The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - The Real Story Of La Eme From A NOTORIOUS Mexican Mafia Boss

Episode Date: July 5, 2026

Former Mexican Mafia member René “Boxer” Enriquez tells the real story of La Eme — one of the most feared and powerful prison gangs in American history. In this interview, René breaks down how the Mexican Mafia gained control inside California prisons, how La Eme influenced street gangs across Los Angeles, how prison politics really work, and what it means to become a “made” member of the organization. He also opens up about his childhood, gang life, violence, addiction, betrayal, debriefing, and the long road toward redemption after leaving the life behind. This is a rare inside look at the Mexican Mafia from someone who lived it at the highest level — and survived to tell the truth. Watch until the end to hear René explain why La Eme still holds power today, how prison gangs communicate, and what he wants young people to understand before choosing that path. Topics covered: Mexican Mafia history, La Eme, California prison gangs, Los Angeles street gangs, prison politics, organized crime, gang violence, prison life, René Enriquez, true crime interview, cartel connections, debriefing, redemption, and life after the Mexican Mafia. Go Support René! YouTube: @ReneEnriquezUncensored IG: https://www.instagram.com/reneenriquezuncensored/ Book: https://www.streetgangs.com/store/books/blackhand/ This Episode Is #Sponsored By The Following: HelloFresh! Go to https://hellofresh.com/connect10fm now to Get 10 Free Meals + a Free breakfast for Life! One per box with active subscription. Free meals applied as discount on first box, new subscribers only, varies by plan. Shopify! You don’t need anyone’s approval to make a living. Build your own business with a free trial at https://shopify.com/mitchell Join The Patreon For Bonus Content! https://www.patreon.com/theconnectshow 00:00 Introduction & Mexican Mafia Origins 05:50 Boxer's Early Life & Family Background 09:35 Youth, Gangs, and First Encounters 12:19 Gang Recruitment & Early Violence 16:00 Rise of the Mexican Mafia on the Streets 22:38 This Episode Is Sponsored By HelloFresh 24:25 LA Drive-By Moratorium & Organization's Power 28:00 The Mexican Mafia's Structure & Street Gangs 34:00 Brand, Violence & Expansion 40:20 Infighting & Mafia Politics 49:23 This Episode Is Sponsored By Shopify 50:43 Surviving and Killing in Prison 54:00 Boxer's Initiation into the Mexican Mafia 01:00:00 Mafia Warfare: Prisons in the '80s & '90s 01:08:00 Prison Hit Jobs and The Politics of Violence 01:14:00 Drug Trafficking & Control in Prison 01:19:00 Management, Money & The Mafia Franchise 01:26:00 Cartel Connections & Mexican Mafia Operations 01:33:00 Boxer's Path to Full Member & First Murders 01:41:00 LA County Jail Politics and Mafia Influence 01:50:00 Running Rackets and Ordered Hits in Jail 01:56:00 Evolution to Organized Crime Syndicate 02:03:00 Boxer's Arrest, Life Sentence, and Prison Mentality 02:08:00 Reflection, Therapy & Personal Change 02:14:00 Cooperating, Debriefing, and Testifying 02:22:00 Parole Fights, Political Challenges & Release 02:34:00 Aftermath, Legacy & Life on the Outside 02:39:00 Final Reflections & Channel Promotion Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Stay the fuck out of this. This is a Mexican mafia business. When he's dead, we'll surrender. You've got to be willing to kill and die and go to death row for this. The cops turn the keys. The Mexican Mafia turns the minds. They called the gladiator school because you go there to learn how to kill. Murder is a very simple motivator.

It's urban street terrorism. I don't care what ethnicity are. You speak violence. LA County Jail is probably one of the most violent places you could ever do time at. You could survive there or you can survive anywhere. Very few Mexican Mafia members go through unscathed. Renee, Boxer Enriquez is the most infamous. living member of the Mexican Mafia, the ultra-powerful Latino prison gang, known as La Eme.

René began his career with the mafia while serving time at San Quentin in the early 1980s, and went on to become a member of La Eme's governing body inside the notorious shoe wing at Pelican Bay State Prison. René is one of a handful of MA leaders responsible for expanding the Mexican mafia beyond prison and into the streets by uniting all of the Latino gang members in Southern California and imposing attacks on their neighborhood drug sales. To this day, the Mexican mafia collects tens of millions of dollars a year through this extortion system, which they enforce with unimaginable violence. And that was Renee's legacy. He was at the forefront of this movement. In the early 2000s, while serving a life sentence for murder,

Renée dropped out of the gang and went on to testify in dozens of mafia trials over the next two decades. To this day, he is still a marked man, and we therefore had to blur his face in order to protect his identity. René's got a best-selling autobiography, which I highly recommend you check out, and a successful YouTube page where he dissects what the Mexican mafia is up to today in real time. Ladies and gentlemen, to call this a pleasure would be an understatement. Here to expose the secrets of the most fascinating criminal organization in modern times, it's Renee, Boxer Enriquez, on The Connect with Johnny Mitchell. On the internet are going to see your face blurred.

And for the haters that think I'm just talking to like AI, I mean, look, I can't even believe after reading your book and knowing your story that I'm talking to you right now. You're so soft-spoken and well-mannered. Were you always like this? Not always. I was an asshole at one point in my life. I guess I just refined as I got older.

I get softer and found peace. I think it's really about finding peace. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, you were an asshole for a lot of years, a long time. My wife says I still am. To be fair, I don't know you. So maybe you are an asshole. You have your moments.

But it didn't need to be like this because you're from like a suburban middle-class family, which is not like a lot of Cardales that came from. the gutter that come from the ghetto. What was childhood like? Childhood, I mean, it was idealic from the exterior, right? Lived in Thousand Oaks, in Cerritos, California, little bedroom communities. And my dad was an entrepreneur.

He had a furniture factory in a liquor store and developmental real estate. So he came, he was born in Clarkdale, Arizona. He went to Mexico, was raised there, and came to the United States with that American dream. My mom was from Cadets, Catacus, Mexico. And she came with the American dream. Both had previously been married, so they had separate families. But they married and achieved that dream. So I came from a solid family,

right? But it was fraught. That was fraught with dysfunction by family. One of the things I never admitted in the book, because of shame, was sexual abuse in childhood. And I think that was the catalyst that drove me down the path towards this antisocial behavior. From your father? No. From my brother. Your older brother? My older brother.

Okay. That could explain it quite a bit. Do you think the excesses? Because you're born in 1962, you start to use drugs and really kind of just be a rebel and a fuck up in the mid-70s. Do you think it was the excesses of the late 60s, early 70s and being in California and, you know, just this kind of like liberalism and, you know, just this kind of like liberalism and, you know, hippie culture. Do you think that bled over into into your life? Oh, definitely. This is post-60s free love, turn on, tune in, all that stuff, right? That nihilistic, anti-god culture. It still existed in Cerritos, California. In fact, it was there that I developed that

propensity for getting high. You know, drugs were everywhere, sex was everywhere, partying was everywhere and it was like not a care in the world you know sometimes I'm driving where I live and and I'll be thinking back to a point where I remember a summer where I felt this breeze and I felt this warmth and I felt this freedom and not a care in the world other than when's the next kegger party when's the next next ditching party who's the next girl I'm gonna be with and that that's all it was I mean in that era I think it contributed greatly to my, I guess, my wayward path.

Right. But I get, you know, keg parties and hook it up with girls. I did all that. But then the step to play drive-by shootings, like, it wasn't that big of a leap, right? Like, you went from doing drugs at 14 to by 16, you're, you know, being a prospect in a local Latino street gang. Actually, it began at about 12. My brother had joined a neighboring gang called Artija, Arta, A-R-T-A. And I saw those guys that were dressed nice.

They had their cholo apparel all creased down. And they had this what we call Peggy. It's like magnetism, right? Chicks loved them. Dudes feared them. I was like, oh, man, I want that. And I used to hang out in the garage. My garage at our house in Stratos was the party spot.

Homeboys, home girls, stoners, cheerleaders, whoever, they knew they can go score and party. And I used to hang on the garage and watch all this. So I was allured towards that. But I didn't get in the gang until I was about 12 years old. One instance where my brother was at his girlfriend's house down the street, this is a seedyer part of Artesian, California, in what we call the 190s.

I was walking with two of my brother's homeboys, and they dragged me behind the gas station. And they said, we're going to jump you in the hood. And I was scared. I was just talking about yourself. I said, no, uh-uh, uh-uh. No. And they beat the crap out of me.

Boom, boom, boom. And I remember I was crying. And one of them picked me up. Bobby Gorell picked me up, brush me up, and says, homeboys, don't cry. You're a homeboy now. And I was the homeboy. Wow.

And that was the same brother who sexually abused you. Also jumped you into the gang? No, he wasn't part of the jumping out. Okay. Yeah. It does seem like, because even today, M.A exists, right? Seems like there's a lot of, or, you know, want to be MAs, want to be young Latinos that are

trying to get into gangs. And it doesn't seem driven by economics that much. Like, if you want to make money, you try to get hooked up with a cartel. You don't join a gang that's, you're almost guaranteed to go to prison for and have to stab somebody that's, and you're guaranteed to get caught and probably do the rest of, rest of your life in prison. Like, there's still people willing to go through that, to make that part of their life, right? Like, there was just an MIA.

There's just a big Mexican mafia bust here in L.A. back in April. So do you think people are drawn to that because of the Pague A? Because it's an identity. Like, or is it money? Like, what drives people wanting to join a gang like the Mexican Mafia today? I think there are multiple factors to contribute towards. individuals adopting the ideology of the organization, right?

Because they hail from the streets from a neighborhood. And we were talking off camera a little while ago, we talked about going to the NBA. You wanted to go to the MBA. That's the NBA for gang members. That's the bigs. Like that's arriving, right? In your street gang, you get that reputation.

You gain pega, you gain juice. You put in work for the hood. You're with girls. You sling a little dope. we make money. But then when you go to prison, you have to abandon that gang ideology and adopt the ideology of the organization, which means you're part of what is known of La Casa the cause, right? You can no longer have street complex, that you're part of a bigger organization, right? And you're a foot soldier. There's a hierarchical system. And for most guys,

they surrender their autonomy and adopt that ideology to the point where they're willing to go to death row. A lot of it has to do with indoctrination, kind of like a brainwerectrination, kind of like a brainwashing technique. And it's very effective. I mean, the Mexican mafia has been in existence for about 70 years, maybe more.

And it's cultivated this relationship with streak eggs over decades and decades of time. And there's a lot of mystique behind the organization. It will always exist and it can't be destroyed. Because there'll always be a prison subculture.

And people will always be doing life in prison. So there'll always be a pool of individuals to recruit from. Yeah. But not just anybody can get in. It's like probably one of the elitist prison gangs that there are. Do you think it's as big now as it was back in the 80s and 90s in your heyday? What is the what is the standing now? Like what do you hear? Well, it's grown exponentially. Like in my time, those maybe 70, 80 members. Now there's about 125, 130 members. Let's say 140, just to be a liberal. Just in case we don't know about five or 10 that are.

out there. But it's grown exponentially. It's now a transnational criminal organization. It's not prison-centric. It's gone through this, this horizontal integration, right, where the organization stops focusing on prisons and starts concentrating on the community, right? And that occurred in approximately 1992 when the Mexican mafia stopped drive-bys in Los Angeles, California. I don't know if you remember that. Yeah. This is crazy. So, and to think this existed just 40 years ago in California in L.A. So there was an epidemic

of drive-by shootings innocent people getting hit, right? From all of these independent little shithead gangs around L.A. And tell us how the M.A. step forward and essentially made a pact with

either it was the LAPD or the sheriff's department. You guys basically used your power to put a a squash to that. Yeah, the first concept came out, right? It was myself, Little Mo Ruiz, and Jaco Padilla were talking. And Little Mo Ruiz, we used to joke and call him the brainstem

because it wasn't too intelligent, right? So me and Jaco would joke and says, well, all he has is a brainstem, right? He doesn't have a fully formed brain, right? And he was like, my ace, boom. He was my right hand man. Little Moe was so loyal, good friend of mine. And I don't say, I don't speak about this in a derogatory sense, right? It's just how we joked about him.

But he popped out one day and said, let's stop the drive-bys. After we had seen on the news multiple instances where babies were getting shot and collateral damage, really, in these drive-bys. And the worst perpetrator of this was 18th Street with the predominant gang in Los Angeles. They were committing these acts. And we were taking aback by an old lady's getting shot, civilians getting shot, little kids getting shot. So I took the idea and I pitched to the then acting commissioner, Choucaestro, and Winochet Shriac, Black Dan Borella, all these brothers that are on the streets, about 10 Mexican mafia members of parole. I was in the county jail fighting two murders. And my first idea was I gave it to a senior.

and a senior deputy sheriff in the Los Angeles County Jail who worked in high power. And I told him, I said, hey, what could we do about this? And he says, we can provide a venue and an auditorium, we'll provide security. So I called the brothers up. And I got admonished for it. What are you doing? Talking to the cops about this? Don't talk to the cops.

We're not going to use them. We're going to do it. And we developed it. We started pushing it. Mexican mafia started having meetings where thousands of gang members would show up at these what we call junta's, J-U-N-T-E. It's a meeting in Spanish. And there were a couple of roads.

Can't bring guns. No cameras. None of that stuff, right? And it flourished. That's where the program was initiated. So you're looking at a prison gang, a bunch of knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing thugs. Zero education.

Yeah. That have this status, this mythical status, that are finally in prison, out of prison, and they're interacting with gang members. For the gang members, it's like, my God, that's my rep. That's a real Mexican mafia member speaking to me. So it provided like a status mobility system for gangs, right?

So the concept was, hey, you're going to become part of this. You're going to work with us. You're going to rep your hood. You're going to collect taxes from all illicit activities. And you're going to give us a portion and tribute. So it was a perfect system. It's like the perfect storm because L.A. was fraught. I think there were like 1900 homicides that year in Los Angeles alone.

Yeah. And it began. And now it's like perfected. There's this perfected technique, which is still called the program, where people pay tribute to the organization every month. Okay. And that really worked to curb drive-by shootings. And it's innocent people getting killed, too.

It did in a sense. Obviously, it's not perfect. Perfect. There was a lot of variations to that, a lot of violations of the rule. And then the Mexican mafia used that to make money again. Of course. Like it's all, at the end of the day, it was all self-serving. All self-serving. Because it was cloaked in this morality, right? Hey, we're not for women and kids getting shot, right? But behind that, on the cede, the underbelly of it was like, hey, we could make some dough doing this. Right. And that's really what it became. So even though there was a stopping of the drive-bice, a moratorial. him, gangs are still doing it.

So the Mexican mafia would then greenlight that gang to all the neighboring gangs. A, that gang violated the rule they're on the green line list. So all the neighboring gangs, they would go shooting at them. People were eliminated. And the Mexican mafia would then a rep would come forward from those gangs. How do we stop this? How do we get off of this? Pay us 20K.

Pay us 5K or give us two pounds and 10 guns or whatever. Right. And really it started off minuscule. It started off with a pittance. $500 here, $200 there. But cumulatively, it's a lot of money. And today it's a lot of money. It's a powerhouse.

So tell us about the program. The program is this. The program is double-ended, right? The first one is a taxation of gang territories, right? And we don't use that phrase because it's so abrasive. Like, we're going to tax you. Nobody likes to be taxed. Nobody likes taxes.

It's not just the tax paying America. Gang members don't like it either. So it's like a tribute. Like you're going to take care of these brothers. You know, if you could show some love, show some love. And they use that euphemism, right? Piso. They call it in Mexico.

It's like a Piso. It's a quota. Yeah, yeah. It's, it's like a regalo, like a gift, right? Yeah. We call a regalo or a fairia. Feria. But they give X amount every month to the local representative for the gang, which is a member of that gang.

