28 Years to Join the Mexican Mafia — He Died Before They Let Him In 

You can judge a real man’s worth by the success of those around him. The man who wrote that sentence typed it on a smuggled phone inside a California prison cell and sent it to his best friend. 6 weeks later, that friend opened his front door for the last time. Look at the people around the man who wrote it.

 One fell on a bus bench waiting for the first ride of the morning. One fell in a parking lot asking his girlfriend if the deal felt wrong. A 23-year-old woman was found on the grass of a park she never  chose to visit. And the writer ended up on the floor of a prison day room, graded at last by the world he spent 28 years trying to impress.

 His name was Ezekiel Romo. The streets called him wicked. This is the story of what he was trying to prove, who he was proving it to, and who scored the final audition. Drop your city in the comments. Let’s see how far this one travels.   >>  >> 28 years before that day room, a different room measured him first.

 Van Ny, 1996. On one side of the courtroom stood the sister of Manuel Aila, 19 years old when  his life stopped. She told the judge her brother had been doing well in school, that he had goals, that everything he was going to become ended  outside a hamburger stand. She asked for every year the law allowed the young man being sentenced, she warned, would go on hurting their community.

 On the other side, Romo’s lawyer stacked up letters from family, from neighbors, from a former teacher, and asked the court not to write an 18-year-old off. One line carried the whole argument. I think that he’s worth saving, judge. Worth. The word entered the record early. Nothing in the file before that summer demanded a courtroom.

 Romo’s parents split when he was four, and his father’s parents raised him in San Fernando. As a teenager, he pulled honest paychecks from his uncles, who ran a construction outfit and a machine shop. He had also grown up claimed by BL Street 13, a gang packed into a few crowded blocks between Vanise Boulevard and Brimfield Avenue.

 The 13 [snorts] stands for the 13th letter of the alphabet, M. And in California, that letter answers to one organization, the Mexican Mafia. Both of those worlds walked into Tommy’s hamburger stand on Rosco Boulevard one summer evening in 1995. An argument  with Avala, a punch that caught Romo in the face. and an answer delivered in front of a crowd of diners that ended the argument and the other man’s  future in the same second.

 Manslaughter 10 years for an 18year-old. A sentence with a door still  built into the far end of it. The judge chose mercy. What the mercy  bought is the rest of this story. 10 years was the price on paper. Romo kept adding to it. inside. He could not stop putting his hands on people. And every incident stacked new time onto old.

 By the accounts of the case, the worst of it landed in a Sacramento courtroom in 2007, where Romo stood trial beside an inmate named Marco Avalos for an attack on a fellow prisoner with a deadly weapon. Avalos, who had used the weapon himself, drew  26 years to life. Romo drew eight more years on top of everything he already owed.

 By then, California’s prisons ran on rules written by the Mexican mafia. Street beefs. That meant everything outside the walls meant nothing inside them. Young men from rival neighborhoods answered to one chain  of command and a new arrival had two options. Get swallowed by that system or become one of the people doing the swallowing.

 Romo became one of the people doing the swallowing. and the state  noticed. Formerly validated as a prison gang member, he was sent to the security housing unit at Pelican Bay, the deepest hole California owns. 22, sometimes 23 hours a day alone in a sale built without a window. Most men come out of the SHU smaller, Romu  came out fluent.

 He taught himself the law, wrote his own petition for release from segregation, and carried it into federal court  with no attorney but himself. The courts turned away, nearly all of it. The SHU did not break him. It taught him paperwork. When he walked out in late 2014, 18 years after walking in, he was a soldier of the Mexican mafia with an application half finished and a neighborhood waiting to become the rest of his resume.

The neighborhood he came home to failed the interview, Panorama City, late  2014. Where Romo expected soldiers, he saw what he called dirty homeboys, users, informants, anyone he judged too soft or too loose to  trust. He told a longtime BL street member he was going to clean out house. Four words, less a plan than an order.

