On a hot summer day in 2012, Jennifer Chrisman watched a black SUV pull into a school parking lot in the small town of Grenada, California, just south of Yreka.
Inside sat Darren Rose, a fellow member of the Alturas Indian Rancheria. He had promised her a deal, Chrisman said, but only if she came by herself and kept the meeting secret from her brother.
The tribe’s few members had been divided for years, fighting in court for control of the rancheria leadership and finances. And now, as she walked over to the vehicle under a hot afternoon sun, she wondered what was coming next.
“I asked him what he wanted and why he called me, because I want nothing to do with that man,” Chrisman said.
Rose presented her with a contract to give up her voting rights and all future shares of the tribe’s revenue. In return, she would be named the tribe’s associate gaming commissioner and receive $10,000, health benefits and a $3,000-a-month salary for life.
Chrisman said the offer came with a threat.
“‘We're going to go after you for embezzlement,’” Chrisman said Rose told her. “‘We are going to disenroll you and your brother.’”
After she left Rose’s vehicle, she called her brother Joseph Burrell. He had already signed a similar deal, although his agreement relinquished his tribal membership.
She signed too, after Rose added a waiver of the tribe’s sovereign immunity, allowing her to sue if Rose didn’t honor the contract.
The promised payments, she said, came sporadically, and she never received health benefits.
“If they just don't like something you've said about them in public, they stop paying,” Chrisman said.
Chrisman said she now has terminal cancer. Treatment costs thousands of dollars a month. She said her husband has spent most of his retirement savings. She’s used that sovereign immunity to sue the tribe repeatedly in Sacramento Superior Court, with no judgment yet over healthcare.
Over the last 15 years, the Alturas Indian Rancheria has brought in tens of millions of dollars from tribal businesses and federal funding.
Chrisman and another member, Wendy Del Rosa, said public money and profits now go to Rose and Wendy’s brother, tribal Chairman Phillip Del Rosa, rather than tribal services.
“Nobody ever saw anything of those funds,” Wendy Del Rosa said. “Darren [Rose] got half. Phillip got half.”
She claimed they even transferred her private retirement funds into a tribal account she cannot access.
Phillip Del Rosa and Rose denied those accusations and said the tribe has paid Chrisman. They also claimed Wendy Del Rosa and a former top official in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Wayne Smith, have stolen money from the tribe. They contend years of infighting can be traced back to Smith.
The result is a dispute whose scale is difficult to reconcile with the size of the government at its center. The Alturas Indian Rancheria is one of the smallest federally recognized tribes. For years, its handful of members have been divided by shifting alliances and accusations of fraud, embezzlement and forgery. At times, there have been more lawsuits than tribal members.
“The tribe is so small. One member could shift the balance of power.”Wendy Del Rosa
Family business
The Alturas Indian Rancheria was always a small settlement. In the 1920s, the federal government purchased about 20 acres near Alturas, the only incorporated city in Modoc County, for displaced Pitt River families.
In the beginning, only 10 or so people lived on the small parcel on the Modoc Plateau. Over the years, the numbers dwindled as people left in search of work.
Chairman Paul Del Rosa, a local stock car racer, opened the Desert Rose Casino in 1999, a modest operation intended to provide the rancheria with a steady stream of income. He wouldn’t live long to see the fruits of his effort. Paul Del Rosa died in a car accident in 2002.
After Paul Del Rosa’s death, the rancheria had four enrolled members: his children, Wendy and Phillip Del Rosa, and his niece and nephew, Chrisman and Burrell.
But the tribe soon turned to a novel strategy for increasing its population — and business opportunities. It began adopting members.
Wendy Del Rosa said attorney John Peebles introduced the tribe to Rose, then a member of the Karuk tribe. Rose joined with promises. He said he controlled an interest in a 160-acre federal allotment in Yreka, about 170 miles away from the rancheria, where the tribe could build a second casino.
For Chrisman, it was a mistake that would tear apart the family.
“It went south the minute Darren Rose became a member,” Chrisman said. “It's gone horribly wrong since then.”
In 2009, the tribe expanded membership to those without known Native American ancestry. Wendy Del Rosa said the tribe adopted Calvin Phelps, a tobacco businessman from North Carolina, and Don Packingham, a retired law enforcement officer from New Mexico, to help the rancheria break into cigarette manufacturing.
The combination of gaming and tobacco appeared to offer the descendants of that small band of dispossessed families a route to prosperity.
Instead, the tiny tribe began to fracture.
Rose faction vs. Del Rosa faction
Rose’s plans for a new casino ran into legal roadblocks. The BIA questioned Rose’s ownership of the Yreka allotment.
