Adviser to Indians Jailed in Murder-for-Hire Plot

The 60-year-old adviser to the Cabazon band of Mission Indians has been arrested in Indio and booked on suspicion of soliciting two police informants to kill from one to four or more persons.

John Philip Nichols, a non-Indian hired to guide efforts of the 24-member band to become financially independent, was arrested late Wednesday afternoon at a motel where, investigators said, his conversation with the informants was recorded.

Police declined to disclose the identities of the supposed victims until they can be notified, but it was learned that some of those named on tape recordings are residents of the Coachella Valley.

Nichols was held without bail in Riverside County Jail in Indio while investigators prepared to ask the district attorney’s office to issue a complaint. If he is charged, Nichols is expected to be arraigned Tuesday.

Indio Police Capt. Carl Kennedy said the initial information about the case came to police from a confidential informant who agreed to work with investigators by recording a meeting with Nichols. Kennedy said police have not determined a motive for the alleged plot.

But, he said, police have been unable to connect the purported murder-for-hire proposal leading to Nichols’ arrest with the unsolved July, 1981, execution murders of a former Cabazon tribal official and two others in Rancho Mirage.

The victims, Alfred Alvarez, 32, Patricia Castro, 44, and Ralph Boger, 42, were found shot to death on the patio of a ramshackle house. Alvarez had been vice chairman of the Cabazon Tribal Council and security chief of the tribe’s poker casino on its 1,700-acre reservation adjacent to Indio.

Shortly before his death, Alvarez told the Indio Daily News that he feared for his life. After the murders, his sister, Linda Streeter, said that Alvarez believed that non-Indians running the casino were skimming gambling profits.

The killings were investigated without success by the Riverside County sheriff’s office, but official interest in the murders was renewed last year when Jimmy Hughes, a 27-year-old ex-Army Ranger, told authorities that he had been a payoff man in the Alvarez case.

Hughes, security director of the Cabazon band’s casino and bingo operations for four years until early 1984, reported that he had been instructed in Nichols’ presence to take $25,000 to the mountain community of Idyllwild in the summer of 1981 and to give the money to a man there as partial payment for the Alvarez killings.

Hughes was joined by Indio resident Peter Zokosky, a retired arms consultant who had served as a volunteer financial adviser to the Cabazon band, in demanding a renewed investigation into the Alvarez murders.

The Riverside County sheriff’s office and the state Department of Justice responded and started inquiries. But after months without announced results, Hughes went public with his charges last October, then left the state. Zokosky later moved to the Los Angeles area.

At the time of Hughes’ statement to the media, John Philip Nichols was reportedly out of the state, but his son, John Paul Nichols, project manager for the Cabazon band, denied the charges and denounced them as “garbage.”

Deputy Atty. Gen. Sanford Feldman confirmed in a telephone interview from San Diego on Friday that a special investigations unit of the state Department of Justice is looking into the three murders. But he said, “It (the arrest of Nichols) does not appear to be related to the Alvarez matter.”