The ATF Informant Who Nearly Brokered an Alliance Between the Mexican Mafia and La Familia Michoacana, Part 1 ~ Borderland Beat

La Familia wanted protection for its members in American prisons, a seat on the prison councils that run the prison yard and help collect debts and commit murders on American streets. In return, the Mexican Mafia would get an endless supply of meth at a price low enough to corner the Southern California drug market.

Ralph “Perico of Norwalk” Rocha, a member of the Mexican Mafia, became an informant for the ATF

The deal offered a different kind of advantage to the man ultimately in charge of negotiations: Ralph Guy Rocha.

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

Rocha, originally from the Norwalk area, became an EM member in the federal prison system after he was indicted in 1994 on federal racketeering charges, along with high-ranking Mexican Mafia members such as Benjamin “Topo” Peters, Ruben “Nite Owl” Castro, Raymond “Huero Shy” Shyrock and Randy “Cowboy” Therrien.

According to Guillermo Moreno, a special agent for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation who specializes in La eMe, Rocha’s time in the federal prison system put him in a position of competition — and subservience — to Emeros in state prisons like Padilla.

Gonzalez-Munoz and Rocha were released from federal prison in early 2007 and took to the streets en masse to conquer even more territory.

Rocha and “Cisco” Munoz-Gonzaleza, also an eMe member, allegedly feuded with henchmen of then-influential member Jacques “Jocko” Padilla, who ran Azusa 13 from his maximum-security cell in Corcoran State Prison. Rocha and Munoz allegedly collected taxes from dealers in Azusa. In December 2007, California authorities charged six people with the attempted murder of Rocha and Gonzalez-Mu oz on behalf of “Jocko” Padilla.

Flipping Rocha was said to be an investigative stunt for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. But when Landa-Rodriguez spoke to Montes a year later in 2011, Rocha had not delivered what he had hoped for. His criminal accomplices had all been arrested by other law enforcement agencies that did not need or want Rocha’s help.

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

It was the kind of case that could make a cop’s career. What none of them knew was that their star informant was making his own tapes, a reminder of his bleak view of how they did their jobs.

They played up the threat of the Mexican Mafia, Rocha said, to scare the public and increase their budgets, but also to justify their high-profile contracts with gangs.

Rocha’s words jeopardized the case he had helped build, and even more so did the claim that his henchmen, hoping to create a sensational case, were taking steps to keep alive the “marriage” between La Familia and the Mexican Mafia.

“They make a lot of things happen,” he mused in one of the tapes, “and help create other things to make a certain type of bust.”

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

“El Mas Loco” Leader of LFM then based in Mexico

Calling themselves La Familia, they had promised to reconquer “Michoacán for Michoacános.” But they soon subjected the state—a state of rugged beauty, known for its production of limes, avocados, and a diaspora of immigrants in the United States—to the same extortion and corruption perpetrated by Los Zetas.

In 2011, leaders were concerned about a series of U.S. prosecutions called Project Delirium. Cartel members faced extradition to U.S. 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 make it happen, it was about the love between brothers.

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

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

Montes didn’t even expect to close the deal himself. He was dying of cancer; doctors had told Landa-Rodriguez for the past two years that he had only two weeks to live. All he wanted was protection for a brother serving a life sentence in the California prison system.

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

“I would put it on a faucet,” Rocha said in his tapes. “They’d rather open the faucet all the way and get as much out as they can… Instead of just running a steady stream and getting it all out, you drink as much as you want, and you learn to turn 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 ran an auto repair shop in the San Fernando Valley, and a plaza owner from La Familia, Efrain “Tucan” Rosales. The ATF provided the setting: an unmarked building in an office park in San Dimas, bugged with hidden cameras and microphones.

For Rocha, the tension of being an informant, surrounded by men who would kill him if they discovered his secret, was “like dizziness.”

Twenty years in the Mexican Mafia had made him “deaf,” he said. But once he started working for the government and “respecting things because they were right,” he said, “you think, man, I have kids. I don’t want to die tomorrow.”

He began drinking heavily. At 2 a.m. on a Wednesday morning, a California Highway Patrol officer found him passed out behind the wheel of his silver BMW 745Li, stalled on the 10 Freeway in Ontario.

His eyes were bloodshot and his speech was slurred, the officer wrote in his report. Rocha said he “worked for the government and that was all he would say.”

He was driving without a driver’s license, which had been revoked because he was not paying alimony.

The arrest, a violation of his cooperation agreement, jeopardized the case he was building. His handlers could have torn up his deal, dropped the investigation, and sent Rocha to trial for life in prison. Instead, they asked the CHP not to file charges until Rocha’s undercover work was over.

Rocha complained in his tapes that his ATF handler, John Ciccone, forced him to use his savings to pay his alimony, promising to “pay it back to me slowly.”

“I can only work with the money they give me,” Rocha said. “And that’s not much.”

Ciccone testified that he paid Rocha $447,000. In an interview, Ciccone, now retired, said the amount included reimbursement for expenses and income for the 2½ years he worked undercover.

“We don’t allow him to work, so we have to compensate him for that,” he said.