Complaint: Killing of tribal leader was hit job

LOS ANGELES(AP) – An unsolved 1981 triple murder that spawned decades of conspiracy theories was a hit job orchestrated by a tribal casino director, financial adviser and others to cover up illegal activity at the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians reservation, state authorities said Thursday in a felony complaint.

James “Jimmy” Hughes, the founder of a Miami-based Christian ministry, was arrested Saturday at Miami-Dade International Airport on an outstanding warrant and was being held in Miami, where he is fighting extradition to California.

Hughes, 52, was charged with three counts of murder in the execution-style shootings of Cabazon tribal official Alfred Alvarez and his friends Patricia Castro and Ralph Boger.

Hughes is also charged with one count of conspiracy to commit a crime. It wasn’t immediately clear if Hughes had retained an attorney.

The complaint alleges that Hughes conspired with non-Indian tribal financial consultant John Philip Nichols, Nichols’ son John Paul Nichols, and others in the days immediately before the murders to “prevent Fred Alvarez from exposing illegal activities of John Philip Nichols, occurring at the Cabazon Indian Reservation.”

The reservation is located near Indio, in a rural area of Riverside County about 130 miles southeast of Los Angeles. A message left at the tribal administration offices was not immediately returned.

The elder Nichols died in 2001 after pleading no contest to two counts of murder solicitation and serving 18 months in prison in another murder-for-hire plot. At the time, investigators said they couldn’t tie him to the unsolved 1981 slayings.

The arrest warrant for Hughes was issued in August by the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department after a joint investigation with the state attorney general’s office, said Evan Westrup, a spokesman for the state attorney general. The state is taking the lead in prosecuting the case because Riverside County District Attorney Rod Pacheco is a distant cousin of Hughes.

Westrup declined to say what prompted authorities to issue the warrant 28 years after the crime.

State officials are seeking to have Hughes extradited to California by a special governor’s warrant, a process that could take a month or more, Westrup said. Westrup said the investigation is ongoing and added that an affidavit in support of Hughes’ arrest warrant was sealed by a judge in August.

The bizarre killings were dubbed the “octopus murders” by detectives because of the complexity and mystery surrounding them. For years, numerous local and state investigations turned up no suspects, despite rampant rumors, pressure from the victims’ families, and the apparent suicide in 1991 of a freelance reporter who was probing the matter.

Alvarez was vice chairman of the Cabazon Tribal Council and security chief of the tribe’s poker casino. Hughes was security director of the tribe’s casino and bingo operations for four years, until 1984. The elder Nichols was an outside financial guru hired by the 24-member tribe in 1978 and was considered a pioneer in Indian gaming.

In a 1985 article about the elder Nichols’ arrest in the murder-for-hire plot, the Los Angeles Times reported that Alvarez told the Indio Daily News shortly before his murder that he feared for his life. The article also said Alvarez’s sister said her brother believed the non-Indians running the casino were skimming gambling profits.

The Desert Sun newspaper later reported that Alvarez was shot the day he was to meet with an attorney to reveal “mismanagement of Cabazon monies.”

The sister, Linda Streeter, did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

Alvarez’s father, Leroy Alvarez, said he couldn’t comment about the events surrounding his son’s murder.

“It’s been a long time,” he said. “We can’t say a heck of a lot about that. They said to kind of keep quiet for a while.”

In 1984, Hughes, then 27, told authorities he had been a payoff man in the Alvarez case. He said in the summer of 1981, he had been instructed in the presence of the elder Nichols to take $25,000 to the mountain community of Idyllwild and give it to a man as a partial payment for the Alvarez killings, according to the 1985 Times article.

Hughes went public with his allegations in October 1984 and left California after renewed investigations turned up nothing.

Hughes resurfaced in 1995, when he founded the Jimmy Hughes Ministries. The ministry Web site says the group provides services in Central America to battered women, drug addicts and others. It lists its headquarters as Miami.

The others named in the complaint have not been charged.

Calls to listings for the younger Nichols in New York City and at an Indio golf course on Cabazon property rang unanswered.

Glen Heggstad, another person named but not charged in the complaint, said Thursday he was interviewed by sheriff’s detectives several months ago and was cooperating. Heggstad said he had been friends with Alvarez, and the tribal leader told him before his death that he feared for his life because he had “uncovered some information.”

“I just spoke with the investigating officer, and he says I’m not involved,” Heggstad said. “This is pretty freaky.”

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Associated Press Writer Amy Taxin contributed to this report.