The arrests were made during an early morning operation, with FBI agents executing warrants throughout Southern California as part of a two-year investigation. Nineteen of the suspects were already in custody, while two remain fugitives. The operation is linked to a federal indictment that charges 40 people with a variety of felonies, including racketeering conspiracy, drug trafficking, and illegal weapons possession.

    The Mexican Mafia, known as “La Eme,” is a powerful prison-based gang that, according to federal authorities, exerts significant control over numerous street gangs in Southern California. “Gang members who commit heinous acts like murder, extortion, kidnapping, and drug trafficking are a menace to our communities,” said Bill Essayli, First Assistant U.S. Attorney, in a statement. “These arrests showcase the continued collaboration between federal and local law enforcement to take down violent criminals and disrupt organized crime in both our prisons and streets.”

    Among those indicted in the operation are several high-ranking members of the Mexican Mafia, including Luis Cardenas, 48, also known as “Gangster,” “Pops,” and “Tio,” who is currently serving a life sentence at Ironwood State Prison. Other individuals charged include Jose Antonio Ochoa Madrigal, 41, incarcerated in an Orange County jail, and associates Jaime Alvarado, 42, Karina Cesena, 32, and Mario Flores, 40.

    According to the 66-count indictment, Cardenas was responsible for overseeing the Mexican Mafia’s criminal activities in Orange County and its affiliated jail facilities from June 2024 to April 2026. Authorities claim that Cardenas, operating from prison, used encrypted messaging apps on contraband phones to coordinate criminal operations, including kidnappings and assaults on people who had fallen out of favor with him.

    The indictment also includes allegations related to the 2025 murder of a victim at the Akua Inn, a motel controlled by the Mexican Mafia in Anaheim. According to officials, two men, Matthew Kundrat, 29, and Manuel Ramos, 45, murdered the victim in an effort to gain membership in the Mexican Mafia and increase their rank within the organization. If convicted, the two men could face a life sentence in prison and possibly the death penalty, as per federal law.

    In addition to their involvement in violent crimes, the Mexican Mafia is accused of operating illegal drug trade networks in the region, distributing fentanyl, methamphetamine, heroin, and cocaine through gambling houses and other gang-controlled businesses. Alvarado and Cesena are accused of overseeing operations that involved violent retaliation against “slap houses” that failed to pay the required extortion fees, known as “taxes.”

    The operation led to the seizure of nearly nine pounds of fentanyl, over 120 pounds of methamphetamine, two pounds of heroin, more than six pounds of cocaine, 25 firearms, and over $30,000 in cash.

    Fifteen of the arrested individuals were expected to be arraigned in Santa Ana, with 10 others set to appear in Los Angeles. Twelve more individuals are currently in state custody and will make their initial court appearances in the coming weeks. The investigation continues as authorities work to dismantle the Mexican Mafia’s influence over Southern California’s criminal enterprises.

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Ignacio Gomez Lares Jr. was arrested last week following a Riverside County Sheriff’s Department investigation.

Along with the possession count, Lares was charged with transportation of drugs for sale, being a felon in possession of ammunition and sentencing- enhancing allegations of perpetrating a felony while on bail and possessing more than four kilograms of fentanyl.

Lares, who is being held in lieu of $150,000 bail at the Byrd Detention Center, was slated to make his initial court appearance Monday afternoon at the Riverside Hall of Justice.

According to sheriff’s Sgt. David Ruiz, earlier this month, the agency’s Special Enforcement Team initiated an investigation at a residence in the 3000 block of Lakeview Drive, near East Rider Street, on the east end of the city. Sufficient evidence was gathered for procurement of a search warrant, which was served on Lares last Wednesday night.

“During the warrant service, deputies located over 50,000 counterfeit M-30 pills,” Ruiz said. “Lares was arrested without incident.”

The pills — also known as “blues” — were contained in multiple plastic bags confiscated by deputies. M-30s often contain fentanyl and other synthetic substances.

“Operations like this one are critical in addressing repeat offenders and deterring narcotic use,” Ruiz said.

It was unclear how long the alleged drug trafficking had occurred at the property.

Court records indicated that Lares has one prior strike felony, but the conviction wasn’t specified. There was also no information on the defendant’s previous arrest, for which he posted bond and was released from custody.

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It’s not for lack of opportunity to take action. This year, the California State Assembly passed Assembly Bill 928, the Cockfighting Cruelty Act, authored by Assemblymember Chris Rogers, D-Santa Rosa, which would halt the mass breeding of birds bred specifically to fight each other.

The law, with clear exemptions for legitimate poultry operations, educational programs and agricultural organizations like 4-H and Future Farmers of America, was not taken up by the Senate Agriculture Committee (some senators on the committee wanted more assurances that the bill would not impact their constituents who have roosters for legitimate purposes).