And then he pays up to the secretary or the crew chief. And that individual then pays the Mexican mafia member. Okay. So is the crew chief a part of the Mexican mafia? Or are they all just associates until it gets to the boss who's probably sitting in prison in the shoe? I think one of the biggest misconceptions there are about the Mexican mafia is. that the Mexican mafia is just in prison. The gangs that you deal with are the infrastructure

of the Mexican mafia. So all those people, they're not Mexican mafia members. You've got to be a maid guy to say you're a Karnan. A Karnan is a maid guy. But without this infrastructure, without the gangs to infectuate edicts and the desires of the organization, the organization doesn't exist.

So the real power is not the Cardanles and the made guys. It's the street gangs. They're the program. Right, right. That's what is effectively the Serrainos is a collection of all of these Southern California street gangs that pay an unreglado to, you know, the maid guys who are the Mexican mafia. And that's that elite group. That's why you call yourselves the NBA of gangs.

Okay. So are there actual maid guys, MA official Carnales, on the street today? Yeah, there are members in Los Angeles, California, in Mexico. There are a variety of different places. But if there's only 150 total, how many could there be on the street? About five. About five. So these guys are like real bosses, like millionaires.

No, I wouldn't say that. There's an elite group of Cardinals in the organization that make real money. But millionaires, you look at the organization, cubulatively, the finances generally, generated, you got guys taking down $50,000 at a pop and $25,000 at a pop. They have ties with cartels. You have one Mexican mafia member in Mexico, Bala from Pomona dosi. He's running Mexico. And he runs with the cartels.

And another thing, people think that the Mexican mafia is just these members, these few members, right? And it's something I pointed out earlier in the interview where everybody that paroles from prison, and that has illegal status that doesn't have citizenship in the United States. It's deported back to the country of origin, and typically that's Mexico. So everybody paroling for the Department of Corrections and the federal BOP are deported from Mexico, and who picks them up as soon as they get off the bus, Mexican Mafia. So they have crews of individuals working for different cartels in different plazas. And in turn, they send product to California, Arizona, different states in the United States.

So you have very powerful Mexican mafia members. In Mexico, you have very powerful Mexican mafia members in California as well. And what you guys have done, the way that this small group of elite gang leaders is able to get all of these disparate street gangs to pay a quota every month from their drug sales, their robberies, extortion, prostitution, whatever they're doing, ultimately is the brand that you. you've built, right? Not the brand like the A-B, but like you're mystique. You're, your, yeah, I call it a brand. Like you're the Pepsi Cola of gangs. But that, ultimately, that's from how violent you guys were. It's based on that. And you hit on something, a key point, right? Contemporary marketing. Marketing. Marketing, right? What is, what is the number one thing in a brand, brand recognition? That's right. What is the brand recognition for the Mexican mafia? It's a black hand.

what you had on your chest? The one I had on my chest. The iconic one that everybody Googles and everybody uses in their YouTube. Every news media has used it. We'll probably use it in this episode. So it's brand recognition. And what is the next step?

It is adaptability to the market. When the Mexican mafia was in the shoot, adapted. It created communication methods. It utilized an infrastructure. It created a mess of ad hoc representatives in general prison population yards to represent the maid members

who were slammed down in complete isolation. And then once they got released from the shoe, it was the use of smart technology, conference calls, spoofing apps, iPhones. So the Mexican mafia is evolving, right? It's evolving and it's becoming a true criminal syndicate. It is a true criminal syndicate. But there are some drawbacks to the organization as well,

which are drug use, infighting, no centralized leadership. you have a group of guys that are gang members, right? And they go to prison for, first they get kicked out of the houses, right? Let's say they get kicked out of the house. They get kicked out of schools for violating their rules. Then they get kicked out of the community for breaking their rules. And then they go to prison and they get into this prison setting

and they go to the shoe for violating their rules. Then all of a sudden, they get sponsored into the organization, they make their bones, and they're inducted into the mob. And they're given these rules that they're going to follow. How is it possible for a person that's been a rule breaker in their entire life

to follow this rule? So there's all kinds of distortion of the rules. Yeah. It was always like that. It's always been and always will be. Imposition of sanction for rule violation is really dependent on your socio-political status within the organization.

So if you've got a palabra, you can break any rule you want. Yeah, but if you don't have juice, then you're going to get whacked. Today's episode is brought to you by Hello Fresh. You guys, I podcast once a day, sometimes two times in a day. This is six or seven hours of being in the studio. After I'm done, I'm exhausted. I stumble home to my kitchen with no food in it.

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HelloFresh, do it up. I've been using HelloFresh for years, getting my meals delivered. It saved me countless hours of not having to go to the grocery store or cook. Go to Hellofresh.com slash connect10 FM now to get 10 free meals plus check it out, drum roll, free breakfast, free gratis for life. Free breakfast for the rest of your life just by going to hellofresh.com slash connect 10 FM. That's hellofresh.com slash connect one zero FM to get 10 free meals plus free breakfast, faux life. One per box with active subscription, free meals applied as discount on first box, new subscribers only varies by plan. You guys were not afraid to kill a rival or one of your own guys in front of the cops.

I mean, tell the story about the stabbing that you committed in the visiting room at L.A. County Jail. That was Salvador Monbronosro, who was a boss. He was like a real big-time MA guy. Yeah, there's a galitarian. It's a galitarian in the organization, right? Not anymore. There's a commission now. It's called a mess.

right, a ruling group of individuals who push policy and de-conflict a bunch of stuff. But no one man has complete authority over another Mexican mafia member. One can tell another car not, hey, you're gonna do this, or you're gonna suffer for it. That doesn't happen.

But too many eagles involved in the organization for that. But in the county jail while I was there, fighting my two homicides, there was a political campaign against Daniel Guate Grejeda, a despised member of the organization because he was such a horrible politicker. And we call politic and it's like campaigning to get somebody eliminated. He had done this multiple, multiple times to multiple made members and had him eliminated. Well, during this process, he got stabbed by a guy named after Henry Carlos, Indio. I ended up stabbing Indio at a later date.

But Guate felt that somehow Man Buenos Aires was behind his stabbing. And he knew he was political opposition. So he was housed with Joe Morgan. Joe Morgan, who everybody calls Peg Legg. We never called him that. He was housed with him in 2904. It was an extreme isolation unit in Lely County jail. And he started whispering in Joe's ear,

Amon's talking bad about you, Mon's politicking on you. The guy we're going to eventually stab in the attorney room. visiting room. So he gets to Joe's ear, and for some reason, Joe loved this guy. This guy could do no wrong. He just blind loyalty to Quate Grejeda. So he gives him the green light. Mon's got to go. And I don't find out about it until about a month later, when they're actually going to go try to hit Mon in the visiting room. There's a failed attempt. Benjamin Toppa Peters takes out a handcuff key and a shank to the visiting room because you're

your handcuffed during their visits. I got to stop here right there. So you guys are shackled and you're able to get out of your shackles with a handcuff key. How do you get the handcuff key? How does that work? I had a handcuff key. I had axel blades. I had a 22.

A 22 gun? Yeah, zip gun. In the LA County Jail. Yeah, we tried to kill somebody with it. Okay. And a handcuff key is you could just procure that from the street. and if you fiddle enough with the cuffs, you'll be able to get them off.

Is that it? Legit, Hank, you just haven't smuggled into the county jail. We'd have people turn themselves in, come to the visiting room with alcohol in their breath, and process to a visit. Hell, officer, how are you doing? Just so they smell it, right? Oh, you're under arrest.

And they take them right to booking front. Little do they know, they're packed. Their rectums are filled with contraband. Right. And we have somebody waiting in there, We know who they are, when they're coming, when they get arrested, or somebody's going to turn themselves in for a traffic violation or whatever. And we had trustees that worked down there.

And we tell them, soon as you see that guy, get that and bring it to us. So we got stilettos. I had six rounds to a long-range rim fire 22, the firing mechanism and the barrel, which we tried to eliminate a Mexican mafia member with. But during this process for eliminating Mon, killing Mon, they try. Benjamin Peters tries. He tries to take off the handcuff key,

but his little short arms won't reach the keyhole, right? And he has a real key. He's a good knife, and he doesn't do it. So then he comes to me and says, hey, can we make this happen? Yeah, I can make it happen. I'm going to have my attorney, when he comes to sees me,

pull out these guys as material witnesses. I'm going to be in that attorney room. And my buddy, Benjamin, Temple Peters who's now deceased, is going to be the participant with me, right? And they're going to be chained up to the thing. I'm going to be chained up, but we have handcuffed keys.

He doesn't. And we do it. We do it. We go in there and we really put a hurting to him. Okay. You guys would, in order to get close to a guy, a target,

because again, you guys got to remember, you guys are in isolation. Like, you're already, like, known, validated gang members. you're not on the main line most of the time. So the way that you're able to get targets physically next to you is by having your lawyer subpoena them as a witness for your case. And therefore, they have to let that person into like a visiting room or an attorney room.

Is that how you're able to do it? Yeah, once we get them in the county jail through subpoena, the power subpoena, right? That's fascinating. We pull guys down from prison. Yeah. And we have them there. And guys like to come down and make money because the county jail is a money-making factory, right? Yeah, we're about to talk about that.

And so we pull him down there. And if they got to go, they got to go. That's one of the reasons we use it. You're like, okay, that guy's got to go. Bring him down here. We'll whack him when he's here. Right. Okay, so you get Boyle Roestrel into the attorney room with you.

Your attorney's there present. Is a guard in the room? Yeah, there's a couple of them. you guys don't even you guys don't think like oh i could get in trouble for this no it's death row attitude right right that's one of the things you have to have that's one of the things that was taught to me says you got to be willing to kill and die and go to death row for this and that's okay let's do it in fact that was my desire to go to death row i was fighting the death penalty when i was fighting my murders because it was called the special circumstances case

and um so i didn't care i already thought i was going to death row. Like, yeah, why not? And the one thing, because I had such low self-esteem, that was that facade, right? Right. This is the false bravado.

And I would display it whenever I could, however I could. And that was a way to display it, right? So yeah, they bring this guy in, and we already had it coordinated. He's going to uncuff first and stab the guy. So I'm in the booth, and I remember

sitting, the stand of these booths. private attorney booths. They're all plexiglass. And they have these rolls with benches in them. That's where the other people sit, signed papers. They're in the front row. The booths, they're just benches and there's just

simple partition in front of them. You can reach over and touch your attorney, whatever. I'm in the private booth. And next to me is a guy named Mike Berman. He's an Israeli guy. His uncle worked for Lowell Bergman for 60 minutes. That was his uncle. And his other

uncle worked for the embassy. It was a big shot in the embassy, right, for Israel. And I remember Mike being there, a good friend of ours. And he sees me, I slip off my shoe. And he's watching me. Because the partition is only blinded out from the side. The rest is all plexiclass. You can look right through. And he's as close to me as you are. And he's watching me. And his attorney's just chatting along, not realizing what's happening. And I slip off my shoe and I pull out a big old shank. And he looks at his eyes, it's got like 50 cent pieces. So it's okay. And he sees me take off my hand cuff and my leg iron. He's like, oh, my God, something's going to happen.

You could see in his face, this trepidation, this sheer terror, right? And I told him, it's cool. And I'm just looking at him, and I hear, hey, hey. And I know it started. So I jump up, I didn't even put up my shoe, and I'm slipping around a corner because it's all tile, anolium tile. And I finally get to the row, and Mon already has Topo on the ground. Maan's already dominating Topo.

Maan was a martial artist guy, and somehow Topo had only stabbed him once. Stad them in the head and the knife bent, right? So I come up behind Maan and I started just pounding all the way to the hill. Overhand swings with a knife that's about that big, about two inches wide, and it's just hitting them. I feel like, ooh, ooh, I could hear it, the grunting.

Where are you hitting them? Chest, side, stomach, back, buttocks everywhere. And I'm just going to town. And he turns around and does some crazy kung fu kick. And just lays one in my face. Like, boom. And I saw stars. So I know I got to incapacitate this guy immediately, right?

Even though he's chained up, he's fighting. He has thopo on the ground. He's on top of him, kneeling on him, and kind of kicking back with his foot. So I just go on top of him. I take him down and I have his whole side opened up. His whole side's opened up and I just start opening up on him. Just rooting into him, just boom, boom. And then the attorney room floods with cops.

415. 415 means disturbance, right? And you hear it, bing, bing, the alarm going off 415 in attorney room. And they start piling in like 50 cops. And there was a female officer. her. McDuffie, her name was. Blonde, beautiful, blue eyes.

Gorgeous. Like, gorgeous. Yeah. And she was cool with us, right? And she comes in and she starts hitting me in head. Her and a guy named Zimmerman. Zimmerman's kicking me. He's kicking me.

And those are the two in it, right? McDuffie and Zimmerman. Zimmerman's kicking me, and she has this little leather book. You ever see when you get pulled over and a copos out of his leather book to write your ticket? She has that. She's hit me in the head. with the corner of it. And it's hurting me.

So I stand up and I tell me, hey, leave us alone. It's none of your business. I don't say it that calmly. Obviously, I'm dropping the F-file. I'm like, stay the fuck out of this. This is a Mexican mafia business. When he's dead, we'll surrender. And this spring, denim gets a softer, lighter update.

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you would tell the cops, look, we're not here to fuck with you. Just let us kill this guy and then we'll surrender. It's not a big deal. deal. It's just business. It's just business, right? And we're telling them that, like, this is not, this is not of all of you. But they're being heroic. In fact,

McDuffie, and I think that's her name McDuffey and Zimmerman freaking heroes. They saved that guy. So you think you would have killed him? Oh, I know he would have. I thought he was dead already. That's the only reason I stopped. Because Topo was incapacitated on the ground. All I heard from Topo was this weird

noise he was making. because every time I would come down on Mon, it was the full weight. And Mom was on top of him. So I guess all the weight was going on Toppo. Right. Benjamin, right? And he was making this noise like, eh,

like a duck. If it wasn't so serious, I would have laughed. And so we keep doing this. We keep doing this. And then Zimmerman kicks me a good one. And I get up and I brandish a knife towards him. I just don't fucking get.

get involved. We'll be done here. Yeah. And McDuffie's screaming, you're killing them. Stop. Stop. Lay down. Get down.

And I just go right back to it. At about this time, I have, I'm dredged in blood. I got blood in my mouth. I could smell the blood that wet coppery, wet penny smell. Pennies. Yeah, it's just got a rank odor. It's distinct, right? So we're saturated.

The floor is all smeared up with blood. And he's down already. He's not fighting anymore. and he could hear him yelling, get him off of me, please, get him off of me. And then I give him a couple more, boom, boom, boom, and he just goes, the kind of limp. And I said, okay, he's done.

So I stand up. Topos says, okay, he's dead. Like something of that nature, I'm paraphrasing, right? He's dead. And I'd say, okay, I stand up, I look at them, and I throw the knife, and they vamp on me. Boom! They converge on me and they throw me to the ground and Zimmerman puts me in cups.

And then when I'm cuffed, I'm laying prone on my stomach. He socks me in the eye. He socks me in the eye and says, you're a fucking coward. And I just got him rage. I remember, like, how fucking dare you put your hands on me, motherfucker? And I told him, I said, I'm going to kill you. I said, you just fucked up, motherfucker. And I'm pumped.

Like, the adrenaline's going. We just whack this guy And this cop has the audacity to sock me the eye And call me a coward So they gotta take us to the hospital Right? They take this guy They airlift him out And they take him to the

Gim surgery, all that stuff, right? But they got to take us to medical Because we're covered in blood During the process, I stabbed Benny Peters in the hand Who's Benny Peters? The guy who was my co-defendant in this case Topol Right, topal

I stab him in the hand And they take us to the hospital and they're checking us out, they strip us out. And I see him right there. I said, you're fucking through. I said, you just fucked up. I said, you don't realize it, yes,

but you're going to realize it real quick. And you can see now he's thinking like, oh, shit. I just socked up a main mob guy who was handcuffed. And a captain comes out. The captain comes out, and it's talking to Topol,

and the captain comes to be saved. Renee, calm down. It's over. That's it. He's dead. You guys did your thing. It's over. Please don't talk.

my officer, he fucking socked me in the eye. Excuse my language. Please. Please more? Please more. Please more. Please, sir, I may have another. So I tell him, no, this dude socked me in the eye and called me a coward.

