Former Rohnert Park Officers Who Stole Marijuana Face Federal Sentencing

Two former Rohnert Park police officers are set for sentencing in federal court today after a yearslong legal battle over a scheme to steal and resell marijuana from people they pulled over along Highway 101.

Prosecutors have asked for a 46-month prison sentence for former Sgt. Brendon Jacy Tatum and 40 months for former officer Joseph Huffaker, followed by probation. Attorneys for both men have asked for home confinement.

KQED first reported in 2018 on allegations from drivers who said Rohnert Park officers stole marijuana from them during traffic stops well outside city limits. In 2020, the city paid out more than $1.8 million to settle lawsuits filed by the victims of these officers.

In 2021, a federal grand jury indicted the two officers. Tatum pleaded guilty shortly thereafter and agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors. Huffaker fought the charges, but was found guilty by a jury last summer.

Tatum spent three days on the witness stand describing how he used his role leading the department’s interdiction team to steal hundreds of pounds of cannabis during traffic stops between 2014 and 2018, bringing Huffaker into the scheme in late 2017.

But the sentencing closes only part of a scandal that exposed broader failures in Northern California law enforcement during the final years of marijuana prohibition. Trial testimony, public records and interviews revealed questions about how supervisors, investigators and outside agencies failed to stop — or fully investigate — officers who allegedly robbed drivers along Highway 101.

“It kind of bewilders me why there was only two officers that were prosecuted,” said Texas resident Zeke Flatten, a former undercover officer, private investigator and filmmaker.

Flatten was among the first people to report being robbed by officers, but eight years later, no one has been prosecuted in his case.

Who stole from Zeke Flatten?

On Dec. 5, 2017, Flatten said he was driving south on Highway 101 in Mendocino County in a rented Kia when he was pulled over by an unmarked SUV. Two white men wearing green tactical pants and black vests marked “police” approached him.

“Immediately, things were not feeling right to me,” said Flatten, who honed his intuition working undercover in the 1990s. He said he began noticing other details: the officers were not wearing badges, name tags or insignia that identified the department they worked for.

The men asked for his license and the rental agreement, but did not explain why they had stopped him. In interviews with KQED, Flatten said they asked him to get out of the vehicle, patted him down and asked if there were any “money, guns or drugs” in the car.

Flatten said he told them he had a medical marijuana license.

“He [the officer] immediately opened the hatchback of the vehicle, went for a box that I had in the back,” Flatten said. The officers found three pounds of marijuana that Flatten said he was taking to Santa Rosa for lab testing.

The men identified themselves as agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, according to Flatten.

“ Marijuana is taking over in California, like cigarettes. You may get a letter from Washington,” Flatten recalled one of the officers saying as they handed him back his license and rental agreement.

They kept the cannabis.

“ I knew at that moment that I had been robbed,” Flatten said.

Flatten filed complaints with the ATF, the FBI and Mendocino County authorities.

FBI Special Agent Jeremy Heinrich testified at Huffaker’s trial that he received Flatten’s complaint on Dec. 11, 2017, and contacted local law enforcement agencies in Mendocino County.

Those calls went nowhere, Heinrich testified, and he closed the case eight days later.

Even now, the FBI has not identified or arrested the men who stopped Flatten. Flatten said he is certain that Tatum was not involved because both men who stopped him were white and Tatum is Black. Flatten believes Huffaker was involved, though Huffaker has denied it.

The U.S. Department of Justice declined to answer questions about the case and denied KQED’s Freedom of Information Act request for documents related to the timeline of their investigation, citing privacy exemptions. KQED appealed the denial.

Flatten’s complaint, however, would become key in exposing the scheme.

Barron Lutz

About two weeks after Flatten was robbed, Humboldt County resident Barron Lutz was also driving south on Highway 101 when he was pulled over by two officers in an unmarked black SUV who identified themselves as ATF agents. They seized 23 pounds of cannabis from Lutz and refused to provide an inventory receipt.

“I wasn’t sure if I was being robbed or I was being arrested,” Lutz said on the stand.

The stop was nearly identical to Flatten’s, with one key difference: California Highway Patrol officers stopped to ask if the officers needed assistance. The CHP’s Scott Baker testified that he recognized Tatum from working with him on a joint narcotics operation in Mendocino County.

