He Ran 12 Gangs From Pelican Bay, Made His Daughter Boss & K*lled By His Own Mob: Popeye Roman 

The reported 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. >> On June 10th, 2020, at 10:44 in the morning, on the exercise yard at the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison at Corcoran, a 64-year-old inmate was standing in open ground.

Two other inmates moved toward him. Each one was carrying an improvised stabbing weapon. The attack started without warning. Both men drove their weapons into him repeatedly, targeting his face. Guards saw what was happening and ordered them to stop. [music] The two men did not stop. Responding staff moved in and put them in restraints.

 By then, it was already over. Medical personnel worked on the inmate on the yard. They kept working on him as they moved him to the prison’s medical facility. His name was Danny Roman, known on the streets of South Los Angeles and inside the California prison system as Popeye. He had been in the custody of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation since 1985, serving life without parole.

35 years. The network he built outside those walls never stopped running. How a man serving life without parole managed to run more than a dozen street gangs across South Los Angeles from inside one of the most isolated prisons in California. And what eventually brought everything to a violent end on a yard in Corcoran.

That is what this video is about. Drop a comment and tell us where in the world you are watching from. We want to see how far this story travels. The Harpies, also known in federal records as Harpies Dead End, claimed territory southwest of downtown Los Angeles and north of the University of Southern California.

It was not the largest gang in Los Angeles, but under Danny Roman, it became the street level arm of something much larger. Danny Roman joined the Harpies when he was young. He climbed through the ranks by committing acts of violence against rival gang members and against civilians. He eventually reached the top position, shot-caller for a dozen street gangs across South Los Angeles.

 That meant he controlled who got taxed, who got hit, and who got left alone. Under his direction, the Harpies ran a systematic extortion operation against local businesses and launched regular attacks on rival gangs. They also targeted students at the University of Southern California. Street robberies and assaults that drew public attention to the area and eventually drew law enforcement attention to Roman himself.

 In the mid-1980s, Roman was arrested and prosecuted for murder. >> [music] >> He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. On January 11th, 1985, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation formally received Danny Roman from Los Angeles County >> [music] >> to begin carrying out that sentence.

 For most people convicted of a violent crime and sentenced to life without parole, that date marks the end of everything. The career is over. The influence is finished. They go in and the world continues without them. Danny Roman went in. The world did not continue without him. Roman’s first placement was at Folsom State Prison.

In 1985, Folsom held a significant population of gang-affiliated inmates from Southern California, including several members of the Mexican Mafia, known in Spanish as La Eme. La [music] Eme was [clears throat] not a street gang in the ordinary sense. It was a prison-based criminal syndicate whose influence reached into Latino street gangs across Southern California.

Later, law enforcement accounts would describe it as a small organization, roughly 140 inducted members with [music] power far beyond its size. Money moved in from the streets, orders moved out from the prisons. To become a member, a carnal, a prospect needed a sponsor and needed to demonstrate a willingness to commit violence for the organization.

Roman was brought up as a prospect alongside a man named Rene Enriquez, known as Boxer. Enriquez would go on to become one of the organization’s highest-ranking members before eventually cooperating with federal authorities and leaving La Eme. His first-hand account of Roman’s induction is the most detailed record available.

 According to Enriquez, >> [music] >> two existing members, Raymond Alvarez, known as Beto, and Ernest Roybal, known as Kilroy, opposed Roman from the start. Their stated objection, Roman was not Mexican. In 1985, those two pushed for a formal rule requiring all future members to be of Mexican descent. Roman spent months in a state of political uncertainty.

 Enriquez watched him during that period and remembered the frustration visible on his face. Roman resolved the situation the only way La Eme’s internal culture allows. He identified a man in the prison population, someone named Yesco from the San Fernando Valley, went into Yesco’s cell with a large shank that prisoners call a bone crusher, and attacked him.

