Operation Black Widow 1

Operation Black Widow attempted to stop one of America’s most ruthless gangs from ruling the streets from behind bars. But how do you defeat a criminal enterprise that thrives on prison itself?

Maxim, November 2003 By Justin Berton

Late in the afternoon on May 20, 2001, Daniel “Lizard” Hernandez stepped out of his green Dodge Durango and met with one of his street soldiers in Salinas, California. Lizard was a lieutenant in Nuestra Familia, the notoriously brutal prison gang. Recently released from Pelican Bay State Prison, he now commanded the gang’s street regiments, and all killings had to go through him. His young associate had a victim in mind: Raymond Sanchez.

Lizard listened patiently as his underling laid out his case. Although Sanchez claimed he was an allied norteño—any Hispanic gang member from north of Fresno—the drug dealer wasn’t paying his gang taxes. Worse, Sanchez had disrespected turf boundaries by pushing heroin inside Salinas’ tiny Chinatown. The soldier complained he’d chased Sanchez down Chinatown’s streets with a gun, but still the fool wouldn’t budge.

Finally, Lizard spoke. “I don’t want any bloodshed,” he said. “We got more on the table than just a fight for powder. You can’t smoke everybody that sells dope.”

But the soldier persisted. Sanchez had boasted he was “the new king in town” and threatened to cap anyone who disagreed. If NF didn’t stand up to him, they’d look like bitches and lose money.

“All right,” Lizard allowed. “If something comes at us, you can’t help it…Just don’t go out looking for it.”

The next night something came up. Sanchez showed his face inside Cap’s Saloon, a dive bar for bailouts and parolees only two doors down from a police precinct. He ordered a drink and sat alone on a stool, listening to the Mexican oldies that blared from the jukebox.

At the other end of the bar, a budding norteño named Armando Frias, 19, took notice. He knew a green light on Sanchez was in the works. The teenager sneaked outside to call an NF captain.

“The no–good is here,” he reported.

Frias waited 20 minutes in the parking lot for a courier, who slipped him a pistol. Then he walked back into Cap’s and minutes later shot Sanchez in the neck. Sanchez flopped facedown on the wooden bar. The teenager bolted toward the front door, shooting up Sanchez’ incoming friend on his way out.

Frias and his NF associates loaded into a getaway car and sped toward Oklahoma. But it was a waste of gas.

The cops had been following their plans all along.

The Blooming Flower

Meanwhile, 450 miles to the north, near the Oregon border, business chugged along as usual inside Nuestra Familia headquarters, also known as Pelican Bay State Prison. Built in the late 1980s exclusively to control the state’s 2,500 most violent inmates, half of the high–tech compound is reserved for the brightly lit Security Housing Unit, or SHU. Inside the SHU, “the worst of the worst”—including the three generals of Nuestra Familia—spend 23 hours a day triple–locked inside neat pods of bone–white antiseptic cells.

Law enforcement agents say that from inside these spartan confines a handful of Nuestra Familia generals and captains miraculously orchestrated a criminal network over an area the size of Wyoming. According to government agents, 10 years after the Bay’s opening in 1989, the NF had surged from a few hundred members into a supergang topping 1,000, a growth so astonishing that guards nicknamed it the Blooming Flower.

“With the prison population growing so fast, they had their pick,” says Jared Lewis, a former gang investigator and NF expert. “They pulled in young guys by the bushel.”

The escalation of NF represents the unwanted flipside to the prison explosion in America, and California in particular: What’s bred inside later grows on the outside. Once paroled, young norteños set up street regiments clad in flaming red San Francisco 49ers bomber jackets and UNLV Runnin’ Rebels caps. The NF hierarchy controls drug flow in over a dozen Northern California cities and moves hundreds of thousands in cash—all while its leaders are in lockdown. With a mantra of “blood in, blood out,” nobody walks away from the gang. Law enforcement agents believe NF soldiers have carried out as many as 300 murders on brothers turned traitors.

