Johnny Johnson was at a friend’s birthday party in Hollywood when he got a message on Instagram.
Johnson didn’t recognize the account that sent the message early that Friday morning in 2023, but it conveyed an offer he found hard to resist: Was he interested in burglarizing a cannabis grow in exchange for 10 pounds of the take?
“I’m a nice person,” Johnson testified nearly two years later at his trial on murder charges. “I always say yes and that’s been my downfall for my entire life.”
So Johnson drove toward Chatsworth, guided by Instagram messages from a person he didn’t know.
“It sounds crazy,” he told the jury, “but it’s the truth.”
The job went terribly wrong. There was an unexpected confrontation, a shootout and a car left drifting down a silent street with a dead man behind the wheel.
The investigation led police to a man now accused of orchestrating a staggering array of thefts: Hoverboards from a warehouse in Vernon. Watches from the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Beverly Hills. Millions worth of Hermes bags snatched in late-night break-ins in West L.A. and Newport Beach.
But his primary targets, authorities say, were marijuana grows. According to testimony and other evidence presented in court, the organizer of the thefts used drones to pick his targets.
Then he sent in crews of young men who typically didn’t know one another. Like the robbers of Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” who referred to each other only by colors — Mr. White, Mr. Pink — Johnson told the detectives the crew had operated with strict anonymity, never revealing their real names to each other.
“Whoever put this s— together, they done put a team together. You feel me?” Johnson said, according to a tape of the interview.
When the detectives later allowed him to phone his brother and recorded the call, Johnson was overheard saying, “I couldn’t even tell on nobody if I wanted to!”
A security guard killed, an iPhone left behind
From the outside, the building in a Chatsworth office park looked as if it could have been a data storage center — which it was, before it became an indoor marijuana grow.
Inside the 28,000-square-foot facility were row after row of plants flowering under bright lamps, according to photographs shown in court. Brad Lamoureux, the facility’s co-owner, testified that the site contained $1 million worth of cannabis and $50,000 in cash.
When he was solicited to burglarize the grow, Johnson testified he was just three months out of federal prison after serving two years for possessing a gun as a felon.
He described the Instagram account that sent the message as a “finsta,” an anonymous burner account. The user sent Johnson the address of a Bank of America down the street from Lamoureux’s facility. There, Johnson said he found a group of masked men. One handed him a gun.
Security cameras captured what happened next: A man with a crowbar pried open a steel door leading to the grow as Johnson and another masked man stood guard. They appeared to notice something or someone at the end of the driveway. Johnson and the second man pointed first, then raised their guns. Muzzle flashes erupted, and Johnson and the second man opened fire while running backward.
The bullets struck Christopher Harris, who had taken the job guarding the grow to provide for his children — three sons, including twins, and one daughter, said his sister, Crystal.
Harris, 33, grew up with his eight siblings in Watts. To his dismay, no one called him Christopher or Chris, his sister said. Everyone called him Hukkie, a play on Huggy Bear.
“He was just this big, chunky bear of a kid,” she said.
Crystal described her brother as a lifelong entrepreneur. When he was 11, he rode around South L.A. on a moped, pumping gas for a few dollars. Later he started a mobile car-detailing business, and he worked as a caregiver at an assisted-living facility before taking the job guarding the marijuana grow.
LAPD officers found him slumped behind the wheel of his Kia sedan. Shot in the head, Harris had tried to drive off before he died.
The LAPD had a few leads from a phone that one of the intruders had dropped while scrambling over a fence. It belonged to a Compton resident named Fredrick Reed, who, according to records shown in court, logged into his iCloud account from another device the same day of the homicide and asked Google some questions:
“Can police go thru apple iphone”
“if u erase iphone what happens”
“if u erase iphone what happens when police try to look for evidence”
“iphone erase pending how long”
Detectives saw that Reed had sent a text six hours before the homicide that said: “Lmk if we outside tonight.” Then, about half an hour before Harris was killed, Reed wrote: “Love you bro feeling good about this one,” adding a heart emoji.
The LAPD matched a name to the number that received Reed’s texts: Montayleray Harbin.
‘Nuchie the Great’ and a crime ‘conglomerate’
A South L.A. native, Harbin, 33, worked as a manager in the music industry, his attorney said in court. Johnson told detectives that he knew of Harbin, whom he referred to as “Nuchie the Great,” but had never met him. Johnson said Harbin was affiliated with a rap group called the BlueBucksClan.
Harbin served about 10 years in prison for a robbery he’d committed when he was 17. Shortly after his release in 2020, Harbin was convicted of burglary and sentenced to probation in 2022, court records show. His attorney, Kellen Davis, did not respond to a request for comment.
When detectives arrested Harbin for the Chatsworth heist in December 2023, they found inside his Mercedes Benz SUV a wireless reciprocating saw, crowbar, bolt-cutters and a drone, a detective wrote in a search warrant affidavit. His iCloud account contained “dozens and dozens” of videos showing overhead views of commercial and industrial buildings, Deputy Dist. Atty. Heather Steggell said in court.