Because the real plan was bigger. BL Street was going to run like a franchise of the Mexican mafia, taxing every  dealer, working its blocks, collecting the debts, removing the problems. Three made men sat somewhere above him. Names on the far side of prison walls. And if Romo could prove his blocks ran with discipline,  he might stop being a soldier and become one of them.

 Every franchise needs a first entry in the books. In November 2015, Romo took a kilo of cocaine from a supplier named Felipe Dogado. Payment promised inside a week. The week came and went. Then Romo went to work, not on the debt, but on the man holding it. He started spreading word that Delgado was an informant.

 Word was, in most stories, that phrase drifts in from nowhere. In this one, the boss built it by hand. One problem remained. The state had strapped a GPS monitor to Romo’s ankle. As a condition of parole, he turned it into his alibi. A younger BL  Street member would handle Delgado, and Romo’s own ankle would swear he was elsewhere.

At 5:30 in the afternoon on November 6th, behind an apartment complex  on Kester Avenue, Felipe Delgado fell. Across the neighborhood, one of Romo’s men stood at Panorama High School watching his son play football when a police helicopter lifted  over the field. He knew where it was headed. Romo kept the product.

 He never paid a dollar. The cheapest way to settle a debt was to erase the man holding it, and that became the whole accounting system. Two months later, Romo went back behind walls himself. Somehow, that was the promotion.  The promotion came dressed as a traffic stop. In January 2016, officers pulled Romo over and found a little over a pound of methamphetamine in the car.

 He pleaded guilty and took 4 years at Sentinel State Prison, a facility parked in the Imperial County Desert, hours from Los Angeles with nothing around it but sand and wire. A 4-year term reads like an ending. Prosecutors would later call Sentinel something else. his corporate headquarters. California’s prisons leak phones.

 Some come in through staff. Some come over the walls at night carried by drones. Once a phone reaches a cell, the walls keep the  man and lose the business. Romo ran BL Street on FaceTime almost every day. His crew huddling in a bathroom whenever a meeting needed privacy. He issued orders from a desert.

 He settled disputes over money and respect on streets he could  not see. Most of the men obeying him had never shared a room with him. In his own messages, he graded himself generously. He had complete control of Panorama City. He was a general. The gang was an empire. Some say I’m too hands. He wrote the tone of a man listing his weaknesses in a job interview.

 The ground belonged to Oscar Molina called Smoking, a longtime BL street hand who ran the day-to-day while the general ran the map. Molina didn’t just follow Romo. He worshiped him. On Christmas Eve 2017, he texted his boss not to let anything change him. Told him he was one of the few real camaraders he had left. Promised that your boy would always have your back as long as I am around.

 Romo answered that words like those were a gift. He accepted more than money or shiny objects. He saved the message. Seven weeks of being around remained. Quick pause. A story like this takes days inside  court records and case files to rebuild. And YouTube only shares it with people who ask. If you want more deep dives into how empires like this rise and fall, hit subscribe.

 It costs nothing and it tells the algorithm this story deserves an audience. Now, back to the desert. The first order the public ever got a clear look at left the desert in the last week of August 2017. Its target was a ghost from Bllythe Street’s own past. Eidro Alba called Toppo had run the neighborhood once.

 By 2017, he was 38 and living out of his Dodge Avenger,  moving small amounts of product and shaking down the dealers who still had corners to keep the fear alive. He told people he was collecting for Mexican mafia members sitting in federal prison. It was a rented reputation, and one of the men he claimed to collect for was no longer alive to lend his name to anyone.

 for a boss auditioning to prove  his blocks ran clean. A broke man billing the organization’s name was not competition. It was the exact mess Romo had promised to sweep out. Alba was warned to stay out of Panorama City. He kept coming back. On the night of August 27th, Alba sat in a Target parking lot on Rhymer Street waiting on a customer, his girlfriend in the car beside him.

