Oklahoma Criminal Defense Blog

Federal authorities have documented many links between most of the major U.S. prison gangs and Mexican drug trafficking organizations.      The most recent National Drug Threat Assessment from the Justice Department reported prison gangs were operating in all 50 U.S. states are increasing their influence over drug trafficking along the U.S.-Mexican b order.

Federal prosecutors in San Diego charged 36 defendants of racketeering for their activities between the Arellano Felix drug trafficking network and California’s Mexican Mafia prison gang, the gang members allegedly working in drug trafficking, kidnapping, and murder attempts for the Mexican cartel.

Baldemar Rivera for years ran a Texas prison gang named Raza Unida while he was in isolation. Reportedly, this is common for gang members for the organization to be run from someone in solitary confinement.  Rivera says he used sign language to discuss gang business with one of his minions who visited him.  Rivera communicated with gang members in other Texas prisons through his captains in prison, who wrote to the soldiers, also in prison.  Within 3 or 4 days, the word had been passed, the word was out.  Rivera, now 50, and now serving a 60-year sentence for murder, says he left the gang life 10 years ago after completing the state’s gang-renouncement program.

Rivera was running Raza Unida in the 1990s, when prisoners used mail to communicate with each other and the outside world.  Now they use cell phones.  Texas prisons seized 1200 cell phones from prisoners last year.  And Texas prisons do not allow prisoners to mail letters to other inmates, so they mail to third parties, who then pass on their letters to the prisoner intended.

Prisoners also hold conference calls provided by friends on the outside.  Mail censors watch their mail, so some prisoners communicate in Nahuatl, language of the Aztecs.  It is an ancient language, but it’s still spoken by about a million and a half people in Mexico.  The gang members learn Nahuatl from books, and some of them adopt Aztec names.  They claim they are honoring their heritage, but they are just concealing their communications.

The gangs sometimes get their hooks into prison employees or even court employees.  One woman who worked in the federal defender’s office in El Paso was convicted of acting as liaison between gang members behind the walls and their confederates outside.

Gang members have testified in at least two federal cases about how money from the gang’s outside businesses of extortion, drug sales, and other illegal undertakings, ultimately found its way into the gang members’ commissary accounts in prison.

An FBI agent testified last year in a prosecution against Texas’ Mexican Mafia prison gang that the gang collected at least $8,000 a week, sometimes $40,000 a week, in San Antonio alone.  The proceeds were sent to gang members in prison, where they spent the money on food, personal items, or they could send money to their family members on the outside. Drugs were available to gang members and visitations from girls.

Contraband is smuggled in by guards, lawyers, and visitors.  Revenue from drug sales on the street pays for it.      A cell phone cost $2,000. Contraband is dropped off at pre-arranged locations accessible to prisoners on work detail.  Sixty phones were discovered on one occasion in an air compressor delivered to a prison workshop.

When gang members are released from prison, they are expected to report to gang leaders on the outside, attend gang meetings and make their contribution to making money for the gang. That usually means selling drugs or enforcing on the street dealers.

The number of active gang members nationally is estimated at about 1 million.  Prison gangs like the Mexican Mafia, the Texas Syndicate, Hermandad de Pistoleros Latinos (the Brotherhood of Latino Gunmen), Raza Unida, and Mexikanemi comprise only about 45,000 members.  However, they control most of the local street gangs as well, especially in southern California and south Texas.

Stephen Caracappa and Louis Eppolito were convicted three years before of acting as assassins for the Mafia while they were employed by New York Police Department.    Finally, [in March, 2009] they were sentenced in Brooklyn by U.S. District Court by Judge Jack Weinstein, Eppolito to life plus 100 years with a fine of $4.75 million, Caracappa to life plus 80 years and a fine of $4.25 million.

The judge said the two defendants likely had hidden assets to pay the fines.  One asset that will not be seized, however, is their police pensions.  Both men have been drawing tax-free disability pensions from the City of New York since they left the police department.  Caracappa retired in 1992 as a first-grade detective.  He receives $5,313 a month.  Eppolito retired in 1990 as a second-grade detective and receives a $3,896 per month in pension.

