The Mexican Mafia 9781594032738, 9781594031953

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Th e m e x ican mafia

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The mexican mafia

\\==\==\==\==\\ Tony Rafae l











New York & London

Copyright © 2007 by Tony Rafael All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Encounter Books, 900 Broadway Suite 400, New York, New York, 10003. First edition published in 2007 by Encounter Books, an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, Inc., a nonprofit, tax exempt corporation. Encounter Books website address: www.encounterbooks.com Book design and composition by Wesley B. Tanner/Passim Editions, Ann Arbor. Manufactured in the United States and printed on acid-free paper. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997)(Permanence of Paper). FIRST EDITION Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rafael, Tony. The Mexican Mafia / by Tony Rafael. p. cm. ISBN-13: 978-1-59403-195-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-59403-195-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Mexican Mafia. 2. Gangs--California—Los Angeles. 3. Prison gangs—California. 4. Mexican American criminals—California—Los Angeles. 5. Organized crime investigation—California—Los Angeles. I. Title. HV6439.U7C257 2007 364.1’060979494--dc22 2007008530 1 0 9

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Contents

Introduction

vii



Prologue

3



Chapter 1

7



Chapter 2

21



Chapter 3

41



Chapter 4

65



Chapter 5

75



Chapter 6

84



Chapter 7

97



Chapter 8

109



Chapter 9

119



Chapter 10

139



Chapter 11

153



Chapter 12

171



Chapter 13

187



Chapter 14

191



Chapter 15

215



Chapter 16

239



Chapter 17

273



Chapter 18

289



Chapter 19

319



Epilogue

357



Index

363



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I NT R O D U C T I ON

C

riminal enterprises take many forms and incubate cul-

tures of their own. This book deals with a criminal group that, since its founding in 1957, has grown into a large, powerful, and violent organization. From prison cells in Pelican Bay, members of the Mexican Mafia can order executions on practically any Los Angeles street, throughout most of Southern California, even in neighboring states. It has far-reaching intelligence and communications systems, as well as a standing army of thousands of street soldiers. vii

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“Mafia” conjures up well-dressed Italian dons and Runyonesque wise guys. The reality, in this context, is less glamorous and considerably bloodier. In terms of structure, organization, methods, and size, the Italian and the Mexican Mafia have nothing in common but five letters. The Italian Cosa Nostra is a different creature from the Salvadoran Mara Salvatrucha, just as the Mara is nothing like the white-power Aryan Brotherhood (AB) or the Black Guerilla Family. The Mara is a street gang with overt signifiers; it operates with little structure and uses violence indiscriminately. The Cosa Nostra exists in plain sight but operates in the shadows. It uses violence sparingly, at least compared to other criminal enterprises, and works within a top-down command-and-control hierarchy. The Aryan Brotherhood is a prison gang, extremely violent but with only a loose structure and a negligible impact on street crime. Its presence is felt mostly, though not exclusively, in the state and federal prison system. Like the Aryan Brotherhood, the Mexican Mafia (also known as the Eme) is primarily a prison gang. But while the AB has remained a prison gang, the Mexican Mafia has projected its power to the streets. Most neighborhoods in Southern California that have a strong Hispanic street gang presence feel the power of the Mexican Mafia. It took local and state law enforcement over twenty years from the founding of the Mexican Mafia to recognize its influence on the streets. It took another two decades for federal law enforcement to address the Eme as a significant criminal organization. This book could have been written in several ways. One was to take a sociological approach, providing a matrix of numbers and graphs indicating homicides, arrest and conviction rates, housing stock, income distribution, and all the other arcana of the discipline, to illustrate broad social forces. Many books have employed this approach, but they’ve been written for social scientists by social scientists and do nothing to illustrate how criminal enterprises and street gangs conduct their business at the operational level. Another approach would have used interviews with active gangsters, reformed criminals, Eme dropouts, gang intervention specialists, and law enforcement officials. There are a number of books that deal with the subject

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in this manner, but they rely largely on self-reporting and are only as accurate as what an interview subject is willing or able to reveal. In 2001, an opportunity presented itself that was tailor-made for the method of investigation I wished to pursue. In May, Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Anthony Manzella filed the biggest case of his career. It also turned out to be the biggest Mexican Mafia murder conspiracy case ever prosecuted by the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office. The final verdict didn’t come in until September 2006. During the five years that the case took to grind its way through the court system, Los Angeles had two mayoral administrations and three different police chiefs, and achieved the dubious distinction of becoming the murder capital of the nation. In 2000, one victim of the exploding murder rate was Lori Gonzalez, the granddaughter of LA Police Chief Bernard Parks. Her murder was a case of “wrong place, wrong time.” She was riding in a car with an old classmate; the man who shot her was aiming for her companion. Unlike most of the roughly 400 to 500 murders that occur in Los Angeles every year, the murder of an innocent young woman related to the city’s top cop makes headlines: “If the chief’s family isn’t safe, are any of us?” The simple answer, of course, is no. Every year there are stories like this one: An innocent victim was hanging Christmas decorations in her own living room when she was hit by a gangster’s stray bullet, intended for a rival two streets away. The majority of murders in Los Angeles are committed by gang members and the overwhelming majority of victims are gang members, too. Due to the methods used in attributing causes to homicides, it’s difficult to pin down how many of the 1,000 or so murders committed in Los Angeles County are gang-related, but the widely used estimate is half or slightly more. It becomes even more difficult to attribute gang-related homicides to a particular prison gang or larger criminal enterprise. Most law enforcement officials familiar with both such operations estimate that 300 homicides per year in LA County have some connection to the Mexican Mafia or some other prison gang. When William Bratton was appointed Chief of the Los Angeles Police De-



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partment in 2002, he stated that at no time in its history did the Italian Mafia kill three hundred people a year. He was looking at the situation from the perspective of an East Coaster whose concept of gangs was formed from the type of criminal enterprises familiar to him. It didn’t take him long to determine that there was an entirely different dynamic at work on the West Coast. When he digested the numbers, fighting the gang situation in Los Angeles became his top priority. As a result, in the media and even in the chambers of City Hall, Bratton was derisively called Bill “War on Gangs” Bratton. By 2007, after a series of vile homicides and cross-fire killings of innocent children, it seemed that every politician, policymaker, and civic leader had had enough and was demanding to “put the gangs out of business.” For decades, DDA Anthony Manzella had been trying to do just that. The eight defendants named in his filing in 2001 were Richard “Lil Pee Wee” Aguirre, Scott “Gato” Gleason, Anthony “Tonito” Medina, Randall “Jo Jo” Rodriguez, Clinton Conroy, Gerardo “Criminal” Reyes, George “Chato” Vidales, and Javy “Gangster” Marquez. With the exception of Clinton Conroy, all were members of the Avenues, a large gang located in the Highland Park section of Los Angeles made up predominantly of second- and third-generation Hispanic-Americans. Avenues also had four members who had graduated from the street gang and become validated members of the Mexican Mafia. (There is one other individual whose status as a member is still in question.) This is possibly the highest number of active Eme members ever claimed by a single street. Because of that Eme connection, Manzella’s case was the perfect vehicle for examining the intersection of the Mexican Mafia and smaller street gangs, the operations and resources of local law enforcement and the state justice system, public perceptions of street gangs, and the politics of big city crime fighting. It was by sheer good fortune that I became aware of the case. In any other city in the country, a case like Manzella’s would have gotten wall-to-wall coverage. In Los Angeles, no one gave it any attention. Frankly, Manzella preferred it that way. This book, then, is in large part an examination of that case. It’s also an

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exploration of the Mexican Mafia’s history, a look at the structure and operation of a typical street gang, and an assessment of the strengths and many weaknesses of law enforcement and the justice system. Assembling a book of this nature required a vast amount of help and cooperation on both sides of the law. Credit is due to the following: Anthony Manzella, Ruth Arvidson, Rich Valdemar, John Berdin, Andy Teague, Bob Lopez, Rick Ortiz, James King, Larry Burcher, Gil Garcia, Mike Camacho, Jose Carrillo, Carlos Sanchez, Mike Villalobos, James Myers, Laura Eimiller, Rich Lopez, Bob Mundry, Alex Bustamante, Barbara Bernstein, Gerry Fradella, Luisa Prudhomme, David Horowitz, Peter Collier, Roger Kimball, Alan Jackson, Doug Pierce, Stoney Jackson, James Maxson, Terry Thornton, Frank Eubanks, David Gelfound, John Ramseyer, Bill Eagleson, Tyrone Lawson, Michael Camacho, Tom Herman, Olivia Rosales, Jessie Diaz, Chris Blatchford, Hollis Berdin, Jeanette Garcia, Thom Mrozek, Mike McPherson, Jeff Crawford, Sherri Carter, Michael Dossey, John Dunne, Chuck Markel, Ray Lotz, Al Marengo, Jerry Gibbs, Roy Nunez, Greg Freeman, Kevin Rogan, Bruce Riordan, Rick Swanston, Ray Mendoza, Tom Herman, Linda Allstot, Steve Getzoff, Blaine Talmo, Gege Renzulli, and Mike Marcinko. There are others who must remain nameless but who contributed significantly to peeling back the layers of secrecy.

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1996 Alfred Salinas

Alex Aguirre

Big Rick Aguirre

Albert Tolento

“Tigger”

“PeeWee”

“Psycho”

“Boxer”

Cypress Ave.

57th

Richie Aguirre

Randy Rodriguez

“Little PeeWee”

“JoJo”

57th

57th

Jackie Palomares

Joseph Torres

Randy Morales

Frank Cordova

“Chato”

“Clavo”

“Muppet”

“Kiko”

Johnnie Martinez

Jimmy Maxson

Javier Marquez

Benny Garcia

Scotty Gleason

“Sleepy”

“Drac”

“Gangster”

“Sleepy”

“Gato”

43rd

57th

Drew Street

“Evil Nick”

George Vidales

Gerardo Reyes

Anthony Medina

Uribe

“Chato”

“Criminal”

“Tonito”

Amador Reyes

Jerry Ramirez

Rascal

Clint Conroy

“Pelon”

“Trooper”

Happy

Whisper

Trickey

David Deloza

Carlos Caldera

Vince Caldera

43rd

“Huero”

Bam Bam

Paul McDonald

Kilo

“Slowboy”

Chopper

Frank Puga

Sparky

Eme members

“Trooper”

Eme associates (lieutenants) Filero

Anthony Ochoa “Smokey”

Eme associates Robert (Santanas)

Eme soldiers, workers, crew

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PROLOGUE

O

n the morning of March 14, 2002, eight young men

filed into Judge David Wesley’s court on the 9th floor of the Los Angeles County Criminal Courts building. They wore the clownish, baggy orange or blue jumpsuits of LA County Jail’s inmates. As K10 prisoners, the highest security level in the County system, they were shackled at the feet and their handcuffs were padlocked to a waist chain. The chains, what the deputies call “transport jewelry,” clinked noisily as the men left the lockup area behind the bailiff’s door and scuffled across the courtroom to their seats in the jury box. 



Th e m e x ican mafia This was the first morning that the eight men, all members or associates

of the Avenues street gang, appeared together in the same court at the same time. Despite the gravity of the charges against the men, there was an atmosphere of happy reunion. None of them scowled or showed any sign of being unhappy with their circumstances. They nodded greetings and smiled to friends and relatives in the spectator seats. Before the eight were allowed to enter, two deputies examined every inch of the jury box. While it looked like they were fluffing the cushions, they were actually feeling for weapons or anything the prisoners could use to unlock their shackles. To a practiced inmate and veteran criminal, even the plastic tips of shoelaces have been known to unlock the standard issue handcuffs. Eight armed, uniformed deputies and four in plainclothes were scattered throughout the courtroom. The plainclothes cops wore their Hawaiian shirts untucked to cover the Smith and Wesson .40 caliber semiautomatics they wore in open-top, black leather basketweave holsters. They had CS spray canisters clipped to their belts on the offside, next to the two spare ammo magazines, spring-loaded steel batons, and handcuffs. Their badges hung down their chests on beaded dog-tag chains. The tallest of the plainclothes deputies, Jail Supervisor Michael Kepley, whispered instructions to each deputy. The deputies then took strategic positions around the courtroom. Kepley sat in the last seat of the last row of the spectator area, positioned to observe the whole room at a glance. Only a few of the people in that courtroom knew that Kepley had already been targeted for murder by the Mexican Mafia. He was on a “greenlight” list, a hit list issued by “shotcallers”—Eme members or Associates with the power to issue orders at that high level. (The capitalized term “Associate” is the official California Department of Corrections designation for a person who has been taken into the confidence of the Eme and is doing work for them. Elsewhere in this book, “associate” is used with its conventional meaning.) The fact that the custody detail felt that so much firepower was necessitated by eight shackled men—who had to perform yogic contortions just to scratch an itch—made it clear that these were no average street thugs.

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Javier “Gangster” Marquez was already serving a life sentence for prior homicides. Marquez was also reputed to be a newly-minted brother in the Mexican Mafia, what the Eme calls a “Carnal.” Anthony “Tonito” Medina was serving a sixty-five-year sentence for a revenge killing—not gang-related, but what the gangsters call a “personal.” Tonito also hated cops. While a fugitive for that prior killing, Medina was arrested for pointing a laser-sighted Glock 9 mm at two LAPD officers during a traffic stop. The youngest of the eight, twenty-year-old Richard “Lil Pee Wee” Aguirre, was charged with four homicides, the first of which he’d committed at age fifteen. Most of the eight defendants had nothing to lose, and the deputies were there to make sure that if any of them got brave, the consequences would be terminal. Between them, the eight Avenues homies now sitting in the jury box were being prosecuted for seven homicides. The atmosphere among the defendents was nevertheless jovial. When Randall “Jo Jo” Rodriguez, at thirtythree the oldest of the eight, made eye contact with his mother, Connie, and tried by facial gestures and lip reading to communicate, one of the deputies stepped in front of him and said, “No talking.” Connie turned to the other spectators and shook her head, finding some sympathy with other families but getting a stony look from Kepley in the back seat. Connie’s a gray-haired mother of twelve with thirty-two grandchildren she rarely sees. Jo Jo is her youngest child. Richie “Lil Pee Wee” Aguirre tried to engage the deputy nearest him in a conversation about baseball. The deputy told him to shut up. Pee Wee turned to Gerardo “Criminal” Reyes, to his left but separated by two seats, and mouthed something. Reyes cracked up, which sent a ripple of laughter through the spectators. With the deputies distracted, Scott “Gato” Gleason flashed two of the spectators the Avenues gang sign, the index and middle fingers pointed down with the thumb in between them to form the letter A. One of the two whispered loud enough for some sitting close by to hear, “Avenidas ’til the wheels fall off.” The man responsible for this gathering was Deputy District Attorney Anthony Manzella, an old-school DA with decades on the job and as keen to prosecute as he’d been when he was part of the Charles Manson prosecu-



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tion team. Manzella was late and Judge Wesley wouldn’t appear until all the participants were in the room. Michael White, one of the eight defense lawyers asked where Manzella was. The clerk told him, “DA Manzella is wrapping up something else downstairs. We’re waiting, too.” Manzella was double booked. He had an 8:30 court date on another case involving the homicide of Bernard Parks’s granddaughter, Lori Gonzalez. Manzella was prosecuting the shooter, Samuel Shabazz, and there was pressure on him to win it. Obviously, when the police chief’s own granddaughter is gunned down outside a Popeye’s Chicken in South LA, the city has PR issues to address. Manzella was the guy to do it, never mind that he was also prosecuting eight of the city’s toughest gangsters. When he finally entered the courtroom with his assistant, Ruth Arvidson, all eyes turned to him. With a hint of the North Jersey accent that hangs on even after forty years in Los Angeles, Manzella looked around, smiled, and said, like a guy late for a lunch date with his pals, “You shouldna waited on my account.” So began the biggest and most complex Mexican Mafia murder and conspiracy trial ever prosecuted by the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office. The motions and countermotions would continue for a year. The actual trial wouldn’t start for nearly a year after that. “Violence is swift,” Manzella said on his way out of court that afternoon. “Justice is glacial.”

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C H A P TE R o n e

C O L D CA S E S

I

n the early months of 1999, LAPD detective John Berdin

and his partner Andrew Teague were shouldering a crushing case load. They were assigned to the Homicide Table in Northeast Division, one of the oldest of the department’s eighteen divisions. As the last few years of the century ticked away, Northeast experienced one of those homicide spikes that to the average citizen seems wildly inexplicable. If the media had covered any of the homicides that Berdin and Teague were investigating, they’d have been characterized as “senseless,” the default term for whatever the media don’t understand or care to investigate. But as with most of the 500 or so murders that occur in the LAPD’s jurisdiction, very few of Northeast’s homicides ever make the news. 



Th e m e x ican mafia The homicide unit, like the other units at Northeast, is nothing more

than a cluster of desks pushed so close that the detectives either stare at each other or rub elbows. The desks are small, even by “cubicle” standards, and crowded with papers, files, computers, the occasional crime scene photo, and whatever else can’t go elsewhere. The file cabinets against the wall are well-worn McDowell & Craig and Steelcase units, the kind no longer seen in modern offices. (They are, however, starting to appear as retro items in the designer boutiques on Venice Boulevard. The cops would laugh to see the prices they fetch.) The nerve center of the homicide unit is the green cabinet where the murder books are stored. These are blue three-ring binders as thick as a big city phone book. Were a civilian to open one, he’d find the contents about as thrilling as a pile of receipts at tax time. It’s the dry, bureaucratic residue of violent death. The hand-written notes, interview transcripts, chronology reports, prior arrest records, a rental car agreement, property record, and police forms are the raw material a homicide investigator chews on for weeks, months, or years at a stretch. Each murder book begins with the same kind of entry, a typewritten memo signed by the investigator first to the scene: “At 03:00 AM on the morning of May 20, I was contacted at my home by the watch commander at Northeast Division and instructed to respond to the location.” Everything that follows becomes the official version of events. In some cases, the paper trail leads to a quick arrest and prosecution. In others, the entire contents of the book end up an artifact of no consequence to anyone but the investigating officer (IO) and the victim’s survivors. Since everything in a murder book may eventually be given to a defense attorney, detectives are trained to be both meticulous and ambiguous in phrasing their notes. A wrong word or deceptive syntax, however insignificant it seems during an investigation, could become the crack that crumbles a case when hammered by a defense attorney. (More often than not, at least in Northeast homicides, the suspect will be represented by a public defender.) Cases live or die by what’s in these books. Everything has to

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be there, and everything has to make sense to a prosecutor. It also has to be compelling enough to convince a jury and invulnerable to a defense attorney’s attack. In the early part of 1999, Andy Teague and John Berdin had seventeen murder books that were going nowhere. In one way or another, all the homicides were connected to the Avenues gang. These were still open—cold cases to outsiders, maybe, but cases are never cold to an IO. They’re just not strong enough yet. There are only three ways for a murder case to go. The first is “cleared,” when a prosecutor finds sufficient evidence for a filing and an arrest is made. The second is “cleared other,” when a DA finds enough evidence in the book to indicate a likely suspect, but for some reason refuses to file. Sometimes the suspect is already dead, killed in retaliation for the victim in the book, or by an overdose, a suicide, or a shootout with police or rival gangsters. Sometimes the case is a wobbler. The suspect looks good for it, but it’s going to be tough to bring forward. In the real world, prosecutors look at such a case and carefully consider the odds of winning it. If their conviction rate isn’t looking so hot lately, they don’t want to take a wobbler to court and risk another mark in the loss column. So sometimes the case is “cleared other” and the murder book is retired. The third way, the open case, is the kind that could turn into a Black Dahlia-type mystery, remaining open for generations. These cases hang over a homicide cop like a spectral failure, haunting his sense of personal or professional pride. The killer of the victim in the blue book is still out wandering the streets of his jurisdiction. There are people who know the shooter and know he did it, but because the shooter’s friends are also gang members, they’ll never talk. Almost never. Sometimes, as a case drags on, the dead man’s sister or mother will call the detective desk and ask if they’ve found the killer yet. The survivors provide bits of information that seem major to them, but are useless to an investigator. Relatives grieve long after the murder book is retired to the green cabinet. There’s no reason for the homicide cops to touch it; there’s nothing new to click into the three rings. Families put flowers on the grave every an-

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niversary. A victim’s sister marries; an empty place is set at the table. They tell the homicide cops things like this hoping that something will be done. Sometimes they bring a Bible to the IO, praying for divine intervention. And sometimes they just move away and are never heard from again. None of the seventeen murder cases Teague and Berdin were looking at were strictly theirs. These were inherited cases. Neither Teague nor Berdin were the original investigators called out to the scene. Most of the detectives who’d started the seventeen murder books were no longer in the division. Some had retired. Others had moved on to new assignments.Teague himself had only recently transferred from Van Nuys Division and he was still learning from Berdin about the gang players in Northeast. There was a lot to learn. Avenues or Los Avenidas is the largest and most active gang in Northeast. At the time of Andy Teague’s assignment to the area, the gang claimed some 600 active members. By 2005, the number had grown to 1000. The gang takes its name from the numbered avenues that run roughly perpendicular to Figueroa Street, the main artery through Northeast’s jurisdiction. The numbers run from Avenue 19 at one end to Avenue 61 at the other. Like most street gangs, Avenues has a number of subsets, smaller gangs known as cliques (or cliquas in Spanish). According to veteranos, there are only two true Avenues gangs. One is Cypress Avenue and the other is 43rd Avenue. Other cliques, such as the Assassins, Drew Street, Back Street Killers, the Chicos, and Avenue 57, are considered associate gangs. Like almost every gang in the city, Avenues has rivals at their borders and inside their own territory. The traditional rivals are El Sereno, Lowell Street, Highland Park, Dogtown (which occupies a few streets in the heart of Avenues territory), and Glassell Park, which Avenues has nearly extinguished. Almost all the rivals are other Hispanic gangs, but there are a few tiny Filipino gangs in the area that are considered more of an annoyance than a threat. With numbers superior to any other gang’s in the area, Avenues has the power to crush any gang that dares to cross its borders. By the time Teague arrived in Northeast, the Avenues had been entrenched in the area for decades. Teague was no stranger to street gangs. His previous Division, Hollen-

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11

beck, like Northeast, has gangs that trace their roots back three generations. The dynamics of the gang world are the same all over the city and, in fact, all over the southwest. To Teague, this was the same old drama. He just needed to become acquainted with a fresh batch of characters. It’s a fact of life in the homicide business that most murders are committed by people who know their victims. More often than not, the killer is a relative. If a middle class housewife in the San Fernando Valley goes missing, the first person to come under suspicion is the husband or ex. If a child is sexually assaulted and killed, the cops look real hard at relatives and neighbors. It’s the same in the world of street gangs—the same, but with a pool of potential suspects that runs into the hundreds. A veteran gang cop once described the average gang as a giant dysfunctional family. As with any family, gangs have their internal squabbles, alliances, cliques, parental figures, the wild child, the obedient son, the prodigal, the lazy one, the good earner, and the one who’s only out for himself. In a gang as large as Avenues, the task of accumulating what the military calls “actionable intelligence” is Herculean. With that many players, internal dynamics can change daily. The flux makes solving fresh homicide cases hard enough. With cases that were already three, four, and five years old at the time Teague and Berdin inherited their seventeen murder books, the two had to recreate the past. Like archeologists of crime, they had to freeze that moment in time when the trigger was pulled and figure out not just who pulled it, but what the world of the Avenues looked like when the victim hit the pavement or slumped over the wheel of his car. Complicating matters for Berdin and Teague was the strong presence of the Mexican Mafia in the Avenues gang. The Eme was heavily connected to Avenues through some powerful individuals. In whatever down time he had between investigating fresh homicide cases, Teague pored over the seventeen murder books like a cryptographer. He knew that everything he needed to make the cases strong enough for a DA’s filing was in the books. If he worked the individual strands of information long enough and hard enough, a picture would emerge.

12

Th e m e x ican mafia In addition to the fact that all these open homicides pointed in the direc-

tion of Avenues involvement, Teague had indications that they were connected in various ways to the Aguirres, specifically, Alex “Pee Wee” Agguire and his younger brother, Richie “Lil Pee Wee” Aguirre. Alex and Richie were known to Teague. When Teague was working homicides in Hollenbeck, he and his partner, Detective Charles Markel, were called to the scene of a homicide on a cold March night in 1995. Teague drove from his home in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains far to the East of Los Angeles and responded to 400 South Soto Street, a Shell gas station just east of downtown. By the time Teague and Markel arrived, the scene had been secured, but the body of the victim, Oscar “Lil Man” Rodriguez was still at the location, slumped in the passenger’s seat of a blue two-door Ford Escort. Lil Man was a thirty-seven-year-old known member of the Primera Flats gang. At the scene, Teague counted sixteen bullet holes in the Escort and noticed that the right passenger side window was blown out, as was the entire rear window. Lil Man was wearing a Dallas Cowboys t-shirt and a red and white plaid shirt. Teague lifted the t-shirt and observed a large PRIMERA FLATS tattoo on Lil Man’s chest and stomach. The letters were six inches high, done in the ornate gothic typeface favored by Hispanic gangs. The tattoos looked like they were done by a professional or a skilled amateur. It didn’t look like some of the cruder prison tattoos Teague had seen for years on the streets of Newton and Hollenbeck. Later, during the autopsy, Teague and Markel made notes on the rest of Lil Man’s tattoos. On a banner above the Primera Flats tattoo, Lil Man had a banner with ESTILO MEXICANO emblazoned on it. He had PF (for Primera Flats) on his left earlobe. There was a large naked woman that ran across his chest and down to his arm. There was a MADRE tattoo on his left hand, as well as MARTA, OSCAR, and BENNY alongside the Primera Flats tattoo on his chest. Oscar was found to have cocaine and heroin in his system; he had the unmistakable arm tracks of intravenous drug use. He also had $861 in his left sock and $120 in the pocket of a jacket found in the back seat. Clearly robbery was not a motive.

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13

During Teague’s preliminary look at the body, Lil Man was riddled with what looked like a half dozen bullet wounds. There were what appeared to be entry wounds to the front, side, and back of the body. When Teague looked inside the Escort, he wasn’t surprised to see blood all over the passenger’s seat, dash, and floor. “The steering wheel, though, looked like it was dipped in blood,” he recalled years later. “It was obvious that the victim hadn’t been driving when he became a bullet magnet. And there was a bullet, a nine mil, embedded in the steering wheel at around the ten o’clock position.” Whoever was driving must have been hit as well. At the scene, Teague and Markel learned that a woman filling up at the pump observed the blue Escort pull up behind her. A young man, a kid, really, exited the Escort and asked her to call an ambulance because his friend had been shot. Before she could make the call, she spotted an LAPD radio car cruising up Soto and flagged it down. The responding officers called paramedics. LAFD Rescue Ambulance 12 arrived at the scene a few minutes later. The EMT examined the victim and pronounced Oscar “Lil Man” Rodriguez dead at 10:56 PM. The young man that asked her for help was a cherubic fourteen-yearold, Richard “Lil Pee Wee” Aguirre. “At first, Lil Pee Wee told me that he was driving the car in East LA somewhere with Oscar,” Teague remembers. “Lil Pee Wee said they stopped for a light and two guys got on either side of the car and started shooting at them from the sidewalk. I looked at him and there was no blood on his clothes or his shoes. If he was driving, he would have been covered in blood. There was no way he couldn’t be. So I asked him how come he didn’t have any blood on him. Pee Wee thought that over for a minute and then changed his story. He said he was actually in the back seat and the guy driving was a guy named Crow. He told me that Crow was hit, too, but he stopped the car and bailed out. That’s when Richie supposedly crawled into the driver’s seat and drove to the gas station. We gave him a GSR [gunshot residue test] and he came up clean.” Teague and Markel took Lil Pee Wee to Hollenbeck and put him in an interview room. Although he was only fourteen, Lil Pee Wee carried him-

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self like a veteran. “He knew how to hold his water,” Teague said. “He told one ridiculous story after another but he never copped to anything. He said, ‘Why would I lie?’ As it turned out, he had a lot of reasons to lie. Finally we had a radio car take him home. Technically, he was the victim in the shooting even though we suspected there was a lot more to the situation than he was telling us. We also called his parole officer and let him know what happened.” Although Richie Aguirre’s juvenile record is sealed by law, Northeast cops remember arresting him for numerous crimes. He was on supervised release from the California Youth Authority (CYA) at the time of Lil Man’s murder. Soon after midnight on the night of the murder, Marta Rodriguez, Oscar’s wife, arrived at the Hollenbeck station and told Teague and Markel that she’d received a call from an unknown person who told her that her car, a Mercedes, was parked at 23rd Street and South Wall. Oscar had been using her car that night and she hadn’t heard from him. Teague and Markel had to tell her that Oscar had been shot to death. The two detectives drove Marta to 2331 South Wall, where they found her car parked at the curb with the doors unlocked. By the next day, Teague had traced the Escort. It was owned by Enterprise Rental Cars and had been rented to Alex Aguirre, Richard Aguirre’s older brother. Alex paid $348.69 for six days. Right after getting the information on the rental, Teague got a call from a U.S. Marshal. The Marshal told Teague that he had information that Alex and Oscar were using strong-arm tactics to collect taxes from gangs in the area, including the East Side Treces (EST), a small gang in South Central, on behalf of the Mexican Mafia. To the detectives, this seemed out of the ordinary. Alex Aguirre was an Avenues member. Oscar was from Primera Flats. Geographically, the two gangs were too far apart to be considered allies or enemies. The other oddity was that Alex was collecting from another gang that was also geographically remote from either of their respective gangs. The Marshal also told Teague that Oscar was on parole after having served time in Pelican Bay, the Supermax prison facility in Crescent City, California, and that he was a validated Associate of the Mexican Mafia. What

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the Marshal didn’t tell Teague, and what few in law enforcement knew at the time, was that Alex Aguirre was a full-blown Carnal, a made member of the Mexican Mafia. Teague wondered why the U.S. Marshal Service would have any interest in Lil Man Rodriguez and Alex Aguirre. When Teague asked the Marshal the obvious question, he got the response a civilian would get. They couldn’t tell him. This is typical of Federal law enforcement agencies. A veteran County Sheriff’s gang expert describes Federal authorities as a black hole: Information goes in, but nothing ever comes out. “They show up and they want all sorts of information and ask to look at our files. They want everything. When you ask them for something, you get nothing. Just for fun one time, we asked them for information contained in some files we gave them. They wouldn’t tell us. They wouldn’t even tell us what we told them.” On February 2, Teague called Alex Aguirre’s parole officer and told her that he wanted to talk to Alex. Teague wanted her to call Alex to her office where they could interview him. As it turned out, she already had a meeting scheduled with Alex for the next day, February 3. Teague and Markel drove to the parole office in Pasadena and waited for Alex. When he arrived, his face was covered with bruises. He had an enormous shiner on his left eye. His left hand was bandaged. When Teague and Markel asked Alex how he got his injuries, he refused to answer. They told him to take the bandage off his left hand. What they saw was a through and through gunshot wound perforating the web of his hand between thumb and forefinger. This was the hand in which Teague had postulated the driver of the Escort would have been hit. They arrested Alex on the spot for parole violation. Part of a felon’s parole agreement is that he not associate with other known felons. Just having been in the car with Oscar Rodriguez was enough to send Alex to prison for at least 120 days. The hole in Alex’s hand and his name on the Enterprise rental agreement proved to his parole officer that Alex had been associating with the wrong people. Shortly thereafter, a confidential informant (CI) stepped forward and

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told Teague and Markel the entire story of the night of January 31, 1995. Alex Aguirre and Oscar Rodriguez were on a mission that night. They were to enforce a Mexican Mafia edict to tax the East Side Treces. As the informer told the story, the EST was either reluctant or flatly refused to pay this tax. As a shotcaller and enforcer, it was Alex “Pee Wee” Aguirre’s job to make sure they kicked up. If they didn’t, it was his job to force them by any means necessary, up to and including murder. On the night of the shooting, Alex and Richie left their house on Lincoln in Northeast and drove to pick up Oscar near 23rd Street and Wall. It may seem strange to someone not familiar with gang culture that thirty-one-year-old Alex and thirty-seven-year-old Oscar would bring fourteen-year-old Richie Aguirre on an enforcement mission, one with a strong likelihood of going sideways and ending in violence. But in the gang world, even a youngster like Richie is expected to prove himself. The sooner Richie was taught to conduct business, the better chance he stood of surviving an inevitable future encounter. A mission like this one would also prove to his older brother and to the Mexican Mafia that Lil Richie had the courage for a fight and the guts to stand his ground, what’s known as being “down” for the neighborhood. At the time, Richie was still on the farm team, but he had ambitions for the major leagues. Soon after Richie and Alex picked up Oscar, they drove up on Juan “Mr. Yago” Avila and a group of other East Side Treces members. Sometime in the previous weeks, Alex had pistol-whipped Avila: That was the first warning to pay up. He’d obviously ignored it. When the three men in the car saw Avila and his crew, Alex said, “They’re the ones. Let’s get ’em.” Alex parked and the three exited the vehicle. Alex and Richie waded into the group of ESTs and started a fistfight. Oscar apparently disappeared. Even though Alex and Richie were outnumbered, they fought hard and held their own. Before the tide turned against them, they ran back to the Escort. When they got to the car, Oscar was already waiting. The three jumped into the car and drove off down an alley. As they pulled away, Juan Avila jumped out from between two buildings

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and began firing a 9 mm handgun into the vehicle. Alex tried to run him over but missed. As the car drove towards him and then passed, Avila fired into the front, the right side, and the rear. Oscar Rodriguez caught almost every round. Alex took one round, the wound in the web of his left hand, and Richie, who took cover on the floor in the back, miraculously escaped without a scratch. When they got out of the area, Alex bailed out of the car and told Richie to drive the Escort to a safe location and call the police. Alex also told Richie to tell the cops that he and Oscar had only been driving through the neighborhood when they got lit up by gangsters. Alex took off and called a homie to scoop him up. Richie was left on his own to try to tell the cops a story good enough to keep his older brother out of jail. As hard as Richie tried, there was no way to keep Alex from his fate. From February 3, 1995, Alex never again drew a free breath. Soon after Teague and Markel arrested him for parole violation, Alex was indicted in a Federal RICO prosecution that also rolled up twenty-three made members of the Mexican Mafia. It was to be the first of three big RICO prosecutions launched by the FBI and the Los Angeles Metropolitan Task Force on Violent Crimes, a task force including the LAPD, LASD, and FBI. A few months later, Alex and a lot of top rank Carnales would be prominently featured in a series of articles in the LA Times and The New York Times. The Federal government had finally gotten serious about dismantling the Mexican Mafia, and Alex’s indictment was the first shot fired in the war. The man who fired the shots that killed Oscar “Lil Man” Rodriguez received the ultimate sanction for resisting the Mexican Mafia. At 10:20 PM on March 2, 1995, a month and some days after he killed Lil Man, Juan “Mr. Yago” Avila stood on the sidewalk in front of 219 East 57th Street. One or more unknown individuals rolled up and emptied two handguns into him. He died at the scene, a month short of his twenty-second birthday. One of the IOs who responded to the scene was Detective Abiel Barron. Barron was working Newton Division at the time, and he and Andy Teague had worked together as patrol officers there. Years later, the two were destined

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to work together again in Northeast, chasing the same set of characters. The full truth about Alex Aguirre’s encounter with Juan “Mr. Yago” Avila wouldn’t be revealed until years later. The circumstances illustrate how often Mexican Mafia members break their own rules and figuratively and literally stab each other in the back. When Alex Aguirre rolled up on Avila, Avila was on the phone with another Eme member named Randy “Cowboy” Therrien. When Avila saw Alex Aguirre and knew he was there to collect, Avila asked Cowboy if he’d sent somebody over to tax them. As it turned out, Avila and Cowboy Therrien had already negotiated drug deals and Avila was dutifully kicking up his portion of taxes. Avila was under the impression that Cowboy was the only Eme member he had to deal with. For his part, Therrien knew that he was poaching on Alex Aguirre’s legitimately sanctioned taxation area. When Avila asked Therrien who these people were, Therrien pretended that they had no status and that it was okay with him if Avila refused. Avila and his homies, of course, refused with the utmost prejudice. Law enforcement learned about this incident because Randy Therrien’s phone was being monitored by the Metropolitan Task Force on Violent Crime. Even though the Task Force knew everything about the shooting, they were in no position to tell Andy Teague, a local detective who wasn’t part of the Task Force. After Alex was indicted in the RICO case and information about this incident was revealed, Therrien found himself in bad standing with the Mexican Mafia: He was greenlighted. Therrien’s only escape from certain death was to become a government informant and enter Protective Custody. While in prison, he had a religious conversion and turned to the Bible. As often happens, Juan “Mr. Yago” Avila became a sacrificial pawn in a battle between two Eme brothers. Even when you try to be a good, loyal gangster and pay your taxes, you wind up dead from a squabble of which you have no knowledge and over which you have no power. Despite a sizable pool of suspects, no one was ever arrested for the murder of Mr. Yago. The case remains open to this day. It’s clear that his murder was retaliation for Lil Man’s. It can be assumed that the murder was

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ordered by Alex Aguirre while he was in custody. It’s an accepted fact of life that Mexican Mafia members and associates don’t need to be on the street to conduct business. To shotcallers like Alex Aguirre, going to prison doesn’t put you out of circulation. It means you’ve been relocated to the home office.

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C H A P TE R t w o

TA S K F O R C E , TA X AT I O N, AND THE P H O N Y T RU C E

I

n the early 1990s, a convergence of forces put the Mexi-

can Mafia in Southern California on a collision course with local law enforcement and the U.S. Department of Justice. That collision would result in the biggest Federal RICO prosecution ever directed at the Eme and deal it the biggest blow in its history. It was also the first time that a RICO case had been filed against a criminal organization other than the Cosa Nostra. In military terms, this confrontation could be characterized as a classic “meeting engagement” wherein two opposing forces, only vaguely aware of each other’s presence, suddenly find themselves face to face on an unprepared battlefield. 21

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das and by world events beyond their control. On the international scene, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of Communism removed the nation’s number one political, military, and ideological enemy. As a result, the FBI refocused some of its resources to combating internal problems. One of those problems was the spike in urban combat among street gangsters and the evolution of street gangs into organized crime groups. There was no shortage of potential targets. On the East Coast, Jamaican and Cuban drug cartels, the Russian Mafiya, and gangs like the Latin Kings began to rival the power and influence of the more established Cosa Nostra. In the Midwest, groups like El Rukn, Folk Nation, and the Gangster Disciples were making the transition from loosely affiliated and often warring street gangs into organized criminal enterprises. El Rukn and the Gangster Disciples went even further and attempted to reinvent themselves as politically legitimate activist organizations. On the West Coast, transplants from the East were establishing outposts of the Russian Mafiya. Reflecting its style and preferred criminal activities was Armenian Power, a homegrown gang centered in Glendale, Burbank, and Pasadena. Neither of these ethnically European groups can be considered street gangs. They’re organized criminal enterprises operating on a far more sophisticated level; they don’t get involved in gang-banging crimes like drive-by shootings and feuds over neighborhood control. Much larger in numbers and far more violent were the established street gangs like the Bloods, Crips, Black P-Stones, and almost incalculable numbers of Hispanic street gangs. In the wake of the riots in April 1992, policymakers at the highest levels at the Department of Justice were forced by the reality on the street to pay particular attention to Los Angeles city and county. The riots sent massive shockwaves through the political and law enforcement communities. Within hours of the ignition of the riots on the corner of Florence and Normandie on April 29, 1992, it became abundantly clear to anyone with a TV set that the LAPD was unprepared for such a level of violence. The last time

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the city saw anything like it was twenty-six years earlier, when Watts exploded. In that instance, the trigger was a routine traffic stop; it escalated into a citywide conflagration. In 1992, it was the acquittal of the four LAPD officers charged with brutality in the beating of Rodney King. In the post-riot period of evaluation and analysis, a number of uncomfortable facts came to the surface. One was that law enforcement in LA was indeed a thin blue line between order and chaos. The riots started in LAPD jurisdiction and the unchecked violence underscored the department’s chronic, decades-old problem of severe understaffing. When William Bratton was appointed police chief in 2002, some ten years later, the problem still hadn’t been addressed. One of his first public pronouncements after being sworn in was that Los Angeles was “one of the most if not the most under-policed” big cities in the country. He made it a priority to boost manpower from roughly 9,000 sworn personnel to 15,000. As of 2006, the staffing level still hovers around 9,000. While the politicians, media pundits, and activists sought to assign blame for the riots to disenfranchisement, poverty, lack of jobs, lack of social services, and institutional racism, it became clear to law enforcement that a number of the individuals who lit the fuse to the riots were in fact hard-core gangsters. Probably the most notorious to come out of the riots was Damian “Football” Williams, a career criminal who was seen on national television beating a defenseless white truck driver named Reginald Denny at the Florence and Normandie intersection. Once other gangsters throughout the city realized that the LAPD wasn’t responding to the attacks at that infamous intersection, it was open season and the riots spread throughout the city and as far as Long Beach and Pomona. Then-police-chief Daryl Gates went to Williams’s house after the riots and personally took him into custody. Police chiefs don’t normally serve felony warrants. The fact that it was Gates who knocked on Williams’s door was a clear message from the LAPD to all the city’s gangs that the cops were back in control. The local media had something of a field day with the arrest. Gates was known for his tough, militaristic stance against crime. He was famous, and

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often ridiculed by the press, for launching campaigns like Operation Hammer and for buying a military-surplus armored vehicle and equipping it with a steel battering ram to knock down the reinforced doors of crack houses. What the media never reported was that the LAPD’s arrest of Williams probably saved his life. Reginald Denny wasn’t Williams’s only victim on the evening of April 29, 1992. Williams and some of his homies had also dragged Hispanic drivers out of their cars, beaten and robbed them, and spraypainted them with gang graffiti. When Eme shotcallers saw Williams’s disrespect of Hispanics on their TV sets, they put Williams on their greenlight lists. Ironically, the contract to kill Damian Williams was picked up by the Mara Salvatrucha, a now infamous street gang made up mostly of illegal Salvadoran immigrants. Any Sureno gang member would earn immediate stripes for killing Williams. The Eme had painted a target on his back and he was fair game for any street gangster who wanted status. The truth of gang involvement in the riots seeped into the public consciousness years after the fact. In an unintentionally revealing article written by self-styled gang peacekeeper Kershaun “Lil Monster” Scott (LA Weekly, Dec. 6-12, 2002), he made the case as well as any gang investigator that gangs were at the forefront of the violence. Scott, the younger brother of legendary Eight-Trey Gangster Crips member “Monster” Cody Scott, talked about the truce between the Bloods and Crips that took hold temporarily after the riots. He stated, “The riot itself was the motivating factor behind the treaty. Think about it. If I was in a store trying to move a huge safe, it didn’t matter to me that the man helping me was from the Rolling Sixties (a rival gang). It mattered more to both of us what was inside the safe. After three days of this cooperation, gang members saw that they could get along. The reasoning behind it didn’t matter. A sense of community had been restored.” Kershaun Scott’s monumental tone-deafness and the platform handed him by LA’s left-leaning press underscore one of the reasons why it’s almost impossible for the public to get accurate information about gang culture. What was clearly lost on the editors of the LA Weekly was Scott’s implica-

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tion that a riot costing over fifty lives, resulting in over a billion dollars in damage, and destroying the livelihoods of thousands of shop owners, only served to make rival criminals feel good about themselves and each other. By the time the California National Guard had decamped from the shopping malls and was packing up and heading back to its barracks in May 1992, local and federal law enforcement was already formulating plans to prevent violence on this level from happening again. On the Federal level, the legendary FBI agent Charlie Parsons tapped into the FBI’s internal program called Project Safe Streets. This wasn’t so much a task force as an operational plan to partner up with local law enforcement to target street violence. At the time, Parsons was the Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the Los Angeles office, whose area of operations is the most populous of all the FBI regional offices. The jurisdiction covers 40,000 square miles and encompasses eighteen million people. It runs from Santa Maria in the north to Santa Ana in the south and as far east as Palm Springs. Parsons spent several months after the riots knocking on the doors of local police chiefs to gauge what resources individual departments needed to target gangs and what level of cooperation they were willing to provide to the FBI. The goal was to launch a task force made up of FBI agents and local law enforcement personnel. On the local level, the LAPD and LASD already had gang-suppression units in place. The LAPD had CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) units. The LASD had Operation Safe Streets (OSS). The LAPD’s CRASH units were staffed by street cops and detectives who were intimately familiar with gangs and gangsters. The film Colors with Robert Duvall created a fairly accurate depiction of these units. These cops knew gang members by name, knew the gangs’ internal beefs, histories, feuds with other gangs, who was married to whom, their parole status, even what individual gangsters liked to eat and where they hung out. This deep knowledge of gangs and individual gangsters can only come from years of patrolling the same streets. It’s not unusual, for instance, for a veteran CRASH cop to have arrested three generations of gangsters from the same family over the course of a twenty-five-year career in the LAPD. It’s

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also not unusual for CRASH cops to patrol the neighborhoods and streets where they grew up and to arrest gangsters who once sat next to them in grammar school. The same could be said of OSS personnel. Many of them are black and Hispanic cops who grew up in gang-infested neighborhoods and, for reasons of their own, resisted the calls to join a gang and instead went into the military and eventually returned to their old stomping grounds as patrol officers. Retired LASD gang cop Sgt. Rich Valdemar once put it succinctly: “The three biggest products of Hispanic neighborhoods are priests, cops, and gangsters.” What OSS had that CRASH units didn’t was the intelligence-gathering capability of Operation Safe Jails (OSJ). Because the LASD runs the LA County jails, it’s in a position to gather prison gang intelligence and to monitor communications between inmates in the County system and gangsters on the street. This is conducted on a daily basis and yields a huge amount of information. While most of it is not immediately actionable, it becomes invaluable in fitting together the puzzle pieces if and when a major case is developed. OSJ, which was launched in mid-1990, almost never happened. In a perfect world, OSJ would have been established decades ago, when the Mexican Mafia and other prison gangs were beginning to gather strength and exert influence on street gangs. In truth, OSJ only came about because of a budget crunch. And it did so not out of careful planning but as the result of a few key individuals finding themselves doing remedial police work. In late 1989 and early 1990, LASD deputies in the custody division, which runs the jails, were racking up overtime hours, something that cost the County a lot more than it had in the budget. To ease the crisis, Sheriff Sherman Block decided to demobilize some specialized investigative units, put them back in uniform, and assign them to custody duty. This is akin to putting a thoroughbred in front of a plow. These units were staffed by veteran investigators with decades of experience in their area of specialization. One of the units stripped of personnel was the Prison Gang Unit (PGU). This unit, like SWAT, the bomb squad, and the anti-terror unit, was struc-

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tured to answer directly to the Sheriff. Like all bureaucracies, there’s always a certain amount of intramural rivalry. PGU was considered by most brass hats to be operating way out there, without the strict supervision under which other Sheriff functions labored. It wasn’t exactly considered a “cowboy” outfit, but it was close. PGU’s job was to obtain information and intelligence from a variety of sources and piece together the organizational structure of the Mexican Mafia and other prison gangs. It was further tasked with monitoring paroled shotcallers. Based on prior history, career criminals like made Eme members generally pick up their careers within days or weeks of hitting the streets. They come out of prison with orders from more senior Eme members to perform a wide variety of functions, from executing errant members or enemies, organizing drug sales in their neighborhood, and collecting overdue taxes, to expanding the Eme street empire into virgin territory. It was PGU’s job to conduct surveillance on them and to arrest them as soon as they violated the conditions of parole. Very few people outside of PGU understood the importance of the work it performed. By arresting shotcallers when they violated probation, PGU prevented murders and disrupted the Eme’s plans to consolidate power. When Eme generals get taken off the streets, the foot soldiers are left with no orders and no structure, and they lose focus. One of the most prominent members of PGU to be put back in uniform and folded into Custody Division was Sgt. Rich Valdemar. There was some indication of the Sheriff Department’s perception of PGU when Valdemar reported in uniform for his first day in County Jail in early 1990. A captain brought the new arrivals into a room and said, “Welcome to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.” This was addressed to a group of men who had been in the department for decades. It was a not-so-subtle indication that this—being in uniform and putting in hours behind a desk or walking the tiers—was the real work of the department. As a result, from 1989 until almost the end of 1993, paroled Eme members who hit the streets of Los Angeles County did so without any sort of surveillance from the LASD or, in fact, from any law enforcement agency. All

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they had to do was periodically report to their parole officers and pee into a cup. That was the extent of law enforcement monitoring. As FBI SAC Parsons was making his rounds, Daryl Gates became the first political casualty of the riots. In the first hours of the riots, when a command presence on the streets was needed the most, Gates held back. He had no plan to contain major rioting. Street cops, who by inclination and training wanted to drive towards the sound of gunfire, were told to pull back and wait for orders. While the command staff dithered and tried to implement some kind of riot-suppression plan on the fly, the city went up in flames. On June 27, 1992, Gates stepped down. On June 30, Willie Williams, the black former chief of the Philadelphia Police Department, was sworn in as LA’s new chief. At the time Williams took over, rank-and-file cops in the LASD and LAPD were thoroughly demoralized. Being ordered to stand back while innocent civilians of all colors were being robbed, burned out of their stores, assaulted on the streets, and killed, rattled cops to the core. Faith in the command staff evaporated. Supervisors and commanders were seen as cowards. Picking an outsider as LA’s police chief did nothing to improve morale. The message from LA’s political overlords was that there was no one in the command staff qualified to run the department. Picking a black chief was a political expedient designed to defuse anger among LA’s blacks by putting a black face on a department thought to be at best insensitive to minorities and, at worst, outright racist. Appointing Williams was a knee-jerk reaction by the city’s overwhelmingly liberal politicians, who subscribed to the irrational concepts of racial and ethnic politics. In Lou Cannon’s book Official Negligence, he concluded that racism had nothing to do with the King beating. It was a failure of tactics and training. By late 1992, Charlie Parsons had hammered out a deal with a number of police departments in LA County. He sent out a six-page Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) outlining the participants, goals, and operational procedures for the Los Angeles Metropolitan Task Force on Violent Crimes (LAMTFOVC). The agencies that signed on included the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (now called the

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ICE), the California Department of Justice, the Compton Police Department, the Inglewood Police Department, the Long Beach Police Department, the Los Angeles County Probation Office, the LAPD, the LASD, and the San Fernando Police Department. There were three items in the MOA’s mission statement. 1)

Identify and prosecute those individuals or groups responsible for crimes of violence during the recent civil unrest in Los Angeles County, with particular emphasis on perpetrators who are members of, or are associated with, violence-prone street gangs.

2)

Establish and maintain a system for the collection and dissemination of operational intelligence concerning potentially violent criminal activity and/or renewed civil unrest.

3)

Target the most violent individuals/gangs with the specific intent of identifying and prosecuting the leaders and core members of those groups for any and all State or Federal law violations on which prosecutable cases can be developed.

As outlined in the MOA, each agency would contribute a certain number of officers and investigators to be partnered with FBI agents. Their salaries would be paid by their respective agencies. Overtime would be paid out of a Department of Justice budget. Vehicles, radios, monitoring equipment, and so on, would also come out of the DOJ budget. Task forces like the one that Charlie Parsons proposed don’t have a great track record. They fail to accomplish their goals for a number of reasons, most of which have to do with the culture of the FBI and the cultures of individual police departments. Local cops perceive FBI agents as overly clever college grads with little knowledge of the street—and as absolute hogs when it comes to taking the glory for successful cases. For its part, the FBI’s sense of most local police departments is that they’re made up of unsophisticated radio-call chasers who lack the subtlety of mind to see the big picture of a major investigation and who lack the discipline or inclination to perform the soul-grinding chores of filing endless but necessary reports and memos. There’s some truth to both sides. Most local detectives and gang inves-

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tigators can spend an entire career never bringing to trial in a single case more than a few defendants at a time. A typical case may involve one or two crime scenes, one informant, some forensic evidence, and a compressed time frame of events. The FBI’s stock in trade is major investigations involving dozens of defendants, multiple crime scenes, a huge amount of forensic evidence, multiple informants, and a time frame of criminal activity that may span a decade or more. The FBI also has access to the most advanced scientific tools, cuttingedge surveillance equipment, and huge financial and logistical resources. Local cops inhabit an entirely different world. A homicide investigator may have to wait six or seven months to get a ballistics report out of the local PD’s lab. Covert surveillance equipment and even mundane items like unmarked cars and radios are often antiquated, in disrepair, or otherwise unreliable. The LAPD’s crime lab in particular is woefully lacking in skilled personnel and new equipment. At one point, the LAPD lab accidentally disposed of thousands of DNA samples collected during rape investigations. At the same time, they had a backlog of 6,000 fingerprints that needed analysis. All the same, what local cops lack in resources they more than compensate for in street intelligence. They know the major players, the supporting cast, and how they all got there. As the LAMTFOVC was to prove, when those differences and strengths are brought together under wise management, the results are greater than the sum of the parts. Charlie Parsons signed his copy of the MOA on October 1, 1992. Sheriff Sherman Block signed on November 11, 1992. Willie Williams signed on one month and eleven days later. The last to sign on was the INS on February 3, 1993. By the middle of 1993, the Task Force began to form up and target specific individuals and gangs. In all, ten squads were formed and placed throughout the county. Each squad had specific assignments. The squads in Compton and Inglewood targeted primarily black gangs like the Crips and Bloods. Other squads targeted the Russian Mafiya, Armenian Power, and big street gangs like 18th Street and the Mara Salvatrucha. The squad assigned to

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monitor the Mexican Mafia was located in the West San Fernando Valley, in LAPD jurisdiction. This was an unusual venue for targeting the Eme, as its traditional turf was East Los Angeles. The Eme also had a major presence in the San Gabriel Valley and other regions in the LASD’s jurisdiction. There are conflicting opinions about why the decision was made to locate the Eme squad in the San Fernando Valley. Some Task Force members claimed that it was put in the Valley as a convenience to FBI agents who lived in nearby Westlake Village and Agoura. It was an easier commute. Others claim that the squad was located there to placate local politicians who were campaigning to have the Valley secede from the city of Los Angeles. Although the Valley is the economic engine and largest tax base for the city of Los Angeles, it receives fewer services and less attention than the rest of the city. Valley secession was the nightmare scenario that plagued a number of LA’s mayors during their terms in office. In any case, the Valley was not the ideal base of operations to go after the Mexican Mafia. According to Special Agent James Myers, the FBI overlord of the Valley squad, the participating local police agencies were taking a gamble on the Task Force. Some of the best and most knowledgeable cops were taken off active cases and sent to the Task Force, depriving their departments of valuable resources. If these cops had stayed where they were, they were sure to have racked up arrests and brought cases to trial. There was no guarantee that the Task Force would produce anything in terms of prosecutions and convictions. No one from the LASD’s Prison Gang Unit was assigned to the Task Force by Sherman Block. By the time the Task Force was formed, the PGU had been stripped of all but two officers. While both were veteran street cops, neither had spent significant time in the PGU. The gang-intelligence core of PGU officers had been put back in uniform to work in the jails. Of all the units that should have had a real presence in the Task Force, the PGU had been hollowed out and the resident expertise on the Mexican Mafia scattered to the winds. At around the same time that Jim Myers was getting his forces up and running, the Mexican Mafia was setting into motion a policy initiative that

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would set it on a collision course with Myers’s group, every major law enforcement agency in Southern California, and, ultimately, the US Attorney’s Office. In one of those random convergences of fortune, by the early 1990s a significant number of made Eme members had been paroled. Some of them, like Ernest “Chuco” Castro and Peter “Sana” Ojeda, were veteranos who had spent most of their lives in jail. Others were up and comers, younger men like Alex Aguirre. While the Eme originally adopted its name from the Italian Mafia, its organizational structure was that of a street gang. It’s a radically different syndicate in terms of operation, style, attitude, and the nature of its crimes. The Italians are vertically structured in the classic corporate pyramid. At the top is the Commission, made up of the heads of the families. Below that are the caporegimes (captains like John Gotti) with their consiglieres and underbosses. And below that are the crew chiefs, soldiers, and associates. In a sense, La Cosa Nostra is like a feudal system. Warlords, the family heads, control a territory. The family heads create policies, establish rules of conduct, and sanction retribution for errant members. The killing of made men or family heads has to be submitted for approval and blessed by the Commission. Poaching on another family’s territory is prohibited, and it’s dealt with. At least, that’s the way it operates in theory. The Mexican Mafia, however, is a horizontal organization. There is only one rank—a brother, or Carnal. Since 1957, when the Eme was founded by a dozen young Hispanic inmates at the Deuel Vocational Institution, the policy has been “one man, one vote.” There aren’t bosses, family heads, or subordinates, and there’s no line of reporting. Territories are up for grabs and while fighting and politicking between brothers is technically forbidden, it happens with such frequency that the rule may as well not exist. Compared to the Italian mob, the Mexican Mafia is chaotic. It is not, however, totally devoid of structure. While there aren’t supposed to be leaders, it’s inevitable that some members become more equal than others. Whether through personal charisma or outright fear and intimidation, some members rise above their equals. They can float policies, suggest operations, and

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settle disputes, all without having to issue a command. In this respect, it’s a more subtle structure than that of any other organized criminal enterprise. Orders by brothers are issued, but only to associates and prospective members, never to another made member. By the early 1990s, that handful of Eme members had swollen to between 350 and 400 Carnales. For most of its history, the Eme was primarily a prison gang. Membership was open mainly to inmates; it was rare to induct a criminal who hadn’t spent a considerable amount of time in either the California Department of Corrections (CDC) or the LA County Jail. In fact, the Eme still calls the LA County Jail “headquarters.” The Eme controls drug smuggling into the prisons, collects cell taxes from Hispanic and non-Hispanic inmates, collects commissary items and other luxury goods sent to inmates by their families, and orders or conducts hits against anyone that resists their commands or competes with their drug business. It doesn’t stretch credulity to claim that the Mexican Mafia runs the California prison system. The correctional staff is there to provide housing and services, but the power is almost completely in the hands of Eme brothers. One correctional officer said that, “We don’t run the prison. They do. We’re not the enemy, we’re just the referees.” The Eme is not the only prison-based gang in the CDC. Its chief rivals are the Nuestra Familia (NF), a northern California-based Hispanic gang, and the Black Guerilla Family. One of the other prominent prison gangs is the Aryan Brotherhood (AB), which is also known as the Brand, a name taken from Louis L’Amour novels. Over the years, the Eme has been able to accomplish something that no other prison gang has done. It’s projected its power beyond prison walls and into every street and neighborhood with a significant Hispanic gang presence. The evolution from pure prison gang to a many-tentacled criminal organization happened almost completely below the radar of law enforcement over the course of decades. That in itself is a testament to the secretive nature of the organization and to the fear and intimidation it exerts on those who might snitch or give up its secrets. By the time the Task Force was ordering office supplies and plugging

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in their coffee machines, the Eme had already launched the most ambitious initiative in its history. Carnales like “Chuco” Castro, “Sana” Ojeda, and Frankie Buelna had been ordered to hit the streets and deliver the news to every Hispanic gang in Southern California. What the street gangsters heard would forever change the nature and structure of Hispanic street gangs from a disjointed rabble of territorial street fighters into an army marching to the same beat, what has been called the “Blue Tsunami.” There were three elements in the Eme’s edict. One was that all Hispanic street gangs had to stop drive-by shootings. The second was that they had to swear allegiance to the Mexican Mafia and fly the blue flag of Surenos, the Spanish word for southerners. (This stems from the Southern California roots of the Eme.) The third item on the agenda was that every Hispanic gang in Southern California and in the smaller Northern California outposts of Surenos was to pay taxes to the Mexican Mafia. The unspoken penalty for failure to obey, of course, was death. It’s impossible to determine who floated this initiative. There are some who claim that the taxation aspect of the policy was started much earlier by shotcallers from the 18th Street gang. And there were several localized antecedents to the no drive-by edict. The concept of banding all Southern California Hispanic street gangs under the Sureno flag, however, was something new. Regardless of its roots, the fact remains that this major initiative was blessed and given permission to proceed at the highest levels of the Eme in the prison system. What made it extraordinary was its public nature. It ran contrary to the Eme’s core principles of secrecy. One of the Eme’s rules is that members can never acknowledge the existence of the Eme to anyone other than another member under penalty of death. Non-members who claim to be members are also subject to execution. Members who reveal their status to law enforcement or anyone else are also subject to death. On the afternoon of September 18, 1993, the LAPD, LASD, Task Force, and every law enforcement agency in Southern California was hit between the eyes with a reality no one could have predicted. On a seemingly invisible

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cue, over a thousand known Hispanic gang members began to converge on a football field in Elysian Park near downtown Los Angeles. The LAPD was the first to become aware of this because its academy is located in the same park. The boldness of holding a conference in the shadow of the police academy was stunning. While the homies straggled in by twos, threes, and in groups as large as a dozen, cops went running to unmarked cars with video cameras to document the event. What the cops witnessed was a well-organized convention, complete with featured speakers, internal security, and pat-down searches. Girlfriends were left behind at the perimeter of the park. Rival gangsters who anywhere else in town would have immediately started shooting each other were ordered by a higher power to cool their animosity for the afternoon and listen to the new rules. The man delivering the message was Ernesto “Chuco” Castro, a recently paroled Eme member. Castro was a career criminal who had spent more than half of his forty years in prison. When he was released from the CDC he took with him the plan to organize all of Southern California’s Hispanic gangs under the Eme flag. Two men, Sapo Fernandez and Moe Ferrell, veteran Eme members with plenty of status in the organization, had sponsored Castro for induction into the brotherhood in San Quentin in April of 1983. Chuco’s brother, Eduardo “Deadeye” Castro, was also a made member. Law enforcement knew that this was a major power move. A young Armenian Power gangster had the audacity to show up at the event with a fully automatic MAC-10 machine pistol stuck in his waistband. The Eme’s “security” staff took the gun away from him and bitch-slapped him in front of his homies. Armenian Power, as its name implies, is an ethnically Armenian street gang, but it considers itself an ally of Hispanic gangs and the Mexican Mafia. Ordinarily, this level of disrespect would have resulted in retaliation, either on the spot or later. But that afternoon a much stronger power was present. While this brazenly public “come to Jesus” meeting sent alarms throughout the law enforcement community, there was still more to come. Similar meetings were going on all over Southern California. A veteran Eme

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member, Peter “Sana” Ojeda, held other major meetings in Orange County. Frankie Buelna, another brother, held meetings in Pacoima in the north end of the San Fernando Valley. Others were taking place at the LA Coliseum, Riverside, Compton, and in the San Gabriel Valley. It became clear in the following days that the Elysian Park meeting was not a localized event. The same policy was being enforced wherever there was a significant Hispanic gang presence. An event of this magnitude inevitably gets media attention. While law enforcement had no illusions about the nature and intent of these meetings, the media and some politicians and activists had a somewhat different take. After the LA riots and prior to these Eme-sponsored meetings, the Crips and the Bloods had called for an actual truce. They also held very public meetings, but these were publicized ahead of time and the media was invited to witness them. What the media saw was impressive. Crips and Bloods sat in the same room and tied their blue and red railroad kerchiefs together as a symbol of solidarity and peace. According to most sources, this was a legitimate attempt to stop the bloodshed. There were no other items on the Bloods/Crips agenda. There was no call to unite under the umbrella of any prison gang like the Black Guerilla Family. The entire thrust of the truce was to stop the killing, not to create a larger and more unified ethnic gang. The Bloods/Crips truce has been widely believed to have started with Stanley “Tookie” Williams, a notorious Crips leader awaiting execution on San Quentin’s death row. Williams would eventually be executed in 2005. But in 1992, he appeared on a video asking the Bloods and Crips to stop killing each other. While Williams was the public face of the truce, the real source was powerful South Central LA drug dealers. Put simply, constant killings were bad for the drug business. The truce would serve numerous purposes. One was to get the drug business back up and running efficiently. Another was to reduce law enforcement scrutiny. Still another was to help along efforts by activists to have black gangs perceived as a legitimate political and social force rather than as a purely criminal enterprise.

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In the minds of some, the reason for the truce didn’t matter. They could countenance a large volume of drugs on the street, so long as the killing stopped. Politicians and activists were ecstatic. Here was proof that the gangs themselves could do what law enforcement had failed for so long to do. The implication was that law enforcement was at best an ineffective force for dealing with gangs and at worst had actually contributed to the problem. The real power, activists believed, lay with the gangs themselves. If the gangs could be “empowered,” they could police their own neighborhoods and keep the peace. There were even proposals made to put no-longer-feuding gang members on the city payroll as community leaders. While the euphoria over the Bloods/Crips truce was short-lived, it lived long enough to overlap with the Mexican Mafia’s meetings. Those who wanted to believe that street gangs could evolve into legitimate political entities now had another piece of evidence to bolster their argument. They paid scant attention to all three items in the Eme agenda. All they heard was “no more drive-bys.” But what the big homies in Elysian Park and elsewhere were actually saying was not “no more killing.” Prior to these meetings, drive-by shootings had gotten completely out of control. Babies, kids, old people, and housewives were regularly caught in the crossfire. Invariably, the victims, like the shooters, were Hispanics. While the Eme has no qualms about “taking care of business,” they do to some degree draw the line at killing innocents. There was also self-interest involved: They realized that the next drive-by could take one of their own family members. Most importantly, the killing of innocents energized law enforcement and politicians to launch extraordinary measures. By no stretch of the imagination could the “no drive-by” edict be called anything like a truce. It was nothing more or less than a change in the rules of engagement. As Randy “Cowboy” Therrien, caught on FBI surveillance tapes, put it in late 1993: “If you gotta down somebody, down ’em. All we’re saying is don’t drive-by.” In 2004, the Sixties radical and former California State Senator Tom Hayden wrote a book about gangs, Street Wars: Gangs and the Future of Vi-

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olence. The book is a profoundly muddled and often dishonest examination of Southern California and national gang culture. Early in the book Hayden discusses the Elysian Park Eme meeting through the eyes of a reformed, fourth-generation Santa Monica gang member named Manny Lares. Hayden states that Manny had been brokering peace treaties and truces among west side gangs for years before the Eme meeting in Elysian Park. According to Hayden’s book, “Manny arrived in a vanguard ‘car’ filled with peacemakers from west side gangs.” But then Hayden characterizes Manny as being nervous about walking into the huge crowd. “Manny remembers walking through thirty guys in a parking lot ‘with only six bullets in your gun, fifteen if you’re rich, but everyone was cool.’” Hayden never bothers to speculate about why a “peacemaker” who has brokered truces for over a year is walking into a giant meeting—where a peace treaty is supposedly on the table—illegally carrying a gun. Hayden dissembles the events of that afternoon. “When he [Manny] arrived on the grounds, Manny noticed the individual named Chuco talking ‘a lot of high powered bullshit,’ which triggered Manny’s paranoia since ‘he [Chuco] knows the cops are here, how could he not know?’” Why doesn’t Hayden articulate the details of that “high-powered bullshit”? It could be because Chuco’s agenda doesn’t fit Hayden’s fantasies about gang culture. Hayden can’t quite decide what he believes. On one page he states incorrectly that the “message of the day was to stop the violence.” One page later he states correctly that the message was, “If there was business to take care of,” it would be conducted one on one. So was it stopping the violence or merely re-channeling it? It can’t logically be both. Soon after the Elysian Park meeting, Chuco Castro would become an informant for the Task Force. When Manny learns of this later he suspects that the FBI had put Chuco up to stirring the pot and actually increasing violence between rival gangs. Hayden quotes Lares again, “Who knows, maybe he [Chuco] settled a lot of scores for the LAPD.” A few paragraphs later, however, Hayden all but dismisses the power and influence of Castro

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and the Eme. He quotes the LA Times, that “there was ‘growing resistance on the streets to the Eme.” A page later, he states, “In the end, Manny said, the result was less killing for the first time since his childhood (a reduction confirmed by police statistics as well).” Then, a sentence later, Hayden quotes the LA Times again: “La Eme was ‘credited with decelerating one of the bloodiest cycles’ in L.A.’s gang history.” On top of his many contradictions, Hayden writes that “truce ventures were emerging like Manny’s, and others were reported in San Diego, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Santa Ana.” Those ventures Hayden cites were nothing more than carbon copies of the Elysian Park meeting, where the call was to create not a truce but a complete vertical integration of the Mexican Mafia prison gang with every Hispanic street gang in Southern California. The simple truth is this: The Mexican Mafia set out to control the drug trade—and to tax the dealers—in every neighborhood with a Hispanic street gang. The Eme has little difficulty enforcing taxation. Every gangster knows that the Eme controls the prisons. And every gangster knows that he’ll eventually end up there. The Eme may not get you on the street for resisting the taxation, but it will when you’re brought into custody. Reluctantly or willingly, street gangsters have to obey the Eme if they’re in any way inclined to stay alive. Hayden accurately states that there was resistance to the Eme. What he fails to elaborate on is that there has always been a level of resistance; that level is best described as minute, localized, and easily crushed. The few pages of Hayden’s book quoted illustrate in microcosm why the public, politicians, and policymakers are often baffled by the gang phenomenon. The first order of business in addressing the issue should be to get the facts straight. This piling-on of contradiction, misinformation, incomplete information, cherry-picking of facts, promotion of outright falsehoods, and muddled conclusions is what passes for analytical discourse on the subject of the Mexican Mafia and the culture of street gangs. It would be simple to dismiss Hayden and others who write on the sub-

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ject of gangs as misinformed or ignorant. They know not of what they speak. The fact is, what they write—the conclusions reached by this tortured logic—is driven by an agenda to place blame on the usual suspects and exonerate the real culprits.

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C H A P TE R t hr e e

CHUCO MEETS THE LAST MAN S TA N D I N G

T

o Sergeant Rich Valdemar and the other deputies in

the LASD Prison Gang Unit and Special Investigations Unit (SPI), being sent to custody division or a patrol car felt like exile. The program to which they’d fallen victim was called TORA, Temporary Overtime Reduction Assignment. They’d been at the cutting edge of crime fighting but thanks to TORA, they were now riding herd on inmates in backwaters like the County Jail in downtown and the Biscailuz Center in Monterey Park. 41

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gin their careers there and Valdemar had earned his rookie spurs by spending much of the 1970s within bad-breath-distance of prisoners. Now he was in Biscailuz Center dealing with, among other offenders, mental patients. He suffered under the effects of budget shortfalls, near-sighted commanders, and a divorce. He was at a personal and professional low point. As for the Prison Gang Unit, no one was minding the store. The PGU, previously a full complement of deputies with intelligence and surveillance functions, was reduced to one man, Roy Nunez. Deputies with longer time in the Sheriff’s Department were last to be rotated out of specialized units, regardless of their time with the PGU. As it turned out, the last man standing in the PGU had virtually no time on the job. Nunez showed up for duty in the PGU on the same day that Valdemar left. There was no time for training or even to brief Nunez on ongoing investigations. Nunez, who was a veteran of Operation Safe Streets and had an excellent knowledge of gangs still had to train himself on the unique specialties of the PGU. Luckily, Nunez was a skillful autodidact. It’s a widely held misconception that law enforcement agencies are tightly interconnected entities with advanced equipment and capabilities. This myth is propagated by movies, TV shows, and novels. As intelligence failures in the post-9/11 world have shown, law enforcement bodies like the LASD are vulnerable to corporate myopia, personality clashes, inertia, and lack of imagination on the part of policymakers and senior command staff. In retrospect, the gutting of PGU in early 1990 could not have been more badly timed. By the late 1980s, a number of veteran Mexican Mafia members were being paroled. Career criminals were out and about and nobody except Roy Nunez and a few other deputies could keep an eye on them. Nunez’s lack of experience in the PGU was offset by his singular dedication. He quickly established working relationships with the California Department of Corrections Institutional Gang Investigators (IGIs, also known as Igees). The IGIs’ job is to gather intelligence on prison gang members and their associates and to decide where to house them and what threat they pose to the Correctional Officers (COs) and other inmates. Igees are also re-

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sponsible for conducting debriefs on members and associates who want to drop out of the Eme and other prison gangs. Nunez also kept in close touch with investigators in OSS and, surprisingly, with LAPD CRASH cops. There had been a history of bad blood between the LAPD and LASD over the handling of cases dating back to the late 1970s. Nunez, who characterizes himself as a team player, tried to mend fences with the LAPD. He also realized that street gangs and shotcallers conduct business outside of their home neighborhoods. They sell and transport drugs, shoot rivals, and form working arrangements across the numerous jurisdictions in Southern California. If a gang member commits a crime in LAPD’s Hollenbeck Division, he might hole up in a cousin’s or uncle’s house in Rialto or the high desert of Palmdale and Lancaster in LASD jurisdiction. Cooperation among agencies is necessary, but it’s something that isn’t easily accomplished. In the time between entering the PGU and the arrest of Ernie Castro, Nunez collected mountains of actionable intelligence on Mexican Mafia members and associates currently on the streets or about to be paroled. He spent money out of his own pocket to buy a database program that he used to cross-reference Eme members, associates, street gang members, tattoos, criminal backgrounds, residences, cell assignments in the CDC and jail system, and any other factor he felt was relevant. He also took an eight-week course at East Los Angeles College to learn Nahuatl, the Aztec language that the Eme had begun to use for communications. It was the Eme’s version of the US Marines’ use of Navajo code talkers in the Pacific campaigns during WWII. Without knowing it, Roy Nunez was laying the groundwork for what would become one of the biggest cases of his career. After decades of training and through a combination of charisma, street smarts, and a background in the same neighborhoods as his charges, Rich Valdemar was a cop prisoners could talk to. Valdemar’s dialogue with gangsters, either in custody or on the street, had always been a major factor in his success as a gang investigator and in the success of the PGU. Valdemar’s demeanor with inmates was easygoing and non-confrontational. He knew how to accord them respect, how to inhabit their world. He was able on many occasions to get Mexican Mafia members to admit the ex-

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istence of their secret brotherhood. This point was frequently challenged by defense attorneys: If the Eme was so secret that the penalty for revealing its existence or admitting to membership was death, why would an Eme member put his life in the hands of a cop? As the case of Chuco Castro would show, Eme members are often more afraid of their brothers in the mob than of law enforcement. For members in bad standing, jumping into the arms of law enforcement is the last safe refuge. Soon after Valdemar was back in Custody Division, the County jail system was undergoing one of its perennial race wars. Black inmates, outnumbered significantly by Hispanics, were being beaten, stabbed, and killed out of a combination of blatantly racist attitudes and conflicts over jail business like drug dealing, gambling, and control of homosexuals. While the business component of the black-Hispanic conflict is important to understanding the race wars, the roots of the conflict are equally attributable to cultural differences between black and Hispanic inmates. Most of the animosity is one-sided. While black inmates generally don’t mind being celled with Hispanics, Hispanics resent being celled with blacks or forced to associate with them in the dorm-style sleeping arrangements often found in the overcrowded county jail system. The Mexican Mafia has an intense racial pride. One of its rules is never to make La Raza look bad in the eyes of law enforcement or other inmates. That pride expresses itself in many ways. All Hispanics entering the jail or prison system are given a sheet of rules by the Mexican Mafia that they call the X-files. Newly arrived inmates are mandated to keep a clean, orderly cell and to maintain a high level of personal hygiene. They must share luxury items with other Hispanics and their cellmates and demonstrate racial solidarity by never allowing an assault against a Hispanic to go unchallenged. The image of the average Eme or Hispanic inmate with an immaculately groomed walrus moustache, trim haircut, snow-white T-shirt, and razorsharp creased pants has become iconic. It’s a point of pride that there’s no such thing as a dirty Mexican in the jail or prison systems. One sure sign of status among Hispanic inmates is an ample supply of soap. Blacks, by con-

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trast, are dismissed by Hispanics as the kind of people that “jerk off in their own blankets.” In the custody environment, even a slight like a black cutting in front of a Hispanic in chow line is a sin that cannot go unavenged. An incident as small as this has often escalated into a county-wide race war that sometimes spills over into drive-bys and assassinations on the streets. Valdemar not only understood the culture of Hispanic inmates but also, thanks to years on the street, had a thorough understanding of the business side of the Eme. He understood that the Eme was far more interested in business than in rioting, which is itself bad for busines. When violence erupts, a facility goes into lockdown; visits are suspended, drug smuggling into the jail stops, communication with the outside is cut off, and money ceases to flow. It wasn’t unusual for a shotcaller to hint to Valdemar that a certain prisoner should be transferred out of one section of housing. When Valdemar asked why, the response was typically vague. In the world of the Eme, a hint can carry the power of an outright warning. More often than not, the individual under discussion was in line for an assault and the shotcaller, probably for venal reasons such as avoiding a lockdown and the cessation of visits and privileges, just wanted to avoid trouble. Valdemar would relay the information to his superiors; usually he’d be told not to baby his charges. Then supervisors would be surprised that an attack had occurred, having learned nothing from Valdemar’s experience. Valdemar began lobbying his supervisors to screen inmates more closely and to separate them not only along racial or gang lines but also on their status or membership in prison gangs like the Eme, the Black Guerrilla Famly, and the Aryan Brotherhood. After a particularly violent period, Biscailuz went into a full lockdown and deputies conducted a massive search of the cells. Valdemar and other deputies like Angel Jaimes collected a huge stash of prison-made weapons. Among the weapons seized were giant “bone crusher” shanks (knives), spears made from tightly rolled up cardboard ad inserts from magazines, and tiny razor blades glued into the ends of melted toothbrush handles.

