Mexican Mafia Gave Him 35 Years of Power — Took It Back in 27 Minutes
The visiting room at Pelican Bay State Prison sits at the far northern edge of California behind three fences. On one side of the table a graying man in prison blues. On the other his daughter. A few feet away a guard listens to every word. That is his job. The father mentions a man named Johnny. Johnny is long gone. Then he says it.
Someone needs [music] to go where Johnny is. The guard hears a family catching up on old names. What he is actually hearing is an order. The kind of order no one survives. Eight years later that graying man is lying on a yard of a different
prison. And the organization he served [music] for 35 years put him there. >> The purported leader of the Mexican Mafia has been stabbed to death. Officials say 64-year-old Danny Roman was attacked and stabbed by two other inmates. Roman was accused of running street gang operations throughout California from behind bars.
Gang experts say if this was not a quote sanctioned Mafia hit, it could lead to more violence. I’m Danny Roman, a Mexican Mafia member and shot-caller who ran gang activities in South LA from behind bars, murdered today at Corcoran State Prison. The 64-year-old Roman stabbed repeatedly by two fellow inmates. He died in the prison hospital.
A former Latino street gang leader had been a state prison since 1985 when he started serving a life sentence for first-degree murder. >> This is the story of a man the state of California locked away for life and how from a concrete box he stayed more powerful than the sentence until the day the power was the [music] thing that ended him.
His name was Danny Roman. On the streets of South Los Angeles they called him Popeye. What you are about to see is how a man inside the most secure prison in America built a communication system his guards could watch but never read. How he handed his own daughter the one thing the most ruthless organization in Southern California forbade any woman [music] to touch.
And why after 35 years of service his final 27 minutes were arranged by the same organization he gave his life to. Drop a comment with where in the world you are watching from because this story started on one street corner in South LA and it did not stay there. That street corner belonged to the Harpies. In federal paperwork the gang appears as the Harpies dead end a South Los Angeles crew whose territory ran southwest of downtown >> [music] >> just north of the University of Southern California campus.
It was never the biggest name in the city in a county carrying hundreds of gangs on the map. The Harpies were a mid-sized operation holding a few square miles of it. Danny Roman joined young >> [music] >> and he came up the way men come up in that world, not by talking but by being willing to do what other members hesitated to do.
Rival crews learned his name. So did people who had nothing to do with the life. By the mid-1980s, Roman had climbed to the top of the Harpies. One gang, one neighborhood, that was the entire kingdom. Then the kingdom collapsed [music] to the size of a courtroom. Los Angeles prosecutors charged him [music] with murder. A jury convicted him in the first degree.
The sentence was life without the possibility of parole. No hearing down the road, no date to work toward, no version of the future that included a front door. On January 11th, 1985, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation formally received Danny Roman [music] from Los Angeles County.
He was in his late 20s. At home, his daughter was 9 years old. She would grow up knowing her father through folding chairs and visiting hours. Most men walk through those gates and disappear. The career ends. The influence dies somewhere in processing, between the fingerprints and the prison blues.
Danny Roman walked through those gates and went looking for a [music] promotion. The promotion he wanted was not handed out on any street corner. It lived inside the walls. Roman’s first stop was Folsom State Prison. In 1985, Folsom held a heavy concentration of Southern California gang members, and among them, members of something [music] that was not a street gang at all, the Mexican Mafia.
Inside, they call it La Eme. La Eme did not claim corners. It claimed gangs, a prison-based syndicate of roughly 140 made members, carnales, brothers, whose reach extended into Latino street crews across Southern California. On paper, the math never worked. 140 men, most of them locked down, directing the loyalty of thousands, but money moved in from the streets, orders moved out from the prisons, and every order was backed by consequences. Nobody wanted to test.
Roman wanted in, and here the story [music] picks up its most reliable narrator, Rene Enriquez, a young prospect known as Boxer, coming up in the same era. A man who would rise high inside La Eme, then walk away from it, and become one of the most important [music] witnesses the outside world has ever had on how that world runs.
By Enriquez’s account, Roman’s application hit a wall immediately. Two veteran carnales, one known as Beto, the other as Kilroy, stood against him. Their reason was written into his blood. Roman was not of Mexican descent, and around that same time, by the same account, those two pushed for [music] a formal rule that every future member had to be.
So, Roman waited, not weeks, not months. LAPD records place his induction on May 16th, [music] 1988, nearly 3 years after he arrived. Sit with that. A man serving life without parole spent 3 years patiently applying to an organization whose only retirement plan is a funeral. The application [music] ended in another man’s cell.