Because of the legislature’s failure to close this glaring loophole, cockfighting continues to plague California communities. Just last month, San Bernardino County authorities wrapped up a multiweek investigation, “Crowing Rooster.” Over a span of six weeks, deputies served 26 search warrants, arrested 56 people (as young as 16 and as old as 73) and seized 3,500 fighting birds. Alongside thousands of birds, law enforcement confiscated 12 firearms — three of them untraceable “ghost guns” — as well as cocaine, methamphetamine and fentanyl. They also found $259,000 in cash.

These findings are certainly not the exception: Most cockfighting events are hubs for narcotics trafficking, illegal gambling and they can even result in crimes like murder (Miguel Martinez-Mendoza, 48, was shot and killed in Merced County during an illegal rooster fight).

Sadly, too often children are also present and involved in the events.

The results of this massive cockfighting investigation should be a wake-up call for every state lawmaker. Cockfighting is a criminal enterprise hiding in plain sight, and available data suggests that this loophole in the law has enabled and emboldened cockfighting operations in California.

Three of the largest cockfighting seizures in U.S. history have occurred in California, and there is evidence to suggest the presence of gamefowl yards across 43 of California’s 58 counties. Polling consistently shows that Californians are against cockfighting, including a poll conducted earlier this year in which 71% of the state’s voters said they would support legislation to crack down on cockfighting operations.

At this point, there are enough cases, data and animal suffering to warrant a change in the law. We can’t afford to wait any longer for the needed action to address cockfighting. Next time around, the Senate Agriculture Committee must pass this bill.

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Instead of facing the gas chamber at San Quentin, the reputed Mexican Mafia member turned death row into a base of power, law enforcement authorities and gang defectors say, collecting extortion payments, trafficking drugs and orchestrating acts of violence through a vast network of underlings from San Diego to Seattle.

Ayala, 74, now faces racketeering charges brought by federal prosecutors in Sacramento, who allege the National City native conspired with members of the Sinaloa cartel to distribute methamphetamine, heroin and fentanyl throughout the western United States.

Ayala, who was transferred last year from San Quentin to Centinela state prison as Gov. Gavin Newsom shut down death row, has yet to enter a plea. It wasn’t clear Friday whether he was represented by a lawyer.

In a bare-bones indictment made public Friday, prosecutors allege Ayala oversaw a partnership between the Mexican Mafia and the Sinaloa cartel, Mexico’s most powerful drug trafficking group, and offered protection to its former leader, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

It wasn’t clear from the indictment whether Guzman accepted — or would even need — the alleged offer. The former kingpin is serving a life term at ADX Florence, a maximum security federal penitentiary in Colorado where he has no contact with other inmates.

San Diego has produced many Mexican Mafia members, but none as powerful as Ayala, a witness told FBI agents in 2023.

The witness — Ayala’s alleged liaison to gang members in the San Diego area — pleaded guilty to drug trafficking charges and was sentenced to a lengthy prison term.

According to a transcript of the witness’ interview with the FBI, Ayala carved up the San Diego area with two other alleged Mexican Mafia members, his brother Hector and Richard Buchanan.

Buchanan controlled the east side of San Diego and much of its South Bay. Ayala’s brother got North County and Chula Vista. Ronaldo Ayala had Spring Valley, Paradise Hills, National City and “everything else,” she said.

“At the end of the day,” she told the agents, “this is Ronnie’s city.”

According to the witness, Ayala also collected a regular payment called “the light bill” from the San Diego County jail system, which he split with his brother and Buchanan. Every module in the jail system was required to contribute $50 a month through CashApp, the woman told the agents.

Ayala’s underlings ran different rackets, she said. Some bought methamphetamine in Tijuana and shipped it to San Bernardino or Texas. Others ran casitas — illegal gambling parlors — or “trap houses” where people could buy and use drugs, according to the witness.

San Diego County prosecutors charged seven people in 2022 with operating a trap house in the Encanto neighborhood for Ayala. His representative in San Ysidro, Juan “Sleepy” Castro, oversaw loan-sharking and human smuggling operations in addition to selling drugs, prosecutors wrote in court papers. Castro was sentenced in 2023 to 10 years in prison for trafficking methamphetamine.

Because he was held on death row with high-profile gang members from across California, Ayala’s reach went beyond San Diego, the witness told the FBI.

According to the indictment made public this week, Ayala collected “taxes” from Riverside, Sacramento, San Francisco and even Seattle, where prosecutors say gang members working under Ayala committed an arson attack on a musician who claimed in a music video to have “mafia” ties.

Two reputed members of Seattle’s United Lokotes gang, Samuel “Payaso” Morales and Alexis “Menace” Rodriguez, are also accused of extorting the unnamed musician whose property was burned.