I says, I'm going to have him killed. I tell the captain this. You see the captain, he's like shook up. He shook up. The cops don't get threats. We don't target cops. We don't target cops, ever. But he put his hands on me, right?

and I'm doing mafia business. And I told him, said, none to do with you, bro. Let me kill this guy and I'll surrender. And he insisted upon being a hero, which I'm thankful for. Mons survived. He saved Mons life, literally.

And so the captain goes back over there and he's huddling with the lieutenant and the sergeant and Topo. So all of a sudden they bring Topo to me. Topos all stitched up. We're in the firmery. And I'm still, I'm still sweating. drip it's wet and we're still covered in blood and uh uh topos says hey be cool calm down it's over

he's dead he's dead it's over and i'm telling him about the cop he's not give him a pass give him a pass it's no biggie you know it's no biggie so i looked at the captain and and i begrudgingly the i tell him not to worry about it wow and then they took us and they isolated us we ended up in court the next day they ran us that quick Yeah. We're at court the next day. There's some footage somewhere that shows us going into court for that attempt to murder. Mon survived.

That's right. Mon survived. So you guys, the way that you treated authority when you were in prison was almost like you were equals. It was like we are mobsters. This is what we do. We're not going to fuck with you guys. And it was that, you know, most people go in and they're completely, even tough guys are completely, are completely subservient to this, you know, the authority of the state, right?

The guards and the judges and the laws. You guys had no regard for that. And that's probably what gave you the most power. It was a complete disregard for your own lives. Because you're like, yeah, I'll kill this guy in front of the cops and I'll go to death row. It means the end of your life. But it's like, well, that's all right. That's what I do.

That's where it was. See, you got to understand that the cops run the prison. They control the prison. We control the prisoners. They don't control the prisoners. We control the prisoners. And that's the one thing that they understood. Every prison in the state of California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, the BOP understands that the organization controls the prisoners.

They turn the keys. The Mexican mafia turns the minds. And that's the power of the organization. Because if simply as saying, kill that guy, Sudanios and South Siders will go kill that guy at the request of a Mexican mafia member. They would do the same thing to cops if it was required by the Mexican mafia. But you guys try not to do that? After business.

Of course. In fact, the Asker Brown Accord with the Mexican Mafia, Arian Brotherhood, Black Gorilla family, and the Northwest of the Familia is part of a bigger agreement to reduce staff assaults. And in the California Department of Corrections of Rehabilitation. Huge settlement where all the Mexican mafia and all prison gang members were released to the general prison population yards. So you negotiated that, you meaning the top guys at La Mesa and the other heads of the biggest gangs negotiated that deal with the California prison authorities? No. But we were in the first peace talks. The first peace talks occurred in 2000 after the biggest riot in the history of California.

At Pelican Bay. At Pelican Bay State Prison. Everybody's seen that footage. Well, the guy gets his brains blown out. Yeah, myself, Jacopadilla, and Danny Pina, all Mexican mafia members, when sat before the warden, Pelican Bay State Prison, Warden Robert Ayer's, who I recently had a conversation with Brian Perry, the Director of Corrections, assistant director of corrections, who I recently had dinner with,

and Senator Tom Hayden's chief of staff, and I believe it was George Palankos, chief of staff. We had negotiations with these people that we could bring a piece of court throughout the state of California. Just release our leaders from the shoe. Let us go. Exactly. Let us go a program with the general population. Exactly.

But during this process, we told them, we can't do this unless you allow us to speak to every prisoner in Pelican Bay State Prison. And they went for it. They let us walk around the entire prison. You see groups of three BGF members, groups of three AB members, groups of three Mexican Mafia members going to each pod in the shoe. The only time in history it's been done. And you sons of bitches, of course, use that time to not negotiate peace to give murder orders to sell drugs. Yes. We were passing dope.

In fact, in that process, the same guy, Daniel Grejeda, that pariah and the organization, had to go. We had a couple of targets. We finally narrowed down where the infighting was come from, from two individuals, from Daniel Grejera, Kuate, from Larana, and Angel Valencia,

stumped from Sangra. These two Mexican mafia members were creating so much dissension within the organization. They created the division within the organization. So we, myself and Danny Peña, discussed killing one of those individuals on the table in front of the senator,

the warden, and the director corrections. So we're going to have this. You have to pull this guy out today during this negotiation. He's a key component, but our whole objective was to kill him. It was Jacopadilla who got scared. You could see the terror in his eyes.

Oh, my God, no. We'll never get out of the hole. And it's, bro, this is a business we got to do. We're never got a chance to eliminate this guy. We're in shoe forever. Let's kill him now. we have a chance to kill him right now let's do it he's a cancer and jaco like he bitched out of it just straight bitched out of it danny pinia was a gamer danni bina dany boy from hazard he was a gamer like he said that let's do it we'll get around the top of the table we'll whack this guy uh but yeah we were using that time the past messages putting people on the hit list deconflicting a bunch of stuff talk about the the system called where you choose to represent yourself what was what What is the thing that you guys used, say you were in L.A. County Jail, right?

You were fighting death penalty cases, bodies in the early 90s. What was the system you used? Like, if you wanted to have a guy killed and he was in Corker in state prison, how would you get that guy down to L.A. County Jail? Explain that whole system that you guys, the legal loophole that you guys manipulated to obviously run your rackets, but also get close to a target to stab him and kill him. So they have a process called subpoena deuceus take them. And you can subpoena anybody or any record down to court as part of your defense.

And we would utilize that. You could represent yourself an appropriate persona, which means you can represent yourself. Because everybody has the right to any legal representation they can afford. They can afford it. It'll be appointed to you. And if you don't want that, you can represent yourself. But there's an old saying, only a fool has himself for a client. And I had myself for a client.

I represented myself in the stabbing case that I caught in the courthouse. I've caught a stabbing in the courthouse as well. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, it was Henry Carlos. Henry Carlos had previously stabbed Daniel Grejeda, and it did ripally so. I got to put that caveat out there right now. What Henry Carlos did in stabbing Daniel Grejada was absolutely correct. Guata Grosda had threatened him, sent him a kite, and told him that

that the sky was going to fall on him. Because he wasn't doing what Guata was asking. Like Guante had the belief that he was running the county jail. Because of his association with Joe Morgan, he believed that Joe Morgan gave him the permission to be the boss of bosses in the county jail. And the Mexican mafia doesn't have that. And Joe Morgan didn't have that authority.

No Mexican mafia member does. So Guate was functioning under the belief that he was the boss and was threatening brothers. and Indio Carlos took action, stabbed him in the shower. Indio's only mistake, Henry Carlos' only mistake, was that he didn't kill him when he had the chance. He had Guata Grada on the ground, naked in the shower, stabbing him repeatedly, but let him up.

And that's technically a violation, right? No, I mean... Because doesn't that show cowardice? Henry was no coward. Okay. Henry was no coward. So why did you have to feel like you had to stab him? Because the brothers asked me to.

Black Dan Borella and the brother's there at the time. told me, yeah, let's get this done. He's got to go. Quatt had started the campaign against him saying that Henry Carlos was stocking him in the law library that was going to stab him again. Another political ploy, right? So I take on the mission and they asked me to take

Aryan Brotherhood John Stinson on the hit. But somehow I knew, in my immature political mind, I knew that if I did that, I wouldn't survive it politically. Because here I'm bringing an outsider. which may have been viewed okay, but I wasn't going to take that risk, because Guata was already having a bad taste in everybody's mouth. So I excluded John from the hit. I subpoenaed Henry that day, and I went that day to court,

and we're on the 13th floor at the criminal courts building in Los Angeles, California. And as soon as they brought him in the tank, I already had a knife. I had like a six-inch knife, metal shank. They walk him into the tank, and I start stabbing. I'm stabbing like 30 times. And it wasn't until they pulled out a gun. I want him said, get the gun, pull out the gun. That's what I stopped.

I ran to the toilet and I threw it away. Much to his credit, I had Henry Carlos pinned on the benches, and I was stabbing him. And much to his credit, as soon as I went and flushed the knife, he stood up and looked at me and said, you ain't done shit. I walked out of there.

I gave that man credit. He was gangster. Henry Carlos is a gangster. You got to give it to him, because he would stood the storm. A lot of Mexican mafia members would have checked in, went PC and cooperated after that. He didn't. He weathered it.

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with Shopify nothing stands between your idea and a real business. So go make it one. Start your free trial today at Shopify.com slash Mitchell. That's Shopify.com slash Mitchell for a fully free trial. Shopify.com slash Mitchell. Explain to people why it's so difficult to kill somebody with a six-inch knife. Because you stabbed a lot more people than you actually killed. Sure. Sure. I mean, when we say whack, it just means to try to kill them, right?

Right. But then there's whacking and taking them out, right? Right. Yeah, I stabbed quite a few people during my career as a Mexican mafia member. But it's so difficult because the weapons are inferior. Right. You don't have bowing knives. You don't have a ginsu.

You don't have a ginsu and you don't have butcher knives. You have these roughly hewn metal pieces that are sharpened on the floor, and you have a fraction of time to effectuate this hit, right? You're doing a hit, and they're on you. So that's in the county jail. In the state, they have lethal coverage. They have a Ruger 223, and they shoot you with it, right? The shots are fired for effect.

Don't blow your brains off. They've done it multiple times. So it's not through lack of effort or desire that these people survive. Maybe the Lord's with them if you're religious or it just isn't their time. A lot of people survive these sins. A lot don't. And the last two years have been 108 murders in the state of California. That's the Department of Corrections.

Inmate on inmate homicides. So people do die. That's in the modern day. That's in modern day. Like 108 murders in two years and in a small population. Yeah. That's huge. That's huge.

Okay. So going back to how you first made your bones and became, you know, a full carnal, when was the first time you actually killed somebody? Was that on the streets or in prison? It's on the streets. Okay. All right. So I want to back up a little bit and talk about how you actually became a full, fully made member. How did you first catch a body, go to prison, and then start getting groomed by the MA?

So I went to a county jail, went for robberies, and I just started learning about what a Sudaniel was. Because I wanted to stab some rival gang members in the county jail. Those guys had shot out of my house. And I saw one of them, and I told somebody, I want to whack that dude. Give me a knife. And they told me, now you can't do that, dude. So what do you mean I can't do it? He shot out of my house.

It's my enemy. They told me, no, you can't. You know, you're a Sureno now. You're part of what, you're part of the causa, right? I said, what is that? So, well, there's these guys downstairs. Those guys are the bosses. And that's when I first introduction to the Mexican mafia, right?

And it's in LA County Jail? Okay. L.A. County Jail. And even then, they were talked about and hushed undertones and whispers. It wasn't like this overt thing like today. Like, they're on social media. You know, Mexican Mopias on social media. Go figure, right?

Yeah. And, but back then it was like really a secretive thing. The organization really was a secret criminal organization. But they still controlled everything behind the scenes. And that was my first introduction towards it. Then I went to Solidad State Prison after Processing to Chino. And I met Blackdam Barlow. He was in Ad Seg.

I was in Ad Seg as well. And he sent me a note and some Camel Cigarettes and a greeting card and wrote me a note. And I was like, wow, a Mexican mafia member really wrote me a note. I'd only heard about these guys. Myth. They were like mythical, you know, figures to us. And I finally get to San Quentin, and I actually meet the mobsters, right? And I have no aspirations of being a mobster.

I don't see myself as that at all. I had never done a hit before at all. So I go to San Quin, they start having me get knives for them. And they're on the mainline in San Quint. They're in North Block, what was called Max B. This is like prior, they had shoe, which is called Max A. But they had different terminology for it back at the time. There's like two levels of being in the hole.

A max B is like kind of freedom. They could have contact visits. They got dope. They lived in a block that was housed with general population, just separate tiers. And I happened to be a general population inmate working in North Block. And I would see them on a regular basis. So there's the first time I met Benjamin Peters,

the guy I would eventually stab Mambonostro is. And the guy I would eventually do a murder for it. But I meet him there, and I noticed that my status on the yard just skyrockets, because I'm taking the dry cleaning down to the dry cleaners. I'm getting all the food from the kitchen for them. I'm getting them a cartons of cigarettes. Like, everybody's doing these things for them, and they're giving it to me to take to them.

And I become a camarader organization. They make me like a little brother. I'm not a maid guy, but Benjamin Peters, you should talk to me one day. He said, yeah, you're a little brother. You're my little brother. And he called me that the first time. And I felt like this great sense of pride that a Mexican mafia member is calling me a little brother. So I leave from there after doing a bunch of favors for them.

And I get to DBI, to a vocational institution. They call it the gladiator school. And that's where the Mexican mafia started. That's where it started. Back in 50s. Back in 1956 or 57, depending on whose version. you believe. But that's what originated. Right there at DBA. They called the Gladiator School

because you go there to learn how to kill. So first down the yard, I walk out to the yard and a guy named Roy Bori Rivas walks up to me and says, hey, boxer. I said, what's up? And he says, the Cardinals want you to do a favor.

That means a favor, right? And to us, that means you're going to whack somebody. And then at this period in time, Mexican mafia members were on the general population with us. There were two Mexican mafia members there. And I says, yeah, sure. So he gives me a knife, big old chrome rod.

You ever see a paint roller? Yeah. Oh, the chrome? This is all straightened out, all sharpened up to a nice big point. And it's got a T-shirt handle on the end. And I tuck it in my shirt. He says, that guy right there on the Hamo Court. His name's Angel from Santa Monica.

He says, whack him. He says, this guy's going with you. And the other guy just happens to be Francisco, Francisco Martinez, puppet from 18th Street. all these people I'm interacting with, we would all become Mexican mafia members later on. Puppet is going to be a huge figure in the organization, got RICOed a few times.

Roybo Rivas became kind of like a zodiac killer for the mafia over Mexico. And everybody else that we punctured with their, we were just camaradas at this time. We're doing favors for the organization. So they asked me this, and I says, okay, let's go. So he says, here's puppet. Puppet's going to grab them, you stab them.

So we walked straight over there. We didn't hesitate, didn't wait. I said, let's go do it, man. Because I hated to have the knife and have to wait. And I just wanted to walk straight towards them and get it done. That's how I've done all my hits. Because it's that nervous period of waiting and the anticipation, the anxiety. In fact, I wouldn't smoke cigarettes because my hands shook so much when I went to go do hits.

It wasn't until after that's what I had my cigarette. So me and Puppet walked to this guy. and first or second handball court, and puppet just bear hugs him. And I just start nailing it. Over and over. And the stomach? Stomach, torso, everywhere his arms aren't.

And then the handle slides up to the hilt of the knife. It was loose. So I got him maybe 10, 15 times. The guy walks, boom, falls down. They come pick him up. And it's over. I throw the knife. I take off.

Got away with a hit. That was the first time I had done a hit for the organization. And even then, And I didn't have aspirations. Like, oh, man, I'm on a fast tracker. I didn't even have that thought. I was just rep in the hood. Like, my neighborhood is Artizia.

And we had an older homeboy named Wiro Shryak, who was a Mexican mafia member. And what we do on that year reflects on him. So I was just wrapping the hood. That's all I was doing. Visit BetMDM casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager.

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Right. What was Folsom like back in the 80s? It was a big house. This is back when prison was prison. Well, you could do a head, you can whack somebody, you can get away with it. And they wouldn't tell on you. Now they have this thing called 1030s, right? Confidential memorandums.

People write notes or they tell the cops. And they're considered reliable confidential sources. That didn't occur back then. It was like, this was when the joint was the joint. I'm certain they had informants, but it wasn't as prolific as today. Because they're everywhere now. And I get to Polsom State Prison

and it's a time of war between the blacks and the Mexican Mafia. So I get there, the first day I get there was some guy stab me in the cheek. A Norteño just got released from the hole

and we're going to Chowhall and he gets a fork out of the Chowhall. They were giving us real cutlery, right? And he stabs me with it and we fight and they fire two rounds from the Rueger to 23

the mini 14, and they take me into the infirmary, and they take this guy to the hole. And there was nothing about a skin wound, a flesh wound, but it bled profusely. So they take me there, and they take me to the hole because I'm going to pick them up with the soul. And it's then that I realized, because I thought I did something wrong.