The inmate was called Yesco, out of the San Fernando Valley. By Enriquez’s telling, Roman walked in carrying what prisoners call a bone crusher, a blade built for one kind of argument. What happened inside that cell was over fast. So were the objections. [music] Danny Roman was a carnal now. The price of admission was another human being, and carnales do not get to retire.
The state of California tried to force [music] the retirement anyway. At some point after his induction, Roman was transferred as far north as the state goes, to Pelican Bay State Prison, and inside it to the security housing unit, the shoe. It is less a cell block than a theory poured in concrete.
The theory goes like this. A precast concrete [music] cell with no window to the outside world, 23 hours a day alone. The 24th hour in a bare exercise pen, also alone. Every letter in or out read by staff trained to recognize gang code, every phone call monitored. Because a man like Roman was never dangerous on account of his hands.
A shot caller’s power is the ability to be obeyed at a distance, and distance was the one thing the shoe manufactured [music] in bulk. The walls were for his body, everything else in that building was aimed at his [music] voice. So, Roman sat inside the same problem every lockdown leader sits inside. He could not pick up a phone and give an instruction.
He could not put an order on paper. Every channel out of that building ran through people whose entire job was to find exactly what he needed [music] to send. Every channel but one. The state reads a prisoner’s mail. It listens to his calls. What it cannot do is stop his family from visiting. A visitor clears security, sits down across the table, talks for an hour under a guard’s eyes, and drives home.
And if the two people at that table have spent years building a language of their own, old names, old neighbors, people who moved away, the guard is watching a conversation he can see perfectly and read not at all. For that to work, Roman needed someone on the outside he trusted without limit.
Not an associate, not a dilute no, family. In 35 years, there was exactly one person. Her name was Vianna Roman. She was the 9-year-old. She grew up the way daughters of lifers grow up. A childhood measured in supervised hours, metal [music] detectors, and the long drive to wherever the state was keeping her father that year.
Pelican Bay sits more than 700 miles from South Los Angeles. She learned that road the way other kids learn, the way to their grandmother’s house. And the organization her father belonged to kept one rule older than his membership. Women did not touch the business. Not wives, not mothers, not daughters. Men had been put in the ground for sharing operational details across the kitchen table.
Danny Roman broke that rule with his own [music] child. Not because he held it cheap. He had watched it enforced. He broke it because a man in his position can afford to trust [music] no one. And a father gets exactly one exception. Locked in a concrete box, owning nothing, owing nothing.
Trust was the only inheritance Danny Roman had left to give. He gave all of it to her. In her father’s world, she [music] was known as Prima. Once a month, she made the drive north. She cleared security, sat down at the table, >> [music] >> and talked with her father about family, old names, people who moved away. A guard sat within earshot the whole hour, hearing exactly what he was supposed to hear.
Remember the conversation this [music] story opened with. >> [music] >> At that table, soplon is the word for an informant. Johnny was a member who had been dead for years. Put the two together and the sentence [music] stops being
nostalgia. Someone has been branded a snitch and that someone needs to join Johnny. The guard heard a memory. Manuel Valencia, the man waiting for her instructions back in South LA, received a verdict. There was a second language writing underneath the first. Years later, reviewing visiting room footage for investigators, Renee Enriquez recognized it.
Roman, mid-conversation, pulling his index finger back in slow motion. A trigger squeezed that quarter speed. A name attached. Nothing for a microphone to catch. And the federal wiretaps would eventually capture what the daughter had become. She tracked the organization’s money herself. [music] She told members in plain terms when their payments came up short.
She ordered discipline, the physical kind. When one man fell behind, she took his car and held it as collateral. Diana Roman didn’t carry her father’s messages. She carried his authority. Authority, it turns out, has an address. Here sat on Compton Avenue, Baja Mar Tortilleria y Carniceria, a family meat market. Fresh tortillas in the front.
The kind of storefront South Los Angeles has on every commercial block. In LAPD wiretap files, the location carried a shorter name, the meat Shop, on the 25th of every month, money arrived there. Not sometimes, every month, on schedule. Collections drawn from 15 gangs across South Los Angeles.
$5 to $6,000 a cycle, landing as reliably as a civil service paycheck. Lieutenants came through to sit with Prima and talk business behind the counter. And according to informants in the case file, some of the people who would walk through that door did not leave the way they came in. The daily grind belonged to Manuel Valencia, the Harpy’s street-level [music] shot caller, working out of Walnut, 25 miles east. Assignments, collection, problems.