Both detectives, who joined the police force in 1969, retired before they were charged with anything, so their convictions do not interrupt their pensions from the city.  Although first reports of the detective’s corruption surfaced in 1979, they continued to receive promotions in the police department.  Implicated a  number of times, they were never charged until in this prosecution.  The pensions are not subject to seizure for the fines due the federal government.

Under New York law, pensions due former public employees are treated as property in trust for the employee. Efforts to exact forfeiture of such pensions as penalty for those convicted of corruption have failed in the past.  In 2009, 450 corrupt former officials, judges and police officers were reportedly still receiving pensions despite their convictions.

Caracappa, now 68 years old, is gaunt, with little color in his face.  Eppolito is 61 and doing better but still a wreck.   They will have little opportunity to spend their pensions in prison, but their families can.  The testimony of the families of some of their victims at the sentencing hearing did not prompt either of the men to give up their pensions.

Caracappa’s and Eppolito’s trial [in 2006?] lasted 3 weeks.  It was built around the testimony of Burton Kaplan, a wholesale garment dealer who was involved in a number of schemes with people in organized crime.  Jimmy Breslin wrote a book about Kaplan, entitled “The Good Rat, ” which describes how Caracappa, using a police computer, helped track down a man named Nicholas Guido for the Mafia.  Caracappa made a mistake, however, and gave a wrong address with the same name, who was soon shot to death.

Caracappa’s and Eppolito were charged with accepting $4,000 a month payments from the mob for spying, plus tens of thousands extra for the occasional kidnapping or murder.  They disclosed the identities of witnesses and leaked information, compromising investigations.  In their first mob killing in 1986, they used the siren on their unmarked car to pull over a jeweler on a Long Island road.  They told Israel Greenwald they needed him to stand in a lineup to investigate a traffic accident.  Then they drove him to a garage, where he was shot to death.

At their trial, the detectives were convicted of murdering a capo in the Gambino family capo in his Mercedes-Benz on the Belt Parkway in New York.  The jury also found them guilty of kidnaping a man, putting him in the trunk of their car, and delivering him to a mobster, who then tortured the man for hours before killing him.

Following the trial in which they were convicted of racketeering conspiracy, the trial judge issued but did not impose a life sentence for each detective.  The judge stated he believed the five-year statute of limitations had run on the crimes the defendants had committed and therefore overturned the convictions.  The most serious crimes of which the two detectives were accused occurred in Brooklyn, including murders, in the 1980s and 1990s, prosecutors used more recent and less serious crimes, such as money-laundering and dope distribution in Las Vegas, Nevada, in 2004-2005, to bring the earlier acts into the conspiracy net as an ongoing criminal enterprise.  The judge did not believe the conspiracy could include the earlier acts, but the United States Court of Appeals differed and reinstated the convictions.

As criminal defense attorneys will tell you, an attorney is expected to defend someone suspected of a crime.  That was not the case in New Mexico earlier this month.  The lawyer called the police, but she did so when a man apparently told her to do so.

Lauren Oliveros called the police in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to report a man walked into her law office and told her had killed two people the day before and wanted to turn himself in.  The man told her where the bodies could be found.

Ralph Montoya wanted to give himself up.  He was already on bail for attacking these very two victims weeks before.  Police found the bodies of Stefanie Gray and her boyfirend, Hector Torres at Torres’ home.  Ms. Gray was a high school teacher, and Torres was a professor of English at the University of New Mexico.  Gray was also a graduate student at the University of New Mexico due to defend her thesis this month.

Following the tip from Montoya, police went to Torres’ home, kicked in the back door and found their bodies in the house.  Police reported they found a handgun was in Torres’ left hand, pointing at his head.  One officer said the handgun appeared to have been placed there, but that could be one of those “police opinions” that creep into the courtroom and are claimed to rest on some sort of expertise, but which are really based on nothing more than “hunch”.  In other words, police routinely claim to know things that they really do not know.  But none of that apparently matters to solving this case.

At the time of these deaths, Montoya was on bail for attacking Ms. Gary and Mr. Torres. In that earlier incident, Montoya reportedly forced his way into the front door, chased Gray into a back bedroom, jumped on her and kicked her, all while Torres was fighting him.  Gray broke free, Montoya pulled a knife, and Torres started talking.  Torres must have been a pretty good English professor because he talked Torres into dropping the knife.