Helping Ayala collect “taxes” on sales of drugs from the Sinaloa cartel partnership was Angel “Snappy” Esparza, who was sent to death row for murdering three people in Riverside County, the indictment charges.

Ronald “Temper” Sepulveda, whom Ayala referred to as “our main supporter,” oversaw the reputed Mexican Mafia member’s affairs in Riverside County, including the extortion of musicians, prosecutors allege.

Allen “Frankie Chino” Fong, a San José gang member serving a 17-year prison term for assault, is charged with collecting “taxes” for Ayala while held at the state prison in Solano.

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Jacob Austin Parr, 45, is charged with second-degree murder for the 2022 death of Isaak Quintin Ruiz.

Jurors went behind closed doors after the prosecution and defense delivered closing statements on Dec. 19, and they deliberated part of the day on Dec. 20, when Riverside County Superior Court Judge Timothy Hollenhorst gave them a rest period through Christmas and New Year’s. He directed the panel to return to the Riverside Hall of Justice on Jan. 2.

Parr is being held in lieu of $1 million bail at the Byrd Detention Center.

According to a defense brief filed in April, Parr and Ruiz had been friends for several years, but Parr had only sold narcotics to the victim periodically in the four months prior to his death.

Testimony by sheriff’s investigators during the defendant’s 2023 preliminary hearing indicated Ruiz had attempted to kick his drug habit, trying to detox in a rehabilitation program, but he continued to “struggle with opiates.”

“The decedent’s girlfriend … told police that he struggled with addiction and went from using heroin to fentanyl,” the brief stated. “She said that it was difficult for him to resist smoking whatever substance he had in his possession.”

Court papers said Parr was endeavoring to put his life on track and quit using or selling drugs, but when Ruiz couldn’t find a seller, he turned to the defendant.

“(Ruiz) rejected offers for less lethal opiates and said he would save his money for ‘fetty,”‘ the brief said.

In a text exchange between the victim and defendant in February 2022, Parr warned, “You gotta be careful, bro’. This (expletive) will kill you if you haven’t used in a while,” according to the narrative.

At one point, before allegedly selling fentanyl to Ruiz, the defendant offered him Narcan, an opioid antagonist that can arrest the effects of fentanyl and save victims who have taken a potentially lethal amount, the brief said. Ruiz didn’t accept.

On the night of April 22, 2022, Parr met Ruiz at a Norco restaurant, allegedly selling him an undetermined amount of fentanyl, then the two left in Parr’s car and drove to a nearby 76 Station on Sixth Street, where Ruiz stepped into the men’s room and locked the door, according to investigators.

Parr drove away.

The victim consumed the fentanyl he’d purchased and passed out on the floor. He was in there for two hours before the clerk finally unlocked the door to check on him, discovering him dead, according to investigators.

Detectives ultimately identified Parr as the person who allegedly sold the fentanyl to the victim, culminating in his arrest on July 12, 2022. The defendant has a prior conviction for misdemeanor DUI.

Since February 2021, the District Attorney’s Office has charged over 30 people countywide in connection with fentanyl poisonings.

In November 2023, prosecutors closed the books on the county’s first fentanyl murder case to go before a jury, culminating in the conviction of 34- year-old Vicente David Romero, who was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison for the 2020 death of a Temecula woman.

Public health statistics show there were 550 known fentanyl-related fatalities countywide in 2023, a 9% increase from 2022, when there were 503. Data from 2024 hasn’t been published.

Fentanyl is manufactured in overseas labs, principally in China, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which says the drug is smuggled across the U.S.-Mexico border by cartels. It’s 80 to 100 times more potent than morphine and can be mixed into any number of street narcotics and prescription drugs, without a user knowing what he or she is consuming. Ingestion of only two milligrams can be fatal.

Fentanyl is the leading cause of death for Americans between 18 and 45 years old.

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A former Girl Scout raised in a town called North Pole, population 2,427, Powers had gotten involved in the drug business. She sold blue fentanyl pills and smuggled money for a dealer in California, according to court documents and interviews.

Powers had never met her boss, Heraclio Sanchez Rodriguez — he had been serving a life sentence in the California prison system since 1998. Authorities charge that Sanchez ran one of the largest drug trafficking organizations in Alaskan history without ever setting foot in the state.

Using contraband cellphones, Sanchez spun a web that stretched from Mexico to Los Angeles to far-flung Alaskan villages, authorities say. Flights carried women traveling with drugs and cash. Packages stuffed with fentanyl pills flowed through the U.S. postal system. Cash App payments linked senders in Alaska to recipients in Mexicali and Culiacán.

“This guy’s very intelligent,” Powers’ brother, Charles Hills, said of Sanchez. “He created a network and bought his way into enough circles of trust, whatever you want to call it, and just destroyed the area.”

