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.

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.”

To the horror of the “zero-tolerance-for-drug” people, the Republic of Mexico has decided to be lenient with those caught with small amounts of drugs.  The new laws allow up to about four joints of marijuana for personal use and about one-half gram of cocaine, which translates into about four “lines” of cocaine or half the weight of a paperclip.  The limits for heroin and methamphetamine are about half the size of a pencil eraser, for LSD about enough to make a few grains of salt.

Oklahomans must even show identification to purchase some cold medications at a pharmacy because those medications contain ingredients used to manufacture methamphetamine.  Previously such cold medicines were purchasable over the counter.  No more.  And some credit this tightened policy with a significant drop in the number of meth labs making methamphetamine in Oklahoma.

“That’s just a reckless policy to have,” said Mark Woodward spokesman for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics about the new Mexican policy.  It takes away a huge deterrent away from someone using drugs.”  No surprise that this agency is completely against backing up one inch in the “War on Drugs.”

Are we winning the “War on Drugs?”  Most criminal defense lawyers in Oklahoma would be skeptical.  I guess the argument to continue the “War on Drugs” is that the drug situation would be even worse if we ever let up, if we ever stop prosecuting to the maximum against any use of any drugs at any time in any place no matter what.  That is one reason the United States allows those in serious, genuine pain to suffer so much, unlike European governments, because “drugs” are medically indicated to address pain and “drugs” are seen in the United States as inherently evil and criminally tainted, something to prosecute rather than to use as a medical tool to alleviate suffering.

The new Mexican laws do not make it strictly legal to possess the enumerated small quantities of drugs, but such users arrested face drug treatment instead of jail, so long as no violence is involved.

About 90-95 per cent of the illegal drugs entering the United States come across the Mexican border.  That is why drug enforcers in the United States worry about the more permissive law in Mexico.  “I think it’s going to increase the work of our customs agents,” Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson said.  Law enforcement commonly develop a prosecution for large amounts of drug distribution or trafficking from witnesses prosecuted for possession of small quantities.  Without the arrests for smaller amounts, the thinking goes, the potential for larger prosecutions diminishes.  Whether those arrested for the smaller quantities possess the smaller amounts for personal use or not, law enforcement will lose the leverage over them to reach up the distribution ladder without the threat of jail on the smaller fish.

The new law allowing possession of smaller amounts in Mexico is intended to concentrate on catching and prosecuting the big dealers rather than the smaller possessors of drugs.  Mexican President Felipe Calderon reportedly hopes the new law will help with the increasing drug addiction in Mexico.

Mexico has seen a doubling in drug addiction in six years to 307,000, according to a Mexican government study.  Meanwhile drug use in the United States has remained fairly constant at around 10 million from 2002 to 2007, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.   The number of Mexicans who have tried drugs, which is not the same as “drug use” and certainly not “drug addiction”, rose to 4.5 million.  Mexico has a population roughly one-third that of the United States.