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One morning Valdemar and Jaimes left the weapons on the desk of Captain Paul Myron, the head of the facility, before Myron reported for work that day. The pile was three feet high, and it gave Myron the message that it was time they went proactive rather than reactive. The next day, Valdemar and Jaimes were invited to have breakfast with Myron. They laid out a game plan to develop intelligence and to house inmates according to more useful criteria. The program that was resulted from that breakfast meeting was Operation Safe Jails (OSJ). OSJ formalized a classification process that hitherto had been incomplete or ineffective. Prior to OSJ, the deputies in the Classification section of the jail system would assign each inmate a potential threat level from K1 to K10, with K10 being the most inclined to violence. The classification took a number of factors into consideration, such as the inmate’s prior behavior in the County Jail and the type of crime for which he’d been arrested. OSJ added other factors ranging from the minor, such as the number and types of tattoos an inmate carried, to major ones such as his gang affiliation, status, possible membership in a prison gang, and a record of the inmate’s 115 write-ups (records of misconduct) in the CDC. The OSJ classification system would also include information that might be contained in debriefing documents. Debriefing is a formal process only conducted in the state prison system when an inmate decides to leave a prison gang or to inform on his former gang associates. It can take months because every piece of information the inmate provides has to be documented as factual by at least three sources. If an inmate is found to be lying in a debrief, the debrief is terminated and none of the information provided is considered valid. A deputy reaching out to the CDC for information on a paroled gangster was standard operating procedure when Valdemar worked on the PGU. It was a novelty when he floated the idea of doing the same for inmates coming into the jail system. What Valdemar offered was a more complete assessment of what an inmate might do in the system, but predictably there was reluctance on the part of the deputies meant to implement the plan. Under enlightened leadership, OSJ should have been melded with the

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Classification function to provide a full jacket on each incoming inmate. As it turned out, Classification and OSJ functions were separated. OSJ could provide input on an inmate, but ultimately it was the Classification deputies who made the final decision on K status, housing, and segregation of individuals into the High Power Gang Module. While it was only a partial success in Valdemar’s eyes, it was better than what the jail system had done previously. Examined on balance and in light of the US Attorney’s RICO trials, it could be claimed that the Mexican Mafia’s intelligence system was, and may remain, superior to law enforcement’s. It’s no surprise: There’s more at stake for a hardened gangster than there is for a cop. To the average cop, his job is a job. If he does nothing more than go through the motions and put in his time, the worst that can happen is retirement with a good pension. For a shotcaller, his job is a matter of life and death. A failure of intelligence could spell a life sentence or a bullet in the head. When the Los Angeles riots erupted in 1992, Rich Valdemar, other gang cops, and other specialized units were yanked out of exile and put back on the street on a variety of assignments. Valdemar found himself back in plainclothes performing surveillance and gathering intelligence on violent gangs. On March 13, 1992, the film American Me was released in the US. It was the first film to examine the rise, growth, and operations of the Mexican Mafia. Edward James Olmos directed the film and also played the lead role. The significance of the release date wasn’t lost on the Eme, Hispanic street gangsters, or law enforcement. That year, the 13th fell on a Monday. Most new films are released on Fridays. But a Friday release that also fell on a 13th wouldn’t happen until many months later. Olmos and the distributors wanted a release on the 13th because of the importance the Eme attaches to that number. The letter M is the thirteenth letter of the alphabet and is an important signifier of allegiance to the Mexican Mafia. Although it was fictionalized, the arc of the story stayed pretty faithful to the Eme’s history. The film’s release created a brief stir among the Mexican Mafia and Hispanic street gangs. To the general public, however, it was just

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another prison movie portraying characters the average film fan couldn’t really connect with. There was nothing likeable about these men. Unlike the anti-heroes of films like Goodfellas (1990) and the Godfather trilogy (1972, 1974, 1990), there was nothing mythic or multi-dimensional about the Carnales in American Me. They didn’t wear suits, hadn’t built criminal empires in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, and they hadn’t managed to corrupt labor unions or the building trades. To the average viewer, all the Eme seemed to do was kill people. As written, the screenplay deviated little from historical, documented fact. It was widely reported at the time that Olmos had shown a copy of the script to Joe Morgan, a major person of influence in the Eme, prior to the start of production. Morgan was reported to have blessed the script. There were also reports that he and other Carnales allowed the production company to film unmolested in gang-controlled areas. As the director, however, Olmos took some liberties with the script that was originally shown to Morgan. The lead character, Santana Montoyo, was based on an actual Eme member named Rudolfo “Cheyenne” Cadena, a charismatic and idealistic brother. In the early 1970s, Cadena had a vision of creating an übergang by resolving the conflict between the Mexican Mafia and its arch-enemy, the Hispanic, Northern-California-based prison gang Nuestra Familia (NF), also called Nortenos. He wanted to bring both prison gangs under the banner of a united Raza and, some say, transform it into a political force similar to the Black Panthers. Cadena was a fan of Carlos Castaneda’s mystical books and had his antennae tuned to the revolutionary political rhetoric of the time. It was his idea to use the Nahuatl language and to adopt the Aztec war shield as an icon of the Mexican Mafia. He anointed Eme members with Aztec names in addition to their street names. Cadena called Joe Morgan—known as “Pegleg” for his prosthesis—“Cocoliso,” the name of an Aztec warrior. There wasn’t much support among other Eme members for the north/ south alliance that Cadena proposed; there apparently was even less interest among the membership of the NF. To launch his initiative, Cadena

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arranged to have himself transferred to Chino State Prison in Southern California to have a sit-down with the ranking NF members to hammer out a truce as a preamble to an alliance. When Cadena arrived in Chino, he was told not only that was the truce off, but also that he’d be killed by the NF at the first opportunity. Despite his efforts to stop the north/south killings, the war continued unabated and Cadena found himself in the enemy’s camp and without allies. Cadena could have asked prison officials for Protective Custody (PC). This would have kept him out of the general population and out of harm. He could have decided to stay in his cell instead of going to the yard with the other inmates. He did nothing like it. Knowing that he was doomed, Cadena walked out of his cell in Palm Hall and met his fate calmly. He was stabbed repeatedly and then thrown off tier three to the cement on the ground floor. After he landed, he was stabbed again to make sure he was dead. Cadena came to be revered by the Eme. While the brothers didn’t think much of his politics, they respected the fact that he refused PC and went down with the pride of the Aztec warriors he emulated. Cadena also got respect from the very same people who killed him. To this day, his grave in Barstow is visited by both Nortenos and Surenos. To the Carnales, what Olmos did with the Cadena character in American Me was as close to blasphemy as one can get in the prison gang world. In the film, Santana/Cadena is shown being killed by his own Eme brothers. That didn’t sit well with the Eme. If the entire film had been pure fiction, the Eme would have had no objections. But the blending of fact and fiction disparaged the memory of one of their most revered brothers. In an early scene, Santana/Cadena is shown being raped in Youth Authority. It matters little that he later takes revenge on the rapist. The fact that he wouldn’t fight to the death to prevent his rape is unthinkable to a Carnal. Never mind that the incident never happened in real life. To make it up and then not to portray what Cadena would really have done was beyond the pale. To compound Olmos’s error, Cadena/Santana is in another scene unable

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to have conventional intercourse with a woman when he is released on parole. In the film, the Olmos character turns her over and tries to anally penetrate her. She objects. The Eme did as well. In yet another scene in the film, a Cosa Nostra inmate is anally penetrated with an evil-looking serrated knife wielded by a Carnal as revenge for a deal gone bad. The Eme just doesn’t roll that way. The brothers don’t go to all the trouble of disrobing a target, bend him over, and then knife him in the rectum. They’ll just cut his throat or choke him out. The Carnales have no objection to being portrayed as murderers, drug dealers, and extortionists. It’s what they do for a living and it makes their job easier if that reputation for ruthlessness precedes them. They draw the line, however, at any implication of homosexuality or sexual dysfunction, a fact apparently lost on Olmos when he invented those scenes. Two months after the film was released and six weeks after the start of the LA riots—significantly, May 13, 1992—Ana Lizarraga, a technical consultant to Olmos on American Me, was machine-gunned outside her apartment in the Ramona Gardens housing project. She was packing her car for a trip to Utah to attend her mother’s funeral. The shooter was Jose “Joker” Gonzalez, a member of the Hazard Street gang that calls the Ramona Gardens home. Whether her death on the 13th was planned for that date or coincidental, it was clear that the Mexican Mafia was furious. The fact that she was shot a dozen times is a classic indicator of an Eme hit: It was more than murder, it was overkill. It was a message to the world and to American Me’s producers that nobody crosses the brotherhood and lives to tell the tale. Her death would not be the only one. Two other unpaid advisers, Manuel “Rocky” Luna and Charles “Charlie Brown” Manriquez were also killed, though Luna may already have been greenlighted. Olmos himself was targeted for execution. Rich Valdemar, who by this time was back on the streets, heard from informants that the Eme had greenlighted the director. There was a price on his head and any soldado with a gun could make a huge jump in his status by killing Olmos. By law, credible threats like the ones Valdemar was hearing have to be relayed to the intended victim, whether that victim is a civilian or another

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gangster. When he was informed, Olmos filled out an LAPD application for a permit to carry a concealed weapon. Despite the fact that the LAPD knew the threat was real and imminent, the LAPD refused to grant him one. The department hadn’t issued a civilian carry permit in nineteen years. The sole exception was when it gave one to Willie Williams, the new chief of police, because he wasn’t a sworn peace officer. Had the department granted one to Olmos, the chief and the command staff would have been forced to establish a rational criteria to issue permits. This was something the department wanted to avoid. It was much easier and more politically expedient to simply say, “We don’t issue permits.” This was a clear case of political correctness trumping the safety of a Los Angeles resident. Olmos could afford bodyguards, some of whom ironically were off-duty or retired LAPD officers. Even with armed security, the threat was always present. So, according to several sources, Olmos bought his way out of the death sentence for $50,000. Lizarraga, Luna, and Manriquez never had the means or opportunity to do the same. Among the Eme members who saw American Me was Ernesto “Chuco” Castro. He was in his early forties and had spent more than twenty years behind bars. In April, 1983, Chuco became a Carnal while serving a sentence in San Quentin. When he was paroled in 1990, Castro settled in Rosemead and rented a comfortable three bedroom house on Edmond Street. The property included a small outbuilding at the rear. He married for the second time and started a family in what by any standards would be considered a decent, middle-class neighborhood. He had adult children by his first wife. One of his sons followed Chuco into the gang life but was never made a member of the Eme. Chuco’s brother, Edward “Deadeye” Castro, was also a Carnal but according to law enforcement, they didn’t caper together. They did business in different parts of the county. The ideal position for a brother with Chuco’s status and history is to be on the street and function as an organizer and a collector. In that position, a made guy doesn’t have to expose himself much to law enforcement. He can keep his hands clean and order associates and local gang members to sell dope, collect taxes, and drive out or kill drug dealers who resist. Chuco

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could basically phone it in. He’d be able to maintain his up status with the brothers and hold on to his local franchise as long as he fed the money pipeline going into the prison system. It’s called kicking up. For a brother on the street, life was as good as it was going to get for Ernie Castro. There was decent money flowing in and enough of it was being kicked up to keep the brothers in jail happy. He had solid associates and trusted brothers he could tap whenever he needed someone to back his play. In addition, he was in love with his wife and was insanely attached to his baby daughter. He also got custody of a young son he had from his previous marriage. His main problem was that he was a regular heroin user and his wife was also addicted. The Mexican Mafia will tolerate a certain amount of drug and alcohol use. Relaxing with marijuana and beer or occasionally snorting up a few lines of coke or meth is considered acceptable recreational behavior. But an addiction to any substance is considered a liability. Gangsters know better than anyone that a heroin addict, a speed freak, or an alcoholic can never be relied on or trusted. An addict facing prison and a long spell of cold turkey is more likely to become an informant than a hardened vato who thinks of going to prison as a family reunion and can do an easy five years standing on his head. Months before Castro’s Elysian Park meeting, Roy Nunez had already flagged Chuco as a person of high interest. Nunez knew his history, his circle of associates on the streets, his Eme “rabbis” in prison, and the names and gang affiliations of the street soldiers Chuco used to sell or move drugs. Nunez also had several confidential informants that regularly fed him intelligence. It was all in his database. By the end of 1993, Nunez had put in eighteen months on his database and some of the old guard from PGU had begun to filter back into the unit. In late October 1993, Rich Valdemar, who had been the supervisor of the PGU’s surveillance unit prior to his exile at Biscaialuz, returned as supervisor for the entire PGU section. The Surveillance Section of the PGU had never been gutted to the same extent as the intelligence and investigative section. The surveillance unit was a necessary asset that the LASD used as a fire bri-

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gade. Even though it was organizationally attached to PGU, its surveillance activities weren’t limited to the Mexican Mafia or prison gangs. The unit was called on to run surveillance on fugitives, Russian drug dealers, Ecstasy rings, crooked cops and politicians, wanted felons, and even occasional property or financial crimes. When Roy Nunez and the rest of the law enforcement community learned that Ernie Castro had been ordering hundreds of gang members to meetings, it was clear that major policy initiatives were afoot. It was time to get close to Castro and find out just what the Eme was planning. On the night of November 5, 1993, Roy Nunez borrowed Deputy Rich Lopez from OSS and, with backup from two deputies from the surveillance unit, made a fateful traffic stop on Ernie Castro. The stop was ostensibly because Castro was speeding—which he was. But Nunez had been told by a snitch that Castro had a gun in the car and probably had dope on him. Castro was driving an early 1980s blue Cadillac he’d extorted from a drug dealer as part of the dealer’s tax obligation. Strapped into a child seat in the back was Castro’s baby daughter. Based on personal observation and information from snitches, Nunez knew that Castro never went anywhere without his young daughter. The traffic stop was made in the parking lot of the light industrial business where Chuco’s wife worked. He’d gone there to pick her up after her shift. Castro took the stop stoically. It was part of his life. As a parolee, he knew that any cop could stop him at any time and search him and his vehicle without a warrant. Other parts of the parole arrangement were that Castro could not possess firearms or drugs and that he had to avoid contact with known felons. Castro’s wife wasn’t as stoic. She yelled at Nunez and Lopez, cursed them, and threatened them. The backup unit took her aside while Nunez and Lopez searched Castro and his vehicle. The search turned up two bullets, stashed behind the ashtray, and a knife. Technically, Castro was in violation of his parole agreement and the two deputies could have arrested him on the spot and sent him to County Jail for at least a year. It speaks to the two deputies’ street smarts and their

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focus on the bigger picture that they didn’t arrest Castro that night. They knew they had a high ranking brother hooked up, bagged, and with one foot already in jail. Nunez put Castro in the back of the patrol car and talked to him for over an hour. Nunez outlined the amount of time Castro was looking at. He asked Castro if he was ready to see his babies grow up without him. He painted a picture of Castro locked up in Pelican Bay while his little girl went to her First Communion, Confirmation, high school graduation, and all her birthday parties. Nunez talked to him more like a father confessor than a cop. Over a decade later, Nunez recalls that they talked like two family men agonizing over an uncertain future. Nunez and his wife had raised a family to adulthood and then adopted a second set of children. The new crop of kids they raised had come from the huge pool of “at risk” juveniles, kids that had been thrown away by gangster fathers and drugaddicted mothers. Nunez wasn’t so much rattling Castro’s cage as trying to instill in him a certain sense of obligation. He was also trying to plant a seed. Here was a chance, a very remote chance, that he might be able to get a major Eme Carnal to flip. Out of Castro’s earshot, Nunez and Lopez decided to release Castro. They weren’t sure what would develop. Based on history, flipping a Carnal of Castro’s stature was a long shot. Nothing of the kind had happened since 1978, when Raymond (known famously as “Machine Gun” or “Mundo”) Mendoza had a religious conversion and became an informant for the LASD and a witness in a State prosecution against the Mexican Mafia. The deputies took possession of the bullets and the knife and let Ernie Castro go home that night. Nunez and Lopez didn’t trust to chance that the seed they’d planted in Castro would bear fruit on its own. The following Monday, Nunez and Lopez sat down with their new supervisor, Rich Valdemar, and hashed out what sort of plan they could implement. None of them had the luxury of concentrating exclusively on Castro. They were all working other cases and had been thrown into triage mode. They had no spare resources to keep tailing

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Castro. They had to decide on a course of action that would yield the largest return for the least amount of time and manpower. They could have done an warrantless search of Castro’s residence if they took a parole officer along. But after several phone calls, they couldn’t find one available. The alternative was to craft a search warrant and see if they could get a judge to sign it. The chances of getting a judge to sign a warrant based on the two bullets and the knife Nunez and Lopez had found in Castro’s car were thin. Valdemar realized this was a half full/half empty situation. The informant’s information about Castro having a gun was only partially correct: They’d found the bullets. A judge might look at the bullet evidence as partially incorrect: There was no gun. The request could go either way. The three men also had to decide how far up the chain of command to take this information. As veteran cops, they’d had the unhappy experience of having actionable information be dismissed as either insufficient or unimportant by supervisors. The political sensitivity of law enforcement agencies in the post-Rodney King period resulted in an atmosphere of “if you do nothing, you don’t get in trouble.” After the double prosecution of the four LAPD officers charged in the Rodney King beating, the LAPD began calling itself the “drive by and wave PD.” The LASD, although not involved in the King case, also felt its chilling effect. Proactive action became a relic of better times. Valdemar, Nunez, and Lopez didn’t want to take it any higher than their lieutenant, an immigrant who after decades as a US citizen still had a thick German accent. The lieutenant blessed the idea of seeking a warrant and kicked the idea up to his supervisor, Captain Ronald Black, a veteran street cop with a lot of gang experience. Black had no objection. “We could have been stopped at any time during that week,” Valdemar recalled years later. “There were other people I’d worked for that wouldn’t have gone with the warrant. They would have sent it even further up the command chain and when it gets up there, it gets mulled over and thought about, and by the time they made a decision, we would have lost momentum. The window of opportunity could have closed.”

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Th e m e x ican mafia By mid-week, Nunez had the warrant signed by a judge and both he and

Valdemar agreed to invite the LAPD on the warrant service. There was no compelling need to invite the LAPD. Castro lived in LASD jurisdiction. It was an LASD case from the beginning. But Valdemar and Nunez genuinely wanted to create a mutually beneficial working relationship with the LAPD. They called two LAPD officers, Cota and Vaughn, with whom they’d worked in previous cases. Valdemar also made a call to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) and asked if they wanted to be part of the warrant service. The ATF had been pestering the LASD for cases. They were looking for work and had asked to take part in any future LASD operations. The ATF promised to assign a body. On November 12, 1993, a Friday and exactly one week to the day since Roy Nunez’s traffic stop, Valdemar and his team served the search on Ernie Castro. It was a crisp and sunny Fall day. The team consisted of Valdemar, Nunez, Lopez, LASD deputies Rufus Downs and Leon Brown, and LAPD officers Vaughn and Cota. The ATF agent, despite prior requests to be included in LASD operations, failed to show up. They surrounded the house and Valdemar knocked on the door. He handed Castro’s wife the search warrant when she opened the door. Gaining access to the house was uniquely anticlimactic. They handcuffed Castro and he slumped on the couch. “The minute we walked in, he looked defeated,” Valdemar recalled. “The house was fairly neat and well kept. We don’t usually see that. But Castro wasn’t your average street gangster. He was making a lot of money for himself and the brothers in the joint.” While Valdemar and Nunez searched the house, Lopez and the LAPD cops searched the Cadillac. The trunk was filled with boxes of car cleaning gear, a hockey mask (Castro didn’t play hockey), tools, a spirit level used in construction, and miscellaneous items. They also found a plastic bag containing about a dozen rocks of cocaine, syringes, and spoons for melting heroin. The real treasure was located under a trap door in Castro’s bedroom closet. The door, which was covered by carpeting, led to a concrete lined crawl-

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space under the house. Deputy Leon Brown reached into the crawlspace and came up with a heavy gym bag wrapped in a plastic trash can liner. He handed the parcel to Valdemar who unzipped the gym bag and began pulling out guns. As Valdemar checked and unloaded the weapons, he laid them out on the bed. There were two .357 Magnum revolvers, a .45 caliber semiautomatic pistol, two Glock semiautomatics chambered in 9 mm, a .44 Magnum with a massive 8-inch barrel, and a fully automatic MAC-10 machine pistol. They later concluded that the MAC-10 was the weapon Castro’s security team had confiscated from the Armenian Power gangster at the September 18th Elysian Park meeting. Even if Castro hadn’t been a convicted felon, possession of a MAC-10 alone could have sent him to Federal prison for a decade. The weapon is considered a Class 3 firearm, in the same category as a military machine gun. It was manufactured by Military Armament Corporation, a Georgia company founded by the gun’s designer, Gordon Ingram. Designed to chamber either a .380 cal. or 9 mm, the short-barreled, easily concealable Ingram had a 1600 round-per-minute rate of fire. Originally designed for the military, dynamic entry teams, and high-risk personal protection operators, it could empty its 30-round magazine in a blink over two seconds. It was never an accurate weapon, but what it lacked in precision it overcame by being able to put up a wall of lead. It’s an ideal gun for close quarter combat in an urban environment because of its high rate of fire and the low risk of over-penetration. While Ingram never intended it as such, it was also a perfect weapon for the close confines of gang warfare where the combat distances are short, concealment is at a premium, ammunition readily available, and overwhelming firepower rules the day. Along with the guns, the warrant team also found $10,163 in cash and numerous third-party letters, greenlight lists, and wilas (general orders that don’t necessarily include hit lists) sent from brothers in jail. Since inmates aren’t allowed to communicate with parolees, inmates send letters, usually containing coded messages, to an intermediary on the outside who in turn forwards the letter to the intended recipient. Defense lawyers are sometimes duped into passing gang information from inmates and sometimes

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they do it willingly. By using third parties, inmates communicate from jail to jail, from jail to the outside, and from the outside to the jails. “When we started pulling out the guns, the paperwork and the money, we could see he was crumbling,” Rich Valdemar remembers. The seed that Nunez planted had apparently germinated. “He started talking about all the work he’d put in for the brothers and how no matter how much you did for them, there was always somebody that wanted your head. He told us flat out that he’d killed guys on nothing more than the word of a Carnal who said the guy had to be taken care of. And then he’d found out later that the guy he killed hadn’t broken any rules. He was killed over a personal beef.” Roy Nunez recalls: “Our jaws dropped when he started talking like that.” Valdemar told Castro in a matter of fact manner that he was looking at ten years for each gun charge, a total of seventy years. Then there was the dope, the cash, and the greenlight lists that could make him part of a conspiracy to commit murder. “He didn’t roll right then and there, but it was practically written on his face that it was just a matter of time,” Valdemar says. “What finally turned him was his kids. He was crazy about them, especially the little girl.” The warrant team took Castro to the LASD’s Temple Station and put him in a cell. They booked all the property and spent the rest of Friday afternoon and evening filling out reports. By Monday morning, November 15, 1993, the gears of law enforcement were spinning at high speed. The PGU team had a meeting with Captain Ronald Black to inform him that Castro wanted a deal and was ready to consider some kind of cooperation. He wanted to work off the gun case, obtain a new identity, and relocate himself and his family. The problem was that the LASD doesn’t have the manpower or financial resources to house, clothe, feed, and protect a confidential informant and his family during the course of what was sure to be a lengthy investigation— and on top of that to provide him with a new identity, housing, and expense money to resettle in another part of the country. This level of help for an informant could only come from the Federal government. Everyone on the PGU knew that an FBI task force was operating in the LA area. They knew that Sheriff Sherman Block had signed a Memorandum of

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Agreement and that some LASD deputies had already been assigned to a squad of the Task Force working on the Grape Street Crips. It was obvious to everyone that this was precisely the kind of case the LAMTFOVC had been created to exploit. They had to move quickly but not so fast as to jeopardize their main asset, Ernie Castro. They knew that if they held Castro in custody for too long and then released him without a public, plausible explanation, there was a strong chance that the Eme members Castro was dealing with would suspect that he’d flipped. Similar situations had happened in the past and they didn’t want to repeat that kind of mistake. At the same time, bringing in the FBI, negotiating an agreement, and bringing a US Attorney on board to evaluate and approve the agreement would take a lot of time. Nunez and Lopez, under the supervision of Rich Valdemar, started multitasking rapidly. They arranged to meet FBI Special Agent James Myers and US Attorney Robert Lewis in the lobby of the Bonaventure Hotel. Myers and Lewis knew practically nothing about the Mexican Mafia, its history, or the major players. Nunez and Lopez brought them up to speed and made it clear that getting a man with Castro’s stature to flip was the equivalent of flipping a Sammy Gravano or Joe Valachi. Myers and Lewis signed on immediately. This was the kind of case they’d hoped to develop. Charging Castro with a Federal case was out of the question. It would raise too many red flags with the homies. They decided to charge Castro with a local case and then to find a way of pushing him through the system quickly and plausibly. After the meeting, Myers and Lewis went back to the Federal building on Wilshire and Sepulveda while Nunez and Lopez went off to find a cooperative LA County District Attorney. That same afternoon Nunez and Lopez found a DA who understood the complexity of the situation. The DA filed the gun charges and requested that bail be set at $100,000. This was high enough to create the appearance of serious charges but not so high that it would be difficult for Castro to come up with the money. There was discussion of how to front Castro the money to make bail but, as it turned out, Castro’s father-in-law put up the equity in his house as collateral for the bail amount.

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Th e m e x ican mafia On November 16, 1993, Castro was arraigned and posted his bail. The ini-

tial stages of the case had been thrown together so quickly that when Castro walked out of the Pomona Courthouse on the 16th there was no signed deal between him and the Department of Justice. All that existed was a verbal agreement. Castro could have decided at any time after posting bail to back out and take his chances. If he did that, of course, he would probably have been charged with Federal gun crimes and state parole violations, and the DOJ would have lost an informant with the power to deal a devastating blow to the Mexican Mafia. Both sides had a lot to lose and a lot to gain. The FBI wanted the Mexican Mafia, and Ernie Castro wanted out. He wanted freedom. Very little has been written about the events leading up to Ernie Castro becoming a government informant. What has been written to date has been either erroneous or purposely misleading. Perhaps the most egregious example of this is contained in Tom Hayden’s book, Street Wars. Here is Hayden’s narrative of the events. “Was it possible the Elysian Park event was also a setup? Until the unlikely day that police files are disclosed, there can be no certain answer. Certainly the pressure for truces came from the bottom up, not simply the top down. Given all the means of surveillance, did the police know, exploit, or channel the sentiment as it evolved? In November 1993, shortly after the Elysian Park gathering, police raided Chuco’s Alhambra home, shovels in hand, and dug up guns buried beneath the place. Perhaps the guns were his, perhaps not, but Chuco was in big trouble as an ex-con, drug addict, and active member of La Eme since 1983. But his bail was mysteriously lowered from $500,000 to $100,000, and he used $10,000 from a drug sale to buy his freedom. At that point, according to official police claims, Chuco turned informant against a score of his Eme Carnales. Or the arrest might have been a cover story to create the appearance that his previous activity, such as the Elysian Park convention, was genuine. The Federal charge on Chuco—illegal possession of weapons—was dropped. Instead, the FBI placed him in a government protection program, and paid him as much as $200,000.” Hayden’s speculations, half truths, omissions of relevant facts, and reck-

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less accusations border on paranoia. To begin with, the Elysian Park meeting in September was not a unique event. As illustrated earlier, similar meetings were being held in Santa Ana, Compton, the West San Fernando Valley, and the San Gabriel Valley, by other Eme brothers. These meetings were a full-court press orchestrated by the shotcallers in Pelican Bay and they laid the groundwork for what eventually came to be known as the Sureno Movement. Rather than orchestrating these meetings, law enforcement was frankly completely blindsided by them. When Hayden states, “Given all the means of surveillance,” he infers that there were vast surveillance resources at the disposal of law enforcement. In fact, “all the means of surveillance” amounted to Roy Nunez and a thoroughly gutted Prison Gang Unit. It was at best a lucky break fully exploited by a few motivated cops who knew what time it was. As for police files being disclosed: There’s nothing secret about those files. Any researcher with an ounce of initiative can gain access to thousands of pages of testimony, property reports, chronos, charge sheets, and motions. They’re a matter of public record, available at the Federal Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles for the copying cost of ten cents per page. Castro didn’t live in Alhambra. He lived in nearby Rosemead. This is a minor error but significant in that Hayden can’t even get simple details straight. The guns were not buried under the house, as Hayden claims. The raid team didn’t take shovels with them. Where Hayden gets the idea that shovels were involved is beyond speculation. To suppose that the guns might not have been Castro’s is nothing less than an accusation that the LASD and LAPD planted the guns. At no time during the subsequent investigation and lengthy trial was there ever any charge brought by the defense that the guns were planted. There isn’t an iota of evidence to support this flimsy conspiracy theory. While Hayden mentions the guns, he fails to mention the cash, drugs, incriminating thirdparty letters, greenlight lists, and wilas, also found at the scene. To include those items, of course, Hayden would have to somehow acknowledge that Roy Nunez, Rich Lopez, Richard Valdemar, Rufus Downs, Officers Cota and Vaughn, Lt. Cuvier, and Captain Ronald Black had all con-

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spired to scrounge up $10,000 in cash, sit down and write bogus letters to and from real individuals (complete with postmarked envelopes), and, of course, plant the dope. By acknowledging that these items were found in the crawl space with the “planted” guns, Hayden would be forced to attribute them to the conspiracy as well, taxing the credulity of even his most ardent admirers. So Hayden conveniently left the dope, cash, and documents out of his narrative because they would clutter up his theory. Castro’s bail was never lowered to $100,000 from $500,000. It was always set at $100,000. Castro did not buy his freedom with money from a drug sale. His father-in-law put up the equity in his house as collateral. In Hayden’s narrative of the Castro arrest, he can’t seem to decide if Castro was a saint or a satan, a drug-addicted dupe of the police or a manipulative super-criminal who turned on his own to save his skin. Hayden, who seems to find conspiracies under every bed, can’t acknowledge reality. The simple fact of the matter is that Castro was a heroin-addicted career criminal who was bone-tired of his life, tired of killing at the whim of his associates, fearful of the wrath of the Eme if he made a misstep, and terrified of going to prison for life and never again seeing his baby daughter. Castro wanted out and he took the only route that was open to him. He became a snitch. Far from being a conspiracy, the entire sequence of events leading up to and following the arrest of Ernie Castro was a combination of fortuitous timing and the correct assessment of street-smart cops who made the right decisions at the right time and exploited an opportunity that comes along once or twice in a cop’s career. If the deck was stacked, it was stacked in favor of Castro and the Eme. A lot of things could have gone wrong for law enforcement from the very beginning. The LASD’s PGU was short-handed. If Roy Nunez hadn’t had the initiative to tail Castro, he never would have made the fateful traffic stop. If the LAPD hadn’t developed the informant who told them Castro carried a gun behind his car ashtray, there never would have been a traffic stop. If the LAPD hadn’t given Nunez the informant’s information, Nunez would never have tailed Castro. If the judge hadn’t been convinced of probable cause in

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the warrant that Rich Lopez wrote on his own time over the weekend of November 6th and 7th the judge never would have signed it and there would never have been a raid at the house on 8622 Edmonds Street. If the raid team had been less energetic, they might never have pulled up the carpet in the bedroom closet and spotted the trapdoor in the floor. If Castro hadn’t been a heroin user, he might never have collapsed at the prospect of spending the rest of his life in jail. And if the Mexican Mafia hadn’t publicly decided to organize every Hispanic gang in Southern California under the Sureno umbrella, Castro and his Carnales, collectors, and enforcers might have continued to fly under law enforcement’s frequently faulty radar.

“The Mexican Mafia is right now where the Cosa Nostra was fifty years ago. We’ve got a shot at keeping it from growing into what the LCN became.” — DDA Anthony Manzella

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C H A P TE R F O U R

T

he Criminal Courts building on Temple Street in down-

town Los Angeles is a combination of courthouse, jail, DA’s office, and fortress. Its official designation is the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center, named in 2002 after the first woman to be admitted to the California Bar in 1878. She was also LA County’s first female Deputy DA, one of the founding members of the Public Defender’s Office, and had made a failed run for governor of California at the age of eighty-one. Despite the official redesignation, nobody calls it the Foltz building. To everyone that works there, it’s still the CCB, the Criminal Courts Building. 65

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Th e m e x ican mafia Built in the 1970s, it’s a banal edifice of concrete and glass with abso-

lutely no architectural pretense. There is no plaza, no atrium, and nothing that isn’t essential to the function of justice. The building is headquarters for the largest DA’s office in the country and also one of the largest Public Defenders offices. With 4,083 square miles and thirty field offices in its jurisdiction, the LADA processes more criminal cases per year than any other District Attorney in the US—60,000 felonies, 200,000 misdemeanors, and 30,000 criminal petitions against offenders under eighteen years of age. It’s a massive enterprise unrivaled anywhere in the world. It’s also bursting at the seams and woefully antiquated in terms of communications and information technology. DDA Tony Manzella’s office is located on the 17th floor of the CCB in a rabbit warren of windowless, claustrophobic cubby holes. The walls of the 17th floor lobby are covered by floor-to-ceiling black and white images of some of the office’s more famous cases: Caryl Chessman, the Red Light Bandit; Barbara Graham, whose story was made into a movie starring Susan Hayward; the Black Dahlia; the Manson case, and the infamous Sleepy Lagoon case, the first major prosecution involving Hispanic gangs. The images on the lobby walls could hardly be considered the trophy heads in a hunter’s game room. In a surprising show of even-handedness, the losers are as well represented as the winners. The 1942 Sleepy Lagoon case, in which twelve members of a Hispanic street gang were convicted of murdering a rival gang member, turned into a judicial and public relations disaster for the LAPD and the DA’s office. The convictions were overturned in 1944 over allegations that confessions were beaten out of the defendants and that evidence was fabricated. The case became a contributing factor in the Zoot Suit riots of 1943, in which bands of military servicemen stationed in a naval facility in Elysian Park fought with groups of Hispanic Zoot Suiters. Some of the Zoot Suiters were the progenitors of today’s street gangsters; others were merely fashionable young men with good jobs in defense plants and lots of disposable income. Although all the Sleepy Lagoon defendants were eventually released, several of them were later arrested and fairly convicted of other crimes, including murder.

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The narrow hallways of the 17th floor are as unadorned as the rest of the building. The walls of the main hallway leading to Manzella’s office feature “school” pictures of past and present DAs, retirement lunches, and Christmas parties, mixed together with photos in full color of mangled bodies, bloody faces, hard-looking mug shots, and recovered murder weapons. One ancient photo shows a group of young DAs in skinny ties and buzz haircuts. In the group is a boyish-looking Tony Manzella in 1967, fresh out of Georgetown Law School and in his first year with the DA’s office. A before-and-after comparison would reveal that Tony has neither gained nor lost an ounce of weight. And while his face may be weathered by time and the offshore winds that blow between LA and Catalina Island, where he sails his boat, it has lost none of its animated quality. The hallways are made even narrower by stacks of cardboard boxes that contain hundreds of thousands of pages of court transcripts. While the cases are active, the only available storage for the transcripts is in the hallways. If this were a privately owned business, the Fire Marshal would probably declare the hallways a hazard. The entire enterprise on the 17th floor looks more like a low-rent boiler room operation than the prosecutorial arm of one of the richest counties in the richest state in the Union. Manzella’s office has roughly the same footprint as an average parking space. The room is also within a few square feet of the cells in Pelican Bay’s SHU (Security Housing Unit) where Manzella has sent many of his defendants. He shares the tiny space with Ruth Arvidson, his assistant. Their desks face each other and at their backs they have file cabinets and bookshelves. It’s a little like working out of a supply closet. With the exception of the touch-tone phone behind Manzella’s desk, there’s nothing in the room that would look out of place in a Spencer Tracy or Humphrey Bogart movie. There’s no fax machine, computer, electric typewriter, modem, or any other office equipment created after 1970. Ruth occasionally works on a laptop she bought with her own money. She locks it in a steel file cabinet when she leaves because the information in it is sensitive and the DA’s office employs some people who are relatives or friends of known gang members. While officially attached to the Major Crimes Unit, Manzella is in the po-

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sition of being able to pick and choose his cases. He’s been at the game a long time and he ignores all notions of rank and position in the org chart. He’s repeatedly refused to be promoted to a Grade 5 (he’s a Grade 4) because at that level, DDAs no longer prosecute cases; they supervise. Manzella doesn’t want to supervise. He has zero interest in advancement in rank or status. He has no ambition to one day run the entire office or even to make a name for himself outside the confines of the CCB. In 2002, he was approached by a writer from Los Angeles Magazine who wanted to do a profile about him and some of his big cases. Manzella only consented to cooperate if the writer kept his name out of the piece. The writer was puzzled. “How can I do a profile if I can’t even use your name?” Manzella told him that was his problem. The writer relented and did the profile of Manzella as Prosecutor X. The only pictures that ran were of Tony and Ruth with their backs to the camera. Of course everyone in the DA’s office knew the real identity of Prosecutor X, but a lot of them couldn’t believe that Manzella had gone out of his way to avoid publicity. To many DDAs, youngsters and veterans alike, a story in the city’s hometown magazine was a golden opportunity. “After that,” Manzella says, “it started to sink in with these people that I’m not in this for the glory. And I don’t want to cut out a little fiefdom in the DA’s office. To this day, they can’t believe I really don’t care about promotions. I have no political agenda. The big difference is that I love to be in court working the case. A lot of them hate prosecuting. They don’t like being in court. It’s too much work. They don’t get that it’s what I live for. I love it.” In a very real sense, Manzella and Ruth Arvidson function in a capacity almost independent of the DA’s office. They’re like a mom ’n’ pop operation, a two-person field office that happens to prosecute some of the most dangerous criminals in the state. “I pick my own cases and Ruth and I work them alone. I run them my way and, frankly, I get a lot more cooperation and appreciation from street cops and detectives than the people in my building.” Manzella grew up in North Jersey in a deracinated, first-generation Italian family. His grandparents came from Naples. After attending the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, he got his law degree from Georgetown

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University. He married Diane Stiles, his high school sweetheart, and went looking for a DA job in Newark, New Jersey. “After I put in my application, I got a call from a guy who said that I needed to make a $5,000 contribution to the New Jersey Democratic Party if I wanted to be hired by the DA’s office. Diane and I said, ‘Fuck that. Let’s move.’” With the promise of a job in the Los Angeles DA’s office, Tony and Diane moved into a tiny apartment in Los Feliz. Diane started working on her Ph.D. in speech therapy and Tony landed with both feet in the middle of the Charles Manson case. Nearly forty years later, Diane and Tony were watching the first episode of The Sopranos and realized with a pleasant shock that the opening credits flashing across the screen included shots of their old neighborhood. Diane once had a part-time job working in the same Caldwell, New Jersey, pastry shop where the Soprano crew buys cannoli and sfogliatelle. Big city crime fighting came naturally to Manzella. He considers himself connected to the streets in the same way as patrol cops and detectives are. And he knows the power of organized crime. Tony’s father, also a lawyer, could have had a far more lucrative career in New Jersey but his innate sense of righteousness kept him from taking on Cosa Nostra cases. “Once it got around North Jersey that my father wouldn’t defend wise guys, his practice shrank. Because of that, he wasn’t very happy when I decided to go to law school. That was part of the reason we moved West.” The irony of leaving the stronghold of the original Mafia and landing three thousand miles away prosecuting people who patterned themselves on it isn’t lost on Manzella. “The Mexican Mafia,” he says, “is right now where the Cosa Nostra was fifty years ago. We’ve got a shot at keeping it from growing into what the LCN became.” Manzella left the DA’s office in the late 1970s to go into corporate law. He also took time to teach law at Loyola University. One of his students at Loyola, Lawrence Paul Fidler, would eventually preside as the judge in Tony’s last and more complex prosecution. After ten years as a successful corporate lawyer, Manzella felt burned out and unsatisfied. His one true passion was being in a courtroom prosecuting

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career criminals. With his children grown and out of the house and Diane’s career firmly established, he gave himself permission to go back to criminal prosecution. In 1990, he returned to the LA County DA’s office and took Ruth Arvidson with him. “When I was in corporate law, Ruth was an assistant. It took me about ten minutes to realize she knew more law than most of the young attorneys we were hiring. I took her out of plush offices and put her face to face with killers. She loved every minute of it.” The money wasn’t as good as private law and the hours were brutal, but Tony felt re-energized every time he walked into the CCB. By the mid-1990s Tony had re-established his reputation in the DA’s office as a relentless prosecutor. He took on the long shots. These were tough, complicated cases that he had only a slim chance of winning. And even if he did win them, none of them would ever land him in the papers. These cases required the kind of legwork usually reserved for investigators and detectives. “You can’t prosecute the kinds of cases I do from behind a desk. You can’t wait for detectives to do it all for you. The way I look at it, there’s no clear line of demarcation between a detective’s job and my job. You can’t say, the detective job ends here and my job starts there. It’s a continuum. A lot of DAs don’t get that. I consider myself part prosecutor and part investigator. At the same time, the really good detectives have to be investigators and think like prosecutors. Not many can do that. Teague was one of them.” Long before Tony Manzella met Andy Teague, Tony had already strung together a number of successful Mexican Mafia prosecutions. In 1998, Manzella sent Luis “Pelon” Maciel to death row on four murder counts. Maciel is a powerful member of the Mexican Mafia who was known on the street as “Big Homie.” He ordered the killing of Gus “Tito” Aguirre (no relation to Alex or Richard) in 1995 because Aguirre, thirty-six, had dropped out of the Eme some twelve years earlier. This kind of hit is purely business; the fact that they hit him after twelve years indicates that the Eme has a very long memory. Maciel was simply enforcing the Eme’s policy of “blood in, blood out,” by which members are not allowed to leave the Mexican Mafia under pain of death. Maciel ordered two hit men, Richard Anthony Valdez, twenty-two,

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and Jimmy “Character” Palma, twenty-one, to hunt down and assassinate Aguirre. They were told to leave no witnesses. The two young shooters tracked Aguirre to El Monte on April 22, 1995. Aguirre, like all dropouts who remain in the neighborhoods they grew up and operated in, lived in a state of high alert. The fact that he’d survived for twelve years after turning his back on the Eme was a testament to the fact that he was rarely caught “slipping.” Aguirre saw the shooters coming and ran into the house of some friends on Maxson Road. The house belonged to Maria Moreno and her brother Anthony Moreno. Palma and Valdez chased Aguirre into the house and killed Aguirre outright. They then turned their guns on Maria and Anthony, two people who could become witnesses. In a cold-blooded effort to follow Maciel’s instructions to the letter, they also shot and killed Maria’s five-year-old daughter and her six-month old son. The baby was killed with a .45 caliber bullet to the brain. When Jimmy Palma was convicted and sentenced for the killings, he was assassinated in San Quentin on orders from the Eme. The killing of young innocents had clearly offended the brothers and they imposed the ultimate penalty on Palma. The killing of “Character” Palma in San Quentin illustrates the coldblooded efficiency of a Mexican Mafia execution. Long before Palma landed in San Quentin as a result of the multiple murders, the Eme had already determined that shooting children was beyond the scope of their instructions and Palma would have to pay with his life. Once in San Quentin, Palma was treated as a loyal soldier and welcomed by the brothers in residence. On the day that he was killed, he was included in a very strenuous basketball game in order to get his blood pumping. As soon as the game ended, two guys held back his arms and “Chato” Sandoval thrust a dull shank into his chest, held it with one hand, and slapped the end of it like a hammer to a nail. Due to Palma’s racing heart rate, he bled to death before medical help could do him any good. John Monaghan, a deputy DA, prosecuted the Moreno family’s killers and three other accomplices in Pomona and got death sentences on Palma and Valdez. The three accomplices received 129 year sentences. After that trial, an informant told an El Monte police officer that Monaghan had been fol-

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lowed into and out of the courthouse and on the freeway by gang members on the orders of Luis Maciel. As a result, Monaghan and his family were put in a safe location for a week and Monaghan was reassigned from the Pomona court house back to DA’s office in downtown Los Angeles. Manzella volunteered to finish Monaghan’s prosecution of Luis Maciel and to deflect some of the Eme’s attention away from Monaghan. After a tough trial, Manzella convicted Maciel of ordering the murders and got four death sentences on him, sentences which will probably never be carried out. This was one of the rare cases in the LA DA’s history of someone being convicted of murder and sentenced to death without even being at the crime scene. The killings of five innocent people including two children barely stirred a ripple in the LA media. The LA Times gave Maciel’s conviction and sentence less than three hundred words. While the press may not have cared, Tony’s prosecution of Luis “Pelon” Maciel didn’t go unnoticed by LAPD and LASD detectives. Manzella started getting a reputation as a Mexican Mafia specialist, a prosecutor who could tackle difficult cases. In 2000, Manzella sent Arthur “Shady” Grajeda, another Eme member, to jail for life. Grajeda wanted Robert “Huero” Dunton and Robert “Spider” Acosta killed for failure to pay their street taxes. Shady Grajeda comes from one of those families that many social scientists and activists don’t believe exist. Like the Aguirres, the Grajeda family is heavily involved in the Mexican Mafia. Shady’s uncles, Thomas “Wino” Grajeda, Daniel “Cuate” Grajeda, and Senon “Cherilo” Grajeda are all Eme members serving sentences in the California prison system. The Grajedas have weight in the Eme. Cuate Grajeda, for instance, had enough sway that he pushed through a change in a long-standing rule. Prior to Cuate’s change in policy, only a full-blown member of the Mexican Mafia could kill another member, no matter how bad the infraction. Cuate issued orders that anybody could kill a made member if the murder is sanctioned by the Mexican Mafia. Cuate’s change created an open contract that could now be enforced by any of the tens of thousands of Surenos in California. In an effort to distance himself from the actual murder, Shady Grajeda

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ordered Ruben “Diablo” Gomez to kill Dunton and Acosta, or Gomez himself would be killed. On the face of it, this one was extremely difficult to prosecute. Not only did Manzella have to prove that Gomez pulled the trigger, he also had to pull together enough evidence to prove that the murders were a hit and implicate a man whose most lethal action was a spoken order. Manzella and Arvidson personally went out with investigators on the streets of San Pedro to cajole and convince reluctant witnesses to step forward. The witnesses, of course, were putting their lives in his hands. One of the rules of the street is that “snitches belong in ditches.” It almost defies belief that some fifty years after the birth and spectacular growth of the Mexican Mafia, and with hundreds of murders to its credit, the Los Angeles DA’s office doesn’t have a formal, specially trained unit of DAs dedicated to Mexican Mafia cases. Until they retired from prosecuting in mid-2006, Manzella and Arvidson, working alone out a supply closet of an office, were the LA DA’s de facto Mexican Mafia task force.

“What Dixon basically said to us is that no way was he going to be able to convince a jury that this fifteen-year-old kid was some kind of criminal mastermind.” — Detective Andy Teague

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etween working fresh cases, John Berdin and Andy

Teague spent the last few months of the century steadily chipping away at their seventeen murder books. One case in particular, that of one Alan Downey, seemed ready to present to a District Attorney. It was uniquely illustrative of the Mexican Mafia’s presence in the Avenues gang and it appeared to the detectives to be a connection point with some of the other cases. 75

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Th e m e x ican mafia On August 14, 1995, Alan Downey, a drug dealer operating in Highland

Park, was murdered in a car on Eagle Rock Boulevard. Like most drug dealers, Downey did a little bit of legitimate work. He occasionally worked as a second driver for an auto repo man named Gilbert Estrada. The day before he was killed, Downey helped Estrada repossess a green Toyota in Bel Air. It was a consensual repo because the owner didn’t want the car anymore. Downey drove the Toyota back to Highland Park without incident. In exchange for certain favors to Estrada, which Teague and Berdin suspected involved drugs, Estrada would let Downey drive the cars he repossessed until they were to be delivered to the finance companies. Downey was driving that repossessed Toyota when he was shot and killed in the early morning hours of the 14th. When the car was examined by LAPD criminalists they lifted a single usable fingerprint from the roof area. The print was a match for Richie “Lil Pee Wee” Aguirre. Andy Teague was only mildly surprised to discover that the print matched the same fifteen-year-old kid who, only eight months earlier, had been driving around East LA with a dead body in the front passenger seat. “At that point, we began putting together a number of things. One, his older brother Alex was going to trial in the Feds RICO case. Two, Alex was a full-blown Carnal in the Mexican Mafia. Three, we knew Lil Pee Wee was throwing his brother’s weight around Avenues. We had that from any number of sources. And four, we got a statement from Downey’s girlfriend that Downey wasn’t kicking up tax money. The Downey murder and the rest we were looking at had Mexican Mafia written all over them. It was a tax murder.” It was a stretch for Berdin and Teague to surmise that fifteen-year-old Richie was running his brother’s Eme business in Highland Park. This was unheard of. First of all, Lil Pee Wee was not a made member. Second of all, despite his indoctrination into the criminal life practically since birth, nobody that young had ever been charged to run Eme business on that scale. Whether or not Alex had the blessing of other members to turn the Eme’s business over to his younger brother will probably never be known. But the fact seemed beyond question that Lil Pee Wee, at fifteen, was shouldering the kind of responsibility usually reserved for veteranos in their thirties or forties.

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There was additional evidence to tie Lil Pee Wee Aguirre directly to several other unsolved murders and to connect some of his associates to still others. By the early part of 2000, Berdin and Teague also had at least two informants who could provide corroborating evidence on Aguirre’s connection to additional unsolved homicides. The two informants, Jimmy “Drac” Maxson and Gerry “Trooper” Ramirez, could help tie a number of Teague’s unsolved murders either to Avenues gang business or directly to Mexican Mafia business. After years of slow but steady progress, the appearance of those two informants was a huge break for the two investigators. What Berdin and Teague had was usable evidence plus two droppedout Avenues gang members willing to talk. There was enough there to go forward and get at least some of the seventeen homicides cleared. They put together a summary and approached Deputy DA Pat Dixon. Dixon had just successfully prosecuted the group of Avenues members who had shot and killed three-year-old Stephanie Kuhen. Her case, unlike most of Northeast’s murder cases, not only made headlines in the local press but also went national and then international. It was fatuously described by the local and national media as the “Wrong Way” murder. As a direct result of her killing, President Clinton announced that he would make Federal money available to put an additional 100,000 cops on the nation’s streets to fight urban violence. Berdin and Teague felt that Dixon’s experience with the Avenues gang and his familiarity with some of Northeast’s cops gave him something of an advantage. Here’s a DA, Teague thought, who they wouldn’t have to break in. “We figured he was already up to speed with the Kuhen case under his belt. We were really surprised with what happened.” Dixon somewhat impatiently listened to the theory Berdin and Teague had crafted from the available evidence. They mentioned the two informants and their willingness to testify. Granted, the informants wanted a deal in exchange for their testimony—a situation that often causes juries to doubt the prosecution—but that was part of the game. After some consideration, Pat Dixon made the decision to file a single charge of murder against a single individual. To Berdin and Teague’s amazement, Dixon allowed Richie Aguirre to plead to a lesser charge of man-

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slaughter. Dixon dismissed as unwinnable all the other murder cases they presented. “What Dixon basically said to us,” Teague remembered, “is that no way was he going to be able to convince a jury that this fifteen-year-old kid was some kind of criminal mastermind. It was a non-starter for him. In our view, Dixon was giving the Downey case away and turning down all the others we could connect to it. And we knew we had good cases. A manslaughter charge would probably get him [Lil Pee Wee Aguirre] six years. State law says you have to serve a minimum of 85 percent of your sentence. He was fifteen or sixteen at the time. Give or take a few and he would have been out in his early twenties. We knew he was a multiple killer. We needed to find somebody we could convince of that.” Berdin and Teague decided to switch to Plan B. They realized that taking the case to Pat Dixon wasn’t the smartest move they could make. They’d gone to Dixon because of his experience with the Avenues. They realized what they should have done was go to somebody with Mexican Mafia experience. By mid-February 2001, with Richie Aguirre’s case still pending, Berdin and Teague decided to approach the only guy in the DA’s office who seemed to know anything at all about the Mexican Mafia, Tony Manzella. They arrived at the CCB on a cold morning and sat uncomfortably in Tony and Ruth’s cramped office. They gave Tony summaries of the cases and outlined the workings of the Avenues and the gang’s very deep connections to the Mexican Mafia. They told Manzella that Avenues probably had more current members in the Mexican Mafia than any other street gang in the city. Manzella recalled, “I knew fairly quick after talking to them that this would take a lot more investigative work. They had most of it, but I had to get them thinking like prosecutors. There were things I needed that most cops resist doing. They call it chickenshit. The details and things I know will work in court, most cops hate doing that.” A week later, Manzella called Teague at Northeast and said he’d like to take a look at the murder books. Teague asked when Manzella would like the books delivered to him at the CCB. Manzella said not to bother. He’d come to Northeast and look at them there. “That blew us away,” Teague said. “Most DAs don’t do that. It’s not like they’re primadonnas. It’s just that they

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don’t leave the building. Tony wasn’t like that. He and Ruth showed up one day and they sat here for something like two months going over the murder books. We gave him an office and he sat there drinking bad station coffee and took notes. By the time he was done, we had the biggest case in all our careers.” By April 2001, Manzella had the outlines of a case that would involve eight defendants and seven murder victims. All the defendants were Avenues members and all the victims were killed in territory claimed by the Avenues. Manzella also had information that one of the eight defendants, Javier “Gangster” Marquez, had already been inducted into the Mexican Mafia. Some of the murders were simple gang-banging. Some were killings over taxation and two were assassinations of witnesses. The hard part was connecting them all. The charge sheet alone was bewildering in its complexity. In total there were twenty-two charges against the eight defendants. During the period between Manzella signing on to the case and filing it, John Berdin was promoted to Supervisor of the Homicide Table. Andy Teague was assigned James King, a young detective who, like Manzella, was a transplanted Easterner. King, a veteran of Desert Storm, had grown up in Queens, New York, and had brothers in the NYPD and the FDNY. Before moving forward, Manzella had to get Lil Pee Wee’s manslaughter plea set aside. This required some maneuvering inside the DA’s office. He approached the situation straightforwardly. Manzella went to Dixon’s office, flatly told him he wanted to take over Lil Pee Wee’s case, and asked for the files. Dixon handed them over and asked, “You aren’t going to make me look bad, are you?” Manzella just told him he was going to clean up the case a little. On April 13, 2001, Richie Aguirre appeared in court with his County-appointed lawyer and pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the murder of Alan Downey. Due to his status as a juvenile and Dixon’s reluctance to consider the growing pile of evidence against him, Richie Aguirre was set to go to prison for a handful of years. In the gang world, a short sentence like the one he was facing at his age was a career maker. The worst he was facing was a few years in California Youth Authority until he became an adult, and then a few years in prison. Upon returning to the streets, Lil Pee Wee’s status

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would be enhanced by his time in prison and his word would carry its own weight. On the streets, a prison record is a diploma, a curriculum vitae that boosts your prestige and enhances your authority. As to the business he’d been running on the streets, that would continue by remote control, so to speak, under the stewardship of a number of reliable associates. On April 19, 2001, Manzella appeared in court and finessed Richie’s attorney into believing that the case was faltering and that there might not be enough evidence to proceed with the prosecution. Manzella stated that The People would have no objection to Richie Aguirre being released on his own recognizance. Aguirre was elated. He was released from County Jail and he returned to the neighborhood feeling he’d dodged a medium-caliber bullet. While Aguirre enjoyed his freedom, Manzella, Arvidson, Teague, and King were working overtime to make sure that his freedom was temporary. On May 4, 2001, a few weeks after Aguirre’s release, the four took the LAPD’s King Air 200 twin turboprop to Calipatria State Prison, located in the scorching desert just north of the Mexican border and a few miles west of the Salton Sea. The four went to Calipatria to interview Gerry “Trooper” Ramirez, an inmate who was serving an eleven-year sentence for involvement in the death of Cesar Tolentino, a Filipino drug dealer killed in the course of a drug robbery. Ramirez had once been a tax collector for Alex Aguirre, but had been greenlighted for skimming and then outright stealing. Ramirez had escaped three separate assassination attempts and, of course, was still a target. He had no love for either Alex or Richie. Ramirez, maintaining his street dignity, refused to be placed in Protective Custody; in the prison world, PC is for child molesters, perverts, and snitches. He didn’t consider himself a snitch. Even though he provided Manzella and the detectives information and agreed to testify in court, he saw himself as a loyal Avenues member. He considered the Aguirres and their associates traitors who placed allegiance to the Mexican Mafia above loyalty to the Avenues. In a very real sense, Ramirez saw himself as a traditional gangster with loyalties to the streets and people he grew up with. He saw the Eme as an interloper that put “business” ahead of the neighborhood. To him, the neighborhood isn’t about business; it’s about a kind of a

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tribal loyalty that shouldn’t be subordinate to the dictates of a prison gang. Trooper Ramirez wanted a deal and Manzella was ready to give him one. Trooper’s obligation was to tell the truth in court. Once that was done, Manzella would write a letter to the judge suggesting that Ramirez’s sentence be reduced. As it turned out, Trooper lied to deliver some payback to the people who’d driven him out of the neighborhood he still loved. But no one would realize that until almost five years later. At Calipatria, Manzella also interviewed Nick “Evil” Uribe, James Beard, and Martin Fox, all Avenues members who had either left the gang or fallen out of favor. Although they provided some information, very little of it would contribute much to the murders that Manzella and Teague were working. Just days after releasing Richie Aguirre, the four of them once again boarded the LAPD’s twin turboprop and flew to the Federal Prison in Minnesota to interview another ex-Avenues member, Jimmy Maxson. Maxson had stated to Federal authorities and to Andy Teague that he had information about a number of the killings that Teague was investigating. Maxson had turned himself in to the FBI on August 3, 1999, after spending six months in Mexico as a fugitive. He’d been indicted with a number of other Mexican Mafia members, associates, and street soldiers in the third of the three large RICO cases that started with Alex Aguirre’s in 1995. Over the course of his career in Avenues, Maxson had worked himself up from street gangster to Mexican Mafia associate and ran a tax collection crew for Alex Aguirre in Avenues territory. One member of that crew was Trooper Ramirez. Even though Ramirez was a thief and had stolen Alex’s tax money, Maxson hadn’t turned on Trooper like so many other Avenues members had. During their time on the street collecting for Alex, Maxson warned Trooper that he was in trouble and that he should get out of the area before he was killed. Trooper disregarded the warning and stuck around the neighborhood until Alex’s people started shooting at him on sight. Like Alex Aguirre, Maxson had gotten rolled up in Jim Myers’s Task Force investigation. While driving back from Arizona in 1998, Maxson, an admitted obsessive news junkie who never failed to read the daily papers, picked up an LA Times at a gas station just off the 10 Freeway in the high desert. The paper carried the story of the latest RICO arrests and featured his pic-

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ture and name as a man with a Federal warrant for his arrest. Maxson tried to contact his wife Leticia at home, but the phone was answered by an FBI agent. Maxson decided to keep driving to the Mexican border. Maxson’s life as a fugitive lasted six months. On August 3, 1999, he crossed back into the US and surrendered himself to the FBI at the LAPD’s Hollenbeck police station in East Los Angeles. He sat on a bench in Hollenbeck’s lobby, uncuffed and basically free to come and go for four hours. Eventually two FBI agents, Angela Lawrence and Leticia Lucero, arrived and took him into custody. This third RICO indictment was a direct result of the Task Force that had been put together after Chuco Castro’s arrest and “flip” in 1992. In time, it would become clear that the Task Force’s efforts were paying dividends well beyond what anyone could have predicted back in 1994. While still in Federal prison in Minnesota, Maxson gave Manzella and Teague the chapter and verse on Avenues business: Maxson’s association with Alex, Lil Richie, and Gerry “Trooper” Ramirez, the tax collection and enforcement crew he ran for the Aguirres, and information on the murders that had been relayed to him by the people who actually pulled the triggers. Like Ernie “Chuco” Castro, Maxson was tired of the life. He was tired of running and, like Chuco, his having a young child made him reconsider his entire existence as a criminal. He desperately wanted to be with his son and he was willing to cooperate if it might put him back into his son’s life. On the late-night flight back from Minnesota, Manzella knew that the case he was contemplating had just gotten a little stronger. In many ways, Jimmy Maxson was an ideal witness and informant. His credentials as an Avenues and Mexican Mafia insider were solid. But while he carried and used guns, Maxson had never taken the final and irreversible step of taking a life. He was therefore credible as an Eme Associate but he wasn’t the kind of cold-blooded killer a jury might doubt. From his experience, Manzella knew that all informants have an expiration date past which they are no longer useful or convincing. He knew the case he was contemplating would drag on for months, maybe years, and he hoped Maxson, Trooper Ramirez, and one or two others he would soon interview could be brought to the stand before their expiration dates. Manzella

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had no idea that this case would eat up the last five years of his career as a prosecutor. As the LAPD plane went wheels down in Los Angeles, Manzella, Arvidson, and Teague began operating at full speed. Manzella was fighting the clock. For one, Richie Aguirre’s plea date was rapidly approaching and if the plea went through, Manzella would lose him. There was also the matter of another defendant, Gerardo “Criminal” Reyes, who was in Federal custody on an immigration hold and about to be deported to Mexico. If Reyes was deposited across the border, Manzella would lose the man he believed was the actual killer of Randy “Muppet” Morales. Manzella had to get Reyes arrested and charged to keep him from leaving the country. On May 24, 2001, a few days after Manzella’s return from Minnesota, Richie Aguirre failed to appear in court for a hearing on his manslaughter plea. That afternoon, Manzella called Aguirre’s lawyer and told him to have Richie appear the next day in Manzella’s office on the 17th floor of the CCB. Manzella allowed Richie’s defense attorney to believe that the meeting would be a mere formality. The attorney was all but convinced that the DA was dropping the case against his young client. The next morning, a Friday, Manzella filed his case. He was charging Richie “Lil Pee Wee” Aguirre, Javier “Gangster” Marquez, Scott “Gato” Gleason, Clinton Conroy, Anthony “Tonito” Medina, Gerardo “Criminal” Reyes, Randy “Jo Jo” Rodriguez, and George “Chato” Vidales on a variety of crimes including murder and witness murder. Some were already in custody on other charges. Some needed arrest warrants. Richie was going to walk into the CCB under his own power that afternoon. Manzella told Richie’s attorney to call him when he and Richie arrived in the parking lot. They pulled in at 3:00 PM on the dot on a Friday, a time when the CCB is practically deserted. Manzella told the attorney he would meet them in the ground floor lobby. While Manzella and Ruth Arvidson talked to Richie Aguire and his attorney, Andy Teague and James King stepped up behind Richie and arrested him. Tony produced the information sheet he had filed that morning charging Richie Aguirre with three murders. May 25, 2001 was the last day that Richie Aguirre would spend a free man. He was a month and four days past his twentieth birthday.

“Teague and Markel are definitely bad apples.” — Armando Wood, Public Defender

“I found Detective Teague to be a credible witness. I found the use of the ruse was both creative and resourceful and something you don’t often see.” — Hon. Lance A. Ito, Judge

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C H A P TE R s i x

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hile Manzella had tried his entire career to stay out

of the public’s eye, his lead investigator, Andy Teague, had been splashed all over the TV and print media for years. His name had been placed on the Christopher Commission’s list of LA’s forty-four worst cops. These were officers whose offenses ranged from the minor to all-out criminal, including off-duty bar fights, fabricating evidence, having sex with prostitutes, and having a large number of civilian complaints leveled against them for brutality. 85

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an cops, the public outing of scandalous police behavior is inevitable. John Berdin had worked with rookie cops who he believed had no business being in uniform. “Some of these people I wouldn’t ride with. They were close to being criminals themselves. We’ve known for years the screening process was broken, but those decisions are made up high. Unfortunately for Andy, he got swept up in the OJ hysteria after the Fuhrman tapes came out in the trial.” Teague’s problems actually began when he appeared in a video on LA’s CBS evening news in 1991. At the time, he was in uniform patrol working in Newton Division, a part of the city so violent that cops and residents call it “Shootin’ Newton.” On June 29, 1988 Teague had a confrontation with Sonny Davis Flores, a black gang member who according to Teague had interfered with his arrest of a suspect in front of Flores’s house. Flores was standing on his porch yelling at Teague and his partner while the officers took the man into custody. Teague approached Flores to arrest him for interference with a police investigation. As Teague tried to cuff him, Flores attempted to run inside his house. Teague tried to restrain him, and it turned into a fight. The result was Flores being pushed off the porch and into the bushes. One of the Flores’s neighbors, Anthony Ennis, another black male who characterized himself as a former gang member, shot eight minutes of video of the encounter between Teague and Flores. After the confrontation, Teague apparently asked Ennis for a copy of the tape, but the man handed Teague a blank cassette. According to Ennis, Teague returned several times to the house demanding a copy of the tape. Ennis made informal complaints to the police department that Teague was harassing him to obtain a copy of the tape. He stated at one point that Teague beat him up and left him with a cut over his eye. None of the investigations of Teague’s alleged misconduct against Ennis amounted to anything. But in January 1991, Teague arrested Ennis, alleging that the man had threatened him. According to the police report, Ennis told Teague, “We’re not afraid to shoot the police. I’ll shoot you the next chance I get.”

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Teague made a report about the threat and took it to a DA. The DA declined to file charges against Ennis because there was a lack of probable cause for the arrest. The simple truth is, threats like Ennis’s are made on an almost daily basis in Los Angeles, especially in heavy crime areas like Newton, Hollenbeck, and 77th Division. If the DA filed every one of them, the system would be clogged beyond repair. Most cops take threats as part of life and, while they generally note them in reports, they rarely take them to a DA for a filing. Soon after the DA declined to file against Ennis, and some five months after the airing of the infamous Rodney King beating, Ennis brought the tape of the scuffle to the local CBS TV affiliate. A small portion of the tape aired on August 2, 1991, a Thursday. The next day, Ennis and his attorney, Celeste Mulrooney, brought the tape to the LAPD’s Internal Affairs department, but Ennis refused to leave a copy of the tape and declined to be interviewed by Internal Affairs. Ennis’s charge of harassment, like Teague’s accusation of a death threat, went nowhere. Teague was issued an official reprimand but suffered no demotion, loss of pay, or administrative leave. It was a dramatic episode that would have been forgotten if the LA riots hadn’t erupted and the subsequent Christopher Commission hadn’t been organized to deal with the LAPD’s bad apples. Andy Teague’s name landed on the Commission’s list of the LAPD’s worst cops. The list contained forty-four names. Andy Teague was number fortyone. What landed Teague on the list was the episode with Flores and Ennis and the fact that he had accumulated eighteen civilian complaints in his eighteen years on the job. The list was unofficially released to the LA Times on October 15, 1995. The leak of the list came a month after then-Chief Willie Williams held a news conference and blasted Andy Teague and his partner Chuck Markel for falsifying evidence in a murder case. On September 1, 1995, Williams stood before video cameras and print reporters to announce that Teague and Markel had fabricated evidence against two murder suspects and then lied about the fabrication in a preliminary hearing. The two officers were

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asked to turn in their guns and badges and told to go home and wait to be contacted. A reporter on the scene asked what kind of proof the department had that the two detectives had fabricated evidence. Williams said, “We have a signed confession.” As presented to the media and the public that day, the charges and the proof seemed like a slam dunk. Two bad cops were caught doing what many people suspected every cop of doing—framing innocent suspects. As it turned out, the truth was a lot scarier and more revealing of the politics and ass-covering that often rip big cities apart. The case that Teague and Markel were accused of tampering with began on November 29, 1994. Two black males, Gerard Moody and Kevin Adams, had driven down to the Aliso Village housing projects to pick up a third man, Racjon Floyd. Adams and Moody were admitted East Coast First Street Crips who used to live in the Aliso Village Projects. They and most of the Crips in that project had been driven out of the area by Hispanic gangs years earlier and had relocated to 80th Street and Broadway. They were picking up Floyd on their way to an adult education school in downtown Los Angeles. As it later came out, they drove down Mission Street and Adams apparently pointed to a car and said to the other two men, “I think that might be the enemy.” The enemy in this case was Pablo Trujillo, Jr., a Hispanic male with no gang ties. Trujillo was driving and had a passenger with him. Adams retrieved a 9 mm pistol from beneath the seat; under Adams’s direction, Moody maneuvered the vehicle close to Trujillo’s car. Adams fired three rounds. One hit Trujillo in the head and he died almost instantly. The three men then got on the freeway and headed to school. At the time of the shooting, Teague was a detective trainee working with Chuck Markel in Homicide at Hollenbeck. They were on call that morning and responded to the scene around noon. As Markel remembers, “Our surviving victim, the passenger, could not identify our murder suspects. But the description of the car was unique enough that he was able to describe it in great detail. Right down to the fact that there was a For Sale sign on it. We put out a BOLO (Be On the Lookout) on the car and sure enough the fol-

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lowing night two uniform Southwest cops spot it and pull it over. The driver was Gerard Moody.” Markel and Teague showed the surviving victim a picture of the car and he identified it. Moody was interviewed and admitted to being in the passenger seat of the car when it was at the murder scene. But Moody claimed that the person who did the shooting was a man he barely knew named TBone. The detectives suspected that Moody was lying. They went to the school that Moody attended and interviewed staff and faculty, who stated that Moody always came to school in the company of two other men. As part of the school’s security procedures, every student had to sign in. When Markel and Teague looked at the sign-in sheet for the morning of the murder, they saw the names of Kevin Adams and Racjon Floyd immediately below and above that of Moody. Teague didn’t know Floyd, but he knew Adams as a First Street Crip. He had previous encounters with Kevin Adams and his twin brother Keith, an admitted Crip as well. Teague made a photocopy of the sign-in sheet. It could turn into evidence and when they got back to Hollenbeck station. Teague clipped the sign-in sheet into Trujillo’s murder book. When they went to interview Racjon Floyd, it turned out he was much younger than the other two. Markel and Teague suspected that Floyd, who had no criminal record of any kind, was probably not the shooter, but he was a witness for sure. Based on the surviving victim’s statement, they knew that the shots were fired from the front passenger seat of the suspect’s car. Moody had already admitted to being at the scene and in that seat when the shots were fired by the mystery man, T-Bone. “T-Bone was a pure fiction,” Markel recalled. “So now we had all three people that were in the car and we brought them down to Hollenbeck and interviewed them individually. At one point, Moody mentions Floyd’s name. So Andy took the photocopy of the sign-in sheet and he dummies up this photo ID six-pack. He took a picture of Floyd and circled it. Then he writes in the box next to the picture, ‘Floyd is the one that shot the Mexican.’ Then Andy does a clip job and puts Moody’s signature under the statement. This leads Floyd to believe that Moody had just fingered him as the shooter. The

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funny thing is, we never used that. It was a perfectly legal ruse, something they teach you in detective classes.” Even though it was perfectly legal, Teague took the extra step of calling DA Dave Demerjian, the head of the Hard Core Gang Unit in the DA’s office, and told him about the ruse he was thinking of using against Floyd. Demerjian gave him his blessing. It was within policy and within the law. It’s legal to lie to suspects. “The odd thing is, we never needed to use that ruse,” Markel recalled years later. “Andy was basically using the photo ID as his ace in the hole. What Andy did was cue up the tape of the Moody interview to the point where Moody mentions Racjon Floyd. As Andy is talking to Floyd, he just keeps playing that little snip of tape. ‘Racjon Floyd.” Stops, cues it up again, “Racjon Floyd.’ Over and over again. Floyd eventually admits that he was there, and that it was Moody that said, ‘I think that might be the enemy,’ and it was Moody who got the 9 mm from under the seat and shot the Mexican.” The detectives typed up Floyd’s statement and had him sign it. “Even though it was only the word of an accomplice, we decided to take it to DA Dave Demerjian. He took the case and filed it.” On the morning of May 2, 1995, Markel and Teague received a call from DA Peter Korn at 8:30 in the morning. Korn asked them to come immediately to the CCB for the preliminary hearing on Moody and Adams. The hearing was scheduled for 9:00 AM that morning. The detectives grabbed the murder book and rushed down to the CCB. On the way, Teague skimmed the documents in the car to familiarize himself with the case. Six months had passed since interviewing the suspects and the two detectives had investigated eighteen murder cases in the interval. Within minutes of arriving, Teague was on the stand. He testified about the investigation and that Floyd had fingered Moody as the shooter and Adams as the driver who maneuvered close to the victim’s car to give Moody a better shot. The cross-examination by defense attorney Armando Wood consisted of just one question. Wood handed Teague the phonied-up photo document and asked him, “Did my client, Gerard Moody, sign this?” Teague,

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without really examining the document, said yes. That was the end of the cross-examination. The rest of the preliminary went forward without incident. Moody and Adams were held to answer and their court-appointed defense attorneys began preparing for trial. A month later, Markel and Teague received a call from a private investigator hired by Armando Wood, who asked to see the original photo documents. There were no originals, of course, because Teague had dummied them up from the sign-in sheet. “Frankly,” Markel remembers, “the phony six-pack was the furthest thing from our minds. Even though the ruse document was in the murder book, it was never a factor in the investigation. It was such an obvious forgery that we couldn’t believe that the defense actually took it seriously. He [Andy Teague] did it with tape and Wite-Out. A blind man could see it. We never used it because Floyd started talking before Andy could play that ace card. Technically, we never even needed to put it in the book because it was never used. It just wasn’t part of the body of evidence. Andy clipped it in the book out of an abundance of caution and then forgot about it. Demerjian knew about the ruse and we figured that was enough.” When Markel and Teague were made aware that the bogus photo ID had become an issue, they called DA Dave Demerjian and informed him of the situation. “Dermerjian didn’t seem to think it was a problem,” Markel recalled. “He told us to write a follow-up report explaining what we did, why we did and that it was never used. Demerjian said he’d bring it up at trial and explain to the judge what the situation was. Andy wrote the followup and explained exactly what he did. That was the last we heard of it until we were publicly vilified by Willie Williams on television. That follow-up report? That was what Williams was talking about when he said the department had a signed confession.” On the morning of September 1, 1995, Markel was out of the office doing follow up on one of the dozen cases he was handling. By that time, Andy had become a full-fledged homicide detective assigned to Van Nuys Division in the San Fernando Valley. Markel received a call to get back to Hollenback as

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quickly as possible to report to the Captain. When he arrived, Markel was escorted to the Captain’s office and told that he was under investigation for misconduct. The Captain told Markel to go home immediately and wait to be contacted by Internal Affairs. Markel had no idea what was going on, but the Captain refused to elaborate on the nature of the misconduct. Once he got home, Markel called the police union representative who already had the information that would turn Markel’s life inside out for next year. The union rep told Markel to turn on the TV and he’d find out all about his problem. With the union rep still on the phone, Markel saw Willie Williams on television condemn him and Teague as bad cops who had forged evidence against a murder suspect. Shortly thereafter, Andy got a call from his brother, also an LAPD detective, who was vacationing in England. The chief’s news conference was being broadcast live halfway across the world. The international press was already in town for the O.J. Simpson case, and it covered Williams’s condemnation of the two dirty cops with a certain amount of schadenfreude. In light of subsequent events, Williams had not only jumped the gun, he’d done so maliciously. Two hours before the press conference, DA Dave Demerjian had been interviewed by the LAPD’s Internal Affairs department and had stated that he was aware of the ruse document because Teague had asked if it was a legitimate ploy. Demerjian also told the IA investigators that the forgery had never been used and was irrelevant to the case against Moody and Adams. Demerjian went further and said the DA’s office was largely to blame for the screw-up because Peter Korn, the prosecutor in the case, had not given Markel and Teague enough time to prepare; the two hadn’t looked at or thought about the case for six months. Despite Demerjian’s exoneration of Markel and Teague before Internal Affairs investigators, Willie Williams went ahead with the press conference that tried and convicted them in the court of public opinion. Markel’s children even asked him if he was going to jail and, if he was, would he ever come back. Markel and Teague sat at home for seven months while the District Attorney and the LAPD’s Internal Affairs conducted the investigation. The

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DA and IA went back and examined over 100 cases that the detectives had worked on. After examining the documents in those old cases, neither investigative body could find any evidence of misconduct or wrongdoing on the part of Markel or Teague. Meanwhile, the murder charges against Adams and Moody were dropped. Moody remained in custody for another crime and Adams was released but was named in a warrant for another murder. The timing of Williams’s public indictment of Markel and Teague had all the appearance of a wag-the-dog event. His press conference came within days of the release of Mark Fuhrman’s taped interview with a writer during the O.J. Simpson murder trial. In the tape, Furhman made statements about cops planting and fabricating evidence, beating suspects, and using racial slurs. Furhman was making the department look bad—but so was Williams. Just before the news conference, Williams had been in trouble for lying to the Police Commission about taking a gift of free rooms in Las Vegas and free airline tickets to Germany. This, too, had reached the media. Markel, Teague, and a number of other cops and prosecutors believe that the combination of the Furhman revelations and Williams’s public embarrassment led him to use the two detectives to deflect attention from himself. As for keeping a low profile, however, Williams was so angry about the release of information about his indiscretions that he hit Los Angeles with a $10 million invasion of privacy lawsuit. He claimed to have been humiliated publicly before all the facts were assessed and an investigation completed. It never occurred to him that this was precisely what he had done to Markel and Teague. Seven months after the news conference, Teague appeared before the LAPD’s Board of Rights and was found not guilty of making false statements under oath. He was found guilty of failing to properly prepare for court. He was given a one-day suspension. Markel was also found guilty of failing to prepare properly for a court appearance and was handed an official reprimand, the lightest penalty the LAPD can impose. With their names cleared, Andy Teague and Chuck Markel decided to sue Chief Willie Williams for $20 million. Although they hired private attorneys,

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the two detectives had the full support of the police union. The union, giving Williams both barrels, called on the city to launch an investigation into Williams’s ethics and his handling of the LAPD. The union wrote to the City Council and to Mayor Richard Riordan that “Chief Williams’s time with the LAPD has been marked more by scandal than by innovation or excellence.” There was only a year left on Williams’s contract with the city, and hardly any point in beating up on a lame duck. The City Council had lost confidence in him. The Mayor had stopped speaking to him. No cop in the city wanted him as boss. Williams, the black figurehead brought in to quell the concerns of activists and race-obsessed politicians, turned out to be a disaster for the LAPD and for Los Angeles. Although Teague and Markel were cleared, the aura of misconduct never went away. It haunted every case they worked on. In every case in which the detectives appear as lead investigators, the first step the defense took was to ask for their personnel files. The idea was to introduce their prior “forgery” into evidence in order to sow doubt in the minds of the jury. This practice became so common that the DA’s office now has all the files relating to the Moody, Adams, and Floyd case and the documents clearing Markel and Teague in a permanent state of readiness. Most judges, now long familiar with the details, dismiss this attempt outright and keep it out of the case. Lance Ito, the first judge to handle one of their cases after their exoneration, found no merit in the defense motion to bring in Markel or Teague’s history. Made famous internationally by presiding over the O.J. Simpson case, Ito believed that the photo ruse was “creative and resourceful.” It’s nonetheless an issue that will never be forgotten. “Ultimately,” Markel said years later, “the system worked in our favor. The suit we brought against Williams was at first accepted by the civil court but then it was thrown out after the city appealed it. It didn’t surprise us. We would have liked our day in court because we know we did nothing wrong. The proof is we’re still here working. Andy went on to do some great cases and I’ve handled some really interesting ones as well. One case we worked on, we got a commendation from the City Council. It was a double shotgun homicide that we solved by tracing a pair of prescription glasses left at

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the murder scene by the killer. I think they featured it on Court TV. Usually when you get this kind of commendation, they bring you in front of the City Council and they hand you the plaque and somebody makes a little speech. When we got ours, somebody just dumped the plaques on our desks. Even when you win, you sometimes lose.”