The Flower had to be stanched. In 1998 the FBI and local authorities triggered Operation Black Widow, the largest and most expensive investigation into a U.S. prison gang to date. After a $5 million, three–year investment, the fruits of the operation will be laid out inside a security–heavy San Francisco courtroom this month, when the first trials begin for 12 people charged with more than 200 counts. At stake is the government’s ability to control a gang that has expanded via the very system meant to deter it: incarceration. To achieve that goal, some say the FBI knowingly allowed murders, like that of Raymond Sanchez, to take place.

“There’s blood on the government’s hands,” says Marc Zilversmit, an attorney who defended an NF member. “They sat by and watched these guys pick each other off.”

Blood In

Daniel Hernandez rose with the gang. He came up sureño, a bony, sensitive teenager from Long Beach, where his homeboys considered him anything but hard–core.

“Danny wasn’t known for being so tough when he first got pulled,” recalls an investigator who worked on Operation Black Widow. “He’d fight if he had to, but he never drew blood or caused any serious injuries. He was more of a thinker’s man.”

But Hernandez wasn’t soft, either; he got pinched for ripping off car stereos and was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon. Later he was shipped north to San Quentin, where he bumped into his cousin, who told him the law: Carnal, you’re a dead man here if you ain’t norteño.

According to investigators, it was Art “Big Smiley” Ramirez, an obese and jovial NF captain, who eventually pulled Danny into Nuestra Raza, the NF’s recruiting league. Danny learned how to transform his toothbrush into a shank and fling tiny, kitelike letters, or wilas, into other cells with elastic from his waistband. Smiley also handed his new recruit books on Latino history and an Aztec dictionary so Danny could answer the gang’s “21 Questions.”

At the NF leadership’s ordering, Danny brawled with sureños and no–goods at Quentin, until he earned a ticket to Pelican Bay, where he was dropped into general population. There he introduced himself to Gerald “Cuete” (Spanish for “pistol”) Rubalcaba, reportedly the highest–ranking captain on the floor.

Cuete, serving 15 to life for second–degree murder, was the most feared vato in the pod. He was from a farming town in Tulare County and wore tinted Ray Ban–style glasses and strutted along in a shoulders–back, chin–up mosey. He was lean, charismatic, and calculating. He told Danny he was a former Marine, and he knew the rewards of a disciplined unit. He’d sealed his entry into NF more than a decade earlier at Susanville’s California Correctional Center, where officials say he killed a snitch. Snitches went blood out, Cuete reminded Danny.

Soon the NF leadership offered its new pledge a way in: attack his cellmate, Johnny Fernandez. Danny didn’t hesitate.“I did it because I was ordered to,” he’d later recall.

On February 27, 1995, Danny sneaked up on Fernandez and pummeled him into a crimson mess. Prison guards yanked Danny from his dripping–wet cell and stuffed him into one of the boxes in the SHU. Fifteen months later he returned to the general population—jail–pale and flabby from lack of sun and exercise.

“Congratulations,” Cuete told the newest member of Nuestra Familia. He nicknamed Danny “Axilih”—the Aztec word for “lizard.”

The Web Is Spun

Two years after Lizard settled into Pelican Bay, another gang member in his 20s was freed. He boarded a Greyhound bus to Sonoma County and was picked up by the Santa Rosa Police three months later. Fearing he’d be sent back to Pelican Bay, he agreed to meet with George Collord, a meticulous police detective in his mid–40s. When the parolee spelled out the entire power structure of Nuestra Familia, Collord realized how NF leaders were behind nearly a dozen local killings. Even better, the kid had names: Cuete, Lizard, Pinky, Brown Bob. He said they were not only powerful inside the Bay, but revered—spoken of as if they were gods—on the outside.

“George didn’t know it then,” a fellow detective later said, “but Operation Black Widow had just been born. And they owed everything to that one kid. Without him they had nothing.”