Gray then obtained from the court in Sandoval County a restraining order against Montoya, who was then released on bail on the charges of kidnapping, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, aggravated assault on a household member  and aggravated burglary.  It was while on bail for this incident that Montoya allegedly confessed to going to Torres’ home and killing Gray and Torres.

This was not Montoya’s first rodeo.   In 1995, Montoya pleaded guilty to charges of stalking, assault, attempted arson and attempted breaking and entering after a complaint from a student at New Mexico State University in Las Cruses.  For that, he received probation for a year.      But that was not enough, so in 1998, another woman from Las Cruses obtained a restraining order against Montoya.  She claimed that Montoya had made 15 to 20 threatening telephone calls a day for two months and that she had seen him near apartment window several times.

With a belly still not full, Montoya had an incident in 2005 with a different woman, this one from Rio Rancho.  She complained that Montoya had harassed her for a month after they had dated briefly.  She said he would show up at her home at her new boyfriend’s home, but no charges were ever filed.

Nadine Hamby, spokeswoman for the Albuquerque Police Department, summed up Montoya’s attitude pretty well.  “Obviously ‘no’ was not something he wanted to hear,” Hamby said.   As to the subjects of Montoya’s serial attention, she said: “It appears he wouldn’t leave them alone until he found someone new.”

A very big Mexican drug kingpin was sentenced in Houston to a 25-year sentence.  The sentencing hearing was done in a closed courtroom.  Osiel Cardenas Guillen was the head of the “Gulf Cartel” until his arrest by Mexican authorities in 2007.  He pled guilty to five counts of a lengthy indictment, which included drug trafficking, money laundering and the attempted murder and assault of federal agents.  He also forfeited $50 million in assets to the U.S. Government.

The Gulf Cartel controls much of the cocaine traffic across the Mexican-American border in South Texas.  Cardenas was responsible for “kidnapings, extortion, gun battles in the streets,” according to U.S. District Judge Hilda Tagle, who sentenced Cardenas.

Nevertheless, Judge Tagle followed the recommendation of the U.S. Attorney in giving the sentence because Cardenas was cooperating with the government in pursuing other drug traffickers.

Before he was arrested by Mexican authorities in 2003, Cardenas ran an empire of drug smugglers and gunmen in Tamaulipas, Mexico.  They moved tons of cocaine every year into the United States.  He was famous to law enforcement on both sides of the border for the vicious violence he employed against his enemies. He recruited former military commandoes as his gunmen, known as Zetas.
Even after his arrest, he continued to direct the operations of his cartel from his Mexican jail cell.  Then Mexican President Felipe Calderon broke with previous policy and extradited Cardenas along with 14 other major figures from the Mexican underworld.  Cardenas began cooperating with the U.S. Government immediately when he arrived here.  Meanwhile, his former organization has been weakened by arrests and lack of leadership.

The Zetas have now broken off from the Gulf Cartel. They have become a separate criminal enterprise that controls the crossing at Laredo, Texas, and recently there has been a series of gun battles between the Zetas and what is left of the Gulf Cartel in the towns along the Texas border in a contest for turf.

Cardenas has been in the United States for two years, cooperating with law enforcement all the time, perhaps especially cooperating on the Zetas, since they have split with his Gulf Cartel.  Finally, his sentence was handed down in a courtroom, closed to the public.  Judge Tagle also sealed dozens of documents related to Cardenas’ plea agreement and descriptions of his assets, all at the request of government prosecutors.  It is not unusual to seal documents in a case, but it is very unusual to lock a courtroom for a hearing in a United States Courthouse.

The sentencing hearing was attended by two members of Cardenas family and some law enforcement officers, along with armed guards.  The hearing was not even on the court’s published docket until hours after it was over.   The transcript taken of the hearing reflects that the judge explained the United States Marshal’s Service had asked to keep the public from witnessing the hearing because it would jeopardize Cardenas’ safety.  The affidavit detailing that request was sealed.  Judge Tagle stated that if she opened the hearing, the “defendant, court personnel, United States marshal personnel, other courthouse personnel and the general public will be placed in imminent danger.”