“Fighting gang crime should be his [the new police chief’s] top priority because it’s out of control in this city and there’s no reason it should be out of control with proper policing.” ­— Rick Caruso, Head of the Los Angeles Police Commission, September 17, 2002

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C H A P TE R SEVEN

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etween the time that Tony Manzella filed his case

against the eight Avenues gangsters and the actual start of the trial, Los Angeles experienced one of the worst crime waves in its history. On November 20, 2002, the city became the nation’s murder capital, eclipsing Chicago and Washington, D.C. The year ending in December 2001 recorded 612 murders, more than half of them attributed to gang warfare. 97

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tract renewed and gave up his post on May 17, 1997. Bayan Lewis, a veteran LAPD commander, was put in place temporarily while the city searched for a new chief. This time, they decided to look within the department. Williams, who had been brought in from Philadelphia and whose most prominent qualification for being chief was his skin color, had demonstrated that race was sorely overrated as an instrument of change, an indicator of capability, or even as a public relations tool. The rank-and-file street cops, a number of politicians, and some law enforcement insiders like the police commissioners wanted Mark Kroeker as the new chief. Kroeker had devoted his adult career to the LAPD and had come up through the ranks. He was well-liked, but beyond that he was respected for his abilities and integrity. His problem was insufficient melanin. He was white and the conventional wisdom in City Hall and among political consultants and activists was that the department needed to be perceived as sensitive to minorities. The Williams lesson had yet to sink in. Four-term LA City Councilman Nate Holden lobbied hard and long to appoint a senior LAPD commander, Bernard Parks, as the new chief. Parks, like Kroeker, was an LAPD lifer. But unlike Kroeker, who had spent most of his time in the trenches, Parks was primarily an administrator. He’d held the top job in the LAPD’s Internal Affairs, the unit assigned to investigate officer misconduct. For a department suffering under the perception of corruption brought about by the Rampart scandal, Parks seemed like a worthy candidate. He had a reputation in the department as scrupulously thorough, with a command-and-control, top-down management style. A strict non-drinker, Parks had no tolerance for officers with personal vices. Having an ally like City Councilman Nate Holden was a sword that cut two ways for Parks. Holden was a loose cannon with peculiar ideas about the role of government. By his own admission, he loved to twist arms to push his agenda through. He saw himself as a champion for the poor and disenfranchised and liked to portray himself as a noble warrior whose role was to bring the spoils of battle home to his constituents. He liked doling

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out city money, often unwisely. When fellow council member Mike Hernandez was caught using cocaine, reading porno magazines on the job, and paying for a girlfriend’s apartment, Holden publicly defended him. It was once again Rich Valdemar who found himself in the uncomfortable position of running into a political roadblock while performing his job. Valdemar had received information from a Mexican Mafia Associate who had debriefed that City Councilman Mike Hernandez was buying cocaine in large quantities from the Associate’s brother. Based on that information, Valdemar put together a surveillance team and began observing the dealer as he made his deliveries. On five separate occasions, the surveillance team saw the dealer selling Hernandez cocaine right on the street. Hernandez was apparently so addicted to the substance that he wouldn’t even wait to get indoors to snort up. The LASD videotaped Hernandez laying out lines right on the hood of a car. On several occasions, Hernandez was in the company of another disgraced City Council member, Richard Alatorre, and a political cohort, Richard Alarcon, currently a California State Senator. Alatorre, also a heavy cocaine user at the time, pleaded guilty in Federal court in 2001 to charges of tax evasion for failing to declare some $42,000 he received from entities that had won city contracts. The tax evasion plea was in exchange for the Federal and State law enforcement not pursuing more serious charges of bribery and fraud. When Rich Valdemar’s team presented the surveillance tapes to his supervisors, the response was: “Forget it. We can’t do this. Stay away from it.” The fear at the LASD was that if the department went ahead with the investigation and got a DA filing, the political blowback could hurt the department the next time it went asking for more money or resources from the LA County Board of Supervisors. Although the LA City Council has no direct supervision of the LASD, police departments need all the political support they can get just to be able to do the job entrusted to them. Not one to let his own department stiff-arm him, Valdemar offered the tapes to the Los Angeles Police Department. No one at the LAPD was interested in pursuing the investigation. The LAPD is directly in the LA City

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Council’s line of fire and there was even greater reluctance there to going ahead with investigating one of their own. Finally, Valdemar ran the tapes over to the Interagency Metropolitan Apprehension Crime Task Force (IMPACT) and they picked up the investigation. IMPACT is a multi-agency task force made up of LAPD, LASD, and other departments and the feeling was that if there was political blowback, no single police department would take the heat—they all would, and that would diminish it. It was a matter of sharing the pain. As it turned out, there was no blowback. After admitting to buying and using cocaine, Hernandez made a public apology and promised to go into rehab. He was allowed to keep his council seat and he was even re-elected the following term. In his campaign, he addressed his cocaine use and stated that through his addiction he better understood the problems in his community and how to address them. When Hernandez was term-limited out of his council seat after the scandal, Holden gave Hernandez a $950 a week job as a consultant. Although Hernandez was hired on July 17, 2001, his salary was made retroactive to July 1, 2001. Hernandez was further given a two-week vacation prior to starting his work as a consultant to Holden. Sometimes, out of sheer exuberance, the seventy-three-year-old Holden would perform one-arm pushups in City Council chambers. Out of other motives he tried to pass a law requiring all companies doing business with the city to demonstrate that they had never in their history benefited from slavery. He also tried to pass a law to have all restaurant workers in the city tested for HIV-AIDS out of fear that a worker could infect patrons. At a time when city employees and council members were asked to show fiscal responsibility by using pool cars for travel, Holden insisted on having the city buy him a $42,000 SUV. His reasoning was that he carried a lot of people around. Even to his supporters, Holden was a nutcase. But he was on the politically correct side of the issues, and his race-based politics made him untouchable in Los Angeles. On April 30, 2002 Holden was found guilty of violating the City’s campaign finance laws by the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission. During his

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1999 campaign, Holden committed thirty-one violations and the Commission ordered him to pay a $6,500 penalty. Two of the commission members actually wanted him to pay $30,000 in penalties because of his history of violating campaign laws. In 1999, Holden was fined $27,500 for forty-eight violations committed during his 1995 campaign. Having a champion like Holden wasn’t exactly the kind of support Parks would have liked, but the odd pairing of the morally impeccable Parks and the back-scratching Holden, master machine politician, seemed to work. Parks was appointed as the new chief on August 12, 1997, the same month that the first of the three RICO cases against the Mexican Mafia had wrapped up. Under Parks’s stewardship, the LAPD was well on its way to a total meltdown, and the crime stats were beginning to worry his supporters. Parks began dismantling some of the reforms the department had been coerced into adopting by the very people who wanted Parks in charge. After years of resistance, the department had finally adopted the concept of Community Policing, a system that had worked in other cities. Under this policy, each division had Senior Lead Officers (SLOs) who were assigned as liaisons to the communities in which they worked. Their main job was to talk with community leaders about issues that were important to them. The SLOs acted as the eyes and ears of the department and were responsible for providing police resources to isolate and address problems ranging from graffiti to major crimes. Parks dismantled the SLOs and put them back in cars answering radio calls like conventional patrol officers. Probably because of Parks’s background with Internal Affairs and the perception that LAPD brass cut rogue cops too much slack, Parks initiated a policy that investigated each and every civilian complaint as if it were the tip of another Rampart scandal. Officers who received complaints were taken off patrol and put on desk jobs while the charges were investigated. These investigations could take months and during that time, the officers’ promotions and pay raises were put on hold. In the past, minor or unproven complaints were handled by supervising sergeants at the local level. Under Parks’s new policy, the complaints were

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funneled automatically to Parker Center and the power to dismiss even minor complaints was now reserved for senior commanders. It didn’t take long for career criminals to realize that they could have a proactive or particularly effective cop removed from patrol by lodging a complaint. This was a special danger for gang cops who had the most contact with criminals. Often, gangsters would have a family member, friend, or coerced gang member file a complaint against a particular officer. The number of complaints skyrocketed while their nature took on a pathetically asinine character. Senior commanders at Parker Center were now investigating complaints like “The officer looked at me in a mean way” or “The officer looked like he wanted to hit me.” In one case, a number of officers were dismissed from the force for drinking off duty on the roof of a parking garage. Cops cutting loose and unwinding with beer after work has traditionally been part of the job, an almost sacrosanct ritual of any paramilitary organization. Parks perceived this as an egregious violation and fired most of the officers involved and suspended a few others. News like this had a chilling effect on patrol cops. Should off-duty cops carrying firearms be allowed to have a few drinks before getting in their cars and heading home? Probably not a great idea. Most cops would agree that a reprimand was sufficient to handle this type of situation. But should a veteran cop lose his job and pension over what Joseph Wambaugh once described as choir practice? Most cops would say no. Parks’s reaction was seen as overkill. Fear of complaints from citizens and this mano dura discipline from the brass created an atmosphere of fear in the ranks that eventually resulted in mass apathy. Patrol cops stopped going above and beyond in their job performance. Cops who wanted to keep their jobs knew that it wasn’t worth putting themselves in a situation that could be second-, third-, and fourthguessed by a review panel. As a result, a lot of otherwise dedicated officers did nothing more than answer the radio calls and fill out reports in excruciating detail to eat up as much of their shift as possible. The LAPD became, in

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the words of many cops, “The drive and wave police department. We drive by, say hi, and keep going.” One retired detective remembered a incident in which he responded to an officer-involved shooting. “This was a righteous shooting. Our suspect pulled a gun on the cop and the cop shot him. The suspect survived and was eventually prosecuted. All the evidence was right there. Here’s the odd thing. We had two detectives investigating the suspect but we had twelve people investigating the cop. That was the consent decree. Every OIS [Officer-Involved Shooting] was investigated by Internal Affairs, the DA’s office, the FBI, and the monitors from Kroll [the private security company appointed to monitor the LAPD’s adherence to the stipulations in the Federal consent decree]. It was crazy.” The chronically under-staffed department had to devote way too many man-hours to investigating itself. The consent decree red tape was grinding the system to a halt. The LAPD’s problems extended beyond low morale. The department was losing 400 officers per year to attrition and the Academy was barely able to supply replacements. In addition to retirement, a number of officers were leaving the department for jobs in other cities or out of state. Despite heavy recruitment efforts, there weren’t enough suitable candidates to increase the ranks. Active officers were openly discouraging friends and relatives from joining the LAPD. The appeal of being a cop in LA, once considered the best and most professional force in the country, was gone. It was an awful place to work, a department where if the criminals didn’t get you, the supervisors would. Andy Teague expressed his frustration one day after the Cinco de Mayo parade where the department assigned hundreds of officers for crowd control and other duties. “If they have all this money for overtime for a parade, why do I have to wait seven months for a ballistics report?” The LAPD’s crime lab, located right next door to Northeast Division on San Fernando Road, was suffering from antiquated equipment and insufficient staff. Like the cops making lateral transfers to other departments, experienced technicians and criminalists at the lab were leaving for bet-

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ter paying jobs. “We don’t do anything that the citizens see,” Teague continued. “We don’t prune the trees or make the lights go on or pave your street. But when somebody kills your daughter or your wife, you want everything possible done to catch the murderer. The people in this city are not being well-served. Not everything possible is being done. The crime lab will only rush a ballistics test if I’ve got a filing on a case. If it’s on the DA’s docket then they’ll do a rush. If it’s one of these gang murders or I don’t have a filing, it sits in the line. But if I can’t get a bullet test, I may not ever get filing. For the survivors, and that’s who we really do it for, the family, it’s the most important thing in their lives and the evidence is sitting there waiting to get processed.” Recall that at one point the LAPD’s crime lab had a backlog of 6,000 fingerprints that required processing, and that the same lab accidentally discarded hundreds of DNA samples collected at rape scenes. Parks overcompensated for the Rampart scandal by dismantling the CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) and tried to rebuild it from the ground up. Experienced gang cops who knew the streets and the players were rotated out to other assignments and replaced by patrol officers. It takes years for a cop to get up to speed on the local gangs and get to know the foot soldiers, shotcallers, and overlords in prison and on the street. Parks’s new policy was that cops could only stay in the gang unit for three years. The reasoning behind this was to prevent gang cops from turning into the infamous Rafael Perez, the CRASH cop at the heart of the Rampart scandal, who had planted evidence, shot unarmed gangsters, and generally gone out of control. This new policy basically ensured that by the time a gang cop got good at what he was doing, he was rotated out and replaced by a novice. This was an echo of the situation that Rich Valdemar had experienced in the Prison Gang Unit where the experienced cops were replaced by seasoned cops who just happened to know nothing about prison gangs. As Tony Manzella was preparing to launch his biggest case, there were other disturbing indicators in the air. Convictions were becoming harder for prosecutors. Some courts like Compton were becoming notorious for antagonistic juries. “In any other court in the city, these cases would have been slam dunk, dead bang convictions. But in Compton [a predominant-

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ly black neighborhood with an astonishingly high murder and crime rate], even smoking gun cases were getting not-guilty verdicts. It was giving DAs fits,” Manzella recalled. “Ruth and I started worrying about the jury selection process in downtown. We hadn’t seen it yet downtown but other DAs had. We had to get that right.” By the time Tony was ready to go to trial, the defense attorneys representing the eight Avenues gangsters had prevailed on the system to get the case broken up into four smaller cases. Tony wanted all eight defendants tried at the same time for a number of reasons. For one, it was easier for a single jury to see all the players and for Manzella to establish the relationships between the accused and how they fit into the Mexican Mafia’s taxation and enforcement policies. It would also create less wear and tear on his witnesses like Gerry “Trooper” Ramirez, Jimmy Maxson, and Benny “Sleepy” Garcia. Confidential informants have a shelf life and putting them on the stand too many times used up their effectiveness. Manzella also wanted the luxury of giving the jury a thorough look into the world of the Eme, something he hadn’t much of a chance to do in the past when working in the DA’s Hard Core Gang Unit. “Hard Core Gangs is like emergency surgery,” Manzella says. “These are people that need to be taken off the streets and sent away as fast as possible. Major Crimes, on the other hand, is elective surgery. We’ve got the time to create bigger cases over a longer time frame. We’ve got the time to really put on a big, complicated case and spin a tale that a jury can understand.” Unfortunately, the case was broken up into four separate trials. The big obstacle was the fact that Manzella had asked for the death penalty on Javier “Gangster” Marquez. None of the other defendants were liable for the death penalty and their defense attorneys argued successfully that having a death penalty case attached to their clients might prejudice the jury and have the taint of a capital crime rub off on them. By the middle of 2003, the first trial appeared to be ready for court. Of the eight defendants, the first three to appear would be George “Chato” Vidales, Randall “Jo Jo” Rodriguez, and Gerardo “Criminal” Reyes. They were charged with the murder of sixteen-year-old Randy “Muppet” Morales, an Avenues

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member who was believed to be talking to investigators about Javier “Gangster” Marquez’s murder of two brothers, Herman and Sergio Sanchez. The Sanchez brothers were members of Highland Park, a gang that had resisted paying taxes to the Mexican Mafia. It was the contention of investigators that Marquez had taken it upon himself to punish this gang for resisting taxation. When Marquez learned that young Morales was snitching, he sent word from LA County Jail to have Morales killed. Reyes, Rodriguez, and Vidales were being charged with murder and a special circumstance of witness killing, which adds years to a sentence. Two years had passed from the time when Manzella filed his case to when LA had gone through its paroxysm of violence. Between 1997, when Bernard Parks became the police chief, and 2002, when his five year contract expired, arrests were at an all-time low, crime was rising, the LAPD was losing officers at an alarming rate while LA became the nation’s murder capital. Experienced cops were so few that cops with only a few years on the job were appointed as training officers, riding with officers fresh out of the Academy. One veteran said it was the “nearly sightless leading the blind.” Some officers were so disgusted with Parks that they formally requested that were they killed in the line of duty, Parks was not to attend the funeral. Low morale was bad enough. What was really sinking Parks in the eyes of the City Council and the Mayor were the dismal statistics. Parks wanted a second five-year contract and he openly lobbied for it. Mayor James Hahn, who would ultimately make the decision on who would fill the slot, was barely on speaking terms with the Chief. With Parks’s future in doubt, Nate Holden began a two-pronged public and private lobbying effort. Holden blamed the paucity of Police Academy recruits not on low morale but on a thriving economy that was funneling qualified candidates into the private sector. Close observers, including the city fathers, knew there was no lack of recruits for the LA Sheriff’s Academy or for any of the other police departments in the LA area. During that time period, Santa Monica PD had 260 applications for twelve openings in the department. If that same ratio of applicants was applied to the LAPD’s 1,000 openings, the number of candidates would run into the tens of thousands.

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When Holden tried to minimize the appalling crime statistics, he absurdly blamed senior LAPD commanders for cooking the crime numbers, inflating them in order to make Parks look bad in the eyes of the city. When no one bought that one, he blamed the rise in crime to a terrible economy and a lack of jobs. So in Holden’s view of the situation, this mysterious economy was simultaneously good and bad. When Parks’s contract was not renewed and LAPD commander Martin Pomeroy was put in charge while LA searched for a new chief, Holden publicly suggested that Parks sue the city. When Parks wisely declined, Holden said he’d “get even” with Hahn for this betrayal. The timing, however, was perfect. Due to term limits, Holden could no longer run for City Council. He prevailed on Parks to run for the vacancy and Parks was elected to Holden’s City Council district. The stage was set for a little payback. The spike in homicides couldn’t be blamed on Parks or on any single law enforcement official. Other cities in California and the Southwest were seeing the same phenomenon. While a lot of the crime was homegrown, there isn’t much doubt that the rise in all types of crime from burglaries to murders was the direct consequence of massive illegal immigration. A quarter of the inmates in the California prison system are illegal immigrants. In the LA County Jail, that number is nearly forty percent. Gerardo “Criminal” Reyes was in fact on his way to being deported when Manzella filed his murder charge against him. While legitimate blame could be directed at Parks for the morale problem, the dismantling of the SLOs and abolishing the extremely effective South Bureau Homicide Unit, the half-million plus illegal immigrants coming across the border every year was a significant factor in the rising crime rate. The tragic truth is that these new arrivals aren’t just perpetrators. They also form a very large pool of the easily victimized.

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C H A P TE R E I G H T

PA P E RWO R K

R

andy “Muppet” Morales was sixteen years old when he

was killed in the 5200 block of Remstoy Drive in El Sereno. This is a neighborhood that adjoins territory claimed by Avenues and is home to the El Sereno gang, rivals to Avenues. The location of the murder was chosen by his killers to lead the police in the wrong direction, believing he’d been killed by the El Serenos. 109

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Morales didn’t fit the profile of the usual street gangster. Although he was raised in the Highland Park area, he came from what is usually considered a middle class family. His father Atanacio had, until a severe car accident, held a stable, well-paying job with the city of Glendale as a physical plant engineer in city-owned buildings. Atanacio sent all his children— Randy, his oldest son Anthony, and Randy’s younger sister Stephanie—to Sacred Heart Catholic School where they achieved respectable grades and weren’t thought of as troublemakers. The problem of living in gang-infested Highland Park was addressed when Atanacio moved the family to the somewhat more upscale community of Tujunga, at the north end of the San Fernando Valley. Parts of Tujunga are considered horse country where the zoning allows spacious lots with plenty of room for livestock. The Morales family bought a large house with a pool and lived in a typically suburban style. Randy’s mother Maria, a strikingly handsome woman, stopped worrying about the two male children when they moved to Tujunga. Highland Park was far away and she hoped that the influence, if any, would wear off. Soon after moving to Tujunga, Atanacio and Maria divorced. She was his third wife and the kids divided their time between Las Vegas, where Maria moved after the breakup, and Tujunga. The kids were miserable with the arrangement. According to Atanacio, things started going downhill for Randy after the divorce. Without his father’s knowledge, or permission, Randy would take the bus from Tujunga to Highland Park to hang out with his homies. No one knows for sure when Randy Morales was officially jumped into Avenues but he started putting in work for them on a regular basis. He had a lively personality, was a little smarter and better educated than the run-of-the-mill gangsters in his age group, and, thanks to his good looks, he had a lot of female admirers. He got a reputation as a “pretty boy,” a street term for somebody who females liked to hang with. He liked to party and there was no shortage of people willing to sell him dope or share drugs. Although Randy Morales’s criminal career was short-lived, he apparently packed in a lot in the time he spent on the streets. He got friendly with

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Richie “Lil Pee Wee” Aguirre because they were roughly the same age. Randy and Lil Pee Wee had a few things in common. Both had older brothers they admired and both older brothers were Avenues gangsters. Lil Pee Wee’s older brother Alex had something over Randy’s older brother in that he was already a member of the Eme and threw a lot of weight around Avenues. Randy’s older brother wasn’t quite in that league. Randy Morales started selling dope for Lil Richie, dope that came from Alex or his connections. Through the Avenues network, Randy also came to know Javier “Gangster” Marquez. Marquez lived on and ruled Drew Street, the open-air drug market that accounted for a sizable chunk of the tax money filtered up to Alex Aguirre. Drew Street was a money-maker. Any time of the day or night, a customer could roll down Drew in a car and buy just about any illegal substance. Slinging dope for the Aguirres put the kind of money in Randy’s pockets that most fourteen-year-olds would find astonishing. It was common for Randy to take his sister Stephanie and her friends to the movies and out to eat on his dime. He also took her on shopping sprees to buy CDs, clothes, and electronics. Stephanie worshipped Randy. On July 25, 1995, Randy “Muppet” Morales fired a bullet that killed one of his friends. During that day, Randy, Angel “Trippy” Gonzales, Jimmy Cirron, and a fourth unidentified Avenues Associate were driving around Highland Park in a borrowed Cadillac. None of them had a driver’s license, but they had guns and they were on patrol keeping the neighborhood free of enemies. This is pure gang-banging, which has nothing to do with regulating the drug business or putting in work for the Mexican Mafia. Gang-banging is what you do to establish your street cred, create a reputation, and show your homies how much “heart” you have for your neighborhood. In gang parlance, “neighborhood” is interchangeable with “gang.” Gangsters don’t see themselves as belonging to a gang: They belong to or “claim” a neighborhood. Somewhere in the area of North Figueroa, the carload of young Avenues gangsters rolled up on an equal number of Highland Park gang members. The Highland Park gang’s tag is HLP. As a show of dominance, Avenues gang-

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sters often cross out HLP and replace it with “Helpless” and then add AVES. The code on the street is that encounters with rivals call for an affirmation of your own neighborhood and disrespect for rivals. When the two rival groups met, the usual unpleasantries were exchanged and the Highland Park gangsters opened fire on the Cadillac. By this time in his career in Avenues, Randy almost always carried a gun. He armed himself and pulled back the slide on his .380 automatic to chamber a round in the barrel. Out of a combination of inexperience and the adrenaline rush of being fired on, Randy pulled the trigger prematurely and sent a round through the back of the front seat where Angel “Trippy” Gonzales sat. Angel slumped forward, began to bleed, and stopped breathing within a few minutes. The driver rushed to the first hospital he could think of, in nearby Glendale. The plan was to dump Trippy at the door of the ER and take off. Again, due to inexperience, the plan fell apart at the hospital. They dumped Trippy off but then decided to park the car at the far end of the lot and throw Randy’s gun in the bushes. Then they hung around to see if they could get someone into the hospital to check on Trippy’s condition. A security guard at the hospital observed the entire episode and called Glendale PD. When the officers arrived, Randy, Cirron, and the other Avenues member were still in the lot. The Glendale cops observed the blood in the car, spotted a bullet hole in the seat and found Randy’s gun in the bushes. They took Randy into custody on suspicion of murder and began their investigation. The ballistics on the gun recovered from the bushes matched the bullet recovered from Angel “Trippy” Gonzales. The facts were presented to a DA, who declined to file charges against Randy Morales. The reasoning was that the carload of Avenues had been in reasonable fear of their lives when Randy accidentally discharged the gun. This is not an unusual set of events. There have been numerous incidents in the past when gang members return fire on rivals who shot first and end up killing one or more of the aggressors. In the eyes of the law, the group receiving fire are the victims and when they shoot back are doing so in defense of their lives. This is seen as a justifiable shooting; even if the “victims” are carrying guns illegally, charges are never filed.

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Randy may have dodged a serious charge, but he was in some trouble with Avenues. Northeast gang cops heard a number of conflicting stories. There was probably some truth to all of them. One was that some of Trippy’s friends wanted to “check” Randy, meaning to give him a severe beating and then throw him out of the neighborhood. Another was that more established gangsters realized it was an honest mistake made by an inexperienced soldier in the heat of battle. It was part of the cost of standing up for your neighborhood. In that world, when you go out on patrol, anything can happen and Trippy knew or should have known the consequences of urban warfare. It could just as easily have been Randy in the front seat of the car and Trippy slamming a round into his spine. These older guys were willing to grant Randy a pass. The final word on Randy’s fate, however, was Lil Pee Wee Aguirre’s. Randy was his friend and protégé, and Pee Wee had enough backing from his brother that any decision he made would be upheld by Alex. Gang cops heard that Lil Pee Wee had forgiven Randy for the accidental killing but that Randy would have to work off the offense as atonement. The punishment was that Randy was required to sell dope for Lil Pee Wee—but for free. This may or may not have been true. It was just as likely, as some gang cops speculated, that Randy working for free was the cover story for public consumption. It may have been just as true that Pee Wee felt no animosity at all for Randy and let him continue working under the usual arrangement, giving Randy a slice of the profits. Whatever the truth, Randy did continue hanging with Avenues and was never shunned or disrespected. On August 5, 1995, just a handful of days after Randy Morales killed Trippy, Javier Marquez rolled up on the Sanchez brothers and, according to police, shot and killed both of them. They were riding in a car with their girlfriends and the two women later stated that, in a final act of chivalry, the two brothers threw themselves on the them when the bullets started flying. Neither of the women was hit. Almost immediately after Trippy’s shooting and the murder of the Sanchez brothers, Randy was arrested for possession of cocaine with intent to

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sell and sentenced to Los Padrinos, a juvenile court and detention facility in Downey, California. To some law enforcement officers, Randy seemed relieved to be in custody. He hadn’t become hardened and apparently cooperated with the staff and was as well liked as any offender could be under those circumstances. On August 21, 1995, a month after accidentally shooting Trippy and sixteen days after the murder of the Sanchez brothers, Randy Morales was interviewed at the Los Padrinos juvenile facility by Detective Michael Camacho, a homicide investigator from Northeast. For reasons known only to him, Randy started unburdening himself about his life, Avenues, and things he’d done or heard about. Randy told Camacho that Javy Marquez had told him that he, Marquez, had shot five Highland Park gangsters who’d refused to pay street taxes and that he would kill more of them. According to Randy’s statement to the detective, Marquez had never actually told Randy that he had killed the Sanchez brothers. All he’d said was five HP guys. There was really nothing to connect Marquez directly to the Sanchez murders. Nevertheless, Randy’s statement became part of what investigators call the chrono (for “chronological”) record, a key part of every investigation. It documents the time and date of events in an investigation, including statements made to officers and regardless of whether they’re true, false, direct knowledge, or rumor. Randy’s statement about Marquez’s involvement in the murder of unnamed Highland Park tax resisters was included in the Sanchez brothers’ murder book. On August 25, 1995, five days after Randy’s interview with the detective at Los Padrinos, Javy Marquez was served a search warrant and arrested for possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. On February 26, 1996, seven months after his arrest, Marquez was charged with the murder of the Sanchez brothers. The Sanchez murder book was photocopied and provided to Marquez’s attorney as stipulated by the laws of discovery. Every document connected to a case must be turned over to the defense and failure to do so can result in a mistrial or a case thrown out of court.

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As a matter of course, the names of informants are usually redacted in the discovery documents given to the defense. This is done to protect a witness from intimidation or retribution prior to giving testimony in court. Once the case lands in court, the identity of the witness becomes public information and witnesses are usually relocated. If the witnesses are in custody, they’re placed in Protective Custody in either the County Jail or the prison system. LAPD detective Gil Garcia, who was handling the Sanchez case, went through the murder book and blacked out the names of witnesses. He got most of them. He failed to notice one mention of Randy “Muppet” Morales. Tony Manzella’s contention when he filed his case was that some time after February 26, 1996, Javy Marquez became aware that Randy Morales had snitched. In the world of the Eme and street gangs, official documents containing the names of snitches (known officially by law enforcement as Confidential Informants, or CIs) are called “paperwork.” The reliance on paperwork by the Eme and street gangsters is a necessary corrective to one gangster trying to get rid of a rival over a personal beef by accusing him of snitching. Like the DA and the legal system, gangsters demand proof of snitching. They learned that lesson the hard way. There was a time when only the word of a respected gangster or Eme member was sufficient to seal someone’s fate. Although killings over personal beefs still happen—as Chuco revealed to Valdemar and the Task Force when he was arrested in his house in Rosemead—by and large it’s paperwork that provides criminals with irrefutable proof that somebody is dirty and needs to be silenced. In this first trial, Manzella’s task was to prove that Marquez was given the paperwork on Randy Morales and that he ordered Randy “Jo Jo” Rodriguez, George “Chato” Vidales, and Gerardo “Criminal” Reyes to kill Morales to keep him from testifying about the murder of the Sanchez brothers. Manzella’s case would be built almost entirely on circumstantial evidence and most of that was based on the word of two confidential informants, Jimmy Maxson and Gerry Ramirez—two dropouts who, for two very different reasons, decided to turn on their former associates.

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The difficulty with using CIs is that they’re often just as dirty as the people they’re informing on. For a prosecutor, it’s impossible to make informants look like repentant sinners or people suddenly struck by a pang of civic-mindedness. Most often, the only reason they’re informing is to work off a case against themselves or to keep themselves from being killed by the Eme over an infraction or, in the case of Ramirez, outright theft of drug proceeds. What developed would be illustrative of both the dangers and benefits of using CIs. It’s an indisputable fact that most gang homicides would never be successfully prosecuted without the help of informants. Gang murders are nothing like domestic homicides, insurance killings, or big, splashy celebrity murders. In most gang cases, there’s very little in the way of forensic evidence. There’s almost never any DNA. Also, the connection between victim and suspect can be almost nonexistent. It’s impossible to prove motive, although motive doesn’t need to be proven, because the motive could be nothing more than the suspect receiving a phone call from prison: “Send Sleepy to Fresno” or “that thing over on Fig, get it handled.” The order could be contained on a greenlight list that law enforcement never sees and never will see. In recent years, there’s also been the rise of what the media has called the “CSI effect.” Thanks to the popularity of shows like “Crime Scene Investigation” and the countless murder mystery films in which forensics becomes the prime plot mover, juries have come to expect the same level of forensic presentation in court that they see onscreen. It almost never happens. More often than not, juries are underwhelmed by the nature and quality of the evidence. In Manzella’s upcoming trials, there would be almost no direct evidence. All he had was the testimony of other criminals. In the past, Manzella would not have been as worried about having little in the way of forensic evidence. An appeal to reason used to do the trick. But modern jury panels don’t only want to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt. They also want to be amazed and entertained. When they do witness the reality of a trial, the slow, grinding nature of the justice sys-

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tem, and the banality of the minutiae discussed, some jury members are literally put to sleep. Tony Manzella knew that one of his obligations to the case was to keep the jury interested and, most of all, wide awake.

“Muppet had to go.”



— Javy Marquez

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C H A P TE R N I NE

A

lmost a year before Manzella began his prosecution

of Randy Morales’s killers, Mayor James Hahn reached across the continent and recruited William Bratton to be the new police chief. True to his word, Nate Holden would get even with Hahn for not giving Bernard Parks another term as police chief. Mayor Hahn, whose father Kenneth had established enduring loyalties in LA’s black community in his forty years as an LA County Supervisor, could no longer rely on the black vote that his name had always ensured. Holden and other black politicos threw their support behind Antonio Villaraigosa as the next mayor, hoping to hitch their wagon to a Latino candidate. The demographic 119

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writing was on the wall. Latinos will most probably come to dominate virtually every elected office in the city, the county and eventually the state. With seventy percent of the students in the LA Unified School District carrying Hispanic surnames, Los Angeles blacks see a bleak future for political power. Bratton had worked what was called the miracle of New York City. As the top cop in New York, he’d instituted the famous “broken windows” concept of policing, whereby minor offenses are vigorously prosecuted. He had the NYPD pay close attention to the petty theft, minor assaults, and low-level drug dealing. The reasoning was that career criminals don’t only commit big crimes. They engage in low-level criminal activity as well, so when you prosecute them and take them off the streets, the crimes they would have committed don’t happen. It seemed to work. New York City experienced an impressive drop in crime. Of course, Bratton had 36,000 cops under his command, a workforce that made his vision easier to accomplish. When he was sworn in on October 27, 2002, Bratton’s first order of business was to acknowledge that Los Angeles was woefully short on police manpower, with roughly 9,000 sworn officers covering a huge megalopolis. He felt that LA needed at least 15,000 sworn officers. The idea of practically doubling the force was wildly optimistic. It will probably never happen in this lifetime. There is no political will in Los Angeles to provide the required uniformed force or the support resources. In one of his first public announcements, Bratton stated that his first priority was to target streets gangs. He knew that more than half of LA County’s 1,000-odd annual murders are directly related to gang activity. He made an analogy to the one form of organized crime he was familiar with, the Cosa Nostra, and stated that in its entire history, the Italian Mafia never put six hundred victims a year in graves. The reaction from the media to the straight-talking Bostonian surprised no one. In editorials and even in straight reportage, he was derisively called William “War on Gangs” Bratton. On one public occasion, someone from

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the audience yelled at him to “control your cops.” He fired back: “Control your children.” To the media, that was enough to brand Bratton as another Daryl Gates, a swaggering militarist who wanted to crack heads and put the fear of the badge back into the hearts and minds of innocent victims of police abuse. Before the ink was dry on his contract, Bratton received no end of advice on how to be the top cop. Father Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit gang-intervention activist in East Los Angeles wrote an op-ed in the LA Times on December 15, 2002. It was addressed directly at the new chief and its point was to set Bratton straight on some of the “myths” that Boyle suspected Bratton of operating under. Boyle made several points. One is that even though there were 100,000 gang-bangers on the street, there were only 300 homicides a year [in LAPD jurisdiction] attributed to gang violence. To Boyle, this was an indication that only a small fraction of the gang population was actually willing to pull a trigger. Boyle stated, “If police can understand that their job is to isolate those gang members who ‘bang’ [commit violence], they’ll find themselves not as outnumbered as they think.” As Tony Manzella’s case was to prove, and as the thousands of cases before that had already proven, gang-related homicides do not exist in a vacuum. While only one or two people in a particular clique might pull a trigger, there are a lot more members who aid and abet the murderers. The shooters don’t work alone. They do it for the gang; they do it to boost their status in the gang; they do it to boost their income from illegal gang activity, and they need the gang to accomplish the murders. Boyle’s second “myth” is that of the multi-generational gangster, the young gangster with father, grandfather, brothers, and uncles in the same gang. He claimed that “the rarest find is this multigenerational gang member. Failing to understand this deprives police of some of their best allies: parents of gang members.” There’s encyclopedic evidence to the contrary. More often than not, parents know exactly what their kids are up to. The sad truth is that they’re either powerless to stop them, unwilling to stop them,

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or in some cases encouraging them. Some of these families pass on the legacy of gang membership and related criminal activity as if it were the family business. As this Avenues case and many others show, gang membership isn’t a secret to families, friends, and relatives. In addition, families like the Aguirres, the Grajedas, and others are almost completely saturated in the gang culture. Some families have as many members in prison as they have on the street. And rather than feeling shame, some of these families take a perverse pride in having relatives locked up for decades or for life. Families that are “deep” in the Eme or in a street gang have status in the barrios. There’s an interesting flip-side to that dynamic that Boyle fails to mention. That’s the family that produces one child who becomes a lawyer, another who becomes a police officer, and another who becomes a hard core gang member. There’s a limit to what society or a family can do to divert a young man intent on a life of gang-banging and violence. A family that can produce two honest citizens and a criminal throws a serious wrench into sociological theories about poverty and disenfranchisement. Further in the op-ed, Boyle has a dramatic lapse in memory. He claims that prosecuting street gangs as organized crime under RICO statutes is pointless because street gangs are “disorganized crime.” He clearly forgot that in 1995, 1997, and 1999 the Federal government successfully prosecuted and convicted close to 100 Mexican Mafia members and Associates, all of whom started their criminal careers as pee wee gang members like Randy Morales. The Eme/street gang enterprise may not be as well organized as La Cosa Nostra, but it doesn’t mean it’s thoroughly disorganized. Importing and distributing drugs, collecting the proceeds, keeping out competitors, taxing the dealers and funneling the money into the prisons requires at least a functional level of organization, even if it isn’t on a par with General Dynamics or even the local Rotarians. To deny a functioning organization is to deny reality. Boyle also mentions the recent parolees who hit the streets as “spoons,” his term, and stir things up. Boyle is being less that completely forthright about this. He knows as well as any cop or little homie in East LA that these

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“spoons” are referred to on the street as shotcallers. These are the Eme Associates who come out of prison with specific orders to get business done, punish resister gangs, and keep the tax money flowing up. For reasons that only Boyle can answer, he never mentions and has never mentioned the existence of the Mexican Mafia and the influence it exerts on the streets. Boyle goes even further and dismisses outright the influence of prison gangs like the Mexican Mafia. Boyle states that “of the gang-related homicides this year, I’d wager none was orchestrated from behind prison walls.” He elaborated on that by stating, “To insist that gang members are puppets manipulated on the streets by prisoners behind the walls is to not acknowledge the intrinsically haphazard nature of gang violence and the utter despair it reflects.” Anyone with even cursory knowledge of gangs and the Eme’s relationship to street crime would take that bet and offer huge odds. The facts bear out the truth. Street gangsters very often are puppets of the big homies locked up in prison. The proof is overwhelming and plays itself out on an almost daily basis in almost every neighborhood in Southern California. Jail and prison officials confiscate dozens of greenlight lists with the names of gangs and individuals targeted for what the Eme calls “hard candy,” a euphemism for assassination. They also intercept thousands of phone calls in which orders to assault and kill are issued to third and fourth parties. Some of the conversations are specific enough for law enforcement to contact the intended victim and prevent a murder. Most aren’t. They’re relayed in cryptic or coded language that stumps even veteran cops. In September of 2006, Ruben “Nite Owl” Castro, an Eme member convicted in one of the three Los Angeles RICO cases, was indicted again for running the 18th Street gang’s drug business from his cell in Florence Federal Penitentiary, one of the Supermax Federal prisons. The fact that Castro and others can successfully run a huge drug operation from a prison in Colorado indicates that there must be some organization on the street. The foot soldiers in that organization are the gang members that Boyle refers to as “haphazard.” Father Greg Boyle is not an ignorant man. He knows the nature of the

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cancer that’s consuming East Los Angeles. Unfortunately, his feigned ignorance of the facts of life on the streets is not unique and ultimately destroys some of the very people that look to him to help solve the problem. Two of Boyle’s workers, both ex-gangsters, were killed some time after that op-ed was published. One of them was shot while painting over gang graffiti on Breed Street, close to Boyle’s headquarters. Another was shot in his vehicle while on the way to Boyle’s office. After those incidents, Boyle terminated the painting over of gang graffiti, a showcase program that had been featured many times in the local media. The killings underscored certain facts of life that Boyle refuses to acknowledge. While Boyle isn’t in any way responsible for those two deaths, homeboys that turn their backs on the gang or refuse orders from the big homies—the men who Boyle doesn’t believe have any influence—know better than he does that retribution is almost inevitable. They probably did the right thing by trying to go straight. But they were tragically mistaken if they thought their association with Boyle’s ministry would keep them from harm. In the upper echelons of the gang world, the element that meshes with Eme business, there’s no religious sanctuary, statute of limitations, or forgiveness. When a Los Angeles gang researcher wrote a rebuttal to Boyle’s piece, the Times declined to run it. The rebuttal even referred to several murders committed that year that had been proven in court to be prison-directed hits. When the researcher contacted a Times editor after the op-ed was refused, the editor candidly admitted that it looked like he’d “hit the nail on the head.” When asked if that wasn’t reason enough to run it, the editor said, “He’s Father Boyle. Who are you?” Part of reason the public is misinformed about the true nature and cause of gang violence is the gatekeeping function the media has assumed for itself. No matter how reasoned the argument or how well supported by facts, dissenting voices are stifled. The media is wedded to an ancient paradigm that no longer applies to the realities on the streets in America in the twenty-first century. Father Boyle and a handful of other gang activists have carte blanche to write whatever they like in the editorial pages. They’re also

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the “go to” people whenever a reporter needs an expert opinion on a rash of shootings or some particularly awful gang crime. Theirs are the only opinions that seem to matter and facts provided by dissenters are kept out of the exchange of ideas. Of all the sociological tracts written about the gang culture in Los Angeles, none have ever mentioned the Mexican Mafia as an influence. In Joan Moore’s book Going Down to the Barrio, one of the gangs she explores and analyzes is White Fence, one of those multigenerational gangs that was founded in the 1940s. In that book she cites the “controlling agents” of the gang as being the families of the gangsters, the neighborhood, the police, and the gang intervention activists. White Fence is notorious for its history of violence and for having a number of members inducted into the Eme over the years. When Moore was asked why she didn’t mention the Eme as an agent of control she stated that “they [her interview subjects] only spoke of the Mexican Mafia in hushed tones. They didn’t want to talk about it.” When asked if she probed further as to why they didn’t want to talk about it, she said no. One has to wonder about the value of that kind of research. If none of your interview subjects wants to broach a particular topic, isn’t it incumbent on you as a researcher to find out why? Apparently not. All the conclusions Moore makes in her book are based on the omission of this singularly relevant subject. It’s like building a house and leaving off the roof. The same could be said about similar sociological studies on the subject of Hispanic street gangs. These researchers rely on self-reporting. They dig no deeper than what the interview subject is willing to reveal. One can understand why a subject wouldn’t want to talk to a stranger about big homies, greenlight lists, taxation, and shotcallers. They’re putting their lives on the line just mentioning any of it. Other university-funded researchers like Moore will inevitably write studies about this subject. But the fact is inescapable that anything written on the subject of Hispanic street gangs after 1977 that doesn’t include the Mexican Mafia as a central causal component is absolutely worthless. The Eme, whether as an antagonist or ally, cannot be excluded from the discussion.

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In his op-ed, Father Boyle was, intentionally or not, trying to disabuse Chief Bratton of the notion that what he’d be facing in his next five years was related to major organized crime capable of the sort of violence that La Cosa Nostra had never wrought. In the early months of 2003, William Bratton was invited to take part in a discussion at the First AME Church. The other panelist was the Reverend Cecil Murray, pastor of First AME, and the moderator was Warren Olney, a radio broadcaster who airs a daily news show on KCRW, the NPR affiliate in Los Angeles. After a congenial and frank exchange between Murray, Bratton, and Olney, the floor was open to questions from the audience. If it wasn’t already clear to Bratton before the Q&A, it became abundantly clear afterward that the perception among the audience members of crime and the role of policing was as divorced from reality as one could get and still live on the same planet. The sort of questions and accusations leveled at Bratton were obtuse and irrelevant. One lady who said she was single-handedly raising four grandchildren wanted to know from Bratton why there weren’t more free clinics in the neighborhood. He very politely explained to her that the LAPD doesn’t have any influence on the creation of free clinics. A visibly angry man wanted to know why every time he turns around, there’s a cop car on his street or cruising the neighborhood. He characterized the presence of the police as intimidation and an occupying army. This got a round of applause from the audience. On the same theme, another woman wanted to know why the cops were always arresting the gangsters on her street. She suggested that instead of arresting them, the police should “take them under their wing” and put them on a correct course in life. As respectfully as possible, Bratton explained to the woman that it’s not the department’s job to raise other people’s children. Rearing, educating, and instilling moral values in children are the jobs of parents, not the cop in the patrol car. There were loud hisses from the audience. A little later, someone else wanted to know why there were never any cops around. For the first time that evening, Bratton looked

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genuinely frustrated. Minutes earlier he was being asked why there were so many cops around. During the course of the evening, there was that old, obligatory canard that the CIA was flooding the streets with crack cocaine, something else that got a loud round of applause. And so it went for the balance of the session. It was clear that the entire half-hour exchange between Murray, Bratton, and Olney about staffing levels, gangs, drug use, and monitoring of police misconduct was thoroughly lost on the audience. No one was listening. They were all just waiting for the chance to get at the chief. This confrontational attitude towards law enforcement and suspicion of judicial institutions inevitably finds its way into the jury pool. Some of the criticism and suspicion is deserved. Most of it isn’t. Since the Rodney King incident, the O.J. Simpson trial, and the Rampart scandal, some DAs, especially those working out of the Compton courthouse, were finding even slam dunk cases going bad for them. The political and social climate is such that juries selected from the local population were reluctant to convict. Luckless DAs were coming to the realization that their juries perceived the accused as victims of oppression, sloppy police work, false informants, or, worst yet, elaborate conspiracies. The public’s poor grasp of the issues, its all-too-eager willingness to believe that every cop on the stand should be viewed with the same suspicion as the accused, was a phenomenon Tony Manzella had to deal with when the time came in early September 2003 to pick the jury for the Vidales, Reyes, and Rodriguez trial. When justice is dispensed, it’s dispensed by individuals who may have hidden agendas. The jury selection process is imperfect. Neither the prosecution nor the defense know what they’re really going to get until the verdict is reached. Until then, it’s always a roll of the dice. Like Joan Moore’s interview subjects, the jury system depends on self-reporting. Jury panelists are asked to fill out questionnaires, which are then read by all the parties involved. There’s no way to determine if someone is lying. A clever person can easily determine what sort of answer the parties are looking for. That cuts both ways. Someone who doesn’t want to serve can easily get himself dismissed by feigning intolerance, bias, or plain stu-

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pidity. Someone who does want to serve to ensure a verdict goes a certain way can just as easily depict himself in the questionnaire as fair and openminded, willing to listen to the evidence and to adhere to the jury instructions. The process lives and dies entirely by the good will and honesty of the people who respond to the jury summons. It’s far from ideal, but when the alternatives are considered, the process of adversarial attorneys, an impartial judge, and a hopefully impartial jury remains the fairest system in the world. By September 16, Manzella’s jury was in place. There were eleven women and one male in the jury box. Six of the women were black; the rest were Latinas. Tony wasn’t entirely pleased with the final selection, but he had run out of peremptory challenges. At 11:18 on the morning of the 16th, all parties were present and almost seven years after Muppet’s murder, the accused shooters were finally facing justice. For the first time since their arrest, Vidales, Reyes, and Rodriguez appeared in court in street clothes rather than bright orange or blue jail jumpsuits. In order not to prejudice the jury, the defendants are allowed to have their lawyers or families bring them civilian clothes. George Vidales was wearing Dockers, a beige button-down shirt, and a matching tan V-neck sweater. Randall Rodriguez also wore Dockers with an olive button-down shirt to complement the dark green pants. Reyes was in dark pleated pants with an off-white shirt and a dark blue sweater. Except for some of their visible tattoos, they could have been mistaken for executive trainees. Each defendant was represented by a court-appointed lawyer. Vidales’s attorney was Michael White, an energetic man of medium stature whose curly hair was going gray. Rodriguez was represented by Michael Shannon, taller than White, slim, and with a constant look of dubiety on his face. Reyes was defended by Chris Chaney, the tallest of the three and the tallest man in the room next to Detective James King. With a reserved, slow-paced demeanor, preppie haircut, and trim beard, the forty-something Chaney looked professorial. Chaney doled out well-chosen, perfectly formed sentences with a mandarin delivery. Out of a probable combination of the grav-

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ity of the charges and serious work ahead of them, none of the defense attorneys betrayed the slightest sense of humor, at least not in the presence of the jury. Manzella was cast as the perfect foil to the defense attorneys. In front of and out of the presence of the jury, he maintained the easy affability and constant half-smile of a game show host: Alex Trebek’s authority tempered by Dennis Miller’s irreverent wit, and all of it underscored by Joe Friday’s reserved but direct moral outrage. In his opening argument, Manzella outlined the history of the case against the defendants. He began with the murder of the Sanchez brothers and how Javy Marquez was implicated as the shooter. He then outlined the interview that Detective Michael Camacho conducted with Randy Morales at the Los Padrinos Center, in which Morales revealed Marquez’s admission that Marquez had killed five Highland Park gangsters and that he was going to kill more. Manzella then said he would show that Morales’s name had not been entirely removed from the Sanchez murder book and that a copy of that book had been provided to Marquez’s lawyer. As a result, Marquez became aware that Morales had snitched; he contacted Randall Rodriguez to organize Morales’s execution. For proof, Manzella would offer the testimony of two Avenues dropouts, Jimmy Maxson and Gerry Ramirez. The two had knowledge of the murder prior to the event and knew who’d pulled the trigger. This knowledge came from the shooters themselves; they talked about the Morales murder with Maxson and Ramirez before and after the fact. Ramirez would state that he was asked by Randall Rodriguez to kill Morales but refused. Maxson had information provided directly by Marquez in a phone call that Marquez placed to the house where Maxson was living. In that conversation, Marquez told Maxson that Muppet was “no good. Muppet had to go. Tell Richie [Aguirre] to let it go.” On the night of the murder, Debbie Ramos, a woman who lived on Remstoy Drive, observed the van carrying the shooters leave the scene at high speed immediately after she heard the shots that killed Morales. She iden-

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tified the van and observed “four shave-headed male Hispanic gangster types” in the van. Earlier in the evening, Maxson had also seen the van with Vidales, Reyes, and Morales in it. The van belonged to Diana Demetrio, Reyes’s girlfriend at the time. Vidales had a conversation with Maxson in which Vidales told Maxson they were going to “check” Muppet because he was rat. Maxson told Vidales not to kill Muppet because Muppet was a close friend of Richie Aguirre and Richie would be mad. In his brief opening statement, Michael White said simply that his client, George Vidales, could not have been one of the “shave-headed” Hispanics that Debbie Ramos had seen in the speeding van. As proof, White said Vidales was arrested in the Imperial Valley for public intoxication two weeks after the Morales murder. Vidales’s booking photo taken at his arrest showed enough hair that it could not have grown back from a shaved head in two weeks. Therefore he could not have been in the van. Mike Shannon’s opening statement was also brief and to the point: Jimmy Maxson, one of the two informants, does not implicate his client, Randall Rodriguez, in any way. The only person to implicate Rodriguez is Gerry “Trooper” Ramirez, and Ramirez has plenty of reason to implicate Rodriguez. Ramirez wanted to settle an old score with Rodriguez and has told three different versions of his story. Shannon asked, “Which version of his story is correct, if any of them?” Manzella’s first witness was Detective Mike Camacho. He testified that he had interviewed Randy Morales in custody. During that interview, Morales told Camacho that Marquez had confided to Morales that he (Marquez) had killed five Highland Park gangsters and he was ready to kill more. Camacho noted his interview with Morales as a Chrono entry and filed it in the murder book. A copy of the murder book was made and given to Marquez’s attorney when the charge of murdering the Sanchez brothers was filed. Camacho’s time on the stand was brief and the defense didn’t crossexamine. The next witness, Deputy DA Larry Droeger, did the actual filing of the Sanchez murder case against Marquez. Droeger testified that he

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received the murder book from Camacho and that sometime during the proceedings leading up to the trial, the murder book was redacted, the process in which names of witnesses are blacked out. The process apparently wasn’t thorough enough and Randy Morales’s name was not blacked out in Camacho’s chrono entry. Under cross-examination by Mike Shannon, Droeger couldn’t remember each and every instance of Morales’s name appearing or whether or not it was blacked out. Under cross-examination by Shannon, Droeger admitted that he did not personally go through the murder book page by page to ensure that all the instances of Morales’s name were blacked out. Shannon then raised the doubt that there was no way that Droeger could be sure whether or not Morales’s name appeared. Droeger’s contention was that Morales’s name did appear in the defense attorney’s copy of the murder book because Droeger had had a conversation with Marquez’s defense attorney after Morales was killed; it was Droeger’s recollection that he and the defense attorney had a conversation about Morales’s murder. Interestingly, Marquez’s defense attorney in the Sanchez case could not be called as a witness because that would breach attorney/client privilege. Other than Marquez, his defense attorney was the only person who would be able to state definitively whether or not the copy of the book he received had Morales’s name in it. Tony Manzella’s next witness was Detective Bob Lopez, who at the time of the Morales murder was the Detective Gang Coordinator at Northeast. Lopez had spent most of his career since joining the LAPD in 1978 working gangs at Century Division and Southeast. He was a D3, a detective supervisor. He started in Northeast in 1994 and remained there until 2006. Lopez was meant to provide the jury with a quick immersion course on the subject of the Avenues gang. His job was to provide the context for the Morales homicide and give the jury a lesson on the structure, shotcallers, operations, and Mexican Mafia affiliations of the Avenues. Although Hispanic street gangs have operated in Los Angeles since almost the turn of the century, the average Angeleno knows practically noth-

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ing about the subject except for largely inaccurate fictional portrayals that appear on TV and in the movies and, if they’re readers, what is printed as gospel in the local papers. None of this information prepares them for the reality on the streets. Through Manzella’s direct examination, the jury learned that Avenues is a gang that traces its roots back forty years in the area of Highland Park. In 1995, there were 700 or so verified Avenues members. The verification process consists of a number of factors. One is self-admission. During street interviews, gang members will often admit to police that they’re members of a gang and which specific clique of that gang. They’ll also reveal their gang moniker and the monikers of other members, and sometimes discuss feuds with rival gangs. To the uninitiated, it seems like folly for a young gangster to reveal his membership to a cop. But the fact is, gang membership per se isn’t illegal. Also, a seasoned gang cop develops long-term relationships with the gangsters in his area. Part of developing that relationship is giving gangsters a break for small crimes like curfew violations, possession of small amounts of marijuana, or possession of liquor by a minor. Lopez stated that the Spanish term for a break is pairo, a favor. Gang cops establish an obligation by cutting some slack; the subject is expected to pay back the favor. The information gathered on the street is collected in what the LAPD calls I-Cards, short for Intelligence Cards. The gang officers create an I-Card for each gang member; it contains a photo, legal and street name, gang affiliation, list of gang associates, description of tattoos, and other information the officer feels is relevant. Eventually, the information on the I-Cards is entered into the statewide CALGANGS database. Any contact with law enforcement anywhere in the state is added to the CALGANGS database. The goal is to create a profile that may be helpful in solving cases. By law, the gang cards are deleted from the database if the individual has no contact with law enforcement for a period of three years. Manzella then led Lopez into the area that would connect the three defendants closely with Avenues business and policies. Lopez described several Avenues signifiers. These were logos or symbols that identified Avenues

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territory when they were painted on a wall—or Avenues members when they used as tattoos. The signifiers were the term AVENUES, AVES, the letter A, LA which stood for LOS AVENIDAS, or simply AVENIDAS. The general logo of the Avenues gang was the skeleton head wearing a fedora and a fur collar. Sometimes, the skull was marked with a bullet hole in the temple. Some cliques of the Avenues, like Avenues 43, would also add the numbers 4 and 3 into the eye sockets of the skull. Lopez stated that in some cases, the number and size of tattoos indicated an individual’s level of commitment to the gang. Manzella then introduced into evidence photos of the tattoos carried by Reyes, Rodriguez, and Vidales. Reyes had a large AVES tattoo applied to the back of his head, only visible if his hair was shaved or cut very short. Reyes also had LA tattooed on his temple. Vidales had AVENIDAS, LA, and the skull logo. Rodrigez had AVENIDAS and the skull logo. Manzella reached the centerpiece of Detective Lopez’s testimony when he asked what was the main business of the Avenues gang. Lopez stated that the main source of revenue was the sale of drugs and the taxation of drug dealers. The taxes, also called rent, were filtered up to members of the Mexican Mafia. Lopez further stated that there is a very close connection between Avenues and the Mexican Mafia due to the fact that a number of Avenues members have been inducted into the Eme. Lopez was shown an organization chart of Avenues and Eme members. At the top of the chart were the names of Alex “Pee Wee” Aguirre, Alfred “Tigger” Salinas, Big Rick “Psycho” Aguirre (Alex Aguirre’s cousin), and Albert “Boxer” Tolento. Lopez indicated that these were all Eme members validated by the California Department of Corrections and that they had come up through the ranks of Avenues. They now ran the gang and the drug traffic in Avenues territory for their benefit and the Mexican Mafia’s. Lopez further stated that he’d had personal contacts with almost all the people listed in the organization chart. At the end of the first day of testimony, the jury had received sufficient background in Avenues. The next day, the panel would get an edu-

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cation in the Mexican Mafia through the testimony of Richard Valdemar. By the time of this trial, Manzella and Valdemar had already established a good working relationship. Valdemar had been Tony’s Eme expert in the Grajeda and Luis Maciel cases. Valdemar’s qualifications weren’t limited to expertise in the Mexican Mafia. He was an excellent witness, articulate and succinct. He was also fearless. In the past, Manzella had had some trouble getting gang cops to come forward and testify. In preparing for this case, he’d contacted a Northeast gang detective to testify as an expert on Avenues. The detective refused because he’d grown up in the neighborhood and still had family living there. Most Americans associate the fear of reprisal for police testimony with Third World countries and corrupt governments. It’s sobering to realize that even in Los Angeles, such a threat can still make a cop think twice about doing his job. Valdemar, a Vietnam veteran, had been in close quarters combat. He fought in house to house clearing actions in 1968 during the Tet offensive and he lost count of the many times he was fired on. As an LA County Sheriff’s Deputy, he’d also been ambushed and had stared more than once down the muzzle of a gun. Retaliation from street gangsters or the Eme never entered his thoughts as an expert witness. After Tet, he could deal with anything. Under direct examination, Manzella established Rich Valdemar’s credentials. While Valdemar had always had a thorough grasp of the Eme, he became among the handful of law officers to actually observe the Eme in unguarded moments through the video and audio monitoring he conducted during his time with Jim Myers’s Los Angeles Metropolitan Task Force on Violent Crime. When Chuco Castro set up meetings in hotel rooms throughout Southern California to conduct Eme business, Valdemar and other Task Force members were in the next room monitoring the conversations by video and audio. Sitting on the other end of the wire while Eme members like Ruben “Nite Owl” Castro, Juan “China Boy” Arias, Daniel “Black Dan” Barela, David “Smilon” Gallardo, Jesse “Pelon” Moreno, Raymond “Huero Shy” Shryock, Alex “Pee Wee” Aguirre, Randy “Cowboy” Therrien, and others con-

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ducted business would have been enough to qualify anyone as an Eme expert. Those monitoring sessions were the capstone to Valdemar’s career as a close observer of the Eme. His knowledge was encyclopedic and his recall nearly total. Manzella got Valdemar to explain the validation and debriefing process to the jury. Valdemar explained that the only law enforcement entity that can validate an individual as a member of the Mexican Mafia is the California Department of Corrections (CDC), owing to the organization’s roots as a prison gang. The CDC has a thirteen-point process to evaluate whether an inmate is a member, beginning with self-admission and moving on to other criteria. Valdemar next explained the Debriefing process. As with Validation, Debriefing follows a rigorous protocol that can take months, a year, or longer. During Debriefing, an inmate, whether an Eme member or a lower-ranking criminal, has to confess every crime he ever committed. He has to declare all the people he was involved with, everything he knows about other crimes, and even rumors or stories he’s heard during his criminal career. All the information provided has to be corroborated by at least three different sources. Corroborating all that information naturally can take many months. Individuals who successfully debrief are generally called dropouts, although that’s not an official designation. The CDC has to be rigorous during the debriefing process because in the past, some individuals were directed by the Eme to debrief in order to get into Protective Custody in the prison system. Once there, they’ve been known to kill people who have already debriefed and turned against the Eme. The CDC has to make sure that anyone who debriefs is a genuine dropout and not a sleeper or a mole in the system. Those found to be lying during the Debriefing process are terminated from the program and sent out of Protective Custody. Valdemar explained that there is only one rank in the Mexican Mafia—a Carnal, or brother. When decisions are made, each man has a vote and no brother can give another brother an order. Everything is done by consensus, at least theoretically, and there is no boss of bosses or supreme leader.

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Close allies and trusted associates are called Camaradas. This would parallel the CDC’s classification of Associate. Supporters on the streets and in prisons, mostly local gang members, are variously called Surenos (Southerners), Southern Soldiers, Southsiders, or Soldados. Valdemar went on to explain Eme symbols, such as the number 13 and the letter M, and some of the Eme’s house rules: Carnales are expected to carry themselves like soldiers and never to back down from a challenge or ever refuse to help a Carnal or other Hispanic in a fight. A Carnal can never admit to membership in the Eme or even acknowledge its existence. A Carnal can never cooperate with law enforcement. Homosexual activity or child molestation is forbidden and anyone caught having sex with a man or a child is liable for immediate execution. The Eme comes first above God, family, and friends. Valdemar also explained the rule against “politicking” against another Eme brother, and that it’s because of this rule that the Carnales rely heavily on “paperwork,” proof of wrongdoing or cooperation with police. According to Valdemar, the injunction against politicking is the one most often broken. With this background established, Manzella asked Valdemar to look at the Morales “paperwork,” the chrono entry that indicated Muppet had talked to the cops about Javy Marquez’s admission to killing five Highland Park gangsters. Valdemar stated his belief that this qualified as paperwork. Valdemar also stated that Morales had broken the Eme rules by ratting out Marquez. At the time, there was some question as to whether Marquez was a full-blown Carnal or a high-ranking Associate being considered for induction. Manzella asked Valdemar if it was common for street gangs to kill their own members. Valdemar stated it was rare but that the Eme’s law overrides local gang policies. In the Eme, it’s called “cleaning up your books” or “cleaning up your own house.” Manzella then asked Valdemar what might happen if a gang refused to kill a snitch in their ranks. Valdemar said it would make the whole gang look bad in the eyes of the Eme and that sanctions might

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follow. Manzella then asked, “Can an entire gang get greenlighted?” Valdemar said yes. The set of conditions that Manzella hoped to make clear to the jury was that whether or not Morales was liked by Avenues, the entire gang could risk getting greenlighted if it didn’t clean up its own mess. Under cross-examination by Mike Shannon, Valdemar admitted that terms like Carnal and greenlight were not exclusive to the gang world. In Spanish, Carnal can also be used to describe a close friend. Shannon also touched on the subject of gang-on-gang rivalries that have nothing to do with the Mexican Mafia. Valdemar acknowledged that gangs do fight over issues that are not specifically Eme-related. Valdemar characterized this as gang-banging versus Eme business. Shannon inquired after the number of gang members in LA County. Valdemar stated that there were roughly 83,000 in the county and that there were twice as many Hispanic gangs as black gangs. Under cross-examination by Michael White, Valdemar was asked about Jimmy Maxson. White asked Valdemar if Maxson was facing life in prison after his indictment on Federal RICO charges. Valdemar wasn’t sure exactly how much time Maxson was facing. Under cross-examination by Chris Chaney, Valdemar admitted that he was not an expert on Avenues. Valdemar also acknowledged that gangs have many enemies and that Avenues has enemies such as the Highland Park gang. Valdemar also admitted that killing snitches is not unique to the Eme. Street gangs also kill snitches without orders from the Eme. And street gangsters are also often killed by other street gangsters. The defense was laying the groundwork for the possibility that Muppet Morales could have been killed for reasons other than snitching on Marquez and by individuals who were not Avenues gang members.

“I was going to get killed. Yeah, you could call that getting fired.” — Gerry “Trooper” Ramirez

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C H A P TE R TEN

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he second day of the trial brought out one of Tony Man-

zella’s two most important witnesses, Gerry “Trooper” Ramirez. At the time of his testimony, Ramirez was serving an eleven-year sentence for manslaughter at Mule Creek State Prison. It was a killing in which he was complicit but did not actually pull the trigger. Ramirez appeared in blue prison pants and a gray sweatshirt. His hair was cut short and there was a tattoo visible on the right side of his neck. Of medium height and slightly overweight, Ramirez swaggered into the courtroom accompanied by Detectives James King and John Berdin. 139

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Ramirez stated that he was born in 1978 and raised in Northeast. He was jumped into the Avenue 57 Chicos clique of the Avenues gang when he was twelve years old. The initiation consisted of a beating that lasted fifty-seven seconds and was administered by three or four older Avenues members. Ramirez explained that he was being given immunity in the Randy Morales homicide, but that he wasn’t being given immunity from perjury or any other crime or crimes that he had committed. Also, there would be no reduction of his present sentence in exchange for his testimony, but his mother and three children were to be relocated and he’d be relocated when he finishes his sentence. While working his way up in the Avenues, Ramirez came to know Jimmy Maxson, Randy “Jo Jo” Rodriguez, Alex Aguirre, Richie Aguirre, and the two other defendants in this case, Reyes and Vidales. By 1996, Ramirez had put in sufficient gang work to be considered a trusted ally. Ramirez claimed that he began collecting tax money for Randy Rodriguez. Rodriguez, in turn, was working for Alex Aguirre, who, according to Ramirez, was a Mexican Mafia member. Ramirez saw himself earning major stripes by working for a Carnal like Alex. According to Ramirez, he was given a list by Randy Rodriguez of people he had to collect from on a weekly basis. These people were local drug dealers, drug houses, body shops, used car dealerships, and barber shops. There were twenty-five to thirty names on the list and Rodriguez provided Ramirez with the amount of money each had to pay every week. Sometimes, when the dealers didn’t have their tax money ready, Ramirez would take other property from them like a car, guns, jewelry, or anything of value that could be turned into cash. Ramirez claimed that most of the time, there was no trouble collecting the money. The people he visited knew who he worked for and the consequences of not paying. The people Ramirez never had problems with were the Border Brothers (BBs). These are newly arrived Mexican nationals who deal drugs and are scattered all over Southern California. The BBs generally speaking don’t stake out entire neighborhoods for themselves. Instead they settle in established gang neighborhoods and, happy enough to be in the US, sell dope and obediently pay their taxes to the big homies.

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While the Border Brothers share a similar ethnic background with Hispanic street gangs, they’re often victimized by the more established gangsters who are born and raised in the US: second-, third-, and fourthgeneration Mexican-Americans. The US-born gangsters have a sense of superiority over the BBs because they speak English and can negotiate their way through society with greater ease. For their part, the BBs have excellent drug connections in Mexico and are often responsible for smuggling drugs across the border. As a result, the BBs and established street gangs have settled into a symbiotic working arrangement. Ramirez stated that the few who refused to pay were assaulted, robbed, and driven out of the neighborhood. In the company of other Avenues gang members, Ramirez would ambush them and take all their dope and property. He stated that he started working as a tax collector in 1996 and in the same year landed as a member in Jimmy “Drac” Maxson’s tax crew. The crew included Paul “Slowboy” MacDonald and a gangster named Whisper. It was a point of pride with Ramirez that he never had to kill a dealer. Because he was working for Alex Aguirre, the dealers paid up without resistance. The amount of money Ramirez claimed he handed over to Randy “Jo Jo” Rodriguez was roughly $4,000 per week. Ramirez kept $700 to $800 of that as his commission for collecting the tax. Ramirez stated that he didn’t know how the money got from Jo Jo to Alex Aguirre. Ramirez stated that in June 1996, he had a conversation with Jo Jo Rodriguez about Muppet Morales. Jo Jo told Ramirez that he’d had a phone call from Javy Marquez, who was in jail, that Marquez had paperwork on Morales, and that Morales had to go. Jo Jo Rodriguez asked Ramirez if he wanted to take care of Morales and earn himself some stripes. Ramirez wasn’t interested. He was happy collecting for Alex and didn’t want to disturb the flow of money up to the Alex and the Carnales. According to his testimony, tax collectors working for the Eme are supposed to stay away from low-level gang-banging because it attracts law enforcement attention. Ramirez was supposed to stay away from anything not specifically related to his job as a tax collector. In fact, Ramirez was even told to start dressing “casually” instead of as a gangster in order to keep a low profile. For a seventeen-yearold, Ramirez had worked his way into an enviable position.

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Immediately after their conversation about hitting Muppet Morales, Ramirez and Jo Jo Rodriguez drove to Drew Street, where the two met up with Gerardo “Criminal” Reyes. With Ramirez acting as a lookout, Reyes and Rodriguez had a conversation about hitting Muppet. Ramirez claims that he was close enough to the two men to hear them: Reyes was willing to take care of Muppet for Marquez, but he needed a driver. They asked Ramirez to drive; he declined. At that point, Ramirez claims that they called over George “Chato” Vidales. Vidales was told about Muppet and asked to help with the hit. Vidales at first refused, but, according to Ramirez, Rodriguez told Vidales, “You owe us one.” Vidales agreed to help kill Muppet. During a break in the court day, an oddly jovial mood came over the players. With the jury and Judge Fidler out, some of the court deputies exchanged pleasantries with the three defendants. Chaney gave his client, Gerardo Reyes, a neck rub. One of the deputies went to the court reporter’s bowl of hard candies, grabbed a handful, and passed it out to the defendants. He asked them how old they were. When Rodriguez told him that he was forty-three, Fidler’s secretary shook her head and said, “Old enough not to be doing what you’re doing.” Reyes and Vidales laughed and Rodriguez gave her a dismissive smile. With the judge and jury back in the room, Ramirez continued with his direct testimony. He stated that two or three days after the conversation about killing Muppet Morales, Ramirez met George Vidales on the street and Vidales told him that they had killed Muppet. Ramirez said that Vidales told him, “We took him (Muppet) to El Seputo (a derisive term for El Sereno, a rival gang). We took him to take a piss and Muppet was shot.” Manzella then directed the examination to the area the defense would hit the hardest. Toward the end of 1997, Ramirez had a falling out with Rodriguez and other Eme-affiliated members of Avenues. During a barbecue in Aroyo Seco Park, a hangout for Avenues members, two men tried to kill Ramirez in the bathroom. According to Ramirez, there were fifteen to twenty Avenues members and their families at the park that day. It was a gang social outing at which families were welcome, an occasion to unwind and put business on hold for the day. Ramirez was carrying a gun, as he usually did. When he entered the pub-

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lic bathroom, he was followed by two Avenues members. They closed the door behind them and one of them armed himself with a knife. They told Ramirez he had to leave Avenues and never come back. Fairly certain that they were going to assault him, maybe even kill him, Ramirez pulled out his pistol and backed them out of the bathroom. He gathered up his wife and children from the park and took off in his vehicle. While driving away he called Rodriguez on his cell phone. Rodriguez told Ramirez that he was no longer welcome in the neighborhood. He threatened to kill Ramirez if he came back. Ramirez, furious, threatened Rodriguez in turn. It was his neighborhood; he wasn’t about to be driven out of it. It came to light that both Rodriguez and Alex Aguirre believed Ramirez was keeping tax money. Although the jury became aware that Ramirez was eventually arrested and convicted of manslaughter, it never heard the details of what had landed Ramirez in prison. The backstory was that soon after he was fired, so to speak, from his job as tax collector, he bravely but unwisely decided not only to remain in the neighborhood but also to get even with Alex and Jo Jo. He continued going around to the local dealers and collecting the usual taxes; now he kept all the money for himself. Initially, the taxpayers had no idea that anything was amiss. It didn’t take long for Alex Aguirre and Rodriguez to find out. Orders were issued to kill Ramirez on sight, and he got into two shootouts with gangsters sent to get rid of him. He escaped with his life both times, but it was clear that his days were numbered. Against all good judgment, Ramirez continued to hang around Highland Park to freelance as a dope dealer and hijacker. In the early part of May 1998, he learned from one of his drug connections that some “Chinos” (a Hispanic term for Filipinos) wanted to buy a large quantity of cocaine. They made arrangements to buy the bulk load from Henio Covarubbias, a local dealer from whom Ramirez had been collecting. Henio ran a drug market from his house at 5642 Aldama. Buyers went to the backyard, knocked on the door, and made the transaction. With nobody in Avenues willing to associate with him, Ramirez recruited gang wannabes and a young, inexperienced fifteen-year-old named Robert Gonzales to help him rip off the Chinos. On May 23, 1998, the night of the

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deal, the three Filipino buyers arrived at Henio’s back door and knocked. Within seconds, Ramirez appeared behind them with Gonzales and “Cuban” Manny Lopez acting as muscle. Ramirez had given Robert Gonzales a handgun to make the Chinos understand that this was for real. Ramirez ordered the Filipinos to the ground. One of them, Cesar Tolentino, tried to fight his way out of the trap. Young Gonzales opened fire and struck Tolentino in the back. Tolentino was able to run to the front of the house, but he collapsed and died in front of his car. It was amateur night on Aldama. It didn’t take long for law enforcement to put the pieces together. Manny Lopez and another conspirator, Johnnie Johnson (Ramirez’s getaway driver that night), both rolled on Ramirez and Gonzales. On June 5, 1998, Ramirez, Manny Lopez, and Robert Gonzales were arrested for the murder of Cesar Tolentino. It was a slam dunk. Ramirez didn’t help himself much in his first interview with the police. He admitted to Northeast detectives that his life was over anyway and that he had a greenlight on him. At one point he began crying. The detective told him, “Look, you’re a grown man. You’re a tough guy. Now is not the time to be crying, okay? Compose yourself and let’s get this over with.” Despite his disintegrated mental state, Ramirez never admitted his role in the Tolentino murder or the drug ripoff. During the Tolentino trial, Ramirez took a plea to voluntary manslaughter and he was sentenced to eleven years. Robert Gonzales, the young shooter, was given the same sentence. Gonzales began serving his term in Youth Authority and in time began to respond positively to his environment. He received high praise for his artistic ability and for completing his high school equivalency program. He also earned letters of commendation from his Transcendental Meditation teacher and from his Drama teacher, who had cast Gonzales in a YA production of Hamlet. The jury in this trial didn’t hear about any of that. What it did hear is that soon after his arrest, Gerry “Trooper” Ramirez began talking to law enforcement. He wanted to debrief and be put in a Protective Custody yard. He was now in County Jail which meant he was almost entirely under Eme control. He feared for his life and wanted protection, and the only way he would get it was to debrief. In gang terms, he was a snitch, a rata, the lowest form of life in the world. In his mind, at least he was alive and young enough

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that he had a shot at some kind of life after his eleven years were served. When Manzella asked him point-blank why he’d decided to testify, Ramirez said he wanted a clean break with the past, to start a normal life. He knews the Eme and certain Avenues members wanted him dead: There was no going back to that life. In fact, Ramirez had broken almost every rule. He had skimmed money from tax receipts. He’d stolen Alex Aguirre’s tax money outright. He’d interfered with the protected drug business in Avenues by ripping off a drug deal. Lastly, he’d made the ultimate mistake by becoming an informant. Under cross-examination by Michael Shannon, a slightly different motivation was brought up. Shannon introduced the possibility that Ramirez had gotten himself into big trouble with Rodriguez, possibly with Alex Aguirre, and that he saw debriefing as the only way to survive, even if it meant inventing Rodriguez’s involvement in the Morales murder. The implication that Shannon left hanging in the air was that Ramirez was simply trying to get even with Rodriguez for firing him from his plum job as a tax collector. Shannon noted that while Ramirez hadn’t had any tattoos on being incarcerated for the Tolentino murder, he had been tattooed while in prison. This cast doubt on his sincerity about leaving the gang life. Then Shannon pointed out inconsistencies in Ramirez’s debrief. At first Ramirez told a detective that he’d fallen out of grace with Avenues for borrowing money from Alex Aguirre and never paying it back. Ramirez later told another detective that he’d ripped off Alex Aguirre for $14,000. Ramirez admitted that he’d told different detectives different stories, but claimed that what he related in this court was the truth. Ramirez’s testimony was interrupted by two other witnesses, Janette Sukphranee and Yadira Altamirano. Sukphranee testified that on the night of Morales’s murder, she’d picked him up at his house in Tujunga and dropped him off on Drew Street around 8:45 or 9:00 PM. Altamirano had seen Morales on Drew Street after he was dropped off by Suphranee. She said hello to him and that was their last contact. A few days later, she heard that he’d been killed. Ramirez returned to the stand under cross-examination by Michael Shannon. Shannon brought up Andy Teague’s interview with Ramirez in

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May 2001. During that interview, Ramirez told Teague that he didn’t know Jo Jo’s last name. “He had a weird last name,” Ramirez said to Teague. When Shannon asked if that wasn’t peculiar, Ramirez said that he grew up with a lot of people whose last name he didn’t know. Shannon then brought up the fact that the previous night, Ramirez had been given a transcript of his 2001 interview with Andy Teague and asked if it was necessary in order for Ramirez to keep his story straight. Ramirez said that his story stayed the same no matter how many times he told it. Shannon later got Ramirez to admit that during the time he was collecting for the Eme, he was using a lot of cocaine. Ramirez countered that he got the cocaine for free. In an exchange that became more and more heated, Shannon asked about Ramirez getting fired from his collecting job. Ramirez said, “I was going to get killed. Yeah, you could call that getting fired.” Ramirez further admitted that after he was fired, he started robbing “their connections.” Thus, Shannon got to the heart of what he felt was Ramirez’s motivation for testifying: “You hated Jo Jo Rodriguez so much that you made up a story about him being involved in the murder of Randy Morales.” Ramirez simply answered, “No.” With Ramirez still reeling from Shannon’s cross-examination, Michael White took over. He brought up the inconsistencies between Ramirez’s prior interview statements and what he’d said in court the day before. This got Ramirez so frazzled that he admitted he couldn’t remember what he’d said in the previous day’s testimony. White then asked a crucial question. “You’re a savvy guy,” he said. “Do you know how to get breaks from law enforcement?” Ramirez answered, “Yeah.” Even though the cross-examination was going badly for Ramirez, he maintained his defiant attitude. In the course of cross-examination, it came out that Ramirez had debriefed in 1998. The reason he gave at the time was that he was tired of the gang and wanted to turn his life around. But in 2000, while in Protective Custody, he got Avenues tattoos. White got Ramirez to admit that his original reason for debriefing was not to get his life turned around, only to keep it. Ramirez said that as of 2000, he was still an Avenues gangster at heart and had hopes of one day returning to his old neighborhood.