By 2023, Powers was running from Sanchez. After working for him for about six months, she’d lost some of his money, according to her family. Prosecutors say he turned Powers’ phone into a tracking device and sent a man into the Alaskan wilderness to find her.

Sanchez, whose attorney didn’t respond to requests for comment, has pleaded not guilty to charges of trafficking drugs, laundering money, obstructing justice, carjacking, kidnapping and murder. Grand juries have indicted 58 people in the last year on charges of selling drugs, laundering their proceeds and committing violence on Sanchez’s behalf. He worked mostly with women like Powers, officials say. The highest-ranking ones he called his “wives.”

According to court documents and testimony, Sanchez turned his cell at Salinas Valley State Prison into the headquarters of what was essentially his own cartel. He fielded a steady stream of calls from underlings and documented payments received and owed in a handwritten ledger, authorities say, all under the watch of correctional officers who failed to prevent him from repeatedly obtaining phones.

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation officials declined to be interviewed about Sanchez’s case. In a written statement, a spokeswoman said CDCR helped tap phones, search prison cells and analyze seized devices in the DEA’s investigation. Prison officials developed leads that thwarted “planned violence” at Sanchez’s prison, said the spokeswoman, Terri Hardy.

When the DEA tapped one of Sanchez’s phones in 2023, it opened a window onto what a man can achieve from prison when he has a line to the outside and no fear of incurring more time.

An agent testified that during the single month Sanchez’s line was monitored, he ordered two homicides, told one underling to douse a woman with acid and instructed another to shoot up a home with automatic weapons.

Sanchez’s reach extended as far as Togiak, a fishing village where authorities say the number of fentanyl pills supplied by his organization outnumbered residents 5 to 1. The drugs ruined families. Among the casualties: a father who obtained the fentanyl that killed him from his own daughter.

When Togiak’s mayor learned authorities had traced the addiction and death in his village to a prisoner in California, he had one question: How?

“How did that happen unchecked, unmonitored?” he asked. “This elaborate system, how did he set it up unobserved? That doesn’t make sense to me. Maybe I’m naive.”

‘Normal people’ turned into ‘monsters’

Powers’ family remembers a time before she worked for an imprisoned drug dealer.

Raised in Fairbanks and the tiny city of North Pole, she played football and soccer and danced ballet, but she loved rocks more than anything else.

“Collecting them, picking them up, painting them,” said her mother, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal. “I figured she’d be a geologist.”

Her life took a turn at 17. After a lengthy surgery to treat chronic blood clots, doctors gave Powers fentanyl and Dilaudid to blunt the pain, her mother said. “I told the doctor: ‘Addiction runs in the family. I see a train wreck coming.’”

Powers’ mother spent the next 13 years wondering when she’d learn her daughter was dead.

“She slept in her car sometimes,” she said. “I thought maybe she’d freeze.”

Wary of enabling her daughter, she only paid for two things, she said: car insurance so Powers wouldn’t go to jail if she got pulled over, and her phone bill so she could always call 911.

By early 2023, her mother said, Powers had gone from using drugs to selling them. Her brother said she was recruited by one of Sanchez’s “wives,” who had served time in an Alaskan prison.

According to Hills, Sanchez’s network used the U.S. Postal Service to transport the drugs. Shipping them in small amounts reduced the risk of suffering a bust large enough to damage the entire operation, Hills told The Times. “You can use the mail to make millions without really taking a hit.”

Drug users all over Alaska gave up their mailing addresses in exchange for money or pills, Hills said. His sister’s role was to collect the packages of meth, heroin and fentanyl after they arrived. The job took her from bigger cities like Anchorage to remote villages like Valdez, Tok, Cantwell and Tanacross, Hills said.

Hills said he believed that it wasn’t just the lure of drugs and money but also the threat of violence and blackmail that kept women tethered to Sanchez.

“He takes normal people and turns them into monsters,” Hills said. “Puts people in terrible positions. Makes them hurt each other.”

‘It’s got tentacles. It’s a huge octopus.’

It is difficult to imagine a more isolated place than Togiak.

Home to a fishery that produces half the world’s consumption of sockeye salmon, the village can only be reached by boat or small plane. About 90% of the 800 residents are Yupik, descendants of Siberians who crossed the Bering land bridge.

Around 2022, Togiak’s mayor, Tom Lowe, noticed people stepping off expensive chartered flights carrying only backpacks. It was clear to Lowe these people were smuggling drugs.

“Why didn’t that stand out to the carriers?” he said in an interview with The Times. “You’re paying $8,000 for a flight and coming back the same day?”

Fentanyl overdoses peaked that year in Togiak, Lowe said. He contacted the commissioner of Alaska’s Department of Public Safety, who stationed undercover state troopers in Togiak’s airfield.

“They nailed a bunch of the mules,” Lowe said.