I said, man, they whack me. The first day I get an impulse, and what the hell did I do? And it wasn't until I went back to the hole that I saw the guy in a holding cage, holding a red headband, calling me, who was calling me a scrap, right? And I realized, oh, he's a buster.

He's a Norteño. That's why he stabbed me. Because there's a rivalry between the NF and the Mexican Mafia. So he got me. He did what he was supposed to do. Kudos to him, right? He got off before anybody found out he was NF or N.F. or Norte, and he stabbed me.

So I go back there. I go to the shoe for 10 days. They kick me out to the mainland. And who do I end up in the cell with? My home boy, Sammy Bialva. Sammy Vialba is a shot caller for the block. And he's running the whole building for the Mexican mafia. He wasn't a made guy yet.

He would become a big guy later. And he would get eliminated later. But I'm in the cell with him. And we're talking. It's great. It's great. I know the guy, he grew up with my brother. He's an older homeboy.

And he says, hey, we're going to get off as soon as we can. We're going to get off on the blacks. And he pulls out this massive, massive knife. And he says, I'm going to get you one. I said, okay, let's go. Later that night, maybe two nights later when we're housed together, they come and take him to the home for whatever. They got some confidential information. And he leaves me with a knife. And I get a kite from downstairs, hey, you're ready to go? They're doing control feeding at the time, right? That means They let out one tier of the entire tier, mixed races at the time.

So we're doing controlled showers after feeding. They're going to do controlled showers tonight. You got the knife. Kill your neighbor. I said, okay. And it says, this guy's going with you. This guy named Weasel from Venice. And they sent him a knife.

So I'm waiting. And I hear, you can hear the lock. When the bar, they throw the bar that locks the door from opening, it prevents the doors from opening. old school prison tier. You ever see them when they put a key in thing and they pull that bar? That's what they do.

Boom, boom! I hear it. But then they individually come by and key the doors. They let out about five guys in a pop. And I'm hearing this. I'm hearing the traffic. I'm hearing the movement

and my heart's pumping. And I remember I rolled my knife up. I'm a pair of shower shoes and boxers. So I rolled my knife up and my towel and I have this little bison, Mexican national, little chubby guy. He's looking at me and he's scared of death.

I told, don't you preoccupies. Nothing will be going to happen. And I told him, stay here. I'm sure you believe that. I just don't stay here. I told him, I'm going to do something right now. And he's like, okay, he got to the back of the cell.

He was like cowering back there. He was scared of death, and I get it, right? So the cop comes, opens my door and says, shower. He steps aside, and I just open the towel up, step out the cell. And the guy, my target, is standing right there next to me. And I hit him. Boom, right in the back of the neck. Woof, all the way in.

And then feel it go. Oh, it went all the way in. Yeah, it sunk. It went down, though. It went down towards his chest cavity, right? There was an overhand hit. And then there was another black dude right there with a broob. And he was a porter, what we would call it, a tear tin, or like a janitor, right?

That was his job. He's looking. I mean, I hit him, too. But it just grazed him because it started the stampede. the whole tier you ever hear a stampede it sounded like your feet running down the tier right

so I'm chasing after people trying to stab them because it's now just anything black I'm stabbing right right and they start firing boom boom and I can feel

the percussion from the round with his body like it's a live round live rounds live rounds live rounds two 23 and this is inside

the block yeah this is not outside on the yard This is in the building. In the building. And then, and then, so I figured I got him. I run maybe 10 more, 20 more feet trying to chase this guy, but they're already shooting rounds at us. So I tossed the knife over the tier. I'm on the third tier.

These are five tiers, five floors. And I tossed the knife. You hear it, blink, blink, blink, blink. And then I squat down in front of a cell. And there's an AB guy named John right there. And he's right behind me. He says, hey, brother, you got down. you got down you did that he said I'm gonna send you something in the shoot

which means he's gonna send me a packet of drugs right I just look at him and say right on bro shook his hand through the thing and a guy who's supposed to go in me comes whipping by right and uh he squats down next to me eat those his knife bling blingling blink blink and I said you get him he said yeah yeah got him I got him I got him like 10 times I was okay good he's dead then we got him and we kind of peer over you could see him put I'm in the Stokes Gurney, right? He's laying down on the Stokes gurney, the primary guy. The other guy was just scratched.

And they take us down to the first floor. It's called the first tier. And they start putting their hands on everybody's chest. You know, feel the heart rate, see if it's elevated. And they snatch us up. Let's get over here. And we don't have the blood on us, nothing like that. They take us to the hole.

And I get the incident packet. Get the incident packet. It's the rules violation report. And it shows a diagram of the wounds, right? It's only my wounds. There's no other wounds. The guy didn't do anything. He stayed hiding back there with the knife.

And it was discovered then that this dude punked. He peed on himself. So they ended up whacking that guy. They ended up whacking him. He survived the head. They slashed the throw with a razor. The guy, a weasel from Venice. But it was then like, this dude didn't do anything, right?

Right. He just let me out there in a breeze, you know? That's what I mean, though. So if you refuse to go, if you're a camarader and the Carnale say, you've got to go hit this guy and you refuse that that's an act of cowardice that could get you hit. Yeah, look, if you're a Camarada, you've already surrendered your autonomy to the organization and you've adopted the ideology and you've already voiced your willingness to do hits. So once you get that far, you consider the camarader right?

Right. And it's not a self-affixed title. A Camara is somebody that's viewed by the organization as a comrade of the organization, right? Like, this is a trustworthy guy. We know who he is. We know his past. We know everything about him. You're an associate.

You're an associate of the organization. Okay. But the black guy survives. Yeah. Did you actually successfully ever kill somebody in prison? No. Wow. Never once.

I did a lot of stabbings in prison. Nobody ever died. So there have been other stuff that we participated in where people have died that, you know, to vote through tacit agreement, through a mutual conspiracy in the organization, where people ended up dead. Right. I just wasn't the guy that stabbed them. They pulled the trigger. They pulled the trigger, yeah.

So you got to look at it like this, right? You got 10, 15 years of the mob, whatever it is. There are so many conspiracies that take place. It's like every day is crime. Yeah. Every day is crying. That's what you do. I'm going to make money this way.

I'm going to start that. I go collect my money there. Let's go shoot some dope. Hey, that guy's got to go. That's all it is. That's all it is every day. Every day. Do you think if you had been convicted for killing somebody in prison,

even though you ended up cooperating later, do you think you still would be doing a life sentence? Do you think they ever would have let you out? I think that, yeah, the same circumstances. I think if Mon or Henry would have died or any of those other people would have died, I might not have been let out of prison. That may have been a significant factor that even after incarceration, I continued to murder people. Yeah.

But the parole process is really difficult. A lot of people think that you just do your time, you go to the board, you get granted. It's not that way. It's not that way. And cooperation doesn't get you out. Well, we're going to get to that because people are obviously watching this are like, how the fuck are you free? You know.

So your first stretch, this is the time. time that you go, you're at DVI, then you go to Folsom, then you go to San Quentin. Did you get made during that, that first incarceration stretch? Yes. After that hit of the Black Guy of the Tier, where everybody took off in the stampede, I get made. I go to the shoe and I meet Wittleshi, Shriak, Black Dan Borella, who I got really close with. Joe Morgan's there, Nico Velasquez is there. All the Titans are there, all the big mobsters.

The names you heard about for all these years, they're there. And I go to the yard with these guys, I'm going to shoot two, and Wado Shai says, yeah, you're material. And I said, what's that? He said, yeah, we've got our eye on you. And then they start pulling me to their cells, right? I go to Black Dan Burl. He's my barber. He cuts everybody's hair.

And at this point in time, they would allow you to get one guy out of one cell and put him in another cell so you can get a haircut. It was that loose back then. So Black Dan would give me haircuts and just, educate me. Like, look, they're going to put you up. They got to take a vote first, but don't change who you are. We're making you for who you are today. So I knew then, like, wow, they're sponsoring me into the mob. He said, we can't do it because we're sponsoring Negro right now. So Black Dan, I want to show of sponsoring Negro Vialva. And I said, well, we're going to have sloppy Corwin Elmore, who's a beast of a man, big, filthy, stinky

man. There's a make-a-n-n-n-n-n-corn-a-n. Corwin-Elemore. from Clanton 14. He was a Native America. He was a Mohawk Indian. Wow. And so he's going to sponsor you. So he sponsors me in. The boat passes.

And one day I'm in the cell. And Chilido Grijeda, Sanongrejara calls me. And we had these little handheld mirrors. They had permitted them at the time. Probably about three by three. A little square plexiglass things. He says, hey, stick your mirror out. So I do.

I stick my mirror out. And he sticks his mirror out. And he says, Do you see this? He points to his hand. He says, I says, yeah. He says, that's you now, which meant Black Ant. And I knew right then.

I was like, whoa, that night I got maybe a dozen kites from Kamarales congratulating me. We had wine. We drank wine. Pruno. What they called Pruno? Nobody calls it Pruno. We call wine. Pisto.

We called Pisto, yeah. The prison guards and civilians called Pruno. But that's what we had that night. We drank wine. We partied. And that was amazing. guy. So it's not as official the ceremony as like the Italian mafia. But it does have to be voted on unanimously by who is it the top ranking guys or everybody? Everybody has to vote yes. So 80 people,

100 people have to vote? Yes. No, only the people, their respective institution. That's how it was before. I see. Okay. Now it's everybody has to vote. Everybody has to participate in the vote. and it has to be unanimous, right? So that's like hundreds of people have to vote for you. Yeah. That's why so a lot of people don't get in, right? Maybe once every few years, a couple of guys will get in. And the rate of attrition is much greater, right?

Intrition meaning people defecting. Defecting or getting whacked out. I mean, I don't know if you follow the news or you watch CDC website. A lot of Mexican mafia members have been killed lately. What's going on with that? there's look they didn't violate the rules they didn't violate the rules they killed papay they killed tonito they killed uh dead i ed they killed uh papay tonito they just killed moscow from siphon they just killed moscow from siphon and the guys weren't rats cowards or informants those are the big

rules right big rules uh they weren't any of those things really it's greed it's just infighting infighting and politicking. We call it politicking. Politicking, yeah. That's all it is. It's all it is. I mean, certainly some members are more like than others. Like Popeye was always involved in controversy.

Danny Roman, who's a good friend of mine, always involved in controversy over territory. And depending his daughter, who was secretary for his neighborhood, who ran part of South Los Angeles and ruled it with an iron fist. defend a lot of brothers. But he continued that in prison as well. They started fighting over prison yards. And he was obdurate, hard-headed.

And I think that was part of the reason why it clipped him. But I think the majority of the motivation is territory. Because it's not just the program, like I told you, which is the Mexican mafia sells you drugs, and you distribute those drugs, plus you pay a tax. You pay a portion of the proceeds. Proceeds. So they sell you the dope, they get paid.

And then for the privilege of selling the dope, you're going to pay them an additional fee. So the well and the pump. Kind of like Exxon, big Exxon, big oil, big patroller. So they're getting paid all the way through it. It's not just that. And it's not just the yards, which they're making huge money on. They're having drone drops, and they have routes with corrupt CEOs and corrupt prison workers. A lot of that stuff is not coming to the visit.

It's impossible to get that to the visit. So it has to come in some way. They have routes coming in, corrupt people within the CDC that are working with them. There's a lot of money there. There's a lot of money in the program, but they also have what this called casitas. Casitas are illegal gambling houses.

Yeah, yeah. And the territories that this gang members control. Virtually no overhead with human trafficking, prostitution, weapons, drugs, gambling, and the money is astronomical. Like, if you think they were doing good before, These guys are bawling out of control now. I think they're making more money now, even with all those snitches and the technology and the feds and shit.

I think that the Mexican mobius sees snitches, technology, and all as part of doing business. Daddy Boy, Bina was caught on wire saying, it's not that we're careless when we talk. So we have to talk in order to conduct business. So it's a consequence of doing business. I'm paraphrasing what he's saying. But this is essentially what he said. Like, hey, we know you're listening. But we're mobsters and we've got to do business.

and that's really the way it is. So these guys are serving multiple life sentences. They know they're never going to get up. It's kind of an unbeatable attitude. It is. I mean, what are you going to do to guys serving life? So you're going to give a life sentence? You're going to put them in a hole for six months?

He's still going to do business. In fact, the shoe has been abolished thanks to Gavin Newsom. There's no more shoe. You can only go for a finite period of time. Like before, you were given an indeterminate shoe tour. Right, which is what you were serving at Falcon Bay. Yeah. Yeah.

So now you can only go for a year. Six months. You can kill somebody and get out in nine months. They come right back out, have conjugal visits, and have your drones flying and drop all your cell phones off and all that. Okay. Talk about that is the most mind-boggling thing is the way that bosses, mafioso,

are in the shoe and still communicating. Talk about when you were in the shoe in Pelican Bay, how you would conduct business a thousand miles south on the streets of Los Angeles and collect money from all these different drug-dealing crews? I would have people come visit me, and I would use what is known as informal gang code. Right?

Informal game code is really just a manner of communication which two individuals are predisposed to understand underlying content, right? So if I talk to you about, hey, Johnny, remember that baseball game yesterday? Yeah, and Jimmy was pitching? He was freaking terrible, dude. He needs to be taken off the mound.

Yeah, I freaking agree. he's horrible for the team. To the layperson, it sounds like we're talking about a baseball game where Jimmy was pitching horribly. To me and you, you know we're talking about clipping Jimmy because we didn't intend no baseball game yesterday. And Jimmy is actually Joseph or Joker or whoever, right?

But you utilize this form of communication. In fact, I was never caught on wire or recording utilizing this kind of communication. Because on my channel, that's what I do. I run nothing but intercept a communication. And today's mobster, it's overt. There's very little interpretation needed. But back in that day, we utilized our visitors to send out our messages.

That and plain old letters. Right. We were right letters, hundreds of them. So you would have people come all the way up to Crescent City, California, the very northern, northwest tip of California. Who, can you not describing who they are, but were these females, with these family members, were these, am I in the ballpark

or who was it? You are you hit the nail directly on the head It's females family members wives, girlfriends

And are you talking through glass? You're talking through a phone Yeah you're talking through the phone Yes And so obviously they're listening to you They know the status you have No No at that time no

They had no idea What was happening under their under their roof Oh okay They had zero concept of what was going on There was a few gang investigators It had some idea what the mafia was, but they didn't know about street operations or anything until I dropped out. Oh, wow.

Once I defect it, then they knew this. Oh, my God. This is a, they started putting up pinhole cameras, wired the visiting room. That's when all the intel started pouring in. So it was your fault? My fault. My fault. Okay, so tell us how you would do that.

You have couriers come up to San Quint and visit you, and then they would go back down. to L.A. and relay to your basically general manager. Explain you. Explain how you were able to have this huge enterprise from the shoe in Pelican Bay. So, I mean, there are guys that are Mexican nonprofit members that had nothing. And they couldn't have anything because they didn't have the foresight. They had a narrow perspective and all they cared about was getting money on their books for commissary or shooting dope. But you had progressive thinkers that had highly ridiculet and is that are really organized, right? I had a really good crew.

I had one individual on the streets who ran everything. And everything else was his responsibility. Who is he? Huck. Huck. Huck. He ran everything for me. He was like my brother.

My mother had hooked up with his father. They weren't married, but that was his son. My father's boyfriend, I mean, my mother's boyfriend had a son, and Huck was that person. Oh, he's like literally your half-brother. Half brother, half brother, yeah, step brother. Got it. And I trusted him. I knew him as a kid.

In fact, when I had paroled in 1988, I met him. And it was gung-ho youngster. You know, he was a killer. And that's what I liked about him. It was gung-ho. So when I started in Pelican Bay, when we started that program, I knew I could establish my crew. Because all the brothers on the streets were my friends. I had no adversaries off there.

is my support system. So I started my crew and I told Huck, do it. Collect, deal, do everything. We're blanketed, right? And I would do that to my visitor. My visitor will come up on a Saturday, get my messages, go out to the hotel, call them, relay the messages, and get their responses, and come back Sunday and tell me. Then I give more messages. They go back and the next week, or two weeks later they come back. A really antiquated system, but it was very effective. Okay, and how did Huck collect? How was he able to use your name to wield all this power over just that franchise? The concept of franchise.

