Dr. John Philip Nichols

John Philip Nichols, a non-Indian, was the tribal administrator of the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians at Indio, California, under Tribal Chairman Arthur Welmas, and managed the tribe's business affairs; in the early 1980s the only building on the reservation was a casino.²

The Wackenhut Joint Venture

In April 1981 the Wackenhut Corporation entered into a joint venture with the Cabazon Security Corporation, signed by Robert Frye for Wackenhut and Welmas for the tribe's company; its stated primary purpose was to "qualify for, bid on, and obtain government guard service contracts." Early on Nichols wanted the joint venture to sell night-vision equipment, and it pursued sales to representatives of Guatemala and Honduras; as far as the Justice Department's special counsel could tell, no sales were made. The venture also pursued the manufacture of combustible cartridge cases with Peter Zokosky of Armtec Defense Products, which took people from the joint venture to Picatinny Arsenal in 1981.² Investigating Michael Riconosciuto's claims for the Justice Department between 1991 and 1993, Special Counsel Nicholas Bua found that any business relationship Riconosciuto had was with Nichols or the Cabazons rather than with Wackenhut, and that no witness could "even corroborate that Riconosciuto had access to computer equipment while on the Cabazon reservation."²

Arrest and Conviction

The Indio police arrested Nichols in January 1985 on charges of soliciting murder; a contemporaneous clipping in his FBI file described him as in state prison for diagnostic evaluation "on two counts of murder solicitation," and the FBI recorded that he had been convicted and was serving his sentence. The same file preserves a 1985 report that the California State Board of Equalization was seeking about 2 million dollars in cigarette taxes from Nichols and his son, John Paul Nichols, over a reservation smoke shop run until 1980.³

The Alvarez Murders

On July 1, 1981, Tribal Vice Chairman Fred Alvarez, 32, his friend Ralph Boger, 42, and Patricia Castro, 44, were found shot to death at 35040 Bob Hope Drive in Rancho Mirage. A grand jury in the mid-1980s brought no charges. After new documents surfaced in 2007, the former Cabazon security chief Jimmy Hughes was arrested at Miami International Airport on September 26, 2009, on his way to Honduras, and charged with conspiring with three other men to commit the murders to keep Alvarez from exposing alleged illegal activities by Nichols. On July 1, 2010, after Deputy Attorney General Mike Murphy said prosecutors had "lost confidence to proceed," Judge Dale R. Wells dismissed the charges. No one has been convicted of the murders.⁴

Arms, the Mob and the Alibi

Michael Riconosciuto described Nichols as a former CIA agent. The writer Cheri Seymour wrote that the joint venture was formalized on April 1, 1981, as "Cabazon Arms," to manufacture arms and explosives for export under the reservation's sovereign status, with a Department of Defense secret facility clearance, and that it proposed 120mm combustible cartridge cases, 9mm machine pistols, laser-sighted assault weapons, sniper rifles, portable rockets and biological weapons; that Nichols introduced Riconosciuto to Frye, and that Riconosciuto did a railgun exercise for Dr. Harry Fair at Picatinny; and that the murder solicitation involved five intended victims and drugs and that Nichols served 18 months, his son acting as administrator. Seymour also wrote that he had done business in Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, the Netherlands, England, Canada, France, Spain, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, had managed a Coca-Cola bottling plant in São Paulo in 1960 and led in the Chilean Pentecostal movement, had written himself a ten-year contract with the tribe in 1978 for half the profits of any business he brought in, and had proposed security for Crown Prince Fahd's palace, and that Indio police surveillance in August 1981 observed him with Tommy Marson, Vincent Caci Bologna, Anthony Fratianno and Daniel Magano. Zokosky's timeline placed Nichols in Canada with him from June 22 to June 30, 1981, which John Belton said had been arranged as an alibi. Hughes said he had been told in Nichols's presence to take 5,000 dollars as partial payment for the Alvarez killings, and that the tribe's gambling enterprises were fronts for government-sanctioned covert military activity. Riconosciuto said Nichols's office was broken into to retrieve Phyllis Riconosciuto's diary with passwords for Tyme Shares, and that Nichols and Zokosky blamed him for the murder of Paul Morasca.¹