Togiak has hired more police, coordinated enforcement with state troopers and the DEA and distributed naloxone, Lowe said. Even still, he said, “the drugs have infiltrated a lot of families.”

A mother and daughter from one village family are charged with distributing fentanyl on Sanchez’s behalf.

In 2023, the daughter, Kaytreana Green, found her father dead on the floor of the family home, an Alaska state trooper testified. Prosecutors allege that Green supplied the fatal dose of fentanyl.

“Give your siblings drugs kill them to while you at [it],” her boyfriend wrote in a Cash App message cited by prosecutors.

Sanchez paid for her father’s funeral and Green went on selling, prosecutors wrote in a bail motion. Six months later, she delivered a boy nine weeks premature, an employee of Alaska’s Office of Children Services testified. Toxicology tests found fentanyl and meth in the stillborn child’s blood stream.

Green has pleaded not guilty to conspiring to distribute heroin, methamphetamine and fentanyl. Her lawyer called the 23-year-old “another victim in this tragic story.”

“Like many Native Alaskan women, she was raised in a rural village surrounded by poverty and drug abuse,” the attorney, Daniel Norman, wrote in an email. He said rather than prosecuting women like Green, the federal government should put its resources toward drug treatment and other social services.

The cycle played out again and again. A woman working for Sanchez in North Pole sold fentanyl to a 32-year-old man who thought he was buying heroin, according to testimony at the woman’s bail hearing. He overdosed while driving, crashed and died after 11 days in the ICU.

Shanda Barlow was charged with selling drugs for Sanchez. Released on bail in February, the 34-year-old died three days later of an overdose in Anchorage. Agents found Western Union payments linking Barlow to people in Tijuana and Culiacán, a stronghold of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel.

Prosecutors have not said whether Sanchez has ties to Mexican drug trafficking groups.

“It’s got tentacles,” Lowe said of Sanchez’s organization. “It’s a huge octopus. And it’s a sad deal when you watch it happen around you.”

A robbery, a gun, a life sentence

Sanchez, 57, has spent more than half of his life in prison.

He was 12 when his family brought him from Mexico to California, his attorney said at a parole hearing. Raised in La Habra, he dropped out in ninth grade when his parents split. He worked in landscaping and construction to support his mother and four younger siblings, according to his lawyer.

In 1985, an 18-year-old Sanchez was headed with friends to a party. Stopped at a red light, he thought he saw members of a gang called the Westsiders inside a red Chevrolet Impala, according to testimony at a preliminary hearing.

Sanchez shot at the car, missing the young married couple and infant inside. Convicted of assault with a firearm, Sanchez served less than a year in prison. Three weeks after getting out, he was arrested for burglary and sent back to prison.

Released in 1988, he started a gardening business and raised a family in Pomona for the next nine years. But these trappings of a middle-class life fell away the morning of Aug. 7, 1997.

A Pomona police officer found him wandering in the street, frantic, at 7 a.m., a police report says. Sanchez said men posing as police had pushed their way inside his home. Demanding guns, drugs, gold or money, they bound him with duct tape, beat him with gun butts, doused him with vodka and threatened to set him on fire.

Sanchez said he managed to free himself and ran out a back door. Seven others were still in the house, he told the officer, bound with bags over their heads.

The officers freed the people inside and interviewed them. None were relatives of Sanchez, according to the police report. Some said they’d recently come from Mexico to work for his landscaping business. One woman, who lived in Tennessee, said she was his girlfriend.

Sanchez told the police he had no idea why his assailants thought he’d have drugs or guns. He hung flyers around Pomona offering $100,000 for leads on the suspects.

“I hope they get what they deserve,” Sanchez told his local paper, the Daily Bulletin.

Two weeks after the robbery, Sanchez got into a fight with one of his employees whom he accused of setting up the crime. The police searched Sanchez’s house and found a small handgun in a drawer.

Sanchez was convicted of possessing the gun as a felon, a third strike. Before he was sentenced, his attorney showed the judge dozens of letters written by relatives, friends and employees.

Sanchez was a good boss and loyal friend, the letters said. He cut the lawns of elderly neighbors for free. His mother and three children needed him, the bedrock of their family.

The judge put Sanchez away for 25 years to life. In 1998, that meant he’d effectively been banished from society.

Cellphones would change that.

‘She was going to knock on trouble’s door’

After landing in 2018 in the coastal city of Sitka, Alaska, prosecutors say, Christina Quintana drew up a list of things she needed: zip ties, gloves, black clothing.

A city of about 9,000 at the foot of mountains carved out by glaciers, Sitka was a world away from the Orange County barrio where Quintana grew up.

Her childhood in Stanton was marked by neglect, addiction and abuse, according to court records and interviews. Her mother was hooked on heroin. Her father fled the law and his own family, said Quintana’s aunt, Contessa Villagrana. He jumped bail on a drug case and went to Mexico, where he was killed when Quintana was a teenager, Villagrana said.