He drove the blade directly into Yesco’s mouth. The blow knocked out all of his teeth. Shortly after that, Roman was inducted. He was a carnal now. Whatever objections Beto and Kilroy had raised were finished the moment Roman walked out of Yesco’s cell. At some point after his induction, Roman was transferred to Pelican Bay State Prison, specifically to the Security Housing Unit, the SHU.

The SHU at Pelican Bay was built for one purpose. Precast concrete cells with no exterior window. 23 hours alone every day. 1 hour of recreation, also alone. All incoming and outgoing mail reviewed by staff trained to identify gang-related coded language. All phone calls monitored and logged. The intent was informational isolation as much as physical containment.

A gang leader’s actual power is not in his body. [music] It is in his ability to give orders. The walls hold the man. The silence is supposed to hold the organization. Roman had the same problem every imprisoned gang leader has. He could not call the shot caller directly. He could not write a plain text letter giving instructions.

Every piece of communication in or out was being reviewed by people whose job was to find exactly that kind of content. [music] His solution was the channel the system had the least control over. A visitor could enter the facility, sit across from him in the visiting room, talk for an hour, and leave. If the two people in that room had developed a shared language that sounded like family conversation, the guards were watching something they could not interpret.

Roman needed someone on the outside he trusted completely. He chose his daughter. >> [music] >> Vianna Roman was 9 years old when her father went to prison. She grew up in the years that followed with her father accessible only through the visiting rooms of California correctional facilities. That is a specific kind of childhood.

 A relationship measured in supervised hours and drive times to remote locations conducted inside rooms built for exactly this kind of managed contact. La Eme maintained a firm rule about women. >> [music] >> They were not to be involved in the organization’s business. The organization had historically ordered the deaths of male members who shared business information with women.

The rule was enforced. Danny Roman broke it by giving his own daughter authority that most male members of the organization would have struggled to claim. In the world she operated in, >> [music] >> Vianna was known as Prima. Every month, she drove to Pelican Bay. Under the observation of guards, >> [music] >> she and her father spoke in the language they had developed together.

>> [music] [music] [music] >> She came back with the instructions that would direct the organization for the next 30 days. Back in South Los Angeles, she passed those instructions to Manuel Valencia, Harpies’ street-level shot-caller from the city of Walnut, who managed the daily operations, assigning dealers, [music] organizing collections, directing violence when it needed to be directed.

Aaron Soto, 40 years old and Vianna’s husband, also held a senior role in the network and kept the mechanism running between Vianna’s monthly trips north. >> [music] >> Federal wiretap recordings from the investigation make clear that Vianna was not a passive relay. She monitored the finances directly. She knew what the organization was owed and followed up when payments did not arrive on schedule.

 The intercepted calls recorded her telling members in pointed terms that their tax contributions were not adequate. She ordered physical beatings for members who came up short. In one documented case, she confiscated a member’s car as collateral because he was behind on his payments. She was not running her father’s errands.

 She was running his organization. The clearest available picture of how Roman communicated his most serious orders came from a recorded visit that federal investigators later analyzed in detail. [music] During one of Vianna’s monthly trips to Pelican Bay, Roman used the Spanish slang term “soplón”, a word for informants and people who cooperate with law enforcement.

>> [music] >> He paired it with a reference to a gang member who had died sometime before, a man named Johnny. The instruction he gave Vianna was that the person he was calling a soplón needed to go where Johnny is. To a guard sitting in that room, the sentence meant nothing. To Vianna and to Manuel Valencia, it was a death order.

 Someone had been designated an informant. That person was to be [music] killed. Valencia would assign the Harpy’s members who would carry it out. Rene Enriquez, brought in later by the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Department to analyze surveillance material from the prison, identified a separate layer of Roman’s communication method, one that required no words at all.

In footage from the visiting room, Enriquez recognized Roman pulling his index finger in a slow, deliberate motion, like squeezing a trigger, while talking about a particular person. Without saying it, Roman was indicating that the person should be shot. The network Roman directed through these methods extended well beyond the Harpy’s traditional territory.