Aaron Soto, Vianna’s husband, held a senior seat beside [music] her and kept the operation turning between her monthly trips north. And operation was far bigger than the Harpy’s. Membership in La Eme gave Roman standing over more than a dozen Latino street gangs across South LA, regardless of whose name was sprayed on the wall.
The Alameda swap meet sat squarely in 38th Street territory, not Harpy’s turf. Roman [music] sent Harpy’s members in to collect from the vendors anyway. Nobody objected, because everyone with the standing to object answered to the same man. What was being taxed? The federal indictment spells it out exactly once. Methamphetamine, cocaine, crack, heroin.
Every product moving through those neighborhoods paid a percentage to [music] keep moving. After that, the paperwork just calls it what the street called it. Taxes. It is worth saying plainly what a tax like that is. Every dollar in that monthly envelope came from somebody who was afraid. A vendor, a shopkeeper, a man on a corner who understood the price of saying no.
Fear, collected on a schedule. A machine that regular produces two things. Wealth and people who are tired of paying. By 2010, some of those tired people were wearing Harpy’s tattoos. This is the part of the story the legend usually skips. The first crack in Danny Roman’s operation did not come from a federal building.
By the accounts of the case, it came from his own membership. Harpy’s members squeezed by their own organizations taxes. [music] Men doing the collecting and taking the risks while the percentage flowed upward to a man most of them had never sat across from. Some of them started talking to investigators. The empire was not breached from the outside. It was unlocked from within.
What those conversations fed was the Los Angeles [music] High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Task Force, HIDTA, a joint operation between the LAPD [music] and the DEA. The investigation ran two and a half years. Informants were placed inside the network. Wiretap authorization stacked up. Surveillance settled over the leadership like weather.
And over one meat market on Compton Avenue, where the recordings finally caught what the visiting room guards never could. The business in plain language in her own voice. The federal file needed a name. They called it Operation Roman Empire. [music] The federal government does not name an investigation after you unless you have built something worth tearing down.
And empires historically share one ending. It arrived on the morning of December 6th, 2012. Coordinated arrests swept across the network. 18 people in custody in a single morning. Three federal grand jury indictments. The central one charged 29 defendants [music] with 60 counts under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, RICO, the statute written for exactly this kind of target, not a crime, an enterprise.
And anyone who read that indictment closely noticed a strange [music] gap in it. 29 names on the page, and the man the entire file was named after [music] was not one of them. The gap had a logic to it. Danny Roman was already serving life without the possibility of parole, and no prosecutor has ever found a way to make a man serve two forevers.
So, the government did the only useful thing left, it wrote him into the record as an unindicted co-conspirator, named in black and white as the man ultimately responsible for the enterprise, and aimed its charges at the people it could actually take off the street. It took nearly all of them. On May 1st, 2014, Vianna Roman pleaded guilty to racketeering along with the drug and weapons counts that traveled with it.
Her plea agreement confirmed what the wiretaps already had, that she was the link between her father’s instructions and their execution [music] on the street. Six days later, Manuel Valencia entered his own plea, putting his name to the heaviest work in the file. Before the courtroom doors stopped swinging, 25 of the 29 [music] defendants stood convicted.
The sentences came down in March of 2015 in the courtroom of United States District Judge R. Gary Klausner. Valencia went first, 27 years. Vianna Roman went last. Standing before the judge, she said it plainly, “I ruined my life and my family’s life.” Klausner gave her 15 years, 180 months. Federal, sit with that number the way you sat with the 3 years at Folsom.
Danny Roman had exactly one thing left on this earth to hand his daughter. And he handed it to her across a visiting room table. Now a federal court had appraised the inheritance. It came to 180 months of her life. And Roman himself the indictment could not take a single day from a man with no days on the books. But it took something.
It took the only thing that keeps a carnal a carnal. What keeps a carnal a carnal is leverage. Inside La Eme it has two ingredients. Money coming in and standing that nobody dares to question. Danny Roman was about to lose both. The money went first. After December 2012 the tax stream out of South Los Angeles thinned [music] to almost nothing.
The daughter who ran the collections was in federal custody. A member who cannot produce is a member whose opinion stops mattering [music] and who see other men begin to study. The standing had cracked even earlier. By the accounts of [music] the case Vianna had told her father that men on the street were not showing her proper respect.