 A black set unrolled past. Then rolled past again. She noticed. He asked her the last question of his life. Did she think this was a setup? Inside the glove box sat his point 38. He never got the chance to reach it. When the shooting  stopped and the sedan pulled away, his girlfriend ran into the street, waving down the first car she saw coming.

 She recognized it one heartbeat too late. the same sudden. Seven rounds  came through the window above her and not one of them touched her. She dropped into the seat, lay still in the broken glass and let them believe. From the witness stand, she would later put two Ble Street names on the men who stepped out of that car, and another man rolled in the sedan that night.

 Prosecutors said his  name was Oscar Molina. Toppo had borrowed a dead man’s name to stay alive. The name collected. Two months  later, the problem was smaller than a name. It was one letter of the alphabet. In this world, a tattoo is not  decoration. It is a service record. And every marking has a price that gets paid first.

 through the beating the gang calls getting jumped in or through work done on the organization’s behalf where the record without the service and the skin  itself becomes a lie. Carlos Rios was 21, a BL street hanger on and by his family’s account, a quiet kid who kept his home life and his street life in separate rooms.

 That October, after 10 months in county jail, he walked  back through his family’s door on a Wednesday with the letter B tattooed on his left cheek. His sister’s heart sank. She understood the neighborhood well enough to know what the letter claimed. Romo, hundreds of miles away in his desert cell, understood it better.

 Word reached him fast, and the ruling came back faster. Nobody wears a bee on his face without earning it. This is not a game. On October 28th,  the crew drove Rios out to Valerio Street and told him the night was a tagging run. He was still working the spray can when it started. Santos Martinez, a young Ble Street shooter you will meet again, came up behind him and the gun in his hand ran empty before the job was considered done.

 So Santos’s own brother, Neftily, stepped down from the car and finished what the empty gun had started. Rios had been home 4 days. Wednesday, his sister saw the letter on his cheek. By Sunday morning, she had lost him. He had drawn one letter on his own skin. The company read it as  forgery.

 And in Romo’s books, forgery and war carried the same sentence. The next people to cross that ledger would not even be forggers. They would just be in the wrong lane, on the wrong bench, at the wrong hour. The wrong lane came first. On the night of November 17th, an 18-year-old named Alexis Saana drove through BL Street’s home turf with three other Columbus Street members in the car.

 They had been drinking and out the windows they were yelling an old insult, burrows, donkeys. The name Columbus Street had thrown at Ble Street for years. Santos Martinez was 182 and he was nearby behind his own wheel. He chased two cars ran the streets of Panorama City until they reached the corner  of Rosco and Van Ny where a Wendy’s had closed for the night from his vehicle.

 Santos fired once. Sana’s sedan finished the drive without him across the lot into the front of the restaurant and still the windows gone. >> In Panorama City, a driver slams into a Wendy’s restaurant after he is shot on the road. Take a look. It happened shortly before 11:00 last night at the Wendy’s on Rosco and Vanise Boulevards.

Now, the restaurant was closed at the time. No one was inside when the car barreled through. One witness though says the crash happened seconds after the shooting. >> So, I heard about seven gunshots. Um, I turned my direction to the gunshots. As soon as the fifth one went off, I see a a tan Camry go inside Wendy’s.

 And that’s when I knew like something had really happened. >> The driver is now in the hospital. Investigators were there early this morning to speak or hoping to speak to him and find out who shot him. No one else was hurt. >> By the accounts of the case, the crew went out again on December 8th. A woman named Cynthia Valdez driving the Martinez brothers through Columbus Street territory in  a Nissan Cube outside an apartment complex on Bernett Avenue.

 They fired on a man named Salvador Pñena. He lived one week later at 3:30 in the morning. James Rodriguez sat on a  bus bench at Vanise Boulevard in Chase Street in front of a Denny’s Rodriguez called Smiley was Senior Columbus Street and Molina had personally warned him to stay out of Panorama City. Beside him on the bench sat Elvis Sanchez, 31, a delivery driver with no gang ties anywhere in his life,  waiting for the first bus of the morning.