Lutz contacted the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office the next day, asking whether it had a record of the stop.

“They said they would get back to me, and nobody ever got back to me,” Lutz testified.

According to Tatum’s testimony, a Mendocino County major crimes sergeant called him later that day about a civilian complaint.

“He talked to CHP, and CHP remembered seeing Joe and I up there,” Tatum testified.

Rohnert Park is in Sonoma County, about an hour south of where Lutz was pulled over. Tatum told the sergeant the stop was legitimate.

Afterward, Tatum said, he began trying to cover his tracks: obtaining an incident number and booking a cardboard box of loose marijuana buds into evidence.

The 23 pounds of cannabis he and Huffaker took from Lutz, including designer strains such as Agent Orange and Serendipity, had already been handed off to Tatum’s “broker” and friend, Billy Timmins. Tatum said Timmins paid about $27,000 for the stolen marijuana, which the officers split and spent on high-end hunting rifles, scopes and ammunition.

On Feb. 13, 2018, Tatum received a call from Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman.

“He called me for a favor,” Tatum testified. “He [Allman] was getting a lot of media press and was pissed off because his department was getting blamed for our traffic stop.”

The coverage Allman told Tatum about appeared on the community news site Redheaded Blackbelt. On Feb. 11, 2018, the site’s owner, Kym Kemp, published articles detailing Flatten’s allegations.

When Flatten first called her, she had trouble believing his story.

“To be honest, if he hadn’t been someone that knew people I knew, which is the way Southern Humboldt works, I probably would not have taken him seriously,” she said.

But the deeper she dug into Flatten’s allegations, the more credible his complaints appeared. And the story struck a nerve among residents who had long suspected law enforcement abuses during marijuana prohibition, Kemp said.

False reports

Tatum testified that after receiving that call from the sheriff, he contacted Huffaker, and together, they drafted a press release taking responsibility for the stop. The release referenced an unspecified stop “in December,” and included the same case number tied to the marijuana Tatum had booked into evidence.

“We were both scared and thought that we’d got away with this,” Tatum testified. “But here we are, two months later, having to deal with it again.”

Once the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office received the press release, officials forwarded it to the FBI and Kemp.

Special Agent Heinrich then asked Tatum for the incident report connected to Flatten’s complaint.

But there was no report. Tatum testified that he and Huffaker did not know the driver’s name or the exact stop date. Heinrich, however, had shared those details from the complaint he had received: Zeke Flatten on Dec. 5, 2017.

“We just went with that date based upon what the FBI guy — the date that the FBI guy gave us,” Tatum said.

But in writing the report, Tatum said he and Huffaker drew on the details they could remember for the illegal stop of Lutz, not realizing they were conflating two different stops.

After receiving the report, Heinrich took no further action, despite contradictions with Flatten’s complaint. The FBI declined to answer questions about Heinrich’s handling of the case.

Kemp, however, noticed discrepancies in the report after obtaining it through a public records request, including the date, vehicle description, the amount of cannabis seized and the presence of the CHP officer.

In April 2018, she published another story, showing that Flatten’s stop and the stop described in the report were different incidents.

By then, Rohnert Park officials had realized they had a problem.

“There were numerous things in the press release that gave me heartburn,” former Police Chief Brian Masterson testified.

He placed Huffaker and Tatum on administrative leave and hired an outside investigator.

A pattern emerges

In the days after Kemp’s reporting, KQED received a tip from another driver who said they had also been robbed by Tatum.

In June, KQED, in partnership with Kemp and the North Coast Journal, published a joint investigation examining allegations from eight drivers and the role asset forfeiture played in funding the department.

Within weeks, Tatum left the Rohnert Park Department of Public Safety. The city moved to fire Huffaker, but he fought back, ultimately securing a $75,000 payout to resign.

In follow-up stories, KQED uncovered missing destruction orders for hundreds of pounds of seized cannabis, and followed the lawsuits that began to mount.

At trial, Tatum testified that officers initially used an official foundry based in San Joaquin to incinerate the excess cannabis. But sometime around 2015, they changed that policy. Instead, they began taking the hundreds of pounds of marijuana to a local farm where they would bury it in the ground.