At 12, Quintana was sexually abused by her uncle, court records show. He was sentenced to six years in prison. “Six years,” Villagrana said of her brother, “versus a lifetime of what she has to go through.”

Quintana started cutting school and hanging around her father’s old gang, Big Stanton. Her rap sheet read small-ball and desperate: Trespassing in vacant homes. Shoplifting $45 worth of saw blades. Smuggling drugs into jail. Crashing a stolen car.

Prison became Quintana’s home. Whatever time she spent out was “vacation,” her aunt said.

It’s unclear when or how she connected with Sanchez, who was last out of prison when Quintana was 12, but prosecutors say she became one of his trusted “wives.”

Villagrana said she saw her niece for the last time in 2018. Quintana dropped by and said she was flying to Alaska the next day to visit a friend.

“She was lying through her teeth,” Villagrana said. “She was going to knock on trouble’s door. And trouble answered.”

Quintana was looking for a dealer in Sitka who owed $17,000, prosecutors alleged in an indictment.

The woman wasn’t home when Quintana showed up with several associates. One took the dealer’s children to get a soda. When she and her boyfriend returned home, the dealer told a local radio station, “I was met with a Mossberg 500 in my face.”

One man trained the shotgun at the dealer; another beat her boyfriend with a hammer. Quintana ransacked the home, demanding money and drugs. After the woman said she had neither, Quintana shot her in both kneecaps.

Arrested days later hiding on an abandoned yacht in the Sitka harbor, Quintana pleaded guilty to using a firearm in commission of drug trafficking. She began serving a 22-year sentence at Alaska’s Hiland Mountain Correctional Center.

Less than three years later prosecutors indicted her again, alleging she turned the prison into a recruiting pool for her boss. Women released from Hiland Mountain began flying Sanchez’s drugs and money between California and Alaska, the indictment said.

Quintana has pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking charges. Her attorney didn’t respond to requests for comment.

At a hearing over the conditions of her confinement at Hiland Mountain, Quintana described a bleak scene. She was held with mentally ill women who “bang and scream and yell and throw feces all day long,” she testified.

One of the women she allegedly recruited at the prison was Tamara Bren.

By 2023, Bren had been released. She cut off her ankle monitor and was living as a fugitive — only to surface when Sanchez needed to track down someone who’d lost his money.

Smuggled phones, a kidnapping, a fugitive in the attic

DEA agents were watching in 2023 when Sanchez’s daughter dropped off two women from Alaska at John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana.

The agents had a warrant to search their luggage. The Alaskan women claimed to have no knowledge of the fentanyl and heroin in their bags, a DEA agent, David Rose, wrote in an affidavit. Allowed to board their flight, Rose wrote, the women called Sanchez first.

It’s unclear what they said, but Sanchez’s next call was to Bren, Rose testified at a hearing. The former Hiland Mountain inmate had risen from recipient of drug parcels to another of Sanchez’s “wives,” an indictment says.

The DEA listened to her conversation with Sanchez through a wiretap on his contraband phone, Rose testified.

At a parole hearing in 2021, Sanchez was questioned about the four times he’d been caught using cellphones in the previous year. He said he rented the phones from other inmates for $50 to call his family during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hardy, the CDCR spokeswoman, would not say how many times Sanchez has been disciplined for possessing phones.

According to Hardy, the number of phones seized in California prisons decreased from 7,399 in 2020 to 4,109 in 2023 after authorities used new technology and partnered with federal agencies to root out the contraband devices.

Sanchez denied trafficking drugs to the parole board. “I walk the yard by myself or I don’t come out of my cell,” he said. “Why? Because I don’t want to be around nothing negative.”

With the DEA listening, Sanchez told Bren he wanted to kill the women who’d been stopped at the airport, Rose testified.

Sanchez sent his people to wait for the women in Alaska when they landed, according to the agent. One woman managed to flee, while the other was “escorted” to an apartment in Anchorage, Rose said.

According to the DEA agent, Sanchez ordered an underling, Kevin Peterson, to find the courier who ran and throw acid on her. Peterson was arrested near the woman’s home in Anchorage, Rose testified. Neither woman was apparently harmed.

Peterson has pleaded not guilty to charges of murder, kidnapping, carjacking and drug distribution. His attorney didn’t return a request for comment.

State troopers tracked Bren the next day to a shabby apartment building in Anchorage. When they tried to arrest her, she smashed her black Jeep through a cordon of police cruisers, Rose wrote in an affidavit. Troopers found the Jeep abandoned a few miles away with eight guns and a kilogram of fentanyl inside.

Eight days later, the DEA raided the Pomona home where Sanchez’s sister lived — the same house where men posing as police had accosted him 26 years earlier. Agents found 60 kilos of fentanyl, 47 pounds of meth and a kilo of heroin, Rose wrote.