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To an outsider, Ramirez’s attitude seems incomprehensible. He’d been driven out of his neighborhood at the point of a knife. He’d been ambushed and shot at. He’d been told that the Eme had greenlighted him. Yet, as late as 2000, he persisted in thinking that he’d one day walk back to Avenues and pick up where he’d left off. While this might be an indication of monumental hubris, it also shows how deeply loyalty to the neighborhood runs. Like a number of street gangsters, Ramirez believed that his loyalty to the gang would be rewarded by an equal loyalty to himself, one that would surpass loyalty to the Eme. Like other devoted street gangsters before him had learned, he was wrong. He was almost dead wrong. While his old clique had turned on him, Ramirez still had a few people he could rely on not to shoot him on sight. One of those friends was Jimmy Maxson, his crew chief. Back when Ramirez was still on the street stealing Alex Aguirre’s tax money, Maxson met with Ramirez privately to tell him to stay out of the neighborhood, to watch out for Alex and Jo Jo. Maxson and Ramirez remained friendly until Ramirez’s arrest for the Tolentino murder. After that, they never saw or spoke to each other. Soon thereafter, the world fell apart for Maxson: He was indicted in the third of the three RICO cases brought forward by the Task Force. During the afternoon recess, Chris Chaney asked Manzella if he could take a look at Ramirez’s tattoos. Manzella agreed. Outside the presence of Judge Fidler and the jury, Ramirez was brought in and told to remove his shirt. Chaney, White, and Shannon, with Manzella looking on, examined the tattoos. He had 213 (the LA area code), LA (which could mean either Los Angeles or Los Avenidas), a Mexican flag, an Aztec symbol, and a snake. These Ramirez had received while in prison, and after he’d told the prison gang investigator that he wanted to leave that life behind. While the three defense attorneys looked at the tattoos, Manzella called out, “Look, here’s one of Mike Shannon.” The court staff, Ramirez, and some spectators found this amusing, but the three defense attorneys didn’t crack a smile. With Judge Fidler and the jury back in, Chaney continued hammering Ramirez about the benefits he’d received for testifying. Then Chaney pursued an interesting tack about Ramirez robbing drug dealers after he was fired. Ramirez admitted that he’d robbed a lot of dealers, and that he’d used

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a gun and worked at night, when the dealers were more vulnerable. Chaney asked Ramirez if Randy Morales was a drug dealer. This suggested the possibility that Ramirez had killed Morales in a robbery that had gone sideways. After Chaney’s cross-examination, Manzella stepped in for his re-direct to put a different face on what the jury had just heard. Ramirez said that he’d been having second thoughts about testifying right up to the point he walked into the courtroom. Manzella asked him: “If you had kept your mouth shut and not testified, would you even need immunity?” Ramirez said no. Manzella then walked him through the three attempts on his life by Avenues members. In one instance, Ramirez was walking with his wife on Figueroa Street when he saw a car cruise by slowly. He recognized one of the men in the car as the assailant with the knife in the Aroyo Seco Park bathroom. Ramirez pushed his wife into a store and then ran around to the alley behind the store, knowing the car would come by for another pass. When it appeared in the alley, Ramirez began shooting. The car drove off at high speed and, as far as Ramirez knew, he hadn’t hit anyone. Then Manzella asked Ramirez why he’d gotten gang tattoos in prison after claiming that he wanted to leave the gang life. Ramirez said that he was eighteen at the time and in his heart, he had fallen out with the Mexican Mafia, not the Avenues: “In my heart I was still Avenues.” After Manzella’s attempt to rehabilitate some of Ramirez’s testimony, Michael White decided to cross-examine him again. White got Ramirez to admit that during his career as a tax collector, his ambition was to be a full-blown Eme Carnal. Then White stated that Valdemar had testified that many of the tattoos Ramirez carried could also be interpreted as Mexican Mafia tattoos. Ramirez claimed that plenty of other non-Eme-members also carried those tattoos. Manzella went back for a quick re-direct to establish that Aztec symbols and Mexican flags are nearly universal tattoos among Hispanics in the prison system. Only one of his tattoos specifically tied Ramirez to Avenues. After two days on the stand, the court was finally finished with Gerry “Trooper” Ramirez. Manzella knew going in that Ramirez would be hammered hard and that it would be nearly impossible to make him look like anything but a man fighting for survival. Ramirez’s career with the Eme

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had crashed and burned. They wanted him dead, and the neighborhood he loved beyond common sense had turned its back on him. The next witness, Diana Demetrio, appeared in a prison-issue blue jumpsuit. She was incarcerated on unrelated charges and had been brought down to testify about a van she’d owned. In 1996, Demetrio—a Mexican national, illegal immigrant, and member of her family’s narcotics business— lived on Drew Street and went by the moniker “Kilo Woman” because she dealt in large quantities of narcotics. Since she spoke only Spanish, a translator interpreted her testimony for the court. She stated that she’d had a relationship with Gerardo Reyes in 1996. At that time, she owned a red Ford Windstar van and allowed Reyes to use it. The defense didn’t cross-examine. The next witness was Detective Rick Petersen, who’d originally been assigned the Morales case. The Morales murder occurred in Hollenbeck, where Petersen had worked at the time. He stated that he responded to the 5200 block of Remstoy Avenue at 1:15 AM on the morning of October 6, 1996. As Manzella began putting up the crime scene photos, some of Morales’s family members in the spectator area began crying. Judge Fidler stopped the proceedings and informed the Morales family that some of the photos coming up would be graphic. He asked them if they wanted to stay. They all remained. Petersen testified that he’d recovered six spent shell casings and two projectiles at the scene. He further stated that when he interviewed Ramirez in prison, Ramirez told him that the van used in the murder belonged to Reyes’s girlfriend. Petersen concluded his testimony in under an hour. He’d been the initial investigator on the Morales homicide, a Hollenbeck case, but it was turned over to Andy Teague in Northeast when it became apparent that it involved Avenues and Teague, John Berdin, and Tony Manzella were able to fold it into Manzella’s larger case. The next crucial witness Manzella brought to the stand was Debbie Ramos, a resident of Remstoy Street where Morales was killed. On the night of the murder, Ramos heard gunshots sometime between 11:00 and 11:30. She jumped out of bed, ran to the window, and saw car lights coming fast down

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the street. The street curved around her house so she ran to the living room, where she saw a van driving fast around the curve. Ramos claimed that the dome light inside the van was on and she could see three to four gangsterlooking men, apparently Hispanic, with shaved heads. She also noted that the van was burgundy-colored and had what appeared to be pinstriping along the side. Under cross-examination by Michael Shannon, Ramos restated the information about the van’s appearance. When Shannon asked her if she knew the difference between an Aerostar and a Windstar, she admitted that she didn’t, and that she couldn’t identify the individuals’ faces. The next witness, Lisa Scheinin, the LA Coroner’s Deputy Medical Examiner, provided Randy Morales’s cause and nature of death. She testified that Morales had suffered six gunshot wounds to the head, which she’d arbitrarily numbered one through six although the order of the wounds could not be determined. She stated that number one was fired into the top of the head. Numbers two through five were fired into the left side of the head. Number six was fired upward through the chin and mouth. Of the six, she believed that five were fatal wounds while number six was potentially fatal. Scheinin went through the wounds with clinical detachment, while Maria and Stephanie Morales, Randy’s mother and sister, sobbed quietly in the spectator area. When Scheinin described how bullet five entered the cranial vault and went through the brain stem, hit the top of the inside of the skull, and bounced back to create more brain damage, it appeared that George Vidales and Randy Rodriguez were also choking up and betraying emotion. Reyes remained stoic. The defense did not cross-examine Scheinin. There seemed to be a collective sense of relief in the room when Scheinin stepped out of the witness box, replaced by Starr Sachs, the LAPD firearms analyst. Her brief testimony was related to the bullet evidence. She examined the six spent shell casings and determined that all were fired from the same gun, a .25 caliber semiautomatic. The gun hadn’t been recovered. She also testified that the bullets and fragments recovered from the body were also from a .25 caliber weapon. Since she didn’t have the gun, she couldn’t say whether the gun that

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ejected the rounds was the same one that fired the bullets into Morales’s head. The defense didn’t cross-examine her, either. Surprisingly, Debbie Ramos, the eyewitness to the getaway, was brought back to testify. The result was a long, drawn out process in which the defense tried to shake Ramos’s confidence in the details of what she’d seen that night. Much of it had to do with what she described as the pinstripe on the side of the van. In the course of the investigation, the van was eventually tracked to its new owner in the Pacific Northwest and photographed. In the photos, the van has no pinstriping but it does have a chrome plastic molding. It was clear that the defense was trying to establish that Ramos saw a van with a pinstripe. But the van that used to belong to Diana Demetrio had a chrome plastic stripe. It couldn’t have been the same van. It was a small point, but it was fiercely disputed. After Ramos, the defense put on its first witness. Usually the defense puts on its witnesses after the prosecution has finished. But due to availability, the defense went out of turn and brought up Rosie DeHorton McGraw, the Imperial County Sheriff’s Records Supervisor. She was there to authenticate the photo taken of George Vidales in El Centro two weeks after the Morales murder. He’d been arrested and booked for public intoxication. In the booking picture, Vidales has a fullish head of hair that could not be characterized as shaved, the way that Debbie Ramos had described the men she saw in the red van. Manzella didn’t bother to cross-examine her. During the course of the trial, there were a number of delays caused by what was called the Blue Flu. The Sheriff’s union was in a contract dispute with the County and to make the point the court and jail deputies had staged a sickout. Eighty jail and court deputies had called in sick and there was a shortage of deputies to transport the prisoners from the County Jail to the courthouse. At 1:57 PM on September 9, 2003, James Maxson, Manzella’s most important witness, took the stand. He’d be on for three days and he’d give the jury their closest look thus far into the workings of Avenues and the Mexican Mafia—as well as details about the night Morales was murdered. Maxson’s testimony would be absolutely crucial to Manzella’s case.

“It is not humanly possible for these three defendants to be innocent of this crime.” — DDA Anthony Manzella

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ike Gerry “Trooper” Ramirez, James “Drac” Maxson had

spent his entire life with Avenues. Unlike Ramirez, Maxson hadn’t been officially jumped in until he was twenty-one years old. This was uncharacteristically old for the average gang member—practically a senior citizen considering that kids as young as ten and twelve are routinely jumped into gangs. His jumping-in came as a surprise. One night he was partying in a bar with long-time Avenues members, people he’d known for years, and they’d decided to make him official. It was a formality: Maxson had been capering in Avenues territory since he was a youngster and had been to prison and worked his way up as a respected Associate. 153

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On the stand during Tony Manzella’s direct examination, Maxson outlined his entire criminal career. At fifteen, Maxson and others in his age group started a little Avenues clique called The Insane Ones, the TIOs. In Avenues, as in other large, established gangs, small cliques of young gang wannabes are tolerated, monitored, and often encouraged and counseled. Youngsters are the future of gangs and clever, ambitious up and comers are allowed to test their mettle on the streets. Young sets like the TIOs are the farm team. Natural leaders emerge and the larger gang recruits the good earners and talented criminals. Ultimately, the time comes when the youngsters are told to either clique up with the larger set or stop banging. Maxson was an accomplished operator by the time he was jumped in. He was also well known to the Aguirre clan. He’d grown up with Alex’s siblings Benny and Nancy, and he’d known Richie since he was a young boy. In his testimony, Maxson said that he’d become aware of the Eme’s influence in the neighborhood through Alex, who was six years older than he was. Maxson, like many other Avenues, looked up to Alex as a leader and stand-up criminal. Alex was sharp, smart, well-connected, and made a lot of money. Alex never visibly tattooed himself and always dressed casually. In fact, when Alex first came to the attention of the Task Force surveillance team, they called him Joe College because he just didn’t look like a gangster. By a combination of emulation and common sense, Jimmy Maxson did the same. Throughout his entire criminal career, he’d never gotten a tattoo and never “dressed down.” Through Alex, Maxson came to know Randy “Jo Jo” Rodriguez. It was known all over Avenues that Rodriguez was Alex’s right-hand man, a sort of trusted “consigliere” who spoke with the full authority of Alex Aguirre. Under direct examination, Manzella asked Maxson to point out Rodriguez. Maxson pointed to him and said, “He’s right there.” It wasn’t until Maxson’s release from prison in 1989 (he’d served time for robbery convictions) that his relationship with Alex developed into a more professional one. It was the transition point that many gang members aspire to when they stop banging and start putting in work for the Carnales.

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Maxson rode along with Alex to back his play in drug deals, and also when Alex collected tax money. The two often rode with Jo Jo Rodriguez and Jackie Palomares, another trusted Associate who also did work for Alfred “Tigger” Salinas. Salinas, like Alex, had worked his way up through the Avenues ranks to become a full-blown Eme member. In 1990, an incident involving some Dogtown gang members underscored the change in attitude and behavior when street gangsters become Eme Carnales and Associates. Maxson was riding in the back seat of Alex’s car. Also in the car were Jackie Palomares and Richard “Jasper” Ramirez. Palomares spotted some Dogtown members on the street. The Dogtowns started throwing gang signs. Reflexively, Palomares pulled out a pistol and began shooting. The Dogtowns shot back and Maxson produced a gun to return fire. As he raised it, he accidentally discharged a round and hit Palomares in the thigh. There was no serious injury and the shooting was never reported, but Alex was furious with Palomares. At his level and that of Associates, the banging is expected to stop. Gang signs are supposed to be ignored, not challenged. At Alex’s level, it’s all about dope, money, taxes, kicking up to the big homies in prison, and regulating miscreants. Gang-banging is for the juveniles who still need to prove themselves by showing “heart.” By 1991, Maxson had expanded his portfolio of activities beyond the confines of Highland Park. Always on the hunt for new opportunities, he began an association with a man who ran an aftermarket automotive installation company. The man, who went by the name “June Bug,” installed highend body kits on Porsche sports cars. These were the shovel-nosed and high-winged fiberglass kits that gave Porsche street cars the look of all-out racers. June Bug would install an expensive kit for a customer and then give Maxson the customer’s name and address. Maxson then assembled a crew, stalked the client, and stole his car at gunpoint. June Bug took the car back, stripped it, sold the parts, and then resold the body kits to the next unwary customer. During these carjackings, Maxson was generally the only one carrying a gun. Not trusting his crimies to keep their cool if a victim resisted, Maxson

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didn’t want a carjacking beef to turn into a murder. So he used his crew as muscle and drivers. In 1991, he was arrested and convicted of two carjackings he’d committed in the West San Fernando Valley. He was sentenced to eight years in prison. During his term he was moved around from Soledad to Folsom, then to Corcoran, Pelican Bay, and Centinella. Through his prior association with Alex Aguirre, Maxson made easy alliances in the prison system. The California prison system, of course, is the Mexican Mafia’s home court. As a result of the vast demographic change throughout California, the incredible rise in the number of street gangs, and the overwhelming number of Hispanics in prison, the Eme controls the entire system through sheer numbers and intimidation. Also, thanks to a robust and efficient communications and intelligence system, nothing in the prison system escapes the notice of the Eme. Once Maxson’s association with Alex was verified as valid by the Carnales in prison, he became a trusted Associate. Maxson and Alex maintained communications through third-party letters, visitors, and other inmates. The verification of Maxson’s association with Alex was crucial because using the name of a big homie is a serious matter. Falsely invoking a Carnal’s name usually results in sanctions, from mild to terminal. Maxson performed well for the Eme in prison. He assaulted black inmates when ordered to, made and smuggled shanks, collected canteen items to kick up to brothers, and funneled drugs and information. On the stand, Manzella asked Maxson, “Are all gang members obligated to become soldiers for the Mexican Mafia?” Maxson answered, “Yes. They do it to stick together and not get greenlighted or checked.” Manzella then produced the Avenues organization chart that he had earlier introduced as evidence. In the chart, Richie Aguirre and Jo Jo Rodriguez appear above Jimmy Maxson’s name. Manzella asked why that was. Maxson responded that Richie and Jo Jo had direct contact with Alex; they in turn relayed Alex’s orders to crew leaders like Maxson. Manzella then asked Maxson how he’d received orders from Alex Agu-

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irre after Alex was arrested and indicted in his Federal RICO case. Maxson said he got them from Richie Aguirre or Jo Jo Rodriguez. Manzella then asked Maxson to walk the jury through the chart. Maxson stated that his crew consisted of George “Chato” Vidales, Jerry “Trooper” Ramirez, Paul “Slowboy” MacDonald, Frank “Trooper” Pulga (cousin to Trooper Ramirez), Anthony “Smokey” Ochoa, and a kid named Robert from Santanas, another gang. Robert had drifted away from Santanas and started hanging with Avenues. Maxson identified other crew chiefs and their crews. Carlos and Vince Caldera, known as the Kono Brothers or sometimes simply The Konos, ran a crew that included Johnny “Sleepy” Martinez, Nick “Evil” Uribe, Amador “Pelon” Reyes, and some younger Avenues. Javy “Gangster” Marquez ran a crew made up of Gerardo “Criminal” Reyes (his former brother-in-law) and other gangsters who were identified by their street names: Rascal, Tricky, Kilo, and Sparky. Gerardo Reyes, who hadn’t been raised in Highland Park, met Maria Marquez, Javy’s sister, in Reno while they were both attending a Job Corps training program. As an illegal alien, Reyes wasn’t eligible for the program but had signed on and been accepted. They began dating while in Reno and according to a Northeast gang cop, “She brought him back to Avenues. Javy dressed him [Reyes] up like a gangster and put him to work.” Maria soon after gave birth to Reyes’s child. Benny “Sleepy” Garcia ran another crew, made up of Anthony “Tonito” Medina, Clinton Conroy, and David “Huero” Deloza. Scott “Gato” Gleason, a close associate of Richie Aguirre, didn’t have a crew, but he was given the go-ahead by Richie to put one together. While in prison, Maxson admitted to around thirty assaults for the Eme before his parole in 1996. He served a little over five years of his eight-year sentence for carjacking. Almost immediately after being paroled, Maxson was back in Highland Park, eager to return to the work he’d left in 1991. By 1996, Alex Aguirre had been rolled up in the first of the three RICO cases. The daily running of the Eme’s business in Avenues was left in the hands of Richie Aguirre and, ac-

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cording to Northeast detectives, Randy “Jo Jo” Rodriguez. Despite the fact that Alex was in Federal custody, he had few problems communicating with his operators in Avenues. Soon after his parole, Maxson was involved in a significant gunfight with some tax-resisting dealers on Ruby Street. This group worked out of a house in Highland Park, and an Avenues crew—Maxson, sixteen-year-old Richie Aguirre, Whisper, Slowboy MacDonald, and Gerry “Trooper” Ramirez descended on the house to regulate. The dealers slammed the door on the approaching Avenues and began shooting out of the windows. Slowboy was shot in the leg and the other Avenues opened fire with everything they had. After a massive exchange of gunfire, the Avenues crew took off. Soon after, the dealers moved out of the neighborhood and never returned. While the Avenues didn’t get their money that day, they were successful in driving the resisters off their turf. For their purposes, the policing effort was a success, a clear show to dealers in Highland Park that resistance wouldn’t be tolerated. In crime statistics, this run-of-the-mill shootout went under the category of gang violence. It wasn’t strictly gang-related. It was Eme-related. But there’s no specific Mexican Mafia category in COMPSTAT, the LAPD’s statistics analysis program. Even if there were, unless someone like Maxson or Ramirez comes forward to call it Mafia business, there’s no way law enforcement can know for sure. This shootout shows that many crimes that appear to be ordinary gangbanging are really the result of Eme enforcement. The press may characterize crimes as “senseless” that are anything but, but the purpose is never revealed unless someone comes forward—as in the Morales murder. Around the time of the Ruby Street shootout, Maxson and his girlfriend Leticia moved into a condo on Division Street with Maria Marquez (Javy’s younger sister) and Richie Aguirre, Maria’s boyfriend at the time. Maria had by then broken up with Gerardo Reyes and started living with Richie. Maxson and Leticia went to Arizona for a while. Leaving California without permission was a violation of Maxson’s parole agreement and he was sent back to prison for 120 days.

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In 1998, Maxson was involved in another shooting, this time with a group of Border Brothers outside the house of another Mexican Mafia member, Jesse “Shady” Detevis. Maxson, Detevis, and a number of Associates were meeting at Detevis’s house about Eme business. The girlfriends of the men holding the meeting were left outside to wait. According to Maxson’s testimony, it’s unwise to have women present at these meetings: “Women are not supposed to know the business.” As the women waited, a group of Border Brothers began flirting with them and annoying them. When the men came out of their meeting, they confronted the BBs. A fistfight broke out among the four Emeros and/or Associates and roughly ten BBs. When one Border Brother produced a box cutter, Maxson pulled out a handgun and began firing at the BBs’ legs. Other Emeros in the house heard the gunfire, ran out, and joined the fight. As the sound of approaching police sirens reached them, the combatants broke up and scattered. One of the Eme Associates, Ignacio Felix, landed in the hospital with a concussion. One of the BBs also went to the hospital with a minor gunshot wound to the leg. The rumor is that upon his release, he apologized to Detevis and said that the BBs wouldn’t have bothered the women if they’d known that they belonged to the Emeros. Maxson stated to the court that he believed there were roughly 1,000 Avenues gang members in 1996. While they all considered themselves Avenues, they belong to the various cliques such Avenue 57, Avenue 43, Drew Street, and Cypress Avenue. Further division within the cliques was by age: the Chicos and Pee Wees, for instance. Another clique called itself the Assassins; this was the one involved in the infamous shooting death of Stephanie Kuhen, the three-year-old victim of the “Wrong Way” incident that made headlines around the world. Maxson stated that he, Alex and Richie Aguirre, and Jo Jo Rodriguez were members of Avenue 57. Javy Marquez and Gerardo Reyes were members of Drew Street. Interestingly, Marquez carried a large CYPS tattoo on the back of his head as well, an homage to the original neighborhood, Cypress Avenue. Maxson stated that he’d grown up with the Aguirre clan and that the fa-

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ther, Richard “Half Man” Aguirre, had been a career drug dealer who’d originally moved into Highland Park from Diamond Street, nearer to downtown Los Angeles. The Diamond Street gang is considered one of the older gangs in Los Angeles; according to street lore, Diamond Street homies were prominently involved in the Zoot Suit riots and other clashes with military personnel stationed in Elysian Park during WWII. In addition to dealing drugs and collecting drug taxes, Alex ran people who sold stolen calling card numbers at payphones. (These numbers were usually sold to Mexican nationals who called home regularly.) Alex was also involved in credit card fraud and taxing people who were involved in other illegal activities, such as prostitution, illegal pushcart vending, and the sale of bootleg videos and CDs. One Northeast vice cop could gauge the strength of Avenues influence in a neighborhood by counting the number of prostitutes on Figueroa Street. He said that when the taxation of prostitutes was in full force, the prostitutes would move on to other areas to avoid paying the rent. When Avenues was weak or off its game, the prostitutes would come back and work Figueroa again. Of all the areas that produced drug taxes for Alex, Drew Street was the most lucrative. Although it’s located only a few blocks from the Northeast police station, it’s difficult to patrol. Lookouts alert dealers to approaching police cars and dealers can disappear into the alleys and driveways that open on surrounding streets, such as Chapman. As a result, Drew Street was a twenty-four-hour open air drug market. It produced an average of $1,000 per week in taxes for Alex. Maxson regularly provided Alex between $500 and $800 per week. On a particularly good week, if Maxson robbed a tax-resisting dealer, he might earn as much as $4,000 for Alex. Altogether, Maxson estimated that Alex received $3,000 to $4,000 per week from all his tax collectors. After Alex went away, Richie Aguirre and Jo Jo Rodriguez would receive the tax money and decide how much the collectors got to keep. According to Maxson, Avenues had a good reputation with the Eme and the neighborhood could be counted on to follow orders and take care of business. When other neighborhoods were greenlighted, Avenues could be relied on to take the appropriate measures. Avenues was also known as a

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gang that cleaned up its own messes. When Manzella asked Maxson about guns used in crimes, Maxson answered that the “hot” guns were thrown away, sent to Mexico in exchange for drugs, thrown in a body of water, or chopped up; sometimes the barrels and moving parts were sanded down to alter the gun’s ballistic signature. Manzella then steered Maxson to the subject of Muppet Morales. Maxson knew Muppet, knew him as a friend of Richie Aguirre’s, and knew Muppet sold rock cocaine for Richie on Drew Street. Maxson also knew Diana “Kilo Woman” Demetrio as a volume drug dealer and that she was Gerardo “Criminal” Reyes’s girlfriend. To establish the veracity of the next information Maxson provided, Manzella asked whether he was in prison or on the streets at the time Morales was killed. Maxson stated that he was paroled on October 5, 1996 and was on the streets until April 1997. Maxson said that on the evening of the killing, he was on his way to Drew Street in his Ford 5.0-liter Mustang. He drove up Fletcher, made a left on Estara Street, and came upon Diana Demetrio’s red van, which was being driven by Gerardo Reyes. Maxson also noticed that Muppet and George Vidales were in the van. Both vehicles pulled over to their respective sides of the street and Vidales exited the van and approached Maxson. Vidales told Maxson that he and Reyes were on their way to “check” Muppet. Maxson, knowing that Muppet was close to Richie Aguirre, told Vidales to be cool because Richie would be upset. The conversation lasted only a few moments and they drove off. The next day, Maxson was told by Richie Aguirre that Muppet had been killed. Richie was angry. A day or two later Maxson met up with George Vidales at a small park the Avenues called La Culebra or the Indian Reservation. This was an Avenue 57 hangout and there were a number of Avenues there in addition to Vidales. When Vidales saw Maxson approach, he came out of the park to talk to him in private. According to Maxson, “Vidales said he didn’t know it was going to go down like that. He sounded nervous.” Soon after his conversation with Vidales, Maxson talked with Gerar-

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do Reyes in an alley on Drew Street. Maxson said that Reyes was so nervous that he kept his hand on his gun during the entire exchange. Reyes was afraid there would be blowback from Richie. Reyes told Maxson that it was “Gangster” Marquez’s call because Muppet was a rata. Reyes admitted to Maxson that he’d shot Muppet. Maxson told Reyes that he should have checked with Richie first. Reyes repeated that it was Gangster’s call. Maxson was angry with Reyes not only for killing Morales without approval but also because Reyes was showing disrespect by keeping his hand on his gun. Maxson said that was the last time he saw Reyes. In the early months of 1997, when Maxson was living with his girlfriend, Richie, and Maria Marquez on Division Street, Javy Marquez placed a collect call to the apartment from County Jail. Maria took the call and then passed the phone to Maxson. Javy Marquez told Maxson that he heard that Richie was angry with him for taking care of Muppet Morales. Javy told Maxson to tell Richie to “let it go because Muppet was a rata and he had to go.” Javy also admitted that he’d ordered Muppet’s death because he was facing some murders and Muppet had ratted him out. Manzella asked Maxson why he was testifying. Maxson said, “It’s the only way out. I don’t want to be part of that no more.” Maxson had had a son by Leticia in 1997. He said that the thought of his son growing up with him in prison made him rethink his criminal career. Then Maxson was asked if the US Attorney had in fact ordered him to testify. He said no. Manzella covered the arrangement the State had made with Maxson. He’d been relocated and given money for rent, utilities, and food; he’d be relocated again at the end of the trial. He was currently free on Federal supervised probation, the Federal version of parole. During the five-year period he was on probation, he had to take drug tests, hold down a job, not associate with known criminals, leave the state only with the permission of his probation officer, and report to the probation officer at the officer’s request. Maxson’s direct testimony took an entire court day. Manzella’s direct examination took a clear linear path to give the jury a coherent narrative and provide a context for the Morales murder. It became apparent that the de-

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fense would try to disrupt the narrative Manzella had established. Michael White, the first defense attorney to cross-examine Maxson, started with a shotgun approach. One of his first questions to Maxson was, “Who provided you with a shirt and tie?” Maxson answered, “I did.” White then asked, “With State money?” “No,” Maxson said. “I have a job.” White then moved to the incident outside Detevis’s house. The defense attorney had Maxson explain the shooting of the Border Brother. Then White played an FBI tape of Maxson talking to Whisper, one of his crew members, about the shooting. On the tape played to the court, Maxson is heard saying, “Hey Ese, I got one. Right in front of everybody.” On the tape it sounds like Maxson was bragging. White noted that Maxson used different language on the tape than he used in court. Maxson replied, “When I was involved in that life, I was a different person.” The next series of questions covered Maxson’s drug use during the period when he spoke to Vidales and Reyes about the Morales killing and about Maxson’s telephone conversation with Marquez. Maxson admitted to using cocaine two or three times a week during that time and that he also drank alcohol. He stated that when he was using drugs heavily, he “shut things down” and stayed at home. Maxson made it clear that he didn’t want to be on the street doing business while under the influence. When asked about selling drugs, Maxson said that he’d only obtained drugs for other people to sell on his behalf. He also said, “You don’t keep all the money, otherwise you don’t last too long.” White then produced another FBI tape in which Maxson is heard talking to Jesse “Shady” Detevis. It was the US Attorney’s prosecution of Detevis and a number of other Eme members in which Maxson had been indicted on his charges. Under cross-examination, Maxson never tried to minimize or whitewash his involvement in gang life or his work with the Eme. White asked, “You spent all your waking hours dealing with the kinds of things we’re hearing about?” Maxson answered simply, “Correct.” Then White asked, “Wasn’t your ambition while you were doing this to

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become a member of the Mexican Mafia?” Maxson said, “Yes.” White continued, “As a big homie, if you say so and so is to die, they die. And you wanted that power?” Maxson again said, “Yes.” White persisted, “And you wanted that power the day before the FBI came looking for you?” Maxson nodded and said, “Yes.” After several more questions, Maxson stated that one of the reasons he turned himself in to the FBI in 1999 was because of his son. Maxson became visibly emotional every time he mentioned the boy. White then asked why he turned his life around in 1999 instead of 1997 when his son was born. Maxson said, “It wasn’t that easy.” Maxson stated that there was a greenlight on him; there had been since 1999 when he turned himself in and agreed to debrief. His debriefing period lasted six months. He also stated that Carlos Sanchez, an LAPD Detective named who was attached to the Task Force, was present at almost every one of his debriefing sessions. When Maxson began talking about some of the Northeast homicides, it was Sanchez who contacted Andy Teague and told him that Maxson might have some information on Teague’s unsolved murders. Sanchez had been at Northeast prior to being assigned to the Task Force and he knew that Teague had a number of cases that Maxson might be able to clarify. By the start of the afternoon session, Maxson looked worn out by the cross-examination. But as the afternoon wore on, he became more animated. Maxson stated that he’d known Muppet Morales for a few months and that he’d told the FBI during his debriefing that he’d heard a rumor that Morales had accidentally shot Trippy Gonzales. He also stated that he’d heard there was paperwork on Morales. White asked if there was another rumor that Morales had gotten into trouble with Marquez for failing to assassinate two El Sereno gang members. Maxson said he’d heard that rumor, too. White then went over Maxson’s conversation with Vidales the night Morales was killed, and how he knew that Reyes occasionally used Kilo Woman’s red van. Maxson related the information just as he’d given it to Manzella under direct examination.

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White’s last question was about Maxson’s conversation with Vidales at the Culebra. White asked, “How many people did Vidales name during .

that conversation?” Maxson said, “Two. Him and Criminal.” It was clear that Maxson had no information on Randy “Jo Jo” Rodriguez’s involvement, if any, in the Morales killing. Jo Jo’s name never came up in his testimony and there was no mention of Jo Jo in connection with the Morales murder in Maxson’s extensive debrief. Chris Chaney began his cross-examination of Maxson at a deliberate, methodical pace. He asked about the Avenues organization chart and if it was accurate. Maxson stated that it appeared everybody was in the right spot. Chaney’s job was to sever whatever connections his client, Gerardo Reyes, had with Maxson and to cast doubt in the jury’s mind about the veracity of Maxson’s information on Reyes. That line of questioning got Chaney nowhere. Maxson was never all that tight with Reyes. He stated that he was a lot closer to Jo Jo Rodriguez than to either Reyes or Trooper Ramirez. Then Chaney directed the exchange to the time that Maxson spent as a fugitive in Mexico and why he returned to the US and turned himself in: “In Mexico, were you running out of money?” Maxson said he was. “And the business you knew best,” Chaney continued, “was tax collection?” Maxson again said yes. Chaney then took Maxson over his agreement with the US Attorney in exchange for his testimony. Maxson was asked, “It’s possible that somebody could be a snitch against you sometime down the line?” Maxson said it was possible. Chaney then asked, “It’s to your benefit, then, that if somebody names you, you’ve already stepped in there first and made the deals?” Maxson said, “I made only one deal. That’s the paper I signed.” The paper was with the Federal authorities; it only obligated him to testify if ordered to by the US Attorney. As it stood at the time of this trial, Maxson had volunteered his testimony and was already free on probation. By the end of his cross-examination, all Chaney had done was try to make Maxson look like a guy who’d turn in anybody to save himself from prison. It hadn’t worked. If Maxson was lying about his meeting with Vidales on the night of the murder, his conversation with Reyes after the Mo-

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rales killing, and his phone conversation with Marquez, he could just have easily have made up a lie about Rodriguez and implicated him in the murder. As close as he was to the events swirling in Avenues at the time, all Maxson was able to give Manzella was circumstantial evidence. He had no firsthand knowledge of what happened on the ride out to Remstoy Street or of the actual shooting. Next up to cross-examine Maxson was Mike Shannon. Because Maxson hadn’t implicated Shannon’s client, Randy Rodriguez, in the murder, Shannon’s cross-examination was brief. He went over matters that had been covered by White and Chaney. The only new area was the fact that Maxson and Rodriguez had known each other since childhood. At one point Maxson called him his “closest homeboy.” Maxson also stated that while he was friendly with Javy Marquez, he was much closer to Marquez’s brother Anthony “Trigger” Marquez. Anthony Marquez had been killed in a shootout with a rival gang years earlier, the event that some say put Javy on a mad track of revenge and violence. Shannon asked how Javy could run a crew from jail. Maxson stated that he did it the same way Alex ran Avenues from prison: through calls to burnout phones, letters, and jail visits. Shannon produced documentation of an interview that Teague had conducted with Maxson while Maxson was still in Federal custody. In that interview Maxson stated to Teague that Javy Marquez passed the order to kill Morales through his sister Maria. He also said that he’d heard that Maria provided Reyes, her former husband, the gun with which to kill Morales. Later in the interview with Teague, Maxson also said that he’d heard that all of Drew Street wanted Morales killed for accidentally shooting Trippy Gonzales. Shannon made it clear that plenty of people in Avenues wanted Morales dead. He made it sound plausible that Morales could have been killed by people close to Trippy Gonzales. After an hour of cross-examination, Manzella stepped up for the re-direct. In a brief but pointed series of questions, Manzella dispelled some of the notions that were hanging in the air. Manzella asked, “Why did you plead guilty in the Federal case before you even read the discovery against

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you?” Maxson answered, “Because I was tired of it. I was over being with the Mexican Mafia, the Avenues, and everything.” Then, “Why did you wear a shirt and tie in court today?” Maxson said, “Out of respect.” Manzella asked about Maxson’s debrief. “Did you tell the FBI everything you heard, even if it was second-, third-, and fourth-hand information?” Maxson said yes. After this quick re-direct, Michael White stepped in for another round at Maxson. White asked, “Are you getting any benefit by testifying in this trial?” Maxson said he wasn’t. “So you’re up here merely as a good citizen?” Maxson answered, “Yes.” White then asked, “Would charges be filed if you refused to testify in this trial?” Maxson said, “I never thought about it. Anything would be possible, I guess.” After a few more questions, Maxson stated with more than a little conviction, “When I decided to cooperate, I cooperated fully. Once I turned myself in, it was over for me. I was through.” For all intents and purposes, the trial ended right there at the termination of the afternoon session of September 25, 2003. There was another day of testimony, but most of it was refining certain points and the reading of the interview that Ramirez gave Andy Teague and Tony Manzella in May 2001. Detective James King, who was also present at that interview, took the stand to answer questions about Ramirez’s statements. In that interview, Ramirez never told Teague and Manzella that he’d been asked to kill Morales to earn stripes. Ramirez implicated Rodriguez sometime after that interview. It was the defense contention since the start of the trial that Ramirez only implicated Rodriguez to get even with him for driving Ramirez out of the neighborhood and sending people to kill him. In the normal course of events, Teague would have been called to the stand as a witness. But on June, 25, 2003, almost three months before the start of this trial, Andy Teague and his partner Detective Abiel Barron had a horrific head-on collision on a two-lane desert road while they were on their way to interview a witness in this case. The driver of a pickup truck tried to make an insane pass and crashed into Teague and Barron’s car. Barron was killed instantly and Teague suffered severe head trauma. The driver of the pickup walked away with minor injuries. Teague was close to death when he was brought to the emergency room and for several days it ap-

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peared that he wouldn’t survive. He was put into a drug-induced coma for a month to reduce brain swelling. Aside from Teague’s family, Manzella and Ruth Arvidson were the only non-LAPD personnel allowed to visit him. The department put a twentyfour-hour guard around Teague because they didn’t know if the collision had been an accident or orchestrated by people who wanted to harm him. Ironically, one of the last people to see Barron alive and Teague still healthy was Jimmy Maxson. Teague and Barron had dropped Maxson off at a secure location just before leaving on their errand to the desert. Maxson had fallen asleep early in the evening and woke up just in time to hear the report on the evening news. Minutes later, Maxson got a call from a DA investigator asking if he was okay. The fear was that someone was making a major move to destroy the entire case. Over time Andy Teague recovered, but he was no longer able to function at a high enough level to continue his career. In 2004, he retired for medical reasons. Teague’s accident devastated Manzella and Ruth Arvidson. Since Teague first brought Tony his unfiled cases in 1999, Teague had had almost daily contact with them. They’d spent hundreds of hours together. Now, with Andy gone, they’d lost not only an important part of the case but also a friend. At one point, just before starting the first trial, Manzella said, “If I’d known I was going to lose Andy, I’m not sure I would have gone ahead and filed all the homicides. Andy was one of those rare cops who understood that the case doesn’t end for a detective when the DA files. There’s as much work for a detective after the filing than there is before it. Andy was always there to do the follow up. It was a huge loss.” At 2:14 on the afternoon of September 29, Manzella began his final argument. He described the legal definition of premeditation by saying that it’s like stepping off the sidewalk and seeing the light turn red: If you make a decision to go ahead and cross on the red, that’s premeditation. The law does not require a long period of deliberation. If you decide to do one thing after considering not doing it, it’s premeditation, even if only a matter of a few seconds. Next he described the difference between direct and circumstantial ev-

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idence. Direct evidence, he said, comes from an eyewitness to a crime. He described circumstantial evidence with the example of a person walking into your house in wet clothes. From the wet clothes you can infer that it’s raining outside. There may be other reasons the clothes are wet; the question is whether those other possibilities are reasonable or unreasonable. In considering circumstantial evidence, the jury is required to consider all the possibilities, but it must go in favor of the reasonable one. Morales’s murder was premeditated because the killers took him to a remote location and also got him drunk. During the autopsy, his blood alcohol level was 0.10, well over California’s legal limit of 0.08. He was killed with a firearm, a weapon that is more likely to kill than a knife or a club. Morales was shot six times in the head, most of the shots from close range. Although only Reyes pulled the trigger, Rodriguez and Vidales were equally guilty because they aided and abetted the homicide—even though Rodriguez was not at the crime scene and Vidales was. Rodriguez took part in the planning and relayed the orders from Marquez to Reyes. The defense, Manzella argued, had no defense. All they could do was attack the credibility of the informants, Maxson and Ramirez. Manzella used another analogy about a drunk man looking for his keys under a lamppost because that’s the only place where there’s light. He told the jury that they should believe Ramirez and Maxson because the prosecution had no hold over them. Maxson had not been ordered by the US Attorney to testify in this case. Ramirez still had to serve the remainder of his eleven-year sentence. His testimony got him no time off. Debbie Ramos, the eyewitness to the van taking off after the shooting, had no connection to any of the defendants or witnesses. If the red van she saw was not Diana Demetrio’s van, it had to be an astonishing coincidence. Manzella asked for the jury to return verdicts of first-degree murder for each of the defendants. He also asked that they find true that a witness had been killed, that Reyes personally used a gun, and that Jo Jo Rodriguez and George Vidales were principals in the commission of the murder. His last sentence to the jury was, “It is not humanly possible for these three defendants to be innocent of this crime.” At the next court date, the defense lawyers made their final arguments.

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They concentrated on the motivation of the two witnesses and the lack of direct evidence. Ramirez wanted revenge against Rodriguez for firing him from his job of tax collector. The defense, however, didn’t go into the subject of Rodriguez trying to have Ramirez killed. And Maxson was still working off his Federal case, a case that could have landed him in Federal prison for life, just like Alex Aguirre. They also touched on the fact that even if Maxson was telling the truth, he hadn’t seen Rodriguez in the van and nowhere in his testimony was there any direct or circumstantial evidence to connect Rodriguez to the Morales murder. Debbie Ramos saw men with shaved heads in the van. It was proven through a police booking photo that Vidales could not have had a shaved head on the night of the murder. A few days after the jury was instructed and given the case, it returned with a verdict. The jury found Randy “Jo Jo” Rodriguez not guilty of the murder of Randy Morales. The jury could not come to a unanimous decision on the guilt or innocence of Vidales and Reyes. They hung on those two defendants. Rodriguez was released from custody the day the verdict was read. Vidales and Reyes went back into custody. Manzella took the defeat as part of the job. He wasn’t particularly confident in the jury from the beginning. Although Maxson had made a respectable presence on the stand, Ramirez didn’t do much for the case. He’d gotten himself tattooed with gang insignia even after deciding to debrief, something that observers and probably the jury found puzzling. What probably did the most damage to the case against Rodriguez was the fact that Ramirez hadn’t implicated Rodriguez in the interview he gave to Teague and Manzella in 2001. He’d named Rodriguez well after that interview. After almost four years of preparation, Tony Manzella, Ruth Arvidson, and Northeast detectives had to get themselves motivated to do it all over again. Manzella began feeling mild pressure to just get on with it and come to some kind of plea agreement. He hates pleas. When he’s in a fight, he’s in it to win. “It’s all or nothing,” he said after the verdict. “Next time we’ll do a better job with the jury.”

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C H A P TE R TWE L VE

H ow L os A ngeles outsourced its drug rehab programs TO the Mexican M afia AND L a C osa N O S T R A

T

he taxation initiative and Sureno movement of 1992

wasn’t the first major move the Mexican Mafia had made outside the prison system. One of its most notorious attempts was made in 1977. Law enforcement has different opinions of which Eme member first floated the idea of infiltrating drug rehabilitation centers. Some say it was Cheyenne Cadena. Others claim that it was Joe “Cocoliso” Morgan, the man that many erroneously call the “Godfather” of the Mexican Mafia. Morgan, who was of Hungarian extraction, grew up among Hispanics in East Los Angeles and very early in his life completely absorbed the 171

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lifestyle, attitudes, and language of the East LA Hispanic street gangsters. He spoke Spanish better than some of the American-born Hispanics and eventually became a legendary figure in the Eme, a man who carried a lot of weight with the brothers. He was bright, shrewd, and secretive. Morgan always had more than a few deals going on simultaneously; like the secret cells of any covert organization, he compartmentalized his business so that none of the people he was doing business with knew about the others. Unlike later generations of Emeros who spent as much time fighting among themselves as they did with outsiders, Morgan was an organization man who felt that internal politics were divisive, enervating, and too easily monitored by law enforcement. Politicking made the Eme easier to penetrate. Whoever it was that issued the directive, by the early to mid-1970s, Eme brothers and Associates on the streets began targeting dozens of drug rehab centers, halfway houses, and gang intervention programs that were being funded by local and Federal agencies in response to the riots and social activism of the late 1960s. This was at a time when the Black Panthers were considered a legitimate social group that could address and solve the grievances of oppressed black minorities. That same aura of legitimacy was also extended to other miscreants who claimed to be victims of oppression and racism. True to the politics of the time, men behind bars portrayed themselves not as criminals, but as symptoms of a social order badly in need of rearrangement. They were political prisoners, not criminals. The political climate was ripe for exploitation by individuals and groups who saw a way of making money by playing on the guilt of what used to be called the Establishment. According to intelligence reports that have long been buried in the archives and garages of retired police officers, Cheyenne Cadena was probably the first to make a move into the drug rehab business. He beat Joe Morgan’s launch into program scams by a few years. At the time of this mass infiltration of drug and inmate programs, the Mexican Mafia didn’t even appear on law enforcement radar, let in alone the public consciousness. The few cops who’d heard rumors about the Eme dismissed outright the possibility that the group had any street influence.

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As J. Edgar Hoover demonstrated in his decades-long insistence that there was no such thing as La Cosa Nostra, law enforcement can often be remarkably blind in its assessment of criminal threats to society. Through a paroled Eme member, Cheyenne Cadena managed to infiltrate the National Institute of Mental Health’s SPAN (Special Program for Alcoholism and Narcotics) program in Southern California. An Eme member was able to work his way up in SPAN until he was in charge of hiring counselors, inducting clients, and appointing “detached workers.” The mood of the time, some of which persists to this day, is that the best way to reach an addict or a paroled criminal is through someone who has shared his life experience. It’s a concept that still has the power to seduce the well-intentioned and gullible. The problem with many of the programs at the time was that there was virtually no oversight. Public money was doled out to program directors and scrutiny of the program, if any, stopped when the check was cashed. It was like Dracula running the blood bank. After SPAN, Cadena associates successfully infiltrated another program called LUCHA, the League of United Citizens to Help Addicts. According to a 1977 LASD document used to train gang cops, infiltrating drug programs accomplished four major goals of the Mexican Mafia. One, these programs could and did lobby the CDC for early release of drug offenders. Naturally, with Eme operatives in charge of the programs, petitions for early release were made on behalf its members. Two, the programs could provide the released inmates with perfect cover jobs that would put them in close contact with drug users and dealers. Third, the detached workers and counselors could move easily through the streets as part of their work and monitor the flow and distribution of narcotics. Fourth, program workers facilitated communication with prison inmates. In February of 1977, the lid blew off on the program scam and for the first time in its history, the black shroud of secrecy was lifted off the Mexican Mafia. In the early morning of February 16, 1977, a farmer driving to his fields came across the body of a white female lying in a ditch along Elkhorn Boulevard, eight miles from the Sacramento Airport. Another farmer who

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lived nearby had heard what he believed to be gunshots sometime around 10:30 PM the previous night. The first responders discovered that the woman had been shot in the head and the back. It took Sacramento police a day to identify the victim through fingerprints. She was identified initially as thirty-five-year-old Ellen Anne Weatherford, whose last known address was in Pasadena, the famous Rose Parade town just east of Los Angeles. The first bits of information the local cops pulled together inidcated that she’d worked as a program analyst for the City of San Diego and that she was involved in a drug rehabilitation program in Los Angeles. In San Diego, she used the last name Jacobs, as well as her maiden name, Levitt. The day after the initial ID, she was identified as Ellen Delia. Sacramento cops released information to the press that she had departed on a Western Airlines flight from Los Angeles and landed in Sacramento at 10:14 PM the night of her murder. They surmised that she either met someone she knew at the airport or that she’d been snatched out of the airport, driven eight miles to the field, and then shot. She had a twelve-year-old daughter and a husband, Michael Delia, in Los Angeles. Days later, Sacramento investigators discovered that she hadn’t made hotel reservations in the area and decided she may have been met by someone she knew. Ellen Delia, born Levitt, led a nomadic life. She drifted all over California working clerical and office jobs. Her résumé listed a BA from Antioch College and a Master’s from New York University. Neither school ever had her on its roster. She was inventing herself. When she had enough money, she and her daughter would rent a cabin in Point Arena on the Mendocino Coast and drop out of society for months at a time. In 1965, Ellen had a near-fatal car crash in the San Francisco Area that severely injured her spine, legs, and hips. During her recovery, she became addicted to codeine for the chronic pain she would suffer the rest of her life. In a job application she filled out in 1971, she admitted to having been addicted to pain killers, but claimed not to have used any since 1968. On June 31, 1971, however, she was arrested for shoplifting tranquilizers and pain-

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killers with codeine from a pharmacy in the West San Fernando Valley. She used one of her many aliases when she was arrested. Despite her drug dependence, physical pain, and the burden of singlehandedly providing for a young daughter, Ellen Delia persevered and prospered. She discovered that she had a talent for writing grant applications. She was hired on a project basis for a number of private charities as well as municipalities all over California. She even worked for several police departments and for the Veteran’s Administration when they went looking for Federal grants. She taught herself to find the places where the government was handing out money and developed a skill for obtaining it. In an LA Times article written about her life and death, one grant recipient was quoted as saying, “When she walked through the door, it was like money in the bank.” For the Narcotics Prevention Project, she was able to obtain $1.4 million in funding. For the Community Concern Corporation (CCC), a program for ex-convicts run by Rafael “Chispas” Sandoval, a Mexican Mafia Associate, she got $301,000 in funding. Then in 1975, she was asked by Michael Delia, a convicted bank robber, to write grant proposals for an organization he was starting called the Get Going Project. Her writing and social skills were rewarded by a grant of $362,000 from several government agencies. In the application Ellen Delia described Get Going as “a halfway house for men based on the ‘therapeutic community’ treatment approach. The program is geared to assist the exsubstance abuser/ex-offender in reconstructing his life-style. The focus is on reorienting the client so that at the time of his reentry into the community, he is employed, drug-free, sober, and is leading a responsible, productive life so that he can GET GOING.” Soon after going to work for Michael Delia, Ellen and Michael were married. In addition to Ellen Delia’s skills as a grant proposal writer, Michael Delia’s political connections helped ease the launch of Get Going. For the first eight months of its existence, Get Going was housed in a spare storage room in the offices of State Senator Alex P. Garcia, a Democrat whose district in-

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cluded East LA. Garcia was introduced to Michael Delia by one of Garcia’s political supporters, Robert M. Lewis, a construction company owner from El Monte. Garcia stated years later that he met Lewis in a downtown bar and they struck up a friendship. Lewis organized fundraisers and worked his way into Garcia’s confidence. Garcia often referred to Lewis as his Special Assistant, an unpaid staff position. The fact that Michael Delia was a convicted bank robber probably impressed Garcia more than if Delia had been a social worker or civil rights activist. Here was a guy who seemed genuine in his attempt to get his life turned around and intent on helping other ex-convicts and drug addicts. Besides, there was a lot of government money up for grabs and Garcia saw Delia’s enthusiasm as a way to help constituents in East Los Angeles. Years later, Garcia tried to distance himself from Delia, but the facts are inescapable. Garcia and Delia were close associates—so close that Delia’s home address on his driver’s license was actually the address of Garcia’s senatorial office on Broadway. In addition, two of Garcia’s aides were on Get Going’s Board of Directors. After the grant money came through with help from Ellen Anne Delia’s proposal and Garcia’s political muscle, Get Going moved into a former hospital at 127 South Utah Street in East Los Angeles, a few blocks from where Father Gregory Boyle would, years later, become Pastor of Dolores Mission and establish his Homeboy Industries. With the support of Senator Garcia and other state and local politicians, Get Going became a well-publicized model program. It was the sort of thing politicians and activists called “innovative” because former criminals were controlling their own destinies and helping recent parolees and drug addicts get on their feet and pointed towards a productive life, just as Ellen Delia promised in the grant proposal. If the phrase had been current at the time, Get Going Project would have been heralded as “outside the box” thinking. If anyone had bothered to check, he would have found much to be troubled about. For one, Michael Delia, Sr., Michael’s father, was put on the payroll. According to the investigations launched after Ellen Delia’s murder, it was

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discovered that Delia, Sr. was an associate of Cosa Nostra members Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno, Mike Rizitello, and Jimmy Coppola. All three Italians were members of the Joey Gallo crime family and were apparently tasked with conducting drug and welfare fraud operations on the West Coast. More interesting was that Delia, Sr. was at one time in prison with Joe Morgan and had developed a relationship in Morgan’s favorite business activity—heroin trafficking. It was apparent much later that through Michael Senior’s association with Morgan, Michael, Jr., hired Alfredo “Alfie” Sosa, a known Mexican Mafia member and associate of Morgan, as a drug counselor at Get Going. The address on Sosa’s California driver’s license listed the 127 South Utah Street Get Going address as his residence. Almost from the launch of Get Going in 1975 until Ellen Delia’s murder in 1977, Michael, Jr., and Ellen began to drift apart. With Sosa occasionally living at Get Going and Michael Delia’s change of residence to Monterey, Ellen began an affair with Alfie Sosa, an arrangement Michael didn’t seem to mind. Within weeks of Get Going moving into the South Utah Street location, people living around the halfway house began to wonder what exactly was going on with the much publicized program. Residents of the Aliso Village Housing Project, one of the largest low income housing projects ever built in Los Angeles, became increasingly concerned by the presence of the halfway house. Neighbors noticed that Get Going “clients” were drunk in public, nodding out on heroin right on the property and the sidewalk, or openly sniffing glue and aerosol chemicals. Nearby apartments were being broken into and burglarized and women were routinely accosted and molested by intoxicated men living at the location. In an article published in the LA Times on April 2, 1977, Don Hyde, an elected member of the Aliso Village governing body, complained that four women and a man had been knifed and robbed by men from the house. He also said that he’d been threatened by people in the house after complaining to Senator Garcia. Hyde’s daughter had been stopped on her way home from school and told, “If your father doesn’t back off, we’re going to blow up your house.”

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When Hyde had another meeting with Senator Garcia and his crony Robert M. Lewis about the problems with Delia’s halfway house, Hyde said that Garcia told him, “You’re going to have this halfway house here whether you like it or not.” While Garcia dismissed Hyde’s accusation by saying that Hyde wanted the location on South Utah for his own drug project, he couldn’t dismiss the complaints of Father Walter D’heedene, one of Father Greg Boyle’s predecessors as Pastor of Dolores Mission. D’heedene said that he was punched and beaten up by a man from the halfway house after the priest hesitated in the assailant’s demand for money. Sister Maribeth Larkin, a nun at Dolores Mission, said that when the project was first proposed, they were told by Senator Garcia that the center would provide free food and a youth center with children’s programs. None of it was delivered, and she said that they were “terrorizing the residents.” Even after these complaints, Garcia continued to support Get Going by lobbying the LA City Council to keep permitting the halfway house a zoning variance to allow it to continue operations. The public intoxication and knifings were only the outer manifestation of the corruption rampant at the project. Robert M. Lewis was collecting checks as a Get Going employee and endorsing them back to Michael Delia, Jr. Taking a page out of the Cosa Nostra playbook, Delia created “ghost jobs” and wrote checks to people who either didn’t exist or were Eme members who’d never set foot in the house. One of the people he wrote checks to was a wanted fugitive. An appalled social worker who spent a few weeks at the house told investigators that half the employees at Get Going were openly involved in selling drugs and using Get Going cars to pick up and deliver heroin all over California. Non-drug-users from the neighborhood were paid to provide clean urine samples which were submitted by users who were there as clients. Get Going was turning into a combination of shooting gallery, money scam, drug distribution center, and Mexican Mafia rec room. All of it was financed by tax money. It could be argued that State Senator Garcia should have known what

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was happening with the program he helped create. He heard plenty of complaints and the evidence was right there if he cared to drive by and see people nodding out right on the property. Instead of admonishing Delia to clean up his act, Garcia instead went on the offensive against the critics. The Get Going scam really began to unravel on January 15, 1977, when Robert M. Lewis, Senator Garcia’s trusted confidante and unpaid special assistant, was found murdered in his car on Allesandro Road in Echo Park. He’d been shot multiple times in the head. On January 22, 1977, Alfredo Jimenez, a resident at Get Going, was found shot to death in an overgrown lot in East Los Angeles. A month later, Ysidro Trujillo, a client/counselor/resident at Get Going, was discovered in a shallow grave in the high desert of Lancaster, California. Trujillo’s grave was located 200 yards from property owned by Michael Delia, Sr. Like Ellen Delia and Robert M. Lewis, Trujillo had been shot in the head repeatedly. These events finally forced Ellen Delia to take a hard look at what was happening to her beloved program. Prior to the murder of Lewis, she had apparently collected enough paperwork and evidence to prove to herself that Michael Delia was running the place like a drug bazaar and writing checks to people she’d never seen or heard of. Sometime in early February she called Bill Harris, the Community Programs Manager for the Federal Bureau of Prisons who’d approved a $50,000 grant for Get Going, and told him, “I’ve got the stuff and I’m taking it to Sacramento.” Soon after her talk with Harris she made a call to Mario Obledo, State Secretary of Health and Welfare Services. She told him that she had some information about fraud and abuse at Get Going and she asked to meet him in Sacramento. The appointment was for the day she was murdered. The briefcase full of evidence she took to Sacramento on the Western Airlines flight was never recovered. A week after Delia’s murder, law enforcement in Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Monterey Park (where Michael Delia was living) began sharing information and putting together the picture. LAPD Commander Ray Ruddell, who was in charge of the Los Angeles end of the Delia murder, stated that

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there were as many as twenty murders whose common thread was gang activity aimed at persons connected to state- and federally-funded community projects in East Los Angeles. Senator Garcia, the central public figure in the unfolding scandal, stated that Ellen Delia was only an acquaintance he’d known casually for less than a year. When Garcia was confronted with a report that he’d recently had dinner with Robert Lewis, Mike Rizitello, and Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno, Garcia admitted that he’d had dinner twice with Lewis and Rizitello. Rizitello wanted Garcia to arrange a pardon because he’d been convicted for armed robberies. When asked if Jimmy Fratianno had been at those dinner meetings, Garcia stated, “I think I might have met him but I don’t recall.” According to law enforcement at the time, Rizitello wanted a pardon that would expunge his record because he was getting ready to launch an operation similar to Michael Delia’s. He wanted a clean slate to ensure he’d qualify for private grants and Federal and local dollars. Two people emerged as prime suspects in Ellen Delia’s murder: Michael Delia and Alfie Sosa. On February 20, 1977, Sosa was arrested in Monterey Park outside Delia’s home for possession of a handgun. As a convicted felon on Federal probation, he wasn’t permitted to possess firearms. Michael Delia posted the $5,000 bail for Sosa, after which Sosa quickly decamped to Mexico. When Sosa was arrested on the gun possession charge, Monterey Park Police hadn’t been made aware that there was an arrest warrant issued for him by the Fresno PD. He was a suspect in the murder of Gilbert Roybal, an Eme Associate who’d been shot execution-style on February 1, 1977, two weeks before Sosa pulled the trigger on his lover, Ellen Delia. In 1977, computers and cross-referenced criminal databases hadn’t yet been invented. Warrant searches were done by hand through paper files and a clerk had apparently missed the warrant. Two other suspects in the Roybal murder were Robert “Robot” Salas and Manuel “Tati” Torres, two figures who would in time rise to prominence in the Mexican Mafia. Salas would die of natural causes twenty years later. Torres would be killed by fellow Eme members in 2006 while in custody at the Federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.

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Sosa was eventually arrested by Mexican Police and confessed to being the trigger man in Ellen Delia’s homicide as well as to shooting and killing Gilbert Roybal. As the murders and ensuing investigation began to receive press attention, it was clear that the media and the police at the time hadn’t quite reconciled themselves to the existence of the Mexican Mafia. It was all new to them. The print media referred to the Eme as “the so-called Mexican Mafia” or “a Mexican mafia-like prison gang.” Daryl Gates, at the time the Assistant Police Chief of the LAPD, said that Delia and others had “associations with ex-convicts and others who call themselves the Mexican Mafia.” Even Gates wasn’t sure if the Eme existed. In fact, only a small handful of individuals in law enforcement had any personal knowledge of or experience with this prison-based gang at the time. It would be years before the existence of the Eme entered public awareness. LA City Councilmnan Art Snyder immediately called for a Grand Jury investigation into drug rehab programs and launched a campaign to de-fund every drug and ex-offender program that was in any way tainted by corruption. As a result, Snyder received numerous death threats and his campaign office was shot up in a drive-by. Snyder had to be protected by twenty-fourhour LAPD bodyguard detail. At the time, the State and Federal governments were distributing $48 million a year in LA County to a host of mostly private programs like the one Michael Delia was running. A lot of big homies were making a lot of money courtesy of politicians who didn’t care where the cash went as long as they were seen “doing something” about the drug and crime problems. Snyder started dismantling that source of income and naturally the homies and La Cosa Nostra were upset. Michael Delia was arrested on March 3, 1977, for possession of a .38 caliber automatic and two balloons of heroin. Although he was under suspicion, there wasn’t enough evidence at the time to arrest him for the conspiracy to murder his wife. He posted $7,500 in bail and was freed. In a public statement outside the courthouse when he was released, he denied there was such a thing as the Mexican Mafia. He had to, of course. He also accused the Special Services Unit of the California Department of Corrections of orches-

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trating his wife’s murder and framing him and his associates for it because he was in the business of helping ex-convicts. “They put Jesus Christ on the cross,” Delia said, “and they put me there for helping people.” Among the other five people arrested with Delia for various crimes involving Get Going and other programs were Manuel “Rocky” Luna and Raymond “Huero Shy” Shryock. Almost twenty years later, Luna was killed in Big Hazard, allegedly for acting as a consultant to the producers of American Me. Shryock was eventually rolled up as one of the defendants in the first Federal RICO case in 1995, the same case that indicted Alex Aguirre and sent both of them to Federal prison for life. In 1982, Alfie Sosa was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for Ellen Delia’s murder. By that time, the media and law enforcement had finally gotten wise to the existence of the Eme. The “so-called” label on the term Mexican Mafia had been dropped and the media began using terms like Eme soldier and Carnal. On March 31, 1977, Michael Delia was arrested for the murder of Robert Lewis and Ysidro Trujillo. In time, he was charged by the Sacramento District Attorney for the murder of his estranged wife. The strongest evidence against Delia had been suppressed by the court because of mistakes made in the search and seizure of Delia’s car and residence. Everything stemming from the search was deemed inadmissible and this severely weakened the prosecution’s case. Michael Delia’s journey through the justice system lasted seven years, most of it spent in LA County Jail waiting for trial. After seven years of legal wrangling, the prosecution and Delia’s lawyer decided on a plea bargain. In March 1984, Delia pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for the killing of his wife in exchange for an eight-year prison term. On April 13, 1984, he pleaded again to second-degree murder in exchange for an eightyear term for killing Robert M. Lewis and for participating in the murder of Ysidro Trujillo. Part of the agreement was that all three sentences were to be served concurrently rather than consecutively. Having already spent over seven years in custody, Michael Delia was almost immediately eligible for parole.

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On the evening of June 2, 1984, Michael Delia was released from LA County Jail. Ellen Delia’s murder was only the most visible example of gang and Eme infiltration of seemingly well-intentioned programs. Countless other minor and major community centers, self-help groups, and outreach programs had been corrupted by criminals. Youth centers set up to provide recreation, job placement help, and day care in Hispanic neighborhoods were taken over by the strongest local gang and turned into the gang clubhouse. Young people who genuinely wanted and needed help were intimidated and threatened to stay away. Sports equipment, stereo systems, desks, and even the plumbing was stolen and sold for drugs. Day care facilities that were created to care for children of women looking for or going to work were overloaded by single moms with gang affiliations. They parked their kids at the center and spent the day partying with their homeboys or getting involved in crime. Once the centers deteriorated and required not only more money but also constant police presence, they devolved from public facilities into public nuisances. Unlike the infiltration of the Eme into drug programs, the takeover of community facilities and public parks by gangs was not a conscious policy. It happened naturally over time in neighborhoods with a heavy gang presence. Almost three decades after the Get Going scandal and similar scandals in other programs, there are voices calling for another try at this failed approach of legitimizing criminal groups to act as agents of intervention. In one community, the local police has been told to cooperate with a certain reformed gangster whenever a gang shooting or gang violence occurs. Officers responding to a gang-related incident are instructed to call this individual and brief him fully on the details. The point of this exercise is for this individual to contact the warring parties or gangs and, by mediation, try to avoid retaliation and further bloodshed. While avoiding further violence sounds commendable on the face of it, the unintended consequence is that violent young gangsters can literally get away with murder. Once the shooters find out from a “mediator” what the police know about an incident, they can arrange elaborate, robust alibis.

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In some cases, in order to maintain the confidence of gangsters and not be thought of as snitches, the mediators themselves provide alibis. Out of the necessity to maintain their street credibility, these mediators end up becoming aiders and abettors to crime. Street cops responding to crimes are put in the unhappy position of knowing that what they’ve been ordered by their superiors to relate to the mediators is probably going to reach the culprits before the end of their shift. Another unintended consequence of empowering reformed gangsters to become gang intervention workers is the possibility of this becoming a career path. The only qualification many of these intervention mediators have is a background in criminal behavior. The reason activists and some sociologists like former gangsters in intervention work is that they supposedly have the respect and admiration of young gangsters. It is entirely possible that young wannabes could see gang intervention work as a future occupation. But to get there, they need street credentials. Instead of breaking the cycle of criminality, the practice of hiring former gangsters, no matter how noble its intentions, might actually increase it. In more recent times, Hector Marroquin, a self-described reformed gangster was given a large grant to run an intervention program called No Guns. Even though law enforcement officials had evidence that this group been infiltrated and corrupted, Marroquin continued to receive grant money. In 2006, Marroquin was arrested and released for illegally being in possession of handguns. His son, who allegedly worked at No Guns, was arrested for a home invasion robbery. Soon after, Marroquin himself was shot by an assassination squad that law enforcement believes was sent by the Mexican Mafia. The theory is that Marroquin wasn’t paying up to the satisfaction of the big homies and they decided to put him permanently out of business. Marroquin survived the attack but he soon lost the funding after law enforcement found evidence that a murder had been committed right in the No Guns offices. As a result of this incident, other programs run by reformed gangsters have come under scrutiny. The confidence Senator Garcia had in a “reformed” bank robber is a blazing example of political folly. In an irrational leap of faith, smart, well-in-

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tentioned politicians outsourced almost all of LA’s gang intervention, drug rehab, and convict transition programs to the Mexican Mafia and to associates of the Cosa Nostra. During Get Going’s reign of terror over Aliso Village residents, one victim complained to Senator Garcia that they went to work and obeyed the law, but it was the criminals on South Utah Street that were getting all the government money. He wanted to know: “Where’s our reward?”

“This guy is the reason I hate lawyers.” — DDA Tony Manzella

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C H A P TE R T H I R TEEN

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y early April of 2004, Tony and Ruth were ready to go

again on the prosecution of Gerardo Reyes and George Vidales. Randy Rodriguez was acquitted and released from County Jail and refused to talk to anyone about his case. Although he was found not guilty of the Morales homicide, his defense attorney, Michael Shannon, counseled him that there was no knowing what other allegations might be brought against him. He may not have been implicated in killing Morales, but it was clear that Rodriguez had for years been a close associate of Alex Aguirre. There were still a number of unfiled cases in Northeast’s murder book cabinet and only the homicide cops knew what names they contained. 187

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When faced with a retrial with the same set of circumstantial evidence and the same cast of witnesses, most DAs would have taken the loss and gone for a plea agreement on the remaining two defendants. It wasn’t in Manzella’s nature to let the case go that way. There were a number of factors at work that drove him to seek a second trial. The overriding one was that he knew in his bones Reyes and Vidales were guilty. Manzella was also facing retirement. In two years, he’d be leaving the DA’s office and he didn’t want to end his career by breaking his personal code of never settling for a plea if there were even the slightest chance of getting a conviction. He also felt he owed it to Andy Teague to settle the outcome by battle rather than by decree. Manzella devoted a lot of time with this round of jury questionnaires. He was determined to get at the very least an open-minded jury. After a week of jury selection, the prosecution and defense had a jury both parties could live with. In one of those wild flukes for which no law school could prepare you, Manzella was confronted with a jury crisis. Soon after the jury was picked and the trial began, an LAPD officer testifying in a courtroom across the hall spotted one of Tony’s jurors coming out of Judge Fidler’s courtroom. This cop knew the juror; he also knew Detective John Berdin and asked him what the man was doing there. Berdin told him he was a juror in Manzella’s case. The cop told Berdin that the juror had had fourteen years on the job and had been an LAPD Sergeant, but had been demoted and punished for sexually harassing a female officer. A few years later, he’d harassed another female cop, had been fired from the force, and had forfeit his pension. The juror never mentioned any of this when he filled out his jury questionnaire. Had he mentioned it, the prosecution and the defense would probably have dismissed him. It was clear that the disgraced cop wanted to be on the jury for reasons other than the pursuit of justice. Berdin told Manzella this juror’s background. Manzella realized he had to get this juror out, but he didn’t want to make a big issue out of it. If he made a formal motion to dismiss him, the defense might put up a fight or even succeed in keeping him. What Manzella did was to get the juror’s personnel record from the LAPD

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and place it in the case file. Prior to the start of testimony, while the prosecution and defense were waiting for Judge Fidler to enter and begin the court day, Manzella casually mentioned to White and Chaney that he was putting this juror’s LAPD personnel file in the case file and left it at that. The defense barely took notice of it. A minute later, in a voice loud enough to be heard by Chaney and White, Ruth asked Tony, “Aren’t you going to tell them what’s in the file?” Manzella pretended he forgot to mention the contents. “Oh, yeah, I guess I have to tell you this. This juror was thrown off the force for sexual harassment, but it’s no big deal to us—but I figure you need to know that in case I get a conviction and you appeal it on the basis of a prejudicial juror. So I’m telling you just so you know.” Manzella’s casual mention made it appear that he wasn’t concerned. It was just a formality. A few minutes later, when Judge Fidler entered, both defense attorneys made a motion to dismiss this juror. Judge Fidler asked if the prosecution had any objection. Manzella pretended that it didn’t matter to him one way or the other, but that if it made the proceedings more just and fair, he was okay with it. The juror was dismissed and Manzella avoided a potentially hostile juror. At that day’s lunch break, Chris Chaney said to Ruth, “You know, I think we got played. We shouldn’t have let that juror go.” It was too late. Manzella got his way by making the defense think it was their idea. The rest of the second trial against Vidales and Reyes was almost a carbon copy of the first, except that Randy Rodriguez and his defense counsel Mike Shannon were gone. Manzella opened this trial the same way he did the first one. He covered the murder of the Sanchez brothers at the hands of Javy Marquez. He went over the interview that Randy Morales had given to the LAPD, in which he implicated Marquez in the Sanchez murders, and the subsequent disclosure of that interview to Marquez’s defense attorney. He stated the prosecution’s contention that Reyes had been asked by his former brother-in-law, Javy Marquez, to take care of Muppet because he was a rat. Manzella then connected Diana Demetrio’s red van that Reyes, Vidales, and probably others used to drive Morales to the murder location. Over the course of the next ten days, Manzella called the witnesses again:

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Rich Valdemar to talk about the Mexican Mafia and its connection to the Avenues; Debbie Ramos to testify that she saw the red van and four shaven-headed gangster types roaring away from the area where she’d heard gunshots; the coroner; the firearms analyst, and then Gerry Ramirez and Jimmy Maxson to replay their critical testimony. The second trial was déjà vu, and Manzella lost again. This time it was a single juror who held out, a young man who wrote in his jury questionnaire that he was an entertainment lawyer. Ironically, he was one of only two male whites on the jury. The rest were a mixed group of male and female blacks and Hispanics. When Manzella learned that a single juror had hung the jury, he was livid. Ruth Arvidson, the tall, leggy North Dakotan of Norwegian descent took it stoically and watched, bemused, as Tony bounced off the walls cursing like a Marine drill instructor. “This guy,” he said, “is the reason I hate lawyers.” It took Manzella days to peel himself off the wall and spool up the energy to have a third go at Reyes and Vidales. He knew they were guilty. Their lawyers knew they were guilty. Why couldn’t he make a jury see that? There would be even more pressure for Tony to abandon a trial and just go for a plea. But talk like that only made Manzella dig his heels in deeper. “I’ll quit before I plea this one.”

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C H A P TE R F O U R TEEN

“I loved the Avenues. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. You could say I was a hard core gangster.” — Benny “Sleepy” Garcia

W

ith two losses so far in his case, Manzella began to

wonder if he’d miscalculated. He and Ruth spent hours going over their strategy, jury selection criteria, the way they handled the witnesses, and the testimony transcripts, for any signs of mistakes. They were stumped. “We found nothing we would have done differently with the exception of getting the right jury. We had the right jury the second time around with Reyes and Vidales, but there was that one little bastard that held out. I got a call from one of the jurors and, I’ll tell you this, they were all in favor of conviction except this one white kid. He wasn’t going to convict anybody for anything. He had an agenda and the guy slipped right by us.” 191

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The run-up to the trial of Clinton Conroy and Anthony Medina threatened to turn the case into a circus. Anthony “Tonito” Medina was being charged with the murder of Ferdie Olmedo and Carlo Dellosa. Conroy, his co-defendant, who was with Medina at the time of the Dellosa killing, was also charged with the murder. At the time the murders were committed Medina and Conroy were working as dope dealers and runners on Benny “Sleepy” Garcia’s crew. Alex Aguirre had given Garcia parts of Pasadena, Glendale, and Burbank to run, regulate, and collect from for Alex. Technically, this meant that Garcia was working on Eme business, but Garcia never saw himself as Eme. Like Ramirez, Garcia thought of himself as an old-school gangster with ties that were stronger to the neighborhood than to the Mexican Mafia. But he was clever enough to realize that you can’t do business in your own neighborhood without the blessing of the Carnales. When Alex was arrested on his RICO charges, Garcia began taking orders from Randy “Jo Jo” Rodriguez and Richie “Lil Pee Wee” Aguirre, Alex’s precocious younger brother. Garcia wasn’t happy with the arrangement, but it was the only way to stay in business. In 1997, a year after the murders of Dellosa and Olmedo, Garcia himself was charged with multiple crimes including robbery, assault, and kidnapping. He received a light sentence and was paroled. While on parole, Garcia was interviewed by Andy Teague, who knew that Garcia had knowledge of the Dellosa and Olmedo murders. Through the efforts of Teague and Garcia’s parole officer—who threatened to slap Garcia with a violation if he didn’t cooperate with Teague—Garcia told Teague everything he knew about the Dellosa and Olmedo murders, as well as everything else that was going on in Avenues at the time. Garcia agreed to testify against Conroy, Medina, and Richie Aguirre. He was tired of the life and after his parole, he packed it all in and went full-time into his business. Clinton Conroy, who was neither Hispanic nor an Avenues member, met one of Benny Garcia’s brothers, Danny, while they were both working maintenance jobs at the Disney Animation Studios in Burbank. Benny’s brother, a life-long Avenues member and drug dealer, was selling drugs to Disney

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employees and Conroy was a frequent customer. Through that association, Conroy met Benny Garcia, who was actively recruiting people for his dope business. Within a short time, Conroy started working for Benny Garcia and Garcia hooked Conroy up with Anthony Medina as his partner. Unlike a lot of the Avenues members he associated with, Conroy hadn’t grown up with the ambition to become a shotcaller or to work his way to the ranks of the Eme. He was a drug using drifter who went where the dope was cheap and easy to get. Like Jimmy Maxson, Garcia operated on the Alex Aguirre template of maintaining a low profile and staying away from self-defeating violence. Garcia ran his crew in a very businesslike manner. They were expected to dress “casual” and not engage in gang-banging, drive-bys, or violent behavior unrelated to business. Because drug dealing was dangerous, Garcia provided Medina and Conroy with guns, but they were to be used for selfdefense. If there was any enforcement or regulation that needed doing, they were to tell Garcia and he’d take care of it. Tall, well built, and intimidating, Garcia had a reputation for regulating people and forcing their cooperation without resorting to violence. Although Garcia was deeply rooted in Avenues and the drug business, he had a personal agenda that would have surprised his homies. He was ambitious and energetic and had aspirations beyond criminal life. Since he was fourteen, Garcia worked almost daily doing any kind of automotive work that came his way. Even as a youngster, he was talented and spent as much time working on cars as he did working on the streets. His ultimate ambition was to save up enough money and assemble sufficient tools and equipment to set himself up in the automotive repair business. The problem was, Garcia was impatient. He wanted to get there fast, and dope seemed the way to do it. Unfortunately for Garcia and Conroy, Medina was a loose cannon operating under a different set of values. He had the gangster mindset. Everybody knew Medina had a propensity for violence and that his violence didn’t have a throttle—more like a light switch. But he was a homie and Garcia had a genuine affection for him. At the time of the murders, Garcia

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was twenty-eight, Medina was eighteen, and Conroy was nineteen. Garcia’s greater experience in the gang life gave him a lot of authority and his even temperament and generous nature made him a father figure to the people that worked for him. He paid their rent, gave them cash when they were broke, and tried to counsel them on keeping a low profile and staying out of jail. It may have worked on Conroy to some degree, but it was thoroughly lost on Medina. Late on night of November 12, 1995, Conroy and Medina were driving around in a new Nissan 300ZX sports car Benny Garcia had given them. The car was an insurance job, scheduled to be reported stolen in a few weeks. Around midnight, with Conroy behind the wheel, the two found themselves at the intersection of Townsend and Yosemite, a few blocks from Eagle Rock High School. There was a youth center on one corner and a grocery store with a pay phone on the other. The other corners had an apartment building and single-family residences. As they stopped for a red light, Medina saw a young man at the pay phone and he jumped out of the Nissan. The man at the pay phone, Carlo Dellosa, was a Filipino, what Hispanics call a “Chino.” When Dellosa saw Medina approach him with a pistol in his hand, Dellosa took off running in the direction of the apartment building across Yosemite. Medina took a firing stance, took careful aim, and fired twice. Dellosa fell face forward in the middle of the street with a single bullet in the back. One round missed and was recovered from the bodywork of a car across the street. Medina approached him and fired two more rounds into the back of Dellosa’s head, instant kill shots that blew two of Dellosa’s teeth out of his mouth and onto the pavement. Medina then went through Dellosa’s pockets and took a gold necklace and a small amount of cash. He jumped back into the Nissan and Conroy took off down Yosemite. Conroy had to swerve to avoid Dellosa’s body in the middle of the street. Medina had killed Dellosa because he thought Dellosa was a member of a Filipino gang that claimed a few streets in Avenues territory. It was one of those pointless shootings that Garcia had warned them to avoid. They were supposed to be putting in work for the

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Eme and earning money, but this hit didn’t make them a nickel. Medina was supposed to be beyond that. On November 15, 1995, three days after killing Carlo Dellosa, Medina walked up to a sports car at the intersection of York and Aldama and emptied a semiautomatic pistol into the passenger compartment. He killed the driver, Ferdie Olmedo, another “Chino,” and wounded his girlfriend. The police recovered eleven spent 9 mm shell casings at the scene; the autopsy discovered that Olmedo had been shot twelve times. He had five gunshot wounds to the head and the rest in the back. When the shooting began Olmedo threw himself on top of his sister and his girlfriend and took almost every round Medina fired. Olmedo’s sister, seated on the center console between Olmedo and his girlfriend, was also hit. The intersection of York and Aldama is stone toss from the house where Gerry “Trooper” Ramirez and Robert Gonzales robbed and killed Cesar Tolentino on May 23, 1998. The murders of Dellosa and Olmedo were two of the seventeen homicides that Andy Teague had inherited. They would hang unsolved until Benny Garcia got himself in trouble in 1997 and was forced to cooperate in 1998. A month after the Dellosa murder, Andy Teague and his partner Chuck Markel once again landed in the pages of the LA Times, part of a year-end wrap-up that the Times titled “Fallen Angels of the City.” Teague and Markel were part of the roster of scandalous behavior, a sensationalistic list that included Hugh Grant for being caught with a prostitute. It was a gratuitous cheap shot that made the two cops wonder if the bullshit would ever stop. Two months after the Dellosa murder, Conroy left Highland Park and moved to Nevada. He’d had a fight with Garcia and they’d parted company. Conroy had also had enough of Medina and the Avenues. In the late afternoon of March 22, 1996, four months after killing Olmedo, Medina and two of his crimies carjacked an old white Chevrolet Monte Carlo from a Mexican national on Garvanza Street. The owner had just parked the vehicle when he was confronted by Medina, who put a gun to his chest and asked for the keys. The victim spoke no English and Medina didn’t speak Spanish, but Medina’s intention was clear. The man handed over the keys and Medina took off.