Look at because all of these contemporary business practices are implemented into this objective, right? There's franchising, licensing your name. Anybody who wants to deal dope in my territories can use my name and fall beneath the umbrage of my bona fides, right? Number two, there's profit sharing. Everybody that collects for me, gets part of it. And then there's that status mobility system. They go from gang member to South Sideer, to Sureno, to Camarada, to Carnat. They have that aspiration.

Literally, none of them will ever make it to Carnat. But it's there. The hope and the dream is there. And for a lot of them, they drive towards that because they're marginalized. It's a marginalized population. Guys who've been kicked out of their homes, use drugs, have black education. It's marginalized, right? It's a gang subculture.

And finally, they're participating at something bigger than that lack of the cause, right? And they now have status within their social political arena. Now they're part of boxers' crew. And that means more than any gang membership. If you were on a Mexican mafia member's crew,

nobody can touch you. Right. So how much were you, how many people was Huck collecting from? I don't even know. I mean, Huck had two legitimate businesses made with our money that were, I own, I had like 10%. And one of the popular nightclubs, two baby does up here off of some place in Los Angeles is called, I don't even know the city, but it was off of one of the freeways in Los Angeles. Is it a Mexican neighborhood?

Yeah, it's a Mexican neighborhood. Yeah. It's South L.A., southeast side or something like that. No, I think it's a, what is it's, it's by the Sheriff's Academy. I don't know. Are you a town? No, I don't know. I didn't know I owned it.

Right. So there were multiple occasions that had legitimate businesses that I owned a percentage of. But the cash money was really minuscule for me. I think 50 to 80 a year at the beginning, 1992, 93, 94 that I were receiving payments just just through the prison. $80,000 sitting in the shoe, you might as well have a gazillion dollars. There's nothing to spend your money on it. I was investing in treasury bonds, bank accounts, CDs.

I was doing all this from the prison. They'd allow me, which was crazy. They would allow me to invest money in a banking account and then purchase bonds. And then it allowed me to write. They were called state warrants. I'd fill out a form. And every time my inmate account got upwards to $10,000, I delete it, right? I released the money.

Right. And the state treasurer would issue the recipient a legitimate check. So I was sending out at $9,500 a pop. Yeah. Boom, boom, boom. And it was, for me, I was like, this is good business. For me, a prisoner 20, 30 years ago, making $80,000, $50,000 a year, that was pretty good. But that was the inception of it.

Now it's, they went on to seize funds from, I think, 10 or 15 individual. One Mexican mafia member had $90,000 in account. Another one had $30,000 this count. And they couldn't explain where they got it from. They eventually, in one instance, made the CDC return the money to Danny Roman. It was a $30,000 deposit that they had seized, right? But there was real money flowing in and out of Pelican Bay State Prison. And at the time, law enforcement and, and,

the prison authorities didn't even understand it was happening. So, like my debriefing, coupled with Angel Valencia's debriefing and Chino Delgado's debriefing, because we all defected within the same week. I dropped out, then I made videos for them, and I told them, come on over. You're going to get hit. And they actually came over. So we all three debriefed together. And collectively, that information just rocked the CDC.

So you were operating like this for almost 15 years, and they really had no idea. None. Wow, that's incredible. That's incredible. And in Pelican Bay, you had a ton of drugs. I had more... Do you have heroin whenever you wanted? I went overdose three times on heroin.

I had more dope than I ever had in my life in Pelican Bay State Prison. We had these things called annual packages where your family could collect like cereal and candy bars and soap and put it in a box and mail it to you. Well, Huck would load up mic packages with drugs. And we would get like balls of heroin. And when we would do this, we would make about the size of a little jawbreaker in colored balloons and throw them in trick cereal, handfuls of them.

But each one's a gram. So you throw 30 or 40 in there. That's 40 grams of heroin in a box cereal. You pour it out on the floor. You can't even see them because it was that much of an optical illusion. They just blended right in. And there were a variety other ways, like legal mail and stuff like that.

We'd get dope in. So you could get 40 grams of heroin into Pelican Bay? No problem. In fact, one guy, Ricky Cruz, who's now deceased, he died from COVID. He got in a pound and a half of meth inside the country time collate. He mixed it in with the Kool-Aid. And he had a pound and a half of meth and one pop. I'm like, what are you going to do with a pound of half of meth in the shoe?

Yeah. Tweet balls all night. Yeah. And that's what they were doing. Yeah, and you were a pretty bad heroin addict. Oh, I was a pig. I was a pig. I would shoot dope towel on blind.

Yeah. Until it couldn't move anymore until it was gone. Yeah, and those rigs, you describe them, they're not like, it's not a clean way to shoot heroin. Like, your entire arm starts squirting blood. It was ridiculous. We take these, they give me these pen fillers. They give me a pen filler at Supply Day, right? And it's what you write letters with.

It's just a flimsy little pen filler, but the tip is brass. So we knock out the ball of the writing instrument and pull the tip out and then sharpen it to a point. And we would jab that pinfiller into our arms, into our veins. I have a massive scar on my arm because of that. But that's the way people shot dope in the shoe. Why did in the 80s the height of the crack boom, why do you think that Chicano's, you know, in California, why was heroin like the drug of choice? I think the euphoric feeling, it's like the warmth, right?

It's a high of highs that opiate high is like no other. And I think it's like self-medicating, right, from people who have internal pain, psychological pain, childhood trauma, whatever it is, abandonment, physical abuse, addiction in the family, they're suffering. And without therapy, I think people go to that. They gravitate towards self-vedicating. For me, that's, you know, it's escapism. I was escaping it.

And when I was high, I wasn't in prison. I was just high. I didn't care about anything. Yeah, heroin seems better for numbing your way out of prison than like smoking crack, smoking meth or something. Yeah. Now you're like, I have a ton of energy and nowhere to go. And paranoia sits in.

I'm in a box. Right. And you're paranoid. Did you have, no, there's a couple of famous, well, well, known, camaraderie. Cameratas, or excuse me, Carnal, is that really did operate on both sides of the border. Like, became real drug kingpins. You weren't a real drug kingpin, but you did, obviously, taxed a lot of drug dealers. How deep into the drug game did your operation get?

Like, did you have connections with Tijuana? Yes. Directly? Yes. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, that was a guy named Bat Marquez. Bat Marquez is a friend of mine. He was partners with Papay Barron.

The same Papay Barron that was in Mexico working with the Ariano Felix organization. Real quick, if you watch Narcos Mexico in the season when the big season about the Ariana Felix when they go to war, they feature that guy. Papaya Baran. Papi Baran. David Barron. He was the guy. He's from Logan Heights, San Diego. He was the guy that basically got contracted with the Ariana Felix.

to go to war and he became really, really deep into that organization. Like shootouts with, you know, murdered Mexican cops for them, saved their brother's lives from when Chapo tried to whack him in Puerto Ayurta. So if anybody

wants to research that, that's who you're talking about. Yeah, that's... Christine's Nightclub incident. Right. When he picked up an AK and he killed a couple of guys from the Chappo Chappoosmunkertill. That's the same people I'm talking about. So Popeye, I never met him.

I never knew him. He was a made guy. He got killed on some friendly fire when they were attempting to eliminate Blancornelas, a journalist out there in Mexico. But Bat's arrived, and Bat took over that relationship. Now, a lot of people claim to have cartel ties and the ties with Mexico and the Mexican Mappiah. They didn't exist before Bat and Popeye. It just didn't exist to that level. This is the real formation of the relationship with the Mexican mafia and the cartels.

The real relationship. Now, independent card, and that has maybe had to connect out there, but that type of relationship where they're taking gang members from Southern California and taking them to Mexico to do hits for the cartels. And the cartels thrusting hundreds of pounds in their lap and paying them astronomical amounts of money didn't exist before those guys. I don't care who says it. That's the reality of it. And you were tied in with those guys with Bat.

Bat and his crew. Yeah. So Bat actually, I was on a bus with him in 1995. They subpoenaed like 15 Mexican Mafia members down to a RICO trial, the first U.S. Draco case against the Mexican Mafia, United States of America versus Alex Aguirre at L. So they pull us down for witnesses. None of us testify.

But we're having meetings on the bus, right? And Bat sits next to me and says, hey, man, I want to bring your people down in Mexico. maybe we can do some business. You can do hits over there. If you need somebody here, we can do it. Plus, it's got a lot of product. So yeah, we'll check it out. And sure enough, I send people down to New Mexico.

They go down there, picks them up in an armored vehicle, takes them to his location, which is secure location. They have counter surveillance, all kinds of stuff. And I opted out. How could I be in control of hundreds of pounds of product when I'm in Pelican Bay State Prison? And this is cartels. The cartels, they kill your cat. your dog whatever for the money and i could not be responsible for that what was it meth

meth and uh weed okay so he he wants to just thrust all this to be distributed by my crew and i couldn't i couldn't i couldn't take that risk i didn't have the ability to do it because i just knew i had huck and i didn't know what he could handle come to find out he could have handled it but yeah that's just a risk i didn't want to take because it exposes your family Okay, so you didn't really end up being a drug trafficker. No, I was more a manager. Okay, so you basically just oversaw crews that were selling dope. Yep, that was my thing.

And why not, yeah, why not sell to them the way they do now? Why not be both ends of the water and the well? That concept developed later. Right. The organization is evolving. You're seeing the evolution of a prison gang into a real criminal syndicate. So like I said, I was in. the ground floor. I was in the ground floor when this happened. Yeah, because it really started

off just as a prison gang, right? The 50s, 60s, 70s really just was a prison gang. The late 80s, as you're really becoming, you know, an infamous guy in the organization, that's when they have this symbiosis with the street and taxing drug dealers. And then the next step is, oh, no, we're fully interconnected with Mexican cartels. Yeah. Yeah. You're seeing that now. You're seeing that interconnection with cartels. But understand this.

The cartels see Mexican mafia, Mexico as plasticus. That's plastic, false artificial. They call pellones, boldheads. Pocos, they call Pocos. It's all derogatory because the cartels can't understand why a guy would want to go to prison and serve life. they don't understand it, they don't respect it, and they don't respect drug use.

So, although the Mexican mafia works with them has a symbiotic relationship with them in Mexico, the cartels run it there. In fact, multiple Mexican mafia members have been eliminated, brutally killed by cartels in Mexico. And what does the Mexican mafia do? He had to go.

They accept it because they can't battle with that type of power. That's a $22 billion a year industry. Right. How can the Mexican mafia wage war against an institution that controls a country? Yeah. Yeah. They can't.

But at the same time, they need you guys because they need their product distributed in the United States. That on some level. Okay. Like gang territories. What do gang territories? They sell drugs and who buys drugs, the population in those gang territories. It's smart business for the cartels. It's a win-win for them because it's a pittance to the cartels and say, okay, here's 100 pounds of meth.

And here's a couple hundred-k when they're making billions. So for the cartels, they benefit through market exclusivity and protection in the prisons. I have pictures with cartel leaders from various countries with Mexican mafia members in ADX and Florida. Like, there's a real relationship that exists there. And they're exploiting it to the best of their ability. How so? They have these individuals give them money. They bring them dope.

Right. They gain influence within the organization. I mean, if I had a cartel guy by me next to me at my same unit, it would be that. Let me deal dope for you. Let me serve you. Let me be of service to you. Because you can kill those guys. Oh.

Like, they're just, you know, Mexicans in an American prison at that point. So you, they're kind of like grateful to do that. And have the influence of the organization behind them. Right. But on the streets, they kill Mexican mafia members. It's a crazy relationship. Now, how are you so articulate? Were you, were you always educating yourself while you were down?

I was. I'm auto-dideg. I'll tell myself, right? Yeah, yeah. That's just, I took college courses. And the more I learned, the more I realized I didn't know. I wanted to learn more. Like, oh, that's what they're.

run nuclear physics are. That's what the theory of relativity is. Right. You know, you'd hear these things, and you'd like, what are they talking about? And the more I learned about it, the more I wanted to know. Yeah. That just drove my hunger for education. Do you think your articulate, your verbal IQ and how articulate you are, your intelligence,

was that one of the reasons that you got plucked to be a made guy? Like, did they look at the way the Italian mafia, traditionally, they're like, he's violent, but he's a good earner. Or he's whatever, right? Like, you generally have to have a basket of qualities to actually become, you know, an NBA player. Like, do you think, what did you bring to the table that made yourself different from all these camaradas that will never be made, guys? Nothing. Unfortunately, in the Mexican mafia, the status mobility system is violence.

You get recognized for your willingness to commit murders. You said in the book, you described it as terrorism. Terrorism. It's urban street terrorism. That's really what it is. But unlike terrorism, which we think of as like Middle Eastern, you know, setting bombs off with killing civilians, that's driven by like a political message or a political ideology usually. It all comes back to earning.

You use terrorism and violence to get people to do what you want to do so you can make money. Murder is a very simple motivator. Everybody understands murder. And I don't care what ethnicity are, you speak violence. When somebody commits an act of violence, you know exactly what that is. And that translates through all socioeconomic groups, particularly our target demographic, which is the Hispanic Inc subculture. They know, if I don't do this, I'm going to get a hole in my hat.

Or I'm going to get stabbed 50 or 60 times. So I'm going to do this. It's just the way it is. You know, the Mexican mafia has perfected the mystique of the organization and the prison lore that exists before the nouveau and contemporary organization. That people had their hearts cut out or people were stabbed and thrown off of tears. The Mexican mafia has taken that and expounded on it. Still commits the same level of violence. The egregious overkill, when it stabs somebody, still does that.

still kills people on the streets, but to a lesser note, because they've already capitalized on that. They've taken that, and they've extracted from it, the honey, which is the payday. So you guys don't have to be out there

killing like it's the 1980s anymore because you've done that. You've established your so embedded into street culture that you can basically just call shots and kill when you need to kill. Yes, that's how the organization works. And my day was the violence was the ultimate last resort. You didn't want to kill Camarada, and very few them were killed.

And you didn't want to whack a Sudejo. And it took something monumental to kill a carnage. Because that was the ultimate last resort. Violence was the last resort. And to kill a Cornell, to kill a fellow MA brother, you had to get it approved by everybody, I believe, right? Or everybody in your prison yard? Sometimes. Those rules are gray.

Yeah. You've got old saying in a mom, dead men have no support. Once you whack them, boom, boom, it's done. There might be some hairs raised and people might question, but he's gone. Are you going to risk your life and your career for a dead brother? No. You're not going to do that. You're not going to do that.

So oftentimes these hits are done in groups of five or six guys that make an agreement to kill somebody and exclude other members from the vote. And if another member votes no on the killing, they'll hold another vote. excluding that guy, take the vote, it's unanimous, boom, and they do it. So really, elimination is a tool. It's power grab. So everything you see is a display of and reclamation of power for members, doing a hit, voting yes on that. It's because they're going to share in the profits or whatever their motivation is, right?

See, like me, I didn't know that. I was completely ignorant of political survival within an organization that was cannibalistic. I fully went and did just what I was told. Little did I know, I was making all the errors politically and alienating so many people who were monolithic in their reputations in the history of the organization. You really believed in it. I believed in it.

I was going to go to death row for it. I was going to kill for it. I got three life sentences for it. And I was willing to die for it until I wasn't. Why did you want to go to death row? I wanted my name to be known. I wanted my name to be known. Boxer from the Mexican.

offer. You're going to remember me. You're going to remember me. Okay. And that almost happened. Tell us about the murders that got you sent to, you know, L.A. County Jail for two, three years, that got you sent to Pelican Bay, got you the life sentences. We haven't even got to that yet. What did you, what did you do to go to prison? The first murder, I ordered a woman killed. Her name was Cynthia Galvedan. Cynthia Figueroa Galvodan, part of the Figueroa family. But she was married, she was married to the brother of a Mexican mafia member, and she was dealing dope for us.

