — whose members trace their origins to the Knights Templar — were aroused when various police chiefs in Southern California received a letter in late January that announced new leadership for the group," the Times' Matt Hamilton wrote.
"Following an investigation, officials said, sheriff’s investigators searched two sites in Santa Clarita and found badges, weapons, uniforms and law enforcement paraphernalia."
The Los Angeles County Sheriff's department said in a statement that the Masonic Fraternal Police Department was not a legitimate police force and that Kiel, Henry, and Hayes were arrested for allegedly impersonating police officers.
The Times called attention to a website purporting to represent the Masonic department. The site claims the police department is widely respected and operates in 33 states.
"The Masonic Fraternal Organization is the oldest and most respected organization in the 'World.' Grand Masters around the various states are facing serious safety concerns for their Jurisdictions and their family members. The first Police Department was created by the 'Knights Templar's' back in 1100 B.C.," the site says. "When asked what is the difference between The Masonic Fraternal Police Department and other Police Departments the answer is simple for us. We were here first!"
"AG Kamala Harris" = 120 (Ordinal)
Over the last 25 years, Henry has been a sporadic member of a South L.A.-based Masonic group called the Prince of Peace Lodge, according to the group’s leader, 75-year-old Van Hibler.
Henry left the group in 2011 and launched his own lodge in Santa Clarita with Hayes, which they dubbed the Most Worshipful King David Masonic Prince Hall Grand Lodge, according to Hibler and public records.
Hibler said he kept in touch with Henry. In a phone call a few years ago, Hibler recalled lamenting the trash-talk among some current and former members, and said Henry made him an offer:
“He said, ‘Grand, if you have that kind of problem, call me. I got my own police department,’ ” Hibler said.
Henry had told Hibler before that he wanted to create a police force — something along the lines of the Knights Templar Order that was formed during the First Crusade to protect Jerusalem.
“He wanted to take it into that area,” Hibler said with a chuckle.”I didn’t see a reason for it.”
It is unclear when the faux police department took shape. In 2010, Hayes and Henry created the Masonic Investigative Bureau to “investigate potential candidates for the Masonic Fraternal Order,” according to filings with the secretary of state. Both were also state-licensed security guards, records show.
In the spring of 2013, records show, the duo’s Masonic lodge added a new chief financial officer: Kiel, who was hired for Harris’ office that summer.
At political and community events, the three became familiar faces: Hawthorne Mayor Chris Brown remembers meeting Hayes in 2013 at a free haircut event at a local barbershop. At the event — which Kiel and Henry also attended — Hayes introduced herself as a minister. Either Hayes or Henry appear in photographs with Waters, Harris and former Assemblyman Mike Davis (D-Los Angeles).
Patrisse Cullors, a civil rights activist and the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, said she first met Kiel at a League of Women’s Voters event at which he mentioned his work for the attorney general.
“He was super clean-cut and seemed really legit,” she said.
Kiel later introduced her to Henry and Hayes, who was wearing a priest’s collar.
Hayes and Henry described themselves as Freemasons but did not offer more specifics, Cullors said. Both would later stand alongside Cullors at a downtown news conference denouncing violence in L.A. County jails. But Cullors said she stopped associating with them last summer.
“Things got really odd,” Cullors said. “It wasn’t clear what was happening with them.”
In November 2014, a site that claimed to be the Masonic Fraternal Police Department’s official website was registered. In late January, the group mailed letters to police chiefs across California announcing Henry’s role as the head of their police force.
Appearing at a restaurant in Santa Clarita and a march in Pasadena in recent months, Hayes and Henry wore crisp, pleated uniforms with stars pinned to the collars and official badges, according to witnesses and photos on social media.
Henry told a server at the restaurant that he could pull over drivers and issue tickets “like a normal cop can,” according to some of the restaurant’s employees.
At a meeting in Santa Clarita in February with sheriff’s Capt. Roosevelt Johnson, Hayes and Henry wore their uniforms, but Kiel — who sometimes sported a Masonic pin on his lapel — wore a navy blue suit.