“We took pictures of Joe on the backhoe digging the holes for the marijuana,” Tatum said, referring to Huffaker.

At some point, Tatum testified, he began taking the marijuana home to sell instead of burying it. Investigators never searched the farm, according to testimony from a special agent.

“The more drivers I stopped, or we stopped, the more chances we had to steal marijuana,” he testified.

Tatum testified that he initially sold the weed through his wife’s uncle Joe Porcaro, splitting the proceeds before the two had a falling out. Porcaro strongly denied any involvement, calling Tatum an “unremorseful, pathological liar” in an email to KQED.

Porcaro said he spoke with the FBI, but was never questioned about Tatum’s allegations. Federal prosecutors declined to answer questions about how they verified Tatum’s testimony or why Porcaro was never pursued as a potential accomplice.

‘Robin Hood’

Sometime in 2016, Tatum said he began selling marijuana through his childhood friend Billy Timmins, who later testified against Huffaker in exchange for immunity.

Timmins said he initially believed Tatum was growing the marijuana himself, but later realized the volume was too large.

“I knew that it wasn’t out of his garage,” Timmins testified. Tatum told him he was “getting it off the highway.”

Tatum said he gave drivers an ultimatum: disclaim ownership of the cannabis or face arrest. If drivers denied ownership, he could classify it as found property.

For several years, Tatum testified, the scheme operated without detection.

“It was almost like a Robin Hood story,” Timmins testified. “These guys are scumbags, and I’m going to take their weed and that’s that.”

In 2017, with legalization approaching under Proposition 64, the chief shut down the interdiction team.

Huffaker

Tatum testified that he and Huffaker became close friends. Their wives got along, and they spent time together after work. Tatum said that in late 2017, over drinks, they joked about the potential profits they could make from seizing marijuana.

“We decided that we’d tell people we were the ATF,” Tatum testified. “And not draw attention to the DEA or somebody locally they could complain to or that it could get back to.” Tatum did not tell Huffaker that he had already been stealing for years.

In December 2017, Tatum said the pair carried out several illegal stops.

Phone records place Tatum and Huffaker in the Hopland area on Dec. 6. Tatum testified they were conducting what he called “illegal interdiction,” stopping drivers and seizing cannabis. He said they met Timmins off Highway 101 near the Commisky exit, where they transferred about eight large trash bags full of marijuana into Timmins’ car so the officers could continue making stops.

In late 2023, Tatum told Timmins, his friend of more than three decades, that he planned to implicate him with the FBI. Timmins said he was furious that Tatum had dragged him into his “mess.”

Both men said that was the last time they spoke.

Shortly before trial, Timmins agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors.

Rohnert Park Department of Public Safety today

At least six of the peace officers who either worked alongside Tatum and Huffaker or supervised interdiction operations remain in law enforcement, including five with the Rohnert Park Department of Public Safety and one with the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office.

However, incident reports and court filings show that when Tatum broke departmental policies in front of them — giving drivers ultimatums, refusing to give property receipts and issuing citations for felonies — they did not stop him.

At trial, Huffaker’s attorney asked Tatum whether supervisors ever reviewed body camera footage that captured seizures of large amounts of marijuana and cash. Tatum said they did not.

Tim Mattos, who became chief of the Rohnert Park Department of Public Safety after the scandal, said in a recent interview that the officers were cleared by internal investigations and the FBI.

Mattos said the department has since expanded oversight, implemented a new evidence auditing system, added GPS tracking to vehicles and changed procedures for destroying contraband.

“ Let’s not even let this creep into people’s mind because they’re just not gonna be able to do it,” he said.

Mattos said the department has spent years “living under this cloud” and hopes the sentencing will allow the city to move forward.

Kemp said the case carried significance for cannabis growers who long feared driving their harvest through “the gauntlet” along Highway 101. But there still has not been a full reckoning with police abuses during prohibition.

“It wasn’t just those two officers,” Kemp said. “And it wasn’t just Rohnert Park. It was spread throughout the Emerald Triangle. And how bad was it? We may never know.”

Flatten is still waiting for justice. He believes that at least one of the men who robbed him remains in law enforcement.