The rancheria hired Smith to help push approval for the casino. Smith had previously served as the deputy assistant secretary at the BIA before resigning amid an investigation into influence peddling. As tribal administrator, Smith was paid $15,000 a month, according to court documents. But even with Smith’s help, the BIA refused to approve the 25,000-square-foot gaming facility in 2006.
Despite no new casino, Rose remained a voting member of the Alturas Indian Rancheria. And he was going to play an active role in the tribe’s future.
In 2008, he accused Phillip Del Rosa, serving then as chairman, of embezzling tribal money. Rose organized his ousting with the support of Chrisman and Burrell.
Chrisman said she was already talking with Department of Justice investigators about Phillip and Wendy Del Rosa allegedly siphoning tribal money. She said Rose convinced her that he would right the rancheria’s course.
In the courts, Rose, Chrisman and Burrell became known as the Rose faction. On the other side was the Del Rosa faction, made up of the Del Rosa siblings and newly adopted cigarette manufacturers, Packingham and Phelps.
The two sides held competing elections in 2010 to elect officers in the tribe’s three-person business council, which controls the rancheria’s pocketbook. The Rose faction argued that Phelps and Packingham did not have voting rights, so the Del Rosa faction’s election wasn’t valid.
This situation put the BIA in a bind.
Both factions had submitted competing proposals under the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, which allows tribes to run services otherwise provided by the federal government. The agency didn’t know which faction to fund. Judges couldn’t even figure out if Packingham and Phelps were in the tribe.
Finally, the BIA recognized the last uncontested tribal election, which was in 2008, consisting of Phillip Del Rosa as chairman, Rose as vice chairman and Wendy Del Rosa as secretary-treasurer. The BIA described its decision as interim while this intra-tribal dispute played out.
And the conflict between members continued
In 2013, a majority of the Alturas Indian Rancheria voted to remove Phillip Del Rosa from his leadership position over allegations he stole tribal funds. The order was signed by Rose, Chrisman, Wendy Del Rosa, Burrell and Phelps.
Phillip Del Rosa denied the allegations and has said the removal was invalid. He has never been convicted of embezzling tribal funds. Rose, who is currently allied with Phillip Del Rosa, said Smith manipulated him into signing the document.
Even the tribe’s mail became a fight, reaching the courts of the U.S. Postal Service in 2015 with Rose and Wendy Del Rosa both claiming their home as the tribe’s official address.
“The Tribe’s chaotic governance is mired in continual litigation. Allegations of fraud, embezzlement, forgery, and perjury abound even within this administrative case dealing only with mail delivery,” said Administrative Judge Gary Shapiro. “It has become clear to me that the disputants and others involved in the Tribe’s governance will act in whatever manner seems expedient to them at the moment, depending on the situation at the time amid continually shifting alliances.”
He ruled the Postal Service would deliver tribal mail to Rose.
Wendy Del Rosa said alliances have shifted several times over the years.
“The tribe is so small,” Wendy Del Rosa said. “One member could shift the balance of power.”
Wendy Del Rosa said Rose and Phillip Del Rosa eventually began working together, excluding her and her cousins from decisions about tribal funds. Chrisman, once a member of the Rose faction, said she now blames him for the infighting.
“Darren [Rose] was using all of us as pawns,” she said.
Wendy said the tribe hasn’t held an election for the business committee in over a decade, since the BIA made its interim decision on the rancheria’s leadership. She said she hasn’t spoken to her brother in just as long. Phillip Del Rosa and Rose can outvote her on the three-person committee for any official business.
Peebles, the tribe’s longtime attorney who now sides with Rose and Phillip Del Rosa, said the tribe can’t hold an election while there is a dispute over members. Wendy Del Rosa and Smith would challenge any vote in court, he said.
“It's been their refusal to determine and to come to an agreement as to who the tribal members are that has prevented us from holding an effective election,” Peebles said.
He said Smith at one point even drafted a resolution to make himself a member of the tribe, something Smith denied.
“It was basically to always give [Wendy Del Rosa] a majority, so she always had the power,” Phillip Del Rosa said. “For her and Wayne, for their benefit.”
Peebles said Wendy Del Rosa and Smith raided the Desert Rose Casino in 2014, taking over $1 million. They accused Wendy Del Rosa of using tribal funds to pay Smith hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“The exact same thing they're accusing us of doing is what they've done,” Peebles said.
Smith said Wendy Del Rosa, as the secretary-treasurer, put the casino money into an account for safekeeping.
“She thought that Phillip [Del Rosa] and Darren [Rose] were going to take the money,” he said.
In 2021, the Environmental Protection Agency debarred Wendy Del Rosa and Smith for improperly spending funds granted to the tribe, meaning they couldn’t apply for federal grants for three years. Wendy Del Rosa claims the grant-funded water monitoring work could not be completed because Rose and Phillip Del Rosa obstructed the work.