Sanchez’s sister, Veronica Sanchez, and daughter, Amy Garcia, have pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking charges. Their lawyers didn’t return requests for comment. No trial date has been set.

Bren was captured in June 2023. A SWAT team found her in the attic of an Anchorage home, burrowed into the roof insulation, prosecutors wrote in court papers. By then, they allege, Bren had already conspired to have two women killed.

‘He’s sitting right where he wants to be’

One day last year, Powers’ mother got a notice in the mail from the DEA. Agents had stopped Powers at an airport in Alaska before she boarded a flight to California, it said. She’d been carrying $15,000 in money orders and another $5,000 in cash.

Around this time, Hills said, he got a call from his sister.

“Things are bad,” she said, according to Hills. “The feds were waiting for us at the airport.”

She said she needed to disappear.

On May 22, 2023, Powers was driving along Parks Highway in her red GMC Yukon with an acquaintance, Kami Clark. Sanchez followed her using “tracking applications,” an indictment charges. Hills said Sanchez made his employees download an app called Life360 — designed for parents to monitor their children — that allowed him to see where all his people were at any given time.

Sanchez turned to Peterson, the man he’d allegedly ordered to douse the courier with acid, to abduct Powers and Clark, prosecutors charged.

The last time anyone heard from Powers was a garbled 911 call, prosecutors wrote in court papers. Before the line went dead, a dispatcher heard Powers say, “Don’t shoot me!”

State troopers found the Yukon 11 days later, abandoned near an area called Trapper Creek. Dogs led them to the nearby grave, Powers’ mother said.

After his sister’s death, Hills said all of their family but him “packed up and moved the hell out of” Alaska, he said. Powers’ father died later that year, Hills said. “Just kind of gave up. Broke his heart.”

Bren is also charged with Powers and Clark’s murders, although prosecutors haven’t detailed how she was involved in their deaths.

Hills believes Sanchez’s indictment has made it easier for him to do business. Extradited to Alaska in 2023, Sanchez is jailed with inmates who will eventually be released to the villages and cities that he is accused of flooding with drugs, Hills said. “I think he’s sitting right where he wants to be,” he said.

At a recent hearing, Sanchez said he was held at the Anchorage Correctional Complex in a windowless, one-man cell that measures eight by 10 feet. He is chained and escorted by two guards during what little time he spends outside his cell, he said.

Rose of the DEA testified that Sanchez is still trying to run his organization. Guards recently seized from his cell a list of names and phone numbers of underlings. They were identified as attorneys, apparently in an attempt to register them as unmonitored lines in the jail phone system, Rose said.

No date has been set for Sanchez’s trial. Regardless of its outcome, he is serving a life sentence in California. Hills wonders what motivates a man who could have all the money in the world without ever enjoying what it buys. Where all of the drug profits went remains a mystery.

Sanchez offered a flicker of insight at his parole hearing. He’d seen other inmates reduce their horizons to the prison walls. Not him. Even after all these years behind bars, Sanchez told the board, he still considered himself a “designer.”

“I just love to think,” he said. “I can visualize something and I can build it. That’s what I did. My whole life’s work.”

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He was found guilty of attempted trafficking of large amounts of illegal drugs as part of an organized group, according to an online statement released by court officials, and sentenced to 12½ years in a maximum-security penal colony. His lawyers told reporters after the verdict was delivered Thursday that they will appeal the ruling because Woodland’s guilt hasn’t been proved.

Lawyer Stanislav Kshevitsky also said that Woodland has been suffering from unspecified mental health issues. He didn’t provide any details, but said that the court didn’t take those issues into account.

Russian media reported that his name matches a U.S. citizen interviewed in 2020 who said he was born in the Perm region in 1991 and adopted by an American couple at age 2. He was arrested in January.

He said he traveled to Russia to find his birth mother and eventually met her on a TV show before deciding to move to Russia. Russian news agency Interfax has cited court officials as saying that Woodland also holds Russian citizenship.

Arrests of Americans in Russia have become increasingly common as relations between Moscow and Washington sink to Cold War lows. Washington accuses Moscow of targeting U.S. citizens and using them as political bargaining chips, but Russian officials insist they all broke the law.

Some have been exchanged for Russians held in the U.S., while for others, the prospects of being released in a swap are less clear.

The U.S. State Department said Thursday that it was aware that a U.S. citizen was sentenced by a Russian court and that the embassy in Moscow was closely monitoring the case. The department, citing privacy issues, said it would have no further comment.

The post Russia sentences U.S. citizen to 12.5 years in prison on drug charges appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

RIVERSIDE, CA — This week, a 51-year-old Riverside County man was sentenced to 21 years in federal prison for his lead role in an operation that saw large quantities of methamphetamine trafficked from Mexico into the Inland Empire, prosecutors announced.

