Black Widow 2

Blood Out

Brown Bob was watering his rosebushes one spring evening in 1999, waiting for his wife, Esperanza, to call him in for dinner. He’d taken a job as a night janitor and spent his weekends pampering his Chevy pickup, nicknamed Lucille. Still chiseled like a freight train and covered in bad jailhouse ink, Viramontes had also taken up gardening, tending to his beloved rosebushes daily. The only thing that bothered him was the gang investigators who stopped by to let him know he was on a hit list: No shit, Viramontes would say.

But this day Viramontes got caught with his back to the streets. Around 6:45 P.M., a Ford Explorer carrying two torpedoes—young hitmen—pulled up to the curb on Palo Santo Drive. They came out shooting.

Viramontes ran for the open garage. But with one bullet to the back, shooter David “Dreamer” Escamilla knocked his target to his knees. The former general crawled along the garage floor, leaving a swath of blood in his wake. The second shooter, Bad Boy, fired lead into Viramontes’ legs, arms, and chest.

Then Dreamer casually walked toward Viramontes and fired once more: The bullet grazed Viramontes’ left cheek, spitting blood back onto Dreamer’s shooting hand. The young NF soldiers hustled back to the waiting Explorer.

Esperanza ran from the kitchen to the garage, finding her husband limp and wet in his own blood, still gasping for air. “What have you motherfuckers done?” she screamed.

Catch–22

Brown Bob’s murder showed that even former generals were subject to the “blood out” policy. Cuete allegedly loaded up the hit list, making some NFers worry he’d overstepped his bounds. Others, like Lizard, simply understood the score. “This murder,” he recalled, “was a statement to all Nuestra Familia members that this new high command will not tolerate any member who disregards its authority or directions.”

Lizard would soon be enforcing Cuete’s street orders himself. After 15 years on and off in prison, he was scheduled to be paroled before Christmas 2000. The NF generals, now calling themselves the Organizing Governing Board (OGB), loaded up Lizard with wilas and contact numbers. In one filter they expressly named Lizard “street administrator,” the highest–ranking norteño on the streets.

Before Lizard walked through the prison gates, he met with Louie Holguin, the Bay’s pesky gang investigator, a former cop who enjoyed long weekend motorcycle rides through NorCal’s wilderness. Every inmate knew his sharp face and the indefatigable patience behind it.

“If he didn’t figure out your allegiance on the way in, he’d get to you on your way out,” a former NF member says. “The deals he offered were simple: Fuck up on the outside and you’re coming back in. Tell us what you know now and maybe you can stay out.”

Holguin had been pestering Lizard for months with questions about NF. Each time Lizard had shrugged him off, but now the investigator had him nailed.

Holguin told Lizard about the bundles of paper evidence he had. The guys from Black Widow had ransacked Crazy Girl’s apartment in Boise several months back and found a canon of Lizard’s writings. They shipped the coded letters to Quantico, Virginia, where FBI cryptologists deciphered them. Holguin also quoted an uncoded note in Lizard’s own handwriting. It read: “As you already know, I am committed to Nuestra Familia. We are an organized group both in and out of the prison system. We are not a prison gang, or any other type of gang. However, we are a mob involved in both legal and illicit businesses. Both business levels are despised by law enforcement just like any other crime familias.”

The investigator wasn’t done. Two years earlier Robert “Huerito” Gratton had flipped. Gratton had celled next to Cuete and, as a captain, had helped shepherd Lizard into NF. For his snitching Gratton had earned a spot in the witness relocation program. Holguin told Lizard he could get the same deal.

The pressure fell thick on Lizard. If he kept quiet he’d be back in Pelican Bay in a few weeks on conspiracy charges. The NF hierarchy would become paranoid. Also, NF’s “hot list” had reached 50 names by now, and any misstep during his freedom—one tardy letter to Cuete that suggested he had left the NF behind—would send his boss into a frenzy, and pretty soon he’d have two torpedoes show up on his front lawn.

Lizard made his decision, then headed for the gates.

From Lizard to Gargoyle

At first life in the vast open lands of California’s Central Valley was cushy for Lizard. The Feds code–named him Gargoyle and cut him checks for what would eventually amount to more than $52,000. He also scored a freebie 1998 green Dodge Durango from a gente—a norteño sympathetic to the cause. He cruised around Northern California, playing golf in Stockton, visiting friends and fellow norteños. But he also had a job to do.

On January 24, just a few weeks out of jail, Lizard called for a junta with his regiment leaders at a Motel 6 in Tracy, a small Central Valley farming town. As the five carnals arrived, they stripped to prove no wires, unaware that Collord and FBI agents were videotaping the meeting from the next room.