“The exact same thing they're accusing us of doing is what they've done."John Peebles
Phelps, meanwhile, pleaded guilty in an unrelated federal fraud case and was sentenced to three years in federal prison in 2014. Prosecutors said the tobacco executive bought two corporate jets and a Maserati with $8 million he bilked from his companies. Even while in prison, Phelps managed to vote in a tribal election as part of the Del Rosa faction. But Wendy Del Rosa said he eventually relinquished his membership.
She told The Sacramento Bee in 2015 that the rancheria disenrolled Packingham “for many attempts to overthrow the tribal government.”
“He wasn't the most stable of people,” Wendy Del Rosa said. “People will do a lot of things out of greed, a lot of things.”
Phillip Del Rosa and his faction said Smith, who now works for the Buena Vista Rancheria, is still pulling strings from afar.
“I haven't had anything to do with these people for over 12 years,” Smith said. Referring to Phillip Del Rosa and Rose, he said, “I think they're despicable human beings.”
During these years of shifting allegiances, backstabbing and litigation, the tribe has continued to take in millions of dollars through businesses, gaming payments and federal programs. State and federal agencies have alleged that not all of the money was obtained legally.
Cigarettes, marijuana and cement
The casino proposed for the federal allotment in Yreka was never built. But the tribe didn’t let the land go to waste.
In mid-July of this year, a steady stream of cars exited I-5, driving into the dry hills above Yreka to visit an Alturas Indian Rancheria drive-thru smoke shop and gas station. Fuel there cost about 20 cents less per gallon than in the valley below.
Across the street was an unfinished commercial building. Farther down the road, dust rose from AIR Construction and Excavation trucks transporting material to a nearby cement batch plant, another company run by Rose and Phillip Del Rosa.
The BIA says it’s all illegal.
In June, the agency filed a cease-and-desist order against Phillip Del Rosa and Rose, informing them again that the federal government never approved commercial activity on the allotment.
“It’s really not even a tribe. They’ve made it into their own private enterprise.”Wendy Del Rosa
The warning was not the first. In 2014, the BIA also issued an order to stop commercial activity on the land and to pay trespass damages. The agency’s regional director, Darin Jarnaghan, said the tribe has been trespassing on the property since 2005.
Peebles said the cease-and-desist letter is a big misunderstanding.
“We've had a number of meetings with [the BIA] since that time,” he said. “They had not done their research.”
He said the tribe is still planning to build a casino on the land.
In a statement, the BIA confirmed it communicated with the tribe but disagreed with Peebles’ interpretation.
“Unless and until the required federal approvals are obtained, commercial activities on the allotment remain unauthorized,” the agency said.
But the businesses on this allotment aren't the only rancheria operations to run afoul of the law. The tribe managed to break into the cigarette business, with or without help from Packingham and Phelps.
According to state prosecutors, Rose, as president of Azuma Corporation, began selling contraband cigarettes in 2009. The BIA and California Attorney General’s Office have long alleged the business failed to collect taxes or file required federal paperwork. The agencies sent cease-and-desist letters to Rose from 2009 to 2012, ordering him to stop selling cigarettes.
A court found Rose guilty of 51,000 violations of California’s Unfair Competition Law in 2013, fining him $765,000 and prohibiting him from selling cigarettes to anyone besides members of the rancheria on the tribe’s land.
But prosecutors allege Rose only grew the business.
“Expanding beyond Rose’s previous retailing of contraband cigarettes, Defendants used Azuma and other tribal businesses to establish a vertically integrated contraband cigarette operation, importing, manufacturing, distributing, and retailing contraband cigarettes throughout California,” according to court documents.
The state claimed Azuma became the “primary source for contraband cigarettes” in California, with Rose himself often making deliveries in unlicensed vehicles to avoid detection. Last year, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Rose and Phillip Del Rosa cannot claim sovereign immunity after violating state and federal tobacco laws.
The state’s lawsuit is still in court. Prosecutors are seeking a fine of three times California's damages for alleged violations of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
Rose and Phillip Del Rosa also tried their hand at the marijuana business. That business venture also ended in legal trouble.
Following a tip from Wendy Del Rosa that Rose and Phillip Del Rosa were using the tribe’s event center to process cannabis, Drug Enforcement Administration officers raided the Alturas Indian Rancheria and nearby XL Rancheria in 2015, seizing 12,000 plants.
Canada-based tribal tobacco magnate Jerry Montour allegedly funded the operation. Phillip Del Rosa said their marijuana venture was small and noted that authorities filed no charges.
At one point, the tribe was reported to be on the verge of opening the country’s first tribal online gambling platform. Wendy Del Rosa said she believed the venture, once again, would have been illegal. Phillip Del Rosa and Rose blame Smith for derailing the venture.
