Alleged ‘Irish Mafia’ member pleads guilty to distributing heroin and meth for the Aryan Brotherhood
SACRAMENTO — A California woman has accepted a plea deal on charges that she conspired with incarcerated Aryan Brotherhood members and an allegedly crooked lawyer to distribute heroin and methamphetamine inside and outside of prison, court records show.
Jeanna Quesenberry pleaded guilty on Monday to two federal drug distribution charges. She is scheduled to be sentenced in late February, around the same time that several of her co-defendants are set for trial on charges that they conspired to commit murders within the California prison system to further the Aryan Brotherhood’s interests.
Quesenberry’s plea deal says her attorneys are “absolutely precluded” from arguing for a sentence of less than seven years in federal prison. She technically faces up to life in prison, though federal sentencing guidelines will almost certainly recommend a much lower prison term.
Quesenberry was indicted in 2019 on two separate cases, both of which accused her of working with others to sell drugs. She accepted a plea deal in her other case last year, but has yet to be sentenced in each.
When she was indicted alongside more than a dozen alleged Aryan Brotherhood associates and members in 2019, federal prosecutors described Quesenberry as an “important” member of the Family Affiliated Irish Mafia, or FAIM, a Bay Area-based gang formed in the early 1990s in Rodeo.
As part of Quesenberry’s plea deal, she admitted to working directly for Ronald Yandell, an alleged Aryan Brotherhood commissioner who is among those set for trial in February. Quesenberry also admitted to conspiring with a drug courier named Samuel Keeton — who has already pleaded guilty — as well as an allegedly corrupt lawyer named Robert McNamara, who’s accused of smuggling drugs to an incarcerated prison gang member during a legal visit.
In Quesenberry’s other drug case, prosecutors say she worked with three other women to sell heroin, including one instance where she allegedly told a co-defendant who was having a heart attack she wouldn’t take her to the hospital under their drug deal had been completed. She was arrested after an undercover investigation led by the Drug Enforcement Administration, which ultimately led to a wiretap operation targeting contraband cellphones of alleged prison gang members.
Quesenberry was released from jail in 2021 due to health reasons. Later that year, El Dorado County prosecutors charged her with a still-pending unemployment fraud case, stemming from an unrelated investigation, court records show.