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Less than an hour later, Medina was on the 700 block of Worcester Street in Pasadena, cruising slowly and looking for a particular young man. Medina was in the front passenger seat and one of his crimies was behind the wheel. They double-parked in front of a vacant lot and called over the guy Medina was looking for: Luis Figueroa, who was drinking a forty-ounce bottle of beer and talking to some friends. Figueroa had recently come from Mexico illegally. When he wasn’t working his fast food job, he hung around Worcester riding his bicycle, socializing, and drinking. As Figueroa stepped up to the front passenger window, a man who lived on the street had to squeeze by the double-parked Monte Carlo to get to the driveway at his house. As the man passed the Monte Carlo and began turning into his driving, he heard two shots behind him and saw the white Monte Carlo pull away fast. He looked back and saw a small crowd form around Luis Figueroa. He was dead. There was a hole in his neck, another in his head, and a huge pool of blood had already formed on the pavement. The broken bottle was lying next to him. The Monte Carlo drove quickly to Marengo Avenue, the shortest route to the 210 Freeway back to Highland Park. As the Monte Carlo headed south on Marengo, Medina and his crimies noticed Pasadena PD police cars heading north directly at them. The Pasadena PD’s headquarters is less than half a mile away on Marengo and Walnut, just over the 210 Freeway, and patrol cars were already rolling at high speed to Worcester. The Monte Carlo pulled over to the curb in front of a fire hydrant. The occupants bailed out of the car and went running through the yards. They left the driver’s door open, the engine running with the keys in the ignition, and the headlights burning. Once the responding officers secured the crime scene and began collecting information, they put out a call that the suspect’s vehicle was a white Monte Carlo with several Hispanic occupants. A patrol officer spotted the abandoned Monte Carlo and secured the area around the car. A quick check of the plate returned the car as stolen that afternoon from Highland Park. Pasadena detectives located the registered owner and brought him to the

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location where he identified the car. He related how the car was stolen and gave the officers a description of the suspects. When Pasadena criminalists processed the Monte Carlo, they found a single usable fingerprint on the passenger side rear view mirror. When Pasadena PD Detective Mike Villalovos ran the print, it came back to Anthony Medina. Villalovos spent hours with the owner to determine who’d worked on the car, driven it, when, where it was parked, and for how long. He needed to exhaust every possibility because he knew that somewhere down the road, a defense attorney would claim that Medina had brushed against the car as it was parked on the street. Villalovos contacted Northeast Division and learned that Medina was well known to Northeast gang cops as an Avenues gangster; they suspected, but had no proof, that he was involved in a number of serious incidents. The last known address for Medina was in Montebello, a town a half hour East of Pasadena. Villalovos and another detective went to the address and learned that it was the residence of Martha Gomez (not her real name), an employee of the California Youth Authority, the youth detention system. In addition to Gomez, three recently paroled young men lived there. Villalovos described her living arrangement as a revolving door where young men used her place as a crash pad and parole address in exchange for having sex with her and providing her with drugs. Gomez was minimally cooperative and told them that Medina had moved out some time ago. She allowed the detectives to look through the house. In one of the bedrooms, they found a quantity of papers and documents, one of which had Medina’s name on it and the address 488 Marengo Avenue. Villalovos realized with a shock that 488 Marengo was directly across the street from the spot where they’d recovered the stolen Monte Carlo. The next day, Villalovos went to the address and knocked on the door. As he stood in the arbor-like entrance overgrown with vines, he looked across the street. It struck him that on the night of the murder, as he and the Pasadena patrol officers were searching the vehicle and processing the scene, Medina had probably been watching everything from this apartment. The resident at 488 Marengo turned out to be a female, Lilian Flores (not

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her real name), young, pretty and scared out of her wits. Lilian claimed that she knew Medina but hadn’t seen him in a long time. She admitted that they’d been dating since they both attended Florence Nightingale High School, but had broken up. She allowed the detectives to look around the apartment, but Villalovos was waiting for another officer to deliver a search warrant that was at that moment being signed by a Superior court judge. Even though she claimed she lived alone, Villalovos noticed two dirty dishes on the kitchen table. He also noticed male clothing in the bathroom and wet towels. They’d just missed him. When the warrant arrived, the detectives searched the apartment and found a plaque with Medina’s name and her name on it, the kind of thing you buy at amusement parks and carnivals. Under one of the couch cushions, Villalovos found a newspaper clipping about the Figueroa murder that had been torn from the Pasadena Star. In another drawer, Villalovos found several photo albums full of pictures of Lilian and Medina. In a number of the pictures, Medina posed throwing the Avenues gang sign. For the next two months, Pasadena and Northeast cops fruitlessly searched for Medina. An arrest warrant was issued and police agencies all over the County received a BOLO (Be On the Look Out) on Medina. He bounced around all over the county staying just steps ahead of the police. Late on the night of May 25, 1996, two months after the Figueroa murder, Northeast patrol officer Mark Dimitt and his female partner Hollis Averbuck were driving in the area of York Boulevard and Toledo Street. They heard a crime broadcast regarding a man with a gun on York and Avenue 52, just a few blocks away. As they cruised along the nearly deserted York Boulevard, they noticed a male Hispanic with a blue gym bag running at top speed in the opposite direction. They turned around and intercepted him. When they asked him why he was running he told them that some guy in a pickup truck had just aimed a gun at him. The gun’s red laser sight had dotted his chest. When the officers asked what the truck looked like, he pointed over their shoulders and said, “There it is, right there.” They turned and saw a black pickup truck with three people in the cab accelerating south on York. They left the man with the gym bag and took off in pursuit of the

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pickup. As they accelerated on York, they put out a broadcast that they were going to make a felony stop. The truck came to a stop at York and Hamlet, a particularly dark stretch with no streetlights. As the police car came to a stop behind the truck, Dimitt and Averbuck saw a head peek over the bed of the pickup truck and then duck back down. As Averbuck was using the microphone to call in the traffic stop, she observed the red laser dot blazing away on the back of her hand. Dimitt yelled out “Gun,” and told Averbuck to get out. Averbuck slid down into the footwell of the patrol car, reached up to unlock her door and kicked it open. Dimitt rolled out on his side and managed to squeeze off two rounds as the figure in the truck bailed out and started running. Thanks to the patrol car’s headlights, Dimitt got a clear look at the suspect’s face and even noticed that he was wearing a black Raiders jacket. The suspect ran through a parking lot and disappeared. Two blocks away, an officer responding to the shots-fired call saw the suspect running down the dark street. The red dot on the gun was still on and the officer was able to follow it bouncing on the pavement, buildings, and trees. He continued following the dot until he caught up with the suspect and drew down on him. The suspect, Anthony Medina, threw down his gun and gave up. It was the end of his criminal career. On October 28, 1996, the LA DA filed charges on Medina: one count of first-degree murder for killing Figueroa, one count of carjacking, one count of second-degree robbery, two counts of attempted murder for pointing the gun at Dimitt and Averbuck, and two counts of assault on a police officer. The gun Medina was carrying was a Glock model 17 with a fifteen-round magazine, modified with what’s known as a “plus 2” base pad that increases the magazine’s capacity to seventeen rounds. When the gun was examined, a round was found in its chamber, raising the capacity to eighteen. Before Medina’s preliminary trial, Captain Michael Hillman, Northeast Division’s Commanding Officer, examined the gun and activated the laser sight. He test fired the gun in the condition in which it was recovered and found that it functioned perfectly. There was no doubt that Medina had been cocked and locked for combat that night.

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Rather than go to trial, Medina and his lawyer approached the DA’s office and settled on a plea agreement. On July 27, 1997, Medina pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter for the murder of Luis Figueroa. He also pleaded guilty to the other charges. In exchange for the pleas, the DA asked for and got a sentence of thirty-one years and four months. If he’d gone to trial and been found guilty of first-degree murder, he might have faced the death penalty. It was ultimately discovered that Medina had shot and killed Figueroa because he suspected Figueroa of making advances to Lilian, his girlfriend. The tragic truth was that Figueroa had been spending a lot of time around Lilian because he had a crush on one of her girlfriends. Hollis Averbuck was married to Detective John Berdin who, at the time of the potentially fatal felony stop was actively tracking Medina. What no one knew at the time, of course, was that Medina was also responsible for the murders of Dellosa and Olmedo. That information came out a year later, when Benny Garcia decided to cooperate. The jury in Tony’s trial knew nothing about the Figueroa murder; that information would have been prejudicial. The jury would be presented only with facts relating to the Dellosa and Olmedo murders. There were a number of other things the jury wasn’t aware of. Two years before the start of his trial, Medina had contacted Andy Teague from County Jail and offered to testify that it was actually Conroy who pulled the trigger on Dellosa and that another Avenues gangster named Nick “Evil” Uribe had shot and killed Olmedo. Neither Teague nor Manzella believed him; none of the evidence pointed to those two. In 1998, Garcia had already provided Teague and Berdin with all the information needed to put Medina behind the trigger in both shootings. Garcia had no axe to grind against Medina. In fact, it was just the opposite. Garcia had paternal feelings for Medina. He’d tried mightily to keep him out of serious trouble. But Manzella had a problem on his hands. None of the evidence pointed towards Conroy, but a smart lawyer could make a strong case and possibly convince a jury that it was Conroy who killed Dellosa and Uribe who killed Olmedo. Manzella approached Conroy’s defense attorney, Charles Patton,

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and informed him that Medina had implicated Conroy as the shooter. According to the rules of discovery, Manzella was compelled to inform Patton; it was exculpatory information and the defense attorney had an absolute right to know. Manzella told Patton, “I don’t like the story, but it’s consistent with another version of it. The train is leaving the station for your client. If it leaves and he still doesn’t have his bags packed, he’ll miss it.” Patton then consulted Conroy and told him that Medina was rolling on him. Conroy immediately agreed to testify against Medina but he wanted immunity on the two killings. Patton went back to Manzella and asked for a formal court proceeding in Department 100 that would etch the agreement in stone. Manzella wouldn’t have it. “We go to Department 100, and everybody will know about it. It becomes public record and they’ll kill him [Conroy] in jail.” Patton then asked for Conroy to be released. Manzella told Patton, “No fucking way. He stays in jail until he testifies.” Manzella offered to write Patton a letter outlining the agreement of immunity and other incidental terms in exchange for truthful testimony. “We’re not going on the record at this point. Everything stays the way it is. He makes his court appearances and he continues to act like a defendant.” Patton accepted the terms and Conroy spent the next two years in County Jail waiting for his trial and pretending that he was still a defendant in the case against him. With that deal made, Manzella ignored anything Medina had to say. It was all buttoned up and Medina was ready to meet his fate. In Manzella’s opening argument on September 14, 2004, he sketched out the Dellosa and Olmedo homicides and said he would prove that Medina pulled the trigger in both incidents. Part of the proof would come from Benny Garcia and Clinton Conroy. They had agreed to testify against Medina in exchange for immunity on the two murders. Manzella outlined Garcia’s drug business and that Medina and Conroy were part of his crew. Garcia had provided a gun to Medina for self-defense, but the day after shooting Dellosa, Medina went back to Garcia and said he needed another pistol because the one he had given was burned and he had to get rid of it. After the Olmedo murder, Medina again went back to Garcia and asked for yet another gun because he burned that one

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too. Medina also told Garcia that he’d cut his hand on the car window when he was shooting at Olmedo. From Tony’s point of view, this was an easy prosecution. There was little wiggle room for the defense, and most of the heavy lifting had been done by the time he stepped into Judge Larry Fidler’s court. His opening argument lasted a mere twenty-three minutes. In his opening statement, Medina’s defense attorney, Daniel Nardoni, told the jury that, “You’ll see inconsistencies in the testimony of the two witnesses. Both men are convicted felons. Both have done time in State prison.” Nardoni continued and said that in 1996, Garcia was convicted for possession of narcotics. In 1998 he was convicted on two counts of kidnapping for ransom, two counts of robbery, and two counts of assault with a deadly weapon. On February 11, 1998, Detectives John Berdin and Gil Garcia interviewed Benny Garcia. At that time he only implicated Medina in the Dellosa shooting; he made no mention that Medina had also been involved in the Olmedo shooting. It wasn’t until October 26, 2001, that Benny Garcia implicated Medina in the Olmedo murder. “Garcia and Conroy are admitted felons, robbers, and extortionists,” Nardoni said. “Their credibility is questionable.” Nardoni also stated that neither of the two women in the sports car was able to identify the shooter when they were shown several six-packs. “They made no identification at all.” Tony’s first significant witness was Detective Gil Garcia, the Northeast homicide detective who’d responded to the Dellosa murder scene. Gil Garcia recovered four spent shell casings, two teeth, a bullet fragment, and a blue belt clip from a pager. There was no money on the victim, Dellosa. Under cross-examination, Gil Garcia stated that while he was at the scene, he did not observe anyone in the area that looked like they were searching for a pager clip. On the afternoon of the first court day, one of the jurors stated that she knew about this case. She was a teacher at the Pasadena Opera Program and at one time, Magnolia Olmedo, Ferdie Olmedo’s sister, was one of her students. After a discussion with Manzella and Nardoni, and some ques-

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tions of Magnolia Olmedo’s one-time teacher, all parties agreed to keep her on the jury. Then another juror asked Judge Fidler through the court clerk if the shell casings were brass. Fidler said that he needed to cut her off before this juror went off on a tangent and her own investigative path. He dismissed her from the jury. This was another manifestation of the CSI effect: jurors thinking they know as much about crime and forensics as cops because they’ve seen it on TV. As this wasn’t strictly an Eme case, Manzella didn’t call on Rich Valdemar or any other Mexican Mafia expert. Instead, he called Jeffrey Crawford, a thirty-one-year LAPD veteran and a specialist on the Avenues. Crawford went into the methods of gathering gang intelligence and how that information is stored in the CALGANGS system. He stated that Medina was, in his opinion, an Avenues member and had been in the database since he was a teenager. Under cross-examination by Nardoni, Crawford admitted he knew nothing about Benny Garcia other than what was on his gang I-Card. Crawford’s job was to provide the jury with a context on the operations and structure of Avenues and how they were divided into separate cliques. His testimony was a purely educational exercise for the benefit of the jury. The star witness of the day was Clinton Conroy, a tall, beefy man with a shaved head, ruddy complexion, and a collection of visible tattoos. Unlike Medina, who was dressed in Dockers and a crisp collared shirt, Conroy wore a baggy orange County Jail jumpsuit. He was brought into court by Detective James King and one of the LASD court deputies. After Conroy took the stand, the court deputy took a position to his right and kept his eyes on the courtroom. King sat at the back of the courtroom. Through the question-and-answer process of direct examination, Manzella explained to the jury that Conroy had originally been charged with the murder of Carlo Dellosa. Now he was appearing for the prosecution and would receive immunity on that charge in exchange for his truthful testimony. The agreement stipulated that he would be relocated at State expense. He was to have no contact with gang members. He had to testify fully

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and truthfully. Any crimes he committed in the future would be prosecuted. Were he found to be lying, he’d be prosecuted for perjury. Manzella then took Conroy over his history with Avenues. Conroy had his first contact with Avenues in 1995, the year that Dellosa was killed. He stated in a quiet, direct, and remarkably articulate manner how he met Danny “Chinito” Garcia while working for the Disney Animation Department. Danny was Benny Garcia’s brother and through Danny he came to know Benny. Conroy admitted that he was using a lot of methamphetamine at the time and Benny was a dealer. Conroy started working for Benny Garcia in March of 1995 as a drug runner and money collector. He would pick up crystal meth from cook houses in West Covina and La Puente and deliver the dope to Highland Park and Sun Valley. Conroy stated that at first Garcia was selling on the retail level but within a few weeks he’d moved up into wholesale trafficking. Conroy stated that he’d collected money for Garcia and on occasion, when the customers couldn’t pay but still wanted the dope, he’d taken their property. He worked with Garcia at first, but in October Garcia had put him with Medina instead. Garcia paid for all of Conroy’s living expenses, including rent, food, clothes, and utilities. He stated there were always guns around because some of the dealers and users they dealt with would pay part of their dope bill with weapons. Benny Garcia had tried to instill in Conroy and Medina the notion that gang-banging was bad for business because it attracted too much police attention. Conroy claimed that he didn’t remember what he and Medina were doing on the night of the Dellosa murder. He did remember that earlier in the night, he and Medina had been driving on Meridian Street; Medina had spotted three Border Brothers and told Conroy to pull over. Medina jumped out of the car and robbed the three BBs at gunpoint. A few minutes later, they were on Yosemite and Townsend when Medina told Conroy that there was a guy at the pay phone. Conroy made a U-turn and drove back towards the man at the pay phone. Then Conroy made another U-turn and parked on Townsend. Medina got out of the car, ran along the wall, and turned the

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corner. Moments later, Conroy heard three shots and saw Medina running back to the car with a gun in his hand. With Medina back in the car, Conroy turned left onto Yosemite but had to swerve at the last moment to avoid the body that was lying in the middle of the street. Conroy asked Medina, “What the hell happened?” Medina told him that the guy had a hand in his pocket. The guy then started throwing money at Medina, money that Medina showed Conroy as they drove away, and then he told Conroy that he shot the guy. As they left the area and made a left onto Eagle Rock Boulevard, they noticed a police car with sirens blaring heading in their direction. They made a number of random turns until they were out of the area, then drove to a safe house in Glendale. This was an empty apartment to which Garcia had access; they used it as a place to stash their dope and guns and occasionally to party in. They parked the Nissan, wiped it down to get rid of the prints, and jumped into another car. This car was also an insurance job. (Conroy claimed they’d had access to a lot of insurance cars and several apartments.) After wiping down the Nissan, they went to a motel for the night. Under Manzella’s direct questioning, Conroy stated that he’d thought Medina was only going to rob the guy at the phone like he’d done earlier with the Border Brothers. It hadn’t occurred to him until the next day that he’d unwittingly become an accomplice to a murder committed in the course of a robbery, a special circumstance crime that made him liable to the death penalty. The next morning, Conroy and Medina returned to the crime scene to see if they could find Medina’s blue pager belt clip. It wasn’t there because Detective Garcia had collected it the night before; it was now sealed in an evidence envelope along with the spent shells, the bullet fragment, and two of Dellosa’s teeth. In January of 1996, Conroy and Garcia had a falling out over some jewelry Conroy had stolen. Soon after that, Conroy moved to Nevada, but apparently hadn’t quite absorbed the fact that consorting with dopers and dealers could land you in jail forever. Later that year, Conroy was convicted of a burglary and pulled a short

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sentence in Susanville, a prison in Northern California. After his release, he was arrested again for carrying a concealed weapon and was sent back. During his second stay in Susanville, he got permission from the Sureno inmates that ran the prison to get himself a CYPS (for Cypress Avenue) tattoo on his chest. As a minority white inmate, he needed protection; having an Avenues tattoo gave him instant protection and respect from the Southsiders and it also provided him with a tacit alliance with the Aryan Brotherhood. He spent thirteen months in Susanville and was paroled to an address in Northern California. In 2000, he was arrested in Nevada for possession of a pound of marijuana and got a nineteen- to forty-eightmonth sentence. While in custody in Nevada, he was charged with the Dellosa murder and brought back to LA. As hard as he tried while cross-examining Conroy, Nardoni couldn’t find any way of prying contradictions out of the statements that Conroy had made in court or previously to detectives. Nardoni asked Conroy if he was armed with a gun at the time that Dellosa was murdered, but Conroy denied it. Then Nardoni pursued a line of questioning that hinted that Conroy’s testimony might be revenge for a problem he’d had with Avenues. But the only person Conroy ever admitted to being angry at was Benny Garcia. Conroy stated to Nardoni that he barely knew any of the people in Avenues and he only met Richie Aguirre in County Jail after he was extradited from Nevada to Los Angeles in 2001. In 1995, Richie Aguirre was only a name to Conroy. Conroy was close to being a complete outsider to Avenues. During that day’s lunch break, Manzella met with Magnolia Olmedo, Ferdie Olmedo’s sister, and Michelle Cortez, Ferdie’s widow, in a conference room on the seventeenth floor. After nine years of waiting and mourning, Magnolia was finally going to come face to face with her brother’s killer. As Manzella ran her through the questions he would ask, Magnolia started crying. Manzella sucked it up as hard as he could but by the time they were done talking, he started tearing up and had to leave the room. After thirty years of seeing countless autopsy photos, skulls blown open by 12 gauge slug shots, innocent young women riddled by +P hollow point bul-

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lets, and bodies burned beyond recognition, Manzella’s skin hadn’t really gotten all that thick. On the stand, neither Magnolia Olmedo nor Michelle Cortez could identify Medina as the shooter. They never saw the shooter because the car was low slung and the shooter was standing at the driver’s side window. All they saw was a hand with a gun and then Ferdie throwing himself on top of them to shield them from the fusillade of bullets. Magnolia had been hit in the lower back and had needed several surgeries. The next witness, Dr. Lisa Scheinin, testified about the wounds Olmedo received. He was hit five times in the head, all shots traveling from left to right. The bullet travel was consistent with Magnolia and Michelle’s testimony that the shooter stood at the driver’s window. Each of the five head shots would have been fatal. The other seven gunshot wounds were delivered to Ferdie Olmedo’s back and side, again consistent with the testimony of the two female witnesses. Diana Paul, the LAPD criminalist, testified that all the projectiles recovered from Almedo’s body had been fired from the same gun and that all the recovered shell casings had been fired from the same gun. But since the gun was never recovered, she couldn’t conclude that the gun that had fired the projectiles was the same one that had ejected the spent rounds. Benny Garcia provided the longest and most detailed testimony of the Medina trial. Remarkably self-possessed and straightforward, Garcia provided the jury a rare look at the operations of the Mexican Mafia at the street level. After some initial nervousness, he seemed to relax and after each question, he turned his head towards the jury and directed his answers at them. Manzella began by leading the jury through Garcia’s career as an Avenues gangster, drug dealer, and Eme Associate. Garcia stated that he was jumped into Avenues by his older brother Danny and one of Danny’s friends when he was ten years old. He joined because his entire family was in the gang. After they beat him up, they shot him in the leg with a BB gun so he would know what it felt like to be shot. Soon after he was jumped in, one of his older brothers was shot by ri-

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vals and the family moved away. But a year later, the family moved back to the area. Garcia said of this time in his life, “I loved the Avenues. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You could say I was a hard core gangster.” In 1987 or early 1988, Garcia, then approaching twenty, met Alfred “Tigger” Salinas and Alex “Pee Wee” Aguirre. He knew they were Mexican Mafia members and because of that he didn’t want to get too close to them. Although he’d moved out of Highland Park by the time he met Alex and Tigger, he was around all the time. In 1989, after Garcia had gotten married, Alex asked Garcia if he wanted to collect taxes for him in Burbank and North Hollywood. Although this is outside traditional Avenues territory, it illustrates how Carnales like Alex Aguirre work beyond their home turf. In addition to regulating dealers, Alex wanted Garcia to sell speed, but he too would be required to pay his taxes. Garcia had terrific sources among the Paisos, Mexican nationals in the country illegally who in turn had connections to high-volume dealers in Mexico. To Garcia, a veteran gangster since the age of ten, being taxed was like being punked. He had too much pride and knuckling under to Alex Aguirre was too much of blow to his ego. Instead of being taxed, Garcia came to an agreement with Alex. Garcia would sell Alex speed for the same price that Garcia paid for it. It was an honorable way for Garcia to circumvent the taxation. It was an arrangement he could live with. After Alex was sent to Federal prison on his RICO case, Garcia continued to honor his agreement. He sold his dope at cost to Richie Aguirre. To help him run the dope and taxation business, Garcia recruited Clinton Conroy. Soon after that, he recruited Anthony Medina and partnered them together. At one point in the direct examination, Garcia went beyond the question Manzella had asked him and said, “I hate to see him [Medina] in this situation. I’m gonna be considered a damned rat. I’m here because I have to be here. I hate to be in this situation.” Manzella then broached the subject of greenlights. Garcia said that he was greenlighted by Alex Aguirre in 1992 over an incident involving Richard Aguirre, Sr.’s car. Garcia had gotten into a fight with his wife and she’d

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thrown him and his belongings out of the house. All his clothes and tools were on the sidewalk and, because he didn’t have a car, Garcia had no way of bringing them to his mother’s house. Richard Senior lent Garcia his car but told him to bring it back that night. When Garcia got to his house, the police arrived as a result of the fight he was having with his wife. Fearing arrest and the possible impoundment of the borrowed car, Garcia gave the keys to a friend and told him to bring it right back to its owner. The friend didn’t bring the car back for two days. As a result, Alex put a greenlight on Garcia. When Garcia eventually explained the situation, Alex took the greenlight off Garcia. Garcia went on to claim that he was greenlighted again when Richie Aguirre accused him of holding back too much from the tax money he was collecting. Then Manzella asked him if he was greenlighted for his testimony. Garcia said, “I was already in the hat so it doesn’t matter what I do now.” Manzella then asked about his relationship with the Mexican Mafia. Garcia said, “I was a Mafia Associate. A puppet on a string. The Mafia relies on weak-minded people.” He then went on to say that he and Alex were “pretty close. I wanted to be like him.” Of Conroy and Medina, he said that “[they] were not as close to the Mafia as I was.” In November of 1995, Garcia, Medina, and Conroy got together so Medina could get another gun from Garcia. At this meeting, Conroy told Garcia that Medina had shot a Chino on Townsend and Yosemite. Garcia stated, “That’s why he gave the gun back to me, to get rid of it.” Manzella asked him, “Did you give Medina another gun?” Garcia said, “Yes. A 9 mm. All I had was guns with clips.” Then Manzella asked, “Did Medina give you back this second gun?” Garcia said that a few days later he gave Garcia back the second gun, “To get rid of it. He told me he shot another Chino. He shot the Chino while he was in his car. When he shot him, his hand went through the car window and he cut his hand. He said there was other people in there. A couple of girls. This is what he told me.” As Garcia sealed the deal on Medina’s guilt, Medina stared straight ahead at the jury and took the blows without flinching. Before the beginning of the afternoon session, while the parties waited

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for Judge Fidler and the jury to enter, Manzella, Garcia, and Nardoni had a conversation about what happened to the dirty guns. Garcia said that he traded them to Mexican nationals for drugs. The Mexicans then took them to Mexico for resale. Manzella continued his direct examination after the lunch break and asked him how he’d been charged with kidnapping. Garcia explained that a couple of “down-and-out” guys in the neighborhood had begged him and his wife for money. His wife took pity on them and took them into the house, fed them, and told Garcia to give them some money. Sometime later, Garcia and his wife left the house. While they were gone, the two guys they helped came back and cleaned out Garcia’s garage. They took all his tools and even stole his kids’ bikes and toys. Garcia knew these guys and knew where they lived. He caught one of them and basically kidnapped him, threatening to kill him unless he told Garcia where his property was. The other man called the police and Garcia was arrested and charged with kidnapping and other charges. He faced a long prison term, but the judge took the circumstances under consideration and gave him a light sentence, admonishing him not to take the law into his own hands. Chastened and relieved, Garcia decided to go straight. It was the last criminal act he would commit. It was while he was in prison on the kidnapping charges that Garcia first talked to Andy Teague about the Dellosa and Olmedo murders. Manzella asked Garcia what his reaction was when Medina told him about shooting the two Chinos. Garcia said he was mad at Medina. “The guns were supposed to be used for self protection, not to gang-bang. . . . The plan was to sell drugs and keep the money flowing.” The last questions Manzella asked were about the greenlight that the Mexican Mafia had put on all Chinos. Garcia explained that the TRGs (Tiny Rascal Gangsters, a Cambodian gang centered in Long Beach) had been greenlighted by the Mexican Mafia in 1994. Long Beach has the largest Cambodian population outside of Cambodia. Most TRGs are born in the US and grow up emulating and then warring with the Longos, a Sureno gang also located in Long Beach. Garcia characterized the greenlight as “all the Chi-

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nos.” It was therefore every loyal Sureno’s duty to assault any Chino he happened upon, never mind that the Chinos in Highland Park were Filipinos and not Cambodians. A Chino was a Chino and, in Medina’s view of the world, he was only doing his duty as a firme (solid or stand-up) Sureno. He was earning stripes with his gang and establishing a reputation with the Mafia for taking care of business. Lessons that could be learned from the murders of Olmedo and Dellosa are unfortunately lost on policymakers, activists, and sometimes even those in the top echelons of law enforcement. The murder of the two Chinos is the kind of crime that is often characterized as “senseless” or “disorganized.” On the face of it, they appear to be senseless. But any in-depth examination reveals that they are simply part of a larger Mexican Mafia policy of keeping neighborhoods under its control. When well-intentioned activists like Greg Boyle state categorically that street murders and violence are just disorganized crime they’re either unaware of the underlying facts or choose not to believe them. The Figueroa murder, on the one hand, was clearly an independent act by a jealous boyfriend. The Dellosa and Olmedo murders, on the other hand, had plenty to do with the gang business of keeping rivals out of the neighborhood and with the broader Eme policy of greenlighting all Chinos. The average DA looking at the Dellosa and Olmedo murders wouldn’t know how to file them. Manzella knew the underlying issues. Part of his evidence was a greenlight list confiscated in County Jail that, among other gangs, targeted the TRGs for assassination. That list also included Benny “Sleepy” Garcia. By the time Manzella finished his direct examination of Garcia, the jury had a fairly complete picture of the Mexican Mafia’s involvement in the drug business in Avenues territory and how the various puzzle pieces of the Dellosa and Olmedo murders fit together. Daniel Nardoni’s job now was to try to unravel the narrative and start casting doubt on Garcia’s truthfulness. When detectives first interviewed Garcia in 1998 about Medina’s part in the Dellosa murder, he didn’t volunteer information on the Olmedo murder. Nardoni asked Garcia why he left it out. Garcia answered, “Because I

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was not being forced to do what I’m doing now.” It wasn’t until 2001 that Garcia finally came clean on Medina as the shooter in the Olmedo murder. Andy Teague and James King conducted this interview in Garcia’s parole officer’s office. The PO basically told Garcia that he’d better tell all he knew or else he’d be sent back to prison. Nardoni then explored Garcia’s relationship with Alex Aguirre. Garcia stated that he liked Alex and he was close to the family. He stated that he always called Richard Aguirre, Sr., “Mr. Aguirre” and never referred to him by his street name, “Half Man.” Garcia admitted that he and Alex had had a few beefs but that they’d been patched up. Garcia’s sister at one time even dated Alex. Garcia further said that even after Alex went away to Federal prison, “I still looked up to him.” Then Nardoni moved on to Garcia’s relationship with Medina. Nardoni asked him what he’d given Medina in exchange for working for him. Garcia said, “An apartment and money in his pocket.” He also stated that he gave Medina guns and that Medina never denied having shot the Chino on Townsend and Yosemite or the other Chino on York and Aldama. In fact, Garcia claimed that Medina had told him the shooting took place just outside the store parking lot on York and Aldama. Garcia stated that after the shooting on Yosemite, “I gave him [Medina] another gun the same moment like a dummy.” When asked why, Garcia said, “If he needed a gun I would not want him to not be able to protect himself. If you lived our lifestyle, you would understand why I gave him the gun. I was dumb. Dumb.” Nardoni then asked Garcia about the white Nissan 300ZX that Conroy and Medina were driving when Medina allegedly shot the Chino. Garcia said, “Somebody gave me the ZX. I knew somebody with a junkyard.” Nardoni asked if it was an Armenian man who ran the junkyard and if he was one of Garcia’s sources for obtaining guns. Garcia said it was. Nardoni’s next to last question was whether Garcia was in the hat while he was serving his six-year term for the kidnapping of the people that robbed his garage. Garcia stated that he was in PC (Protective Custody): “Yeah. I had a hit on me from the mob.”

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Nardoni’s last question was, “How many strikes do you have against you?” Garcia stated simply, “A lot.” Manzella had no reason to do a re-direct on Garcia. Nardoni hadn’t been able to shake him. Garcia was a singularly impressive and believable witness. Unlike the evasive and confused demeanor of Gerry “Trooper” Ramirez in the Morales case, Garcia came across as one of those rare criminals with a sense of honor. He lived by a code. He admitted to being a drug dealer, extortionist, kidnapper, and tax collector, but he did it all according to personal rules that never harmed the innocent or people who weren’t directly involved in the criminal life. In many ways, he was living up to the example of his hero, Alex Aguirre. It was all about the business. Soon after Nardoni’s cross-examination of Garcia, Manzella told the court that the prosecution had rested its case. Nardoni stated that he would introduce no witness and made a motion to dismiss all charges against his client, Anthony Medina. The basis of the motion was that there was no independent evidence: All the prosecution’s evidence came from co-conspirators. Judge Larry Fidler’s response was brief and to the point. “Mr. Garcia is not an accomplice as a matter of law. Motion to dismiss is denied.” The jury deliberation took precisely five and a half hours. The jury found Medina guilty on all charges and he was eventually sentenced to Life Without Parole (LWOP). The same day that Medina was sentenced, Clinton Conroy walked out of County Jail and immediately left for parts unknown. Tony Manzella knew that he’d had a strong case against Medina, but even he was surprised by how quickly the jury reached a verdict. “I think that’s some sort of record for me and Ruth. I don’t think we’ve ever gotten a guilty verdict that fast.” Tony and Ruth didn’t spend a minute basking in their first victory. They were soon going again on Reyes and Vidales. Judge Fidler had advised them that if they didn’t get a conviction on this third attempt, he’d dismiss the case and set the defendants loose.

“There’s a nigger. You guys want to kill a nigger?” — Alejandro “Bird” Martinez

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C H A P TE R F I F TEEN

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n an ideal world, Andy Teague wouldn’t have been bur-

dened with seventeen unsolved murders in addition to a fresh crop of new ones. But in busy divisions like Northeast where gang warfare erupts on an almost weekly basis, Teague’s situation was a standard load for an LAPD homicide detective. In the early morning hours of April 18, 1999, Teague got a call at his house and was told to respond to 343 Avenue 52 in Highland Park. When he arrived there at 4:30 AM, he found a bullet-riddled 1984 Cadillac Fleetwood. The rear window was blown out, the right rear tire was flat, and there were gunshot holes in the body work. The 215

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driver of the Cadillac, Kenneth Wilson, a thirty-eight-year-old black male, had already been transported by the Coroner’s office by the time Teague arrived. According to what Teague could piece together in his first few minutes at the scene, Wilson had been killed in a hailstorm of handgun and shotgun fire. The closest thing Teague had to a witness was Shunita Calvin, the woman Wilson had been visiting on Avenue 52. She told him that after she heard the gunfire, she ran downstairs because she was worried about Wilson. She knew he was outside parking her Cadillac. When she reached the street, she saw a van roaring away from the scene. She described the van as having a spare tire mounted on the rear. Teague collected ten shell casings, all of them 9 mm, and five expended 12 gauge shotgun hulls. The shotgun hulls were OO Buckshot. “Double O buck” as it’s called, is a shotgun specific designation for a particular kind of round. Each OO shotgun shell contains 9 pellets, each pellet approximately .32 caliber. That translated to forty-five separate projectiles fired at Wilson from the shotgun and ten from the 9 mm. It was no surprise to Teague that the Cadillac looked like it’d been caught in a Gaza ambush. What puzzled him was why. The scene itself wasn’t unusual, but Wilson wasn’t from the neighborhood and didn’t fit the profile of the usual murder victim. In the coming weeks, Teague would find out a lot about Kenneth Wilson, but nothing he uncovered shed any light on why he was killed or who did it. Wilson had no criminal record and didn’t live in the area. He was from Ontario, California, and was only in Highland Park to visit Shunita Calvin and her family. Wilson had his wallet, cash, and jewelry on him when he was killed so robbery was ruled out as a motive. The number of rounds shot at first led Teague to believe this was some kind of payback. It was overkill, the clear hallmarks of an assassination or a maybe gang hit. But Wilson’s history was absolutely clean. Teague couldn’t find anyone who would want Wilson dead. A real puzzler. Teague learned that Shunita Calvin and Wilson had been friends for a decade. Wilson had gone out the night of his murder with two other males, both of whom were friends with Calvin. One of the men was Duane Wil-

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liams, Wilson’s uncle, who had recently begun dating Calvin. The other was Frank Eubanks. They had borrowed the Cadillac from Shunita Calvin, who had bought it a few months earlier. The three men had gone to a nightclub in Hollywood and gotten back to Avenue 52 at around 3:00 AM. Williams was drunk and had passed out in the back seat of the Cadillac. Eubanks was driving and parked the car with its nose blocking a driveway that ran to the back of Calvin’s building. Eubanks and Wilson went upstairs to tell Calvin that Williams was passed out and she should go down and see if she could wake him up. Calvin eventually got Williams back into the apartment and told the other two men she needed to move the car because it was blocking the driveway. Wilson volunteered to move it for her. A few moments later, the people in Calvin’s apartment heard a series of gunshots. They went out to the street where they found the Cadillac crashed into a parked vehicle and Wilson expelling his last breath. The Wilson case went nowhere for almost a year. It looked to Teague that it was going to join the other unsolved cases. In the early morning of Sunday, May 2, 1999, almost a month after the murder of Kenny Wilson, two Avenues gangsters—Jessie “Listo” Diaz, twenty-two, and Merced “Shadow” Cambero, twenty-one—were out on patrol in the area of Avenue 43 and Figueroa. They were both members of the Avenues 43 clique and were basically keeping guard at headquarters. Diaz decided to spray paint a large “Avenues” tag on a wall across the street from a Jack in the Box restaurant. This is an infamous wall that gets hit almost as soon as the owners cover up the graffiti. As Diaz began spray painting, his partner, positioned himself diagonally across the street to watch Diaz’s back. This was standard practice. Cambero had a police scanner tuned to the Northeast frequencies to hear if someone was calling in the tagging. He also had a 9 mm pistol in case a rival gang like Highland Park strayed through the area. The gun and scanner, along with the black hooded sweatshirt he wore, were also standard operating procedure for the 43rds. As Diaz painted away, a car with four people aboard pulled into the Jack

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in the Box drive-through lane. The front passenger, Jeanette Garcia, an offduty LAPD officer, was just a few months out of the Academy. She was asleep because she’d put in a long shift the day before and she was wiped out. Her boyfriend, a fireman from Ventura County, was driving and in the backseat were Garcia’s sister and her male friend. Garcia’s sister noticed the tagger across the street and woke up Jeanette. She asked Jeanette if she should call the police and report the tagging. Garcia, knowing better, said not to bother. By the time the police responded to a low-priority call like a simple tagging, the suspects would be long gone. As Jeanette was having the conversation with her sister, Diaz stopped painting and noticed them talking and pointing in his direction. Diaz approached the vehicle and challenged them. Garcia remembered Diaz walking up to the driver’s window and yelling, “You want to get blasted? You want to get blasted right now?” Garcia told her boyfriend to forget the food and just leave. Her boyfriend backed the car onto Avenue 43 and then put the car in drive and began making a left onto Figueroa. As the car began its turn, Merced Cambero flipped the hood of his sweatshirt over his head and appeared in front of the car aiming his pistol at them. Years later Garcia said, “If it was me driving, I would have run him over. But I was trained. My boyfriend turned the other way, away from the bullets, and drove up the other direction on Figueroa. Me, I would have run him over.” As Garcia’s car corrected its turn, Cambero began firing. Garcia could hear rounds hitting the bodywork, saw the rear window blow out and realized there was no longer any way she could avoid trouble. She retrieved her off-duty Smith & Wesson semiautomatic and pushed herself out the passenger side window as Cambero continued to fire. Garcia remembered Cambero running after them as her boyfriend accelerated. She fired six rounds at Cambero, stopping after each pair of rounds to evaluate the situation as she’d been taught in the Academy. “He seemed really startled,” she said, “after I started shooting back.” No one was hit. Garcia stated years later that she was terrified after the event. She wasn’t afraid of being shot at; that was the job she’d signed up for. What she feared

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most was having Internal Affairs, the DA’s office, and the Consent Decree monitors determine that her returning fire might be out of department policy. She was still in her probation period and she was afraid she’d lose her job for doing her job. As it turned out, the shooting was within policy and Garcia continued on with the LAPD. Her fear of being punished for unloading on an active shooter, however, is something that lurks in the mind of every cop in the city. The next day, Detective Rick Ortiz, one of Northeast’s senior gang cops, got a copy of the report on the shooting and read the physical description of the tagger provided by Garcia and the other people in the car. No one in the car could provide a description of the shooter. He had the hood over his face the entire time. It took Ortiz about ten seconds to figure out that the tagger was Jessie Diaz. As a gang cop, it was Ortiz’s job to keep track of all the characters in the area. He’d known Diaz since he was a little gangster and had been part of the investigation team that looked into the murder of Diaz’s half brother, Rudy Maldonado, at the hands of a rival gang. The value of a gang cop like Rick Ortiz can’t be overestimated. He not only made the case on the Garcia shooting, but also was fundamentally the man responsible for initiating one of the biggest Federal hate crime cases ever brought against Hispanic gangsters. Ortiz’s contribution however, may be one of the last of its kind. After the Rampart scandal, the LAPD decided to rotate officers out of gang units after they complete three years on the job. Three years is just enough time for a gang cop to get familiar with the hundreds, if not thousands, of gangsters in his division. Everything learned on the job stops being a human intelligence resource the minute a cop is rotated out. To test his hunch on Diaz, Detective Ortiz put together two different sixpacks. Diaz’s photo was in one of the six-packs. He showed the six-packs to Jeanette and the others in the car and they each identified Diaz as the one who’d been tagging and who’d threatened to “blast” them. Ortiz got an arrest warrant for Diaz, but before it was issued, a Northeast uniformed cop spotted Diaz riding a bike at night without a headlight. The cop took Diaz into custody and brought him to Ortiz at Northeast. Ortiz

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put Diaz in an interview room and paid a visit to the apartment where Diaz lived with his mother. Ortiz found nothing in the apartment that connected Diaz to the shooting on Figueroa. As Ortiz was returning from Diaz’s apartment, he thought about how he might rattle Diaz’s cage. Once he got to Northeast, he grabbed a large stack of meaningless paperwork and a blank videocassette tape. He hand printed a label with JACK IN THE BOX – SECURITY and stuck it on the blank tape. He then put the tape on top of the stack and walked into the interview room where Diaz had been stewing for a few hours. When Ortiz sat down across from Diaz, Ortiz angled the cassette tape so that Diaz could see the label. Ortiz remembers Diaz focusing on the tape and becoming visibly nervous. Ortiz’s style, like Rich Valdemar’s, is easygoing and disarmingly friendly. He didn’t get on Diaz’s case. All he said to him was, “Hey, Jess, you know what? We had this shooting over by the Jack in the Box and I want to talk to you about it. We pulled this tape from the security camera and guess who I see on it.” That was all it took. Diaz banged his hand on the table and blurted out, “Dammit, I knew it. I just knew I was on that fucking tape. I just knew it.” What Ortiz got was a gold-plated admission that Diaz was present at the shooting. Diaz told Ortiz the entire tale. It fit perfectly with the statements made by Garcia and the others. Diaz also stated that Merced “Shadow” Cambero was there and that Cambero had pulled the trigger. He offered to testify in exchange for immunity on the four counts of Assault with a Deadly Weapon that he knew he was facing. Ortiz told him he couldn’t guarantee immunity until he talked to a DA, but that he’d do what he could. Ortiz had solved the case in record time. The rest was details. The next day, the case unraveled. Diaz’s family called Ortiz to tell him that Jessie was recanting his statement and that he wouldn’t testify against Cambero. They were afraid that Cambero would retaliate against the family and that Diaz would be assaulted or killed in county jail while awaiting trial. Diaz decided to face the charges alone. Based on all the available evidence, the DA’s office charged Diaz with four

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counts of Assault with a Deadly Weapon on July 7, 1999. Even though he hadn’t pulled the trigger, he was an accomplice. At the preliminary hearing on July 21, 1999, Diaz pleaded not guilty, but there was enough evidence to hold him for trial. After four months in County Jail, Diaz consulted with his lawyer and waived his right to a jury trial and a court trial. He pleaded guilty to all four counts and on October 18, 1999, he was sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison. If he served all his time, he’d be out at age forty-eight. After a year in state prison, Diaz began to doubt the wisdom of not having turned in Cambero and cut himself a deal. If he’d testified against his homie, he’d be out right now: maybe not back in Highland Park or even in California, but he’d be free. Fed up, Diaz sent word through prison officials that he wanted to talk to Northeast about the murder of a black man in Highland Park. Detectives John Berdin and Andy Teague were informed of Diaz’s desire to talk to them and they visited Diaz at Wasco State Prison. They found Diaz to be simultaneously angry, spiteful, and completely demoralized. According to John Berdin, Diaz was a broken man. “The guy was beat down,” Berdin recalled. The reasons were obvious. All the people he’d capered with were on the street, and they’d done a hell of a lot more damage than tagging. He hadn’t even had a gun on the night of the assault. He hadn’t shot anybody. As for his friends, all free men, he told Teague during his first interview, “Fuck them fools.” Diaz had information to offer about the murder of Kenny Wilson. He claimed that he’d been there in the van when it happened. And he named Merced “Shadow” Cambero, Gilbert “Lucky” Saldana, and Jose “Clever” Delacruz as accomplices in the murder. He laid out the entire series of events and he wanted a deal in exchange for his testimony. Berdin and Teague told him that they were grateful for the information, but that there was nothing they could do for him. They laid out the law for Diaz and told him that he had 120 days after sentencing to cut a deal with the DA. Diaz was close to a year beyond that window of opportunity. They could take his statement and petition the DA, but there was nothing even

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the DA could do about granting him a reduction in sentence. It was too late. A year too late. Incredibly, Diaz didn’t care. He was ready to talk even if he had nothing to gain. The story he told would, over five years later, make national news. On the night of April 17th and the early morning hours of the 18th, Merced “Shadow” Cambero, Gilbert “Lucky” Saldana, Jose “Clever” Delacruz, and Jessie “Listo” Diaz were riding around in a Chevrolet van they’d stolen on Hub Street, a short drive from the scene of the murder. They picked the Chevy because it had a vent window that could easily be broken to reach inside and pop the door latch. They spent most of that night looking for rival gangsters and throwing up Avenues tags wherever they found a clean wall. Cambero had a .357 Magnum revolver. Delacruz was armed with a 12 gauge shotgun and Saldana was armed with a 9 mm semiautomatic pistol. It was a typical mission, one of the four or five per month this crew went on. Since they couldn’t find any rivals, they decided to go into enemy territory. They would park, send someone out to throw an Avenues tag on a rival’s wall, and then wait to see if anyone came out to cross out the tag or otherwise retaliate. It was a fairly cold night and there was nobody on the streets. They were trying to start a gang war but nobody came. At roughly 3:30 AM, they stopped at the corner of Monte Vista and Avenue 52 and tagged the wall near a grocery store. This area technically belonged to Dogtown, a small gang that was hardly worth the trouble. Dogtown had a handful of members and none of them could really be called active, certainly nowhere near as big or active as Avenues. After they finished tagging and got back in the stolen van, they drove part way down Avenue 52 and saw a black man driving slowly in the opposite direction. According to what Diaz first told Teague, Cambero was first to see Wilson. Cambero said to the other three Avenues in the van, “You guys want to kill a nigger?” One of the three said, “Fuck it.” Wilson drove to the end of the block, made a U-turn, and drove back towards them. Diaz told Berdin and Teague that Cambero, Delacruz, and Saldana got out of the van through the large sliding door and pursued the

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slow-moving car on foot. When they were at the right rear quarter of the car they opened fire. Cambero shot first and then Saldana and Delacruz cut loose with their weapons. They ran alongside the car as it veered towards the sidewalk and emptied their guns. Diaz said they saw the Cadillac crash against a parked car before they piled back into the van and drove off. With Diaz’s statement on tape, Berdin and Teague returned to Northeast and issued warrants for the arrest of Saldana, Delacruz, and Cambero. In a situation where one criminal implicates others, his word isn’t enough to proceed with a prosecution. There has to be corroborating evidence or an admission by the people implicated. The best that Berdin and Teague could do at that point was bait the hook with Diaz’s statement and see who bit. Delacruz was still in the neighborhood and easy to find. When Berdin and Teague brought him to Northeast for an interview, they played the tape of Diaz talking about the murder. Delacruz admitted that he’d been in the van and had fired his shotgun “at the car.” But he said he wasn’t aiming for the driver. His admission of being there and firing a weapon was enough to charge him with murder. One down, two more to go. When Gilbert Saldana was brought to Northeast, he heard Diaz’s taped interview as well. But Saldana hung tough. He denied being in the van or having anything to do with the Wilson murder. There was nothing to do but let him go and continue searching for additional evidence to pin on him. Merced Cambero was never found. Like the roughly 3,000 other fugitives wanted by law enforcement in the US, he’d fled to Mexico and as of January 2007, has yet to return or to be turned over by Mexican police. Delacruz’s trial was prosecuted by the DA’s Hate Crime Unit. He was charged with a hate crime in addition to the murder charge. On February 25, 2002, he was found guilty of murder but not guilty of the hate crime. Jose Delacruz received a sentence of forty-five years to life, but his story was far from over. Soon after the Wilson murder, it was becoming clear to Northeast detectives and patrol officers that a new kind of crime wave was spreading in Highland Park. Detective Bob Lopez recalled seeing a new strain of graffiti appearing on walls and fences. Instead of the usual tags, he noticed

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“187 Niggers” and “Mayates get out.” The “187” is a reference to the California penal code for murder and “Mayate” is the Spanish slang equivalent of “nigger.” The tagging evolved into assaults on the black residents who were moving into Highland Park in greater numbers. On July 31, 2000, a male black named Mike Samson was attacked by two Hispanic males with a heavy metal steering wheel security lock on the corner of Colorado and Mount Royal. He was hit repeatedly in the head and suffered severe lacerations. Samson’s friend told police he was attacked by someone wearing a floppy beach hat who’d left the scene in a gray Cadillac. A few minutes later, a Northeast patrol officer pulled over two Hispanics in a gray Cadillac. The passenger took off running but the driver, Fernando “Sneaky” Cazares, an admitted Avenues gangster, stayed with the car. The officer found a floppy beach hat and a steering wheel lock in the back. He also found two scanners tuned to the Northeast frequencies. Three months later, on October 26, 2000, a black male named Christopher Bowser was beaten and robbed on the corner of Avenue 43 and Figueroa, the same corner on which Cambero and Diaz had assaulted Jeanette Garcia a year earlier. Bowser refused to identify the assailants to Northeast cops. A week later, a black male named Anthony Prudhomme was found shot to death in a basement apartment he rented from a friend. From what Northeast detectives could determine, several individuals had broken down the door to his apartment, beaten him, and then shot him in the head while he was held prone on his bed. Robbery was ruled out as a motive because money and other valuables were left behind. On November 30, 2000, twenty-eight days after Prudhomme’s murder, Christopher Bowser decided to cooperate with the police. He identified Alejandro “Bird” Martinez, an Avenues 43 gangster, as his attacker. On December 3, 2000, Martinez was arrested for assaulting Bowser and was sent to County Jail to await trial. Nine days later, Christopher Bowser was shot and killed on Avenue 43rd and Figueroa while waiting at a bus stop. In a little over a year, Northeast detectives had three male black murder victims—Wilson, Prudhomme, and Bowser—and other assaults, racial graf-

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fiti, and verbal threats directed at black residents of Highland Park. The only threads connecting all the murders and assaults was that none of the victims were gang members and that all the evidence pointed towards the Avenues 43 clique. To close observers, Hispanic gangsters assaulting and killing black nongang-affiliated citizens wasn’t a new phenomenon. Like the Eme policy initiative of 1992, there was another initiative that essentially ordered all Surenos to keep their neighborhoods free of blacks. It was nothing short of an ethnic cleansing policy that, to its discredit, the major media chose to ignore. This media refusal came to an end when the US Attorney filed Federal hate crime charges against five members of Avenues on November 17, 2005. The media was forced to acknowledge the existence of this vile policy because the gatekeepers at the LA Times, The New York Times, Los Angeles Magazine, LA Weekly, LA Citybeat, and all the LA electronic media could no longer keep the truth locked out. For years prior to the media becoming aware of it, gang cops, prosecutors, and, tragically, law-abiding blacks knew all too well there were some neighborhoods that blacks just shouldn’t go into. A Los Angeles DA said, “In some parts of town, the lines are so well defined that a black is safe on one side of the street but he’s liable to get killed if he crosses over.” There was plenty of evidence to support that statement for anyone even casually interested in the subject. On August 27, 1995, Eric Green and Michael Davis, both black males, stopped at the intersection of Gordon and 11th Street in Pomona. A Pomona 12th Street gangster, a juvenile named Frank Limon, approached the car and fired a .22 caliber pistol at Green. Although it was clear to the police and the DA that racial animosity was the motive, there wasn’t enough evidence to charge Limon with a hate crime. Limon was convicted of second-degree attempted murder and sentenced to sixteen years in prison. Green was left partially paralyzed, nearly blind in one eye, and suffering severe cognitive disorders. He still has one of the bullets lodged in his brain. Michael Davis was able to identify the shooter because he lived around the corner from him. At Limon’s trial, Davis testified that he’d known Limon for years and never had any racial trouble with

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Limon. The trouble only started after Limon was jumped into Pomona 12th Street and he started earning stripes. In 1999, a Compton Varrio Tortilla Flats gang member named Juan Reyes was convicted of attempted murder with a hate crime allegation for firing an AK-47 at Meredith Wilks, a black male resident of Compton. Wilks had a Latina girlfriend, Anna Ramirez, and they were riding in his car on their way to rent an apartment. As Wilks and Ramirez drove slowly looking for the address, Reyes yelled out to some of his homies to “get the guns.” They sent a young gangster on a bicycle to ride in front of Wilks’s car, forcing him to slow down as they retrieved weapons from under a porch. Reyes yelled out, “Fuck Mayates,” and began firing at Wilks. Reyes’s crimies also cut loose with their weapons. Wilks threw himself over Anna Ramirez and, like Ferdie Olmedo and the Sanchez brothers, took all the rounds. He survived, but suffered permament brain damage. Reyes went to Mexico, returning only when he thought that the heat was off. He was arrested and convicted of attempted murder and the hate crime enhancement. This crime was never covered in the big LA media. A detective at Reyes’s trial stated that the Hispanics don’t like it when a black moves into the neighborhood; they especially don’t like if he dates a Hispanic woman. In their eyes, Wilks had been guilty on both counts. On May 29, 1999, Levar Haggins and his passenger Anthony Melancon had stopped for a red light at the intersection of Spruce and Mathiessen in Compton. Jorge Diaz, a member of Compton Varrio Tortilla Flats, rolled up to Haggins and yelled out, “Fuck niggers. This is T-Flats.” Haggins was shot and killed almost instantly. Neither Haggins nor Melancon were gangsters. Diaz received life without parole for first-degree murder and the hate crime enhancement. This racial murder was also never reported in the major LA media. On September 29, 2001, Robert Hightower, a black male, was shot and killed in the Harbor Gateway area in an unprovoked attack by Marco Milla, a known gang member. Hightower, who was not a gang member, and three friends had gone to visit a friend on Harvard Street. After parking their car, they were approached by Milla who threatened the group, made numer-

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ous racial slurs, and pulled a gun. When the group of blacks ran, Milla fired and hit Hightower in the spine. Hightower died before surgery could begin at Harbor UCLA Medical Center. Milla was eventually convicted of a racially motivated hate crime and sentenced to life without parole. The homicide and subsequent trial never reached the public airwaves or the print media. On August 8, 2002, Roy Williams, a black male resident of Pomona, was attacked in his own yard by three Pomona 12th Street gangsters. One of them, Ricardo “Chivo” Diaz, had previously threatened Roy Williams with harm if Diaz ever saw Williams on the street. Williams told police that Diaz had previously told him that “niggers shouldn’t be outside the gate [Williams’ own front gate], and the street was his domain.” The day of the assault Diaz yelled at Williams that “niggers had no business living in Pomona because that was his territory and he explained to me then that was 12th Street territory.” During the physical attack, Diaz told one of his homies to “Pull out the gun. Shoot the niggers.” Diaz’s crimey couldn’t get a clear shot because Diaz and Williams were fighting. Diaz broke off, ran to his accomplice, and grabbed the gun. He aimed it at Williams and cocked the hammer. By then, Williams had run in the house, locked the door, and ran for the phone. When the police arrived, they arrested Diaz. They knew right where to find him. Diaz lived next door to Williams. In Diaz’s trial, Pomona Police Officer Richard Martinez testified as a prosecution witness and told the court that “groups like the Mexican Mafia have forbidden Hispanic street gang members from associating with black street gang members and forbidden them from making deals with them.” Williams, a fifty-one-year-old laborer, was not a gang member. Diaz’s threats and assault had nothing to do with black gangs. In the middle of the case, Diaz took a guilty plea to one count of making a terrorist threat and was sentenced to ten years in prison in exchange for the Assault with a Deadly Weapon charges being dropped. This case never made the news either. On April 21, 2003, Dennis Weathersby, a black male, was shot and killed by Hispanic gangsters in Duarte, a community in the San Gabriel Valley to the east of Los Angeles. Weathersby was not a gangster; in an editorial, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune correctly deemed the murder racially motivated. It

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was one of the rare race murders that actually got any media attention. On July 5, 2003, Manuel “Knuckles” Barron, another Pomona 12th Street gangster, shot and killed Desmond Boykins, a black male resident of Pomona. The next day, Barron and three other 12th Streeters drove up to the curb at 525 Buena Vista Avenue in Pomona, where a group of workers were waiting for the gates to open at the Unistar warehouse. Among the men were Lawrence Day and Markeith Brooks. Brooks reported to police that the driver had brandished a .38 caliber revolver and asked, “What the fuck are you niggers doing here?” The driver continued calling the men “monkeys” and said that he was from 12th Street, that it was his neighborhood, and that niggers didn’t belong there. The black men took off running when it appeared that Barron was about to shoot. On July 10th, Barron shot and killed Antuan Wheatley, a black male, and wounded Wheatley’s friend Mark Dolan. During the investigation of the homicides and racial assaults, Pomona detectives searched the house of one of Barron’s co-defendants. In his room, they found the clothing an eyewitness described as that worn by Wheatley’s killer and a notebook with a lot of gang illustrations, graffiti, and names. An elaborately drawn “Nigger Killers” tag had a page to itself, with the names Nuckles, Boy, and Moreno underneath. The three had essentially started a little clique of Pomona 12th Street and called themselves the Nigger Killers. Apparently, they were trying to live up to the name. In testimony given by Marcus Perez of Pomona PD, he was asked the significance of the Nigger Killer notebook. He told the court, “What that means directly is that they don’t like African-Americans and if an AfricanAmerican would enter their neighborhood, they would likely be injured or killed. If 12th Street would allow an African American to live in their neighborhood, they would be viewed as humiliated by the surrounding rival Hispanic gangs. I had an example of this very recently on another Hispanic gang where they actually forced the African-American family out of the area for fear of humiliation and retaliation from rival gangs. So it really is important that they try to keep their neighborhoods free of African Americans.” Barron received multiple life sentences because he was a ju-

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venile at the time of the murders. Had he been a few years older, he’d have been eligible for death. None of these murders or trials ever made it beyond court documents and police reports. Beginning in 2001 and continuing right up to November 17, 2005, when the US Attorney unsealed an indictment on four Avenues gangsters charged them with racial hate crimes and the murders of Bowser and Wilson, a Los Angeles gang researcher tried unsuccessfully to interest the media in what was clearly ethnic cleansing on a scale that was frightening for an open and tolerant society. Events like the murders of Bowser, Prudhomme, Wilson, Hightower and Boykins aren’t supposed to happen in the US. And if they do, then they usually get the well deserved attention of the James Byrd truck dragging murder in Texas and the Matthew Shepard atrocity in Wyoming. But for years, the media chose not to see what was so plainly obvious to even a casual observer. The proposal for an article on the Eme-initiated policy of driving all blacks out of neighborhoods controlled by Surenos, and the subsequent murders, made the rounds for years with no takers. One editor at a national magazine wrote the researcher that the article was “un-occasioned seeming.” Another wanted proof that these murders had actually happened. When he was shown the proof in the form of court documents and transcripts of testimony and interviews with detectives, he still didn’t believe it and chose not to run a piece. Another editor at a Los Angeles weekly paper said if he ran the article he wanted to make sure that no one would think that the idea of ethnic cleansing was in any way being endorsed by his paper. The researcher told him that the paper would only be running information that was well-documented in court cases. The editor still demurred and refused the article. Another editor stated flatly that his paper didn’t want to be responsible for starting a race war. Still another newsweekly turned down the article with the excuse that it was too long. When the researcher offered to cut it down to smaller size, the editor responded that they wouldn’t have room in their paper for years.

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After first being promised anonymity, a newspaper reporter told the researcher that, “If it was a gang of white skinheads, we would have already done a five-part series on it. But right now, you’re out of luck. You should write a book about it.” There was a lot of truth to that. While the LA Times and other LA media were standing off from the Eme-ordered hate crime homicides, they were reporting on other hate crimes. On December 7, 2004, Jim King, a seventeen-year-old black male, was assaulted by four white juveniles in a Simi Valley mall while King was selling newspaper subscriptions. During the physical assault, King managed to break free but tripped and fell. He tore a ligament. The four whites took off in a car that was stopped within minutes of leaving the mall. The Simi police arrested the four and found skinhead and white power paraphernalia in their car. The LA Times covered the initial beating and arrest and then did a follow-up the next day on how King was handling the assault. The paper also did stories when the white teens were prosecuted. The assault on Jim King also made the evening news on every local channel, complete with “on the scene” coverage of reporters doing stand-ups at the mall where the assault took place. The Times did a similar series of stories on a white supremacist teenager in Ventura who, along with his friends, beat a homeless man to death and stole his jar of pennies. Similar stories ran about white racists assaulting blacks in Palmdale and Lancaster. All these stories were, of course, legitimate news and deserved the coverage they received. But the fact that the media as a whole completely ignored the race murders in Compton, Pomona, Torrance, Duarte, and especially Highland Park, which is a fifteen-minute drive from the offices of the LA Times, is a troubling indicator of the filtering system so clearly in operation at the major news outlets. From the point of pure newsworthiness, the Highland Park, Pomona, and Compton killings were much bigger stories; they were more violent and were the result of an organized conspiracy to kill blacks and drive them out

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of Hispanic neighborhoods. The race crime stories the media did run were about the actions of individual racists. The Highland Park and other murders committed by Hispanic street gangsters were the result of orders issued by a criminal organization. Even if these were solved and the killers sent to prison, there were thousands more in the Sureno ranks ready to continue the campaign of intimidation and murder. Luisa Prudhomme, the mother of murder victim Anthony Prudhomme, tried for years to get the LA media interested in the case of her son and the other black victims of the Avenues gang. She encountered nothing but polite apathy. By August 20, 2004, when Debra Yang, the US Attorney for the Central District of California, indicted four Avenues gangsters on hate crimes as the result of the Wilson murder, the media gatekeepers were finally overwhelmed. The LA Times couldn’t ignore a Federal hate crime indictment. The August indictment named Gilbert “Lucky” Saldana, Merced “Shadow” Cambero, Alejandro “Bird” Martinez, and Fernando “Sneaky” Cazares. All were Avenues gangsters. They were charged on three counts of violating the civil rights of African-Americans in Highland Park. The only victim in that indictment was Kenny Wilson. Close observers of Avenues realized that two names were conspicuously missing from the indictment: Jessie “Listo” Diaz and Jose “Clever” Delacruz. It was fairly obvious to anyone who knew the background of the Wilson murder that Diaz and Delacruz would probably be used as prosecution witnesses. The other missing names were of the two other murder victims, Bowser and Prudhomme. The gang researcher once again contacted all the media outlets that had turned down the story on the racial murders and alerted them that there was now a Federal hate crime prosecution component to the story. Once again, they all declined to run the story. On November 17, 2005, a superseding indictment was returned by a grand jury. This one added the names of Porfirio “Dreamer” Avila, another Avenues gangster, as a defendant, and Christopher Bowser as an additional victim. Anthony Prudhomme’s name was still missing as the third victim.

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After the second indictment, the phones at Northeast homicide began ringing with press inquiries. Detective John Berdin asked himself: Where were these people four years ago? The fact was, John Berdin and Andy Teague had gotten as far as they could at the state level on the murders of Wilson, Prudhomme, and Bowser and the other assaults and threats against black residents of Highland Park. Berdin and Teague, along with Detectives Bob Lopez, Gabe Rivas, and David Torres, had done all the heavy lifting and the majority of the investigative work. They’d gotten Diaz’s statement on the Wilson murder and had already sent Delacruz to prison for it. Saldana was by then in prison on another homicide and Cambero was hiding out in Mexico. Plenty of evidence pointed to Alejandro Martinez as the man who ordered Bowser’s shooting and had helped send Porfirio Avila to prison as the trigger man in the Bowser killing. It was the lobbying of Northeast detectives that finally got the US Attorney interested in the Highland Park murders. Northeast cops also had another very strong suspect. He was an Avenues 43 gang member whose brother is an LAPD officer and whose sister is a lawyer. This shooter had been implicated by one of the defendants as the man who pulled the trigger in Anthony Prudhomme’s killing. To get this other shooter would require the heavy pressure of a Federal indictment. They took the cases as far as they could and they felt the Federal government should finish the case. By the time the Federal trial started in July 2006, the story that no one wanted to touch became a national and international news event. The trial was covered by The New York Times, Newsweek, the LA Times, Fox News, and all the local TV channels. Once it appeared on the Drudge Report, it blasted through the internet. As expected, Jessie Diaz and Jose Delacruz were put on the stand as prosecution witnesses. In his first day of testimony, Diaz stated that Avenue 43 was actually in competition with other Avenues cliques to see which could drive the most blacks out of its neighborhood. He also told the FBI that the gang got an order from the Mexican Mafia in 1998 to “kill any blacks on sight.” The truth was that the order, official or otherwise, had been issued much

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earlier than that. Maybe Avenues had only gotten the official word in 1998, but other Sureno gangs had been actively keeping their neighborhoods from being “infested” by blacks for years. When Diaz gave his statement about the Wilson murder to Berdin and Teague, he stated that there were only three other people in the van that night: Cambero, Saldana, and Delacruz. The truth was that Alejandro Martinez and Fernando Cazares were also in the van. Diaz hadn’t given up the names of Martinez and Cazares was because they weren’t shooters. It was only during the second grand jury hearing that he admitted the men had been there. It was at this point that Diaz admitted that it was Martinez, not Cambero, who said, “You guys want to kill a nigger?” Diaz’s reluctance to tell the whole truth the first time is fairly typical of people who become confidential informants. They reveal enough information to implicate the shooters but often leave out accomplices because, in their minds, the accomplices aren’t really guilty. The entire concept of snitching is a monumental emotional hurdle to overcome. From their earliest days as little taggers and bangers, they’re taught that the foulest creature on earth is a homie that capers with you, shares risks, watches your back and whose back you watch, and then—when the stakes get too high— decides to roll and rats everybody out. Snitching turns you into a man of no honor or loyalty and, in a very fundamental way, you become a man without a country. Everyone in the neighborhood, sometimes even family members, turn their backs. The big homies put you on the greenlight list. Even law enforcement, while grateful for assistance in making difficult case, often don’t show you much respect. The only people who seem to value and respect informants are the victims’ families and friends. Although most of the investigations were done before the US Attorney indicted the four Avenues members, the team of USA Alex Bustamante, USA Barbara Bernstein, and the lead investigator, FBI Agent Gerry Fradella, pieced together a remarkably coherent and airtight case. The plight of the defense attorneys was evident in Judge Percy Anderson’s courtroom as they tried to shake the prosecution witnesses. Even before testimony began, the defense attorneys didn’t appear to see

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much daylight for their clients. During opening arguments, Reuven Cohen, who was defending Gilbert Saldana, as much as admitted that the defendants were guilty and that his job was to just to minimize the damage a Federal conviction would bring. Cohen said that the killing of Wilson was not a hate crime but a simple gang killing committed out of “boredom.” It was difficult to determine if Cohen was trying to help his client or make him look worse in the eyes of the jury. In a sick way, killing out of racial hatred is at the very least acting out some sort of cause, no matter how perverted or diseased. Killing out of boredom is the act of a psychopath. Prior to the start of the trial, the five defense attorneys, one of whom was Michael Shannon (attorney for Randy “Jo Jo” Rodriguez in Manzella’s Avenues trial), issued a statement saying that the Federal government had no power to involve itself in a common street crime. The US Attorney didn’t see it that way. By any rational standards, these murders were a conspiracy as egregious as any organized assault committed by the KKK, the Aryan Nation, the Aryan Brotherhood, or any other white supremacist group. The government’s case was that these individuals had deprived the victims of their right to use a public facility. This law was originally written as part of the Civil Rights Act. In this case, the public facility the victims were being deprived of using was the streets of Highland Park. Soon after the start of the trial, when stories began appearing in the LA Times, Cohen apparently received some kind of threat. He issued a statement saying that he was in no way minimizing the plight of blacks and that his defense of an accused racist was merely the way that a free society operates. A few members of the media wondered privately why the US Attorney was even bothering with this trial. The feeling was that all the shooters were already serving time for various charges and this trial was just a piling-on. The question goes right to the heart of the public’s and media’s lack of awareness about the nature of Hispanic street gangs and their nearly inseparable integration into the Mexican Mafia. Although neither the US Attorney’s office nor the FBI stated it publicly, the simple answer to that question is that the trial was a strongly worded message to the big homies,

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shotcallers, and Carnales in and out of prison: Ethnic cleansing in the Eme’s name will not be tolerated. The evidence that USAs Bustamante and Bernstein presented was powerful and impossible for the defense to minimize. The jury heard tapes of conversations between one of the defendants and a friend in prison bragging about “fucking up Mayates,” and how “that fool with the boom box [Bowser] is gone.” The jury also saw the homicidal mindset of Alejandro Martinez when it was shown a picture of the “43rd KILLS FOR THRILLS” tattoo on his head. Gilbert Saldana’s ex-girlfriend, who at the time of the trial was about to graduate from the LASD academy, testified that Saldana had no tattoos because he didn’t want to make it easy for the cops to identify him as an Avenues gangster. After four weeks of testimony, the Federal jury returned guilty verdicts on all counts against Martinez, Saldana, Cazares, and Avila. Apparently the message was lost on the Avenues gang. A few days before the end of the trial, a black high school football player from Lincoln Heights High School was confronted and attacked outside a party on Avenue 44 and Figueroa by several Hispanic gang members. One of his Hispanic teammates stepped between the black youth and the gangsters to protect him. A gangster shot the Hispanic ball player dead. No suspects were identified at the time and, as of January 2007, Northeast cops don’t have enough information to make an arrest. Soon after the trial ended, three black males rolled up on three Hispanics on Central Avenue and fired a total of thirty-four rounds from two AK-47s. When the victims were down, one of the shooters approached the prone bodies and delivered a coup de grace round to the back of each head. The three Hispanics, one a young boy, died at the scene. None of them were gang members. This was an unprovoked attack and although the LAPD wouldn’t say so officially, the triple murder was clearly in retaliation for what had happened in Highland Park. The war that no one wanted to notice could no longer be ignored. As often happens, the media forgot the man largely responsible for kicking open the door and making that huge Federal case possible. If it hadn’t

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been for Detective Rick Ortiz correctly identifying Jessie Diaz as the tagger the night of Officer Jeanette Garcia’s shootout, Diaz wouldn’t have landed in prison for twenty-seven years. And if Diaz hadn’t been facing that long sentence, chances are he wouldn’t have rolled on the other shooters. It’s entirely possible that, were it not for Rick Ortiz’s familiarity with the active gangsters in his Division, the Wilson murder would never have been solved. It’s possible that solving the Bowser and Prudhomme murders might have blown back and gotten the Wilson murder solved and still resulted in the Federal trial. But that wasn’t the way it played out. Like LASD Deputy Roy Nunez, who made the traffic stop on Ernie Castro that in time evolved into the first Federal RICO trial against the Eme, Ortiz was the right man at the right place with the right level of knowledge. He combined the circumstances that were handed him with smart police techniques and an innate ability to communicate with Diaz in a way that Diaz understood. He cracked Diaz and set in motion a chain of events that in the course of five long years brought to public consciousness the Eme’s vile ethnic cleansing policy. Rick Ortiz’s pivotal role cannot be overestimated. He made the case. The current LAPD policy of rotating people out of gang units every three years will deprive the department of the kind of deep gang intelligence possessed by people like Ortiz. If that policy continues, cracking big cases by picking up a thread and unraveling the entire fabric of a bigger conspiracy will become more and more unusual. The policy is misguided. Ironically, the same Federal entities that prosecuted the Avenues for hate crimes insist that this policy is enforced as part of the consent decree. Despite all the media attention that was finally given to the racial homicides, the killings continued. In late December 2006, a black fifteen-year-old named Cheryl Green was shot to death within a block of where Robert Hightower was killed by Marco Milla in 2001. Her killers were a pair of Hispanic gangsters who were charged with murder and a hate crime enhancement. In January 2007, an apartment building in Compton that housed black residents was firebombed and racial graffiti was found on a wall. In the aftermath of the Green killing, Janice Hahn, the former mayor’s

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sister and city councilwoman whose district Green was killed in, promised to impose a gang injunction in the area and to sue landlords who rent to gang families. She also compared the Harbor Gateway area to the South during the era of Jim Crow segregation. What apparently escaped Hahn’s notice was that three separate gang injunctions were in effect in Northeast at the time Wilson, Prudhomme, and Bowser were killed and that prohibiting rentals to gang members is unconstitutional. A week after the murder, Hahn led a group of black citizens south of the 206th Street “forbidden zone” that blacks know not to cross and bought snacks in a liquor store in the gang-controlled area. Although Cheryl Green’s homicide received wide press coverage and public comment, not one article or newscast and not one politician ever acknowledged the reality that the Hispanic gangsters who are assaulting and killing blacks are only following orders from the big homies.

“I can’t believe that this kid PC’d me.” — Benny “Sleepy” Garcia

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C H A P TE R Si x TEEN

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omewhat re-energized by their success in convicting

Anthony Medina, Tony Manzella and Ruth Arvidson prepared themselves for the prosecution of Richard “Lil Pee Wee” Aguirre and Scott “Gato” Gleason. Manzella’s two star witnesses were again James “Drac” Maxson and Benny “Sleepy” Garcia. Aguirre was facing charges of murdering Joseph “Clavo” Torres, Alan Downey, and Raul “Crook” Rodriguez. Gleason was charged only with the murder of Rodriguez. Manzella’s road to conviction was going to be tough. Although the murders themselves were straightforward street shootings, the difficult part would be explaining to 239

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the jury the complex motives and Avenues/Eme machinations behind them. Manzella had three story lines to keep straight and coherent in the minds of the jury members. If he didn’t get his case presented just right, the backstories could become a hopeless muddle. Manzella, Arvidson, and the defense attorneys had spent years familiarizing themselves with thousands of pages of interviews, police reports, chronos, and medical and firearms evidence. All that had to be distilled into a few days of explanation that a jury could digest and understand. The other issue he had to deal with was the almost entirely circumstantial nature of the evidence. In the real world, gang murders aren’t tightly scripted and there’s almost never any forensic evidence tying the shooters to the crime. Avenues gangsters aren’t amateurs and don’t leave very much in the wake of a homicide. There are the shell casings, the projectiles removed from the bodies, and, once in a great while, a fingerprint. That’s the bad news. The good news is that gang homicides usually require more than a single assailant and information about a killing becomes an open secret in the neighborhood. Sometimes the gears of law enforcement and the justice system mesh quickly. Other murders with complex motivations, multiple suspects, and Mexican Mafia connections, absolutely require the assistance of informants and can take decades to bring to trial. H. Clay Jacke, representing Gleason, and Norm Kallen, representing Richie Aguirre, had a somewhat easier task than the prosecution did. They needed to demonstrate to the jury that the two main witnesses were lying out of self-interest. Their story line was that the informants needed to make up a good tale to get themselves out of trouble. Manzella began his opening statement on the morning of April 19, 2005. After a few minutes of trying to hit every point on the map he had in his mind, he quickly realized that he was already losing the jury. It didn’t take him long to realize there were puzzled looks on their faces and he backtracked, taking a slower, more deliberate tack. He told the jury he was going to present a puzzle. The puzzle would be difficult grasp but if they, the jury, stayed with him, all would become clear. The jury visibly relaxed; some leaned forward, their interest piqued.

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Manzella stated that on New Year’s Eve 1995, a man named Jose Aroyo was killed at a house party. The suspected shooter in that killing was Richard “Stalker” Ramirez. The Aroyo murder, Manzella explained, was not part of the present case. What made it significant is that a gangster named Raul “Crook” Rodriguez from Alpine Street, had identified Ramirez to police as the killer. Alpine Street is one of the oldest gangs in Los Angeles and can trace its roots back to 1909. In retaliation for fingering Ramirez, Rodriguez was killed in April 1996. Manzella moved on to the murder of Joseph “Clavo” Torres, killed on Isabel Street in Glassell Park in July 1995. Torres was shot four times in the body and once in the head. Clavo is the Spanish term for a nail or spike, but it also means a quantity of drugs or a heroin syringe. In August 1995, Alan Downey was killed on Eagle Rock Boulevard. He too was shot in the head. Manzella’s contention was that Richie Aguirre had shot Downey over taxation. Manzella briefly walked the jury through the organization of the Eme and its connection to Avenues through Alex Aguirre, his younger brother Richie, and Scott Gleason, Richie’s co-defendant. Manzella characterized Richie and Gleason as Eme Associates because they were involved in the Eme business of regulating the drug business, running Avenues, and collecting taxes. In the course of events, Jimmy “Drac” Maxson was paroled from prison in April 1996 and returned to Avenues to pick up where he left off. Within days of hitting the streets, Maxson met with Richie Aguirre and Scott Gleason at Danny’s Taco Stand at 3916 Figueroa Avenue to catch up with had happened while he’d been in prison. At that meeting, Maxson was told about the murders of Downey, Rodriguez, and Torres. Gleason flat-out told Maxson, “I did Crook [Rodriguez] and a CP [Cypress Park] boy.” Over tacos, Maxson further learned that the paperwork on Rodriguez being a snitch had come from Johnny “Sleepy” Martinez, another Avenues 43 member who ran a crew for the Aguirres. Gleason confided to Maxson, “I set it up.” Manzella laid out the backstory on the murder of Alan Downey. Downey

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had been working for Alex Aguirre. His arrangement was to buy dope from Alex at premium prices and then, on top of that, to pay taxes to Alex. In exchange, Downey was given Burbank as his area and Alex would keep Burbank free of competing drug dealers. There came a point when Downey only bought some of his dope from Alex because, according to people he complained to at the time, “Alex’s coke was shit.” The coke was being stepped on too many times and Downey’s clients had complained. Downey then started buying his coke from the owner of the Big O Bar, a now-defunct establishment that took its name from nearby Occidental College. After Alex was arrested on RICO charges, Downey started doing business with Benny “Sleepy” Garcia. Garcia was very businesslike. He had high quality dope he got through his connections with the Border Brothers, and Downey was making very decent money. Downey decided that because Alex was gone and Downey wasn’t buying his dope from Richie Aguirre, Alex’s surrogate, Downey didn’t owe anybody taxes. Freelancing dope in Avenues territory cost him his life. When Richie Aguirre found out that Downey was selling dope under his nose, not paying taxes, and that the dope was coming from Garcia, he decided to confront Garcia rather Downey. Richie told Garcia that he, Garcia, had to kill Downey or else Alex would put him, Garcia, in the hat and both he and Downey would be killed. Garcia refused to kill Downey. He told Richie, “Go fuck yourself.” Richie pulled a gun. Garcia rushed him and wrestled the gun away from him. Another Avenues gangster, one of the Caldera brothers, jumped in on Richie’s side and stabbed Garcia in the cheek with a small knife. Soon after that confrontation, Garcia heard that Downey had been killed on Eagle Rock Boulevard. On the “Clavo” Torres killing, Manzella once again had Maxson as a witness. Richie Aguirre had informed Maxson that he and Javy Marquez had confronted Torres over tax collection. At the time, Torres was working for another made guy in the Eme, Alfredo “Tigger” Salinas. As a full-blown Carnal, Salinas had the same status in the Eme and in Avenues as Alex Aguirre.