And she was stealing. She was stealing and pinching the dope. In retrospect, it was minuscule. Unlike the family members of the victim that say it was only over $10, it wasn't over $10. It was the principal. The principle that we embraced her and allowed her work for us. and she stole for me repeatedly.

That was the principle that was violated. And people had been stealing from us, from my crew. I was running area in Hawaiian Gardens on Camulus and Oregon. I had a dope house there. I think they call them trap houses now. But I had a dope house there, and I ran all that dope. Plus, I was running around pressureing all the drug dealers for dope. I was robbing them and extorting them because the Mexican mafia was dormant at this time.

This was when you're on parole in the late 80s. after you got out of your first stretch, right? Yes. Okay. Yeah, and you're a fucking gangster. Like you're, you got robbery crews that are just kicking in dudes doors, home invasions,

tying them up, torturing them, taking their dope, and then saying, you've got to work for me now. Yep. Or don't work at all. Because I went out there

and I went out with the, on the premise that I'm, yo so cardanans. You're of la mafia, right? I'm a brother, and I'm from the mob. You're going to pay me. And guys are like,

that's a prison thing, isn't it? What's the M.A.? I'm like, well, I'm going to show you what it's about. And Mundo had a concept that they said, called the spreading the Amic gospel or the whacking people on the 70s and 80s. But we were doing the same thing. And we picked up on what he was doing,

and we started doing it. But at that time, I got a lot of political flag for it. Look at Renee, he's lost his mind out there. He's kicking indoors. He went like a wild man. No, there was a principle. I was pushing the principle. Are you going to respect the organization?

It is not just in prison. This is a street thing now. So we did that. So we get this girl to come deal dope for us. She starts clipping us. And I tell Mo, I says, take her, go dump her. A little Mo Ruiz, Jacopo Diaz gives him the gun. 357 Python.

And it takes her to an area in Boyle Heights and shoots her once in the head and once in the back. A couple days later, I think it was New Year's Eve. That was on the day before Christmas Eve, Cynthia Galbadon. And then on the day before Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve, David Galbadon. No, David Gallegos, his name is Loco or Pelon from Marabia. He's been on the hit list.

I have received a message from Mexican Mafia member. Benny Peters, the guy stabbed the guy with an attorney room a year earlier while I was out on parole. It said, hey, this guy's got to go. He's a coward. And we had a meeting there. We had three Mexican mafia members. He calls from the county jail. I accept the hit.

And another member who is there present with me is supposed to go with me on the hit. So every time I approach this guy about, hey, let's go do this. Oh, I got baseball practice. I got this. You got a thousand different reasons why I couldn't do it. As kids, this kid's that. So I go do a parole violation. I get back out and I'm running this drop house on Oregon and Camulos.

It's actually on Camulos and. And Oregon, yeah, Camila's an Oregon. In White Pence, Gangtorian Ball Heights. I'm in this house and we have guns everywhere. We're selling dope. I have three crew brimers with me. And who shows up to the door? David Gallegos.

The guy agreed to kill six months earlier. And he's attempting to strong arm my drug dealers for dope. So one of the guys that man's the door comes to say, there's a guy out here saying he's a Mexican mafia member who wants dope. I said, Tom come inside. And when I see him, I was, oh, shoot, you're not going home, buddy. And I end up chuckle in Jess because I'm living in the moment. But I want to say immediately, I don't take this lightly. I understand that taking a human life, it's a huge burden to carry.

It impacted the family so terribly. But I'm in the moment telling the story. So I just want to translate that to your viewer. That's not who I am today. That's who I was then. And what you're seeing is who I was then right now. So in my mind, I'm saying, you're not going home, buddy. And I tell my friend, hey, go fix him up a shot because he's asking for dope.

And I tell me, you want to get high? Is that what it is? Yeah, yeah. So I tell him this is my dope house and welcome. And we start talking politics, just like normal. I sit down next to him. and I tell Jacco Padilla, go cook him up a lethal dose. And contrary to popular belief, a hot shot is not the battery acid or poison or sinus.

That's not a hot shot. Hot shot is an intentional overdose. There's plausible deniability in it. Here's a heroin addict. Did overdoses. He's found in an alley. Oh, well. That's what we were initially planning with this guy.

So, Jocko goes to the bathroom. He cooks up like 10 bindles of heroin and a bunch of coke. and a bunch of Coke, and we hit him with it. Boom. And the guy just goes out. So we put him in the bedroom, and I could hear, he's in respiratory arrest. I could hear it. That death rattle.

And I said, you know what, let's make sure. I said, go cook him up some more. So we go cook up another 10 balloons of heroin. And I got him, I got his arm, and I'm trying to inject him. And what does he do? He wakes up. And he looks at me, says, he's trying to kill me? I said, no, bro, I'm going to try to give you some coke to bring you out of it.

You OD. And I hit him again and it goes right back out. Then we know he's gone, right? You hit a little death runner. We carry him out in Asadap, like a Mexican blanket. We carry him out to the car in Asarap. We had a black car called a night rider. We took it from a drug delivery.

We extorted him for it. So we put him in the backseat, and we take him to a place. and by the Estrada projects off of Olympic Boulevard in Los Angeles, called Spend Street. It's like a perfect, idyllic place to commit a murder. It's like what you see out of a mob scene. Dark, no lights, alley, and we dump them onto the ground. I shoot him five times in the head just to be sure. I said, what if this guy wakes up again?

I said, let's just take him here. I want to do this and make sure it's done because I can't. fail at this. You can't. I mean, that's, you know, you try to whack a guy and you miss and he's out there. And it's your political career. So I wanted to make sure it was done. So I shot him five times in the head with a 357 and his body was discovered the next morning. Great news. The federal EV rebate is back. Eligible customers get up to $5,000 with the federal EVAP rebate on select 2027 Volt and 2026 Equinox EV models. Visit your local Chevrolet dealer today. Visit your local Chevrolete for more details.

Okay. And a while later, you know, the cops put the case together, whoop-dy-whoop, you get arrested, and now you're facing the death penalty for two murders in L.A. County Jail. What year did you go in? 1990. January 10th, 1990. And you ran there for how long? In the county jail? Yeah.

About two and a half years. Okay. And this is where it gets wild. I had, a lot of people might know this. I had no idea that, especially back then, L.A. County Jail operated like a mini penitentiary. L.A. County Jail is probably one of the most violent places you could ever do time at. If you could survive there, you could survive anywhere. I used to carry around a knife and a key everywhere I went.

In fact, I had a 22 homemade zip gun in there. I had the stuff smuggled in. It was wild there. You could have anything you wanted. and the violence was so off the hook because it's a political hotbed. Everybody comes there, all politics go there. It's like a hub for the Mexican mafia.

There's a lot of money to be made there as well. Right. Like it's so crazy because I've been to county jail and not here, but in Oregon, and I've seen how controlled and locked down and isolating it is. Like to think that you guys could get in all of that stuff like it was a real prison, like it was a yard,

is fucking fascinating. Like you guys had, there was like real drug dealing, like drug kingpinning going on in there. There was. I used to sell drugs for Aryan Brotherhood, uh, member John Stinson and Quante Grosda.

Uh, but I wasn't at a drug dealer. I was a drug user. That was like I just wanted to get high. Yeah. You know, I never really thought about making money off a dope. I had gobs of dope,

but I'd shoot it all. Right. So like, I own the drug dealers. And the product is free to me. Right. So that's, like, I was never prosperous drug dealer. Everybody said, Renee was a big, I was not.

You were controlling drug dealers in L.A. County Jail too? And a matter of fact, when they brought whales in, we would extort them. I got one for Mercedes-Benz. I got another one for, you know, pounds of dope. Wait, wait, wait, wait, so whales, like big kingpins would come in. Wales, yeah. Without any protection. Yeah, you're like, they call gamblers.

They're dropping $100 grand at a pop, a million in a pop. They're called whales. Yeah. We call them whales when they come with their large scale. in fact two Mexican mafia members had this thing called Operation Wildebeest. Like Wilderbeast. They go on this massive migration thing. And I told him, why did you call it Operation Wildebeest?

You know, the Wildebeest, they go on this massive migrations, right? And there's always the dumb one, the big one that's slow. And he's going to the river. The crocodiles get him. But we wait for that big one, that dumb one, and we get them. And they would actually take these kingpins hostage in the cell and tell them, get on the phone, sign over your boat. sign over the Mercedes, sign over your house, and they were successful at it.

That was Bobo Brulio Castellanos and Ruben Tupi Hernandez. So I did the same thing over there in the county jail. I'd see one and it's like, hey, bro, come here. Come here. And I tell me, come on, sign it over. But I soft-handed them. I never threatened them. You're like, oh, hey, man, I paid 80 grand for that car.

Come on, man, I'm all lady needs a car. Come on. And they would do it. Of course, because big-time drug dealers are tough guys. They're not. You could have got me. I would have been a whale. You would have got me.

I'd be like, whatever you want. There you go, bro. That's how they operated. And these were cartel guys. These were just big drug dealers, right? Neighborhood drug dealers that made it big. Gang members are gang fringe gang members that made it big. Lived in the neighborhood.

So they got this level of people of residents. If you live in a gang territory, you're not a gang member, you're a resident. Or you're a gang member. Or you're a Sudeo or a Suleo. outsider, right? Right. So these guys are mainly residents. A lot of them buy size, but you get them and you sting them.

And they take it willingly. And it was just, it was kind of lucrative. For me, I was like, oh, wow, that worked. So you got to just sign over his Mercedes? Yeah. On the spot. On a spot. On a spot.

I had him deliberate, took it, signed it over. Yeah. The other fascinating thing about your stretch in L.A. County was, yeah, the way. way that you were calling witnesses down meetings, the way you would hold meetings by calling in brothers from prisons all over the state. There was a line in America in me. It says the state's so lame and pays for the game.

And that is it in truth right there. We just subpoena these guys. This is back in the 90s where cell phones didn't really exist. And if they did, there was those big brick phones. Now everybody has cell phones. Every Mexican mom member. on every prison you have got a cell phone, except for the feds. They're not as prolific in the feds, which is the Federal Bureau of prisons.

But in the state of California, every Mexican mafia member has a cell phone and a backup cell phone. Right. That's how prolific they are. Wow. But back then, it was like Stone Age. This was Stone Age. We get out once every couple of days to use the phone, and we get visits, and we conduct our business that way on the phones. And they didn't have the ITMS system implemented in.

ITMS is the inmate telephone monitoring system, which automatically records everybody. You use a PIN number from your booking number. And your calls are recorded. So you were running your business like without a hitch in county? Without a hitch. Everything was going by. We're introducing drugs and contraband. And it was really just a big party.

Were you ordering hits or were you doing hits or besides that, the stabbing in the attorney's room? Yeah. I remember that we ordered a couple of hits. in there. There was quite a few. Richard Chamberlain was eliminated by Sudezinos for John Stinson. He was eliminated there in the county jail. We found out later on because Guante Gros asked me, hey, make sure this get done. It gets done. And then years later, we find out that the AB is coming to him to get people eliminated for them. But he's using us and the Soutreños thinking that it's his business, right? One of the strikes against him. There were, there were,

quite a few eliminations of the county jail. One guy got stabbed up about 100 times and stuck under his bunk. There was the individual I stabbed in, in DVI, my first hit, Angel from Santa Monica. He ends up in the gang module, 41 or 4,700 years later, unmeanounced to me, he ends up in a cell with gang members, and they butcher him and murder him. Same guy, for that reason, because I hit him years before. No way. And I didn't even know this until really. Recently, one of my viewers informed me, hey, this is this guy, and I don't think you know these facts. And I really truly did. Wow.

That's how many murders are occurring and hits are occurring within the organization at any given location. It's that kind of violence. That it just becomes mundane and like, oh, well, another one bites the dust. Yeah. I think it's wild. The recent indictment in April here in L.A. of all these Mexican mafia guys, But there was only like two murders on the indictment. Everything else was for racketeering, drug trafficking, kidnapping.

Like two murders. If you go read an indictment from the early 90s, there's like 15 murders on one indictment, you know? Like there was so much killing. Murder doesn't make money. Murder brings heat. So you really don't want to kill. You have to kill people. It's the nature of the beast.

Because that's the ultimate sanction. It's the ultimate sanction. It's the ultimate sanction. and it reverberates. Yeah. Like you take a rock and you throw in the middle of a calm, placid lake,

what's going to happen? Ripples. So when you whack somebody, that ripples out into the gang world. Are you given credit for being this kind of pioneer of moving the organization from just a prison gang

to an integrated criminal organization dealing with street taxation and, and, you know, extorting drug traffickers and things like that? No, nobody's ever give me credit, but it's okay. I don't want credit. I know what I did. I mean, I don't need the pat on the back.

I know what I did. But you really were, like, one of the first guys to do that. I was. I was with Chico Castro, Pui, Aguirre. But I want to tell you this, it's those guys that really pushed it, right? The guys in the streets, Puiuigiri, a bunch of associates, Gizmo, Fortisia. He was like a, just a camarada, but he was pushing a hard line out there for Garnan Chuie,

Chiu and Mariana Martinez, who died in Springfield, Illinois recently. But these guys were like progressive thinkers, right? I was the enforcement aspect. Came out of our head, and then we kind of refined it later. But it took a village to do this. I couldn't take sole responsibility for doing it

because that would be like kind of megalomaniacal. Yeah. Right? Like, oh, I did this. You know, I'm the king of the way. I didn't. I didn't. I never professed to be a genius

or a top dog. I never even thought of myself as a leader of the organization. I was just a button. You know, I just went and did what they told me to do. Well, who's they? They or they?

The cardanless. Other carnage, I tell me, hey, this is got to be done. And then we vote on to like, why? Right. Why? Well, he did this. He did that. How do you vote?

All right, cool. Let's do it. Like, I was that dummy. You kind of go along to get along. I was just a dummy. You know, I told my, my past wife I told her this

we're talking about something and she says how could you be so fucking stupid to kill people who want to kill you? It was this epip focal moment and I said, what the fuck am I doing? You know, what am I doing?

These guys don't even like me. They put me on the hit list like three times and I had never done anything wrong That's the whole thing. Like, I had done things that 90% of the organization had never done. I killed for it. I willingly accepted life sentences for the organization. And to have dudes a questionable intellect and flawed moral turpitude

questioned me as a cardan. Certainly, I was no a pristine individual. Cardanas aren't that. But I know what I did for the organization. There's guys. that are members now that have never picked up a knife of the organization, have never blown anybody's brains out, never done any of those things. And they're like in the hierarchy now, they're mess up members.

And they're, you know, they're like the leaders of the, and I can't believe it. Like, that guy's never done anything. So I went through that period where I was questioning, like, what am I doing? What am I doing? It just didn't seem like it was equitable to me. And ultimately, that's what you were saying. it's a cannibalistic organization. So even if you have all the juice

and are calling shots for years, eventually you'll end up on the hit list. Oh, certainly. Very few Mexican mafia members go through unscathed. Unscathed. Like never get into a political wrangle, never get politiced on, and they never end up on the hit list.

But just upon and beyond that, I don't know how they do it. Do you think, well, maybe they're cooperating? No. There are some members that are cooperated. Well, of course, but do you think there are any members that are cooperating for years the way that Whitey Bulleer of the Irish mob was cooperating with the feds for like decades? I know there are. Wow.

That are still in the organization. No, in the mob. It's wild. Obviously, we can't speak of that, but it happens. Okay, so what, tell us how that case, that double murder got adjudicated. So they go to this stage called the liveslays stage in Los Angeles County Spirit Court. It's when they determine whether the death penalty is going to be sought. And it's really based on a couple of factors.

Victim Relatibility, sympathetic victim. Really, it's based on a lot of political stuff. So it's determined that they're not going to seek out that they drop the death penalty off the table. Okay, but you were found guilty? No, I wasn't found guilty yet. Okay. The individual who went with us on one of those murders, I did the murders with one gun, the other gun we got rid of.

But this gun, after I get done killing the Mexican mafia member in the alley, I gave it to him, I said, dispose of it. He'll take it to the pier and throw it off the pier. He says, okay, he saves it. He buries it in his girlfriend's backyard. And later, he gets arrested for a robbery. and he tells the cops immediately, hey, all the stuff that's happening here, it's the Mexican mafia. And it's Boxer Ramirez that's doing it.

