“Socalj” for Borderland Beat
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The cartel wanted Rocha to finalize the deal with its bosses in Mexico, but ATF brass refused to approve the trip, he said in his tapes.
The agency was reeling from the “Fast and Furious” scandal, in which weapons trafficked into Mexico with the ATF’s knowledge were eventually used to kill a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
Rocha turned to Landa-Rodriguez’s old cellmate, Michael “Mike Boo” Moreno, and another carnal, Fred “Fast Freddy” Montoya, asking them to cut off the GPS monitors on their ankles and travel to Mexico. Once they returned, they’d surrender to serve time for violating their parole in the California prison system, where they could tell incarcerated Mexican Mafia members about the pact.
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| “Fast Freddy” Montoya, the Mexican Mafia member who traveled to Mexico |
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| “Mike Boo” introduced ATF informant Rocha to LFM’s Hugo Montes |
“I tell them it’s vital,” Rocha said. “Something so big, so important. We can’t write letters. We can’t talk on the phone. That’s been our Achilles heel from day one.”
But when Rocha showed up at Moreno’s house in Fresno, “Mike starts backing out.”
“This is what you became a carnal for,” Rocha said he told Moreno. “If [there’s] any moment in your life that you’ve got to give to the Eme, it’s right now.”
As he listened to Moreno’s excuses, Rocha said he thought to himself: “I’m glad I’m getting out of this s—.”
Montoya, meanwhile, was arrested for tampering with his GPS monitor before he could flee to Mexico. With Montoya serving time for the parole violation at San Quentin, Rocha said he told his handlers: “I need him out here to go with us. So you need to squash his violation or make it work so he gets out.”
Prison records show that Montoya, who could not be reached for comment, was discharged 21 days after being arrested.
Rocha’s handlers denied on the witness stand and in interviews that they lobbied anyone to release Montoya. Rocha told The Times he couldn’t recall the incident but suggested he wasn’t always truthful in his recordings. “I might have over-exaggerated things, thinking I might write something. A book. Make something sound good.”
Four days after getting out, Montoya called Rocha from Michoacán. In a call that Rocha taped for the ATF, Montoya said he’d met Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, the cartel’s messianic founder, whom the Mexican government had erroneously declared dead a year earlier after a three-day gun battle.
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| “El Mas Loco” Leader of LFM at the time based in Mexico |
Moreno Gonzalez had descended from a mountain hideout dressed in all white, according to Montoya. “He presented himself only to us, the Eme,” Rocha said in his tapes.
After Montoya returned from Mexico a wanted fugitive, Ciccone was “stressing the f— out,” Rocha said. He claimed Ciccone gave him ATF money to pay for Montoya’s stay at a La Puente hotel while Montoya hid from his parole agent.
“They know where he’s at,” Rocha said. “And they could arrest him at any time. But because of the intricacies and the complications with this case, they’re letting — he’s staying out.”
Rocha’s handlers told The Times they didn’t allow Montoya to elude his parole agent or fund his life on the run. Montoya was eventually arrested in Bell Gardens, four months after he traveled to Mexico, parole records show.
“They’ll probably kill them or just rob them, depending on the individual, I guess,” he said.
Rocha’s handlers said the talk of hurting dealers was just that — talk. Had they known a violent act was going to occur, Ciccone said, they would have intervened.
Imprisoned on the other side of the country, Landa-Rodriguez was being updated on the negotiations between the Mexican Mafia and La Familia Michoacana when Hugo Montes, trying to avoid mentioning Rocha by name, said he’d met with “El Cotorro.” The Parrot.
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| “Fox” Jose Landa-Rodriguez the Mexican Mafia member approached with the deal by Montes |
“Oh, no, no,” Landa-Rodriguez said.
There was a time when the idea that Rocha might be a snitch was unthinkable to his carnales. His penchant for violence was well-known. Even after he became an informant, agents in an unrelated case intercepted a call in which the daughter of a Mexican Mafia member said she narrowly avoided being lured to a meeting with him.
“I wasn’t going to come out of there,” she said, adding: “I know how Perico works. I know how he gets down. That motherf— is ruthless, beyond ruthless.”
But Landa-Rodriguez had grown suspicious. He told the Montes brothers to stay away from Rocha and put the cartel deal on hold.
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| Ralph “Perico from Norwalk” Rocha, Mexican Mafia member turned ATF informant |
ATF Adds Fire to the Deal
After learning of the call, Rocha said in his tapes, he told his handlers to put Landa-Rodriguez in solitary confinement and take away his phone privileges so he couldn’t contact the Montes brothers.
Defense attorneys referenced in court an email in which a federal prisons official wrote: “After being called by the ATF last night, I set some things in motion to have Fox and his cellmate, Ray Lozano, placed in SHU,” a term for the prison’s lockdown unit.