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But for reasons that law enforcement believes have to do with infighting among the Brothers in the Eme, Salinas decided to take over Alex Aguirre’s drug operations. At a confrontation in Montecito Heights Park, Richie Aguirre and Javy Marquez told Torres that from now on, everything he collected would go to Alex. Apparently Torres refused and, according to what Richie Aguirre had told Maxson, “Gangster” Marquez shot Torres with a “big-ass gun.” This revelation had come as a blow to Maxson. He’d grown up with Torres since grammar school and they’d had nearly parallel careers in Avenues. But Maxson at the time was still living the gangster life and he put Torres’s murder down to business. He had to suck it up and carry on. Clavo got crossed up and paid with his life. That’s all it was, he told himself. Clavo got crossed up. By the end of Tony Manzella’s opening statement, the jury was beginning to a get a sense of what happens on the streets of Highland Park. Clay Jacke was the first of the two defense attorneys to make an opening statement. What he had to say only took a few minutes. His last sentence summed his defense strategy. “No way is Mr. Gleason connected to these murders. There is no shred of evidence except for the word of Jimmy Maxson. He’s a liar for hire.” Norm Kallen’s animated opening statement reminded the jury, “There’s a difference between Alex and Richard Aguirre. When these murders occurred, Richard Aguirre was only fourteen or fifteen years old.” Then Kallen stated, “Without Jimmy Maxson, we wouldn’t be here.” He then went on with the undisputed fact that “Mr. Maxson and Garcia are hard-core felons.” The use of informants clearly cuts both ways and a defense attorney can’t hammer too hard on the evil nature of informants. It leaves the question in the minds of rational people that if these informants are so bad, why had their clients associated with them? Kallen went into Maxson’s history: He’d been rolled up in the Federal RICO case and faced life in a Federal penitentiary. Although Maxson never testified for the prosecution in the RICO case, he was picked up by the LA

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District Attorney, relocated, and given money by the State. Garcia was given the same deal. The fact was, Kallen was absolutely right. Without James Maxson, Gerry Ramirez, and Benny Garcia, it would have been impossible for Manzella to file the cases. It’s a reality Manzella acknowledges. In most of his opening statements, he’d prepared the juries for the moment when defense attorneys brought up his witnesses’ criminal histories. He’d never attempted to paint his witnesses as choirboys. “When you cast your play in hell, the actors are not angels,” he told the juries. “The reason is simple. Criminals commit their crimes with other criminals and around other criminals. The only people who have that knowledge of crimes are the people they associate with. They don’t commit crimes in front of priests or police. That’s why these witnesses are here.” Manzella’s first witness was Richard Valdemar who, by the time the trial had started, had retired after three decades with the LASD. Valdemar went into his background in the LASD, his work in the jails, his pioneering efforts in Operation Safe Jails, and finally his role in the Joint Metropolitan Task Force. Valdemar also covered the origins of the street taxation that had become the cornerstone of the Mexican Mafia’s income and the Eme’s influence and power on the streets. He credited Peter “Sana” Ojeda as having started the taxation initiative in Orange County and Ernie “Chuco” Castro with the same in Los Angeles County. Valdemar then touched briefly on the one-man, one-vote organizational structure of the Eme and that technically, no Carnal could give another Carnal orders. Decisions were supposed to be made by consensus, but he acknowledged that “while it’s supposed to be very democratic, some members are more equal than others.” Manzella then had Valdemar explain some of the terminology used in prison and on the streets, such as “in the hat,” “greenlighted,” “rata,” and “paperwork.” According to Valdemar’s testimony, three members are usually required to vote in a new member. But in some prison yards where there aren’t many

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members, a single Carnal can bring in a new member. New members can be inducted in jail or on the street. Valdemar stated that when he was on the Task Force, he monitored a meeting in which Luis “Pelon” Maciel was inducted in one of the infamous meetings held in motel rooms. According to Eme rules, a new member needs a sponsor and that sponsor becomes responsible for the behavior of his protégé. If the new member screws up, it becomes the sponsor’s responsibility to check him or in the case of a serious infraction, kill him. It’s called “cleaning up your own books,” or “taking care of your own house.” If the sponsor refuses to kill his protégé, then the sponsor himself may be killed. Valdemar stated that he knew for sure that Alex “Pee Wee” Aguirre, Alfred “Tigger” Salinas, Big Rick “Psycho” Aguirre, and Albert “Boxer” Tolento were all Avenues members that had been inducted as full-blown Carnales in the Eme at the time of the murders under question. To the best of his knowledge, Jimmy Maxson, Benny Garcia, and Javy Marquez were all Associates at the time of the murders; Marquez had been inducted as a Carnal sometime after the murders of Downey, Rodriguez, and Torres. Manzella then introduced a photo board into evidence. It displayed Richie Aguirre’s and Scott Gleason’s tattoos. Richie’s included a clock with the hands at one and three o’clock. In Valdemar’s judgment, this “13” indicated Richie’s status as an Eme Associate. Richie also had a “213,” an indicator of Sureno or southsider status, and a further indicator of loyalty to the Eme. Richie’s other significant tattoo was the Aztec war shield, a by-now traditional Eme indicator that was originally started by Cheyenne Cadena back in the 1970s. Gleason’s tattoos were the “213,” the Aztec war shield, the letters “SUR” indicating a Southern Soldier or southsider, “XLIII” (the Roman numeral 43) on this right thumb to indicate the Avenue 43 clique, a pistol, and a black hand tattoo on his right hand—another indicator of loyalty to the Eme. Manzella produced an official document indicating that Raul Rodriguez had cooperated with the police by informing about the murder of Jose Aroyo. Manzella asked Valdemar if this constituted paperwork in the eyes of

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the Eme or any street gang. Valdemar said that it did. Valdemar went on to say that two hallmarks of an Eme assassination are overkill, usually by multiple shots to the head, and that the killers are usually someone that the victim trusts or at least knows. Valdemar finished his direct testimony by stating there were 80,000 Hispanic gang members in LA County and that for the most part they were all Surenos loyal to the Eme. He also estimated that there were between 250 and 300 full-fledged Eme Carnales either in prison or on the streets. Under cross-examination by Norm Kallen, Valdemar admitted that Richie Aguirre didn’t appear on any tapes or wiretaps made by the Task Force. Kallen then asked Valdemar if Richie had ever appeared on any of the surveillance tapes made of the Aguirre house. Valdemar said Richie Aguirre did not appear on the tapes, but that he’d observed Richie riding on his bicycle in the neighborhood. Valdemar further stated that Richie Aguirre was never present at any of the Eme meetings. Since Richie was only fourteen or fifteen at the time the Task Force was watching Alex, it would have been a historic event if Richie had been present. Norm got to the heart of his examination of Valdemar when he asked if informants ever gave false information to law enforcement. Valdemar said that some do, but that law enforcement checks and corroborates the information before acting on it. After Kallen’s cross-examination, Clay Jacke asked Valdemar if the terms he described earlier were exclusive to the Mexican Mafia. Valdemar said that other groups, such as the Aryan Brotherhood, also used those terms. Then Jacke asked about the Aztec war shield and whether it was exclusive to the Eme. Valdemar said, “Yes. I’ve only ever seen it in the prison context.” Jacke asked if overkill and killing people in secluded spots were exclusive to the Eme. Valdemar said that neither was. Although Manzella hadn’t planned on a redirect, the defense had unwittingly handed him a small gift by broaching two subjects Manzella was prohibited from mentioning: the surveillance of the Aguirre house and Richie’s connection to the Eme through his older brother. Manzella asked, “What is Richie Aguirre’s connection to the Eme?” Valde-

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mar said, “Richie was involved with the Eme through his older brother Alex, who was a full-fledged Carnal. I wrote a memo to the California Youth Authority to that effect.” Manzella then got to the opening Kallen had given him about the purpose of surveillance at the Aguirre house. Valdemar stated the surveillance had been prompted by wiretaps and other information gathered by the Task Force. Valdemar was then asked the meaning of “shotcaller.” He stated that “a shotcaller is a guy who directs gang activity.” Manzella asked whether Richie was one. Valdemar said yes. Manzella would never have been able to broach the subject of the Task Force surveillance because its target was Alex, not Richie. But once Kallen gave him the opening, Manzella drove through it. Realizing that he’d screwed up, Kallen went back for a short re-cross. He asked Valdemar if there was any way to get off a greenlight list. Valdemar said there were two ways, both at best temporary: “One is intercession by a big time shotcaller or Eme member and the other is to perform a suicide mission.” A suicide mission is one in which a greenlighted individual is sent to atone for his sins but has a very low probability of survival. The mission could be to assassinate someone who has a lot of protection or to rip off drugs from a heavily armed dealer. Sometimes a gangster successfully accomplished the suicide mission but was himself killed by the very people who’d sent him. Kallen’s last question to Valdemar was, “Are there tapes where Richie is named as a shotcaller?” Valdemar said, “No, but there are tapes of him acting like a shotcaller.” After the jury was excused for the day, Kallen raised the point with the court that he hadn’t been provided with tapes of that nature and that Valdemar’s testimony was thus an opinion not based on any factual evidence. Manzella responded by saying he didn’t have any such tapes either. The tapes were Federal property and the Federal government is notorious for not turning over that kind of evidence to anyone, not even to prosecutors. Judge Fidler let Valdemar’s testimony stand. By the end of the court day, Manzella was on a high. The defense had giv-

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en him a gift. It was now on record that Richie Aguirre, although he was only fifteen or so at the time, had been characterized by the leading Mexican Mafia authority in the State, if not the country, as a shotcaller in the Avenues. The next court day, Valdemar was back on re-direct. Manzella entered into evidence a blow-up of a greenlight list and asked his witness to interpret it for the benefit of the jury. Valdemar stated that greenlight lists are generated by Carnales and shotcallers within the prison system. Greenlight lists, or “Listas” as they’re known by Hispanics, are written in near-microscopic lettering. They’re then smuggled out of the institutions through family visits, inmates leaving the prison on parole, or in the mail. Valdemar pointed to the enlarged “Lista” and interpreted it for the jury. The word “Verde” at the top was Spanish for green. Below it were the names of three gangs, Lowell Street, Opal Street, and TRGs. Lowell and Opal are two Hispanic gangs that had either refused to pay their taxes or had committed an error so egregious that the entire gang was targeted for assassination. The TRG, a Cambodian gang in Long Beach, had historically resisted all efforts at taxation. Valdemar went further down the photo enlargement of the greenlight list and indicated to the jury the “Personal Hard Candy” section. He told the jury that this was a list of individuals targeted for assassination. Manzella directed Valdemar to the middle of the list where “BENNY SLEEPY GARCIA, AVES” appeared. Since the list was intercepted on August 20, 2002, it was clear that Benny Garcia had been in the hat for years. Manzella asked Valdemar if only full-fledged members of the Mexican Mafia could put someone’s name on a greenlight list. Valdemar said that Associates can request that someone be put on the list. The Carnales will then take into consideration the source and nature of the request, the validity of the claim, and then come to a decision. Essentially, the Eme conducts its own internal investigation, a process similar to how law enforcement checks the validity of its own sources. Manzella quickly ran through his next witness, Marta Ramirez, Joseph “Clavo” Torres’s girlfriend at the time he was killed. Since she spoke no Eng-

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lish, the court provided a translator. All she could testify to was that Torres was an Avenues gang member and that he’d told her he collected taxes. She claimed she didn’t know who he collected for and that she couldn’t remember whether he was connected to the Mexican Mafia. Norm Kallen took Marta Ramirez off on a different story line. She had apparently bought a car for $500 but had only given the owner $300 with a promise to pay the rest. While her boyfriend Torres drove it one day, he was pulled over. Because he didn’t have a valid registration for the vehicle, the car was impounded. The seller refused to give Marta the title until she paid the balance. Marta said that Torres was doing a lot of crystal meth at the time and also shooting up, though she didn’t know what. She testified that Torres got a kitchen knife and went to see the man about getting the registration so he could get the car out of impound. Kallen was steering the cross-examination towards Torres’s possibly having been killed by the man who’d sold Marta Ramirez the car. Manzella objected and there was a long bench meeting between Manzella, Judge Fidler, and the two defense attorneys. Tony complained to Judge Fidler that Kallen was trying to bring up an issue of third-party culpability. Judge Fidler asked Kallen, “Do you have anything at all on this pink slip guy?” Kallen had to admit to the court, “Not at this time.” Kallen basically went off on a fishing expedition trying to put some doubt in the jury’s mind, but he had nothing to back it up. Judge Fidler shut down the line of questioning. At the end of the bench meeting, Norm Kallen terminated his cross-examination of Marta Ramirez and Tony called his next witness, Brian See. See was the last person other than the killers to see Joseph Torres alive. See had only known Torres for a month, but he stated that he’d gotten to like him and that they’d spent a lot of time together. On the night Torres was murdered, See drove him to a street that was unfamiliar to him and dropped Torres off. He described the street as having apartment buildings and then terminating at a street beyond which an un-

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developed hillside was visible. Torres exited See’s car and said they would meet later. See never saw Torres again. Under cross-examination by Kallen, See stated that there were people all over the street when he dropped Torres off and that Torres was agitated about something. Right after See finished, Manzella brought on Detective John Berdin and asked Berdin if Brian See’s description of the street sounded familiar to him. Berdin stated that the description sounded like Drew Street. He added that Avenues controls Drew Street and that it was a thriving open-air drug bazaar. Avenues, Berdin stated, also controls neighborhoods like Eagle Rock, Highland Park, Glassell Park, and Silver Lake. Although most of it is in Northeast Division, some Avenues territory also extends into Hollenbeck Division. Under cross-examination, Berdin said that there might be other places in Highland Park that could fit Brian See’s description but that he had other information that led him to believe See was talking about Drew Street. Manzella called Officer Javier Montenegro, who’d responded to 3061 Isabel Drive on the night of July 22, 1995 and had observed EMTs treating a victim. Manzella then called Captain Ted Kalmas of the LAFD who’d responded to the Isabel address at 11:00 PM that night and who’d pronounced Joseph Torres dead shortly after examining him. John Berdin was called again, this time to give testimony as the lead investigator on the Torres murder. He’d responded to the murder location at 1:15 AM on July 23, 1995; he indicated that he’d processed the scene by collecting five spent shell casings and directing that photos be taken of the casings, the body, and the area around it. After Berdin stepped down, Manzella called the medical examiner who’d performed the autopsy on Torres.The ME stated that Torres suffered six gunshots to the body and one to the head. The round to the head entered just in front of the left ear, traveled left to right and shattered the skull. This round was instantly fatal. Two rounds went through the lungs and one through the heart, all fatal. The other rounds to the body were not instantly fatal. The ME also indicated that there was evidence of stippling to the head

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wound, which told the ME that the muzzle of the gun was between one to eighteen inches from Torres when the shot was fired. A toxicology test indicated that Torres had .59 micrograms per milliliter of amphetamines in his system. Dennis Fung, an LAPD criminalist, testified that all five recovered shells were .45 caliber and were all fired from the same gun. The two projectiles recovered from the body were also .45 caliber and were fired from the same gun. He characterized the .45 caliber round as “large.” Manzella’s next witness, Gilbert Estrada, had only appeared under subpoena. He didn’t want to be there—he’d previously told detectives he didn’t want to “rock the boat”—and it was obvious he’d been compelled to testify. Estrada, who once had a car repo business in Highland Park, was a friend of Alan Downey’s and occasionally hired him to help him repossess cars. The Toyota Camry that Downey was driving when he was killed was a car that Estrada and Downey had repossessed that day or one day earlier. In court, the detectives went into the details of his repo business and discovered that the mileage noted on the repo report on the Camry was not the same as on the car’s odometer. The police suspected that Estrada and Downey would roll the odometers back in order for Estrada and Downey to drive the cars for the three or four days before they were turned into the finance company that owned the paper on the cars. The Northeast cops realized that Downey was hanging on to repossessed cars and using them to move and sell his dope. The detectives believed that it was Downey’s intention with this constantly renewed fleet of cars to avoid detection by Avenues regulators like Richie Aguirre and Javy Marquez. Estrada admitted under direct examination that he knew Downey was selling drugs out of the Big O Bar. He claimed that he didn’t know what Downey did with the cars before they were turned over to the finance companies. Although Estrada couldn’t or wouldn’t shed any light on Downey’s dope business, Judy Guttierez—Manzella’s next witness and Downey’s girlfriend at the time of his murder—did, albeit reluctantly. When Judy was brought into court in handcuffs, she was a physical and emotional wreck. She stated that she’d only known Downey for a few

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months before he was killed and that she hadn’t know that he was selling dope out of the Big O Bar. When Manzella asked her if Downey was paying taxes to the Mexican Mafia, she broke down. “I don’t remember,” she said. “I’m so messed up. I’m on Thorazine. I have depression.” Guttierez began sobbing loudly and Judge Fidler called the parties to a bench meeting. They gave Guttierez a few moments to collect herself and Manzella continued with his direct examination. She stated that she knew Ron Flores, the manager of the Big O Bar, but when asked if Flores and Downey were working for the Mexican Mafia, she said she didn’t know. She also said she didn’t know Alex Aguirre. All of Manzella’s questions to Guttierez began with the same preamble: “Isn’t it true you told detectives . . .” It was obvious from this phrasing that soon after Downey’s murder she’d told investigators everything she knew. Now, in court, almost ten years after the fact, she was reluctant to confirm those things. It was painfully obvious that Guttierez was terrified. What Manzella was able to get out of her in court was the sequence of events on the day Downey was murdered. After Downey and Estrada had picked up the repossessed Camry, Downey met Guttierez and they spent the day driving around and doing errands. That night they went to the Highland Park Motel and she registered them as Mr. and Mrs. Judy Guttierez. Sometime later that night and early morning, Downey left to buy cigarettes and something to eat. When he hadn’t come back, she paged Downey and he called her back, saying that he’d be back to the motel in five minutes. When over an hour passed and Downey hadn’t returned, Guttierez called Ron Flores, the Big O Bar manager, and told him that Downey hadn’t come back. Flores told her that he’d go looking for Downey. According to Guttierez, Flores saw the Camry nosed against a wall on Eagle Rock Boulevard. Flores then rushed back to the motel, picked up Guttierez, and the two went back to the Camry. When Guttierez confirmed to Flores that that was the Camry Downey had been driving, they went back to the motel.

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The last few questions went right to heart of what Manzella needed to get in front of the jury. He asked, “Didn’t Alan Downey tell you that he does not pay rent to anybody?” She said, “I don’t know.” It was clear she did. It was clear that that was what she’d told the detectives ten years ago. Then Manzella asked, “Didn’t Alan Downey tell you that he collected taxes but that the taxes stayed with him?” She answered, “No.” Manzella had gotten exactly what he needed from Guttierez. For one, he’d put all of Downey’s actions prior to the murder before the jury. Downey had left the motel. He planned on returning in five minutes but he’d been obviously ambushed on Eagle Rock Boulevard. As for Guttierez and Flores, their actions after they saw his car clearly revealed fear. Manzella also showed the jury Judy Guttierez’s abject terror at being perceived as a cooperating witness. Manzella’s next witness was Detective Beatriz Cid who was the responding homicide detective the night of the Downey murder. She arrived at 3912 Eagle Rock Boulevard at 5:00 AM and observed the Camry. The left front tire was flat, the lights were on, the engine was running, and the moonroof was open. She observed a body in the driver’s seat, slumping over into the passenger seat area. The driver’s window was down and the right rear window was shattered. She didn’t find any shell casings at the scene but a spent projectile was recovered in the right rear passenger floor. According to what she could determine, the Camry had been traveling north on Eagle Rock Boulevard but had crossed the median divider, hit a tree, and then hit the brick wall on the southbound passenger lanes of Eagle Rock Boulevard. After Detective Cid’s testimony the jury was dismissed for the day and Detective James King came to the witness stand. He testified that Judy Guttierez was not at the address she had given and he’d had to track her down through her parole officer. King picked her up at the Alhambra, California, Superior Court where she faced drug charges. King said that Guttierez had told him that she was afraid her mother would take custody of her two children if she testified. Manzella then asked Judge Fidler to put Guttierez in jail for the weekend because she was a flight risk. Fidler obliged.

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The following Monday, April 25, 2005, was Richie Aguirre’s twenty-fourth birthday. Short and stocky, Richie had put on weight since his arrest four years earlier. Like the rest of the defendants and almost everyone else in County Jail, the lack of exercise and sunlight had made him pasty. Manzella had an interesting development to deal with on that morning. A month earlier, Richie’s defense attorney, Norm Kallen, had had Johnny “Sleepy” Martinez brought down from Pelican Bay. Martinez was an Avenues 43 veterano who was serving an eighty-five-year sentence for homicide; although he wasn’t a full-fledged Carnal at the time, he had a lot of status. Martinez had sent word to Richie Aguirre that he was ready to take responsibility for killing Raul “Crook” Rodriguez. He’d never see freedom anyway; he was doing the Eme in general and Alex Aguirre in particular a big favor. With Lil Richie acquitted of the Rodriguez murder, Richie would be able to go back to the streets and continue operations on behalf of Alex and the brothers. But there was another reason just as important that drove Martinez to take Richie’s case. The Mexican Mafia’s home turf is the LA County Jail in downtown Los Angeles. A Carnal or a powerful Associate in County is a valuable asset to the whole organization. It’s easier to get visits in County than in Pelican Bay, which is almost on the Oregon border. To make sure that Martinez would remain in County even if his claim of having killed Downey went sideways, Martinez stabbed another inmate, Luis Rodriguez, in plain sight of the jail deputies. He hoped to pick up an attempted murder or at least an assault charge, enough to keep him in County Jail for months, if not years, while the charge went through the long court process. Martinez could further drag out the process by going in propria persona (representing himself without benefit of a lawyer, a right of every accused). According to the intelligence Manzella had received from Operation Safe Jails in LA County, Martinez’s victim, Rodriguez, was basically told to “take one for the team.” Rodriguez was told that he’d receive minor stab wounds in order for Martinez to remain in County Jail. Manzella was sure the epi-

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sode had been staged; although Rodriguez had been stabbed close to twenty times, the shank was short and not very sharp and had only inflicted minor wounds on Rodriguez. That the stabbing took place in plain sight only reinforced Manzella’s conviction. It was one of the many ways that the Mexican Mafia and other prison gangs game the system for their own ends. More often than not, they game it successfully. With a DA who was less versed in the ways of the Mexican Mafia, Johnny “Sleepy” would have been charged and kept in County. But Manzella knew that the only way the plan to keep Martinez in County would work was to file charges against him. Manzella exercised his prerogative not to file against Martinez. The only obstacle left for Manzella was to prove that “Sleepy” Martinez could not have shot and killed Rodriguez. That Monday, Beatriz Cid was brought back, having had a chance to listen to the taped interview she’d conducted with Gilbert Estrada and to check her notes on her interview with Judy Guttierez. According to Cid, Guttierez had spent the entire day with Downey before going to the Highland Park Motel. At 1:30 AM, Downey left the motel room to go to the 7-11 on Eagle Rock Boulevard. At 2:00 AM she paged Downey. He called her back and said he’d return in five minutes. When Downey was still missing at 3:15 AM, Guttierez called Ron Flores and he went looking for Downey. Flores found Downey’s car and collected Guttierez at the motel. Both went to the scene of Downey’s murder. They then returned to the motel to wait and see what had happened. During Cid’s interview, Guttierez admitted that both Downey and Flores worked out of the Big O Bar as dealers for Alex Aguirre. Aguirre, in fact, was known to hold court in a back room there. Guttierez also told Cid that she’d been afraid for Downey because he’d stopped paying Alex Aguirre his tax money. Downey had told Guttierez, “Somebody wants me to pay taxes. Fuck that, I don’t pay taxes to anybody.” Under cross-examination, Norm Kallen asked Cid if she and her partner had threatened Guttierez with having her two children taken away from her. Cid stated that they’d told Guttierez that there were drugs in her hotel

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room and that she could have her kids taken away. Although the tactic was heavy-handed, it didn’t amount to anything illegal. Manzella’s next witness, Detective Bob Lopez, gave testimony on his knowledge of the Avenues gang and its relationship with the Mexican Mafia. When Lopez was shown the organization chart, he identified Albert “Boxer” Tolento, Alfred “Tigger” Salinas, and Alex “Pee Wee” Aguirre as validated Eme members. Lopez was then shown pictures of Richie Aguirre’s and Scott Gleason’s tattoos. Aguirre had an “AVES” on his right bicep and a skull wearing a fedora hat and a fur collar. Lopez stated that the skull was the Avenues logo. Gleason was more heavily tattooed with an “A’s” on his chest, the skull and fedora, a large “AVES” on his stomach, “AVENUES 43” on his left forearm, “AVES” on his right knee, and “AVES” on the knuckles of his left hand. After Lopez was finished, Manzella asked Norm Kallen if he wanted to stipulate that a fingerprint matching Richie Aguirre’s was found on the Camry in which Downey was killed. Kallen declined to stipulate so Manzella was compelled to bring on Ruben Sanchez, the LAPD fingerprint analyst, who testified that he’d processed the vehicle and found a print matching Richie Aguirre’s on the roof area of the Camry. The next day, Kallen asked Judge Fidler again that Rich Valdemar’s comment about Richie Aguirre being a shotcaller be stricken because there was no proof other than Valdemar’s recollection. Manzella responded that there were hundreds of hours of Federal wiretap tapes, none of them indexed by content. Someone would have to go through each tape to find the conversation to which Valdemar had referred. Judge Fidler was visibly annoyed and told Manzella and Kallen to come to some kind of agreement on this issue. The next witness, Daryl Takahashi, a city bus driver, placed Javy “Gangster” Marquez at the scene of the Downey murder close to the time that Downey was killed. On the night of the murder, Takahashi was driving north on Eagle Rock Boulevard with a co-worker and a friend. He was headed into Highland Park to drop his co-worker off at his home on Avenue 40. As Takahashi drove

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north, he noticed the Camry up against the wall with its lights on. He continued to Avenue 40 where he dropped off the co-worker and returned south on Eagle Rock Boulevard. He noticed that the Camry was still there. He stopped and saw the body lying across the front seat. At that point, Takahashi drove across Eagle Rock Boulevard and dialed 911 from a payphone. While waiting for the connection, he noticed a car drive south on the boulevard, cross over the median and drive the wrong way in the northbound lane. A person in the back seat pointed a handgun at Takahashi. When the car was closest to him, a truck heading north drove between him and the car. Immediately after that, the car left in the southbound direction and Takahashi and his passenger went to the 7-11 to call the police. They waited at a gas station until the police arrived. Takahashi informed the officer that the car with the armed man was on the boulevard heading north. The officer, for whatever reason, dismissed this bit of information and continued securing the scene. Two months later, Beatriz Cid showed Takahashi several photo six-packs. He identified the driver from one of the pictures. It was Javy Marquez. Takahashi wasn’t able to identify the armed man in the backseat, having never gotten a good look. Norm Kallen cross-examined Takahashi to the point of tedium. He used multiple avenues of questioning to get Takahashi to doubt his own identification of Javy Marquez. After what felt like hours, Takahashi stood by his original decision. Manzella then brought Benny Garcia back to testify on the Downey killing. First, he walked Garcia through his history with Avenues. At eleven, he’d been jumped in by his brother and another Avenues gangster. By the time he was thirteen, there were so many shootings and assaults that he started carrying a gun almost every day. Garcia recalled being shot at for the first time in 1983. He was in a car with other Avenues members on their way to a party. As they passed a group of Cypress Park gangsters he flashed them the Avenues sign. He wasn’t armed

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that day because his brother had been arrested and the police had confiscated all the guns at his house. The Cypress Park gangsters jumped into their cars and followed Garcia and his homies. At an intersection, three CP cars boxed Garcia’s car in and challenged him with the usual, “Where you from?” Garcia defiantly shouted, “Avenues.” The CP gangsters opened fire but no one in Garcia’s car was hit. Garcia told the jury that he responded the way he did because he’d rather take a bullet than back down and deny his gang. Acting any other way would have brought disrespect and shame on him and on Avenues. In 1985, Garcia was dabbling in the dope business and using a lot of powder cocaine. He was also a major presence on Drew Street, where he ran a small crew of dealers who were using more cocaine than they were selling. When the “Wetbacks,” as Garcia called them, started moving into Drew Street, they sucked sales out of Garcia’s business. These were illegal Mexican nationals, the Border Brothers. Garcia admitted that if he hadn’t been using so much coke, he would have had more motivation to take care of the Drew Street business. By his own admission, he’d been “slipping.” He’d send his crew over to Drew Street to regulate the Border Brothers; they’d give his regulators a lot of free dope and the matter would be forgotten. In 1986, Garcia was involved in a major gunfight when a group of Highland Park gangsters rolled up on him and his homies. In 1986, after a year in the California Youth Authority, he was approached by Alfred “Tigger” Salinas and asked if he wanted to kill people for the Mexican Mafia in exchange for a steady $500 per week. Garcia basically laughed at it. He was already making far more than that as a mechanic. Also, while he wasn’t opposed to killing people, he wasn’t going to do it on the orders of some “Mafia guy.” If he was going to kill anybody, it was going to be on his own terms and for his own reasons. Ordinarily, refusing a request from a Carnal would instantly put Garcia in “down status.” The difference, as he explained to the jury, was that he was asked, not told. He owed the Mafia nothing and the offer was made as a business deal. The Eme had no hold on him at the time and he’d never broken an Avenues or an Eme rule. Garcia was a solid soldier.

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In 1989, Garcia got married and moved out of Highland Park. He had decided to get out of the gang life and to get himself fully set up in the automotive business. The problem was that his four brothers, all still in Highland Park and actively gang-banging, complained to him about all the Avenues homies who were being shot and assaulted by rival gangs. Garcia, still emotionally connected to the neighborhood, made frequent visits back to Highland Park. He said he felt it was his duty to stand up for his neighborhood. In 1993, on one of these visits, he met Alex Aguirre. Garcia had known about Alex ever since he was a little gangster. He admitted to the jury that he’d wanted to be just like Alex when he grew up. In that neighborhood, everybody did. By that time, the Border Brothers had completely taken over Drew Street and Alex was more or less out of the business. Alex asked Garcia if he was interested in helping him reclaim Drew Street for Avenues. Garcia told him that it could be done and that they could probably both make a lot of money. Garcia then told the jury the incident in which Richard Aguirre, Sr. had lent him his car, and the resulting greenlight from Alex. He related that he’d gone directly to Alex and asked him what the deal was, and that they’d had a loud argument in the course of which George “Chato” Vidales rushed Garcia. Garcia pulled a gun on Vidales. Alex got between them and hit Garcia in the face. Garcia, feeling thoroughly and unjustly accused of something he hadn’t been responsible for, gave Alex his gun and said, “Go ahead and kill me.” Instead of shooting, Alex kept Garcia’s gun and increased the amount of tax money Garcia owed him. Garcia left without the gun but came back the next day with the extra money and said he wanted his gun back. Alex ducked Garcia for days. Garcia left Highland Park to go back to where he was living at the time. When he came back three months later, he found out that Alex had put “a pretty serious greenlight” on him. Soon after this event, Garcia was arrested for kidnapping. Garcia was told by OSJ deputies in County Jail that they had information about a green-

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light on him, and asked him if he wanted to be put in Protective Custody. His feeling at the time was that if he was facing death at the hands of the Eme, he was going out on his feet and fighting for his life. He wasn’t about to hide behind “law enforcement skirts.” All the jail authorities can do in such a case is document the threat and have the intended victim sign a statement saying that he’s aware of it and has refused Protective Custody. While Garcia was in County Jail waiting to face his charges, he received a “kite” (an order from the Eme) ordering him to collect taxes on the tier and send the money to Alex, Chuco, and Tonito (not Medina, but another man with the same moniker). Garcia suspected the legitimacy of the kite and placed a call to Alex’s house from a jail phone to check it out. Richie Aguirre answered and told Garcia that Alex wasn’t home. Garcia asked Richie to ask Alex if the kite was legitimate. When Garcia called again, Richie told Garcia that the kite was a real order. As a loyal Associate, Garcia collected the taxes and sent them up the ladder as instructed. There was another instruction on the kite that Garcia should attack blacks in County Jail because the blacks were “making the race look bad”—that is, La Raza, the Hispanics. At his first opportunity, Garcia found a broken broomstick and stabbed a black inmate in the neck. He was caught in a bathroom trying to wash the blood off his hands. As far as Garcia knew, he still had a greenlight on him from Alex Aguirre. Because he wasn’t in PC, Garcia was in no position to refuse the orders on the kite. Although he was in “down status” with the Mafia, he had no choice but do what he was told. After the kidnapping charges were dropped, Garcia was paroled and he went back to Highland Park. He located Alex and asked him if the kite he’d gotten was legitimate. Alex told him that it was a bogus kite. Not only that, but Garcia was now responsible for all the money he’d collected and sent to the wrong people. Alex told him to dig into his own pocket and give the money to its rightful owner, a gangster named Smilon from Big Hazard. Garcia felt betrayed by Richie and doubly betrayed by Alex. Alex,

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for his part, told Garcia that he’d “done good in County” and to forget the greenlight. Garcia realized that Richie had insinuated himself into Mafia business and had prevented Smilon, a high-ranking Eme member, from getting was he was entitled to. Interfering with somebody’s cash flow was an extremely serious offense that, were it to become widely known, could cause Richie a lot of trouble. After leading Garcia through this history and background with Alex and Richie, Manzella showed Garcia the Avenues organization chart. Garcia recognized nearly every name on the chart and affirmed the chart’s accuracy as crew chiefs and members. Garcia stated that his crew had consisted of Anthony Medina, Clinton Conroy, and David Deloza. Javy Marquez had Gerardo Reyes and four other Avenues named only by their monikers: Rascal, Sparky, Kilo, and Tricky. Johnny “Sleepy” Martinez had Nick “Evil” Uribe on his crew.

After lifting Garcia’s greenlight, Alex had put Garcia together with

Alan Downey to work as a tax collection team. Alex gave them Glendale, from Vineland Avenue down to Highland Park. In addition to selling dope to the dealers in Glendale and collecting taxes from them, Garcia and Downey were tasked with finding freelance dealers and bringing them into the taxcollection fold. Garcia told a story to illustrate how this worked. He’d decided that a certain freelance dealer from the Elmwood neighborhood should buy his dope from him and pay him taxes. The dealer didn’t believe Garcia worked for Alex and balked at the deal. Instead of beating the dealer and taking his dope, as some collectors would have done, Garcia took the dealer to visit Richie Aguirre. Richie informed the dealer that he was Alex Aguirre’s brother, that Garcia worked for him, and that it was time to pay taxes. The Elmwood dealer, faced with an offer he couldn’t refuse, gave Richie money on the spot and promised to pay him a minimum of $50 a week from then on. As Garcia answered Manzella’s questions, it became clearer and clearer that Garcia wasn’t just testifying. He was unburdening himself. His time on

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the witness stand was a cathartic experience in which he was erecting a final wall between what he’d been since the age of ten or eleven and what he had become since leaving the criminal life. After Alex Aguirre was arrested in the RICO case, Garcia continued to honor his agreement with Alex and sold Richie dope at the same price that Garcia paid for it. It was Garcia’s way of not being taxed. Downey, however, stopped paying his taxes to Richie Aguirre. The situation between Garcia and Richie Aguirre began to deteriorate. While Garcia still had a lot of respect for Alex, he bridled at the notion that he had to show the same respect to “this little kid,” as Garcia described him in his testimony. Garcia had come up through the ranks and earned the respect of Avenues members and Eme Associates the hard way. Richie had had it handed it to him. And Garcia came to the conclusion that Richie wasn’t kicking up all the money he owed to Alex. He was keeping more than his share—not to mention abusing the people who worked for him, something that Alex never did. In July 1995, these problems boiled over. Garcia accused Richie of smoking up the profits he was supposed to kick up to Alex and stealing from the collectors and runners. Richie pulled a gun on Garcia; Garcia rushed him and took the gun away from him. Vince Caldera, a long time Aguirre associate stepped in and stabbed Garcia in the face, leaving a scar Garcia will carry forever. Richie told Garcia to kill Alan Downey because Downey had quit paying his taxes. Garcia said he wouldn’t: Downey owed him $2,500 and so was worth more alive than dead. Garcia and Richie had another confrontation a few days later at Downey’s house. Garcia had taken a new tack with Richie and spent an afternoon trying to school him in the realities of the dope business. He told Richie that robbing his own people wasn’t right. It was something Alex would never do. The advice fell on infertile ground. Richie wasn’t buying it. Garcia’s take on Richie was that he was drunk with power and, at fifteen, too immature to handle the responsibilities Alex had left to him.

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A week after Richie ordered Garcia to get rid of Downey, Downey was murdered on Eagle Rock Boulevard. By the end of Benny Garcia’s testimony, the jury had a fairly complete understanding of the dynamics that had put Alan Downey at the wrong end of a gun. Norm Kallen had a huge job ahead of him. Benny Garcia made a terrific witness. He appeared frank and honest about his life as a criminal. There wasn’t a hint he was hiding anything. Kallen began by trying to portray Garcia as a hardened killer. He asked, “When Tigger Salinas contacted you when you came from the County Youth Authority, you had a reputation as a killer?” Garcia said, “I don’t know what reputation I had.” When Kallen asked about the money Garcia was offered as a torpedo for Salinas, Garcia said that he’d always had enough money because he’d been working since he was seventeen. The $500 per week Salinas had offered him was laughable. Kallen began to scramble the timeline of events in an attempt to make Garcia contradict himself. He asked questions about the number of times Garcia had been in custody and the number of greenlights Alex Aguirre had put on him. Garcia began questioning Kallen in order to clarify exactly what was being asked of him. Garcia backtracked several times, explaining to Kallen that he needed to explain the background before answering his questions. Kallen asked Garcia about the kite he received in County: “You took it upon yourself to execute the orders in the kite?” Garcia said, “No. I did it only after Richie told me it was a legit kite.” Garcia further explained that he’d survived in custody with a greenlight hanging over his head because he “hung with the Paisos” for protection; he often got the word through them that somebody was about to make a move on him. He would beat people before they had a chance to beat him or kill him. And because the correction officers knew that he had a greenlight on him, they wouldn’t even write him up for the preemptive assaults he was committing.

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At one point in the afternoon session, Norm Kallen read a very long, convoluted passage from prior testimony that puzzled everyone in court. Garcia told Kallen that he didn’t understand it. Kallen asked him if he wanted him to read it again. Garcia’s answer was a “yeah,” right out of a sitcom. It got a huge laugh from everyone in courtroom, including Judge Fidler and the jury. It was a turning point in the trial. Garcia seemed bulletproof against Kallen’s challenges. Kallen then began hammering Garcia on whether or not he had immunity on the murder of Alan Downey. Garcia flatly told him that he didn’t. Kallen went at him again. Garcia finally said, “Maybe I’m dumb, but I don’t understand what you’re saying.” More laughter from the jury. Judge Fidler saw that this line of questioning was going nowhere and asked to see the agreement that Garcia had signed with the DA. After examining the document, Fidler said there was nothing in the agreement that gave Garcia immunity on the Downey murder. After a lot of jumping around about when Garcia was greenlighted Kallen asked, “When was it when you were greenlighted?” Garcia said, “I don’t know. Maybe you can ask Richie.” This was not an answer Kallen wanted. Kallen asked another question unrelated to the greenlights or the time of his custody, Garcia said with a perfectly droll delivery, “Now you got me off track.” This elicited another round of laughter from the jury. Toward the end of his testimony, with Kallen growing increasingly impatient, Garcia had finally had enough and said, pointing to Richie Aguirre, “I can’t believe this kid PC’d me.” He couldn’t believe that on account of Richie, who was immature and not even deserving of his status, Garcia had to go into Protective Custody, a place usually reserved for child molesters and snitches. Kallen’s last question was whether Garcia had ever killed anybody. Garcia stated, “I shot at a lot of people but I don’t think I ever killed anybody. At least, I hope I didn’t.” Garcia had done so well under cross-examination that Manzella was only required to do a very brief re-direct. He asked, “Are you being paid to testify or be relocated?” Garcia said, “No. Not even a dime.”

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Manzella’s next witness was Detective Jose Carillo, who’d interviewed Raul “Crook” Rodriguez after the murder of Jose Aroyo. Rodriguez had told Carillo that Richard “Stalker” Ramirez had been thrown out of Aroyo’s party after fighting with Aroyo. But he came back with a gun and killed Aroyo. Based on Rodriguez’s statement to police, Ramirez was eventually convicted of killing Aroyo. Rodriguez’s statement became part of the discovery in Ramirez’s trial and therefore became what the Eme considers paperwork, proof of cooperation with law enforcement. Since none of the guns used in the three homicides were ever recovered, forensic evidence was limited. It was determined, however, that a different gun was used in each murder. Manzella’s next major witness was Jimmy Maxson. He gave the same testimony regarding his history with Avenues and the Eme that he had in the Reyes, Vidales, and Rodriguez trials. One interesting piece of information that he provided was that when Alex Aguirre came out of jail in 1989 as a made Eme Carnal, he issued orders that there would be no more drivebys. While this was of no interest to the jury and was irrelevant to the case, it is interesting to note that this locally issued edict predated the policy announcements made by the Eme in the large meetings of 1992. Maxson admitted that while not in prison he committed around twenty-five robberies and somewhere between fifteen and twenty assaults. All of these crimes were committed in his capacity as a tax collector and drug regulator for Alex Aguirre. There were no innocent people involved in any of these and Maxson considered all of them Eme business. Maxson told the jury of a large shootout he was involved in with Richie Aguirre, “Slowboy” MacDonald, “Trooper” Ramirez, and an Avenues gangster named Whisper, on Ruby Street. They had all gone there to take down a drug house that refused to pay taxes. Randy “Jo Jo” Rodriguez drove there in a separate car carrying all their guns. It was a routine tactic when they went somewhere in force to put all their guns in a separate car, to draw less police attention. As soon as they knocked on the door, they began to receive gunfire from inside the house. They all fired back, but as far as Maxson knows,

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the only person injured in the gunfire was Slowboy, who took a minor wound to the leg. Maxson went through his entire history and the Federal indictment in 1999. After six months as a fugitive in Mexico he came back to turn himself in and “get it over with.” Manzella asked Maxson if it was common among the Avenues gang members and the Eme Associates to talk about the crimes they committed. Maxson said it was: “We had to know what was going on.” On that topic, Maxson said that his first conversation about the killing of Raul “Crook” Rodriguez was at Danny’s Taco Stand on Figueroa and Avenue 43, where Scott Gleason told Maxson that he’d taken care of Crook. Richie had confirmed it. Some days later, Gleason and Maxson had a conversation in a car about “Crook” Rodriguez being killed. Gleason told Maxson that Johnny “Sleepy” Martinez had paperwork on “Crook” and that “he had to go. He was a rata.” According to Maxson, Gleason also told him that Rodriguez was killed at 43rd Park and that Richie had given Gleason the gun to do it with. Maxson explained that the location was “Montecito Heights Park, but we called it 43rd Park because that’s where all the Avenue 43 guys hang out.” A few days after that conversation, Richie confirmed the details of the story for Maxson. In January 1997, Maxson moved into a condo on Division Street with his girlfriend Leticia, Richie Aguirre, and Richie’s girlfriend—Javy “Gangster” Marquez’s sister Maria. Some months later, Javy Marquez made a collect call to the condo from County Jail. Maxson spoke with Marquez about money Marquez was expecting from Richie to help Marquez defend himself against his pending murder cases. Maxson mistakenly thought the case was the Downey murder. Maxson later told Richie that Marquez wanted money for his defense on the Downey murder. Richie told Maxson that Marquez was being a “crybaby” and that he, Richie, had shot Downey. Marquez had only been the driver. Richie went on to say that Downey had been killed for not paying his taxes. In a conversation Maxson had with Richie Aguirre about the “Clavo” Torres murder, Maxson asked about a rumor he’d heard that Torres had spit on

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Richie before “Gangster” Marquez shot him. Richie admitted to Maxson that Marquez “hit him with a big ass cuete (slang for gun).” Maxson knew that Torres had been collecting taxes on Drew Street for “Tigger” Salinas, another Eme Carnal, though only Alex was supposed to collect there. So Richie and Marquez lured Torres to Isabel Street from Drew Street and Marquez shot him. Under cross-examination by Clay Jacke, Maxson covered the ground he had with Manzella. Jacke wasn’t able to shake any new information out of Maxson, but Maxson was getting rattled. Unlike Garcia, who was self-assured and confident, Maxson was nervous. He began to answer questions before Jacke finished them and Judge Fidler had to stop him several times to make him wait. The fact was that Maxson, unlike Garcia, was dangerously exposed to retaliation and living a nomadic existence moving from motel to motel in the LA area. Maxson’s young son was living in another state with his mother, who was still involved with drugs and gangsters, a fact that made Maxson depressed and fretful. Garcia, however, had bounced out of the gangster life, moved out of state with his wife and kids, bought a house, and was making over $200,000 a year with his own garage. Due to a scheduling conflict, Manzella brought in his next witness, a deputy medical examiner, before Jacke had finished with Maxson. The ME testified that “Crook” Rodriguez had received six gunshot wounds with a .22 caliber weapon. The entry wounds were to the left temple, right cheek, right jawbone, underside of the chin, lower left cheek, and a grazing wound to the left shoulder. Some of the head wounds showed evidence of stippling, an indication that the muzzle of the gun was from a few inches to one and a half feet away. A toxicology test indicated that Rodriguez had cocaine, alcohol, and PCP in his system. Maxson was brought back to the stand for Jacke to finish his cross-examination. Despite Maxson’s anxiety, Jacke wasn’t able to get Maxson to contradict himself on those details his that implicated Jacke’s client, Scott Gleason. Norm Kallen, however, came out blazing. Although he got Maxson

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even more nervous and scattered, Kallen wasn’t going over very well with the jury. His first question to Maxson was, “Do you always wear a tie and shirt?” Manzella objected and Judge Fidler sustained the objection. It was a weak opening. Kallen hammered Maxson on his criminal career, but there was nothing that he could get out of Maxson that Maxson hadn’t already admitted under direct examination. Maxson, like Garcia, hid nothing about his drug dealing, violence, carjacking, shootouts, or ambition to be a made man in the Eme. Kallen asked, “Weren’t you working your way to becoming a member of the Mexican Mafia?” Maxson said, “I guess. When you’re an Associate, that’s what happens.” By trying to make Maxson look like a gangster aiming for the major league in the Eme, Kallen was frankly digging a deeper hole for his client, Richie Aguirre. Richie’s older brother was already a Carnal and Kallen had no way to dispute that Alex had left Richie in charge of the same business. All Kallen could do was try make Maxson appear to be lying on behalf of the Federal government and the DA’s office. The next day, Kallen began by exploring the amount of money Maxson had been given by the DA’s office. The total over the course of the trials—including the two hung trials of the Morales murder—amounted to a little over $8,000. This wasn’t a lot, but because Maxson had tested “dirty” on a drug test soon after he was placed on Federal probation, Kallen asked whether Maxson had used government money to buy drugs. Maxson said he had a job. After Norm Kallen was done, Manzella did a brief re-direct that covered all the shootings Maxson was involved in. It was clear there was no evidence to indicate anyone had been killed in any of the shootouts. Manzella merely wanted to make sure that the jury knew Maxson was not a killer. After Manzella finished, Norm Kallen went at Maxson again. This time he was going to play his ace card. After a few preliminary questions about Maxson’s various shootouts, he asked whether Johnny “Sleepy” Martinez had been present when Raul “Crook” Rodriguez was shot. Kallen’s question was meant to put Martinez at the scene of the crime and to bring

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him on as a defense witness as the real shooter of Rodriguez. Maxson answered simply that Martinez “was busted at the time.” Kallen and Jacke had been blindsided by this piece of information. Kallen all but stopped his cross-examination; he and Jacke scrambled to consult their trial materials. Kallen and Jacke had been working with notes from Andy Teague’s first interview with Jimmy Maxson while Maxson was in Federal custody. (Since Federal law enforcement doesn’t allow their suspects to be recorded, not even by other law enforcement agencies, the only documentation of that interview was Teague’s notes.) These notes were imprecise. For instance, Teague noted—incorrectly—that Johnny “Sleepy” Martinez was present at the park when “Crook” Rodriguez was killed. The truly bizarre part of this episode is that Kallen’s client, Richie Aguirre, also knew that Johnny “Sleepy” hadn’t been present at the park when “Crook” Rodriguez was shot. He’d never informed his defense attorney—a sign of disrespect, if not outright contempt. Although Maxson’s revelation struck a blow at Kallen and Jacke, it had little effect on the jury, which had never been aware of the Martinez episode and knew nothing about his wanting to take Rodriguez’s murder. Manzella would have preferred to drop the bomb himself that “Sleepy” was in custody—after Sleepy had taken the stand and uttered his false confession. But he rolled with it. Maxson had been asked a legitimate question and had answered it truthfully. Kallen terminated his cross-examination. His last and best chance at getting Richie off had been torpedoed, curiously, by Richie himself. After Manzella brought Detective James King to the stand to testify that the total amount of money spent on Maxson’s behalf was $8,700 and that the last time any expenditure was made was on July 25, 2003, Manzella rested the prosecution’s case. A few minutes later, Kallen and Jacke also rested. With the jury excused, Norm Kallen asked Judge Fidler to bring John Berdin to court. Kallen also wants to call Joseph “Clavo” Torres’s employer, owner of a kennel where Torres occasionally worked. The employer had a life insurance policy on Torres and Kallen thought that it might lead to third-party culpability.

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Judge Fidler agreed to the additional witnesses. Manzella then started needling Kallen: “Norm hasn’t prepared his final argument yet, that’s why he wants to call all these people.” Kallen responded in kind. “I know what I’m going to say. You’re afraid of what I’m going to say.” Manzella laughed and, referring to the recent debacle with Johnny “Sleepy” Martinez, said, “I know what you’re going to say. If you want help, I’ve prepared a little outline for you.” After the personal shots, Manzella told Kallen that he wanted “Sleepy” Martinez sent back to Pelican Bay prison. Kallen, looking somewhat defeated, said that it was okay with him; he wouldn’t be calling Martinez after all. Kallen and Jacke had decided to let Martinez go back to prison. Manzella wanted to seal the deal. He wanted it on the record that Martinez was on tape admitting to the murder of “Crook” Rodriguez, that Jacke and Kallen were aware of the tape, and that they’d chosen not to call Martinez as a witness, though he’d admitted to having been present at the murder. This way, the conviction wouldn’t be overturned on appeal for incompetence of counsel. After a day and a half of final arguments by the prosecution and defense, the jury was given the case. Two days later, the jury found Richie Aguirre guilty of the murders of Alan Downey, Raul “Crook” Rodriguez, and Joseph “Clavo” Torres, even though Richie had only pulled the trigger in Downey’s killing. He’d aided and abetted the other homicides. Scott “Gato” Gleason was found guilty in the murder of Raul “Crook” Rodriguez, receiving life without parole. Richie, a juvenile at the time of the murders, received seventy-nine years to life. Five years earlier, he’d accepted a manslaughter plea on the Downey murder with a six-year sentence. If Tony Manzella hadn’t taken the homicides that Teague brought him, Aguirre most likely would have been getting ready for parole. Instead, he’d spend the rest of his life in prison. So much for Pat Dixon’s contention that no jury would buy that young Richie Aguirre was a criminal mastermind. Detective Rick Ortiz recalled driving Richie from Northeast to the California Youth Authority for one of Richie’s frequent juvenile crimes. Richie

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had sat in the back seat of the car and jokingly asking Ortiz to take him to County Jail instead. When Ortiz asked why, Richie told him that all his friends and a lot of his family were there. “I got a cell waitin’ for me already,” Ortiz remembers him saying.

“There’s no getting out of this motherfucker.” — Randy “Cowboy” Therrien

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C H A P TE R S e v e n TEEN

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nlike the birth of the Italian Mafia, whose roots have

never been definitively documented, the Mexican Mafia’s origins can be followed to a time, a place, and an individual. Veteranos and law enforcement gang experts all agree that the man who invented the Mexican Mafia in 1957 was Luis “Huero Buff” Flores, a member of Hawaiian Gardens, a California street gang. His idea was to create a supergang made up of gangsters in the penal system. 273

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The place was the Deuel Vocational Institution (DVI) in Tracy, California. In recent years, DVI has been a minimum-security prison and a reception center for incoming inmates. This is one of the several facilities in the California Department of Corrections (CDC) where newly convicted inmates are sent for evaluation and processing to determine their medical condition, addictions, mental health status, and potential for violence. From there, inmates are sent to institutions appropriate to their needs and the CDC’s security considerations. In 1957, DVI was the place where the “worst of the worst” juvenile offenders were sent. It was common practice that when juvenile offenders created security problems in the juvenile system, they were sent to DVI and treated as adults. The hope was to get them into an environment where older and even more hardened criminals would readjust their attitudes and put them in their place. As it turned out, Flores and the original members of the Eme became the oppressors rather than the victims the CDC had hoped for. In one of those strange quirks of history, 1957 was also the year that the Italian Mafia finally came out of the shadows, thanks to the curiosity of a local New York State patrol officer. On November 14, 1957, the highest-ranking members of La Cosa Nostra gathered at the home of Joseph Barbara in rural Apalachin, New York, to chart the course of their organization. A local cop noticed the parade of Cadillacs and limousines converging on the small town and decided to investigate. His curiosity scattered the Mafiosi into the woods, ducking cops and cameras. It was after this meeting that J. Edgar Hoover finally reversed his longheld opinion that La Cosa Nostra didn’t exist. It’s unknown whether “Huero Buff” Flores was influenced by the news stories of the Cosa Nostra’s Apalachin meeting, but it would have been impossible for him and the Eme’s co-founders not to have heard about it. As young criminals growing up in Los Angeles, it was also more than likely that they’d heard about Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, Mickey Cohen, and Jack Dragna, the Italian mob’s point man on the West Coast. Forming a prison gang from street gangsters was an odd concept. Street

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gangsters hate rival gangs as much as they do the police or snitches. Rivalries between warring Hispanic gangs are older than the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. The conflicts between rival barrios date back to the first decade of the twentieth century, with the first big bulge of immigration from Mexico. Every Hispanic neighborhood had its own clique: Kids that hung out, ditched school, smoked dope, bonded, and felt obliged to keep interlopers or intruders out of their neighborhoods. This forming of what eventually evolved into nothing less than neighborhood militias at first manifested itself as car clubs, sports organizations, and even church groups. Much like modern-day taggers often evolve into full-blown gang-bangers, these early groups of Hispanic youngsters took those harmless clubs and turned them into quasi-criminal groups. By normal standards, these groups were only marginally criminal, dabbling in petty theft, joyriding, drinking, and marijuana. The violence they did commit was directed not against the then-majority white population but at other Hispanic youth groups. It was neighborhood warfare that rarely escalated to homicide. This low-level violence, usually a matter of fists, sticks, and rocks, turned deadly—and went public—on August 1, 1942, when a young man named Jose Diaz was beaten and stabbed to death after a party in what was called the Williams Ranch area of Los Angeles. It’s now called the City of Vernon. The murder happened near an irrigation pond that the locals called Sleepy Lagoon after a popular song of the time. The Sleepy Lagoon murder threw a hot light of publicity on these groups of Mexican “juvenile delinquents.” The public reaction to the Diaz murder, fueled by sensational newspaper stories of “roving gangs” of Mexicans preying on peaceful communities, was characterized by social activists at the time as “hysterical.” The fact is that in 1942, hysteria was the coin of the realm. The attack on Pearl Harbor was only nine months old at the time, and the West Coast was still in fear of a Japanese attack. Henry Kaiser’s steel plant devoted entirely to war production was intentionally located thirty miles inland in Fontana, instead of in a coastal city, which would have made

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transportation and logistics easier. The War Department chose Fontana because Japanese bombers would have had a harder time surviving a long run inland. The heavy-handed reaction to the Diaz homicide by the LAPD resulted in twenty-two young men being charged with murder. The trial of the Sleepy Lagoon killers exposed all manner of wrongdoing by the LAPD and the DA’s office. In a fashion typical of the time, the LAPD beat confessions out the suspects. Eventually all charges against the twenty-two were dropped. Some of the people in that group, however, were eventually arrested and convicted fairly of other homicides and assaults. By the time that Luis Flores got his brainstorm about creating La Mafia Mexicana, as it was first called, gang warfare between Hispanic neighborhoods had become an established fact. Rivalries were by then set in stone; gangs like White Fence, San Fer, Pacoima, Avenues, Clanton, Varrio Nuevo Estrada, and Hoyo Maravilla were already into their second decade and firmly established as self-sustaining entities. The drive-by shooting, which was invented in Chicago by the Italian Mafia in the 1930s, had yet to become a common tool of retribution among street gangs. Given such deep street rivalries, it was a marvel that Luis Flores ever got so far as to suggest the idea that inmates who were enemies on the streets should abandon that animosity when they hit the prisons. But he did, and it worked. From the very beginning the Eme stressed quality over quantity. Flores and his associates didn’t want to be the biggest prison gang—although they did become just that. They wanted to be the baddest and most feared group in the prison system. The only way to establish that sort of control and that level of intimidation was violence—quick, brutal, and unexpected. In terms of organizational structure, Flores emulated the street gang, in which there was no clearly defined or appointed leader. It was to be an organization of equals with only one rank—Carnal, or brother. If decisions affecting everyone were to be made, they would be voted on. To prevent internal conflicts, a “no politicking” policy was instituted. In theory, no Carnal could speak badly about another Carnal or lobby to sanction him unless

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there was a good reason, such as snitching or failing to carry out the desires of the group. The hope was to abolish personality conflicts that could lead to infighting and weaken the group. That theory rarely worked in practice. What did seem to work for nearly two decades was the oath of secrecy that all Carnales were obligated to take. No member was ever to speak about or acknowledge the existence of the Mexican Mafia except to another member. Violation of this rule resulted in death. As a result, members were as brutal to the Carnales who strayed as they were to the rest of the prison population. One of the earliest squabbles settled by consensus was about the organization’s name. Some felt that “Mexican Mafia” or even “Mafia Mexicana” owed too much to the Italian mob. It wasn’t original and didn’t reflect Hispanic heritage. The man who resolved the conflict to everyone’s satisfaction was Rudy “Cheyenne” Cadena, one of the most influential and charismatic members in the Eme’s history. Cadena, in fact, coined the term “Eme,” the Spanish pronunciation of the letter “M.” It was decided that Mexican Mafia, La Mafia Mexicana, and La Eme were all legitimate and could be used interchangeably. This was typical of Cheyenne Cadena’s knack for conflict resolution and keeping the peace through charismatic leadership rather than force. Another rule the original group insisted on came to be known as “Blood In, Blood Out.” To join, a prospect had to prove himself by spilling blood. If he wanted to leave, the only exit was death. A Carnal joined for life. Forty years later, the code remained intact. On one Task Force videotape, Randy “Cowboy” Therrien is heard talking about a member who dropped out to become a preacher. Although this member had never debriefed or even talked about the Eme, the Carnales were discussing killing him. Therrien said, “There’s no getting out of this motherfucker. There’s no back door. You walk away and pick up a Bible, I’m gonna come looking for you.” Years later, when Therrien found himself in “down status” with the Eme and feared for his life, he actually did pick up the Bible and became a prison minister. In addition to backing each other up, an attack on one Hispanic was con-

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sidered as an attack on all Hispanics. Nobody could disrespect La Raza and get away with it. Over time, a number of other rules and regulations were imposed. One was that no Carnal would participate in homosexual activity. Renting out or controlling prostitutes in jail was considered permissible because it was business. Members and Associates also had to stay physically fit to keep themselves ready for battle. They were also expected to maintain perfect personal hygiene because they represented the Eme and La Raza. In the Eme, and in the institutions the Eme controls, neatness counts. Members and non-members alike are expected to maintain orderly cells. Although drug use is tolerated, addiction to heroin or any substance is a liability to the individual and the group. Carnales who become heroin addicts are subject to sanctions, from banishment to assault to murder. Among Eme experts in law enforcement and Eme dropouts who have become informants, there’s a difference of opinion on why Flores felt it necessary to create the Eme in the first place. One school of thought is that Flores and the Hispanics needed to band together in order to protect themselves from assault, robbery, or predations from other prisoners. According to this theory, the Eme was organized for defense and only in time became the dominant group in the prison system. The other school of thought is that the original founders didn’t need protection: They were already the baddest and most predatory group at DVI. That theory is supported by the fact that other Hispanics were the group’s earliest victims. Although officials at DVI weren’t aware of this new group, they realized that these individuals were a problem. According to Ramon “Mundo” Mendoza, one of the most notorious Eme dropouts, DVI decided to teach these young incorrigibles a lesson by sending them to San Quentin. The hope was that once these “kids” hit the big yard at Quentin they’d learn a lesson. In a pattern that would be repeated throughout its history, this attempt by law enforcement to suppress the Eme only increased its power. As soon as they reached Quentin, two charter members of the Eme, Ed-

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die “Potato Nose” Loera and Jesus “Liro” Pedroza, attacked and killed Robert “Bobby Loco” Lopez for no reason but to announce the Eme’s arrival to the general population. A few days later, these two again attacked and killed another inmate. Soon after, Alfredo “Cuate” Jimenez and Mike “Acha” Ison, two other charter members, each killed an inmate. Ison, also known as “Hatchet Mike,” had a wing man, Eddie “Pelon” Moreno. In Ramon Mendoza’s book released on CD, he called Moreno “pound for pound, the deadliest man in the California prison system.” Ison was a Northern California Emero who formed an alliance with the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang. Ison and Moreno were transferred to Folsom, where they set up shop and recruited new members. The Eme doesn’t need a lot of members in an institution to control it. A handful of dedicated Carnales could and did run an entire yard by virtue of the fear they instilled in other prisoners. After spending decades behind bars, Mike Ison was paroled in 2004 and returned to his old neighborhood in San Francisco. By that time, Ison was a tired senior citizen with a drinking problem. He had the misfortune to get into a bar fight and was killed by blows to the head with pool cues. Very few Carnales retire gracefully. One of the inmates that Hatchet Mike befriended at Folsom was Joe Morgan, a criminal of Hungarian descent who’d grown up in East Los Angeles in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood. At the age of sixteen, Morgan killed the husband of his thirty-two-year-old girlfriend and was sent to into the juvenile system. A bone infection in his right leg required it to be amputated below the knee. Despite this handicap, Morgan became the unquestioned handball champion of the CDC. This mental and physical discipline was a commodity highly desirable in an Eme member. In the late 1960s Morgan was voted into the brotherhood and given the moniker “Cocoliso,” the name of an ancient Aztec warrior. His other handle was “Pegleg Joe,” but only his closest associates dared use it in his presence. In time, Morgan became one of the more influential members of the Eme and he was often mistakenly called “the leader” of the Mexican Mafia. Law

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enforcement and the media mistakenly call Morgan the “Godfather” of the organization. During his time at Folsom, Morgan met Edward Bunker and established a friendship that continued long after Bunker became a celebrated crime writer. Bunker and Morgan shared a similar background: violent family life and abandonment. They grew up in similar Los Angeles neighborhoods and both men were fiercely anti-authoritarian and possessed of high intelligence. It’s interesting to speculate what might have happened had Morgan, like Bunker, decided to abandon the criminal life and pursue some other avenue. Bunker went on to write Education of a Felon and The Animal Factory. He appeared in over twenty films, playing small parts, usually as a heavy, and became something of a Hollywood darling. Quentin Tarantino cast him as Mr. Blue in Reservoir Dogs. Not every Hispanic neighborhood knuckled under to the Mexican Mafia. One gang in particular, Hoyo Maravilla, was one of the oldest gangs in California and its members considered themselves the true OGs. Whether known as Hoyo Mara, Mara, or Maravillosa, the gang’s name means “marvelous” or “wonderful” in Spanish. This was a bit of irony. During the early years of the twentieth century, waves of immigrants from Mexico were overloading the housing market and new arrivals settled into wood and tarpaper shantytowns in outlying parts of Los Angeles. These areas weren’t technically part of the city and had no sewage system, electricity, or trash collection. Anything but “marvelous.” Maravilla viewed these young Emeros as upstarts lacking in respect for the older, more established gang. Maravilla was the prison group that looked out for the welfare of Hispanic inmates. The Eme preyed on its own race and Maravilla felt it was borderline traitorous. Some of the Eme’s founders, including Morgan, had come from Maravilla, so Maravilla is often given a pass by the Eme for transgressions that would get any other gang a greenlight. From then until now, Maravilla and the Mexican Mafia have had a hot and cold war. What began as a prison beef has evolved over time into a street feud. Some Maravilla cliques have refused to pay taxes. Graffiti in

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those neighborhoods needs little interpretation. Yard-high letters proclaim their neighborhoods as “TAX FREE.” An open challenge to the Eme’s authority doesn’t go unanswered, and a number of tax-resistant barrios live under a perennial greenlight. But Maravilla wasn’t the only group to object to the influence of the emerging Mexican Mafia. A number of other Hispanics were being terrorized by the Eme; while they didn’t at first openly challenge it, they felt they needed a countervailing force. It emerged in the form of a rival prison gang called La Nuestra Familia. The bulk of the original Eme membership came from Southern California. The NF came mostly from Northern California. Prior to the famous “Shoe War” at San Quentin, the two groups had never formally squared off against each. But after that event, the battle lines were drawn and the fight continues to this day. The San Quentin Shoe War began, as it sounds, over a pair of stolen shoes. An Eme member named Carlos “Carlitos” Ortega spotted a brand new pair of shoes sitting unattended. He found they didn’t fit and gave them as a present to another Eme member named Robert “Robot” Salas. The shoes fit Salas and he was seen wearing them by their rightful owner, Hector Padilla, a member of the NF. Padilla challenged Salas as a thief, and Salas stabbed Padilla with a shank. Although Padilla survived, the incident lead to a number of attacks by Eme members and Associates against NF members. As a result of those attacks, the bulk of Eme members were thrown into solitary, leaving NF with numerical superiority on the yard. With most of the Eme members locked up, the NF decided on a major assault against any Eme member still in the general population. Despite the NF’s full-court press against the Eme, only one member was killed in San Quentin. The violence, however, spread to other prisons in California and soldiers fell on both sides. The rivalry between the NF and the Eme can be characterized as a north/ south split. The Norteno versus Sureno war continues to this day. The Southsiders call the Northerners “norputos,” “sod busters,” “farmeros,” and

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“wetbacks.” For their part, the Northerners call Surenos “surats” and “hamburger-eating Mexicans.” The NF has adopted its own symbols and signifiers. Since N is the fourteenth letter of the alphabet, the Nortenos use the number 14 or the Roman numeral XIV as a signifier. The Norteno counterpart to the Eme’s black hand tattoo is a sombrero with a knife or machete. Unlike the Eme, the NF has a traditional pyramid organizational structure. There’s an elected leader, the “mesa”—comparable to a board of directors—and various levels of membership and authority. What drove an irreconcilable wedge between the NF and the Eme was the murder of Rudy “Cheyenne” Cadena, the charismatic Emero who had a vision of turning the Eme and the NF into a unified, legitimate political organization. While he was in prison, Cadena had absorbed the spirit of the 1960s. He read the mystical writings of Carlos Castaneda and taught himself Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. He arrived at the idea of using Nahuatl as a code language and gave Eme members Aztec monikers. Cadena also caught the era’s political activism. His political awakening was in all probability influenced by the visibility and credence that the society beyond the prison walls was giving to the Black Panthers. Although he probably had fewer illusions about the true nature of the Panthers than did the students and college professors who rallied to the Panthers’ cause, he saw the possibility of transforming the Eme and the NF into a similar agent of social change. In 1971, Cadena was spending the last few years of his twelve-year sentence in Tehachapi State Prison. He requested that prison officials allow him to visit San Quentin where Gonzalo “Chalo” Hernandez, head of the NF, was housed. Willing to try anything to bring inmate violence under control, officials granted the request. Hernandez was one of Cadena’s homeboys. But Cadena went southside while Hernandez allied himself with the Nortenos. At that meeting, the two agreed to a truce and the violence stopped. It was at best temporary. At Folsom, Joe Morgan and his clique of Emeros saw it as some sort of capitulation. They wanted to control the prisons, not to

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share power. In their eyes, Cadena had fallen from grace. He was no longer a warrior. He’d become some kind of inmate politician. After Cadena was paroled, the truce broke down. Three months later, Cadena violated his parole and was sent back to prison. Upon his arrival at Folsom, he began hearing that the war was heating up again in San Quentin and other prisons. Cadena thought that he could intervene again and reinstate the truce he’d forged with “Chalo” Hernandez. Cadena approached prison officials again and asked to be transferred to the California Institution for Men in Chino, California. This is where Hernandez was housed and it was also an NF stronghold. Apparently Joe Morgan and the Eme hawks purposely undermined Cadena’s peace mission by ordering as many assaults as possible carried out against the NF. Soon after his arrival in Chino, Cadena met with the NF leaders and assured them that he’d order all the hits stopped and bring back the truce. The next day, as if to send Cadena an unambiguous message, Santos and Ernie Aranda, two brothers from Maravilla who’d joined the Nortenos and become full-fledged NF brothers, were stabbed by Eme soldiers in another section of the Chino prison. Cadena was suddenly a man with no power. His influence with the Mexican Mafia had evaporated and his importance in the eyes of the Nuestra Familia was diminished to the point that he was now a legitimate target for retribution. Cadena could have escaped his fate by “locking up.” He could have requested Protective Custody. But that wasn’t the way he would play it. Going into PC was for the weak and cowardly. If he was going out, he’d do it the same way he’d lived his entire life, on his feet and fighting. The night Cadena arrived in Chino, he was loudly taunted by the Nortenos and told that his time had come. That night he could hear them sharpening their shanks on the concrete floors of their cells. On December 17, 1972 Cadena was asked if he wanted to go out to the exercise yard with the rest of the prisoners. He could have stayed in his cell, but he didn’t. When he stepped out on the third tier of Palm Hall, he was

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assaulted by Eddie “Crackers” Vindiola, Frank “Joker” Mendoza, Ray “Tiny” Contreras, and Juan “Manzana” Colon. He was stabbed repeatedly and hit with a pipe. When they got tired of stabbing him, he was thrown off the tier to the concrete floor below. When he hit the concrete, “Tiny” Contreras finished him off with a shank. The prison medical staff counted over seventy stab wounds. Cadena met his fate like a warrior, a beau geste that wasn’t lost on his killers or the rest of the Nuestra Familia. To this day, his grave is visited by Eme and NF members out of respect for a guy who died valiantly. It’s no surprise that the Mexican Mafia took such offense when Edward James Olmos portrayed the Cadena character in American Me as having been killed by his own Carnales. The Mexican Mafia will accept being called killers, extortionists, and drug dealers. It is, after all, what they do for a living. They draw the line at people telling lies about them or assigning them responsibility for crimes they never committed. It could be argued, of course, that the Morgan faction was in some part responsible for triggering the assaults that broke the truce. But decisions on that grand a scale are made by the majority and the majority had ruled that the truce would not happen. Cadena had gone against the majority, believing that his status was so high that no one would contradict him. He’d forgotten than he was part of a democratic process, albeit a criminal one. The rift between the northern and southern Hispanics in the prisons and on the streets created peculiar alliances for the NF and the Eme. Although the Eme dominates most prisons in California through sheer force of numbers and its propensity for violence, the Carnales formed a working relationship with the Aryan Brotherhood (AB), another prison gang made up almost exclusively of white members. Although miniscule compared to the Eme and the larger Sureno population, the AB provides a valuable boost in the total number of available soldiers. The understanding between the AB and the Eme is similar to the mutual self-defense alliances forged by nations. If an AB is assaulted, Eme members and Associates are obligated to jump in and take his side. Similarly, if an Eme member or Associate is wronged or beaten, AB members or Associ-

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ates are required to jump in and take care of business. In addition to adding muscle in prison fights, the AB and the Eme share intelligence and information. There have been numerous incidents in which the girlfriends or wives of AB members have gotten civil service jobs at places like the Department of Motor Vehicles, various District Attorney offices throughout the state, and even as civilian employees of police departments. With access to government databases and license information, these outside contacts can run background checks on prospective members or find the address of an individual targeted for execution. To counter the AB/Eme alliance, the NF has reached a similar agreement with the Black Guerilla Family, a prison gang founded by the radical Black Panther George Jackson in the late 1960s. The schism within the ranks of Hispanics on the lines of black/white association is a baffling phenomenon. The basic law laid down by the Mexican Mafia requires street gangsters to forget their grievances on the streets when they hit the prison system. When they hit the yards, Sureno street gangsters are expected to unite under the larger flag of the Mexican Mafia. The same is expected of the Norteno street gangsters. Once in prison, they operate under the NF banner. For some reason the Eme and the NF have never been able to extend that doctrine to their own conflicts. This decades-old war may have done as much to sap the strength of both prison gangs as any efforts by law enforcement to curtail their criminal activities. What the Eme has done—project its power beyond the prison walls and into Hispanic gang-dominated neighborhoods—the NF has also accomplished in northern California cities. But the complete vertical integration of street and prison gangs has been achieved on a large scale by the Eme alone. This is something the neither the AB, the Black Guerilla Family, nor any other prison group has ever been able to pull off. Black street gangs like the Bloods and Crips don’t have a superior criminal hierarchy to deal with. Black gangs are localized and restrict their activities to the neighborhoods they control. Black gangs in California are freelancers working on a lawless frontier. While black gangsters do share some form of allegiance to the Red and Blue of the Bloods and Crips, the al-

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legiance is more theoretical and thoroughly lacking in structure. They don’t have the vast intelligence network of the Eme and they don’t issue daily greenlight lists. Although black criminals clique up in prison for self-defense, once they’re paroled back to the streets, alliances to a black prison group are generally terminated. The Eme has you for life, behind bars or free. This projection of power into the streets makes the Mexican Mafia unique among prison gangs and creates an extremely difficult challenge for law enforcement. For one, the prison gang/street gang dynamic is portable and easily replicated outside of the California prison system. With the continued migration of Mexican nationals expanding and settling into other parts of the U.S., the Sureno Movement and the Eme travel along with the new arrivals. This is not to say that all Mexican nationals are gang members. In truth, they’re overwhelmingly the victims of the gangs. But the fact cannot be avoided that Hispanic gangs, and in time the Eme, will find fertile ground for growth wherever a large enough population of Hispanics exists. An example is the rise of 18th Street cliques in places like Canada, Oregon, and parts of the Southern U.S. Although far removed from the streets of Los Angeles and the NF/Eme rivalry, these cliques still call themselves Surenos and show deference and loyalty to the Mexican Mafia. In the last decade, some police departments in rural areas of Utah, Nevada, and Washington have been confronted with a seemingly overnight explosion of gang warfare. The sudden rise took many of these departments completely by surprise. In these instances all it takes is one or two hardened veterans of LA’s street wars to show up in town and start organizing. The gang culture that took generations in Los Angeles to mature and develop into a criminal group is transplanted as a fully functioning entity anywhere that an informal support group of friends, relatives, and former cellmates happens to live. Although this colonial policy of scattering criminal cells all over the nation has gotten the Mara Salvatrucha (MS or MS-13) a lot of media and law enforcement attention, the fact is that the Mexican Mafia has a similar initiative flying below the radar. The Eme is shrewder about its expansion and

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maintains a lower profile than the Mara. It took Southern California law enforcement twenty years to become aware of the Eme’s power on the streets. While it won’t take decades for smaller police departments to become aware of the Eme’s presence in their jurisdictions, the fact is that they’re no more prepared for it than California was in 1977.

“If they get me, or I let them get me, they’ll kill me.” — James Maxson

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C H A P TE R e igh t e e n

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he third trial of Gerardo “Criminal” Reyes and George

“Chato” Vidales was a make-or-break situation for Tony Manzella. Judge Larry Fidler had told Manzella that if the State didn’t get a conviction this third time around on the Morales murder, he would dismiss the case and cut the two defendants loose. Judge Fidler and Tony Manzella weren’t the only two people in the courtroom anxious to see this trial end in a conviction. Atanacio Morales, Randy’s father, had expressed a lot of frustration about the case. It was now July 2005. His son had been dead ten years and the killers still hadn’t met justice. One of them, Randy “Jo Jo” Rodriguez, 289

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had been acquitted and Atanacio feared the same thing would happen to Reyes and Vidales. He’d lost his faith in the system. While Manzella was starting his trial on July 7, 2005, another trial involving Avenues was opening just down the hall. The lead investigator in that case was Detective Rick Ortiz, the man who’d made the first crack in the case that ultimately led to the Federal hate crime prosecution against the Avenues 43 clique. This new case resulted from the murder of Alfred “Tigger” Salinas’s son, also named Alfred. The elder Salinas was mentioned as a figure in Tony’s prosecution of Richard Aguirre and Scott Gleason. They’d been convicted of killing Joseph “Clavo” Torres, a tax collector who worked for the elder Salinas. Torres had been told that he was no longer collecting for Salinas. When Torres objected, he was shot and killed. The younger Salinas, a collector for his father, also met his fate over taxation. According to investigators, the younger Salinas was collecting taxes in Highland Park on behalf of his father. The elder Salinas had disgraced himself in the eyes of his Emero brothers while he was out on the streets. As a senior member, his assignment had been to maintain a low profile, regulate the neighborhood, and maintain the flow of money into the Eme’s treasure chest. Although he kept his eyes on the business, he was conducting a turbulent relationship with a younger woman. One night at Marcellino’s Bar on Broadway his young girlfriend threw a beer in his face and tried to get two of her friends to assault him. According to the court records at his murder trial, Salinas ambushed her and shot her to death when she went to her car. Salinas’s Eme brothers saw this as a thoroughly avoidable murder, distasteful and frankly unmanly. Emeros don’t kill women over a lover’s spat. As a result, Salinas was essentially terminated from collecting taxes and, according to law enforcement, the area was given to Alex Aguirre. The younger Salinas continued to try collecting and was targeted for execution. On the night of February 29, 2004, Frank “Pops” Guttierez was sitting in a car outside the Salinas home waiting for young Alfred to appear. When he did, Guttierez rolled up in the car and fired several shots at Salinas. He

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missed, exited the car, and went after Salinas on foot. By this time, Salinas’s mother and cousin had come out of the house and the mother tried to get between her son and his assassin. Guttierez fired over her and shot Salinas dead. In court, the mother testified that she knew the killer because he and her son had grown up together and played on the same football team in school, and that he’d spent a lot of time at their house. Clearly, Guttierez had thoroughly absorbed the Mexican Mafia’s ethic that loyalty to it supersedes loyalty to God, family, and friends. Guttierez was convicted and sent to prison for life. At the time, Salinas senior was already sentenced to life without parole for murdering his girlfriend in 2000. On July 5, 2005, Manzella began the opening statement that he’d already presented twice before. He started with the killing of the Sanchez brothers, Yogi and Wicked, at the hands of Javy “Gangster” Marquez. After the killings, Marquez had told young Randy Morales that he’d taken care of five Highland Park gangsters and that he was going to take care of a few more. At the time, Morales was in juvenile custody for cocaine possession and told detectives what Marquez had confided in him. Morales’s statement to detectives was included in the discovery evidence given to Marquez’s defense lawyer in Marquez’s prosecution for the Sanchez killings. Morales’s name should have been blacked out, but remained due to an oversight. The prosecution theory is that Marquez had seen Morales’s statement and had ordered that Morales be killed. On October 5, 1996, Morales was driven to Remstoy Street and assassinated on those orders. With his opening statement highly polished and succinct, Manzella gave the jury an overview of the Mexican Mafia and its operation. He also told the jury, “The connection between the Mexican Mafia and the Avenues is so strong that it’s tough to tell where the Avenues ends and the Mexican Mafia begins.”The fact is, Avenues is not unique in that regard. To prove his theory, Manzella stated that he’d bring out Gerry “Trooper” Ramirez and Jimmy “Drac” Maxson, tax collectors for the Eme who’d been told about the Morales murder.