That a rising political star like Kiel may have become tangled up in the group has stunned longtime friends like Dallas Fowler, a member of the Los Angeles Commission on the Status of Women who attended college with Kiel in Florida.
“He was always focused, always on the job,” said Fowler, recalling that their last conversation was regarding a training session that Harris’ office was organizing. “He had to have truly believed what he was doing, or was misled in some way.”
Early in her political career in the 1990s, Kamala Harris had the backing of California’s wealthiest families that control the state’s Democrat political machine.
“At splashy weddings, charity balls and all the right restaurants, she hobnobbed with San Francisco’s moneyed elite — and made lasting allies who backed her at every stage of her political career,” senior staff reporter at Politico Michael Kruse wrote in August 2019.
The article begins by describing the 1999 Napa wedding of Vanessa Jarman to oil heir Billy Getty as lavish and “replete with red carpet, hundreds of flickering votives,” a “fair amount of wine,” and a “168-person guest list stocked with socialites and scions, philanthropists and other assorted glitterati.”
Among “the coterie of the chosen” was Kamala Harris, a 34-year-old prosecutor who had just 18 months under her belt at the San Francisco district attorney’s office.
“And she wasn’t just some celebrity’s all but anonymous plus-one,” Kruse wrote. “She was featured in the photo coverage of the hot-ticket affair, smiling wide, decked out in a dark gown with a drink in hand.”
Today, Harris often humbly describes herself as “a child of Oakland,” which implies she’s comes from the poor neighborhoods of a gang-infested city. However, her Indian-born mother was a breast cancer researcher and her Jamaican-born father was a college instructor. At Stanford University, he taught Marxist economics. A family with two professional-level incomes would hardly be poor in California in the 1970s and ’80s.
Still, how did a upper middle-class, mixed-race woman from immigrant parents end up among high society’s glitterati?
Prince Hall Freemason Willie Lewis Brown, Jr.
In 1994, Kamala was “introduced splashily in the region’s most popular newspaper column” as the steady girlfriend of “one of the state’s most powerful politicians,” Kruse wrote. Namely, Speaker of the California Assembly Willie Brown, who was married at the time and 30 years her senior.
Brown would go on to become San Francisco’s first black mayor in 1995, at which point he announced he was breaking off his relationship with Harris. Willie was succeeded as mayor in 2004 by current California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is the adopted son of John Paul Getty III.
Cozy, isn’t it?
The New York Times described Brown as one of the country’s most powerful state legislators.
The San Francisco Chronicle called Brown “one of San Francisco’s most notable mayors,” adding that he had “celebrity beyond the city’s boundaries.”
Brown had a checkered 40-year history in politics, beginning with his assemblyman post in 1964. He was repeatedly investigated by the FBI for his “pay to play” politics but never indicted. A book could be written on Brown alone, but here are just a few odd notables to provide a little color.
From 1975 until its demise in 1978, Brown supported the Peoples Temple, led by Jim Jones, while it was being investigated for alleged criminal wrongdoing, Willie’s Wikipedia page states. He “attended the Temple perhaps a dozen times and served as master of ceremonies at a testimonial dinner for Jones where he stated in his introduction ‘[l]et me present to you a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein … Chairman Mao.'”
Wiki also reveals that Willie’s “flamboyant style made him so well known as the consummate [crooked] politician that when an actor playing a party politician in 1990’s ‘The Godfather Part III’ did not understand director Francis Ford Coppola’s instruction to model his character after Brown, Coppola fired the actor and hired Brown himself to play the role.”
Among these other things, Willie is also an active and influential Prince Hall Mason, according to the Prince Hall Masons, which is a branch of North American Freemasonry, founded by African Americans in 1784. Today, Prince Hall is the oldest and largest (300,000+ initiated members) predominantly African-American fraternity in the nation, according to its Wiki page.