Ciccone said Landa-Rodriguez was sent to solitary confinement for violating prison rules, not because Rocha told them to do it.
Spooked by Landa-Rodriguez’s warning, the Montes brothers changed their phone numbers and sent word they didn’t want to deal with Rocha. Ciccone said this posed a serious problem: The brothers were the conduit that passed cartel dollars to the Mexican Mafia to build support for the deal. After they went into hiding, Rocha was accused of pocketing the money. Ciccone said he worried Rocha could be killed.
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| Hugo Montes was a Los Angeles based distributor for LFM |
The task force sent informants posing as gang members to the Montes brothers’ homes with a phone number for Rocha. Ciccone said he figured the house calls would “light a fire under them.”
The ruse had worked, but the rumors shadowing Rocha hadn’t gone away. Police in South Los Angeles arrested a gang member carrying a note smuggled out of prison.
“Perico de Norwalk is a rat,” it read. “Ya sabes he’s got to go.”
Rocha Placed on the Lista
Some of the defendants in the indictment pleaded guilty. Five went to trial. Just before it began in 2019, their lawyers obtained Rocha’s personal recordings from his ex-girlfriend.
Pointing to Rocha’s sneering appraisals of the defendants, the attorneys asked the judge to throw out the case. How could they be guilty if the government’s own witness said they were too stupid, too incompetent, to have accomplished the conspiracy on their own?
The Montes brothers “just seem to be flunkies.”
Montoya was so high on meth, “he’s just agreeing with everything I say.”
But there was also what Rocha said about his handlers. They were liars, he claimed, spreading “straight bulls—” about the Mexican Mafia in books and television specials to scare the public into raising their agencies’ budgets.
Rocha said when he asked why they exaggerated the Mexican Mafia’s reach and sophistication, “their response was, ‘Job security. If we don’t make it out to be more than it is, there’s no reason for our position. We’ll be a regular patrol cop.’”
Steven Kays, a retired Los Angeles County Sheriff’s detective who oversaw Rocha’s undercover role, told LA Times that his old informant was “just blowing smoke.”
“We’re all aware what the mafia does, the control they have,” Kays said. “I’ve worked gangs most of my career. God help us if they ever get their stuff together.”
Failed Trials
Prosecutors did not call Rocha as a witness during the trial. Ciccone said it was the plan all along to keep him and his “serious amount of baggage” off the witness stand and rely instead on the recordings he made for the ATF.
U.S. District Judge Christina Snyder refused to let the defense call Rocha to testify in their own case. The only evidence that mattered, she ruled, was what the defendants said themselves.
That they wanted to sell drugs was beyond dispute. But as an attorney for Montoya — who was on tape declaring, “I’m a mother—ing dope dealer!” — put it to the jury, the defendants could not have pulled off the deal had Rocha not nudged it along. “And Perico was a paid informant, an employee of our government,” said the lawyer, Carlos Iriarte, “being monitored, driven, by the agents.”
The end result of a case that consumed nine years and untold amounts of manpower and money — including the nearly half a million paid to Rocha — was mixed.
One Mexican Mafia member was convicted of buying two pounds of meth and sentenced to 20 years in prison, although he was acquitted of the overarching conspiracy. The jury could not reach a verdict for another defendant. The rest, including Montoya and Landa-Rodriguez, were acquitted.
Rocha’s handlers considered the case a success. “Disrupting the project in and of itself from ever materializing, people don’t know how impactful that was,” Ciccone said.
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| Fugitive La Familia plaza boss who met with ATF informant Rocha |
La Familia has since splintered into smaller bands of traffickers. Moreno Gonzalez was killed — this time for real — in 2014. A DEA agent testified in 2019 that Rosales, the plaza boss with whom Rocha met in 2011, remained at large.
“This was his way of trying to cover himself,” Ciccone said, “so if he thought he’d get screwed by the cops at the end of the day, he’d lay us all out.”
In the end, Rocha got all he’d been promised: a life sentence reduced to time served, a new identity, a place in the federal witness protection program.
It was hard to explain why he made the recordings at all, he said. He couldn’t tell anyone about his double life. Putting it on tape was “like talking to myself.”
He stopped when he came to respect his handlers, he said, who showed him a different way to live. Wherever he is now, Rocha said, he has learned to appreciate “the things I took for granted.”
“It’s nice to smell the air, see the clouds, feel the sun,” he said.
It is a long way from where he’d spent the first four decades of life — jails, prisons, the streets. What he called “the jungle.”
“I always knew in my gut, in my heart — when I was doing that shit, I knew it wasn’t right,” Rocha said. “But when you’re in the jungle with jaguars and monkeys, you’re going to eat the jaguars and the monkeys to survive.”