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“Socalj” for Borderland Beat
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“Long time no hear, you know?” he told Hugo Montes in Spanish in a recorded call.
Pleasantries gave way to business when Montes pitched Landa-Rodriguez on a deal.
“This is something that is going to interest you for the rest of your life,” he promised.
Both men were from Michoacán, a state in western Mexico where at the time in 2011, a drug cartel called La Familia Michoacána was producing enormous amounts of methamphetamine.
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| eMe member “Fox” Jose Landa-Rodriguez and La Familia distributor Hugo Montes |
The deal Montes wanted to make with Landa-Rodriguez was unprecedented.
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| Ralph “Perico from Norwalk” Rocha, Mexican Mafia member turned ATF informant |
The deal offered a different kind of benefit to the man who ultimately took charge of the negotiations: Ralph Guy Rocha.
Rocha, originally from the Norwalk area, became an eMe member in the federal penitentiary system, after he was indicted on federal racketeering charges in 1994 along with high-ranking Mexican Mafia members like Benjamin “Topo” Peters, Ruben “Nite Owl” Castro, Raymond “Huero Shy” Shyrock and Randy “Cowboy” Therrien.
Being made in the federal prison system put Rocha in a position of competition – and subservience – with state prison-based Emeros like Padilla, according to Guillermo Moreno, a special agent for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation who specializes in La eMe.
Gonzalez-Munoz and Rocha upon being released from federal prison in early 2007 and hit the streets running and looking to takeover additional territory.
Rocha and “Cisco” Munoz-Gonzaleza, also an eMe member, were allegedly feuding with the associates of then-influential member, Jacques “Jocko” Padilla, who ran Azusa 13 from his maximum-security cell at Corcoran State Prison. Rocha and Munoz were supposedly collecting taxes from dealers in Azusa. In December 2007, California authorities charged six individuals with trying to murder Rocha and Gonzalez-Mu oz on behalf of “Jocko” Padilla.
And so it was a stroke of luck for Rocha — and the investigators counting on him — when he got wind of the would-be alliance with La Familia.
It was the kind of case that could make an agent’s career. What none of them knew was that their star informant was making tapes of his own, memorializing his dim view of how they did their jobs.
They played up the threat of the Mexican Mafia, Rocha said, both to scare the public into raising their budgets and to justify their plum assignments on gang task forces.
Rocha’s words jeopardized the case he helped build, none more so than the claim that his handlers, hoping to make a sensational case, took steps to keep the “marriage” between La Familia and the Mexican Mafia alive.
“They allow a lot of stuff to happen,” he mused in one tape, “and help create other stuff to make a certain type of bust.”
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The chain of events that led Landa-Rodriguez to Montes — and eventually to Rocha — began years earlier, when Los Zetas, a cartel founded by deserters from an elite Mexican military unit, spilled out from their base in northeastern Mexico and overran Michoacán. Local traffickers rose up against Los Zetas, announcing their counteroffensive by rolling the severed heads of their enemies onto a nightclub floor.
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| “El Mas Loco” Leader of LFM at the time based in Mexico |
Calling themselves La Familia, they had promised to retake “Michoacán for Michoacános.” But before long they had subjected the state — one of rugged beauty, known for producing limes, avocados and a diaspora of immigrants across the United States — to the same extortion and corruption practiced by Los Zetas.
By 2011, its leaders were concerned by a series of U.S. prosecutions called Project Delirium. Cartel figures were facing extradition to American prisons, the domain of the Mexican Mafia.
The potential deal between the two organizations was rooted in global criminal ambitions, but for the man with the connections to get it done, it was about a brother’s love.
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| “Fox” Jose Landa-Rodriguez the Mexican Mafia member approached with the deal by Montes |
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| Hugo Montes was a Los Angeles based distributor for LFM and brokered the first meeting |
Montes didn’t even expect to see the deal through himself. He was dying of cancer; doctors had been saying he had two weeks to live for the last two years, he told Landa-Rodriguez. All he wanted was protection for a brother who was serving life in the California prison system.
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| Fugitive La Familia plaza boss who met with ATF informant Rocha |
Rocha sat down with Montes and his brother Freddie, with whom he owned an auto repair business in the San Fernando Valley, and a plaza boss of La Familia, Efrain “Tucan” Rosales. The ATF provided the setting: an unmarked building in a San Dimas office park, bugged with hidden cameras and microphones.
“I go, ‘Well, how about this? We got Surenos” — gang members with ties to Southern California and loyal to the Mexican Mafia — “from California to New York. To Maine to Miami, to South, North Dakota. So what do you want? You want to take over the United States?”
“Dude’s eyes got this big. Big as silver dollars.”
For Rocha, the strain of being an informant, surrounded by men who would kill him if they learned his secret, was “like vertigo.”
20 years in the Mexican Mafia had left him “numb” to death, he said. But once he started working for the government and “respecting things for being right,” he said, “You think, man, I got kids. I don’t want to die tomorrow.”
He started drinking heavily. At 2 AM one Wednesday morning, a California Highway Patrol officer found him passed out behind the wheel of his silver BMW 745Li, stalled on the 10 Freeway in Ontario.
His eyes were bloodshot and his speech slurred, the officer wrote in his report. Rocha said he “worked for the government and that was all he would say.”
He had been driving without a license, which had been revoked after he failed to make child support payments.
The arrest, a violation of his cooperation agreement, threw the case he was building into jeopardy. His handlers could have torn up his deal, shut down the investigation and sent Rocha before a judge to face a life sentence. Instead, they asked the CHP not to bring charges until Rocha’s undercover work was over.
Rocha complained in his tapes that his ATF handler, John Ciccone, made him dip into his savings to pay his child support, promising to “funnel it back to me slowly.”
“I can only work with the money they give me,” Rocha said. “Which ain’t much.”
Ciccone testified he paid Rocha $447,000. In an interview, Ciccone, now retired, said the sum included reimbursement for expenses as well as income for the 2½ years he worked undercover.
“We’re not allowing him to work a job, so we’ve got to compensate him for that,” he said.
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| La eMe members Mike “Boo” Moreno and “Fast Freddy” Montoya |