The drone footage showed Harbin was focusing on buildings that had clusters of air conditioning units mounted on the roofs. The units, needed to dispel heat generated by lamps used to grow marijuana indoors, are a “dead giveaway” of a cultivation site, Lamoureux testified.
Harbin, who pleaded not guilty to conspiring to commit burglary, could have been jailed not only for the new case, but also for violating the terms of his probation. Instead, he was released after posting two bonds totaling $175,000 and subjected to house arrest.
The conditions hardly seemed to slow him down.
In February 2024, Harbin allegedly contacted Richard Auston, a reputed member of Compton’s Westside Piru gang nicknamed “Panda.” In a search warrant affidavit, an LAPD detective described Auston, 33, as a central figure in two crime “conglomerates” called NWA and LargoTown, unions of at-times warring gangs that had set aside their differences to pull off robberies and burglaries.
Auston and his associates — most of whom were affiliated with Blood gangs in South L.A. and Compton — worked with Harbin, who is a member of an unspecified Crip gang, the detective wrote in the affidavit.
According to the affidavit, Auston visited Harbin at his family’s home on Harvard Boulevard before driving to a cannabis grow in an unmarked building in Paramount.
While on the phone with Harbin, Auston and two others cut off the locks and smashed open a back door, a detective wrote in the affidavit. Over the next hour, the burglars hacked about 200 plants from their stems and loaded them into their cars. They fled after an employee from a nearby tire shop confronted them.
After Harbin’s lawyer persuaded a judge to lift his condition of house arrest, saying he needed to be able to travel for his career as a music manager, Harbin met Auston in downtown L.A. to plan a burglary in nearby Vernon, a detective wrote in a search warrant affidavit.
While Harbin remained downtown, Auston traveled with the rest of the crew to a warehouse, where they sawed through an iron fence, forced open a rear door and stole 72 hoverboards and nine motorcycles, the detective wrote.
Arrested in December 2024, Harbin pleaded not guilty to the new burglary charges and was let out again after posting a $585,000 bond.
Just weeks later, on Jan. 10, 2025, five suspects ran into a watch boutique in the Waldorf Astoria in Beverly Hills, smashing open display cases with hammers. Chased by police, they crashed their Mercedes Benz sedan in West L.A. and were arrested, according to a search warrant affidavit.
Detectives suspected Harbin was behind the heist and two others that netted dozens of expensive handbags, Det. Kimberly Santander of the LAPD wrote in a search warrant affidavit.
When Santander searched his family’s home in February 2025, she found a drone and reflective vests that resembled those worn by burglars who’d forced their way into Revolve, a high-end store at the Grove shopping center, four months earlier. Disguised as construction workers, the three thieves made off with 21 Hermes bags valued at $500,000, Santander testified at a recent preliminary hearing.
At Harbin’s girlfriend’s house in Canoga Park, the probation report said, detectives found $8,752 in cash, 100 pounds of marijuana, and bags stolen from Revolve and the Real Real in Newport Beach, which had lost 58 Hermes, Chanel, Dior and Louis Vuitton bags valued at $700,000 in another early-morning break in. According to the probation report, a GPS ankle monitor that a judge had ordered Harbin to wear showed he was near the Real Real when it was ransacked in January 2025.
Harbin’s probation officer urged a judge to revoke his bond — he was now facing three cases, along with a probation violation — and jail him. The GPS monitor hadn’t deterred him, the officer wrote, and Harbin was “a threat to the community.”
A month after her report was submitted, Los Angeles County Judge Bernie C. LaForteza ordered Harbin to again enroll in a GPS tracking program and set his bail at $155,000, which he promptly posted.
Harbin was on the street again.
‘He orchestrated the whole thing’
As the cases against Harbin piled up, he also faced trouble outside of court. Some of his criminal associates were demanding payment, according to text messages cited in Santander’s affidavit.
“We need them,” he wrote to his girlfriend, Shellbie MacShate.
MacShate told him there was no money.
“I’m losing so much because of your loses,” she wrote.
In July, on the first day of his trial for the break-in that led to Harris’ death, Harbin abruptly pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit burglary, admitting he conducted surveillance on the Chatsworth grow and recruited a team to steal from it.
Then he was allowed to walk free again.
Harbin remains out on bail pending his sentencing, which is scheduled for May. The district attorney’s office and judge have agreed to give him four years in prison.
Some of those who worked for Harbin have faced much harsher penalties. Johnson — who claimed not to know who recruited him for the fatal heist — was convicted of murder, along with the second shooter who opened fire. Before he was sentenced in September to serve 70 years to life, Johnson, 31, apologized to Harris’ family.
“There’s nothing I can say that will make you feel better,” he told them, shaking his shackled hands back and forth. “There’s really nothing I can say.”
Crystal Harris still believes Harbin should also be held responsible for her brother’s murder.
“He orchestrated the whole thing. How many times are they going to let this guy get away with setting these things up?” she asked. “Somebody’s already died.”
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