The Mexican Mafia has been raking fat stacks of cash out of the Los Angeles County jails for a really long time. They have what experts call a “well-oiled machine” running like a printing press for money. Ramon Amaya knew he was talking on a recorded line but thought he was being vague enough not to get in trouble. He was wrong.
Jails run by the inmates
Authorities at the jails are always listening in. When Ramon Amaya spoke on the phone to his wife, from the Pomona city jail, he knew the call was tapped. Ramon didn’t think he dropped any clues. You wouldn’t catch them unless you knew what to listen for.
His gangland name is “Happy” but he wasn’t thrilled that his judge might actually let him loose. He really had to get to the main downtown LA lockup, quick. He had a plan.
“I’m gonna tell the judge, ‘F— you, keep me.‘ I’ll spit in his face” to make sure he was kept in custody. He wasn’t real happy about the food jails provide, especially the “nasty” macaroni. There was a good reason he wanted to get transferred fast.
“I should stop eating,” he told his wife, “because I’m going to have to s—.” That was enough for the guards listening in to ruin his day.
“To authorities investigating the drug trade in the jails, Amaya’s words made sense.” Amaya was smuggling “about two grams of heroin and seven grams of methamphetamine” to the Men’s Central Jail.
According to the friendly FBI agent who testified at his trial, Ramon had stashed the drugs “inside his anal cavity and he didn’t want anything to disrupt that.” Either a lenient judge or an upset stomach, the LA Times points out, “until he got to the L.A. County jail.” Smuggling is normal in prison but the scale of the dealing and other cash skimming operations is insane.
Three big operations
The Mexican Mafia has a “lucrative operation” running rampant in LA county jails. Authorities estimate that around 140 men “control Latino gang members behind bars and on the streets of Southern California.”
While all the inmates are impoverished and can’t carry cash there are ways to make money. Besides drug sales, the Latinos rely on taxes and a “kitty” cut they pull from commissary sales.
Inmates buy snacks, toiletries and clothes at the facility commissary “For every $7 that a Latino gang member spends, he must contribute $1.50 worth of items to a collection, or kitty.” It’s not chump change.
The items skimmed “are sold within the jail to an inmate who pays for the goods by directing a friend or relative on the streets to send the money to an associate of the Mexican Mafia.” For instance, a kitty bag sells quickly at $35 because it contains $50 to $60 worth of goods. Across the jails, that adds up. “about $23,000 a month.”
A second way of making money is through “fines.” Inmates have no recourse to paying, other than going to the authorities and entering a protective custody wing of the jail. One “right hand man” testified “that his boss accused another of Martinez’s deputies, Rafael ‘Stomper‘ Carrillo from the Avenues gang, of pocketing money owed to the Mexican Mafia. Carrillo was forced to pay Landa-Rodriguez $15,000.”
The biggest money maker of them all is the “thirds” tax on all incoming drugs. A third of the substances get kicked to the floor leader. Meanwhile prices inside the jails are so inflated that dealers can still make a fortune off the two-thirds remaining. “A gram of heroin costs about $50 on the street, but one-fourth that amount can go for $150 in jail.“