And I have everything. He flips right there to get out. They release him that day. He meets with Alan Carter, head of the organized crime, anti-terrorism division in Los Angeles County. And they cut him a deal, and he walks. He flips on us. We go to this process. And we're a year, two years in the county jail.

I've already picked up to stabbings, a weapons charge, narcotics distribution in the county jail. I picked up a bunch of different. I didn't care. I just didn't care anymore. It was as if I was trying to commit suicide by cop. Like, okay, you're going to wash me up? Let's really do it.

I'm going to show you. And so we're in this process and they approach us with deals. Anthony Avales, the guy who took the gun and saved it for his own get out of jail. free card, ends up in a cell with somebody somewhere and tells them, yeah, I blamed all this on these mob guys, but I'm the one that did it, impugns his own credibility. And that's disclosed to us later. So they start coming at us with deals. And they came out of us with-

Because he fucked up. He fucked up. So now they don't have a rock solid case. No. No. So they come at us with a deal where they're going to cut my co-defendant, Gilbert Reese, a manslaughter deal. no life tops. And they're going to give me two life sentences for 15 in life and a life without for the possibility for 20 years, plus a five year sentence for a narcotics distribution.

And I think about it and I think about it. And we go back and forth. And at least one of us is going to survive. Mo's going to get out. And I tell me, I want to take the deal? He says, yeah, so let's do it. And then back in that time, if you got 15 to life, Were you, did you actually, if you behaved, not that you were going to behave, but if you did, change your life around, could you actually get out? Were they letting people out that had the L?

No. Okay. Life was washed up. You washed up. Even if they say 15 to life, you're. If they said six months to life, you're not getting on the prison. Okay. Did they change that since then, I believe? They're there, they're bletting guys. I think they're even letting LWOP guys. So many people. It's a great exodus right now. How do you think I got out of prison? The law's changed. I'm sitting right here. Yeah. No cuss, no change, no nothing. Right. I'm a free man. Okay. Because the law's changed. But back then, so you're thinking, okay, life is life.

I'm going to get life, but Mo will get out. Yeah. That's what we thought. So we take the plea bargain. And I remember right after I took the plea bargain, I went to sleep in the court holding tank, waiting for the chain. We called the busted chain.

Waiting for the chain back to the county. And I took a nap. I used a little roll of toilet paper for my pillow. And I remember waking up and every fiber of my being and my brain screaming, no, no, what did you do? This is it forever. And I just like, fuck, I'm done. And I would have nightmares after that.

I remember I'd wake up and not knowing where it was at. I wake up, completely dumbfounded. I look around. I said, where am I? Then I'd see the jail bars. And so, all you're doing life? and so you're never getting out. And I'd be okay.

That's what I was. Yeah. Yeah, you did have moments of clarity, but most of the time you're right, it's like you just wanted to kill yourself. I think that's later after I got transferred to Pelican Bay, I would shoot these huge amounts of dope. And I would end up on the floor. I remember one time I woke up on the floor, I had a hypodermic needle sticking out of my arm and a cop was knocking on the bar. I said, Renee, you're right? And I woke up, and I said, yep.

He says, do not die on my watch. And he took off. I remember that distinctly. Yeah. I remember distinctly. And it was like, they didn't care. They didn't not care. They just didn't want to do paperwork.

No. So, yeah. And I think it was really a subconscious way of committing suicide. I just, I didn't know it at the time. Mm-hmm. But I was trying to end myself. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I mean, that seems what the whole, it seems like what everybody, who commits murder in front of a guard or, you know, like these things you know you're never going to get out of prison. They're going to keep putting you in smaller and smaller boxes. You're like rushing towards that. It is a way of slow suicide. It is. It is.

I think the average individual doesn't realize that. I think it takes a certain point of maturity and development. Because really, when you go to prison, you're in this arrested development. You see a lot of guys still speaking like, what I live? and acting like kids and joking around my kids because they're in a state of arrested development. That's what their level of intellect was when they went in. And they never progressed beyond that. But thankfully, I went to therapy.

And I did years of therapy. Before I even got considered for parole, did therapy. And I continued to do therapy. I go once a month, I have complex PTSD. But I had to address the antisocial personality disorder with narcissistic tendencies, right? But I wasn't diagnosed as a narcissist, just ASPD, right? But I had to address that. It's like, well, how do I fix this?

If I'm ever want to get out, I got to be able to address this, right? I got to know what's wrong with me. So I started studying ab-psych, gen psych, taking all kinds of rehabilitative courses. And then the more I learned, the more I wanted to know, right? Like, oh, man, that's why I do that. Or that's what that's called, you know, that's what free-floating things. anxiety is. That's where I was having panic attacks and I didn't even know what they were. This overwhelming anxiety and sense of doom. And I didn't even know what they were. And I just put the facade up. Because Boxer, from the Mexicanite was a facade, right? That was a facade. That wasn't Renee. Today I'm Renee. And that was just the image that I projected, like the alter ego.

Right. So when I stripped that away, you start learning and you start developing. I don't want to kill people anymore. I don't want to commit an act of violence. I don't want to harm anybody. I've been hurt, right? I saw it written somewhere. I said, well, one day you're going to, you know, karma's going to get you or something like that.

And you're going to know what it is. And I took all those victims' awareness courses and reconciliation. And I thought I knew, you know, like what reconciliation was. I wrote the letters. I sent him to the DA and the judge because you couldn't communicate directly with the family. It's like, I'm so sorry for what I've done. I'm not going to ask you for forgiveness because that's asking too much. I can only honor your loved one by continuing to do the right thing for the rest of my life.

And I thought, okay, I'm cool with this victim stuff, right, until my son got killed. And then it hit me. you know, it hit me like, it doesn't ever go away. And how many times have I done that to people? So I think the most important thing in my life is about just giving back to the community. And I do these interviews and my channel and everything that I do as a way to sway people.

It's not a glorification. It truly isn't. It might sound like that one of the throes of disgust and murder, but it's really about telling people like, bro, there's no life in this. I mean, if you choose to do this, hey, knock yourself out, bro,

be the best gangster. you can be if that's who you are. But I'm here to tell you, it ain't all that. And there's peace on the other side of this. You don't have to do what I did. You don't have to testify in all these cases. You don't have to do all those things. But if you just choose not to commit violence anymore,

I become a better person each day. Like whatever it is, just to be a better person, right? I think that's important. And it's unfortunate that a lot of people can't get beyond that limited scope of thinking that, now I got to live by the rules or I got to be a homeboy and that's not life that's doing life that's right um okay so it's 2003 when you decided to to drop out you remember the day where where you were and and tell us what led you it had been leading to this for a while but basically your life was in danger um and you were sick of it so tell us how you you went from leaving the MA to cooperating to then getting out. So getting out of prison.

March 22nd, 2002, right? I get called out for medical. And it's a normal thing. You go in your boxers and your tennis shoes and your T-shirt and they put you in waist chains. They walk you out there. But this is a little different that day. There's a bunch of guards out there. They're being very secretive.

And they're all standing in the doorways to each. blah, cell block. And as soon as I step out of the unit, there's like four of them waiting right there and they get around me. And they say, the secret squirrels want to see you. Secret squirrels meaning agents. And I thought it was IGI.

I thought it was institutional stuff, which what it was at first. But I said, yeah, sure, no problem. But all this time I'm going to this huge battle with my buddy, Daryl Bacher. Daryl Baca is like my best friend. And we're trying to kill each other. I finally lost all support in our

organization. And I know it's just a matter of time. I had already contemplated locking up. I even wrote a note one day in a cell. They had these things called request for interview forms. I wrote, hey, man, I want to lock up. And then I got, I became shamed and I ripped it up and said, no, I'm not doing that. Fuck that. I'm going to weather this storm. And then we tried a couple of times to stab each other. So this is what they hit me with this, right? I just got a visit. And they pulled me up for medical and I'm in medical. We do this weight. temperature, all that good, you blood pressure. And then they walk me in there. And it's a little guy named Renéard, little cowboy, he's about 5'5. He's got a bowl old tie and got a big old chaw dip in his mouth. Renee, I know he's from the AMI.

I said, no. I ain't from the AMI. Right? And he starts talking to me. So, yeah, I think you're in trouble and this and that. So now you're tripping, bro. I'm not even from the Ma. What are you talking about? You're not supposed to acknowledge the existence of the organization to the authorities. He's just

It's a rule violation. It's those unspoken rules, right? But he gives me a dip and a cup of coffee. And he said, well, let me show you, right? So he pulls out this thing out of his pocket. He gets it out. And it's a little recorder. It's a recorder.

A little tiny one. He said, I'm going to let you listen to something. And I listen to it. It's my voice. It's my last visit where I'm saying, I'm so fucking tired of this. What would you do if I wasn't this anymore? and he turns it off right there.

That's all he played. He says, let me change your life. And I was like, whoa, that moment. Got a lump in my throat, like, because I knew I was going to do it. I knew I was going to do it. I told him, no, man, I'm not going to do it. But I was shaking that belly.

You ever get really scared of your, instead of your stomach shakes? You get that trembling? I was doing that. And he opens up the freaking Saldor, shakes my hand. and says, let me change your life. You could save lives. And I said, well, what does this entail? He already had Sacramento, the United States Attorney's Office, the director's office,

on the phone waiting for me. So he said, come out here. So we go out there, we get on the phone, talking to special agent, Devin Hawks from the SSU, Brian Perry, the director of the SSU, and somebody else was on the line. And we start talking. I said, well, I don't believe it. I don't believe that you're going to do this. And how do we know you're not gaming us?

So what are you talking about? And he says, hey, man, is anybody going to get hurt? You know, we don't want anybody to get hurt. We know somebody's on the list who's on the list. So I tell him, this guy and this guy, Angel Valencia, and, you know, they're going to get whacked, right? And then I snap. I'm telling. I say, hey, I don't want to talk to you guys.

I don't want to talk. And they caught me down. I guess they got a psychological formula that they use to ease you down when you get. Jumpy, right? Because they start talking to me and soothing me. And then finally I tell them, I need immunity. I need immunity. I need attorney.

I need this. I need that. I'm watching every movie that I'm thinking. I want to put the Fifth Amendment. I want to poke the fifth. I'm doing all that, right? Like ridiculous Hollywood shit. This is, calm down.

This is right now, we've already moved your stuff. Unbeknownst to me, they already went to myself and moved my stuff out. At that moment, everybody knew I had PCed up. They didn't even have to hear from me. Right. They knew. Boxer checked in. Boxer checked in.

So they said, we're going to move you over here to this location. It's safe. It's completely filled with debriefers. It's a PC unit. So we go through that process and they move me down there. The next day, I'm like, no, I want to go back. Uh-uh. I don't want to do this.

Are they come and see me? I said, no, man, fuck this. I ain't a rat. I ain't doing this, right? I am not doing this. And they do this, a little process again, a little counseling thing, right? Everybody goes through this, chill, bro.

You know, you're having virus remorse. It's done. You can't go back. And slowly but surely, they start pulling me out every day, every day, until finally FBI, United States Attorney, the director of corrections, they all fly up there. And we have a proper.

That's where they go through this real debriefing, right? and they're taking notes, FBI, just taking notes. Like you see in the movies. They bring us a dignitary dinner, and we have dinner. I have dinner with these guys. It's kind of weird, you know. What are you proffering? What are you talking about?

Everything you know about. Because the proffer is to test the veracity of your sincerity and the credibility of what you're saying, right? The veracity is everything. Because if you don't do that, then a defense attorney is going to get ahead of it and find out that you're withheld. that you withheld because you thought you're going to criminate yourself, but they have this process called Queen for a Day, right?

So you have immunity for anything you say that day. So you dump it, you vomit it out, everything. You put it on the table because you got immunity for that. So you can talk about cold cases, if you want. Cold cases, everything. Everything, because I tell you, when you get in, how did you get in the gang? Who did you know? What murders do you know about?

What stabbin did you do? What murders did you agree to? All that goes into your debrief. So you hear people saying like, oh, no, debrief but I only told them myself or I only did this or I only did that I only had to tell about this one shooting that's not true a real debrief is a real debrief and and that's what it entails it entails cracking your chest open and saying this is what I've done so we went to that process this is we'll be back we're gonna get a plane we're gonna come get you and they flew me out the FBI flew me out to long

Beach from Pelican Bay. I stayed in a local facility for about 13 months with multiple debriefs. They don't flow them back. 9-11. All that stuff was, you know, all the resources were going to domestic terrorism and there was no Mexican mafia indictment. So I got dropped off on a PCR Lancaster, started using dope, slinging dope. And then a couple of years into that, I relapsed. I had, you know, I had been sober for a few years. And what was the offer? Like you're checking in, you're dropping out of the gang, but they didn't make an offer to like get you out early, right? There's no way they could have did that.

At the time, California Petyl Code 1170D1 stipulated that you couldn't alter your sentence after 120 days. I'm 30-something years into this damn thing. You're just talking, you're just telling everything because you don't want to be part of the gang anymore. You're not proffering to like get out to gain something for yourself except for just staying safe. and going to a PCR. Yeah, that's all I wanted was PCR. I didn't even testify at that point. Right.

That wasn't even on the table. Okay. Right? Because I thought of that, like, is there a way you can reduce my sentence? It's nothing we can do. There's no federal statute. And the feds, they have federal rules of criminal procedure, Rule 35, FRCP, Rule 35. At any time the government can make an application for sentence reduction and get a

granted, right? So you see guys with a thousand years of the feds getting out. That's how it's done, right? But they couldn't take the existing state sentence and converted it to a federal sentence. Just no way to do it. There was no legal mechanism available for that. I exercised. I hired attorneys. I had attorneys pointed to me. I had an attorney for 10 years that we tried every way to do this. There was no way to do it. So there was no deal. I couldn't cooperate my way out of prison. So that didn't exist. After I went back to Lancaster, a guy by the name of Jeff Boscott, DEA, TFO, he's a

task force officer, came up after they killed Jerry Ortiz of Los Angeles sheriffs and in Hawaiian gardens. They shot him. Gang members killed a deputy sheriff and I said, hey, we want you for this case. And he flew a DEA Blackhawk up there and picked me up in Lancaster State Prison, flew me down to that same place that I were. I originally debriefed that and kept me there. And it started the process over 10 years

where different agencies, Homeland Security investigations, DEA, ATF, FBI, a bunch of local and state prosecutors for various counties who asked me, hey, we want you to testify. We want you to testify. And these are cases that they're making, right? Are they RICO cases mostly? Some of RICO, some of them are RICO, some of them were states, some of them are 186.22.

step back, the gang enhancements. Most of them are those, right? But I did. Are these people that you know? Some of them I did know. But the majority of the people, 99.9% of them, never heard them. I was just coming in as a historic witness or communications analysts because I would get all the wiretaps collected from all these places of the ITMS system. And they'd give them to me and they say, Renee, find it.

So what are you getting out of this? I'm just in a cell. what I ask. This is what I ask. Yeah. Because I have a vision, right? I have a vision. I know they can't get me out of prison,

but they can document my cooperation. I said, look, I'd like a letter from you, documenting my cooperation, not asking you to endorse my parole, other than to document the case that I worked on. And I did that, and I got over 100 letters from every agency you can think of. I'd debrief for the State Department.

You asked State Department. I met with a CIA agent. I'm dead serious. Wow. I'm dead serious. Wow. What do they want to know? His thing was economics.

Economics. In fact, they wanted me to write a curriculum for the business school economics for USC. Marshall School of Business, I think he's called it. Like one of the prestigious economic schools at USC. and I would have done it, but they wanted me to do a pro bono. Get the fuck out of here. You want me to write a freaking

manuscript for free? Get the fuck out of here, right? This writing's hard for me, right? I write, but I don't really like it. I'd rather speak, right? But I would have done it. I met with every agency there is. Every agency that even met with people

from other countries. In each instance, I'd ask them, document my cooperation. That's all I want. So for the first few years that I was being housed, and I was housed out of the CDC custody for like 10 years. Like I'm living in substations, and I'm living good, right? What does that mean, substations?

