Lawyer accused of facilitating Mexican mafia activities can avoid prison sentence

A lawyer accused of helping members of the Mexican Mafia traffic drugs, collect extortion money and expose government informants pleaded guilty Thursday in a deal with prosecutors that could spare him a prison sentence.

Gabriel Zendejas Chavez, who was indicted in 2018 in an investigation into the Mexican Mafia’s practices in Los Angeles County jails, told U.S. District Judge George Wu that he was guilty of a rarely filed charge of “misrepresentation of a crime.”

Chavez, 47, admitted that he learned of a crime during a meeting with an inmate in a prison, failed to report the crime to authorities, and attempted to cover it up.

Federal prosecutors have agreed to resolve Chavez’s case without jail time, a fine or any period of court-supervised release. Wu scheduled a sentencing hearing for Nov. 4.

Chavez’s attorney, Meghan Blanco, said the guilty plea would likely result in the revocation of his law license. Chavez declined to comment after the hearing.

Chavez was indicted on racketeering charges in 2022. Testifying in his own defense, he described how he went from being a high school English teacher who studied law at night to a criminal defense attorney representing some of the most feared inmates in California’s prisons.

Chavez told the jury — sometimes through tears — that he was upset with clients who threatened him to join their practices. Wu declared a mistrial after the jury could not reach a verdict.

Prosecutors reached a plea deal with Chavez after his attorney accused them of suppressing evidence during his 2022 trial — hundreds of thousands of pages of documents from the prison files of the men he was accused of conspiring with. With a new trial scheduled to begin Oct. 1, Chavez signed his plea agreement last week. The conduct he admitted to in that agreement was a stark contrast to the charges prosecutors laid out in a superseding indictment filed in February.

According to the indictment, Chavez passed along a message during an unsupervised legal visit that Frank “Little Man” Munoz, a Mexican Mafia member who had fallen out of favor with the organization, had been marked for death. Munoz was gunned down in Hawaiian Gardens in 2016.

Prosecutors also implicated Chavez in a far-reaching plot to remove from office Arthur “Turi” Estrada, an alleged Mexican Mafia member from Rancho Cucamonga. From his cell in Corcoran, witnesses at Chavez’s trial testified, Estrada controlled a network of underlings who collected money and sold drugs in nearly every prison in California.

Some Mexican Mafia members held at the maximum-security prison in Pelican Bay accused Estrada of being greedy, witnesses said. Prosecutors alleged that Chavez met with Mexican Mafia members at Pelican Bay and San Quentin under the guise of legitimate legal visits to drum up support for a move against Estrada.

In a two-month period in 2014, Estrada’s right-hand man, David “Radio” Cortez, was murdered in Tijuana, and Estrada’s brother, George “Domingo” Estrada, was shot to death in Ontario. Both murders remain unsolved.

On the witness stand, Chavez denied participating in the campaign against Estrada. His lawyer asked what would have happened if he had been caught between the two factions.

“You’re done,” Chavez testified. “You’re dead. And if you’re lucky, you’re the only one, and there’s no one around you.”

There is no mention in his plea agreement of power struggles, shootings or even the Mexican Mafia. The only thing Chavez admitted to was visiting a man in the Los Angeles County Jail he knew was involved in extortion and failing to alert authorities. He admitted to covering up the inmate’s crimes by using “hand gestures” and “coded language” and by writing down “the names of members of the criminal enterprise.”

It is an apparent reference to a tape played during Chavez’s trial, which featured a legal visit to Luis “Hefty” Garcia, a client of Chavez who was ordered by the FBI to wear a wiretap.

In the 52-minute recording, Garcia discusses with Chavez a plan to extort $100,000 from the Mongols motorcycle gang in exchange for protecting the Mexican Mafia behind bars.

Chavez admitted he had talked to Garcia about “a lot of illegal things” but insisted he had no intention of following through. He testified he only went along with the plans in the recorded meeting because Garcia had threatened to harm his young daughter.