The Mexican Mafia and More

!Aqui Estoy y No Me Voy!

La eMe

For the lay person, or those who haven’t read my book, I will give a synopsis on the beginning, or how I got started in this life pursuit of the MOST insidious gang of thugs to penetrate not only the prison systems, but also free society.

 

We have to go back to the first week in December, 1971. I had been working with a street gang in the Maravilla Housing Projects named the “Rock Maravilla”.  Believe it or not, I believe that I was making some headway into changing the minds and attitudes of a few of the members. This was not an easy job, but a fascinating one.  Only the Chief of Police and a few others really knew what my assignment was, and as a result, I caught some flack from the miss-informed. Unfortunately a murder occurred and was about to change my life forever.

 

On December 6, 1971, an assassination style murder occurred in one of our city parks. I was off duty at the time, but the next morning upon arrival at work, I was called into the Detective Division by Lieutenant Bob Collins.  He was aware of my working with the gangs of East Los Angeles and asks me if I heard of a gang with the initials eMe.  I had not, however, told him I would check it out with some of the older gang members and let him know.  (I am not going to write out the whole story of my book, but just give you a glimpse of what’s in it).

 

After several inquiries and dead ends I discovered that this was only one of at least three murders in the past month that had the signs of assassination style killings. This would eventually lead to the formation of what would later be called the Prison Gang Task Force. (California ’s Original Gang Task Force).

 

I worked this from that day in December 1971 until I retired in November 1978. Naturally the book goes into more detail. Five years after retiring, I moved to Texas and became a Probation Officer/Surveillance Officer, then later went to work in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Institution Division.  I interviewed most of the Texas Prison gang members and stayed abreast of what the connections between these groups and those in California.

 

Here it is almost thirty-years later and I am still involved.  I try to attend as many seminars put on by the various associations that I belong and also sell my books.  I still enjoy this and probably will until my demise.

        Just a few other tid-bits on what you will find in the book "The Mexican Mafia, The Story"

                                    

 

WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT:

I worked in Law Enforcement and Corrections from 1958 – 2002, a career that spanned almost 50 years.  Although I did not become aware of the Mexican Mafia until 1971, I was able to backtrack and verify their early years and up to 1978, through multiple “reliable sources.”  This book is about the true history of the California Mexican Mafia from its crude beginning in 1957.  It covers in-depth activity, as I observed it, from 1971 through 1978, when I left the Monterey Park Gang Task Force in California and set upon a new career in the State of Texas.  This story was an on-going active investigation of the Mexican Mafia in which I was actively involved since we first discovered an assassination murder on the street that occurred in Monterey Park, California in December 1971.  I’ve followed this group very close over the years up until even today, in the year 2005.  It was a project that I was very proud of and still am proud.

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EL MOCO VERDE (Green Booger) and other Nicknames

Eventually as time went on, all law enforcement personnel at the Task Force, and all of our informants were given a nickname.  Joe Moody gave most of these nicknames to the persons involved.  My close friend Don Elder named me. The name Don put on me, “Moco,” is only the first half. It is really “Moco Verde.”  In Spanish, "Green Booger", sounds kind of gross, but most of my close friends just call me “Moco.”

 

Let me explain how this came about:

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THE SHARING OF OUR INFORMANTS

Although we would become involved in a myriad of cases ranging from parole violations to murders, we concentrated our operation on drug traffickers. The information on suspects arrested came from several sources, including the California Department of Corrections, arrests by other agencies, and from informants

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PT. II:  THE MEXICAN MAFIA &           

OTHER PRISON GANGS

Now that I have given you a short synopsis of how the Prison Gang Task Force started out, introduced some of the investigators and informants, as well as just some of the heinous acts perpetrated by this criminal gang let me expand a bit more on the group we were set up to address. It will be necessary for me to digress at this point of my story on the Mexican Mafia to tell you a little bit more about two other violent prison gangs that played a significant role in the story; the Aryan Brotherhood and the Nuestra Familia.

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JOE MORGAN’S FIRST MURDER AND ESCAPES

Joseph “Cocoliso” Morgan, (a nickname that only a few knew him by) years earlier had become a legend in his time.  As a young man of 16 years of age, he became infatuated with a married L.A. woman named Elvira Rojo.  In Joe’s mind, he was indeed in love. Joe was a fairly handsome youngster, being a stapling boy of 6’ 2" and around 185 pounds. He was quite an eyeful for a married woman 32 years of age. This was true of course, since Jose; her husband was a short stocky and ugly 52 years old.

