© (Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press) The Mexican Mafia has long considered the Los Angeles County jail complex a base of power and a source of wealth. Above, Men's Central Jail. (Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press) The authorities were listening when Ramon Amaya called his wife from the Pomona city jail.
🔴 👉 𝐂𝐋𝐈𝐂𝐊 𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄 𝐓𝐎 𝐆𝐄𝐓 𝐍𝐎𝐖 𝐅𝐑𝐄𝐄
🔴 👉 𝐂𝐋𝐈𝐂𝐊 𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄 𝐓𝐎 𝐆𝐄𝐓 𝐍𝐎𝐖 𝐅𝐑𝐄𝐄
Amaya, a gang member nicknamed Happy, said on a recorded line that he hoped a judge wouldn't release him before he was sent to the county's main lockup in downtown Los Angeles.
“I’m gonna tell the judge, ‘F— you, keep me,’ ” Amaya said, adding that he’d “spit in his face" to make sure he was kept in custody.
And he complained about the "nasty" macaroni he'd been fed in jail. "I should stop eating," he told his wife, "because I'm going to have to s—."
To authorities investigating the drug trade in the jails, Amaya's words made sense.
After getting his wish to be transferred to Men's Central Jail, Amaya was caught smuggling about two grams of heroin and seven grams of methamphetamine. The inmate had hidden the drugs "inside his anal cavity," an FBI agent testified, "and he didn't want anything to disrupt that" — either a lenient judge or an upset stomach — "until he got to the L.A. County jail."
Amaya, authorities say, was a cog in the Mexican Mafia's lucrative operation in the county jails. The Mexican Mafia, about 140 men who control Latino gang members behind bars and on the streets of Southern California, has long considered the Los Angeles County jail complex — the largest in the country — a base of power and a source of wealth.
The county jail system might not seem flush with money. Most of the 15,000-some people held in its six lockups are indigent. They are not allowed to carry cash, and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which oversees the jails, controls what is sold at the commissaries.
But in the recent trial of Gabriel Zendejas Chavez, an attorney accused of working for the Mexican Mafia, and other cases brought by federal and county prosecutors, gang members and law enforcement officers have testified about the schemes through which the Mexican Mafia wrings tens of thousands of dollars a week from the jails’ teeming population and identified the underworld figures to whom the money flows.
