A gang chief has been sentenced to 9 years in federal jail for orchestrating a 2023 gambling operation and heading up a listing of extortion schemes.
The person known as Luis Ramirez, head of the Los Angeles Riverside County-based side road gang, has been discovered to have arranged the criminal activity whilst already incarcerated on separate fees.
Gang chief sentenced for extortion plot
U.S. District Pass judgement on Stanley Blumenfeld Jr., who ordered that Ramirez’s federal time period run consecutively to his current lifestyles sentence in California state jail, made up our minds that he broke more than one rules while incarcerated.
Ramirez allegedly endured to prepare and keep watch over the Westside Riva (WSR), a Jurupa Valley-based side road gang, and performed the acts as a part of a much wider swathe of violence and prison intimidation.
Chief of Inland Empire side road gang sentenced to 9 years in federal jail for ordering 2023 kidnapping in Riverside https://t.co/w2mxcOy9pi
— US Lawyer L.A. (@USAO_LosAngeles) January 13, 2026
This integrated, says the Division of Justice (DoJ) publication, that the WSR underneath his command “performed, controlled, and supervised an unlawful playing industry inside its territory. It required different playing companies working inside its territory to pay a portion of income for the crowd’s permission to perform.”
Courtroom filings and studies through the LA Times have indicated that the WSR has, every now and then, explored a number of alleged actions past drug trafficking and extortion, together with unlawful playing operations and, when it comes to Ramirez, extortion.
Ramirez’s deal presentations VICAR plea
The plea deal and the courtroom paperwork offered additionally display that the WSR, underneath Ramirez’s instruction, demanded “taxes” be paid in alternate for defense.
This extortion of native companies was once an extended checklist of prison behaviour that the WSR allegedly dedicated in a area that they had designated as “territory.”
The gang leader, in Pass judgement on Blumenfield Jr’s determination, authorized the job he orchestrated in reference to violent crime in help of racketeering (VICAR).
Ramirez’s plea, in line with the DoJ, presentations his ordering of the 2023 kidnapping of a sufferer known as “Individual 1.”
Prosecutors mentioned two gang friends kidnapped and held the sufferer within a Riverside outfitter for a number of days with out common get admission to to meals or medicine ahead of she escaped on October 1, 2023.
Each co-defendants, Jose Jonathan Rubalcaba Alarcon, 23, and Gilbert Rey Martinez, 22, later pleaded accountable and gained federal jail sentences of 46 months and 41 months, respectively.
Featured symbol: California Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation