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Michael White, George Vidales’s defense attorney, began by stating that one of Manzella’s own witnesses would exonerate his client. An eyewitness, Debbie Ramos, had seen four shaven-headed Hispanic men driving away at high speed from the scene of Morales’s murder. White said that he’d show that Vidales had not had a shaved head at the time. White also stated that Manzella’s two witnesses hadn’t volunteered to come forward at the time of the Morales murder. They’d waited until they were in trouble to exchange false information for a way out of long sentences. White said, “Ramirez is a liar. Maxson is a liar.” Gerardo Reyes’s defense attorney, Chris Chaney, chose not to give an opening statement, reserving his first remarks for later in the trial. Manzella’s first witness, Detective Mike Camacho, stated that he’d interviewed Randy “Muppet” Morales while Morales was in custody at the Los Padrinos juvenile detention facility. Morales told Camacho that Javy Marquez was recruiting him to sell dope on Drew Street, and that Marquez had told him that he’d shot five Highland Park gangsters and was going to shoot more because Highland Park wasn’t paying its taxes. Camacho said Morales’s statement was included in the Sanchez brothers’ murder book and that two copies of the book had been made, one for the DA and the other for Marquez’s defense attorney. Morales’s name had accidentally been left visible in the copy given to the defense. Michael White’s cross-examination was brief and addressed Morales’s accidental killing of an Avenues member named Trippy in a gunfight with rivals. White’s strategy here was to put before the jury the possibility that Morales could have been killed by other people in Avenues for reasons that had nothing to do with Marquez or Morales’s statement to the police. Next up was DA Larry Droeger, the prosecutor in the Sanchez brothers’ case against Marquez. He stated that he hadn’t personally blacked out (redacted) Morales’s name from the chrono entry. He said he usually let the LAPD detectives do that. Manzella’s next two witnesses were Northeast Detective Bob Lopez and retired LASD gang expert Sgt. Richard Valdemar. Lopez testified on the structure of the Avenues gang, its drug dealing, taxation of drug dealers,

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and association with the Mexican Mafia. He identified Alex Aguirre on the organization chart as a made member of the Eme and that Richie Aguirre, his younger brother, carried a lot of weight as well. Manzella asked Lopez, “Was Richie a shotcaller?” Lopez said that he was and that it was because of Alex. Under cross-examination by Michael White, Lopez stated that there were 600 to 700 members of Avenues at the time of the Morales murder. White asked Detective Lopez if he personally knew George Vidales, his client. Lopez said that he didn’t know him. After White was finished, Chris Chaney asked Bob Lopez if the Avenues fought with other gangs over territorial matters that had nothing to do with the Mexican Mafia. Lopez admitted that all gangs have rivals. The implication was that Morales could have been killed by one of the Avenues many rival gangs. When Lopez was done, Manzella brought out Rich Valdemar to testify on the nature, organization, and income source of the Mexican Mafia. He stated that the only the CDC can validate an individual as a member. He also explained “paperwork” and greenlighting. In Valdemar’s opinion, Javy Marquez had had the power to request a greenlight on Randy Morales. Marquez was not a full-blown Carnal at the time, but he did have a lot of status and was considered reliable. Michael White’s cross-examination was brief and covered Valdemar’s work on the Task Force. White asked Valdemar if he’d ever heard Jimmy Maxson talk about Mafia business in any wiretaps. Valdemar said he had. After a number of questions about Maxson and his indictment, White asked Valdemar if he’d heard George Vidales on wiretaps or seen his name on reports. Valdemar said that Vidales had never come up in those tapes or documents. Chris Chaney asked Valdemar if young gang members know the rules and penalties of the Mexican Mafia and gangs. Valdemar said they did. “So,” Chaney finished, “if a person talks, he knows he could be killed?” Valdemar answered, “Yes.” The next two witnesses, Janette Sukphranee and Yadira Altamirano,

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were present on Drew Street the night Morales was killed. Sukphranee testified that she’d given Morales a ride to Drew Street and dropped him off. Altamirano testified that she’d been there when Morales was dropped off, had said hello, and hadn’t seen him again. Their testimony places Morales on Drew Street. Manzella’s most important witness, Jimmy “Drac” Maxson, would deliver the prosecution’s most important evidence against the two defendants. Maxson’s testimony featured four main points. The first was that on the night of Morales’s murder, Maxson was driving towards Drew Street when he saw a red van coming the other way on Estara, a street perpendicular to Drew. The red van was being driven by Gerardo “Criminal” Reyes; it belonged to his girlfriend at the time, Diana “Kilo Woman” Demetrio, a Mexican national illegally in the U.S. At the time of this trial, she had been deported to back to Mexico and was unavailable as a witness. Maxson stated that he pulled over and the van pulled over on the opposite side of the street. George Vidales exited the van and told Maxson that he and Gerardo Reyes were on their way to “check” Morales. Maxson warned Vidales not to kill Morales because Morales was a friend of Richie Aguirre’s. A few days later, Maxson went to Richie Aguirre’s house and learned Muppet had been killed. That day or the next, Maxson drove up to a small park that the Avenues gang calls the “Culebra,” a Spanish word for snake. Vidales came out of the park and told Maxson that he hadn’t known they were going to kill Morales. Maxson stated to the jury that Vidales was afraid that Richie Aguirre would be angry with him. Soon after that conversation, Maxson spoke with Gerardo Reyes on Drew Street. Like Vidales, Reyes was nervous; he kept his hand on the butt of his gun he had tucked in his waistband. Reyes told Maxson that he’d shot Muppet because Muppet was a “rata” and because Javy Marquez had said “he has to go.” Reyes at one time had been Javy Marquez’s brother-in-law; it was Manzella’s contention that Reyes had killed Morales out of loyalty to Marquez. Some time after the Morales murder, Maxson moved into a condo on Division Street with his girlfriend Leticia, Richie Aguirre, and Maria Marquez,

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Javy’s sister. By this time, Maria had broken off her relationship with Reyes and was involved with Richie. Maxson told the jury that one day Javy Marquez called from LA County Jail. Marquez told him to tell Richie Aguirre that Muppet was a rat and that Richie should “let it go.” Michael White tried to destroy Maxson’s credibility. He asked about the four robberies to which Maxson had pleaded guilty. White asked Maxson whether he’d pistol-whipped someone during a carjacking. Maxson said that although he’d pleaded guilty to the robbery and the assault, he hadn’t committed either. He admitted that, yes, he had pistol-whipped people in the past, but not that individual; he’d only taken the deal because it was a fair one. White took up Maxson’s indictment in the Federal RICO case and his association with Eme members like Mariano “Chuy” Martinez, Manuel “Tati” Torres, John “Stranger” Turscak, and Jesse “Shady” Detevis. White asked, “Did you want to become a member of the Mexican Mafia?” Maxson said, “It could have happened.” White asked if Maxson had fled to Mexico in the knowledge that there was a Federal indictment against him. Maxson said he had. White noted that Maxson left his wife and young son behind in the US, an indirect suggestion to the jury that Maxson’s top priority was staying out of jail. But Maxson was clearly troubled by his past. Maxson, like a lot of young people in barrios all over California, had fallen into gang life through his friends. There hadn’t been much of a family to hold him back. Maxson’s father, James Douglas Maxson, was a heroin addict, not a career criminal, who’d died of an overdose when Jimmy was twenty. James was a child of the Sixties who’d immersed himself in the culture and never come back. He was the illegitimate son of a Boston-born Italian-American soldier and an Irish mother who gave him up for adoption soon after he was born. James had been adopted by Howard and Jessie Maxson, a devout Seventh Day Adventist couple from the East Coast. The family moved to California in the early Sixties and settled into an upper middle class neighborhood in the San Gabriel Valley. As a teenager, James heard the siren song of the Wood-

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stock Generation and followed it down a trail of self-destruction. Along the way he married Jimmy’s mother and fathered Jimmy and his older sister. Jimmy grew up pulled in two directions. One was the gang culture of Highland Park; the other was the subdued piety of his grandparents. The happiest memories Jimmy Maxson had of growing up were the summers spent with them, far from Highland Park. The rest of the year he was surrounded by the negative forces of dope, the Avenues, and the allure of becoming a shotcaller. True to his faith, Howard Maxson never abandoned Jimmy and always held out the hope that his grandson would turn himself around. Throughout Maxson’s criminal career, the combination of his grandparents’ influence and his street sense probably kept him from taking the final step and extinguishing a life. Michael White continued pressing Maxson about his Federal indictment and whether he had immunity on the shootout on Ruby Street and the shootout against the Border Brothers. Maxson said he didn’t need it because nobody had been killed in either incident. White asked Maxson if he’d be greenlighted for testifying. Maxson said yes. “And the greenlight,” White asked, “will last forever?” Maxson said, “Until the day I die.” Chris Chaney began a line of questioning that went directly to Maxson’s motivation for testifying. Chaney began with the night Morales was killed. Maxson, he noted, had been made aware of that possibility by George Vidales. Chaney asked, “You knew Muppet could be killed?” Maxson said, “Yes.” Then he asked Maxson if he’d known where Richie Aguirre lived and whether he’d tried to warn him that Morales might be in big trouble. Maxson said that he didn’t call Aguirre because he’d been ordered by the Aguirres not to call their house. By the time of the Morales murder, the Aguirres knew that their phones were being monitored. At one point Chaney asked Maxson, “Did you want to become a Carnal?” Maxson said, “Yes. It’s part of the stuff that goes with the lifestyle.” Chaney continued, “Is one of the ways to become a Carnal to kill someone?” Maxson said, “One of the ways. You could also be a good earner.” Chaney’s last two questions went to Maxson’s state of mind when he was a fugitive in Mexico. “What were you going to do to when the money ran

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out?” Maxson said, “I considered a lot of options.” “One of your options was to spend the rest of your life in prison?” Maxson said, “Yes.” Manzella did a brief re-direct on Maxson to clear up some ideas that Chaney and White might have put into the minds of the jury members. Manzella asked, “Did you ever kill anyone?” Maxson said, “No.” Manzella asked whether Maxson had been offered Federal Witness Security. Maxson became visibly upset. “Yes,” he said. “I didn’t go because I would have had to leave my son behind.” Maxson teared up at having to mention his son. He was in anguish. Maxson had been offered the Witness Protection Program and would have taken it had his wife had agreed to join him. It would have meant changing their names, moving out of the state, and never contacting family members again. The problem was that by the time Maxson was offered the program, his relationship with his wife had soured. She had full custody of their child and if Maxson had taken the program, it would have been a ticket for one. Manzella asked, “Is there a greenlight on you?” Maxson said, “If they get me, or I let them get me, they’ll kill me.” After Manzella was done, Michael White decided to re-cross Maxson. He asked Maxson, “Were you subpoenaed to come to court?” Maxson answered yes. Then White asked, “If you ignored the subpoena, you could be in violation of your deal?” Possibly relieved that his testimony was almost over and because he found the idea of ignoring the subpoena supremely ridiculous, Maxson cracked a smile. Michael White asked, “Is there something funny about this, Mr. Maxson?” Manzella stood up and objected in the same tone that White had used with Maxson. Judge Larry Fidler, who has zero tolerance for deviation from professional conduct, blew up. His face glowing red, Fidler shouted down both parties and said in a tone that chilled the blood, “This will not happen in my court. That applies to everybody.” At the end of the day’s session, Judge Fidler dismissed the jury and cleared the court of everyone except Tony, Ruth, and the two defense attorneys, apparently to chastise them further about their behavior.

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On Monday, July 18, 2005, the case against George Vidales and Gerardo Reyes took a turn that surprised everyone except Tony Manzella, Ruth Arvidson, and George Vidales. There was an uncharacteristically cheerful mood in the court that morning and the notable absence of the defense attorneys and their clients. Judge Larry Fidler walked from his office to the court and back again several times in his shirtsleeves, something he rarely does. Manzella was more gregarious than usual and told the Bailiff, “I guess Mike White’s a little late because it’s hard to swallow.” Clearly there had been developments that everyone except the spectators knew about. A minute later, Manzella asked, “Is today’s guest of honor here?” The bailiff asked who Manzella meant and Tony said, “Vidales. He just went from being a dirtbag to one of my favorite people, so you better treat him good in lockup.” A few minutes later Michael White entered the courtroom and George Vidales was taken from the lockup and brought into the room. Vidales wore his County Jail orange jumpsuit instead of the dress clothes he’d worn throughout the trial. Manzella asked Ruth Arvidson to go up to his office and find a cheat sheet on how to take a plea. Manzella was overheard telling Ruth, “I take so few pleas I forgot how to do it.” Then Manzella, White, and Vidales disappeared into the jury room. It looked like George Vidales was going to roll on his co-defendant and testify for the prosecution. At 9:40 AM, Manzella, Ruth Arvidson, George Vidales, and Michael White appeared before Judge Fidler and Manzella announced that he’d offered Vidales a deal. Vidales would plead guilty to a second-degree murder charge. At the end of Vidales’s testimony, Manzella would ask for a reduction to manslaughter and ask for a mid-term sentence of six years. With the time that Vidales had already spent in the County Jail counting towards the sentence, he could be set free within weeks of testifying. With Vidales on the stand, Manzella went through the terms of the agreement. Michael White would continue to be his attorney but his role was to ensure that his client got a fair deal. White seemed relieved but somewhat disappointed. For the prosecution, the important thing was to have Vidales plead

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guilty to second-degree murder. Once Manzella had that, there was a fallback position should Vidales suddenly change his mind or be untruthful on the stand. Judge Fidler asked Manzella if there was an interview with Vidales that needed to be turned over to Chris Chaney. Manzella told Fidler that there were in fact three of them. In the first two, Vidales withheld some information; he told the truth about Morales’s murder in the third one. In that interview, Vidales admitted there were two other people in the van, Marvin “Greedy” Ponce and Carlos Caldera. At 10:05 AM, after going through the terms of the agreement, Manzella asked Vidales, “On count seven, how do you plead?” Without hesitation or apparent emotion, Vidales said, “Guilty.” Judge Fidler set Vidales’s sentencing date for February 6, 2006. Fidler then asked White, “Do you want to be present when Mr. Vidales testifies?” White said, “No, but Mr. Manzella wants me to be. Can I wear a hood or a mask?” As Vidales left the witness box, Manzella asked him, “Are you going to be a good witness?” Vidales, by now smiling and relieved, said, “Better than Jimmy.” A few minutes later, Chaney entered the courtroom and White took him out to the hall to break the bad news. Looking untroubled by this revelation, Chaney went into the lockup area to consult with Reyes. When Chaney returned, he asked for copies of the videotapes of Vidales debriefing on the Morales murder and asked for a continuance of ninety days to prepare a defense. Judge Fidler said, “I’m not going to give you that. You can come back on Monday and make a showing. Three months is out of the question.” Judge Fidler then asked if Marvin Ponce and Carlos Caldera could be subpoenaed to appear in court. He was told that Ponce was currently housed at Pelican Bay State Prison but that Caldera was available. At 10:50 AM, with the details sorted out, Judge Fidler brought the jury in and brought the members up to date on the new developments. “The reason you don’t see Mr. Vidales here today,” Judge Fidler explained, “is because he has decided to enter into a plea agreement and will testify in this case.” Fidler, a stickler for professional behavior, apologized to the jury for losing

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his temper. He explained that he didn’t want anyone to think ill of Chaney, White, or Manzella. Despite the new developments, there was no reason not to continue with testimony. Detective James King was brought on to confirm that Maxson had received $8,700 in living expenses and that he’d have to account for every dollar. Next, Detective John Berdin testified that he’d interviewed Jimmy Maxson in October 1999 and again in January 2000. Maxson provided information on five homicides, including the Morales murder. As detective supervisor, Berdin had assigned Detective Andy Teague as lead investigator, but Teague was taken off the cases after his automobile accident. The rest of the day was taken up with the firearms testimony provided by the LAPD firearms analyst, Starr Sachs. After a break of nearly three weeks to give Chaney time to prepare, the trial resumed on August 8, 2005. The court day amounted to not much more than a status meeting on the trial and the upcoming trial of Javy Marquez, the man Manzella placed at the center of the Morales murder. During the break, Carlos Caldera had been subpoenaed to appear. The subpoena was served by an LAPD cop instead of the usual court-appointed investigator; Chaney had told Manzella that his investigator was afraid to enter Highland Park. Judge Fidler brought Carlos Caldera forward and told him that he was implicated in a murder and that he had to be represented by an attorney. Judge Fidler made arrangements for the court to appoint Caldera a lawyer. After Caldera was dismissed they dealt with Marvin Ponce’s extraction order from Pelican Bay. Judge Fidler then brought in the jury, told them when next to appear, and dismissed them. Soon after, White walked in and Manzella couldn’t resist needling him. “There’s my favorite lawyer,” he said to White. “He’s my new best friend.” White took the comment in stride, pretending he didn’t want to deck Manzella on the spot. With the jury gone and Judge Fidler still on the bench, Javy Marquez was

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brought in from the lockup. Since he faced the death penalty, Marquez was assigned two defense attorneys instead of one, a standard practice. Since his last appearance in court, Marquez had grown his hair out and wore it in a long ponytail held by rubber bands. His appearance hadn’t changed much except that he looked pale as a result of his six years in County Jail. Since the original filing of the case, Marquez had gone back and forth about going in propria persona (pro per, for short), the legal term for representing oneself. Although Judge Fidler had cautioned him that going pro per wasn’t a wise move, and that he couldn’t appeal a conviction based on an inadequate defense, Marquez insisted. Years earlier in the run up to the trial, Marquez had accused his defense attorney of falling asleep in court and had asked that the court appoint a different attorney. Fidler held a hearing on the matter and had the lawyer removed but without making a finding that the lawyer had actually fallen asleep. It was during that hearing that Marquez impressed court observers, including Manzella, as a bright and articulate individual. Though Marquez had chosen to represent himself, Judge Fidler appointed him two defense attorneys as co-counsels. They would familiarize themselves with his case and in the event that Marquez changed his mind, they’d be ready and able to step in and provide him with a strong and well-prepared defense. Fidler and Manzella had seen this tactic of going pro per at work in the past. It was one of the ways Eme shotcallers used the system to extend their time in County Jail, to continue being close to home and running business on the street. By having two defense attorneys at the ready, Judge Fidler avoided the long delay of getting lawyers appointed and up to speed when the time came to go to court and the defendant suddenly decided he didn’t want to go pro per anymore. Sure enough, on this day, Marquez announced to the court that he was now abandoning his wish to represent himself. His two attorneys were ready to proceed with the trial and Judge Fidler set August 26 as the start day. On August 10, 2005, George “Chato” Vidales made his first appearance on the stand as a prosecution witness. Before the start of testimony and out-

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side the presence of the jury, Chris Chaney made a motion to preclude all of Vidales’s testimony because it contradicted the testimony of Gerry “Trooper” Ramirez. Judge Fidler denied the motion on the grounds that Gerry Ramirez had not testified in the trial. Manzella, all too ready to support Judge Fidler’s opinion, said, “You’re right, your honor.” Fidler fixed him with a dubious look and said coldly, “It’s nice to be supported by the prosecution.” Chaney’s main line of defense against Vidales was that in Vidales’s first two interviews with Manzella and the LAPD, he never placed Caldera and Ponce in the van the night Morales was killed. His having withheld that information until the third interview indicated to Chaney that Vidales was not truthful. Judge Fidler denied Chris Chaney’s motion to exclude all of George Vidales’s testimony. Up to the point when Vidales sat in the witness box, the jury had never heard him utter a word. Tall, dark-skinned, thickset, and covered with tattoos on his neck and arms, Vidales, like Reyes, had been an intimidating presence in the court. No one was prepared for the well-spoken man who emerged on the stand. Vidales didn’t have Benny Garcia’s “I-was-a-criminal-so-what” attitude, Jimmy Maxson’s anxiety, or Gerry Ramirez’s evasiveness. His air was of rueful resignation combined with street smarts and detached thoughtfulness. Manzella’s first words to Vidales were, “I want to start with your history.” Over the course of the direct-examination, the jury learned that Vidales was born in 1974 and had grown up in Highland Park. He had two older cousins in Avenues and had spent a lot of time with them hanging around the park called the Culebra. At fifteen, Vidales was officially jumped in by two Avenues members, men he identified only as Thumper and Johnny Shorty. As a young gang-banger, Vidales and his homies did all the usual gang stuff like tagging, going to gang meetings, and being indoctrinated into gang culture. “We knew about the Mexican Mafia,” he said, “but that came later.” As a juvenile, he was arrested once for Grand Theft Auto and once for disturbing the peace. In 1992, he was arrested for illegally carrying a concealed firearm. In 1993, he was sent to prison for five years for second-de-

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gree robbery. (That charge had had nothing to do with gang business. He’d been stranded late one night and had carjacked a man just to drive himself home.) In 1999, he was arrested again for shoplifting and served thirty-two months. His association with the Mexican Mafia began in 1993 when he started working as a drug runner for Richard “Half Man” Aguirre, father of Alex and Richie. When Vidales started working for Richard, Sr., he knew that Alex was already a full-blown Carnal in the Mexican Mafia, but Vidales hadn’t met him yet. Vidales claimed on the stand that “Half Man” was responsible for selling most of the drugs in Highland Park. Vidales eventually met Alex when Alex was paroled from prison and started living with his father. Vidales then began to work for Alex on Eme business. When Alex went on a mission, Vidales would go with him and carry a gun. He stated that he’d only been involved in two gunfights, neither of which resulted in injury or death. Both were with rival gangs. Since his first prison sentence, Vidales had declared himself a Sureno or a Southern Soldier: He’d been loyal to the Mexican Mafia, even if he hadn’t done actual work for them yet. Vidales had been arrested in May 2001 for Morales’s murder. He’d been out of prison one week. Except for that brief time, Vidales had been incarcerated from 1999 until his appearance in court that day. Vidales had stated in January 2002 that he’d started doing serious work for the Eme while he in LA County Jail waiting for this trial to start. “Javy [Marquez] asked me to help,” Vidales stated. “Javy was in Seg [Segregation, basically isolation] so Javy asked me to collect taxes and sell drugs. A third of the drug money had to be kicked up to the Eme.” Vidales stated that Javy had become an Eme member in 1999 and that he’d “started under their name staying in touch with the people that ran the general population. They would send me the money and I would send it to the other Mexican Mafia members.” Vidales would send the money to another Eme member, Chato Sandoval from Maravilla, at a PO Box on the outside, or he’d put the money in Marquez’s Jail bank account. All Jail and Prison inmates are allowed to maintain

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bank accounts while incarcerated and there’s little monitoring of who puts money in or where it comes from. Inmates can transfer money to the outside or to other prisoner accounts through third parties on the outside. As a result, the Jail and the California prison system are the de facto bankers of the Mexican Mafia and other prison groups. Vidales continued his revelations. The County Jail gang investigators classified him as a South Side Shotcaller, essentially the equivalent of the CDC’s classification of Eme Associate, and put him in the High Power Gang module. “That was where most of the Eme lived,” Vidales explained. Since starting his work for the Eme in County Jail, Vidales had gotten himself in trouble with jail authorities. On May 11, 2002, he was involved in a major disturbance in which all Surenos in County Jail refused to come out of their cells or in any way cooperate with the running of the jail. In April 2003, he was caught with cocaine and written up for possession with intent to sell for the benefit of the Eme. Manzella did some backtracking and asked Vidales how and when he’d met Gerardo Reyes. Vidales stated that he met Reyes on Drew Street when Vidales was selling dope there. Reyes was already in Avenues and he and Vidales became friends. Vidales found out that Reyes was married to Javy Marquez’s sister and that they had a child together. Reyes was therefore the brother-in-law of a powerful figure who’d yet to become a full-blown Carnal. Manzella then directed the questioning to Vidales’s motivation for cooperating in this case. Vidales stated that he’d initiated the contact with Manzella in October 2004 after learning that he’d been greenlighted for his association with Marquez and an internal Eme conflict involving a Marquez rival, Michael “Mosca” Torres. Vidales said of Torres, “We didn’t get along. But when you got an Eme member on the tier, you have to do what he says.” Vidales worked for Marquez at the time, but Torres wanted his own crew working for him in the Jail. Marquez was in Segregation, so Vidales was left to obey whichever ranking member was in charge. The final break between Vidales and Torres came when Vidales was

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asked by another Associate to pass an envelope to Torres. Vidales did so. But when Torres opened the envelope, he claimed that there was some dope missing and accused Vidales of the theft. Knowing he hadn’t taken it, Vidales realized with a shock that he was being set up. When Vidales realized that the tide of power had shifted from Marquez to Torres, he decided to debrief and get himself Protective Custody. In his first two interviews, Vidales hadn’t mentioned that Carlos Caldera and Marvin Ponce had been in the van on the night of the murder. He’d also invented a story about how Morales had been maneuvered into the van and off Drew Street. Vidales stated that after Marquez had been arrested for the murder of the Sanchez brothers, Alex Aguirre put Carlos Caldera in charge of collecting taxes and selling drugs in his name. Vidales told the jury that he’d left out Caldera from the timeline of the Morales homicide because Caldera was still on the street and Vidales was afraid he might retaliate against Vidales’s family in Highland Park. “I seen what happens to people who cooperate,” Vidales said. Manzella asked, “Like Randy Morales?” Vidales said, “Right.” After the second interview, Manzella refused to consider a deal because he knew Vidales wasn’t telling the whole truth. As so often happens when career gangsters debrief, they’re reluctant to give it all up the first time out. Often they’ll give up the shooters but leave out co-conspirators and facilitators. After the second interview and Manzella’s refusal to strike a deal, Vidales had a conversation with Michael White. White counseled him that if he was considering a deal, he should leave nothing out. After his talk with White, Vidales decided to come clean. Manzella walked Vidales through the night of the Morales killing. Vidales stated that there had been an Avenues party that night on Chapman Street, one block over from and parallel to Drew Street. Vidales saw Morales arrive at the party between 9:30 and 10:00 PM. Before Morales’s arrival, Carlos Caldera and Gerardo Reyes approached Vidales; Caldera told him that he’d received a message from Javy Marquez: Morales was a rata and Marquez wanted him dead. Caldera told Vidales that

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Reyes had already volunteered to do the murder. Vidales asked Caldera, “What do you want me for?” The reason was that Vidales was holding Morales’s .25 caliber pistol. Morales had lent him the pistol sometime prior to that night. Caldera told Vidales that if Morales should ask for it, Vidales was to tell him that it was at his house in El Sereno and that they should go there to get it. After creating this ruse, Vidales gave Reyes the pistol. As it happened, when Morales appeared at the party, the first thing he did was approach Vidales and ask for the gun. Vidales, as planned, told Morales that the gun was in El Sereno but that he could arrange a ride over there to get it. Reyes volunteered to borrow his girlfriend’s van. When Reyes left to get the van, Vidales, Caldera, and a group of other Avenues members walked over to Drew Street to buy some drugs for the night. While they stood around on Drew Street, Reyes appeared with Kilo Woman’s van. Reyes told the group that before they left for El Sereno, he had to go buy his girlfriend some groceries. Vidales and Morales got in the van to make a run to the store for food. Before they left, Carlos Caldera gave Vidales some cash to buy beer. At this point, Reyes was behind the wheel. As Vidales, Reyes and Morales made a left from Drew Street onto Estara, Vidales saw Jimmy Maxson driving in the opposite direction in his Mustang. He told Reyes to pull over so he could talk to Maxson. Vidales and Maxson had a conversation about checking Morales. Maxson cautioned him not to kill Morales. After Vidales, Reyes, and Morales got back to Drew Street and Reyes dropped off the groceries with his girlfriend, Marvin Ponce and Carlos Caldera got in the van as well. Reyes gave Vidales the keys and told him to drive. Ponce was in the back seat with Morales, Reyes in the front passenger seat next to Vidales, and Caldera in the middle row of seats. Vidales told the jury that he knew Caldera was also armed with a pistol. As they drove along Division Street, Vidales said that they hit something on the road and he got out to investigate. He said whatever he hit left

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a scuff mark on the van. As they drove, they were all still drinking the beer that Vidales had bought with Caldera’s money. Vidales eventually turned on to Remstoy Street. He knew the street well, that it was lightly populated and had no lights. He stopped, saying he needed to urinate. He was followed out by Morales, Reyes, and Caldera. Marvin Ponce remained in the van. As Vidales urinated into the bushes along Remstoy, he noticed Morales bend over either to tie his shoes or to do something with his pants cuffs. As Morales did that, Vidales saw Reyes approach Morales and fire a round at close range into Morales’s head. Caldera stood near Reyes and had his own gun out. As Reyes continued firing on the now supine Morales, Vidales walked quickly to the van. Vidales stated that Caldera had his gun out to make sure that Reyes “got his business handled.” Caldera was the backup shooter in case Reyes’s gun jammed or he didn’t have the heart to finish the job. Manzella asked Vidales, “Is this typical of Mexican Mafia behavior?” Vidales said, “I don’t know. But Carlos gave Javy his word that it would get done. Otherwise your word is no good and that’s all you have.” In an interview after the trial, Rich Valdemar explained that this was a typical three-man hit, part of the curriculum taught in prison. In an upclose assassination, the designated killer is usually lightly armed with a small-caliber pistol. Since the shooting will be done at close range, usually with shots to the head, a small caliber like a .22 or .380 is powerful enough to get the job done. There’s always a second man with a slightly bigger caliber to finish the job if the primary shooter fails. In addition to the backup shooter, there is usually a layoff man armed with a much larger weapon such as a shotgun or a rifle. His job is to look out for the police or witnesses and either to drive them off with gunfire or to kill them. In prison, the three-man hit team is armed with shanks. The designated hitter is handed the shank immediately prior to the hit. A second man carries a much bigger shank called a bonecrusher to finish the job if the primary fails. A third man looks out for correction officers and uses his body to block the view of anyone looking.

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By the time that Vidales had reached this point in his narrative, the jury was spellbound. Some sat forward in their seats listening intently. Vidales related his story in a matter-of-fact way and seemed neither disturbed nor pleased by what he said. Reyes took Vidales’s testimony without any sign of emotion. He had, in fact, an enigmatic smile that betrayed nothing about his state of mind. Vidales said that after the shooting they’d returned to the van and taken off at high speed. Because they were accelerating, the sliding side door of the van wouldn’t close and the dome light stayed on. It wasn’t until they’d rounded the corner at the end of Remstoy and had reached Huntington Drive that the van finally stopped long enough to close the door. After they stopped again, Reyes wrapped the gun in a paper bag and tossed it in a dumpster. They then went to Vidales’s apartment, where Reyes went into the bathroom to wash blood off his hands and some that had spattered his clothes. After cleaning up, they started back toward Drew Street and noticed police cars and a fire engine driving in the direction of Remstoy Street. On the drive back, they agreed not to talk to anyone about the killing. Vidales told Carlos Caldera that he’d mentioned to Maxson that they were going to check Morales. Carlos said that he’d straighten it all out with Alex Aguirre. Vidales was afraid that Alex Aguirre would greenlight him, so he approached people close to Alex to find out what his status was. He spoke with Maxson a few days after the killing to let him know he hadn’t actually participated. He repeated for the jury what he said to Maxson: “I knew Drac [Maxson] disapproved because of Lil Pee Wee [Richie Aguirre]. I was a little fry in the thing.” To cover all his bases, Vidales also had a conversation with Gerry “Trooper” Ramirez and Gerry’s cousin Francisco “Big Trooper” Pulga about the Morales hit. “I knew Lil Pee Wee was upset. I knew Lil Pee Wee had the power to have me killed over this. I wanted to know from people if Pee Wee wanted to have me killed.” Since Vidales had known the two Troopers since grade school, he knew they’d “be straight with me” and tell him if, in fact, he’d been greenlighted. Ramirez told Vidales that he hadn’t heard anything like that.

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Vidales said of the time after the killing: “My situation was uncomfortable so I took a Greyhound to my mother’s house in [another part of the state]. I was booked a few days later for drinking and driving. They booked me and then let me go.” Manzella’s final question was, “What was the length of hair of the people that were in the van that night?” Vidales said, “Criminal [Reyes] and Greedy [Ponce] had shaved heads. Caldera had short hair. I had a good head of hair. I didn’t shave my head much back then.” In a little over his two hours on the stand, Vidales confirmed everything that Jimmy Maxson and Debbie Ramos had testified to in this trial and the two previous ones. During the afternoon session, Chris Chaney was allowed to play the tape of Vidales’s statements to the LAPD. Before that, he walked Vidales through a number of incidents that cast little doubt on his testimony. Vidales admitted again to having worked for the Eme in County Jail. He also admitted to smuggling drugs into Jail and passing on greenlight lists. The drugs came into the jail through visits, through the “court line” when prisoners are sent to court, or through defense lawyers who smuggle the drugs in their unsearchable legal documents. “It’s not uncommon for the whole jail to know about greenlight lists,” Vidales said to Chaney. “When you get to jail, you get a list of rules and a greenlight list.” Chaney asked, “Do you remember the testimony of Drac [Maxson] and Trooper [Ramirez]?” Vidales said he did. Then Chaney asked, “Did the conversation between Randall Rodriguez, Gerardo Reyes and Trooper Ramirez ever take place?” Vidales said, “No.” While significant to court watchers, the last question was irrelevant to the jury. Gerry “Trooper” Ramirez hadn’t testified in this iteration of the trial and the jury had no knowledge of Ramirez’s testimony in the previous two trials. What was clear was that Gerry “Trooper” had apparently lied on the stand. Randy “Jo Jo” Rodriguez hadn’t tried to recruit Ramirez to kill Morales. Ramirez was most likely motivated to lie in order to get even with Randall Rodriguez for Rodriguez’s throwing him out of the Avenues and trying to kill him over the tax money Ramirez was holding back.

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After cross-examining Vidales, Chaney asked to play the videotape of Vidales being interviewed by the LAPD. After several attempts to get the audio portion of the tape to work, Fidler interrupted the proceedings and told Manzella to find a cleaner copy. There was so much crackle, hiss, and static that it was impossible to understand. Judge Fidler sent the jury home and ended the court day. The terrible tape quality and the ancient machine in the courtroom were indicative of the sad state of technology in the court system and law enforcement. It’s probably fair to say that the average American teenager has more advanced digital audio and video equipment in his bedroom than the average LAPD police station has. Northeast homicide detectives have been requesting digital cameras and equipment to download the images for years but have been regularly denied. The next day, before the jury came in, Manzella asked that Judge Fidler have Carlos Caldera removed from the room before testimony began. Caldera had been told to appear but his lawyer was late, something Judge Fidler found unacceptable. Referring to Caldera’s appointed lawyer, the no-nonsense Fidler said, “If he wants his bar ticket pulled, we can do that.” Chris Chaney again brought up the issue of Gerry “Trooper” Ramirez’s testimony in the previous trials. Manzella objected because Ramirez was not a witness in the present trial. He said, “Trooper gave us perjured testimony.” Then he added, a little testily, “I only object when I get really bored.” Judge Fidler, not amused, responded by asking Manzella, “Can we then expect objections on the grounds of boredom?” Chris Chaney stated to Judge Fidler that he might request official notice on the perjured testimony of Gerry Ramirez. Fidler said, “I won’t allow you to bring in testimony of something hanging out there. It’s not relevant in this case. I’ll only allow that argument if Mr. Ramirez is allowed to testify.” Ramirez was not going to testify, willingly or otherwise. By now, it was obvious that Ramirez had lied about Randall Rodriguez being part of the conspiracy to murder “Muppet” Morales. Chris Chaney was trying his mighty best to reanimate a dead horse. Once the jury was seated, Chaney handed each juror a transcript of the videotaped interview of Vidales by Detective James King.

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In Vidales’s first interview, he lied about the ruse used to lure Morales into the van. He said that he’d owed Morales $100 and that they got him in the van to go to Vidales’s house for the money. Vidales never mentioned Morales’s gun or that Ponce and Caldera were in the van. At this point this tape became so full of static and hiss that it was incomprehensible. Fidler stopped the tape and asked that somebody better find a cleaner copy. James King went to the LAPD’s evidence room to find the original. Fortunately, the evidence lockup is located downtown and King was back in less than an hour. To a jury who may have expected the sort of high-tech presentation of evidence they see on CSI, this situation must have been an eye-opener. In every major respect, except for the gun ruse and the presence of Ponce and Caldera, the information that Vidales gave James King was consistent with everything he’d said in his testimony on the stand. King asked Vidales a key question, whether Reyes had formulated the plan to kill Morales upon learning that Vidales was holding Morales’s gun. Vidales stated to King that the opportunity presented itself and that Reyes was clever enough to run with it. Vidales had lied about a few other things to King. He told King that he’d never been on Remstoy before. He also said that he didn’t know if anyone else was carrying a gun. On tape, Vidales continued to shed light on the background of the murder. He said that, “Javy [Marquez] knew he could get Criminal [Reyes] to do it without Criminal seeing any paperwork. That’s why Gangster [Marquez] went around Pee Wee and Richie and all them. Gangster’s specific orders were to give it to Criminal and Criminal would take care of it.” On the subject of Gerry “Trooper” Ramirez making up his story out of whole cloth, Vidales said, “I never talked to Trooper about anything about Muppet. Trooper got Point A and Point B and built his own bridge to get there.” On the subject of Randall “Jo Jo” Rodriguez being implicated in the murder, Vidales told King, “Jo Jo didn’t even know Gangster at the time. [Javy’s sister] was doing all the talking to Gangster at that time.” When the tape ended, Chris Chaney let the inconsistencies speak for themselves.

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On re-direct, Manzella focused on those inconsistencies and had Vidales explain why he’d lied and why he hadn’t mentioned Ponce and Caldera: “Why did you change your story about the money and the gun?” Vidales said, “I didn’t want to implicate myself anymore.” Then Manzella asked, “Had you ever told Mr. White the facts of the case? That you were the driver?” Vidales admitted, “No. I knew I was guilty but he didn’t know I was. I felt bad because he was putting up a good defense.” As to why he didn’t implicate Caldera, Vidales said, “I didn’t implicate Caldera because he could retaliate against my family. A lot of little homies would love to please him.” Vidales stated that, “State, County, and the street all have the greenlight lists. They call the rules and the lists the X-Files.” Manzella asked, “Are the Mexican Mafia’s rules more important than the rules the Sheriffs give you?” Vidales said, “Yes.” “Is that because the Sheriffs won’t kill you?” Vidales answered, “That’s right.” The next day, August 15, 2005, Carlos Caldera was called to the stand. His lawyer was present. He stated that on the advice of his lawyer, he’d refuse to answer any questions put to him. Judge Fidler excused him and he left the courtroom. At that point, Chris Chaney, who’d subpoenaed Marvin Ponce, from Pelican Bay stated that he wouldn’t be calling Ponce as a witness. At 9:40 AM, Manzella rested his case. It was up to Chaney to salvage whatever he could for his client. He had to portray Maxson and Vidales as liars, showing, among other things, that Ponce wasn’t in the van that night. He called Yadira Altamirano, Ponce’s one-time girlfriend, who testified that she’d seen Muppet on Drew Street the night of the murder and that she’d been with Ponce from 10:00 PM until after 2:00 AM, covering the time frame of the murder. Under cross-examination by Manzella, Altamirano admitted that she was an Avenues member and Ponce was her boyfriend at the time. She socialized on Drew Street almost every night but claimed that she’d never heard any rumors about why Muppet was killed or who’d killed him. When

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Manzella asked whether Ponce had told her to tell the police he’d been with her all night, she evaded the question by saying, “I didn’t know we were going to be questioned.” Chaney’s next witness was Janette Sukphranee, the close friend of Morales who’d driven him to Drew Street on the night he was killed. She stated that she’d dropped Morales off and later paged him six or seven times. She’d looked for him on Drew Street, where she saw Yadira Altamirano. Sukphranee gave Altamirano and two others a ride home. Chaney then had Gerry “Trooper” Ramirez brought from prison to testify. Manzella no longer believed anything Ramirez said about the Morales murder. Chaney, who in the two previous trials had had to portray Ramirez as a liar, now brought him in to testify for the defense. It was a pointless exercise; even were Ramirez perceived by the jury as a total liar, it didn’t diminish any of Vidales’s testimony. Ramirez still claimed that Reyes had pulled the trigger. If he was telling the truth, it did nothing more than implicate Randall Rodriguez. It still placed Reyes as the trigger man in the Morales killing. It was hard to tell where Chaney hoped to go with Ramirez’s testimony. In any event, soon after Ramirez took the stand, Judge Fidler interrupted the direct examination and asked Ramirez, “You realize you don’t have immunity from perjury?” Ramirez said he understood that. Then Fidler asked if he wanted to be represented by a lawyer. Ramirez said yes, and Judge Fidler halted the proceedings to arrange for Ramirez’s court-appointed attorney. When Ramirez took the stand again, he refused to answer any more questions. Chaney asked to read Ramirez’s testimony from the prior trial. Manzella had no objection. The entire exercise seemed pointless. Ramirez was at best a sideshow and there was nothing exculpatory in his testimony to put anyone else but Gerardo Reyes behind the gun that killed Morales. Ramirez had testified in the previous trial that Randall Rodriguez had asked him to take part in the killing of Morales but that he’d refused. But he said he’d been present when Rodriguez and Reyes recruited Vidales on Drew Street because Vidales owed them a favor. He further stated that Reyes had asked Morales for his gun before stepping out of the van to urinate because

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they were in enemy territory and he wanted protection. When they got out, Reyes shot Morales. After a very long reading of Ramirez’s testimony in the prior trial, Manzella read a statement from DDA Cynthia Rayvis who’d prosecuted Ramirez for the murder of Cesar Tolentino. Rayvis stated that the case against Ramirez and his co-defendants was not going well and she offered Ramirez a manslaughter deal. To clear up Altamirano and Sukphranee’s testimony, Manzella brought Vidales back and asked him what happened after the Morales shooting. Vidales said that he, Reyes, Caldera, and Ponce had gone back to Drew Street. Vidales asked Ponce to ask Janette to give him a ride back to El Sereno because Vidales didn’t know Janette. Janette then drove Yadira and Vidales back to El Sereno because they lived only a block away from each other. At 11:05 AM on August 16, 2005, the defense and prosecution rested. Final arguments began at 2:35 that afternoon. Manzella began his final argument with an appeal to the jury’s common sense. He told them that personal prejudice has to be left in parking lot but if something makes sense to them, they can take that into the jury room. He articulated the difference between first-degree and second-degree murder: Premeditation is present in the former but not the latter. In this case, there was premeditated intent and five circumstances to indicate it. One was the motive to silence a witness. The second was that the victim was taken to an isolated place. The third was that the victim was attacked with a firearm and not fists or sticks. The fourth was that the victim was shot six times. The fifth was that five of the gunshots were fatal by themselves. Then Manzella ran through the way the Mexican Mafia operates, and why it wasn’t unusual for a gang to kill its own on orders from the Mexican Mafia. He told the jury that Detective John Berdin had testified that Maxson had helped the LAPD solve five murders. The Morales murder was one of them. He said, “We approached Mike White and offered his client a deal. George Vidales is still guilty of murder. But he’s somewhat less culpable than Reyes and Marquez. We entered into the agreement for the greater good.”

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Manzella then went into the timeline of the Sanchez brothers’ murder, Morales informing about Marquez’s involvement in those murders, the appearance of Morales’s name in the discovery information given to Marquez’s lawyer, and Morales being executed two months later. On the subject of the red van, he told the jury to use common sense. Debbie Ramos saw a red van speed away from the murder scene. Jimmy Maxson saw the killers and the victim in a red van the night of the murder. Kilo Woman, Reyes’s girlfriend, told police that she owned a red van that Reyes was allowed to drive. Vidales testified that they used her red van the night of the murder. The next day, it was Chris Chaney’s job to make Manzella’s argument sound anything but reasonable. He asked why they were in a third trial on this murder, then answered his own question: “There is no physical evidence that ties Mr. Reyes to the crime. There are no prints, DNA, blood, clothing, shoeprints. There is none.” Chaney told the jury, “In trial number one, the prosecution brought you Maxson and Ramirez. In trial two, they presented you with Maxson and Ramirez. In trial three, they gave you Maxson and Vidales. If you don’t believe their word, you can’t convict.” Then he went to the major hurdle he had to overcome. “As dramatic as it seems to have a co-defendant suddenly become a witness in the middle of the third trial, when you look at the details, you come to a different evaluation. . . . Vidales sat for one and half hours and lied on tape to his lawyer, the DA, and two detectives. Maxson looked you in the eye and lied. Vidales can look at some people and lie.” In an interesting take on the events, Chaney posed a compelling question for the jury. “The DA didn’t put Ramirez on because he didn’t believe him. But you see how much work went into proving Trooper was a liar. What’s to say that in another trial sometime down the road, Chato Vidales will be proven a liar? You may then believe that someday someone will come in and call Chato a liar.” As to why Vidales decided to cooperate, Chaney reminded the jury that Vidales had messed up with the Eme and they were going to kill him. . . . “All

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that assaulting police, passing greenlights, collecting taxes. It seems that the worse you are, the more you have to bargain with.” Chaney tried to leave the impression that perhaps it was Vidales who’d shot Morales. “Vidales worked for Half Man. Then he worked for Alex. Lil Richie was Alex’s brother. And Lil Richie was a friend of Muppet’s. So Chato had every reason to be nervous about shooting Muppet.” Because the burden of proof is on the prosecution, the DA is permitted two final arguments. In his second, Manzella began with the fact that Ramirez had contradicted Maxson and Vidales only with regard to Randall Rodriguez. The shooter was Reyes in all their versions of events. He then covered the fact that the prosecution had no hold over Jimmy Maxson. Maxson’s parole officer had told him that he wouldn’t be violated for not testifying. And as to Vidales, he wouldn’t be sentenced until after testifying in this trial; he still had to testify in the trials of Marquez, Marvin Ponce, and Carlos Caldera. Manzella then addressed the issue of Vidales’s having lied in his first interview. Manzella told the jury, “In the second interview, he [Vidales] asked that his lawyer not be there. It would be easier for him to come clean” without White present. “Michael White knew his client was guilty. But you never suspected that. That’s how good a lawyer he is. Because White did such a good job crossing Maxson and because Vidales got in trouble with the Mexican Mafia, we decided to enter into an agreement with Mr. White and his client. Otherwise we would have turned him down.” In closing, Manzella reminded the jury of something he’d said in his opening statement about the source of information on gang and Mexican Mafia killings. “The impression is that a jury should never believe a witness that comes from the same background as the accused. At the top level of Avenues, there is no difference between the Mexican Mafia and the Avenues. The only people that know what’s going on at that level are the people in that group. They come from the same life as the people who commit the killings. They commit their crimes in front of people like them, not in front of priests, rabbis and ministers. The defense put on no evidence that

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this murder could have happened any other way. It’s time for his day of reckoning.” With that, Manzella thanked the jury, and Judge Fidler gave the jury its instructions. The jury’s deliberation took nine and a half hours. It was one of the shortest Manzella had ever experienced. On Monday, August 22, 2005, the jury found Gerardo Reyes guilty of first-degree murder, guilty of personal use of a firearm, and guilty of a witness killing. On September 16, Judge Fidler gave Reyes life without parole but didn’t add the ten years for personal use of a firearm, because it would have been like “putting salt in the wound.” Manzella wasn’t happy: “This is a guy who put five rounds into a sixteen-yearold kid’s head.” Manzella was reminded of a past trial in which he got a guilty verdict on a double homicide. The judge in that case gave the killer life without parole but Manzella asked that the judge give him two life sentences. The judge asked, “What’s the difference? He’ll never get out of prison.” Manzella told the judge, “Your honor, if there’s no difference, why don’t you just go ahead and give him the two life sentences?” Manzella’s logic was apparently inescapable and the judge gave the killer two life sentences. “Those were different times, though,” Manzella said a little ruefully after Reyes’ verdict. “The world has changed. People don’t understand what we do anymore.” Ruth Arvidson laughed and said, “The world hasn’t changed. They never understood what we do. You’re the one that’s gotten more conservative.”

“If they don’t fear you, they don’t listen to you.” — George Vidales

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he first day of Javier “Gangster” Marquez’s trial for the

murder of Randall Morales and Alan Downey coincided with the largest public demonstration in the history of the city of Los Angeles. Over half a million Hispanics, organized by International ANSWER, had taken to the streets to support unrestricted immigration. Downtown LA was closed to vehicular traffic and the streets, sidewalks, and parks became an ocean of humanity waving Mexican flags. The debate over illegal Mexican immigration had finally reached the boiling point. Over the following months, the US voted to appropriate money to begin building a wall along the Mexican border. Municipalities throughout 319

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the country passed laws limiting rentals to US citizens and legal residents, and denying welfare benefits to illegal immigrants. This was also the first day of Tony’s and Ruth’s last trial. Soon after the Reyes verdict, they decided to retire from prosecution and were assigned to work in the DA’s Training Division. Manzella’s new assignment was to show freshly hired DAs how to conduct criminal prosecutions and demonstrate the difference between the law as taught in school and the reality of big city crime fighting. He and Ruth had decamped from their monastic cell in the CCB to the Hall of Records, across the street, where the Training Division was headquartered. Shuttling their document cart from the Hall of Records to the CCB four times a day during the Marquez trial was going to be an enormous inconvenience, and their new office had no security facilities for witnesses. After numerous requests for a temporary office in the CCB, Manzella got fed up with waiting and approached the head of the DA’s Investigative Division. For the most part, DA investigators are retired police officers and Manzella had always gotten more cooperation from cops and Sheriffs than from people in his own line of work. Without any formality or delay, the head of the investigative branch said, “Whatever you need. You got it.” He gave Manzella the key to a huge office on the seventeenth floor. When Manzella and Ruth first stepped into the office, Manzella stretched out his arms and said, “Look, I can hold out my arms and not touch the walls.” Prior to the start of the trial, Jack Stone, one of Marquez’s defense attorneys, had subpoenaed Alex “Pee Wee” Aguirre, Albert “Boxer” Tolento, Alfred “Tigger” Salinas, and Big Rick “Psycho” Aguirre to appear in court. They were to testify for the defense. Manzella was only told in vague terms that these Carnales would testify to the fact that Marquez was not an Eme member or that they would dispute the testimony of Jimmy Maxson. This was clearly preposterous. No Eme member in good standing would ever claim that the Eme even existed let alone claim that he was a member and someone else was not. It was a fishing expedition of Moby-Dick proportions. This highly unusual step would also cause a huge security issue for the

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court and jail deputies. Alex Aguirre was housed at a Federal prison in Florence, Colorado, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons was not inclined to transport him to Los Angeles. It almost takes an act of Congress to get a Federal inmate of Aguirre’s status into a local court proceeding and the Federal authorities saw no benefit in his appearance, either to the prosecution or the defense. Assembling all these Eme members in one place was, according to Manzella, nothing more than a ploy for them to get a vacation close to home turf. He didn’t expect them to testify. He impressed upon CDC investigators the importance of keeping these members out of county jail. As a result, the CDC agreed to house them in its state prison in Lancaster, in the high desert seventy miles from downtown Los Angeles, and to transport them to court when necessary. Before the trial could begin, Jack Stone had some issues to iron out with the court. He made a motion to dismiss the penalty phase of the trial because jail deputies had searched Javy’s cell and thrown out a large number of court and legal documents as well as drawings that Marquez had made during his years in jail and audio recordings Marquez wanted to use in his defense. Stone wanted to use those drawings at the penalty phase to plead for a reduction from the death penalty to life. The drawings were to be used to demonstrate Javy’s talent and so to underscore his humanity. Unlike the defendants in the previous trials who sat passively, it was clear that Marquez was an active member of the defense team. He listened attentively to the proceedings, took copious notes, and was able to get his hands on the documents on the defense table quicker than Stone or Robert Schwartz, Stone’s co-counsel. Outside the presence of the jury, Manzella examined Javier Clift, a jail deputy who had searched Marquez’s cell. Clift stated that when he searched the cell, he found a 5.5-inch shank, various documents, and papers that contained the names, phone numbers, addresses, and social security numbers of several witnesses. Deputy Clift stated that this information is often used by inmates for identity theft or other purposes. Under cross-examination by Stone, Clift said he didn’t remember how

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many pages of documents were discarded, who swept the papers out of the cell, how many drawings were thrown out, or if there were police reports or court transcripts among the items removed. Stone asked Clift if Marquez had asked him anything and Clift said that Marquez had asked him to sign a note stating what had been taken. When Stone questioned Marquez, Marquez was polite and articulate. Stone asked Marquez where he’d been placed while the deputies searched his cell. Marquez stated that he’d been put in the shower for five hours. “They started throwing everything out on the tier and they swept it all away,” he said. Marquez further said that he’d had twenty-one audiotapes but had only been given six back. “I asked for a receipt. He told me I ain’t giving you shit and I got worse things to worry about.” Based on Marquez’s testimony, Stone made a motion to reduce the possible penalty from death to life without parole due to Marquez’s treatment. Manzella objected. He said that if the drawings were so important, they should have been placed in a safe location with the defense’s other important documents. He also went on to say that the driver’s license and social security numbers were those of deceased people. “The information could only be used for identity theft.” Manzella directed the last comment right at Marquez. Fidler chided Manzella. “Don’t address or threaten Mr. Marquez.” Pushing his luck with Fidler, Manzella said to the judge, “Look, he’s smiling.” Marquez said, “That’s because it’s funny.” Tony responded, “See, he thinks it’s funny.” Fidler said he would hold off on ruling on the motion until he consulted with the Sheriffs to see whether drawings were even allowed in jail. Stone then made another motion to exclude the chrono entry of Morales’s statement to the police about Marquez shooting the Sanchez brothers. His position was that Morales’s statement was pure hearsay and should not be admitted. Manzella responded, “The statement is not being introduced for the truth of the matter. But it’s the operative cause for the Morales killing. Even if the statement is false, it violates the Eme edict. This is the motive for the killing whether or not Morales believed it to be true.”

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Judge Fidler had no trouble ruling on this one. “This is the motive for the case,” Fidler told Stone. “You can’t leave it out. It makes no difference if it’s true or false. Other people will testify and you can argue the point to the jury. I’m going to deny a motion to exclude the Morales chrono entry.” Stone made yet another motion for the Eme members to be brought to County Jail. None had arrived and Stone wanted them there. Judge Fidler, well aware of the game, said, “Prison gang members are often brought to County for other reasons. They will be housed elsewhere and made available to you when you need them.” By 10:35 AM, they were ready for opening statements. Manzella began by giving the jury the background of the Morales killing, including Morales’s statement to an LAPD detective that he’d heard Marquez had killed the Sanchez brothers, Sergio and Herman. He explained that the statement had become part of the Sanchez murder book, but that Morales’s name hadn’t been blacked out in every instance. The murder book had been given to Marquez’s lawyer as part of the discovery process and it was the prosecution’s theory that Marquez had seen it and ordered Morales’s execution from jail. Manzella then told the jury he’d produce Jimmy Maxson, a confidential informant who had knowledge of Marquez’s involvement in the Morales murder, and George Vidales, who’d participated in the killing of Morales. On the murder of Alan Downey, Manzella told the jury he would produce Benny Garcia, who’d been ordered by Richie Aguirre to kill Downey. The next day, Stone began his opening statement, outlined his strategy, and articulated his opinion of confidential informants. “We intend to show that the motivation for the witnesses is enormous. Mr. Manzella made a statement that allegiance to the Mexican Mafia comes first above everything. My contention is that the primary allegiance is to themselves. They revert to what’s best for them.” Stone said, “Now Vidales is a known snitch. The penalty for that is death. But he would rather do that rather than face life in prison. The pressure to lie is stronger than anything else.” Regarding Maxson, he said, “Maxson was facing life in prison. To this date, he is still obligated to cooperate with

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the authorities. I’m trying to show you Maxson is a liar and he is lying in his testimony against Javy Marquez.” Stone also cast doubt on Daryl Takahasi’s identification of Javy Marquez as the driver of the car Takahashi saw at the Downey murder scene. At the end of Stone’s opening statement, Manzella called his first witness, Detective Mike Camacho, the investigating officer in the murder of the Sanchez brothers. Camacho stated that he’d interviewed Morales in custody and that Morales said he heard Javy talking about shooting five Highland Park gangsters. Morales also told Camacho that he’d “heard” Javy had shot and killed the Sanchez brothers. The tragic irony is that Morales’s statement would never have stood up in court because it was pure hearsay—but it was enough to have him targeted for death. The killing of the Sanchez brothers was, in fact, Mafia business; they were members of the Highland Park gang and it had been greenlighted for its refusal to pay taxes. Under cross-examination by Stone, Detective Camacho said that he’d talked to other Highland Park members who claimed Marquez had shot the Sanchez brothers. Camacho stated to the court that Morales had told him he wouldn’t testify and that Camacho had promised Morales his statement wouldn’t be put in writing. It was then that Morales had talked about Marquez shooting the Highland Park gangsters and about hearing of the Sanchez brothers’ murder. Manzella had a single question for Camacho after Stone was done. “You wrote down Morales’s statement anyway?” Camacho said yes. Manzella’s next witness was Detective Robert Lopez, who worked at Northeast at the time of the Morales murder. He was Manzella’s Avenues expert. Lopez stated that at the time of the Morales murder, Avenues had 600 to 700 members. He outlined the close association of Avenues with the Mexican Mafia, naming several members, and also explained some signifiers and symbols of each group. Manzella showed Lopez pictures of Javy Marquez’s tattoos. Lopez identified them to the jury as “Avenues, AVES, the skull and fedora logo, Drew Street, and AVES again on the left arm and forearm.” After Lopez finished his testimony, Manzella asked the court if he could

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play a tape of Marquez talking during a jail visit to a person identified only as Downer. Stone objected that Manzella could make the point merely by entering the transcript into evidence; there was no way to determine if Marquez was conducting gang business or Eme business from jail. Fidler said he’d allow the tape to be played, but would explain to the jury that Manzella’s contention that Eme business was being conducted on the tape was “only the opinion of the prosecution and is not offered for the truth of the matter.” Manzella felt it important for the jury to hear Marquez doing business from jail; what they’d hear was a complete lack of remorse. With Detective Rick Ortiz on the stand, Manzella played the tape. Marquez could be heard talking about collecting for the “homie,” referring to himself, and stating that if payment wasn’t made, the response should be to “smash ’em.” Ortiz was only asked if the voice he heard was Marquez’s. He said it was. Manzella’s next witness was LASD deputy Charles Warren, who’d taken pictures of Marquez’s tattoos in 2000 and 2004. In the 2000 picture, Marquez had a black hand tattooed on his left arm. In 2004, the black hand was filled in to form the letter G below it was tattooed “ster” to form “Gster,” an abbreviation of “Gangster,” his moniker. As the photos were shown, there was a heated discussion between Marquez and Stone. Manzella asked for a bench meeting to sort it out. Marquez asked to address the court. Although furious, he checked his temper and spoke to Fidler as respectfully as he could. “I didn’t know that Warren was going to testify. My lawyer didn’t tell me this,” Marquez told the court. Judge Fidler responded, “That’s the nature of a trial.” Stone admitted that he hadn’t told his client this might happen. “There was nothing we could offer in response to this. The tattoos are what they are,” Stone said. Looking thoroughly unhappy, Javy bent over his yellow legal pad and took more notes. The black hand, as the jury was told, is a symbol of the Mexican Mafia. It became clear during the trial that there had been dispute in the ranks of the Eme regarding Marquez’s status as a full-fledged member. Through jail investigators and other sources, Manzella had learned that at the time Marquez had been first inducted into the Eme, the Eme had “closed the books”

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on new membership. This happens periodically when the Eme needs to evaluate its current membership, clean house if necessary, and determine if new recruits possess the necessary qualities. Manzella had been told that a handful of brothers had told Marquez he’d been inducted. Marquez then gave himself a black hand tattoo, an official Eme symbol, but brothers in other prisons objected. There were rumors that Marquez had been greenlighted because he’d jumped the gun by calling himself a brother. Having learned of this, Marquez covered up the symbol and awaited a ruling. Rich Valdemar believed that a high-ranking Emero had been sent to County Jail to interview Marquez. Marquez presented himself well enough for his membership to be recognized officially. Manzella next brought Richard Valdemar to the witness stand. Valdemar gave the jury his background in the LASD, the Prison Gang Unit, and Operation Safe Jails, and stated that there were four major prison gangs in the CDC: the Mexican Mafia, Nuestra Familia, the Black Guerilla Family, and the Aryan Brotherhood. He noted that the Eme also goes by unofficial names like the Black Hand, La Mano Negra, the Clique, Los Carnales, and Big Homies. Manzella asked Valdemar why Hispanic street gangs obey the Eme even though it is primarily a prison gang. Valdemar explained that “the Eme controls the prisons and the [street] gangsters know that eventually they’ll end up in prison and be subject to sanctions and retribution if they don’t obey the Eme while they’re on the street.” Manzella showed Valdemar pictures of Marquez’s tattoos and asked him what opinion he formed about Marquez’s status in the Eme. Valdemar stated that Marquez’s SUR, 213, EME, and 13 tattoos indicated membership in the Eme. Manzella asked Valdemar if he’d heard the tape of Marquez talking to Downer. Valdemar said, “It sounds like he was taxing a drug dealer.” Under cross-examination by Stone, Valdemar was asked if Richie Aguirre was an Eme Lieutenant. He replied that the Eme had no such rank. Referring to the greenlight list Manzella had shown Valdemar, Stone asked whether

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its author was noted. Valdemar said that the lists were anonymous but were generated frequently, even several times a day. Stone asked, “So people just do what the note says without checking?” Valdemar smiled and said yes. Stone asked if it said anywhere on the list that Marquez had killed the Sanchez brothers. Valdemar responded it did not. “The Eme does not have to officially greenlight somebody,” Valdemar continued. “All they have to do is suggest it. They don’t even have to issue an order. If you don’t obey, you die.” With Valdemar’s cross-examination over, Manzella read the statement Judy Guttierez made to police after her boyfriend, Alan Downey, was killed. Guttierez had refused to testify; the only way for Manzella to get her story to the jury was to read it. According to Guttierez, Downey had helped repossess a Camry the day that he was killed. Then she and Downey had gone to a motel in Highland Park. At 1:30 AM, Downey left her to go to the 7-11 on Eagle Rock Boulevard. At 2:00 AM, he called and said he’d be back in five minutes. When he hadn’t returned by 3:00 AM, she called Ron Flores, the manager of the Big O Bar where Downey occasionally worked and sold drugs. Flores went looking for Downey and found him dead in the Camry on Eagle Rock Boulevard. Guttierez told detectives that she’d been afraid for Downey for some time because he worked for Alex Aguirre but wasn’t paying taxes. Guttierez quoted Downey saying, “Fuck that, I don’t pay taxes to anybody.” After court was done for that day, May 3, 2006, another riot broke out in the County Jail. Due to a previous riot, deputies had begun reassigning cells and moving some of the more troublesome ones to other facilities. The inmates were ordered by shotcallers to “gas” all the deputies—that is, to throw urine, feces, spit, and any other foul material they can get their hands on at deputies. Before the start of the court day on May 4, Manzella asked Judge Fidler to sign an extraction order for Richie Aguirre, who was housed at the Kern Valley prison. Aguirre had to be present because Benny Garcia was going to testify about comments Aguirre had made to him. Marquez had the right to have Aguirre deny that he’d made those comments. But Richie Aguirre

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didn’t want to leave Kern Valley. Fidler agreed to the extraction: “Happy to do it. I don’t believe in letting the inmates run the prison.” Manzella’s next witness was Gilbert Estrada, who’d employed Alan Downey as a repo man. Estrada testified that the day Downey was killed, he and Downey repossessed a Toyota Camry in Belaire. Estrada stated that he usually let Downey use the cars from a day to a week, depending on when they had to be turned over to the finance company. Under cross-examination by Jack Stone, Estrada said that he didn’t pay Downey and that he’d known Downey since childhood. Estrada also stated that Downey sold drugs out of his house and probably out of the Big O Bar. Estrada admitted that he’d told Downey to disconnect the odometers when using the cars. Stone asked, “Did Alan have any problems with anybody?” Estrada gave a non-answer: “No. He always had a pocketful of money.” Next up for Manzella was Starr Sachs, an LAPD firearms expert who’d analyzed the gun evidence in the Downey murder. She said that she’d received two projectiles recovered from Downey’s body and one from under the Camry’s driver’s seat. She identified the projectiles as .32 caliber Smith & Wesson Longs, typically fired from a revolver and not a semiautomatic pistol. Because the rounds were fired from a revolver and not a semiauto, the shell casings were retained in the cylinder of the gun and not ejected as they would be from a semiauto. Hence, no shell casings had been recovered at the scene. After Sachs was done, Manzella brought on Ruben Sanchez, an LAPD latent print expert. He testified that he’d found two usable fingerprints in the Camry, one on the front passenger window and another on the roof area, also on the passenger side. One print matched Richie Aguirre’s right index finger, the other his left pinky. After Sanchez’s brief testimony, Manzella brought on Ogbanna Chinwah, a medical examiner with the Coroner’s office. Chinwah testified that Downey died of three gunshot wounds to the head, each of which would have been fatal by itself. The first one entered the left side of the head just behind the left ear. That round had traveled from left to right, through the

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brain. The second round entered just below the first and came to rest under the scalp. The third entered below the left ear, traveled through the neck, and exited. Chinwah stated that a toxicology test found Methedrine and Pseudoephedrine in Downey’s system, but no trace of alcohol. To verify the chain of custody for the greenlight list he’d been using, Manzella brought on Sheriff’s Deputy Kirk Cardella. Cardella stated that he’d confiscated the list on February 2, 2000 from an inmate named Maximo Navarro. After consulting Marquez, Jack Stone decided not to cross-examine Cardella. It was obvious not only that Marquez was actively involved in his trial but also that Stone placed a lot of value on Marquez’s input. The next witness, Daryl Takahashi, was called to identify Marquez as the driver of a car at the scene of the Downey murder. Takahashi told the jury that in the early morning hours of August 14, 1995, he was driving north on Eagle Rock Boulevard to drop off a co-worker in Highland Park. He observed a car with its lights on crashed against a wall on the west side of the street. He mentioned the car to the two people he had in his vehicle and said that if the car was still there when they returned from dropping off his co-worker, they’d call the police. The vehicle was still there when they returned, and Takahashi stopped to investigate. He saw a dead male slumped across the front seats. He and his passenger drove across the boulevard to a pay phone to call the police. Takahashi then noticed a car driving southbound in the northbound lanes. It drove toward them and slowed to a crawl. As it came parallel to them, someone point a gun at Takahashi from the back seat. Takahashi also got what he believed to be a good look at the driver. At that point, a truck traveling northbound drove between Takahashi and the car. The car returned to the southbound lanes and drove off. Takahashi and his friend drove to a 7-11 to call the police and waited until they saw the police respond to the scene. Takahashi and his friend approached the police and told them about what they’d found in the Camry and that they’d been menaced by two people in a car. As they talked to the officer, Takahashi saw the same car drive north on Eagle Rock Boulevard

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and alerted the cop. The officer apparently disregarded the information and continued to secure the scene. Takahashi was later shown several six-packs and identified the driver of the car as Marquez. He stated that he hadn’t had a good look at the armed man in the backseat. Jack Stone, in close consultation with Marquez, spent the rest of the day picking apart Takahashi’s testimony. The main thrust of Stone’s cross-examination was that Takahashi hadn’t made his identification until October 10, 2005, two months after the event. Stone tried mightily to get Takahashi to doubt his identification but Takahashi, despite his mild manner and sometimes inaudible voice, basically said that he’d seen what he’d seen. In re-direct, Manzella asked only a few questions, the most important being: “When you identified the photo, was the face fresh in your memory?” Takahashi said yes. The next court day, Manzella was compelled to bring in Larry Droeger, the DA who’d given Marquez’s defense the Sanchez brothers’ murder book. They spent an inordinate amount of time trying to determine exactly when Droeger turned it over. According to Droeger’s memory of the process, the murder book had been turned over months before Morales’s murder. The problem was, Droeger hadn’t made a court appearance in the Sanchez case until after Morales was killed. Droeger hadn’t noted in any records the exact date he turned over the book. But the exact date was a crucial point for both the prosecution and the defense. If the defense could prove, or at least convince the jury, that Morales was killed before the murder book was given to Marquez’s attorney, the prosecution’s case would go out the window. The only part of Droeger’s testimony that the defense couldn’t cast doubt on was that Droeger remembered speaking to Marquez’s attorney about the Morales murder and that Droeger was absolutely certain that by the time of that conversation, the defense had been in possession of the murder book for months. In order to place Morales on Drew Street the night he was killed, Manzella called Janette Sukphranee, a friend of Morales. The night of his murder,

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Sukphranee had picked up Morales at his father’s house in Tujunga and taken him to Drew Street. Before leaving him, Sukphranee had agreed that Morales was to call her later and she’d pick him up. She stated that after dropping him off, she went back to her house in Glassell Park. At home, Sukphranee met Yadira Altamirano, who asked her for a ride to Drew Street. She obliged. Sukphranee repeatedly paged Morales throughout the night but he never responded. She went back to Drew Street and couldn’t find him. But she did run into Yadira and gave her and someone she didn’t know a ride to El Sereno. Then she drove home and went to sleep. At 3:00 AM she got a call from Morales’s older brother, who told her he’d been killed. At 6:00 AM she was visited by two detectives, Randy’s father, and Randy’s new stepmother. There wasn’t much point in a lot of cross-examination. She had no information that implicated Marquez, and he’d been in custody at the time, anyway. The proceedings were interrupted by a private meeting between the prosecution, the defense, Judge Fidler, and a jail gang investigator. Fidler and the defense had to be informed about rumors of a greenlight possibly involving Marquez. Manzella next called Detective James King, who testified that he’d tried to contact Diana Demetrio but that she’d been deported in 2004 and could no longer be located. King was later brought back to state that he’d been the investigating officer in this case and that he’d administered $8,700 to Jimmy Maxson for housing and expenses while testifying in the trials. Later in the day, Norm Kallen was called into the court and informed by Judge Fidler that Richie Aguirre refused to leave his cell in Kern Valley Prison. Kallen told Fidler that he didn’t know if he was still Richie Aguirre’s counsel. Fidler said rather curtly, “You are. I just appointed you. You may want to explain to him [Aguirre] that one way or another, he’s coming to court.” Manzella had to place Diana Demetrio’s red van at the crime scene, so he called Debbie Ramos, who’d seen the van fleeing the scene of the murder. The next court day, May 9, after ballistics evidence and the cause and manner of death of Randy Morales were introduced, Manzella told the

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court that the six Eme members that the defense had subpoenaed were on their way, but that there’d been problems. Alfred “Boxer” Tolento was discovered by a hand search to have a Lexan shank taped to his thigh. (Lexan is a tough, rigid plastic, as lethal as metal, that doesn’t set off metal detectors.) Another Eme member, Henry Carlos (reputedly the man who’d sponsored Marquez’s membership in the Eme), failed a metal detector test. Prison officials suspected that he had “keistered” a metal shank and needed X-rays to determine whether the shank was in Carlos’s colon. As a result, there would be a delay in getting these defense witnesses to County Jail. Incredible as it sounds, inmates do hide knives in their colons. They cover the knife with wet toilet paper, squeezing the paper around the knife to form a protective barrier. They let the toilet paper dry and then melt plastic from spoons, soda bottles, or toothbrush handles over the hardened toilet paper. Once there’s a solid plastic barrier over knife and paper, the assembly is covered with Vaseline or other lubricants and inserted into the colon. Experienced inmates can hide remarkably large knives. After being informed of the delay, Judge Fidler stated for the record, but outside the jury’s presence, that he’d had a hearing in his office the day before. Jail deputies had alerted Manzella to a possible greenlight on Marquez. Fidler said, “The possibility could be that he ordered a hit without permission. Or that he was a member without permission. If we have to delay to get these witnesses then that’s what has to happen. We’re aware that Mexican Mafia members are brought to County for a lot of reasons. Even if I have to order the LASD to get them, then I’ll do that.” At 3:08 PM on the afternoon of May 9, 2006, Manzella called George “Chato” Vidales, a crucial witness who could inflict severe damage on the defense. Like Marquez, Vidales was articulate, detached, and polite. Vidales began by giving some of his background in the gang world. Manzella probed Vidales on his criminal activities as a matter of strategy. He wanted Vidales to demonstrate to the jury that he was indeed an Avenues and Eme insider, and to reveal some of the workings of that that world.

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Vidales told the court that he’d been involved in two shootings. In the first, a carload of enemies had “hit up” Vidales and his Avenues homeboys with the usual challenge: “Where you from?” The rivals had pointed a gun at Vidales’s crew and he’d started firing. Vidales stated that he’d heard no on in the other car was hit. His second gunfight was under similar circumstances; no one had been injured in that exchange, either. When Manzella asked what other types of crimes Vidales had committed, Vidales said that he’d participated in home-invasion robberies of tax-resisting drug dealers. Vidales then related his association with the Eme through Alex “Pee Wee” Aguirre. He stated that while working as a dope runner for Richard “Half Man” Aguirre, he met Alex and started working for him on Eme business. He also knew Big Rick “Psycho” Aguirre, a cousin of Alex and Richie Aguirre. He said that when he started working for Alex, he became an Eme Camarada or Associate and sat in when Alex discussed Eme business. Although he helped others collect tax money, Vidales stated that he himself was not an official tax collector. Manzella referred Vidales to the Avenues organization chart and asked him whether it was accurate and whether he knew all the people listed therein. Vidales stated that he knew most of the people personally and that the chart was accurate. Manzella asked Vidales if he’d worked for the Eme in prison. He said he had: He’d made weapons, held weapons, and sold drugs. Manzella asked, “Was it required that you do this?” Vidales said yes. “Whatever wishes they had, we had to carry them out.” Manzella then asked if there were penalties for not following Eme orders. Vidales said, “Assault, all the way to a death sentence, depending on the situation.” Manzella steered him to the deal he’d made with the DA’s office. Vidales said that he’d done business for the Eme in County Jail before striking his deal with the DA; he’d stopped after making the deal. Manzella asked, “You did business for the Mexican Mafia while the charges were hanging over your head?” Vidales said, “Yes.” Vidales said it was normal to do that. Man-

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zella asked how he got to do business for the Eme. Vidales said, “There were Eme members in County Jail at the time and they were housed in Segregation. So Javy asked me to run the jail and filter the money up to them.” Manzella’s direct examination of Vidales carried over into the next day, May 10, 2006. There was a lot of information that Manzella needed to get on the record and Vidales was clearly a gold mine. One of the first questions Manzella asked was, “Did you receive permission to conduct Eme business in jail?” Vidales said yes. When Manzella asked who gave that permission, Vidales named Marquez. Vidales said, “Anyone with drugs in jail has to give one third of it to the Mexican Mafia. The Eme then sells it for a profit.” Vidales stated that there were three Eme members in County Jail at the time that he was working for them. They were Alfred “Tigger” Salinas from Avenues, a man named Chato from Maravilla, and Javy Marquez. This was the same Chato Sandoval who stabbed and killed Jimmy “Character” Palma, the gangster who shot Tito Aguirre, the Moreno family, and their young children. Vidales said that the three Eme members communicated with each other and with other inmates through word of mouth, third-party visits, calls to people on the street, and through kites, notes passed hand-to-hand through the jail. Money from drug deals was put into the Eme members’ bank accounts in the jail. “You can go to the cashier’s window and put money into somebody’s account,” Vidales explained. During the examination, Vidales went through a list of crimes and violations he’d committed at the Eme’s behest while in County Jail. In May 2002, Vidales and other Hispanics assaulted black inmates. In September, he blocked his cell and refused to come out. In January 2003, he threw an apple at a deputy. Vidales stated, “It was a group thing. All the Surenos got into it with the deputies.” Then, on April 9, 2003, Vidales was caught with cocaine. “This was Mexican Mafia business,” Vidales said. “I was selling dope for them.” When asked if he’d had any choice in these crimes, Vidales said, “It’s mandatory to participate when they issue an order to all the Surenos.” Man-

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zella asked him, “What’s the penalty for refusing an Eme order?” Vidales said, “Anything from an assault to death.” After Manzella had finished giving the jury Vidales’s bona fides as an Eme insider, he moved on to Vidales’s association with Gerardo Reyes. Vidales stated that he’d met Reyes on Drew Street, where Vidales used to hang out and sell drugs. Vidales knew that Reyes had a child with Javy Marquez’s sister and Reyes was considered Javy’s brother-in-law and one of his close associates. Manzella asked Vidales about the three previous trials. Vidales stated that the first two trials had ended in a hung jury but in the third one, Vidales had approached the DA to ask for a deal. Vidales stated that he’d initiated the contact because the Eme had greenlighted him. Manzella asked, “Who did you have a falling-out with?” Vidales named Michael “Mosca” Torres. The jury never received any background on Torres; it had no direct bearing on the trial. Torres’s history, however, illustrates what happens when gangsters try to usurp the Eme’s power. Torres was a validated member of the Eme, in charge of collecting in the West San Fernando Valley. Apparently, a local gangster decided to represent himself as an Eme member, collect taxes, and keep the money. This kind of move, similar but not identical to what Gerry “Trooper” Ramirez had done in Avenues, was a recipe for instant death. When Torres heard about this, he tracked down one of the pretender’s associates, kidnapped him, and forced him to reveal the pretender’s location. Torres and one of his gunmen took the kidnap victim to the apartment of the wannabe Eme member. When the bogus Eme member answered the door, Torres shot him and left him for dead, but he survived. Torres then took the kidnap victim out to the desert to kill him and dump the body. The plan went sideways, however: The kidnap victim managed to escape unharmed into the dark desert. When he reached civilization, the kidnap victim contacted the LAPD and spilled the entire story about his kidnapping and the attempted murder of the bogus Eme collector. Torres was charged with a variety of crimes and was awaiting trial in County Jail when George Vidales crossed his path.