Henry “Happy” Cervantes arrived early to talk to Lizard alone. Built like a well–tattooed fire hydrant, he’d once taken a bullet, literally, for a carnal. He allegedly told Lizard he’d received a high–stakes filter from Cuete that said he wanted two district attorneys killed, a husband–and–wife team from San Jose named Kittie and Charles Constantinides. A few years earlier, they’d tagged Pinky Hernandez for ordering a murder; now Cuete allegedly wanted to offer their coffins as a “gift” to his fellow general. Happy had even staked out the courthouse. “I can get a gun and go do it,” prosecutors say he swore on tape.

Lizard’s FBI handlers had told him to dissuade violence at all costs. “We ain’t gonna whack no prosecuting attorney,” Lizard said. “Or better yet, two prosecuting attorneys.”

“What if you get away with it?” Cervantes persisted on the tape. “All you have to do is find the motherfuckers, pull up on the side of them…”

“We are not going to whack no DAs!” Lizard boomed, ending the conversation.

Later the other carnals arrived with gifts. Anthony Morales brought 60 grams of negra, black tar heroin. Ramiro Garcia suggested to Lizard that the NF start cooking speed and boasted he was already clearing a few thousand dollars a week dealing it. Other NF rings were piping drugs through Modesto, Stockton, and Sacramento, no problems.

After four months on the outside, Lizard was growing tired of his FBI connection and becoming antsy for the criminal life. He told his FBI handler he was headed to Stockton for golf, then drove to San Jose and sold some NF meth for $3,600. Emboldened by success, he was sneaking away to make other deals and party. He drove down to the town of Lodi and spent a few days with Happy Cervantes and Robert “Wolfie” Hass. He blew through thousands in drug cash his underlings brought him, reporting none of it to the FBI. The investigators decided it was time to wrap things up.

On the morning of April 20, 2001, norteños from Pacifica to Pelican Bay were rudely awakened by surprise raids. Holguin sped in a squad car to track down Happy Cervantes, the vato who allegedly offered to whack two San Jose prosecutors, and found him in a Burger King parking lot. Handcuffed in the back of the squad car, he told Holguin in a knowing tone, “Now they’re gonna move on me.” About a half–dozen other norteños were swept up in the raids.

Finding Cuete was much easier. When a phalanx of guards unlatched his cell door, the old captain in Ray Bans wasn’t surprised to see them. As they plucked through his papers, confiscating letters whose codes they now owned, one guard took down the only photograph hanging on the wall above Cuete’s desk: a picture of Lizard.

Familia Reunion

At a recent hearing in San Francisco’s Federal Building, Cuete and 14 other defendants were led into Judge Charles Breyer’s courtroom shackled at the waist, hands, and feet. They were dressed in blood red prison jumpsuits and paired with their individual attorneys. They sat in a three–tiered bleacher constructed for the trial, the first time they’d shared a room in nearly a year. As they shifted in their seats, the sound of jingling chains continually echoed across the court’s high ceilings.

Cuete’s finely tailored attorney, Richard Mazer, told Judge Breyer he was overwhelmed by the number of documents he still had to sort through—over 50,000 in all—and he still hadn’t received everything from Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven Gruel and his team. “How can I defend my client if I don’t even know what the government knew and when they knew it?” Mazer asked.

He wasn’t the only attorney who was at a loss. Marc Zilversmit had tried to get the case tossed, citing the government’s “outrageous conduct” and its complicity in gang violence, including the murder of Raymond Sanchez, which took place a month after the main raids. “They watched this entire thing go down, and they didn’t say a word,” Zilversmit said. “That makes them liable.”

According to court documents, the investigators hadn’t warned Sanchez because they believed that Lizard’s “no bloodshed” edict had warned off the young soldier. Zilversmit’s motions were denied.

In the end the bulk of binders and videotapes collected from Detective Collord’s secret basement in Santa Rosa led to indictments on 21 NF members, with a total of 15 murders, 80 conspiracies to murder, 100 assaults, 31 drug–related offenses, two drive–by shootings, and “other numerous crimes.”

It’s doubtful the indictments will slow down NF. According to gang experts like Jared Lewis, nothing short of an apocalypse will keep NF from continuing to bloom. The prison population is still growing, providing an ever–changing stock of front–line troops. “Their hit lists may go dormant during this trial,” Lewis said, “but they’ll never go away. They’ll figure out another way to carry on.”

Even Gruel understood Operation Black Widow could only temporarily slow NF. “We used to be three laps behind them,” he said at the hearing. “Now we’re two steps behind.”

Already serving 15 to life, Gerald “Cuete” Rubalcaba was charged with ordering 14 more hits while inside the Bay, including the Brown Bob assassination. At the hearing the star defendant sat behind his trademark shades, stone–faced, jerking uncomfortably at his heavy chains every few minutes as the attorneys above him bickered.

If you listened closely, it was easy to believe he was testing a new code.