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AN ICON HAS RISEN: RODOLFO “CHYENNE” CADENA

Besides Joe Morgan, another eMe legend was Rodolfo “Cheyenne” Cadena.  Here was an intelligent individual who could have done just about anything he set his mind to be in the free world. He was a very handsome young man that had charisma and the leadership abilities to lead masses for good or evil. Unfortunately, he chose to lead them to the bad side. Like Morgan, he virtually grew up in CDC; it became his “Family”.

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THE TAKE OVER OF SAN QUENTIN PRISON

By mid-1966, the Mexican Mafia flexed its muscles and took control of the “Big Yard,” at San Quentin (some referred to it as the lower yard of this prison originally built in 1852). What this meant was the rest of the general prison population was now at the mercy of this group of thugs called the Mexican Mafia.

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MEXICAN MAFIA TARGETS #1 PROJECT SPAN

During the years 1970-1971, the Mexican Mafia attempted and almost succeeded in moving a good part of its organization into the “streets,” through federally funded self-help programs. The most prominent and seriously infiltrated was a program called SPAN. This is an acronym for Special Program for Alcoholism and Narcotics.

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DON’T JOKE, “IF I DO THAT AGAIN, KILL ME!”

The story goes like this:

 Alphy and his crime partner, Alfred “Cuate” Jimenez was serving their sentence at the McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary in the State of Washington.  This facility was later turned over and ran by the Washington Department of Corrections. While walking the yard one day, Cuate was telling Alphy that he figured out that one of the Mexican Mafia’s biggest problems with some of the membership was when the member starts using drugs.

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SEE MOCO RUN!

It was not always the criminal that these out of the ordinary occurrences happed to. One night some of us from the Task Force decided to go to the Hawaiian Gardens area to look for one of the California Department of Corrections escapees, Hondo Lechuga.

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MEXICO, A SAFE HAVEN? NOT FROM THE TASK FORCE

We, in the Task Force, knew their system and worked within their boundaries. It did not matter what our own personal feelings were, we did what we had to do to get the job done.  This in no way compromised us, we knew what we could legally do or not do in Mexico. I will explain a couple of examples.

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PT. III THE TRAFFIC STOP AND THE AFTERMATH

This is one story I don’t have mixed up as I was there, but other people did mix it up either because of their lack of understanding, or because they “couldn’t handle the truth”!

On February 20, 1977, Monterey Park Officer Joe Delia was working routine traffic patrol in a marked black and white patrol vehicle. During the course of traffic enforcement, a vehicle suddenly made an illegal left-hand turn in front of a small Yellow Volkswagen. This was right in front of Delia’s patrol unit and almost caused an accident. The offending vehicle quickly turned into a nearby driveway and into a garage. The two occupants inside the vehicle immediately exited the vehicle and came running outside the garage where they quickly closed the overhead garage door shut with the vehicle left inside.

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MY FUTURE PREDICTIONS…

This gang, the Mexican Mafia, is now nearly a half-century-old, and still going strong (1957-?) There was no way of knowing that this insidious rag-tag gang of 13 original members would be able to grow and spread its terror not only in California, but also into other states.

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FIVE FACTORS MAKING THE

MEXICAN MAFIA EXTREMELY DANGEROUS

In view of the following factors, the Mexican Mafia’s potential for refining and expanding in the communities of California is a constant and continuing grave threat, and I’ll give my reasons. This is in part due to:

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FIRST SIGNS OF THIS INSIDEOUS CANCER SPREADING

I remember that sometime back in the mid 1970s, there were a couple of investigators from the Arizona Prison System who came by the Task Force to make inquires about an apparent “prison gang” that suddenly popped up there. They were not sure of the name, however said that it was mostly made up of Mexican-Americans, and that a few had served prior sentences in the California System.

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THE TEXAS CONNECTION

(MEXIKANEMI/LA eMe)

According to official Texas Department of Corrections (TDCJ) documents, the Mexikanemi, or Texas Mexican Mafia, got started in TDCJ in the latter part of 1984.  The official belief is that it was started because of pressures being exerted on them, by the Texas Syndicate

 

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