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For reasons that have yet to become clear, Torres decided that he’d run the Eme’s business in County Jail and push Marquez aside. He began by eliminating Marquez’s soldiers; Vidales, Marquez’s point man on the tiers, became an expendable pawn in a deadly game between two Eme brothers. As Vidales explained to the court, “Mosca was looking for a reason to get rid of me. I smuggled some dope for him. He said I was short, that I was keeping some of it. I wasn’t keeping it. A friend told me that they were going to hit me. Mosca wanted $1,000. I didn’t have that kind of money.” Vidales went on to explain that the night he heard he would be killed, he contacted jail deputies and told them he wanted Protective Custody and to contact his lawyer about becoming an informant and a witness. Manzella then asked Vidales if he’d done any Eme or gang business after deciding to become a witness. Vidales flatly said, “No.” After going into Protective Custody and contacting Manzella, Vidales gave Detective James King an interview in which he implicated Reyes and himself in the murder of Randy Morales. But, as is typical of informers, he said that he hadn’t told the whole truth because he “was still having trouble fully cooperating.” Manzella asked, “Who did you leave out in the interview?” Vidales answered, “Carlos Caldera and Marvin Ponce.” When asked why, Vidales said, “I was worried about retaliation against my family. Caldera was still out on the street.” Ponce was already in state prison. Vidales told the jury that he’d finally come through with the full story in the third interview; his lawyer had told him to “come clean with everything.” Manzella then walked Vidales through his agreement with the DA’s office. Vidales had taken a guilty plea to second-degree murder in the Morales homicide in exchange for testifying against Reyes and Marquez; he’d further agreed to testify against Caldera and Ponce if those two were ever prosecuted for the murder. He’d also been sentenced to the mid-term of six years for the manslaughter charge. Then Manzella got to the heart of Vidales’s testimony, the night of the Morales murder. Vidales stated that there was a party on Chapman Avenue that night and that Chapman is one street over from Drew. Vidales stated that he got to the party at 8:00 PM and that Morales arrived between 8:30

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and 9:00 PM. Vidales was holding Morales’s .25 caliber semiautomatic pistol because he’d borrowed it from Morales. Vidales stated for the court that he’d needed the gun because he was living in El Sereno at the time and he was having trouble with the El Sereno Lowell Street gang. He then said that he’d been approached at the party by Carlos Caldera and Gerardo Reyes and that Caldera told Vidales he’d been told by Marquez that Morales was a rat. Caldera and Reyes then told Vidales they needed his help. Vidales explained to the court the pretense of driving Morales back to El Sereno in Diana Demetrio’s van to get the gun. At one point, Manzella asked Vidales, “When you said to Maxson you were going to check Muppet, you knew Muppet was going to be killed?” Vidales said, “Yes. I had already gone along with Carlos and Criminal [Reyes].” Vidales stated that he drove to Remstoy Street in El Sereno because he was familiar with the area: “It was a good place for Criminal to handle his business.” When they got to Remstoy, Vidales pulled the van over and told the rest that he had to urinate. Manzella asked, “Why did you do that?” Vidales answered, “So people would get out of the van. I went about twenty or thirty feet away. I did urinate. I saw Muppet either tying his shoes or fixing his pants. Then I saw Criminal approach Muppet real fast and then shoot him. Then he kept shooting him. Criminal stood over him and fired more shots into him.” Then Manzella asked what Carlos Caldera was doing at that time and Vidales said Carlos was behind Criminal with his gun out. He added, “Greedy [Ponce] never got out of the van.” Vidales went on to explain that Caldera’s role was to make sure that the job got done. “If you don’t perform,” Vidales stated in a flat, even delivery, “you fall out of grace. You’re not trustworthy and can be assaulted or even greenlighted for it.” After the shooting, they got back in the van and drove down Remstoy Street and negotiated the turn at the bottom of the hill. The sliding side door was open and as a result, the dome light inside the van stayed on, allowing witness Debbie Ramos to see inside the van as it passed her house. Vidales continued by saying that, “Carlos told me to stop so he could shut the door. We went three blocks to where I lived and Criminal [Reyes] threw

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the gun in a dumpster. Criminal had to use the bathroom because he had blood on him. Then we went back to Drew Street.” Vidales further confirmed that the day after the shooting, he spoke with Maxson at the park about the killing of Morales. “Little Pee Wee was upset,” Vidales said. “There was speculation he would have me killed. So I went to the Imperial Valley where my mother was living at the time.” With all the details of the murder delivered to the jury, Jack Stone began his cross-examination of Vidales. Throughout this process, Vidales never deviated from his businesslike delivery. Vidales stated that although he knew about Marquez while on the street, he hadn’t actually met him until 1999, in County Jail. Marquez was facing murder charges while Vidales was there on petty theft with priors. Vidales remained in County Jail for three months and then was sent to State prison. Vidales stated to Stone that he’d heard Marquez was a Mexican Mafia Carnal and that Marquez had thanked Vidales for helping Reyes get rid of Morales. Vidales stated that at the time he was using cocaine, methamphetamine, and marijuana. Stone asked, “Were you using heroin?” Vidales said no. Then Stone asked, “Did you sell heroin in jail?” Vidales said, “Yes, for the Eme and Javy.” Vidales stated that he’d never actually worked for Michael “Mosca” Torres. Torres just took over the jail and pushed the existing power structure aside and created his own. Stone asked Vidales how drugs were smuggled into the jail and Vidales answered, “It comes in by mail and through attorneys.” In answer to questions from Jack Stone, Vidales admitted that he’d committed robberies and assaults, but had never shot anybody. He also stated that in 1993, he was still a soldier and hadn’t become an Eme Associate until 1999 when he was sent to County Jail. Stone asked, “Do you have to do what the Eme tell you?” Vidales said, “Yes.” Stone continued, “Do you have to do what any gang member tells you?” Vidales said, “No. But everybody from Avenues is obligated in one way or another to the Mexican Mafia. Not every gang runs that way, but Avenues does. We have five members in the Mexican Mafia.” Stone then went into the two previous trials, which had ended with

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hung juries. Vidales admitted that had he been convicted, he might have been sentenced to life in prison without parole. Stone asked Vidales if he’d ever seen his name on a greenlight list. Vidales said, “No. I wasn’t worried about the list. Mosca was right there on the tier. I felt betrayed because of all the work I put in for them.” Stone then asked Vidales whether he was more afraid of Mosca than of law enforcement. Vidales stated flatly, “When you do what I’m doing, every little gang-banger in Southern California has you marked for death.” Stone asked Vidales, “Did Carlos Caldera ask you for a favor?” Vidales said, “Yes. Muppet was a rata. That was one of the rules. To help out the neighborhood. If you don’t do it, you lose the respect you got in the gang.” Stone asked, “So you wanted to do it?” Vidales said, “Yes.” Stone pressed on. “You knew from the start that you were going to kill Muppet?” Vidales stated flatly, “Yes.” Vidales could have answered quite honestly that he’d known he wasn’t being asked to pull the trigger on Morales. But he accepted the blame for it just as if he had pulled the trigger. When asked if he’d participated in the Morales murder to help Carlos Caldera, Vidales said, “No, not for him. For the cause.” He meant the neighborhood and the Eme. Stone’s tactic was to paint Vidales as a hard-core gangster to discredit his testimony against Marquez and show his “repentance” merely as a ploy to escape the penalty for the Morales murder. Stone asked, “You pretended to be a friend?” Vidales said yes. “You set a trap for him?” Again Vidales said yes. Stone asked, “Is this the way gangsters kill each other?” “Yeah,” Vidales said, “so they don’t see it coming.” When Stone asked Vidales if he intimidated people when he went with Alex, Vidales stated that, “If they don’t fear you, they don’t listen to you.” Stone asked how he and Alex did the enforcing. Vidales stated, “Home-invasion robberies to take money, drugs, and make them pay. If they didn’t pay, they would have to move.” Vidales further said that he didn’t have to beat anyone because “they cooperated.” On the subject of helping Jimmy Maxson collect, Vidales stated that he went with Maxson to make drug dealers “pay weekly, collect drug debts,

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and give them a safe haven from other dealers and gangs. It was easier for them to pay than get bothered. We protected them from other thieves.” When asked if he had the power to kill people, Vidales said, “No. I had to get permission. Killing somebody has to come from the Eme.” Vidales went on to say that he’d talked to Marquez while in County Jail from 2003 to 2004: “Javy told me to keep the drugs coming and to extort commissary items.” One exchange between Stone and Vidales didn’t turn out the way Stone had expected. Stone asked, “You said Javy Marquez thanked you for helping with the Morales murder?” “Yes,” Vidales answered, “in the visiting area of the County Jail. Where friends and family can visit.” “He thanked you for killing Morales,” Stone continued. Vidales said yes. “You testified in the last trial, but you never mentioned it before. Why?” Vidales stated honestly, “I was never asked.” Stone asked, “Why are you mentioning it now?” “You asked me,” Vidales said. Later in the cross-examination, Stone asked a question that illustrated how little even people close to this case understand criminal enterprises. He asked Vidales how he passed money to Torres after Torres took over the County Jail. “I gave it to a friend’s girlfriend and she put the money in his [Torres’s] books.” Then Stone asked a silly question: “Did you get receipts?” Vidales answered, “No, the Mexican Mafia doesn’t give you receipts.” At that, the jury—indeed, everyone except for the defense attorneys—burst into laughter. Marquez showed a thin smile and Judge Fidler tried his best to cover up a wry grin. Stone had gotten nowhere with Vidales. All his attempts to portray Vidales as a venal witness, testifying in order to save himself from a possible life sentence, only served to bolster the prosecution’s case that the Eme was a powerful force in the County Jail and on the streets and that anyone associated with it had to submit to its rules or be sanctioned. If Vidales was at all to be believed, he’d been a loyal soldier right up to the time he ran into Michael “Mosca” Torres. Vidales, with no power of his own, was caught in an Eme power play between Torres and Marquez. Marquez

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himself, at least from the Eme’s point of view, had been an outstanding soldier, Associate, and ultimately a solid Emero. Manzella only had to put on a very brief re-direct. He briefly covered Vidales’s failure to mention, in his first two interviews with Northeast detectives, that Carlos Caldera and Marvin Ponce had been in the van that night. Manzella asked why Vidales hadn’t told his lawyer he was involved in the Morales murder. Vidales said, “He never asked and I never volunteered. If I told him the truth, I was afraid he wouldn’t put on his best defense.” On the next court date, May 15, 2006, the wheels of justice ground to a halt. Manzella couldn’t put on his next witnesses, Jimmy Maxson and Benny Garcia, until Richie Aguirre was present and available to the defense to contradict Maxson’s and Garcia’s testimony. But Aguirre refused to leave his cell. Manzella told Fidler that Aguirre would not be in court for another three days. Fidler had as close to a meltdown as his temperament allowed. He said, “I checked the case law and there was no legal reason for the court to issue an extraction order. This was strictly a CYA move on the part of the CDC and the County Jail so if anything happened, they could put the blame on the court order. So now we’ve got a court that’s spending money to the tune of $10,000 per day because of some bureaucratic nonsense. If Richard Aguirre doesn’t arrive, I’ll order a writ. I can be a real hard-nose. That’s not the part of the body I was going to mention.” Judge Fidler explained to the jury that there would be a delay and that they should come back on the 18th. With the jury dismissed, Fidler took an in camera meeting with Marquez’s defense team and some jail deputies. The defense had subpoenaed County Jail officials to hand over some kites they’d intercepted. The defense’s contention was that the kites proved Marquez was not an Eme member and had not been conducting Eme business in jail. Since this was exculpatory evidence crucial to the defense, Fidler asked to see the kites and interview the jail deputies. Manzella hadn’t seen these kites but had learned that they weren’t of much value to the defense.

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During the meeting, Fidler came out and called to Manzella, “Mr. Manzella, I need to see you.” Ever the wise guy, Manzella said, “It wasn’t me your honor. It was Ruth’s fault.” After the meeting, Fidler addressed the defense on the record. “What is the defense’s position on Mr. Marquez being a member of the Mexican Mafia?” Interestingly, Jack Stone declined to be nailed down on this issue. He said, “We’re reluctant to state because that may change.” Fidler then said, “The documents have been supplied, but they’re not relevant and I’m sealing them.” Judge Fidler felt that the kites contained nothing strong enough for the defense to claim Marquez’s membership or non-membership in the Eme. What was most puzzling, however, was the defense’s position, or lack thereof, on Marquez’s membership. The question hung in the air. Could the defense find some sort of exculpatory angle in Marquez’s actually admitting he was a member? The problem was that if Marquez even hinted on the record that the Eme even existed and that he was connected to it, it would mark him for death. On May 18, Richard “Lil Pee Wee” Aguirre appeared in court. His time on the stand was brief and only helped the prosecution. He refused to answer any questions and took the Fifth Amendment numerous times. When it was clear that his presence would contribute nothing, he was excused. The court day came to a halt when Jimmy Maxson failed to appear. There were a few moments of panic when Manzella and the detectives couldn’t reach him by phone; Manzella worried that someone had found him and killed him. As it turned out, Maxson had never got the message to appear in court and had been at work that day. Maxson’s appearance on the next court date was for the most part a replay of his previous time on the stand. This time, he was calmer and didn’t jump to answer before the question was finished. Manzella walked the jury through Maxson’s criminal history and his association with the Avenues, the Mexican Mafia, Richard Aguirre, and Javy Marquez. Jack Stone asked Maxson if he’d used drugs on the day he was supposed

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to appear in court. Maxson said that he’d been at work and hadn’t got the message to appear. “You were at work?” Stone asked, incredulous. “Yes, you can check,” Maxson said. Stone said, “We will.” Stone asked Maxson how many people on the Avenues organization chart he didn’t know. Maxson said there were only three that he didn’t know personally. Then Stone asked Maxson how many tattoos he had, to which Maxson answered, “Zero.” Stone asked how many on that chart had no tattoos. Maxson stated that “Psycho” Aguirre, the Caldera brothers, and Amador “Pelon” Reyes had none. Stone covered the same ground that Manzella had, about Maxson’s tax collection and enforcement, home-invasion robberies against tax-resisting dealers, and carjacking. When Stone had exhausted that line of questioning, he moved on to Maxson’s statement under direct that Reyes told Maxson that Morales had been killed because he was a rat. Stone asked, “Was there any other reason Muppet might have been killed?” Maxson answered, “I heard that it might have been over Trippy being shot and killed.” After some questions regarding Maxson’s drug use after he’d been released from Federal custody, Stone asked, “After Alex went to jail, did Richie become a shotcaller?” Maxson said, “Yes, Richie, and Randy Jo Jo.” Stone asked, “He was fourteen at the time?” Maxson said, “Yes, he was younger than that when he started.” Stone asked, “Didn’t he [Richie Aguirre] claim to have authority that he didn’t really have?” Maxson responded, “He used his brother’s name and he had that clout.” As was the case with Vidales, Stone didn’t get far with Maxson. Maxson was more deliberate in his answers than he’d been in previous trials; nothing rattled him. Manzella went in with a very brief redirect. To make the point that even Stone could make mistakes, he asked Maxson, “Did you agree that there were thirty-six names on that chart?” Maxson said he did. “There are actually thirty-nine names on that chart. Were you lying?” Maxson said, “No.” When Maxson walked out of the courtroom, he had fulfilled the last of

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his obligations to testify. His career as a confidential informant was over. In the coming months, he’d be given full custody of his son, move out of the state, and throw himself into earning an honest living. Manzella’s next witness, Benny Garcia, would provide further testimony, but nothing as compelling as Vidales’s. Garcia would address the circumstances leading up to the murder of Alan Downey. Garcia began by stating his history with the Avenues gang. At one point, his family’s house was shot up so many times by rival gangs that they decided to move. By the time Benny was thirteen, he carried a gun almost every day. Manzella asked him, “Did you want to kill them [rival gangs]?” Garcia said yes; he “wanted them to feel what he felt.” When asked how many shootings he’d been involved in, Garcia said, “A lot.” He described that one day he was driving by a group of Cypress Park gangsters and out of defiance, he threw them the Avenues hand sign. They chased him, blocked him in with three cars, and shot him. He was hit in the hand. When Manzella asked why, unarmed and outnumbered, he’d thrown the sign, he said, “We were knuckleheads. It was a crazy feeling. It was a rush. You were always, always, always supposed to support your neighborhood.” In 1986, Garcia and some of his Avenues homies robbed Oliver’s Chicken in Highland Park. Garcia was quickly arrested and sent to youth camp for a year. After Garcia’s release, he was approached by Alfred “Tigger” Salinas and asked if he wanted to kill people for the Mexican Mafia for $500 per week. Garcia turned it down; he already made more than that as a mechanic. “I told him [Salinas] that I loved my neighborhood. If I shot people it would be on my own terms not because somebody told me to. Bala told Trigger [two Avenues members] that I would always be available. Bala was Eme at the time and he spoke to Trigger about me.” Sometime later, Garcia said he was approached by Alex Aguirre. Garcia knew Aguirre was an Eme member. “It’s a small neighborhood,” he said. “Everybody knew he was Mexican Mafia. I knew his dad and Little Richie. Alex wanted me to tax all the Border Brothers on Drew Street. He wanted me to tell them they had to start paying taxes.”

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Garcia accepted Alex’s offer. “I went to Joe Pipas and we went to Pee Wee’s house. He wanted to tax everyone on Drew Street. I was using coke at the time and I was the puppet for Alex and Half Man [Richard Aguirre, Alex and Richie’s father]. Alex wanted me to tax Glendale and Burbank too.” While Garcia was in County Jail on robbery charges, he found out that Alex Aguirre had greenlighted him over Garcia failing to return his father’s car to him on time. Garcia had given the car to someone else to return but that person kept the car overnight. Sheriffs in County knew that Garcia had been greenlighted, so they wanted to put him in Protective Custody. Garcia refused it. “Alex did a coward move. He should have dealt with me on the street. When I got out [of County Jail], I went to Alex’s house and confronted him. Alex took the greenlight off me and said it was a big misunderstanding. Then Alex asked me to work for him. This was in 1992.” Misunderstanding or not, Garcia had clearly been in great jeopardy while in County Jail. At one point, he intervened in getting the Vineland gang off the greenlight list, because Garcia had a lot of drug connections there and Alex wanted to tap into them. Garcia stated that during his time in County Jail, he received a kite ordering Surenos to attack blacks and to collect cell taxes and drug money and send it to the Eme brothers on the list. Garcia doubted the kite so he called Alex’s house to see if it was legitimate. He spoke to Lil Richie and Richie said he would ask Alex about it and that Garcia should call back. When Garcia called back a few days later, Richie told Garcia that Alex had said the kite was legitimate and that Garcia should act on it. Garcia collected the tax money and sent it to a gangster named Pony Boy from Pacoima. He also attacked a black inmate, though he was never charged because there were no witnesses and no physical evidence. While in County, Garcia asked Pony Boy if the money that he was collecting was making it to the Eme. Pony Boy never responded. Garcia asked the “tier rep,” the Mexican Mafia Associate appointed to regulate the tier, if the kite was legitimate. The tier reps have the “keys” to the tier and relay Eme instructions to the inmates. After asking higher authorities, the tier rep said that it was a bogus kite and hadn’t come from the ultimate source.

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On Garcia’s release, Alex confirmed to him that Lil Richie had no right to involve himself in what was clearly Eme business. It was at that point that Alex took the greenlight off Garcia and asked Garcia to work for him, because, Garcia said, “I didn’t rat Richie out to the Mexican Mafia. Richie could have gotten in trouble for getting involved in Eme business.” After Garcia agreed to work for Alex, Alex introduced him to Alan Downey, another of Alex’s dope dealers and tax collectors. Garcia, through his connections with some Border Brothers, was able to buy drugs in larger volumes. Garcia would sell the dope to Downey at the same price he’d paid for it because Garcia felt it wasn’t right for Alex to tax him. In lieu of an outright tax, Garcia agreed to sell Alex dope at Garcia’s buying price. Downey sold dope out of the Big O Bar. The bar’s owner paid Alex a weekly tribute to “keep the peace” and allow Downey to use the bar as a base of operations. Garcia was also given Burbank, Vineland, and Glendale as his drug sales area. To get the business running, he hired Clinton Conroy, David Deloza, and Tonito Medina as his delivery crew. Manzella asked Garcia if he’d ever worked for Lil Richie Aguirre. Garcia said, “Little Pee Wee was an obnoxious little kid. After Alex got locked up, Richie started acting like a Carnal, throwing his brother’s weight around. We bumped heads a lot.” After Alex was arrested on Federal charges, Richie Aguirre began squeezing Garcia and the other dealers for more money. Richie told Garcia that Garcia was charging Downey too much for his dope, that he should lower his prices because there wasn’t enough profit coming back to Richie to kick up to Alex. Garcia knew that he was charging Downey the same as he always had. So he went to Downey to see if Downey was keeping too much of the cut. Downey told Garcia that he was still giving Richie his cut and that Richie was either smoking up the profits or keeping too much for himself and shortchanging Alex. Garcia then went back to Richie and told him that he wanted to check with Richie’s mother to make sure that Alex was getting what he was supposed to from Richie. At that point, Richie pulled a gun on

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Garcia and threatened to kill him. Garcia rushed Richie and took the gun away. Vince Caldera, Carlos Caldera’s brother, was there at the time and he rushed Garcia and stabbed him in the face. When it looked like there was going to be bloodshed, Richie said they should stop fighting and instead kill Alan Downey because he was the source of the problems. Garcia knew that Downey wasn’t the problem, that Richie had failed as a manager. Richie ordered Garcia to kill Downey, but Garcia refused, saying that Downey was worth more to him alive than dead. A few weeks after that incident, Garcia found out that Downey had been killed and that Garcia had once again been greenlighted by Alex. In 1996, Garcia was arrested and prosecuted for robbery and kidnapping. Garcia explained it to the jury: “These Burbank and Elmwood gangsters robbed my house. So I dragged them out of their house. I went and investigated and I wasn’t very nice about it. I took them for a ride. I asked them who sent them and where my stuff was. One of them got beat up and the other said I stabbed him. But I didn’t stab him. I hit him with the back of the knife. I got most of my stuff back. I was trying to start an auto repair business and get out of all this bullshit, but they took all my stuff. I took a deal for six years. I pleaded no contest. I was sentenced in 1997. By then I had spent seventeen months in County Jail before sentencing.” When he was paroled in 2001, Garcia said, “I changed my life.” He stopped selling drugs and ended his criminal career. In 2001, he was interviewed by Detectives Teague and King but refused to talk. His parole officer, however, said that if he didn’t talk to the detectives he’d violate Garcia and send him back to jail. Garcia also told the jury that he’d testified in the trials of Anthony Medina and Richie Aguirre. With that, Manzella ended his direct examination of Benny Garcia. Robert Schwartz, Marquez’s other defense attorney, took over the cross-examination. Schwartz asked Garcia whether Richie was keeping tax money that should have gone to the Eme and Garcia said yes. Schwartz asked, “Was

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little Richie out of control?” Garcia said, “Yes, he was taking shit from everybody. A gun, use of a car, drugs, whatever it was.” Schwartz asked, “Was there chaos in Avenues because of him?” Garcia said yes. Soon after the exchange, Garcia let out a big yawn. Schwartz asked, “You want some coffee or something?” Garcia, laughing, said, “You got some, I’d love it.” Like Maxson, Garcia was coming to the end of his obligations. He knew that once he’d weathered this cross-examination, he’d never again have to step into the CCB. Schwartz asked, “Did anyone try to kill you?” Smiling, Garcia said, “Yes, a couple of times in module 600 in Supermax. They moved me in there.” According to Garcia, the would-be assassins were a gangster from Elmwood named Downer and another person he couldn’t remember. Schwartz got his timeline and greenlights on Garcia mixed up and Garcia had to correct him. “The second time I was greenlighted I was with Javy in 1700 or 1750 [the High Power module in County Jail]. I talked to Javy about my greenlight and Javy said I should talk to Richie about it.” Schwartz then asked how Garcia knew about his greenlight. “I was in court line in Burbank. A homie told me I was going to get hit. A deputy overheard this and they sent me to County. Once there, I told them that I would not lock it up [enter Protective Custody]. So because of that, they sent me to Supermax. That’s when the Elmwood guy tried to kill me. After Supermax, they just put me in PC even though I hadn’t debriefed.” On the subject of collecting taxes and commissary items in jail, Schwartz asked incredulously, “Are you saying the only way to get toilet paper and extra food was to buy it from an inmate?” Garcia stated honestly, “Yes.” Schwartz refused to accept this. “Are you saying that at this day and age, County officials are allowing this to happen?” Garcia threw it right back at him. “I suggest you don’t ask me. You go down to County and find out for yourself.” One of the deputies sitting in the back row nodded and whispered to a court observer, “That’s absolutely true.” On the subject of Garcia attacking a black inmate with a broken broomstick, Schwartz asked, “Did he bleed?” “I don’t know,” Garcia said. “I hit him

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and took off. I wasn’t going to stick around and ask, ‘Hey, are you okay?’ I booked him and ran.” Schwartz couldn’t rattle Garcia and Garcia was becoming visibly bored with the questioning. Schwartz changed the subject and asked whether drugs were stolen from his garage when gangsters burgled his tools. Garcia said, “No. They took wrenches, diagnostic equipment, a snake, my neighbor’s little motorcycle, everything in there.” Then, condescendingly, he asked Schwartz, “You know what a snake is, right?” The defense attorney said he did. Schwartz changed the subject again. “Why would Richie ask you to kill Downey?” Garcia went into a detailed explanation. “Because I was in control of all the dope. If I killed Downey, Richie’s got control of me and the dope. I was selling dope to Alan for the same price I bought in order not to pay Alex his taxes. But Richie wanted more and more and more. Richie lied when he said I was selling dope to Alan at two or three times the price I was actually selling it to him for.” Schwartz went back into the number of greenlights Garcia thought he’d received when dealing with Richie and Alex. Garcia was tired of the same questions. “I got another for being here. I must have a thousand greenlights on me by now. Kill him on sight. The fact is, I’m a wanted man. For whatever reason, I’m a wanted man many times over.” Schwartz’s last question was “How many people have you killed?” Garcia said, “I don’t know. I hope I haven’t killed anybody. We don’t stick around to find out if you killed anybody. I know I shot people and they fell but I didn’t stick around to find out if they died.” Seeing no need for it, Manzella didn’t go for a re-direct on Garcia. The defense got nothing out of him that he hadn’t admitted in direct examination. Moreover, he’d given the jury plenty to consider. After Detective James King appeared briefly to testify that the amount of money paid to Jimmy Maxson was half of the $14,000 the defense claimed had been given him, Manzella rested his case. He was done with his final witness.

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There was an eight-day break for the Memorial Day weekend and for other court matters. The defense didn’t put on their first witnesses until May 31, 2006. For the first time since the start of the trial, all observers had to check in with the deputies working the metal detector on the ninth floor, surrender their driver’s licenses, and obtain a pass to enter Judge Fidler’s courtroom. There were six deputies in the court and two more in the hall. Two of the six in the court wore ballistic vests outside their fatigue shirts. They were clearly in a sour mood. It was obvious that some high-powered Emeros were expected and the Sheriffs were taking every precaution. With all the parties present but without the jury, Judge Fidler took the bench and made an announcement. “The defense witnesses are here but the two witnesses are on morning and afternoon medication. They have to be taken back to the jail to receive their medication so they’re only available to us in the morning. The Sheriff’s transportation can’t take them back and forth twice in one day. The Sheriffs also tell me that they can only handle two of these witnesses at a time. Four is impossible for security reasons. So I have some serious concerns.” Essentially, the system was so gummed up with procedures that getting Stone’s two Eme witnesses on the stand would take extensive logistical coordination. The names of the witnesses were never mentioned. Stone wanted his Eme witnesses to be held in County Jail until the afternoon because his first two witnesses—who were not the Eme members—had a limited window of availability and couldn’t appear in the afternoon. Fidler stated it would be impossible. Manzella stated to Fidler that if the Eme members took the stand, he’d probe their criminal histories and their membership in the Eme. Manzella reminded Fidler that, as a result, they’d need attorneys. Fidler fixed Manzella with a cool stare and said, “Thank you for making me aware of that. I’ll take care of it.” Due to the scheduling problems, Judge Fidler decided to send the Emeros back to prison and return them to the court the next day. The defense’s first witness would testify to the near impossibility of

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what’s known as trans-ethnic identification. The defense’s contention is that it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, for a member of one ethnic group to make a positive facial identification of a person from another ethnic or racial group. The goal here was to discredit the testimony of Daryl Takahashi, an Asian, who’d identified Marquez as the man driving the car he saw the night of the Downey murder. Manzella made a motion to exclude the defense’s expert witness in this area. Fidler asked for the defense position on this topic. Schwartz stated that the matter of racial identification was a valid field of study and a subspecialty of the general field of psychology. Manzella rebutted that experiments conducted with students on college campuses were not reliable and that newspaper articles were not considered valid research. Fidler said, “Psychologists in this field have been allowed to testify on these matters, but frankly, in my opinion, thus far they have been underwhelming. But the prosecution certainly has experts available to them that can testify to the contrary. Mr. Manzella can also cross-examine and rebut as he sees fit and can make an argument in the closing statements.” This amounted to a denial of Manzella’s motion to exclude the expert witness. Once that issue was settled, Jack Stone stated the defense’s position that Marquez was not and had never been a member of the Eme. He then asked for the kites Judge Fidler had reviewed and sealed the previous week to be entered into evidence. Fidler denied the motion, stating that there was nothing in the kites to indicate that he was “a member, a wannabe, or a hanger-on.” With those issues addressed, Jack Stone put on Robert William Schomer, his expert witness on cross-racial identification. Before getting to Takahashi’s identification of Javy Marquez, Schomer stated his credentials. He was a Harvard graduate and a specialist in Experimental Social Psychology. He’d done work for the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Health and had started the experimental lab at Claremont College. Schomer stated that he was not in court to testify on the accuracy of Takahashi’s identification, only on “factors that affect eyewitness identifi-

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cation.” He stated that there was a large body of research on the subject of eyewitness IDs and that there is no debate on the findings of that research. Schomer was shown the six-pack that Takahashi had used to identify Marquez. He stated that the better way to make an ID was to show the witness one photo at a time rather than six simultaneously. His contention was that when a witness is shown a six-pack, he goes “comparison shopping” by finding a person that looks most like the person he saw. Schomer’s research, he claimed, proved that the use of this method made it possible, but highly unlikely, for a witness to make a correct identification. Schomer further stated that investigating officers often steer a witness in the desired direction with non-verbal cues. When Stone asked him if that happened in this case, Schomer said that it was possible. He went on to say that time is the enemy of accuracy. His research indicated that as more time passes between an incident and an identification, the accuracy gets progressively worse. Schomer said that stress—like the stress of having a gun pointed at you, as in Takahashi’s case—could contribute to an inaccurate identification. (Interestingly, in German courts, stress is believed to enhance accuracy in an identification.) The heart of Schomer’s testimony came when Stone asked him about cross-racial identification. Schomer stated, “The issue is appearance. Young people cannot identify older people well. And vice versa. A black person will be more accurate identifying a black person. Same with white people making identifications. This is normal and has nothing to do with racism. Group memory is not racist.” After an extensive direct examination, Manzella aggressively cross-examined Schomer. Schomer admitted that of the thousands and thousands of crime victims, only a few hundred have ever been interviewed. After a series of pointed questions about the subjects of the experiments Schomer had conducted, Manzella asked point-blank, “So this could all be hogwash?” Schomer, remaining cool at having his life’s work belittled, answered, “You could come to that conclusion, but a reasonable person would come to a different conclusion.”

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Manzella left the jury with this question. “Is it possible that Daryl Takahashi could be stone-cold accurate?” Schomer said, “Yes, anything is possible.” Manzella bored in and asked, “And that Javy Marquez could be stone-cold guilty of murder?” Schomer again stated, “Anything is possible.” After finishing with Schomer, the defense brought in Yadira Altamirano, the former girlfriend of Marvin Ponce. George Vidales had testified that Ponce was in the van at the time Morales was killed. Altamirano testified under direct examination that Ponce had been with her all that night at his apartment. By putting Altamirano on, the defense hoped to make Vidales out to be a liar. Under cross-examination, Alatamirano admitted to being an Avenues member; she socialized on Drew Street or somewhere in Avenues territory almost every night. When he asked if the death of Randy Morales “ever came up in conversation among Avenues members,” she responded, “I don’t remember.” She also didn’t remember when or how she’d learned of Morales’s death. Manzella then asked her whether Morales’s death was a big deal among Avenues members. She said that it was. The last question Manzella asked was, “Did Ponce ever tell you to tell the police that he was with you all night?” She said, “He never said that.” The next court date, June 1, 2006, should have been the day of the subpoenaed Eme members’ testimony. The security was the highest anyone had seen in the CCB in a very long time. No one, in fact, could remember any single trial in which thirteen armed and vested deputies were present. Manzella and Ruth Arvidson both wore their official DA identification tags just to get into the courtroom. Spectators were briefly interviewed and were made to surrender their driver’s licenses before being let in. There were eleven officers in the courtroom proper and two standing guard outside the door. One deputy was overheard saying to another that the Emeros brought down from prison were angry because they were housed in Lancaster and not County Jail. They’d also been denied phone and visiting privileges while in Lancaster and were apparently surly and uncooperative with the Correction Officers and the Sheriff’s deputies.

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Prior to the start of testimony and outside the presence of Judge Fidler and the jury, Jack Stone asked Manzella if he was responsible for denying the Emeros phone and visiting privileges. Manzella said, “I wish I had that kind of power but I had nothing to do with it. That was the CDC’s decision.” According to the defense plan, one of the Eme witnesses was going to testify that that Vidales didn’t even know Marquez. The other was to testify that Marquez was not a member of the Eme and had never been one. This was extremely unlikely. No Mexican Mafia member in good standing would ever admit that the organization exists, much less admit to being part of it or testifying that an individual was or wasn’t a member. At a few minutes after 10:00 AM, the two defense attorneys emerged from the lockup area and told Judge Fidler that the Eme witnesses would not be called and that the defense wished to rest its case. This came as a surprise to no one in the room. The entire episode of bringing Eme members down to County from State Prison was nothing but a farce. Manzella couldn’t help from commenting. “I’m disappointed,” he said. “You put us through all this trouble getting these deputies from Central Casting and now nothing.” In response, Judge Fidler said to Manzella, “I see Mr. Manzella is wearing his identification.” Manzella responded, “Not all these deputies know me, your honor. I’m wearing it in case the shooting starts.” Fidler responded in kind. “I thought it was your job to take the first bullet.” When Judge Fidler took the bench, Jack Stone announced, “We’re prepared to rest, your honor. But we want to call one more witness.” Fidler asked, “Does Mr. Marquez know who it is?” Stone said it was Annette Russo, Vidales’s ex-girlfriend. He didn’t explain what the content of her testimony would be. With that, Judge Fidler ordered the Eme witnesses back to Lancaster prison. Stone asked Fidler if the witnesses could be allowed to remain in County Jail until the penalty phase. Fidler sternly told him that the witnesses would be made available to the defense whenever necessary, but that they were going to Lancaster and that was that.

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With the refusal of the Eme members to testify, all thirteen deputies made a rapid exit. On June 8, 2006, Manzella made the final argument of his career as a prosecutor. Both sides were extremely aggressive in addressing the jury; the jurors sat spellbound as the prosecution and defense covered all the evidence or lack of it from the defense point of view. At the end of the day, the jury was given the case for their deliberation. On June 13, 2006, the jury returned with guilty verdicts. They found Javy Marquez guilty on two counts of first-degree murder, and added the special circumstance of a witness killing and an additional special circumstance of multiple murders. It was now entirely possible that Marquez would be sentenced to death. On July 6th, after deliberating for one hour and fifty minutes, the jury recommended a sentence of life without parole for Marquez. Manzella suspected that the jury was unanimously in favor of a guilty verdict but split on the death sentence. Tony Manzella ended his career with a huge win. It was the biggest Mexican Mafia trial ever prosecuted by the DA’s office and it sealed his legacy as a bulldog. Soon after, he became a highly courted speaker for police and prosecutor seminars all over California. Wherever Manzella speaks, Ruth Arvidson goes with him to organize and type his notes and prepare the visual exhibits. They remain a team even in retirement.

=\ = = \ = = \ = = \ = = \ =

e pil o gu e

B

y early 2007, the city of Los Angeles apparently had

had enough of its gang problem. In January, Constance Rice, a lawyer and head of The Advancement Project, presented the LA City Council with a nine-inch-thick study of the gang situation in the city and made a hundred recommendations on how to solve it. The study was funded by the Council and Rice had spent a year putting the information together. 357

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Among the many conclusions the study reached was that the $82 million per year that the city was spending on gang intervention programs was a waste of money. According to the report, the programs that the city had funded for decades were “designed to fail.” The direct and indirect cost of gangsterism in Los Angeles was roughly $2 billion a year. The solution the study proposed was to create the equivalent of a Marshall Plan to rebuild gang suppression and intervention infrastructure. It would cost $1 billion in the first eighteen months and approximately an additional billion dollars every year for the foreseeable future. While some of the recommendations the study made were simply common sense (for one, having tighter controls on and supervision of gang intervention programs), others missed the mark. Perhaps most puzzling was an item asserting that the influence of prison gangs on the streets had been exaggerated. The opinion of the study was that prison gangs such as the Mexican Mafia don’t exert much control over the operations or activities of gangs. This myth has been repeated so often that it’s become conventional wisdom. As Manzella’s case and hundreds of cases prior to it have shown, the prison/street nexus has been underestimated as a causal factor to street gang violence. Within days of The Advancement Project’s report hitting the desks of the Mayor and the City Council, fifteen-year-old Cheryl Green, a young black girl, was killed by two Hispanic gang members out of what the LAPD believed to be racial motives. The homicide galvanized the city in a way that the Wilson, Prudhomme, Bowser, and other killings had never managed to do. In mid-January 2007, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Police Chief William Bratton, LA County Sheriff Lee Baca, City Councilwoman Janice Hahn, and FBI Director William Mueller held a sidewalk press conference near the site of the Green homicide and promised to put the gang responsible for the murder “out of business.” Mueller called Los Angeles “ground zero for modern gang activities.” This was not hyperbole. Nowhere is the gang culture as widespread and

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violent as it is in Los Angeles. That culture is also becoming one of city’s major export items. The big issue that law enforcement, social scientists, and politicians try to address with little success is: Where do the gangsters come from? How do we stop ten-year-olds from becoming gangsters? Manzella’s case sheds some light on it. Young people become gangsters for different reasons. Javy Marquez, unquestionably the most violent of Manzella’s eight defendants, was manufactured. He grew up with an abusive father who beat him, his mother, and his siblings out of some personal rage. Javy’s father would lock his mom in a room while he went to work. She had to relieve herself in a bucket. He also locked the kids up in a closet for hours and hours at a time. Later, Javy’s mom would leave them in a parked car all day while she went to work because they had no place to live. At one point, Javy’s older brother Anthony turned into a junior version of his father; he’d lock the younger children in a closet. At the same time, Anthony would beat Javy for not doing his homework or attending school. Social Services took Javy and his siblings out of the home on several occasions but that only made the situation worse when they returned. Robert Schwartz said of Marquez that he was one of the brightest people he’d ever represented and that he could have been anything he wanted to be. Anyone who heard Javy speak could be convinced of that. At the penalty phase of his trial, Marquez’s extended family in Mexico said that when he went back there to visit, he was an entirely different person. No surprise: There was no abuse there. When Javy’s brother Anthony was shot and killed by Glassell Park gangsters, it drove his mother nearly mad and turned Javy into an instrument of revenge. Richard Aguirre, however, was raised in the gang culture. His father was a lifelong drug dealer and a veteran of street gangs. His older brother Alex became an Eme member. Richard’s uncles and other family members were all in gangs or involved with the Eme. He essentially grew up in the family business and there was no one around to tell him life could be otherwise.

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Anthony Medina shared with Marquez a similar background of abuse and neglect by a gangster father and a mother unskilled in childrearing and incapable of connecting with him. Medina was street-raised and grew up to believe that guns solve many problems. George Vidales liked to party and enjoyed the status of associating with gangsters. He had plenty of opportunity to go in a different direction; unlike Richard Aguirre, he had stable adult role models and never suffered the level of abuse and neglect that Marquez did. Vidales was also bright, articulate, and could succeed at anything he cared to focus on. Benny Garcia was basically pressured by his older brothers into becoming a gangster. His father taught him a trade and imparted enough sense of right and wrong that Garcia never became the sort of shooter that Medina and Marquez did. Like Jimmy Maxson, there was enough sense in him that he never jumped into heavy-handed regulating and collection. He wanted to make money selling dope and it was just part of the reality of the streets that he ran into the politics and taxation of the Mexican Mafia. He’s more representative of the vast majority of gangsters, who have an irrational attachment to the neighborhood and the gang. He was Avenues, “breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” and it gave him a false identity as belonging to something worth dying for. Ultimately, he realized he was a “knucklehead” and a “puppet” of the Mexican Mafia and decided, wisely, to pick up the tools his father had taught him to use. Clinton Conroy was not much more than a run-of-the-mill drug user and wasn’t ever a gangster. Through his pursuit of drugs, he found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time with an individual who was ready to explode at the least provocation. Gerardo Reyes came to the U.S. from Mexico as a youngster and, like hundreds of thousands of other young people that cross the border illegally every year, he failed to assimilate and was either sucked in or willingly jumped in to the easy familiarity of a gang. He was in Job Corps but never made anything of it. He was ordered to a drug rehab program, but refused to board the bus that would take him there. He’s proof that when the government does give you a hand, you have to at least meet it halfway.

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Randy Morales didn’t fit the usual profile of a gangster. His background was stable, middle-class, and he didn’t suffer the kind of privation or abuse of a Javy Marquez. For Morales, it was fun hanging around, carrying guns, using drugs, and having the girls in the neighborhood give you attention. One court observer, a distant relative of one of the defendants, said, “It’s the girls that do it. They chase after these guys like they’re somebody. So they become somebody. It was like that thirty years ago, too.” Morales, unlike some of the people responsible for killing him, had choices. At fifteen, he chose to clique up because it was the most exciting thing in his life. And he ran into a buzz saw of street and Eme politics. Gerry Ramirez, like Benny Garcia, was a neighborhood guy through and through. He thought that the gang he would give his life for would repay that loyalty by protecting him from the retribution of Eme politics. As a gangster, he should have known that you don’t cross the shotcallers and the big homies by stealing from them. Even after surviving assassination attempts and landing in State prison, he still suffered under the delusion that he could go back to Avenues and resume his career. The simple truth is that for the average gang-banger, banging and representing your neighborhood—even to the point of shooting rivals—is, if not quite fun, at least capable of giving the adolescent mind the sort of rush that no other activity short of organized warfare can possibly replicate. The Mexican Mafia, to the contrary, is strictly business. Los Angeles has been the nation’s test lab as far as dealing with street gangs and the candidates they produce for matriculation into higher forms of organized crime. So far, all the experiments have failed. According to the Los Angeles City Council’s own findings, after spending $82 million per year on gang intervention, not one young person could be identified as having been diverted from joining a gang. It’s beyond the scope of this book to offer a detailed analysis of what hasn’t worked and why. But the problem is huge and analogous to fighting a civil insurgency. In terms of a threat to the law-abiding citizen, there isn’t much of one. He is not for the most part a target of street gangs. The threat does become more alarming, however, when gangs target other minorities.

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Apparently, that’s the dynamic that has finally gotten the attention of policymakers and politicians. The call from social scientists and activists is to give young people something to do other than join a gang. Give them jobs and recreational opportunities, they say, and the gangs will lose their appeal. The problem there is that the age bracket in which young people are introduced to gangs is below the age of legal employment. Ten and thirteen year olds can’t work and shouldn’t be expected to. As to recreational opportunities and after-school activities, the 50 percent dropout rate in LA’s high schools undermines that assumption. The ones who could benefit the most from after-school programs aren’t in school to begin with. They’re already on the streets. As for the older age bracket that can legally work, the sad fact is that they’re unemployable. They can’t read, write, or compute, and qualify only for the lowest paying jobs. Those low-paying jobs, traditionally steppingstones to better pay and a possible career, are dead ends for someone who lacks education. If the education system has “failed,” according to the social scientists, at least in California, it’s not for want of funding. Forty percent of California’s roughly $100 billion budget goes directly to education. Teachers can’t teach students who aren’t there and whose parents either don’t care or aren’t in their children’s lives. While this is contrary to the theories of social scientists, who persist in attributing poverty and despair as the leading cause driving young people into gangs, the ultimate roadblock to a gang is a stable family. As he was finishing his last trial, Tony Manzella was asked if anything could have been done to keep his eight defendants off the streets and out of jail. “Yeah. It’s real simple. We know exactly the kind of families that produce criminals. I’d like to go in there and take them out. But we can’t do that.”

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I N D EX

Aguirre, Big Rick “Psycho,” 133-134, 245,

Acosta, Robert “Spider,” murder of, 72-73

320, 333, 343

Adams, Keith, 89 Adams, Kevin, 88-90, 93-94

Aguirre, Gus “Tito,” 70-71, 334

Advancement Project, the, 357-358

Aguirre, Nancy, 154

Aguirre, Alex “Pee Wee,” called as witness,

Aguirre, Richard “Half Man,” Sr., 160, 208209, 259, 303, 316, 333, 345

320-321; gang activities from jail, 143, 145, 147, 154-158, 160, 166, 170, 268,

Aguirre, Richard “Lil Pee Wee,” back-

290, 305, 308, 311, 327, 349; gang ac-

ground, 359-360; Downey murder,

tivities on the street, 12-17, 32, 70, 80,

76-79, 323; friendship with Muppet

82, 111, 113, 140-141, 187, 193, 208-

Morales, 111, 113, 129-130, 161-162,

209, 212-213, 241, 245-247, 255-256,

294, 316; gang activities, 12-19, 80-83,

259-263, 265, 293, 303, 316, 333, 339,

140, 154, 158, 160, 192, 295-296, 303,

344-346, 359; RICO case against, 17-

308, 311, 326-327, 342-349; in jail, 206,

18, 76, 81, 157, 182, 192, 208, 242-243,

331, 341; Rodriguez murder, 12-19; trial of, x, 5, 239-271, 290, 347

262, 343

Aguirre family, 122, 154, 159

Aguirre, Benny, 154 363

364

Th e m e x ican mafia

Alarcon, Richard, 99

Block, Sheriff Sherman, 26, 30-31, 58

Alatorre, Richard, 99

Border Brothers (BBs), 140-141, 159, 163,

Aliso Village Housing Project, 88, 177, 185

204-205, 242, 258-259, 296, 344, 346

Altamirano, Yadira, 145, 293-294, 312-313,

Bowser, Christopher, beaten and robbed, 224; murder of, 224, 229, 231-232, 235-

331, 353

237, 358

American Me (film), 47-51, 182, 284 Anderson, Percy (judge), 233

Boykins, Desmond, murder of, 228-229

Antioch College, 174

Boyle, Father Gregory, 121-124, 126, 176,

Aranda, Santos and Ernie, murder of, 283

178, 211

Arias, Juan “China Boy,” 134

Brand, the, see Aryan Brotherhood

Armenian Power (gang), 22, 30, 35, 57

Bratton, William (LA police chief), ix-x, 23, 119-121, 126-127, 358

Aroyo, Jose, murder of, 241, 245, 265 Arvidson, Ruth, Aguirre/Gleason trial,239,

Broken Windows policing, 120

240; Avenues murder cases, 6, 78-80,

Brooks, Markeith, 228

83, 105; Marquez trial, 342, 353, 355;

Brown, Leon (LASD), 56-57

Reyes/Rodriguez/Vidales

Buelna, Frankie, 34, 36

trial,

168-

170; Reyes/Vidales trial, 187, 190-191,

Bunker, Edward, The Animal Factory, 280;

297-298, 317, 320; work with Manzella,

Education of a Felon, 280; Reservoir Dogs,

67-68, 70, 73

280

Aryan Brotherhood (AB) (prison gang), viii, 33, 45, 206, 234, 246, 284-285, 326 Aryan Nation, 234

Burbank, gangs in, 22, 345, 346-347 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, 28, 56

Averbuck, Hollis (LAPD), 198-200

Bustamente, Alex (US attorney), 233, 235

Avila, Juan “Mr. Yago,” murder of, 16-18

Byrd, James, murder of, 229

Avila, Porfirio “Dreamer,” 231, 235 Cadena, Rudolfo “Cheyenne,” 48-49, 171Baca, Lee (LA county sheriff), 358 Barbara, Joseph, 274 Barela, Daniel “Black Dan,” 134

173, 245, 277; murder of, 49, 282-284 Caldera, Carlos, 157, 299-300, 302, 305314, 316, 336-337, 339, 341, 347

Barron, Abiel (LAPD), 17, 167-168

Caldera, Vince, 157, 262, 347

Barron, Manuel “Knuckles,” 228-229

Caldera brothers (The Konos), 242, 343

Beard, James, 81

CALGANGS database, 132

Berdin, John (LAPD), with Averbuck, 200;

California Department of Corrections



with Garcia, 202; with King, 139, 269;

(CDC), 35, 46, 173, 274, 279; classifica-

as Supervisor of the Homicide Table,

tion of gang members, 4, 133, 135-137,

79, 300; with Teague, 7, 9-11, 75-77, 86,

293, 304, 321; gang activities in, 33, 326;

149, 188, 221-223, 232-233, 314

Institutional Gang Investigators (IGIs),

Berlin Wall, 22

42-43; Special Services Unit, 181

Bernstein, Barbara (US attorney), 233, 235

California Department of Justice, 29, 60

Big O Bar, 242, 251-252, 255, 327-328, 346

California National Guard, 25

Biscailuz Center, 41-42, 45-46, 52

California Youth Authority, 14, 79, 144,

Black, Captain Ronald, 55, 58, 61

197, 247, 258, 263, 270

Black Dahlia murders, 9, 66

Calvin, Shunita, 216-217

Black Guerrilla Family (prison gang), viii,

Camacho, Detective Michael (LAPD), 114,

33, 36, 45, 285, 326 Black Panthers, 48, 172, 282, 285 Black P-Stones (gang), 22

129-131, 292, 324 Cambero, Merced “Shadow,” 217-218, 220224, 231-233

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365

1957 meeting, 274; unknown origins

Cannon, Lou, Official Negligence, 28 Cardella, Kirk (sheriff’s deputy), 329

of, 273

Carillo, Jose (LAPD), 265

Cota, Officer (LAPD), 56, 61

Carlos, Henry, 332

Covarubbias, Henio, 143-144

Castaneda, Carlos, 48, 282

CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums), 25-26, 43, 104

Castro, Eduardo “Deadeye,” 35, 51 Castro, Ernest “Chuco,” 32, 34, 38, 43-44,

Crawford, Jeffrey (LAPD), 203 Criminal Courts Building (CCB), 65-68, 70,

51-63, 82, 115, 236, 244, 260

78, 83, 90, 320, 348, 353

Castro, Ruben “Nite Owl,” 123, 134 Cazares, Fernando “Sneaky,” 224, 231

“Crow,” 13

Central District of California, 231

CSI effect, 203, 311

Chaney, Chris, Reyes/Rodriguez/Vidales

Cuban drug cartels, 22

trial, 128, 142, 147-148, 165-166; Reyes/

Cuvier, Lieutenant, 61

Vidales trial, 189, 292-293, 296-297, Danny’s Taco Stand, 241

299-300, 302, 309-311, 315-316

Davis, Michael, 225

Chessman, Caryl, 66

Day, Lawrence, 228

Chicago, murder rates in, 97 Chinwah, Ogbanna

(coroner’s

office),

328-329 Christopher Commission, 85, 87

Delacruz, Jose “Clever,” 221-223, 231-233 Delia, Ellen Anne (Levitt Jacobs Weatherford), 173-183; murder of, 173-174

CIA, 127

Delia, Michael, Jr., 174-183

Cid, Beatriz (LAPD), 253, 255, 257

Delia, Michael, Sr., 176-177

Cirron, Jimmy, 111-112

Dellosa, Carlo, murder of, 192, 194-195,

Civil Rights Act, 234 Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center, see Criminal Courts Building Claremont College, 351 Clift, Javier, 321-322 Clinton, Bill, 77

200-206, 210-211 Deloza, David “Huero,” 157, 261, 346 Demerjian, Dave (DA), 90-92 Demetrio, Diana “Kilo Woman,” 130, 149, 151, 161, 164, 169, 189, 294, 306, 315, 331, 337

Cohen, Mickey, 274

Denny, Reginald, beating of, 23-24

Cohen, Reuven, 234

Desert Storm, 79

Colon, Juan “Manzana,” 284

Detevis, Jesse “Shady,” 159, 163, 295

Colors (film), 25

Deuel Vocational Institution (DVI), 32,

Communism, collapse of, 22 Community Concern Corporation (CCC), 175 Compton, Courthouse, 127; Police Department, 29-31

274, 278 D’heedene, Father Walter, 178 Diaz, Jack, murder of, 275-276 Diaz, Jessie “Listo,” 217-224, 231-233, 236 Diaz, Jorge, 226

COMPSTAT, 158

Diaz, Ricardo “Chivo,” 227

Conroy, Clinton, x, 83, 157, 261, 346, 360;

Dimitt, Mark (LAPD), 198-199

murder trial of, 192-213

Disney Animation Studios, 192, 204

Contreras, Ray “Tiny,” 284

Dixon, Pat (deputy DA), 77-79, 270

Coppola, Jimmy, 177

Dolan, Mark, 228

Cortez, Michelle, 206-207

Dolores Mission, 176, 178

Cosa Nostra, La, viii, x, 21-22, 32, 50, 69,

“Downer,” 325-326, 348

120, 122, 126; infiltration of drub reha-

Downey, Alan, murder of, 75-76, 79, 239,

bilitation programs, 171-185 passim;

241-242, 245, 251-253, 257, 261-264,

366

Th e m e x ican mafia

266, 270; murder trial for, 319-355

Fratianno, Jimmy “The Weasel,” 177, 180

Downs, Rufus (LASD), 56, 61

Fresno Police Department, 180

Dragna, Jack, 274

Fuhrman, Mark, 86, 93

Drew Street drug market, 111, 160

Fung, Dennis (LAPD criminologist), 251

Droeger, Larry (deputy DA), 130-131, 292, 330

Gallardo, David “Smilon,” 134

Drudge Report, 232

Gangster Disciples (midwestern gang), 22

Drug rehabilitation programs, infiltration

Garcia, Alex P. (CA state senator), 175-180,

of, 171-185 Dunton, Robert “Huero,” murder of, 72-73 Duvall, Robert, 25

184-185 Garcia, Benny “Sleepy,” 105, 157, 192-193, 195, 200-201, 203-204, 206-212, 302, 360-361; in Aguirre trial, 239, 242, 244-

East Los Angeles College, 43 El Rukn (midwestern gang), 22

264, 268; in Marquez trial, 323, 327, 341, 344-349

Elmwood, gangsters in, 347-348

Garcia, Danny “Chinito,” 192, 204, 207

Ennis, Anthony, 86-87

Garcia, Gil (LAPD), 115, 205

Estrada, Gilbert, 76, 251-252, 255, 328

Garcia, Jeanette (LAPD), 218-219, 224, 236

Eubanks, Frank, 217

Gates, Daryl (LA police chief), 23-24, 28,

FBI, 17, 22, 81-82, 103, 167, 232; anti-gang

Georgetown University Law School, 67-68

181 efforts, 25, 29-31, 58, 60, 234; surveil-

Get Going Project, 175-179, 182-183, 185

lance, 37, 163

Gleason, Scott “Gato,” x, 5, 83, 157; murder

FDNY, 79 Federal Bureau of Prisons, 179, 321 Felix, Ignacio, 159

trial of, 239-271, 290 Glendale, gangs in, 22, 346; police department, 112

Fernandez, Sapo, 35

Godfather trilogy, 48

Ferrell, Moe, 35

Gomez, Martha, 197

Fidler, Lawrence Paul (judge), Aguirre tri-

Gonzales, Angel “Trippy,” killing of, 111-

al, 247, 249, 252-253, 256, 264, 267-270;

112, 164, 166, 292, 343

background, 69; Conroy/Medina trial,

Gonzales, Robert, 143-144, 195

202-203, 210, 213; Marquez trial, 322-

Gonzalez, Jose “Joker,” 50

323, 325, 327-328, 331-332, 340-342,

Gonzalez, Lori, ix, 6

350-351, 354; Reyes/Rodriguez/Vidales

Goodfellas (film), 48

trial, 142,147, 149; Reyes/Vidales trial,

Gomez, Ruben “Diablo,” 73

188-189, 289, 297-299, 301-302, 311-

Gotti, John, 32

313, 317

Graham, Barbara, 66

Figueroa, Luis, murder of, 196-200, 211, 220

Grajeda, Arthur “Shady,” 72 Grajeda, Daniel “Cuate,” 72

Flores, Lilian, 197-198

Grajeda, Senon “Cherilo,” 72

Flores, Luis “Huero Buff,” 273-276, 278

Grajeda, Thomas “Wino,” 72

Flores, Ron, 252, 255, 327

Grajeda family, 122, 134

Flores, Sonny Davis, 86

Grant, Hugh, 195

Floyd, Racjon, 88-90, 94

Gravano, Sammy, 59

Folk Nation (midwestern gang), 22

Green, Cheryl, 236-237, 358

Fox, Martin, 81

Green, Eric, 225

Fox News, 232

Guttierez, Frank “Pops,” 290-291

Fradella, Gerry (FBI), 233

Guttierez, Judy, 251-253, 255, 327

Th e m e x ican mafia

367

Haggins, Levar, murder of, 226

Kalmas, Captain Ted (LAFD), 250

Hahn, James (LA mayor), 106-107, 119

Kepley, Michael (jail supervisor), 4

Hahn, Janice (LA city council), 236-236,

King, James (LAPD), with Berdin, 139; in

358 Hahn, Kenneth, 119 Hamlet, 144

court, 128, 203, 253, 269, 300, 310-311, 331, 336, 349; with Teague, 79-80, 83, 167, 347

Harbor UCLA Medical Center, 227

King, Rodney, 23, 28, 87, 127

Harris, Bill, 179

KKK, 234

Hayden, Tom, Street Wars: Gangs and the

Korn, Peter (DA), 90, 92

Future of Violence, 37-39, 60-62

Kroeker, Mark (LAPD), 98

Hayward, Susan, 66

Kroll (security company), 103

Hell’s Angels, 279

Kuhen, Stephanie, murder of, 77, 159

Hernandez, Gonzalo “Chalo,” 282-283 Hernandez, Mike, 99-100

LA Citybeat, 225

Hightower, Robert, murder of, 226-227,

LA Times, 17, 39, 72, 81, 87, 121, 124, 175,

229, 236

177, 195, 225, 230-232, 234

Hillman, Captain Michael (LAPD), 199

LA Weekly, 24, 225

Holden, Nate, 98, 100-101, 106-107, 119

L’Amour, Louis, 33

Homeboy Industries, 176

Lares, Manny, 38-39

Hoover, J. Edgar, 173, 274

Larkin, Sister Maribeth, 178

Hyde, Don, 177-178

Latin Kings (gang), 22 Lawrence, Angela (FBI), 82

Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), 28, 30 Inglewood Police Department, 29-30 Ingram, Gordon, 57 Interagency Metropolitan Police Appre-

Lewis, Bayan (LAPD), 98 Lewis, Robert (US attorney), 59 Lewis, Robert M., 176, 178, 180; murder of, 179, 182 Limon, Frank, 225-226

hension Crime Task Force (IMPACT),

Lizarraga, Ana, murder of, 50-51

100

Loera, Eddie “Potato Nose,” 279

International ANSWER, 319

Long Beach Police Department, 29

Ison, Mike “Acha” “Hatchet Mike,” 279

Lopez, Bob (LAPD), 131-133, 223, 232, 256,

Italian mafia, see La Cosa Nostra Ito, Lance (judge), 94

292-293, 324 Lopez, “Cuban” Manny, 144 Lopez, Rich, 53-56, 61

Jacke, H. Clay, 240, 243, 246, 267, 269 Jackson, George, 285 Jaimes, Angel, 45-46 Jamaican drug cartels, 22

Lopez, Robert “Bobby Loco,” murder of, 279 Los Angeles City Council, 94-95, 98-100, 178, 357, 361

Jimenez, Alfredo, murder of, 179

Los Angeles City Ethics Commission, 100

Jimenez, Alfredo “Cuate,” 279

Los Angeles County, murders in, ix-x, 120;

“Johnny Shorty,” 302 Johnson, Johnnie, 144 “June Bug,” 155

police departments in, 28 Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, 99 Los Angeles County Criminal Court, 3

Kaiser, Henry, 275 Kallen, Norm, 240, 243-244, 246-247, 249, 254-257, 263-264, 267-270, 331

Los Angeles County Jail, 3, 53, 213, 221, 224, 259, 271; gang activity in, 33, 137, 182-183, 206, 254-255, 266, 295, 303-

368

Th e m e x ican mafia

304, 309, 333-334, 336, 338, 340, 345, 348; policing in, 41; prisoners moved

Maciel, Luis “Pelon” “Big Homie,” 70-72, 134, 245

to, 323, 332, 353-354; riots in, 44, 46,

Maldonado, Rudy, murder of, 219

327

Manriquez, Charles “Charlie Brown,” mur-

Los Angeles County Probation Office, 29 Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department

der of, 50-51 Manson, Charles, 5, 66, 69

(LASD), 17, 99-100, 134, 203, 235, 244,

Manzella, Anthony (deputy DA), ix-x, 85,

326, 332; anti-gang units, 25-30, 34,

362; Aguirre/Gleason trial, 239-273;

42-43, 173; informants for, 54; Tem-

Avenues gang murder cases, 5-6, 78-

ple Station, 58; see also Operation Safe

83, 97, 104-106, 115-117, 119, 121-122,

Jails, Operation Safe Streets

234, 358-359; background, 67-70; Con-

Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office

roy/Medina trial, 192-213; Grajeda tri-

(LADA), 66-67, 73, 103; Hard Core Gang

al, 72-73; Maciel trial, 70-72; Marquez

Unit, 90, 105; Hate Crime Unit, 223;

trial, 319-355 passim; office, 66, 320;

Major Crimes Unit, 67; Training Divi-

Reyes/Rodriguez/Vidales

sion, 320

170 passim, 187; Reyes/Vidales trial,

Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD), 13 Los Angeles Magazine, 68, 115, 225 Los Angeles Metropolitan Task Force on

trial,

127-

187-191, 289-320 passim Markel, Chuck (LAPD), 12-13, 15-17, 87-95, 195

Violent Crimes (LAMTFOVC), 17-18,

Marquez, Anthony “Trigger,” 166, 359

28-31, 34, 38, 59, 82, 134, 164, 244-246,

Marquez,

277, 293

Javier

“Gangster,”

back-

ground, 359-361; death penalty for,

Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD),

105; Downey murder, 251, 256-257;

Academy, 103, 106; Board of Rights,

gang activities, 111, 157; indictments

93; Community Policing, 101; crime

against, x, 83; in jail, 5, 141; in Mexican

lab, 103-104; evidence room, 311;

Mafia, 79, 245, 261, 292, 303-304; Mo-

gang-suppression units, 17, 25-30,

rales murder, 115, 136, 166, 293-295,

34-35; Homicide Bureau, 7-8; I-Cards,

305, 307, 311, 314; Morales/Downey

132, 203; Internal Affairs, 87, 92-93, 98,

murder trial, 300-301, 319-355; San-

101, 103, 219; morale in, 102, 106; in

chez brothers murder, 105-106, 113-

Rodney King riots, 22-24; search for

114, 129, 189, 291, 315; Torres murder,

new chief, 98; in Sleepy Lagoon murder, 276; South Bureau Homicide Unit, 107

242-243 Marquez, Maria, 157, 158, 162, 166, 266, 294-285

Los Angeles Unified School District, 120

Marroquin, Hector, 184

Los Padrinos (juvenile detention facility),

Marshall Plan, 358

114, 129, 292 Loyola University, 69 Lucero, Leticia (FBI agent), 82 LUCHA (League of United Citizens to Help Addicts), 173

Martinez, Alejandro “Bird,” 224, 231-233, 235 Martinez, Johnny “Sleepy,” 157, 241, 254255, 261, 266, 268-269 Martinez, Mariano “Chuy,” 295

Lincoln Heights High School, 235

Martinez, Richard (Pomona PD), 227

Luna, Manuel “Rocky,” 182; murder of,

Maxson, Howard and Jessie, 295-296

50-51

Maxson, James Douglas, 295-296 Maxson, Jimmy “Drac,” in Aguirre trial,

MacDonald, Paul, “Slowboy,” 141, 157-158, 265-266

239, 241-245, 265-268; background, 153-156, 295-296, 360; as informant,

Th e m e x ican mafia

369

105, 115, 349; in Marquez trial, 323-

Moreno, Eddie “Pelon,” 279

324, 331, 337, 339, 341-343, 348; in

Moreno, Jesse “Pelon,” 134

Reyes/Rodriguez/Vidales

Morgan, Joe “Cocoliso” “Pegleg,” 48, 171-

trial,

129-

130, 137, 140-141, 147, 151; in Reyes/

172, 177, 279-280, 282-284

Vidales trial, 190, 193, 291-297, 320;

Mueller, William (FBI director), 358

surrendered to FBI, 81-82

Mulrooney, Celeste, 87

Maxson, Leticia, 82, 158, 162, 266, 294

Murray, Reverend Cecil, 126-127

McGraw, Rosie DeHorton, 151

Myers, James (FBI Special Agent), 31, 59,

Medina, Anthony “Tonito,” x, 5, 83, 157, 261, 346, 360; trial of, 192-213, 239, 347

81, 134 Myron, Captain Paul, 46

Melancon, Anthony, 226 Memorandum of Agreement (MOA), 28,

Nardoni, Daniel, 202-203, 206, 211-213

Mendoza, Frank “Joker,” 284 Mendoza,

Nahuatl (Aztec language), 43, 48, 282 Narcotics Prevention Project, 175

59 Raymond

“Machine

Gun”

“Mundo,” 54, 278-279 Mexican Mafia (Eme; aka the Black Hand,

National Institute of Health, 351 National Institute of Mental Health, 173 National Science Foundation, 351

La Mano Negra, the Clique, Los Car-

Navajo code talkers, 43

nales, Big Homies), passim; compared

Navarro, Maximo, 329

to Italian mafia, viii, 273; connection

New York Times, The, 17, 225, 232

with Avenues, 11-19; control of pris-

New York University, 174

ons, 44-45, 326; definition of Associ-

No Guns program, 184

ates in, 4; definition of Camarades in,

Nortenos, see Nuestra Familia

136; definition of shotcallers in, 4; Ely-

Nuestra Familia (NF) (prison gang), 33, 48-

sian Park meeting, 35-40, 52, 57, 60-61;

49, 281-285, 326

ignorance of, 125; infiltration of drug

Nunez, Roy (LASD), 42-43, 52-63, 236

rehabilitation programs, 171-173, 177-

NYPD, 79, 120

185; organization of, 32, 135-136; origins of, 32-34, 273-284; policy initiative,

Obledo, Mario, 179

31-32, 225; spread of, 286-287; struc-

Occidental College, 242

ture of, 276-278; symbols of, 48, 136

Ochoa, Anthony “Smokey,” 157

Milla, Marco, 226-227, 236

Ojeda, Peter “Sana,” 32, 34, 36, 244

Monaghan, John (deputy DA), 71-72

Olmedo, Ferdie, murder of, 192, 195, 200-

Montenegro, Javier (LAPD), 250

203, 206, 210-211, 226

Moody, Gerard, 88-90, 93-94

Olmedo, Magnolia, 202-203, 206-207

Moore, Joan, Going Down to the Barrio, 125,

Olmos, Edward James, 47-51, 284

127

Olney, Warren, 126-127

Morales, Atanacio, 110, 289-290, 331

Operation Hammer, 24

Morales, Maria, 150

Operation Safe Jails (OSJ), 26, 46-47, 244,

Morales, Randy “Muppet,” background,

254, 326

110-111, 122, 361; Gonzales killing,

Operation Safe Streets (OSS), 25-26

111-114; murder of, 83, 105-106; trials

Ortega, Carlos “Carlitos,” 281

for murder of, 119, 127-137, 153-170,

Ortiz, Rick (LAPD), 219-220, 236, 270-271,

187-190, 213, 268, 289-318, 319-355

290, 325

Morales, Stephanie, 150 Moreno, Anthony and Maria, murder of, 71, 334

Padilla, Hector, 281 Palma, Jimmy “Character,” 71, 334

370

Th e m e x ican mafia al, 190-192, 291-292, 302, 308-311, 313-

Palomares, Jackie, 155 Parks, Bernard (LA police chief), ix, 6, 98,

315; as witness, 105 Ramirez, Marta, 248

101-102, 104, 106-107, 119 Parsons, Charlie, 25, 28-30

Ramirez, Richard “Jasper,” 155

Pasadena, gangs in, 22; police depart-

Ramirez, Richard “Stalker,” 241, 265 Ramos, Debbie, 129-130,149-151, 169-170,

ment, 196-198

190, 292, 315, 331, 337

Pasadena Opera Program, 202 Pasadena Star, 198

Rampart scandal, 101, 104, 127, 219

Patton, Charles, 200-201

Rayvis, Cynthia (deputy DA), 312

Paul, Diana (LAPD criminologist), 207

Red Light Bandit, 66

Petersen, Rick (LAPD), 149

Reyes, Amador “Pelon,” 157, 343

Perez, Marcus (Pomona PD), 228

Reyes, Gerardo “Criminal,” x, 5, 83, 105-

Perez, Rafael, 104

106, 115, 261, 335, 337-338, 360; mur-

Philadelphia Police Department, 28

der trials of, 127-170, 187-191, 213, 265, 289-320

Pipas, Joe, 345 Pomeroy, Martin (LAPD), 107

Reyes, Juan, 226

Ponce, Marvin “Greedy,” 299-300, 302, 305-

Rice, Constance, 357 RICO, prosecutions, 17, 21, 76, 81, 101, 123,

316 passim, 336-337, 341, 353

137, 182, 236, 243, 295; statutes, 122

“Pony Boy,” 345 Popeye’s Chicken, 6

Riordan, Richard (LA mayor), 94

Prison Gang Unit (PGU), 26-27, 31, 41-43,

Rivas, Gabe, 232 Rizitello, Mike, 177, 180

46, 52-53, 58, 61-62, 104, 326 Prisons, Calipatria, 80-81; Centinella, 156;

Rodney King riots (1992), 22-24, 36, 47, 50

Chino, 49, 283-284; Corcoran, 156;

Rodriguez, Connie, 5

Florence (Colorado) Federal (super-

Rodriguez, Luis, 254

max), 123, 180, 321; Folsom, 156, 279-

Rodriguez, Marta, 14

280, 282-283; Kern Valley, 327-328,

Rodriguez, Oscar “Lil Man,” murder of,

331; Lancaster, 321, 353-354; Minnesota Federal, 81; Mule Creek State, 139; Pelican Bay, vii, 14, 54, 61, 67, 156, 254,

12-18 Rodriguez, Raul “Crook,” 245, 265; murder of, 239, 241, 245, 254, 266-270

270, 299-300, 312; San Quentin, 35, 36,

Rodriguez, Randall “Jo Jo,” x, 5, 83, 105-

51, 71, 278-279, 281-283; Soledad, 156;

106, 115, 189, 192, 309-311, 343; acquit-

Susanville, 206; Tehachapi, 282; Was-

tal of, 290; murder trial of, 127-170, 234, 265

co, 221 Prudhomme, Anthony, murder of, 224,

Ruddell, Ray (LAPD), 179

229, 231-232, 236-237, 358

Russian Mafiya, 22, 30

Prudhomme, Luisa, 231 Pulga,

Francisco

“Big

Roybal, Gilbert, murder of, 180-181

Trooper,”

157,

Russo, Annette, 354

308-309 Sachs, Starr (LAPD firearms analyst), 150Ramirez, Anna, 226 Ramirez, Gerry “Trooper,” Aguirre/Glea-

151, 300, 328 Salas, Robert “Robot,” 180, 281

son trial, 244, 265; background of, 361;

Saldana, Gilbert “Lucky,” 221-223, 231-235

Conroy/Medina trial, 192, 195, 213; as

Salinas, Alfred, murder of, 290-291

informant, 80-82, 115-116; Marquez

Salinas, Alfred “Tigger,” 133, 155, 208, 242-

trial,

335;

Reyes/Rodriguez/Vidales

trial, 129, 139-148; Reyes/Vidales tri-

243, 245, 256, 258, 263, 267, 320, 334, 344

371

Th e m e x ican mafia Samson, Mike, 224

(gang), 22, 24, 30, 36-37, 59, 88-89, 285;

San Fernando Police Department, 29

Cypress Avenue, 10, 159, 206, 257-258,

San Gabriel Valley Tribune, 227

344; Diamond Street, 160; Dogtown,

Sanchez, Carlos (LAPD), 164

10, 155; Drew Street, 10, 159, 324; East

Sanchez, Herman “Wicked” and Sergio

Side Treces (EST), 14, 16; 18th Street,

“Yogi,” murders of, 106, 113-115, 129-

30, 34, 123, 286; Glassell Park, 10, 359;

131, 189, 226, 291-292, 315, 322-324,

Hawaiian Gardens, 273; Hazard Street,

327, 330

50; Highland Park, 10, 106, 111-112,

Sanchez, Ruben (LAPD), 256, 328

129-130, 136, 217, 258, 291-292, 296,

Sandoval, “Chato,” 71, 303, 334

324; Hoyo Maravilla, 276, 280-281, 283,

Sandoval, Rafael “Chispas,” 175

303, 334; The Insane Ones (TIOs), 154;

Santa Monica, gangs in, 38

Longos, 210; Lowell Street, 10, 248,

Scheinin, Dr. Lisa (medical examiner),

337; Mara Salvatrucha (MS/MS-13),

150, 207

viii, 24, 30, 286-287; Opal Street, 248;

Schomer, Robert William, 351-353

Pacoima, 276; Pee Wees, 159; Pomona

Schwarz, Robert, 321, 347-349, 351, 359

12th Street, 227-228; Primera Flats, 12;

Scott, Kershaun “Lil Monster,” 24

Rolling Sixties, 24; San Fer, 276; San-

Scott, “Monster” Cody Scott, 24

tanas, 157; El Sereno, 10, 109, 142, 164,

See, Brian, 249-250

314, 331;

Shabazz, Samuel, 6

sters), 210-211, 248; Varrio Nuevo Es-

Shannon, Michael, 128, 130-131, 137, 145-

trada, 276; Vineland, 345-346; White

147, 150, 166, 187, 189, 234 Shepard, Matthew, murder of, 229 Shoe War, 281 Shryock, Raymond “Huero Shy,” 134, 182

TRGs (Tiny Rascal Gang-

Fence, 125, 276 Sukphranee, Janette, 145, 293-294, 313, 330-331 Sureno gangs, 24, 206, 210-211, 229, 233,

Siegel, Benjamin “Bugsy,” 274

245-246; flag of, 34; movement, 171,

Simpson, O. J., 86, 92-94, 127

286

Sleepy Lagoon murder, 66, 275-276 “Smilon,” 260-261 Snyder, Art, 181

Takahashi, Daryl, 256-257, 324, 329-330, 351, 353

Sosa, Alfredo “Alfie,” 177, 180-182

Tarantino, Quentin, Reservoir Dogs, 280

SPAN (Sprecial Program for Alcoholism

Teague, Andy (LAPD), auto accident, 167-

and Narcotics), 173

168, 300; with Berdin, 7, 9-18, 75-78,

Special Investigations Unit (SPI), 41

221-223, 232-233; Garcia interview,

Stiles, Diane, 69

192, 210, 347; work with Manzella, 70,

Stone, Jack, 320-330, 338-340, 342-343,

78-83, 269; Morales murder, 145-146,

350-352, 354 Street gangs, Alpine Street, 241; Assas-

149, 164, 166-168, 188; police background of, 85-87, 103-104; Trujillo mur-

sins, 10,159; Avenues (Los Avenidas),

der, 87-95; Wilson murder, 215-217

x, 4-5, 10-12, 75, 77-82, 97, 105, 109-

Temporary Overtime Reduction Assign-

114, 127ff. passim, 276, 290-296; Ave-

ment (TORA), 41

nues 10, 43, 159, 217, 224-225, 232, 235,

Therrien, Randy “Cowboy,” 18, 37, 134, 277

241, 245, 254, 266, 290; Avenue 57 Chi-

“Thumper,” 302

cos, 10, 140, 159, 161; Back Street Kill-

Tolento, Albert “Boxer,” 133, 245, 256, 320,

ers, 10; Bloods, 22, 24, 30, 36-37, 285; Chicos, 10, 159; Clanton, 276; Compton Varrio Tortilla Flats, 226; Crips

332 Tolentino, Cesar, murder of, 80, 144-145, 147, 195

372

Th e m e x ican mafia

Torres, David (LAPD), 232

Villaraigosa, Antonio (LA mayor), 119, 358

Torres, Joseph “Clavo,” murder of, 239,

Vindiola, Eddie “Crackers,” 284

241-243, 245, 248-250, 266-267, 269270, 290

Wambaugh, Joseph, 102

Torres, Manuel “Tati,” 295; murder of, 180

Warren, Charles (LASD), 325

Torres, Michael “Mosca,” 304-305, 335-336,

Washington, murder rates in, 97

338-340

Watts riots (1965), 23

Trujillo, Pablo, Jr., murder of, 88

Weathersby, Dennis, murder of, 227

Trujillo, Ysidro, murder of, 179, 182 , 195

Wesley, David (judge), 3, 6

Turscak, John “Stranger,” 295

Wheatley, Antuan, murder of, 228 “Whisper” (gangster), 141, 158, 163

Uribe, Nick “Evil,” 81, 157, 200, 261

White, Michael, 6; Reyes/Rodriguez/Vida-

U.S. Department of Justice, 21-22

les trial, 128-130, 137, 146-148, 163-165,

U.S. Marines, 43

167; Reyes/Vidales trial, 189, 292-293, 295-300, 305, 312, 314

Valachi, Joe, 59

Wilks, Meredith, shooting of, 226

Valdemar, Sergeant Richard (LASD), on

Williams, Damian “Football,” 23-24

PGU, 26-27, 41-47, 52, 54-58, 61, 99-100,

Williams, Duane, 216-217

104, 115; at LASD, 50; as expert wit-

Williams, Roy, 227

ness, 134-137, 148, 190, 203, 220, 244-

Williams, Stanley “Tookie,” 36

248, 256, 292-293, 307, 326-327

Williams, Willie (LA police chief), 28, 30,

Valdez, Richard Anthony, 70-71 Vaughn, Officer (LAPD), 56, 61 Veteran’s Administration, 175 Vidales, George “Chato,” x, 83, 105-106, 115, 259; background of, 302-303, 360;

51, 87-88, 91-94, 98 Wilson, Kenneth, murder of, 216-217, 221223, 229, 231-234, 237, 358 Witness Protection Program, 297 Wood, Armando, 90-91

murder trial of, 127-170, 187-191, 213, 265, 289-320, 323; testimony in Mar-

Yang, Debra (US attorney), 231

quez trial, 332-340 Villalovos, Mike (Pasadena PD), 197

Zoot Suit riots, 66, 160