 Inside that Denny’s, the wife of one of Romo’s own crew was waiting tables. Santos pulled up. Neither man ever left the bench. >> Neighborhood is shaken after two men were shot and killed in front of  a Denny. >> CBS 2 Candace Cronin is live for us in Panorama City has the latest on the investigation. Candace. Yeah, the shooting happened at that bus stop behind me right now.

 You can see emergency crew crews have their tools out to clean up uh some of the blood left behind by the shooting. Right now though, police are searching for whoever pulled the trigger. Feelings of fear after learning two men were gunned down while sitting on a bus bench early Friday morning. Police were called to Vanise Boulevard in Chase Street around 3:30 a.m.

 When they arrived, they found one man dead on the sidewalk in front of a Denny’s. A second man was laying in the street by this truck, his clothes and shoes scattered about. Paramedics took him to the hospital where he died. Several shell casings littered a nearby Denny’s parking lot. Detectives believe the double murder is likely gang related.

 Police say employees inside the Denny’s heard the gunshots, but they have no witnesses to the shooting. People who live and work nearby say they’re fed up with the crime and hope police catch the killer. >> Afterward, Santos said a Pobé Pendjo had been caught in it, too. A poor bastard. He meant Sanchez. The next day, Molina reported up the chain.

 Two more Calibazas down. Everything perfecto once again. Romo thanked him, told him to be safe. One man was on a list. The other was on a bench. The man who typed  that report had 8 weeks left. Through the new year, the calls between the general and his ground man curdled. Romo complained about missed calls, about sloppiness.

Money never sleeps, he wrote. But Molina dragged. Romo needled him about too much Halloween candy. The worshipper pushed back the only way he knew how. An apology. His boss seemed to find reasons to go off on him, Molina wrote. And he knew it was meant for his own good. But sometimes I’m not having a good day.

 The word coming back about Molina was harder. He was lying to the boss. He owed people money. He  was deep in the product. He was supposed to be moving on the general’s books. The most loyal asset had turned into bad debt. And this ledger wrote things off only one way. 6 weeks before the end, Romo sent Molina the sentence.

 This story opened with a man’s worth. Measured by the people around him, Molina had been the people around him for 3 years. Around 4 in the morning on February 10th, 2018 in his apartment on Tobias Avenue, Molina told the woman with him he would be right back. He tucked a revolver into his waistband  and opened the front door.

 An old friend was already there. Eater Mendoza called Mousy, prosecutor’s charge, and the first shot met Molina at his own threshold. The revolver never cleared his waistband. The man who promised to always be around was gone before the sun came up. A 23-year-old named Karen Tobar  had been inside that apartment. She had seen that morning too closely or the crew decided she had 12 days later.

Prosecutors say Mendoza and Lorenzo Gonzalez called Scooby picked her up in an  unlicensed bandit cab. At first light on February 23rd, she was found on the grass of Kerry Ranch Park in Silar. She belonged to no gang. She had been in the wrong apartment on the wrong morning. >> Yeah, this really was a horrific discovery.

 Now, authorities have since cleared the scene and they opened the park just a little while ago, but because of this park’s remote hilltop location, authorities have really had a hard time finding any kind of surveillance video that might help in their investigation. A gruesome discovery in a residential Silar neighborhood.

 The body of a young woman found brutally murdered. Police say a security guard was opening Kerry Park around 6:00 this morning when he saw the body of a woman in her 20s lying out in the open in the grass at the top of the hill. Authorities say she was fully dressed and had at least one stab wound on her body.

 The park is closed from sunset to sunrise and the gate was locked overnight. So, police believe that she was alive when she entered the park. Neighbors in the area say the park is a known hangout for troublemakers, but they’ve never heard of violence like this so close to home. >> The murder stuff doesn’t happen every day.

