The old saw is right – there is no honor among thieves.
That’s the lesson that Rene “Boxer” Enriquez, a onetime Mexican Mafia boss, learns in this chronicle by Chris Blatchford, a Peabody-winning reporter for KTTV in Los Angeles. The book charts Enriquez’s rise from a heroin-addled delinquent to feared Mafia leader to government informant.
“I know I am a priority hit, but it doesn’t bother me anymore,” Enriquez says. “Now I’m at peace. I’m not looking over my shoulder. If I do go somewhere and get killed, then I lived by the sword and I died by the sword.”
The Mexican Mafia, or La Eme (Spanish for the letter “M”), was founded in the late 1950s and early ’60s by Latino inmates in California prisons who protected each other – and killed anyone who crossed them. As its members, or carnales, re-entered society, so did La Eme, which was widely feared thanks to its members’ willingness to kill over paper-thin provocations.
In an organization that prized brutality, Boxer Enriquez was a comer. His big break arrived when he tried to murder another inmate in the prison yard while the guards watched the kamikaze attack.
“I was honored that I was picked for the mission and exhilarated by the immediate recognition I received on the yard as a ‘big homeboy,’ ” Enriquez explains. “It felt as if I’d won a schoolyard fight magnified one hundred times. Yeah, it felt good.”
Soon, he was back on the street. Prison – what he jokingly calls “college” – didn’t reform him one bit. Boxer moved from robbing stores to sticking up drug dealers, demanding “taxes” from anyone who operated on his territory. His crew’s ride – a slick, black 1978 Dodge BTM nicknamed “Night Rider” – was acquired by sticking a gun in one dealer’s mouth and forcing him to sign over the pink slip.
“When we drove the Night Rider,” Enriquez says, “we could see drug dealers down the street take off running. They spotted the car and knew it was us. We shot, stabbed and beat people – sometimes in broad daylight – and we didn’t care if we were seen.”
Blatchford shows how La Eme grew to a force that brought hundreds of smaller gangs under their umbrella. Most were too scared to say no.
It’s not hard to believe Boxer when he says that groups like La Eme are a bigger day-to-day threat than al Qaeda. “I told them, let’s run the state, the Southwest United States, let’s run the world! This is organized crime!”
Boxer landed in prison permanently in 1993, but he kept running things outside. Blatchford explains how bosses smuggled drugs inside – there was more than chocolate in the Chips Ahoy – and sneaked out execution orders.
That’s why it was so devastating to La Eme when Boxer “dropped out” and agreed to cooperate with the authorities in 2002.
The Mexican Mafia wasn’t a family – it was a business, with a deadly style of office politics. Almost 10 years after he went to prison for second-degree murder, Enriquez realized one of his old friends would eventually order his death. So he agreed to help the authorities.
“All of my support on the streets was gone now,” he tells Blatchford. “I found myself in turf battle after turf battle, arguing with one carnal after another, and it was wearing me down. . . . The wolves were circling.”
Enriquez pointed out basic ways to strangle the Mafia, such as cutting off the money being mailed to them. Though still imprisoned, he also testified against Eme interests and recorded training videos for law enforcement, teaching them how to hunt people that he once treated like family.
He wanted to show his sons that he could atone, at least partly, for the evil he did. It’s hard to begrudge him for trying to change, but it’s difficult to give him too much credit, since he reformed just before he was to be assassinated. Doing good was his last option.
“I know that I am no swan,” Enriquez writes in the foreword, “but believe me when I tell you that I no longer want to live in the cesspool. What is now different about me? At least I chose to pull myself out of that cesspool. They continue to wallow in it.”
The Black Hand
The Bloody Rise and Redemption of Rene “Boxer” Enriquez, Mexican Mafia Boss
by Chris Blatchford
William Morrow