To listen to the prosecutors to say, José Landa-Rodríguez was an enemy public No. 1.
A member of the renowned Mexican mafia called “Fox”, Landa-Rodríguez was accused in three cases between 2011 and 2018. The accusations included a murder plot, supervise the rackets in the prisons of the Los Angeles County and pursue an alliance between their American prison gang and a drug sign of the state of his home of Michoacán.
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6:56 am September 27, 2025The original version of this story badly expressed the prayer of Landa-Rodriguez. It will serve two more years in prison, not seven.
Landa-Rodríguez, 60, was acquitted in a federal case. But he still faces life for state positions, he reached a guilt agreement that will see him back to Mexico after turning two more years in prison.
On Thursday, Landa-Rodríguez did not declare himself in the Superior Court of the Los Angeles County for making criminal threats and was sentenced in time, said his lawyer Nicholas Rosenberg.
The Los Angeles County prosecutors accused that Landa-Rodríguez, although he imprisoned in a federal penitentiary for illegally restarting the country, sanctioned the murder of an underlying of a rival.
According to the testimony of the trial, Landa-Rodríguez was locked in a power struggle with another member of the Mexican reputation mafia, Arthur “Turi” Estrada, on whom he would raise money from drug sales in the courtyards of the California prison.
Landa-Rodriguez used a coded language in an email to order a success in a subordinate of Estrada, prosecutors alleged. “Do not let our rear courtyards enter,” he wrote, according to prosecutors.
Federal authorities alleged that Landa-Rodríguez put his eyes on a much more lucrative racket than drug agreements in prison. In 2013, he was accused of trying to establish a methamphetamine pipe with a sign of his native state in western Mexico, the Michoacan family.
According to recorded phone calls, family leaders feared extradition and wanted the Mexican mafia to protect them if they ended up in US prisons. In return, the poster promised a cheap drug -free supply that the Mexican mafia could sell in the American streets.
Landa-Rodríguez was discussing the agreement with a representative of the poster in the recorded prison calls when another member of the Mexican mafia, Ralph “Perco” Rocha, heard about the negotiations. Facing extortion charges, Rocha had secretly reduced an agreement for a reduced sentence. It was inserted in the conversations, organizing meetings in an office building with error that allowed federal agents to register each word.
Suspicious that he was working for the authorities, Landa-Rodríguez told the poster to stay away from Rocha. All were accused anyway.
The case against Landa-Rodríguez and four other members of the Mexican mafia was lying when Rocha had secretly registered belittling his government handlers. Landa-Rodríguez was acquitted of all charges in 2019.
But the verdict did not mean that Landa-Rodríguez left prison.
In 2013, prosecutors alleged in a second federal accusation, Landa-Rodríguez took control of the Los Angeles County prison system, the largest in the country. According to prosecutors, he supervised the lucrative schemes that the Mexican mafia uses to extract money from the approximately 6,000 Latin prisoners who represent more than half of the population of tape male prisoners.
Landa-Rodríguez supposedly received a third of all drug sales within prisons, which led prosecutors to double their investigation “Operation Dirty Thirds”. He was also accused of benefiting from an extortion racket called “El Gatito”.
The old man on the right of Landa-Rodríguez, Luis “Hefty” García, testified in 2022 that each Latin inmate had to contribute $ 1.50 in items: food, clothing or hygiene supplies, for every $ 7 spent at the police station. The “kitten” is revealed, creating a secondary market within prisons that is cheaper than the commissioner.
“It may sound like a small amount,” Garcia said, “but in the general panorama, it is a lot of money.”
Each week, Garcia testified that he raised $ 1,500 to $ 2,500 from the “kitty” sales in the central prison of men, $ 1,000 of Twin Towers and about $ 3,200 of the prison complex in Castaic known as Wayside, García testified. This adds up to approximately $ 23,000 per month.
After seven years of litigation, the hearings and the trial of a coacusado, the former lawyer of Landa-Rodríguez, Landa-Rodríguez declared himself guilty of extortion in March.
In his guilt declaration agreement, he admitted that the Mexican mafia was dedicated to murders, kidnappings, extortion, theft and testimony of “promoting a climate of fear” within prisons. He also acknowledged to put an unidentified opponent in the “Green Light” list, the list of successes of the Mexican mafia, in 2015.
In a sentence memorandum, the VITALY Sigal lawyer said that his client has been imprisoned since 1998. When Landa-Rodríguez was the last time Sigal wrote: “Bill Clinton was the president of the United States, the Internet was a relatively new concept that had to access through a telephone access modem [and] The world's most recaller film was Titanic. ”
Sigal said Landa-Rodríguez plans to return home to Michoacán after fulfilling his time and accepting deportation.
The poster with which Landa-Rodríguez once negotiated, now renamed as the new Michoacan family, was designated by the United States Department of the Treasury in April as a foreign terrorist organization.
In August, the Mexican authorities gave Servando Gómez Martínez, a family leader called “La Tuta”, to face drug trafficking charges in New York.
But according to his lawyer, Landa-Rodríguez has no interest in the prison policy or transnational criminal alliances. Sigal dreams of returning to his family's ranch, Sigal wrote, where he lived before coming to the United States at age 15, before joining a south gang or knowing the interior of a jail cell.
Today, “he doesn't seek power, state or conflict,” Sigal wrote. “Only the quiet dignity of aging in the company of loved ones.”