In a lawsuit against Smith, Phillip Del Rosa and Rose allege the failed online gaming deal cost the tribe millions of dollars. Wendy Del Rosa said it was her efforts to stop the cannabis operation and online gaming business that motivated Rose to take control of her retirement account.
“Darren Rose stated that I cost him a lot of money,” she said. “That's why he wanted to take something from me.”
Phillip Del Rosa said the financial company managing her retirement transferred the funds into a tribal account because the retirement account had exceeded contribution limits. He said neither he nor Rose had anything to do with it.
Wendy Del Rosa said Rose and Phillip Del Rosa are more interested in using the tribe to make money for themselves.
“It's really not even a tribe,” Wendy Del Rosa said. “They've made it into their own private enterprise.”
Federal funding
The Alturas Indian Rancheria has also brought in plenty of public funds.
Over the past 25 years, California paid the tribe more than $27 million as part of the state’s Indian Gaming Revenue Sharing Trust Fund, which splits gaming revenue among tribes.
During the coronavirus pandemic, the tribe received more than $3 million through the American Rescue Plan Act and the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, according to a 2021 paper from the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development.
The paper described the payout as “disturbing” and “nothing short of shocking.”
The authors found Alturas had the highest per-member payout in the country. The tribe’s application listed only three members. The researchers concluded the federal formula placed too much weight on tribal employees, regardless of whether they were Native American.
Phillip Del Rosa’s wife, Sarah Del Rosa, who works as a tribal assistant, said the federal money went to support the tribe’s fuel stations and convenience stores.
“The COVID funds were used to create businesses to put people back to work,” she said.
The rancheria received other federal assistance as well.
In 2023, the BIA awarded the tribe $227,273 to research the effects of climate change on the 20-acre rancheria. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development sends the tribe a yearly Indian Housing Block Grant — last year about $110,000 — to support affordable housing.
Over the last decade, the federal government has paid the tribe more than $3 million through contracts that allow tribes to administer services otherwise provided by federal agencies. Known as 638 contracts, they are authorized under the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act. Wendy Del Rosa’s attorney contends the tribe has actually received more than $8 million.
Sarah Del Rosa said that revenue has nothing to do with funding education or health care for the Alturas Indian Rancheria. Instead, she said, the funds mostly go to administrative costs associated with tribal businesses — office space, postage, travel, audits — and legal fees.
“All of these issues that Wayne [Smith], Wendy Del Rosa and Jennifer [Chrisman] are causing are very expensive,” Sarah Del Rosa said.
Wendy Del Rosa said Peebles has made a lot of money representing the tribe.
“I think he's dishonest,” she said. “You're talking a lot of billable hours.”
Tribal Sovereignty
“To be quite honest, the BIA could fix everything tomorrow,” Chrisman said. “And they haven't.”
Peebles made a similar complaint about federal agencies.
“Once they determine it's an internal tribal fight, they stay out,” he said.
But federal agencies are limited in what they can force the Alturas Indian Rancheria to do because of tribal sovereignty. The BIA largely stays out of membership and governance, said Matthew Fletcher, a professor of American Indian law at the University of Michigan and editor of the blog Turtle Talk.
“Tribal sovereignty creates sort of this black box of lack of knowledge,” he said. “A sovereign government doesn't have to tell you anything it doesn't want to.”
Fletcher said tribal sovereignty is an important principle, but the legal limitations can make solving disputes difficult.
“I feel bad for the Interior Department officials who have to try to decide if there's actually a functioning tribal government,” Fletcher said.
“A sovereign government doesn't have to tell you anything it doesn't want to."Matthew Fletcher
The federal government has encouraged tribes to adopt a corporate-style governing structure, he said, because it provides an efficient way to deal with agencies and accept federal funding. But he said it can also lead to the same power plays found in the corporate world.
“As a consequence of that, you have situations like this that arise,” he said.
California’s rancheria system can further amplify those power struggles. Some rancherias have very few members, meaning a single person or family can shift the balance of power.
“Lots of weird things can happen, especially when your numbers are so low,” Fletcher said. “California has a handful of these rancherias that have terribly small citizenship numbers, and Alturas is not the only one where this is happening.”
The members at the center of the Alturas dispute have scattered. Phillip Del Rosa lives in Medford, where he runs a trucking company. Tax records show he and Rose own a $4 million home in Hawaii. Wendy Del Rosa lives in Susanville, California, and Chrisman lives in the city of Alturas.
More than a century after the federal government purchased the land for displaced Pit River families, the rancheria has brought in millions of dollars but has also become the center of a decades-long struggle over who controls its government and money.
“It's just a shame that we all can't benefit from something that his dad left, because this wasn't his dad's dream,” Chrisman said. “Phillip [Del Rosa]'s not the leader his dad was.”
Today, no one lives on the 20-acre rancheria.