It's a police station. That's where I live. Really? So moving me from location to location, whatever agency I'm with, they have a location that they contract with or they have an agreement with where they can put me. Some were better than others.

But it was like anything. unlike anything I had ever experienced. I had big screen TV with computer games. So it's like an apartment in the state jail. Right. But I'm locked up. Yeah. I'm locked up.

But they have the same thing in downtown Los Angeles for WittSec, the official federal witness security program. It's underground in these tunnels. They have little apartments down there where people go down there and stay. So I'm living like that. And the California Board of Prison hearings, which is the parole board and the CDC start contacting my handlers. Hey, this guy's got a parole hearing coming up. I tell him, nah, I pass. I don't want to go. And so finally, after like three times I did this, an attorney contacts my handler, Jeff Boskin, says, I need to see him. So he comes up and says,

why are you refusing to go? I said, I don't think they're ever going to let me go. So I show him everything, all the documents and everything, all the stuff that I've done. And I still hadn't done like really in-depth therapy or rehabilitation. And he just looks at it and says, bro, you're a candidate. He said, don't you want to go home? He says, and they just started the great exodus in the CDC. They had created the elder law. All that stuff was coming into play, right?

Where like a few thousand people had already paroled. Right. People were getting out. That was the very beginning of it in 2014, 2015. And I said, okay, I'm going to go then. So I get my packet together, do my parole plans. I go and they deny me. And they say three years.

It was in Lancaster. And I remember driving out of Lancaster after the denial. And I saw these rainbows, double rainbow. Because it was a rainy day. And I read the Bible, right? I used to read the Bible, right? And I remember that Noah after the big flood. Remember he built the ark and flooded the earth?

And God made a covenant. So I'm going to send a rainbow to you as a covenant. Right? And I just thought about that. That's a covenant. And I went, after 18 months, I went back to the board and boom, they grant it. Wow. They grant my parole, right?

And in front of Governor Jerry Brown. Because here's the process. You go to the parole hearing. The parole hearing recommends your parole, find you suitable. They then do an investigation. And then it goes to the governor's office to this unofficial reversal panel to find out if you were politically viable to release. And then the governor will be made a recommendation endorse it or don't endorse it. He can take four actions. He can take no action, which is one. He could modify the finding.

He could approve the finding or he could reverse the finding. So I go through this process multiple times. With Jerry Brown. And the governor does that for every inmate? Every lifer that's a murder. Oh, okay. It's a murder. There's only four states in the United States. They're do this. And California is one of them. I see. But I thought I was a shoe in because two months earlier, Governor Jerry Brown said the Attorney General, Kamala Harris's office. Got a letter signed by Kamala Harris too. Wow. And Kamala Harris sends a representative down to see me and they asked me to be an expert for Governor Jerry Brown. Because the state, inmates in Asker v. Brown, the big lawsuit that got them all released. The state was being.

being sued. So I write a 22-page expert winner support report for Governor Brown. And everything seems cool on 28 days to parole. And by all, for all intents and purposes, it seems like it's gone. But then Los Angeles Police Department chief, Charlie Beck, asked me to do a training seminar for these swanky, swanky guys. They're called Boosters. It's called the young president's organization, like all multi-millionaires. So it's kind of like a business nightclub thing they take me to. And I do a presentation, contemporary business practices in the Mexican mafia. And I do it.

It goes down well, giving away books, signing books. And one of the cops who's pissed off because he didn't receive overtime that day calls Channel 4 News. And as soon as we exit the building cameras everywhere, Helicopters are following us, and it just blows my whole cover. Jerry Brown reverses my parole. On the day after, they call me into the office. I'm at Lancaster State Prison. It's to say, the governor's office just called

and looks like they're going to grant your parole tomorrow. And I'm like, on Cloud 9, later that night, they called me the office. The governor just took your parole. It's because of how it looks. Exposure. The optics. Yeah, the optics.

Like they're letting this repudiated mobster murderer out. So they made me what is known as a pick case, a public interest case, because the media would just slaughter me every time I went up for parole. Plus, I had a book, and plus I'm a high-profile mobster. So that's a huge amount to overcome. So I went to that process five times. But during an interim, each time they granted me, the governor would write, called a reversal letter. Like, you lack insight. You fail to adequately articulate why you participate.

in so much violence or you lack adequate parole plans. So each time he wrote this, I would study that as a roadmap for the future hearing or address those issues. And all the while I'm going to therapy. And as I went, I started to realize this, you know what? He's right. I can't explain it. And so I started learning.

And therapy and rehabilitation, there's growth, right? There's growth. And let's get this clear. I firmly believe in rehabilitation. Like, I believe that any mobster has the ability to change. Like, I'm a poster child for never being let out of prison. Like, that's the guy who should have stayed in prison for Nan Rickus. Because he's a cut-throat killer, right?

He's a turd. He's taking him good air. I was that guy. But if I could do it, that anybody could do it. So I don't try to keep them in prison. That's not my job. It's not my moral responsibility. they keep themselves in prison by continuing to participate in what they're doing, right?

But they have the opportunity because I had those tools available to me and I took advantage. I went to those seminars as boring as they were, and someone might didn't get anything out of it. But I jumped to the hoops and I checked all the boxes. So ultimately, I had what is called a clinical risk assessment. It's a psyche bell, right? And they found me low risk for recidivism. It's like the most glowing report that I could ever have, right? And I go to the board the fifth time, and the governor denies me again, five times in a row.

And the hardest part was breaking my wife each time. Hey, we're going to get it, but expect the reversal, and then we're going to go to the appellate process. And I appeal twice and lost each time. A guy named Brian Williams, Superior Court judge on a Los Angeles who just recently passed a colon cancer. what did I mean each time? Conservative guy and pro-law enforcement. But the sixth time, I go and I get granted. And the fifth time, he reverses it again.

And I challenge it in the courts. I go to the prison law office and Laura Shepard, attorney out of San Diego. And I establish a little legal team. And they ride a writ of Habe's Corpus, excellent writ. And Judge Ryan Williams sees it again. And they call me out for an interviewer. It's a case they want me to testify on. Because all this time, all these years,

I'm going in and out of the prison system, going to testify in cases, right? And so I'm in the office for the gang investigators on a regular thing where I'm going to go out to court. So they're going to be calling you and talking to you and they're going to pull you to court. Just so happens that day, my attorney calls the prison and says they need to speak to renan ericus and i'm with the gang

investigators he says gets me on the phone he says hey rene i said what's up and uh he says congratulations you on the writ it just fucking hit me like i couldn't speak yeah you know just so emotional and uh and he says hey they're going to appeal it they've already appealed it they asked for a stay. Courts ordered them to release me immediately. But they asked for a stay of execution of that order. So we got maybe two, three years to go on the process of appealing, right? But I know we won. We won. Just so happens. I have another parole hearing coming up. Because after they deny you, they immediately schedule it within 18 months. And there's a lot of debate. Attorney say, don't go. You have the grant already. Your writ's being granted. Why risk it? I go.

I go against my wife's wishes. Don't fucking go. What if you do something wrong? What if you say something wrong? Because each parole hearing is different. Different commissioners, different personalities. And I get this dude named Robert Barton. Fucking prick.

Pearl commissioner. Just tears me up, puts me on the investigation. Tears me up on a, on a, and you can't defend yourself like you can on a witness stand. If you're talking to parole commissioner, you have to show humility. obedience and there's all kinds of stuff you got to do right but I finally understand why he did it he tears me out puts me on an investigation and they postponed the hearing for six months and all the while I'm thinking why the fuck did I come this hearing why didn't I listen to my wife why didn't I listen to my attorney and uh I passed the investigation and uh he grants my parole

and it's during this process that we're waiting for the appeal heel. I later found out that the Attorney General's office talked to one of my case agents. They were just out of function, social function for law enforcement. It says, hey, can you give me your opinion on something? And the Attorney General asked this on my handler. Didn't know it was my handler. He says, I got a case in this guy, Renéin-Rigas, man, and we're kind of wobbling on it, whether we're going to proceed with it or not. What do you know about them? And my handler tells them everything about me. And soon thereafter, the governor decides to say me in bunk.

That means after that program, the board's recommending me, the governor gets the decision that says, you guys make a decision. And that's the finality of it. The in-bunk hearing, which is about 27 parole commissioners, voted unanimously to release me. And I got released 30 days thereafter.

Sheesh. Monumental battle. Yeah. Yeah, they did not want to let you out. No. Had to beat him. Do you think that you would have got released without your cooperation?

Yeah. I think that everything that I did, I definitely think it helped. There's no doubt about that. I don't think there's an inmate in the history of the United States that went to a parole board with the kind of law enforcement support that I had. I even had cops testifying in my parole hearings by behalf. So I don't think there's another inmate that can provide that kind of support. court, right? Do I think it helped? Certainly it helped. Certainly it helped.

Maybe even if, maybe if you hadn't cooperated, you might have still got out. It just would have taken longer. That, but it also came to hinder me. Both governors cited that my cooperation made me a target of the Mexican mafia, thereby threatening the public in the event that they shoot me in a public place. Another one was that I'm gaming the system and how do they know my cooperation is sincere? Well, I'm thinking, after about 300 cases and 65 fucking trials, when do you determine the 65 judges and 65 juries have found me credible?

And all of a sudden, you get a bright idea that I'm not credible. Now, in your own governor's office, utilized me as an expert witness. And you found me credible enough to represent you. And all of a sudden, it comes to this political decision and I'm not credible, that's what really burned me up about the governor's office. that's what were me up about that political process. I think that that should be removed from any governor, having the power and the ultimate power to reverse the decision for political purposes.

I agree. Did you have to testify against any, like, formerly close carnales? No, you know, there's only been a couple of Cardinals that I was close to. Darylbocka, Wyrgy, Black Dan, Sammy Villalva. That's really it. Chanko Padi, he was my friend, Mo was my friend. Has anybody else, has anybody gotten now? out, anybody that used to run with, any mobsters released?

Yeah. There's a, uh, uh, Robo Riva, he paroled. In fact, I saw him in Lancaster. He was a dropout. I'm a drop out. I'm in Lancaster. And he's there. And it's cool.

It's level four yard. All the PC gangs are there. They don't bother us. I dare have a problem with those guys. They didn't like me, but that was okay. Nobody likes me. So, you know, doesn't really, doesn't really bother me, right? Wow.

I don't function based on people's perception of where I am. So Roy Boy was there, and I heard he got paroled a couple of years after that, which gave me great hope, right? Then they paroled Mike Thompson, the AB guy, commissioner. It's coming in tomorrow. Really? Yeah. Awesome.

So Mike Thompson gets paroled, and it really boosts my hopes. And then a couple other bombs are like Albertolento paroles. a bunch of guys start paroling, right? They start paroleing, and it still took that. They didn't have the profile that I did, the media, social media profile. They didn't have any of those things. I had a big, a digital footprint. And I think that's really a thing in my own doing.

I wrote a, I collaborated in the book with Chris Blatchford, Black Catan. And I was bigger than life. And I think that, that bit me on the ass. I think that's what the governors were. Right. Like, okay, we're going to deny you. Right. doing this to grandstand and make make it all about himself yeah so we have your face blurred out

what is your level of risk how realistic do you think you are obviously you're on the hit list for life in today's day and age do you still think you could they could reach out and touch you if they wanted to see that back back right there it's got a defense tool in there that's how real it is it's real wow it's not fake yeah there's got to be some old homeboys sitting in the shoe somewhere that are you know wanting to get their hands on you right look i think the whole subculture has changed i think that the the complete understanding of the consequences of doing something like that is like immediate like to whack me that's going to be a world meet the world news they're going to put it on every news channel everywhere it's not going to

going to be a small thing. And it's not going to be this thing where you're going to get away with it. No. You're not going to get away with it. No. But look, I've accepted that. I've accepted that. Like, okay, that's part of what I signed up for.

I'm not afraid because I can do as much damage as they could do. And I'm not going to be one of those guys. We're just going to walk up, put a gun on my head and shoot me. I'm shooting back. I'm shooting back. You know, so if they want that smoke, okay. you know, I don't want it. I hope that I never see another gang member

the rest of my life. And they live in peace and I live in peace. But if they come, one of us is not leaving. One of us is not leaving, that's for sure. Wow. And you have no more government protection. You have no it's not like a wit-sex situation. I have some layers of protection. Okay.

I can't discuss those, but there are layers of protection. Interesting. Is that for life or just a certain set time? Because you've only been home now four years? for an extensive period. Okay. You released, you got out in 2022. Yeah, July 30th.

Wow, coming up on four years, which is like nothing. It's everything, bro. Of course it is, but it's like you were inside for 32 years. The terrible part is it didn't seem like that. It was like nothing. And now every day is an adventure. Like, I was where I live at, we have a pool in the backyard, a jacuzzi. And I got my big old Kanye Corso.

I got a Coné Corso. Beast. What is that? Connie Corso? Yeah, I don't know of those. I thought people call him cane corsoes. A grill? It's a dog.

Oh. It's a beast, right? I was like, it's either a barbecue or a dog. I have one of those two. We have all that stuff in the back there. And I'm back there. I'm docking down IPAs, and my wife's feet are dangling in the pool. And I'm smoking at a nice cigar.

And I got a good little buzz going on. And I looked around. It's like an oasis back. They got a little palm jar. trees and banana trees and all that stuff. And I just took it in for the moment, Mike. I'm fucking free. Every freaking day.

I never want to lose that feeling. Yeah. Amen. Don't. Oh, no. Don't. Well, Renee, it's been a true honor. It just makes everything, all the stress of this podcast is worth it for interviews like this.

So we'll promote your book and also your YouTube channel. which you're fucking on YouTube killing it. So yeah, promote that first. Yeah, my name is René Rikas, and I do have a podcast called Renee Mrique's Unsensored.

Please like, subscribe, join. But tell us what you do a lot. It's interesting what you do. So just, you know, well, my YouTube channel is all about

revelation of mafia communications. I do mafia profiles. I talk about my personal experiences and debriefing. And I put it all out there. There's no, there's no awards untold, right? But I,

One of the things we really do was we unpack intercepted communications, Title IIIs, videotapes, body cams, the whole nine yards. Real cases, real murders, real recall cases. And all these players I know, maybe they're cooperating in these cases have been consulted on them. And I get my interpretation to the layman as to what's happening. That's fascinating. So you can actually see that these people exist. You know, it's, and the objective isn't like, much. monetizing, but monetizing is important.

I'm not even going to lie about that. I got to pay bills too. Yeah. You know, I got to pay bills. We all got to pay for gas. We all got to pay for taxes. We've got to do all those things, right? So making money is important.

But the real intent of my channel is to get the message out. Like the Black Hand, it was like, if we could dissuade one person and stop them from participating or leave the lifestyle, then my job is done. So if by one of these videos, one of the active guys in prison sees it and says it and says, I'm out. Even if I'm going to stay in prison forever, I'm going to live in peace and I don't have to kill anybody. That's a huge accomplishment.

Yeah. You know, and that's really the objective of the channel. So check that channel out. It'll be collabed with this, with my channel on this episode. And then the Black Hand. It's a great book. It's a great, I mean, it's wild. This shadow organization,

this secret society exists and in California. And, you know, really, is probably the strongest mafia, homegrown mafia we have left in the United States. Really, it's the predominant crime syndicate in California. And it's quickly growing. I think the unrealized potential of the organization hasn't even been seen yet. And if you look at it in terms of organizations, the mob is really in its nascenty. Like you have Yakuza, I've been around 1,000 years. And thieves-in-law, they've been around about 700 years. You have Armenian Mopin, all these other guys, right? Yeah.

Been around for centuries. The Mexican Mopias has been here about 70 years. Yeah. And look at the advances in Spain. Being based in prison. Think about when they get out and make it a society-centric organization where members are solely for the streets. I think it's unrealized potential.

Real threat. Yeah. René Enriquez, thank you so much, Kavanaugh. Appreciate it, ma'am. It's been a pleasure, brother. All right, you guys. We'll see you next time.