 And police say there have not been any missing person reports that match the victim’s description. They also say they have no information on a possible suspect. >> The Empire had no room for witnesses, but every message the Empire had ever typed was still sitting somewhere and someone had started reading. The readers were detectives and they took years.

 By the accounts of the case, the physical trail was there for the finding. One weapon shared across the whole operation, tying scene to  scene. cell tower records putting the crews phones where the 911 calls came from. Cameras catching the little Nissan circling before Bernett Avenue. But the case that mattered had been building itself since 2016.

  Every time Romo picked up a smuggled phone, hundreds of pages of  messages, the general has spent years writing his own indictment, one order at a time. The trial opened in Los Angeles  Superior Court in March 2023 and ran for months. Romo was 45 now. He came to court in a rumpled charcoal suit and glasses, a hummingbird and a butterfly  tattooed on his neck, rising past the collar, and he worked taking notes on a legal pad.

 Leaning into his lawyer’s ear, the man who taught himself law in a windowless sale was assisting on the case of his life. His young co-fendants mostly looked bored. Santos Martinez fell asleep while his own attorney delivered the closing argument meant to save him. The prosecutor left the jury with one question. Why does a boss turn on his own people? Because in Romo’s world, he told them anyone who  didn’t fit the mold got removed.

The jury stayed out 9 days. Santos Machines guilty of four murders. His brother Nefty guilty of murdering Carlos Rios guilty of conspiring  against Saana acquitted of Saana’s killing itself. William Bonitez called Smokes, another Blight  Street hand cleared of the parking lot. The jury hung 9 to three toward clearing him of the bench, but the conspiracy conviction stuck enough to face 50 years to life.

 and Isaquiel Roma, first-degree murder, conspiracy, attempted murder, third strike offenses, everyone. The sentence wrote  itself, life without the possibility of parole. All that remained was choosing his address. The address  the state chose was sent to Nella. On August 30th, 2023, Ezekiel Romo was received at the same desert prison he  had once run like a corner office.

 He had been there less than a year when the building answered him Sunday night, July 21st, 2024. 5 minutes past 8. Romo is in the day room when three men come at him at once. This is not a fight  breaking out. It is coordinated and armed. Officers see it and order it to stop. The orders change nothing. It takes four bursts of pepper spray to pull them off.

 Two handmade weapons come off the floor. At 9:52 that night, Ezekiel Romo is pronounced dead. He was 47. The state named the three, Christian Moreno, Johnny  S. Garcia, Christian Hernandez, all from Los Angeles County, same as him. Garcia was already serving life for murder, robbery, and kidnapping, and by the accounts of the case, had added years for a weapon attack on another inmate.

 A man already doing life has nothing left to lose. That is who gets handed this work. No official motive has been released, but gang researchers have a name for three armed men moving as one in a monitored room. A green light, approval from above. At trial, Romo’s own lawyer said he held no status in the Mexican mafia.

 The word on the street said otherwise, that in those last years, people had started calling him senor, the title he chased  for 28 years. If the street is right, the recognition and the final order may have been signed in the same inc. judge a real man’s worth by the success of those around him. Manuel Aila, a hamburgant.  Filipe deu, adept.

 Toppo Alba, A Borrowed Name. Carlos Rios, A Letter. Alexis Sana, A Wrong Lane. James Rodriguez and Elvis Sanchez, A Bench, Oscar Molina, A Doorway, Karen Tobar, A Wrong Morning. He wanted to be measured by the people around him. In the end, he was in Panorama [clears throat] City in Pakoma tonight. Young men are still looking at ladders like his.

 You have seen where this  one ended. If it made you stop and think, hit like and drop your city in the comments. On your phone, tap the hype button below. The fastest way to put this in front of someone who needs it before a decision they cannot take