The ATF Informant That Nearly Brokered an Alliance Between Mexican Mafia & La Familia Michoacana Part 1

From a federal penitentiary in Virginia, Jose Landa-Rodriguez, a longtime Mexican Mafia gang member nicknamed “Fox” reconnected with an old friend in California.

“Long time no hear, you know?” he told Hugo Montes in Spanish in a recorded call.

Pleasantries gave way to business when Montes pitched Landa-Rodriguez on a deal.

“This is something that is going to interest you for the rest of your life,” he promised.

Both men were from Michoacán, a state in western Mexico where at the time in 2011, a drug cartel called La Familia Michoacána was producing enormous amounts of methamphetamine.

Montes distributed the cartel’s product in Los Angeles. Landa-Rodriguez, nicknamed “Fox,” was a member of the Mexican Mafia, a syndicate of Latino gang members held in American prisons that “taxed” drug dealers but did not operate as wholesalers themselves.

La Familia wanted protection for its members in American prisons, a seat on the inmate councils that run day-to-day affairs on prison yards and help collecting debts and committing murders on U.S. streets. In exchange, the Mexican Mafia would get an endless supply of meth at a price low enough to corner the Southern California drug market.

The deal offered a different kind of benefit to the man who ultimately took charge of the negotiations: Ralph Guy Rocha.

A 20-year member of the Mexican Mafia, known as “Perico from Norwalk,” Rocha had the authority to represent his side of the table, and, unlike Landa-Rodriguez, he could negotiate with the cartel outside of prison.

Flipping Rocha was supposed to have been an investigative coup for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. But by the time Landa-Rodriguez spoke with Montes a year later in 2011, Rocha hadn’t delivered. His criminal associates had all been arrested by other law enforcement agencies that either didn’t need or didn’t want Rocha’s help.

And so it was a stroke of luck for Rocha — and the investigators counting on him — when he got wind of the would-be alliance with La Familia.

It was the kind of case that could make an agent’s career. What none of them knew was that their star informant was making tapes of his own, memorializing his dim view of how they did their jobs.

They played up the threat of the Mexican Mafia, Rocha said, both to scare the public into raising their budgets and to justify their plum assignments on gang task forces.

Rocha’s words jeopardized the case he helped build, none more so than the claim that his handlers, hoping to make a sensational case, took steps to keep the “marriage” between La Familia and the Mexican Mafia alive.

“They allow a lot of stuff to happen,” he mused in one tape, “and help create other stuff to make a certain type of bust.”

The chain of events that led Landa-Rodriguez to Montes — and eventually to Rocha — began years earlier, when Los Zetas, a cartel founded by deserters from an elite Mexican military unit, spilled out from their base in northeastern Mexico and overran Michoacán. Local traffickers rose up against Los Zetas, announcing their counteroffensive by rolling the severed heads of their enemies onto a nightclub floor.

“El Mas Loco” Leader of LFM at the time based in Mexico

Calling themselves La Familia, they had promised to retake “Michoacán for Michoacános.” But before long they had subjected the state — one of rugged beauty, known for producing limes, avocados and a diaspora of immigrants across the United States — to the same extortion and corruption practiced by Los Zetas.

By 2011, its leaders were concerned by a series of U.S. prosecutions called Project Delirium. Cartel figures were facing extradition to American prisons, the domain of the Mexican Mafia.

The potential deal between the two organizations was rooted in global criminal ambitions, but for the man with the connections to get it done, it was about a brother’s love.

“Fox” Jose Landa-Rodriguez the Mexican Mafia member approached with the deal by Montes

Hugo Montes was a Los Angeles based distributor for LFM and brokered the first meeting

Montes didn’t even expect to see the deal through himself. He was dying of cancer; doctors had been saying he had two weeks to live for the last two years, he told Landa-Rodriguez. All he wanted was protection for a brother who was serving life in the California prison system.

Landa-Rodriguez told Montes to contact an old cellmate, who passed off Montes to Rocha. In his secret tapes, Rocha said the Mexican Mafia couldn’t grasp the scope of what the cartel was proposing. Rocha said all his peers wanted was a few thousand dollars up front, blind to the potential of doing business with a cartel that shipped meth north by the ton.

“I’d apply it to a faucet,” Rocha said in his tapes. “They’d rather turn on the faucet full blast and get as much as they can out of it… Instead of just putting out an even flow and get it all, drink as much as you want, learn to shut it off.”

Fugitive La Familia plaza boss who met with ATF informant Rocha

Rocha sat down with Montes and his brother Freddie, with whom he owned an auto repair business in the San Fernando Valley, and a plaza boss of La Familia, Efrain “Tucan” Rosales. The ATF provided the setting: an unmarked building in a San Dimas office park, bugged with hidden cameras and microphones.

Rosales proposed a “marriage” between the cartel and the Mexican Mafia, Rocha recalled afterward.

“I go, ‘Well, how about this? We got Surenos” — gang members with ties to Southern California and loyal to the Mexican Mafia — “from California to New York. To Maine to Miami, to South, North Dakota. So what do you want? You want to take over the United States?”

“Dude’s eyes got this big. Big as silver dollars.”

Source LA Times