In that world that is not a family complaint. It is a political reading. People had noticed weakness. And for as long as Roman’s position was beyond question the organization had looked away from the woman running his entire operation. Once the position cracked the old rule stopped being overlooked and started being useful. Nobody has to invent a charge against you when you have spent years handing them one. And there were older debts.
Word inside [music] was that a kite had circulated. A note passed cell to cell carrying Roman’s signature and a bill. $1,500 plus a quantity of product owed to the Harpies after a man called Rocky was dealt with. Roman had declared his own gang the winner and billed another carnal’s territory [music] without asking anyone.
Men keep that kind of arithmetic >> [music] >> in their heads for years. In recorded calls that later circulated, his brothers can be heard discussing him. One called him a difficult, hard-headed guy. >> And everybody here is in the same agreement, and he’s the only one he just wants to I I I don’t know what he’s doing, but it’s just like I’m going to have to get over there tomorrow and make sure he’s not trying to do nothing over there.
He’s a He’s a He’s a difficult >> He’s a called hard-headed guy. >> So, we know that we know that person he is. >> That’s why and that’s why I had a hard headed home, you know what I’m saying? >> Yeah. >> Inside La Eme, that is not a personality [music] note. It is a case being built. Then came the hinge of the story.
Rene Enriquez, the man who came up beside Roman in the Folsom days, who had walked away and lived, recorded a video message and law enforcement carried it inside. [music] The offer, leave La Eme, debrief, cooperate, there might still be something in it for your daughter. A door, a real one, standing open in front of a man who had spent 35 years in rooms without one.
Roman watched the video, then he chose the oath. There are no resignation letters in [music] La Eme for a member who has outlived his value. The organization keeps [music] exactly one kind of paperwork, and it does not require his signature. The paperwork came due on a June morning in the Central Valley. By then, the state had moved Roman south from Pelican Bay to the Substance Abuse Treatment Facility [music] and State Prison at Corcoran.
Different walls, same sentence. June 10th, 2020, 10:44 a.m. Roman is 64 years old, standing in the open on the exercise yard. Two men come toward him. The first is Raul Alvarado, 47 out of the Lennox gang, known as Spy. According to a source familiar with prison gang structures, who spoke to the Los Angeles Times, Alvarado is a confirmed member of the Mexican [music] Mafia.
The second is Edward Cisneros, 31, one carnal, one Sureno, a foot soldier of that same world. And in that world, the pairing itself is a pattern. A made member present, a soldier to do the work. That is what a sanctioned operation looks like. Both men are carrying prison-made blades. They drive them [music] into Roman again and again, concentrating on his face.
Guards see it and shout orders to stop. The orders keep coming, and the two [music] men keep working, because the only order that matters on that yard this morning did not come from a guard tower. Staff move in and put both men in restraints. Two weapons are recovered. Medical personnel work on Roman where he lies, and keep working [music] as they move him to the prison’s medical facility. At 11:11 a.m.
, a physician calls it, 27 minutes >> [music] >> start to finish. No official finding has ever said the word sanctioned out loud. It does not need to be said. In La Eme, a carnal does not put hands on another carnal without permission from above. Alvarado’s presence on that yard is the seal at the bottom of the order. The sentence the state of California wrote in 1985 was designed to erase Danny Roman from the world.
It failed for 35 [music] straight years. The concrete held his body and never once held his reach. What finally erased him did not wear a uniform >> [music] >> and did not need a courtroom. It needed a yard. Everyone around him took a different door out of the story. Manuel Valencia has more than a decade [music] left on federal time.
And Vienna Roman Prima, the 9-year-old from the visiting room, walked out after 12 [music] years into daylight and a public life out in the open. She left prison through the front door. Her father left Corcoran on a stretcher. The inheritance paid out in full. And the machine never [music] stopped.
La Eme still counts roughly 140 made members, most of them in California’s high-security prisons. The taxes still come in off the streets. Leaving is still a one-way decision. Nothing about the system he served died with him. It simply changed who sits in the chair. Some people will watch this and still [music] see power in what Danny Roman built.
Some of them are young. What it actually shows is a 64-year-old man on a concrete yard, written off by his own organization as a line item, an expense that stopped earning. If you know somebody who needs to see what that life pays out, share this video, and if the hype button is showing below, use it. Both push this [music] story towards someone who may still believe the street gives more than it takes.
The whole story in two sentences. California gave Danny Roman 35 years. His own organization only needed 27 minutes. And if you want to see a man who did not beat a prison but bought one, Tavon White turned the Baltimore jail into his personal headquarters. That story is on your screen now.