 His standing in LA M gave him authority over more than a dozen Latino street gangs across South Los Angeles, regardless of which neighborhood each one claimed. The Alameda Swap Meet sat in belonging to the 38th Street gang, not the Harpies. But both gangs answered to Roman through La Eme. He sent Harpies members in to extort the vendors.

 Nobody in a position to object it, because nobody in a position to object worked for anyone except Roman. The financial engine was drug taxation, methamphetamine, cocaine, crack, heroin. Any distribution operating in Roman’s territory paid a percentage to continue. Beyond drugs, the organization ran armed robberies, killed witnesses in active criminal cases, and settled internal drug debts the same way it settled most disputes.

All of it ran on instructions passed through a woman visiting her father once a month. >> [music] >> The scale of the operation eventually drew the attention of the Los Angeles High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Task Force, HIDTA, a joint effort between the Los Angeles Police Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

 The investigation ran for 2 and 1/2 years. Investigators placed informants inside the network, obtained wiretap authorizations, and conducted sustained physical surveillance on the leadership structure. The phone recordings were extensive. Conversations in which Vianna managed collections, issued threats against members, and relayed her father’s instructions were captured in detail.

 On the morning of December 6th, 2012, the task force executed coordinated arrests across the network. 18 defendants were taken into custody. Three federal grand jury indictments were filed. The central indictment charged [music] 29 defendants with 60 counts under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

>> [music] >> Prosecutors alleged that the Harpies had operated as a continuing criminal enterprise under Roman’s direction. Roman was not among the defendants. The decision was a practical one. He was already serving life without the possibility of parole. [music] A federal conviction layered on top of an existing LWOP sentence changes nothing about where a man spends his remaining years.

The government named him as an unindicted co-conspirator, documented on record as the person ultimately responsible for the enterprise, and directed its prosecution at the people who could actually be removed from circulation. Adding life sentences to a man already serving life is the legal equivalent of telling someone who has already missed their flight that they are also banned from the airport.

The defendants who faced the most direct consequences were Vianna Roman and Manuel Valencia. Vianna, 37 years old at the time of her arrest, pleaded guilty on May 1st, 2014, to RICO violations along with drug and weapons charges. Her plea agreement acknowledged that she had served as the link between her father’s instructions and their execution on the street.

Judge R. Gary Klausner of the United States District Court sentenced her to 15 years, 180 months. >> [music] >> 7 days later, on May 7th, 2014, Manuel Valencia entered a guilty plea to federal RICO charges. He acknowledged participating in a continuing criminal enterprise involving drug trafficking, supervising murder conspiracies, and ordering drive-by shootings against rival gang members.

Judge Klausner sentenced him to 27 years, 25 of the 29 defendants charged in the RICO indictment entered guilty pleas before trial. The street structure Roman had built over three decades was gone. His daughter was in federal prison. His shot-caller was in for 27 years. His tax revenue had been cut off at the source.

Roman remained at Pelican Bay, >> [music] >> uncharged, serving nothing he was not already serving. Left with no remaining network to direct, the collapse of the street network produced two immediate problems for Roman inside the prison system. In La Eme, both problems tend to produce the same outcome. The money had stopped.

Roman’s share of the street level tax revenue, the income that flows from gang territory through intermediaries and into [music] the prison system, dropped sharply after the federal indictments. In La Eme’s internal economy, a carnal who cannot generate income is a carnal without leverage.

 The standing problem had been developing before the arrests. Vianna had communicated to her father that she was not being shown adequate respect by members on the street. In La Eme, >> [music] >> this is not a personal grievance. It is a political signal that a carnal’s authority is weakening and that other people have noticed.

 Roman’s use of a woman as his central representative had been tolerated as long as his standing was unquestioned. Once the standing showed signs of deteriorating, the rule violation became a usable argument against him. There was also a documented pattern of Roman pressing disputes with other carnales in ways [music] that generated lasting resentment.

A kite had circulated through the prison network [music] with Roman’s signature on it, demanding $1,500 and 5 kg of drugs be paid to the Harpies after a man named Rocky was shot five or six times and stabbed more than 50 times. Roman had ruled in his own gang’s favor and expected another carnal’s territory to pay the bill without consulting them.

