SAN JOSE — Five alleged Northern California gang members who are serving life sentences in state prisons are now heading to federal lockup related to a conspiracy case designed to weaken the powerful Nuestra Familia gang, new court records show.
The five men are among dozens of members of the same prison gang the federal government has targeted in an apparent strategy to go after gang leaders and alleged heavy hitters and incarcerate them outside of California, where their influence is the strongest.
Steven “Esteban” Trujillo and Salvador “Gangster” Castro both received 88 months in federal prison, while Bryan “Turtle” Robledo, Alex “Sleepy” Yrigollen, and Edgardo “Big Evil” Rodriguez each received 74 months, according to court records. The sentences were agreed to in advance by prosecutors and the defense, a rarity in Northern California’s federal court system where open plea deals are more typical.
The sentences are the result of a massive 2021 Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, operation and offer a glimpse into the inner workings of Nuestra Familia, a secretive prison gang with a military-like structure, run on a constitution that emphasizes discipline and self-empowerment. In all, 14 separate murder conspiracies are alleged, most of which were hatched within the Nuestra Familia’s vast network of Norteño gang subsets throughout Northern California.
All five men pleaded guilty to the same offense, racketeering conspiracy, but admitted to different murder plots and drug trafficking conspiracies to benefit the gang. Robledo and Castro admitted to a plot to kill a Nuestra Familia associate in 2018, in retaliation for the intended victim murdering a Norteño gang member without authorization. Robledo was also involved in plots to “remove” gang members through assaults or stabbings when he was a “regiment commander” at Pleasant Valley State Prison in 2018, according to court records.
Trujillo, meanwhile, admitted to a 2015 murder conspiracy that resulted in a man being repeatedly stabbed in California State Prison Solano in Vacaville. The victim — referred to only by the initials “AV” — was targeted for murder because of falsely representing himself as a high-ranking gang member. Then, in 2016, when Trujillo was a “regiment commander” of a Salinas Valley State Prison yard, he ordered Yrigollen and Rodriguez to stab a man, “JM,” for “mistreating lower-ranking Norteños by stealing cellphones and issuing orders without authority,” prosecutors said in court papers. Both victims survived.
All of the defendants were accused of playing roles in various drug trafficking schemes, inside and outside of prison, authorities allege.
“For example, in multiple intercepted calls in 2017, Trujillo can be heard on his contraband cell phone coordinating the movement of thousands of dollars’ worth of heroin and methamphetamine in multiple counties in Northern California,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo. They later added that in 2020 and 2021, Rodriguez arranged similar deals in “public locations in Alameda and San Mateo counties to sell a pound of methamphetamine at a time in exchange for $2,900 to $3,800 per pound.”
All the defendants are already serving life for murder except Castro, who is serving life for gun charges. All of them have spent the bulk of their adult lives in state prison, records show.
The racketeering crimes are portrayed in court records as a form of social climbing, discipline, or both. Rodriguez, 42, incarcerated since 2004 for the murder of 19-year-old Hayward resident Francisco Javier Sanchez, was allegedly sponsored for membership in the Nuestra Familia after the attempted murder of “JM”.
Yrigollen, 53, has been in prison since age 22 for the 1991 murder of Raymond Bustamonte in San Jose. For him, the attempted murder of “JM” was a means of undoing a prior demotion for involvement in an unauthorized assault, prosecutors said.
Trujillo, 57, was convicted at age 30 of murdering his 20-year-old mistress Michelle Favela, of San Jose, in a case where prosecutors said he dismembered her body and threw it into the water from a Santa Cruz pier. He was being considered for a position in the gang’s “inner council” at the time of the indictment.
Robledo, 49, was convicted in the 1992 murder of 19-year-old Jesse Guerrero, the founder of a Christian organization who had dedicated the final years of his life to encouraging youths to stay away from gangs. During his 1993 trial, prosecutors said he and two other gang members ambushed Guerrero in San Jose but portrayed Robledo as the trigger man who fired eight shots at the victim, according to media reports.
By isolating the Nuestra Familia members in prisons outside of California, authorities hope to limit their influence and taper the gang’s spread. But it can also have the opposite effect, giving gangs an opportunity to recruit within a new prison system. In the 1970s and 80s, for instance, the Aryan Brotherhood grew into a nationwide organization after a handful of California members were sent to federal prison.
In the early 2000s, the Nuestra Familia was subjected to a similarly large-scale RICO prosecution known as Operation Black Widow. The result was that the gang’s leaders were incarcerated in prisons out of state. But it didn’t take long for a new leadership council to form, comprising men like David “DC” Cervantes, 74, and James “Conejo” Perez, 68, according to authorities.
Cervantes and Perez now find themselves as two of the lead defendants in this RICO case.
Source: www.mercurynews.com