Willie’s house, where lived with his wife for decades — even when they were “separated” — is located on Masonic Street in San Francisco. You can’t make this stuff up.
Prince Hall Freemasonry was created out of necessity by American blacks because they were denied initiation into white lodges by Confederate Gen. Albert Pike, an American author, poet, orator, jurist and prominent member of the Freemasons.
Fall of Albert Pike statue
People stand around the statue of Confederate general Albert Pike after it was toppled by protesters at Judiciary square in Wahsington, DC on June 19, 2020. It was pulled down with rope as dozens of demonstrators chanted “Black Lives Matter!” PHOTO: Eric Baradat/AFP/Getty
Just as in the U.K., Freemasons historically have had strong influence within the justice system and law enforcement — however, just as in the U.K., members are advised not to reveal their affiliation. They also influence professional sports, the entertainment industry, education and black activism, as well as politics.
The Prince Hall Freemasons also have influence among black Greek sororities and fraternities on university campuses, including Kamala Harris’ Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA), which is tied to the Freemasonic Order of the Eastern Star (OES).
Other members of Alpha Kappa Alpha include former First Lady Michelle Obama, author Toni Morrison, singers Alicia Keys and Gladys Knight, comedian Wanda Sykes, actress Phylicia Rashad and Rosa Parks.
Only two white women have ever been honored with membership: Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton.
Cozy, isn’t it?
Historically, Freemasons have also have also infiltrated postmaster positions and have used their positions to spy on the public and influence politics. This doesn’t bode well for an uncorrupted 2020 vote-by-mail presidential election.
Machine Politics in California
As an assemblyman of 15 years, Brown had a reputation for appointing friends and family to city posts, which helped to oil the machine of cronyism in San Francisco’s political cesspool, which includes California Gov. Gavin Newsom, U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and U.S. Sen. Diane Feinstein.
“Newsom owed his start in San Francisco politics to an appointment by Brown to the city’s Parking and Traffic Commission, and later, to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors,” Politco reports.
For at least two years (1994-1995), Kamala was Willie’s mistress. She wasn’t a secret fling. He paraded her to social events all over the state and gave her access to “the coterie of the chosen.” But that’s not all.
During those two years, 29-year-old Harris went from being a prosecutor of three years at the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office to high-paying appointments, thanks to Brown.
“Brown, exercising his power,” the Los Angeles Times noted in 1994, “named attorney Kamala Harris to the California Medical Assistance Commission, a job that pays $72,000 a year.” He also appointed her to the state’s Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, which paid another $97,088 a year. She took a leave of absence as a prosecutor to serve in these positions.
But most importantly, through Willie, Kamala was afforded access California’s high society who would provide the funds she would need to run for District Attorney of San Francisco in 2003.
“Outfitted in sharp designer suits and strands of bright pearls, Harris kickstarted her drive to become San Francisco’s top cop — in its ritziest, most prestigious locale. Predominantly white Pacific Heights — hills upon hills, gobsmacking views of the Golden Gate strait, mansions built and bought with both new tech money and old gold rush cash — is home to Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Gavin Newsom and others, one of the country’s foremost concentrations of politicians and their patrons,” Politico reports.
In a San Francisco Chronicle article penned by Willie Brown himself earlier this year, he wrote, “And I certainly helped with her first race for district attorney in San Francisco. I have also helped the careers of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Gov. Gavin Newsom, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and a host of other politicians.”
It wasn’t just outgoing S.F. mayor Slick Willie and the Gettys who helped Harris obtain the coveted position of San Francisco D.A. in 2004. She was also backed by the Catholic Church. Harris’ campaign was a challenge to Terence Hallinan, who — by today’s standard of the term — was a truly “progressive” prosecutor, and he was aggressively going after predatory pedophile priests within the San Francisco Archdiocese.