People did not forget it. Recorded phone conversations between two La Eme members, Daniel Pena and a man called Snoop, captured the tone of how Roman was being discussed by this point. >> And everybody here is in the same agreement and he’s the only one he just wants to I I don’t know what he’s doing, but it’s just like I’m going to have to get over there tomorrow, make sure he’s not trying to do nothing over there.

He’s a He’s a He’s a difficult hard headed guy. So, we know that we know that firsthand he is. That’s why That’s why I had to come harder at him, you know what I’m saying? >> Yeah. >> Rene Enriques, cooperating with the government, >> [music] >> recorded a video message for Roman and had law [clears throat] enforcement deliver it inside the prison.

>> [music] >> In it, Enriques urged Roman to formally leave La Eme, to debrief, cooperate with authorities, and potentially help his daughter in the process. Roman watched the video. He stayed in La Eme. A green light, a formal authorization to kill, means any Sureno with access to the target is both permitted and expected to act.

There is no mechanism to contest it once issued. Roman had issued green lights himself. He understood precisely what it meant when one was being assembled against him. He stayed anyway. Roman was eventually transferred from Pelican Bay >> [music] >> to the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison at Corcoran.

On the morning of June 10th, 2020, Roman was on the exercise yard at 10:44. Two men came at him. The first was Raul Alvarado, 47 years old, known as Spy, affiliated with the Lennox gang. >> [music] >> According to a source familiar with prison gang structures who spoke to the Los Angeles Times, Alvarado was a confirmed member of the Mexican Mafia.

>> [music] >> He had been in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation since February 15th, 1994, serving a life sentence for second-degree murder from Los Angeles County. The second attacker was Edward Cisneros, 31 years old. He had entered the California prison system on May 28th, 2013, from San Bernardino County, serving life with the possibility of parole for attempted first-degree murder.

One carnal, one Sureno. That combination, a confirmed member alongside a lower-ranking associate, is the pattern associated with a sanctioned La Eme operation. Both men used improvised stabbing weapons. Two weapons were recovered at the scene. Roman was transported to the medical facility. He had sustained multiple severe stab wounds concentrated on his face and upper [music] body.

 At 11:11 in the morning, 27 minutes after the attack began, a physician declared him dead. Given the collapsed network, the dried-up revenue, the recorded contempt from fellow carnales, and the fact that a confirmed member was physically present in the attack, the evidence points in one direction. A carnal does not put hands on another carnal without authorization.

Alvarado’s presence on that yard is the signature at the bottom of the order. The methods Danny Roman used to run a criminal network from inside a maximum-security prison did not end with him. La Eme still has approximately 140 inducted members, most of them in California’s high-security facilities. >> [music] >> The tax revenue still flows in from the streets.

 The enforcement structures that make leaving a death sentence or still in place. In 1985, a California court handed Roman a sentence designed to remove him from society permanently. >> [music] >> It did not remove him from anything. It gave him an office. Diana Roman completed her federal sentence and has since [music] built a public presence as a content creator.

Manuel Valencia has more than a decade remaining in federal prison. Roman’s death did not come from the justice system. It came from the organization he gave 35 years to on a concrete yard 200 miles from the street corner where his career started. The version of this story where the system eventually caught up with Roman would be a more reassuring one.

That is not what happened. What finally stopped him, 35 years later, was the organization deciding [music] he was no longer useful. There are people watching this right now who see what Roman built and see power. Some of them are young. Some of them are being told that the structure he served is something [music] worth giving years to.

What the story shows is a 64-year-old man on a yard in Cork red killed by the organization he served 27 minutes after it decided he was done. If you know someone who needs to see what that life really costs, share this video. That is one of the clearest ways to [music] tell YouTube this story should reach more people.

And if you are watching on your phone and the hype button is available [music] below the video, use it. It helps push the story toward new viewers, including someone who may still think the street gives more than it takes.