Collord made a flurry of phone calls. Suddenly, cops in nearby places like Stockton, Tracy, and Salinas were sending him dusty manila folders marked “homicide.”

A few months later the kid told Collord that NF’s high command had put out a hit on an NF captain named Michael “Mikio” Castillo in Salinas for skimping $9,000 on his gang tax payments. Investigators contacted Castillo in jail, but he refused their help. Five days after his release, investigators found Castillo’s heavily tattooed body in a parking lot with two shots to the back of the head.

Collord’s mounds of manila folders became pillars of white boxes. The detective moved his operation into a basement a few blocks away, where he pinned up mug shots of gang leaders and drew diagrams connecting their hometowns and regiment commanders. The California Department of Corrections sent him photos and surveillance tapes taken from Pelican Bay, and the FBI sent him money, computers, phones, and—most important—agents. The law enforcement web would eventually involve 30 government agencies and stretch from the Oregon border all the way to Fresno.

The Pistol’s Protégé

Cuete elevated Lizard to lieutenant and anointed him his personal secretary, since he did not write wilas. So Lizard allegedly took his boss’ dictation. As the highest–ranking captain outside the SHU, Cuete directed all prison correspondence and acted as a human safe for sensitive NF documents. One day he told his protégé, he’d hand it all over to Lizard.

“Cuete took a shine to Lizard because Lizard was a stickler for detail,” the OBW investigator says. “Lizard took the NF way very seriously. He always offered to learn more and do more for the organization. He was as bright and loyal as they came.”

Holguin’s troops flipped Cuete’s cell regularly. The only off–limits items were “legal documents,” so Cuete had associates mail in stationery with bogus legal headings, which he later filled out and posted to P.O. boxes. He also refined a written code based on the Aztec language; it was so elaborate even his personal letters were safe.

Under Cuete’s tutelage, Lizard began writing to a woman in Idaho named Kalyn Santiago, who had her nickname, Crazy Girl, tattooed over her right knee. In each letter Lizard’s salutation activated the key to the coded letter. If he wrote, “Hello love!” every sixth word was important. If it read, “Hey love,” every third word was worthy.

According to the Feds, Crazy Girl translated and passed the letters along to NF associates on the outside and to the generals in the SHU, who issued hits and directives. Over four years Lizard and other NF scribes mailed more than 3,000 letters to 50 outside mailboxes.

Cuete also showed Lizard a new way NF made money outside: selling CDs. Paroled captain Robert “Huerito” (Blondie) Gratton was using drug money to produce a gangsta–rap CD called G.U.N. Generation of United Norteños—XIV Till Eternity.

“Everywhere we went that summer, we heard G.U.N. blaring out of norteño cars and at parties,” says Tim Helton, a gang investigator in Modesto. “It was hard to miss. Gratton was driving around town in a red Corvette.”

In early 1998, according to FBI documents, Cuete was finally promoted to acting general after General Joseph “Pinky” Hernandez was moved to a county jail to await trial. According to Lizard, Cuete’s first order of business was to call for a hit on Robert “Brown Bob” Viramontes, a former NF general. It was a ballsy move for a temporary general.

“He hasn’t been tending to gang business,” Cuete reportedly declared to Lizard, who wrote Viramontes’ death wila.

Brown Bob, then 44, had taken up a quiet life in the San Jose suburb of Campbell with his wife and two sons. The old general had covered up the Nuestra Familia tattoo on his back with a large Aztec goddess. The wila also reported that B.B. wasn’t helping NF bangers on the outside.

Lizard’s wila eventually reached an associate outside, who passed it on to Santos “Bad Boy” Burnias, a recently paroled soldier in the San Jose regiment. He said he’d do the job once he heard Brown Bob had worked with Mothers Against Gangs.

“He’s been poisoning young minds,” a friend of Bad Boy’s goaded.