THE INTERCEPT: Just six months before Harris took office, a U.S. Supreme Court decision overturned a California law that had retroactively eliminated the statute of limitations for criminal prosecution of child molestation cases. That shifted the focus to holding predators among the clergy accountable through civil cases and through a broader effort to bring attention to predators who had been shielded by the church.
Hallinan believed that the clergy abuse files were a matter of public record; Harris refused to release them to the public.
In her seven years as district attorney, Harris’s office did not proactively assist in civil cases against clergy sex abuse and ignored requests by activists and survivors to access the cache of investigative files that could have helped them secure justice, according to several victims of clergy sex abuse living in California who spoke to The Intercept.
“It went from Terence Hallinan going hundred miles an hour, full speed ahead, after the Catholic Church to Kamala Harris doing absolutely nothing and taking it backwards hundred miles an hour,” said Joey Piscitelli, a sexual assault survivor, who a jury found had been molested as a student while attending Salesian College Preparatory, a Catholic high school in Richmond, California.
Traditionally, Catholics and Freemasons are not compatible organizations. Harris has no personal ties to the Catholic church and no known ties to pedophiles. So one can only conclude that this is an example of her lack of ethics and desire for power. It shows she was a good student of Slick Willies’ pay-for-play politics.
After six otherwise unremarkable six years as San Francisco’s top prosecutor, Kamala once again leveraged her ties to California’s political machine and summoned funds from her high society friends to back her run for California attorney general in 2010.
Countless mainstream newspaper articles critical of Kamala’s five years as A.G. have been written — almost all of them before Joe Biden chose her as his veep. On the whole, the articles describe Harris — the self-proclaimed “top cop” of California — as the antithesis of the progressive reformer she claims to be today.
“Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors,” argued law professor Lara Bazelon in a 2019 New York Times column about Harris’ attorney-general record, the Orange County Register reports.
Calls to review police misconduct grew after Harris took office as attorney general in January 2011, in a state with a historically high rate of police shootings, Deccan Herald reports, but she upheld a policy of not interceding in officer-involved shootings and refused to endorse a bill opposed by police unions that would have required her office to appoint special prosecutors to investigate deadly police shootings.
While Kabala was A.G., the population of California’s prisons exploded. The prosecution rate for drug crimes increased from roughly 50% to 75%. Eventually, state prisons became so overcrowded that they were deemed unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ordered the immediate release of 30,000 low-level offenders. Harris and machine politician and then-Gov. Jerry Brown pushed back against the order by implementing a two-year delay, a move that nearly held them in contempt of court.
Harris’ legal team in 2014 argued before the judicial panel that most of those prisoners now work as groundskeepers, janitors and in prison kitchens, with wages that range from 8 cents to 37 cents per hour, the Los Angeles Times reported. They argued in court that if forced to release these inmates early, prisons would lose an important labor pool.
BUZZFEED: In a Sept. 30 filing in the case, signed by Deputy Attorney General Patrick McKinney but under Harris’ name, the state argued, “Extending 2-for-1 credits to all minimum custody inmates at this time would severely impact fire camp participation — a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought.”
Approximately 4,400 California prisoners help the state battle wildfires, at wages of about $2 a day. There is an exception in the agreement that allows the state to retain firefighters — but only firefighters — who are otherwise eligible for release.
Kabala tried to distance herself from her legal team’s prison labor argument. When asked about it by the media, she proclaimed she was “shocked” and “very troubled” — as though she didn’t know exactly what her office’s arguments would be to SCOTUS or the policies and practices her office had in place.
This wouldn’t be the first time she would unconvincingly claim ignorance about the activities of her team.
The Masonic Fraternal Police Department
In February 2015, a top aide to A.G. Harris named Brandon Kiel waltzed into Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station and introduced himself to Capt. Roosevelt Johnson as R.W. Grand High Priest Brandon Kiel 33° and member of the Masonic Fraternal Police Department (MFPD).