Timoteo Gomez, of Riverside, was sentenced Monday by United States District Judge Jesus G. Bernal. He is the 16th conviction in the federal probe that targeted criminal activities of the Riverside-based Casa Blanca Rifa criminal street gang. According to prosecutors, the gang is responsible for drug trafficking and associated violence in Riverside and the surrounding community.

From at least April 2020 until August 2020, Gomez and others purchased methamphetamine from their suppliers in Mexico as well as Los Angeles and Riverside counties and distributed it across the Inland Empire, according to prosecutors.

In April 2020, Gomez and others smuggled 46.6 pounds of methamphetamine from Mexico across the U.S. port of entry at Calexico and into Riverside County. In May 2020, another co-conspirator attempted to drive a 90.4 pounds-load of methamphetamine into the United States from Mexico through the San Ysidro port of entry, prosecutors said.

“In total, law enforcement seized more than 150 pounds of methamphetamine and $31,035 in cash during this investigation,” according to the prosecutors.

Gomez has been in federal custody since his June 2021 arrest. He pleaded guilty in January 2022 to one count of conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute methamphetamine.

The FBI’s Inland Empire Safe Streets Task Force, which includes the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, IRS Criminal Investigation, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, and the Riverside Police Department, led the investigation into the operation.

During the investigation, the task force received assistance from the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the U.S. Marshals Service.

The post Feds Target Casa Blanca Rifa Street Gang In Riverside County appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

LOS ANGELES, CA — The leader of a Southern California-based drug ring that shipped kilos of cocaine to Alaska on commercial flights and through the mail has pleaded guilty to a federal narcotics charge, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Raul Cisneros Jr., 45, of Compton, pleaded guilty on May 9 to one count of possession with intent to distribute cocaine. He’s the eighth person to be convicted in the case, according to federal prosecutors.

Cisneros managed the operations of a drug trafficking organization from at least July 2014 to August 2016 that sold cocaine and methamphetamine, prosecutors said.

Law enforcement stopped Cisneros in his car in October 2015 while he was en route to an accomplice’s house to pick up money. Inside his car, Cisneros had over 22 lbs. of cocaine packaged in five bundles, which he intended to sell to customers, as well as $5,003 in cash, prosecutors said.

After obtaining a search warrant for Cisneros’ home, law enforcement seized over 66 lbs. of cocaine, 167.7 grams of crack cocaine and over 1 lbs. of methamphetamine from his kitchen cabinets, prosecutors said.

Investigators also found four guns, 72 rounds of ammunition, hundreds of used green cellophane wrappers and a money counter. Inside the truck of Cisneros’ Honda Accord, agents found 15.5 lbs. of cocaine wrapped in seven packages of green cellophane, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Agents also recovered $568,357 in cash proceeds from drug deals, prosecutors said.

Cisneros, who has been in federal custody since October 2020, is due back in court for sentencing Aug. 8. He faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years in federal prison and a maximum sentence of life in prison.

The post SoCal Cocaine Kingpin Faces Potential Life Sentence After Guilty Plea: DOJ appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

RIVERSIDE, CA — This week, a 51-year-old Riverside County man was sentenced to 21 years in federal prison for his lead role in an operation that saw large quantities of methamphetamine trafficked from Mexico into the Inland Empire, prosecutors announced.

Timoteo Gomez, of Riverside, was sentenced Monday by United States District Judge Jesus G. Bernal. He is the 16th conviction in the federal probe that targeted criminal activities of the Riverside-based Casa Blanca Rifa criminal street gang. According to prosecutors, the gang is responsible for drug trafficking and associated violence in Riverside and the surrounding community.

From at least April 2020 until August 2020, Gomez and others purchased methamphetamine from their suppliers in Mexico as well as Los Angeles and Riverside counties and distributed it across the Inland Empire, according to prosecutors.

In April 2020, Gomez and others smuggled 46.6 pounds of methamphetamine from Mexico across the U.S. port of entry at Calexico and into Riverside County. In May 2020, another co-conspirator attempted to drive a 90.4 pounds-load of methamphetamine into the United States from Mexico through the San Ysidro port of entry, prosecutors said.

“In total, law enforcement seized more than 150 pounds of methamphetamine and $31,035 in cash during this investigation,” according to the prosecutors.

Gomez has been in federal custody since his June 2021 arrest. He pleaded guilty in January 2022 to one count of conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute methamphetamine.

The FBI’s Inland Empire Safe Streets Task Force, which includes the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, IRS Criminal Investigation, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, and the Riverside Police Department, led the investigation into the operation.

During the investigation, the task force received assistance from the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the U.S. Marshals Service.

The post Feds Target Casa Blanca Rifa Street Gang In Riverside County appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.