Kiel told Capt. Johnson that MFPD is a 3,000-year-old organization descended from the Knights Templar. It’s sole purpose is to serve and protect masons and their families. Kiel and his two uniform-clad companions, Supreme Sovereign Grand Master David Henry X° and Reverend Tonette Hayes (OES), told Johnson that they hoped to establish a cooperative relationship.
It wasn’t the first time the trio had done this. One month earlier, Henry X° had sent official letters to law enforcement agencies throughout Southern California introducing himself as the newly elected chief of the MFPD.
“Grand Masters around the various states are facing serious safety concerns for their Jurisdictions and their family members,” the statement read. It later goes on to say that it provides its services to the “Masonic Sovereign Grand Masters and their Masonic Jurisdictions, as well as other Fraternities, Sororities and Greek Organizations.”
Kiel then followed up with phone calls to the agencies, identified himself as the MFPD’s Chief Deputy Director and began requesting meetings with agency chiefs. They even provided a website to explain the history of the organization.
Kiel then followed up with phone calls to the agencies, identified himself as the MFPD’s Chief Deputy Director and began requesting meetings with agency chiefs. They even provided a website to explain the history of the organization.
One of the three Santa Clarita residents charged with claiming to be part of a state-sanctioned police agency called the Masonic Fraternal Police Department was sentenced Friday afternoon, according to officials.
Capt. Johnson later recalled that was skeptical of the trio and asked them questions about their organization, questions that he felt weren’t adequately answered. Upon the trio’s departure, Kiel handed Capt. Johnson his business card. The police captain said when he read it, alarm bells went off in his head. The card identified Kiel as an official aide to California Attorney General Kamala Harris’ office. So he contacted the FBI, and detectives from multiple agencies opened an investigation.
Two months later, detectives served a search and arrest warrants on Henry X°, Rev. Hayes and Kiel.
The police raid was on two houses associated with the group in Santa Clarita, The Guardian reported. According to the sheriff’s department, they found “badges, identification cards, weapons, uniforms, police type vehicles and other law enforcement equipment.”
Kiel was charged with six counts of impersonating a police officer and unlawful use of a state ID.
Rev. Hayes was charged with four counts of impersonating an officer.
Henry X° was charged with multiple misdemeanors and three counts of felony perjury.
Prosecutors later accused all three of perjury and conspiracy to commit perjury by obtaining fee-exempt license plates from the Department of Motor Vehicles, USA Today reported.
Henry X° was an Emmy award-winning investigative broadcast news reporter, as well as Kiel’s father-in-law. Henry X° and Rev. Hayes were licensed to run a private investigations company, MIB Investigative Agency, according to state records. Both also had active firearms permits as security guards.
In the following video, Henry X° announces before a lodge of masons that Kiel plans to run for the U.S. Senate in two years.
The three were released from custody the morning after their arrest, on April 30, 2015. Keil was immediately suspended from his position in the Justice Department, but a full year would pass before the trio appeared in court on the charges.
Before a L.A. Superior Court judge on the morning of April 18, 2016, Kiel claimed that the Justice Department knew full well what the MFPD was up to, and Kiel’s attorney argued that search warrant did not include Kiel’s laptop and government-issued Mustang. So the judge threw out the evidence and the case against Kiel.
Within hours of appearing before a San Fernando judge that same day, 48-year-old Henry X° was dead. The cause of death was said to be a pulmonary embolism, which can be the result of a dislodged blood clot. It can can also happen if someone is injected with a hypodermic needle that has air bubbles in it.
Rev. Hayes pled guilty and, on April 29, 2016, was sentenced to three years probation and 30 days community service.
It doesn’t appear that Kamala ever made a public statement about the case or has ever been questioned about it by the press. Instead, news outlets from California to the U.K. have treated the Kiel and Kamala secret P.D. story the same way they treated the revelations about Hunter and Joe Biden. The Lugenpress goes out of its way to label the secret MFPD as fake, downplay Kiel’s working relationship with Harris, protect from political fallout, and portray Henry X° and Rev. Hayes as lone kooks.
Hmm. Really?
