A gang chief has been sentenced to 9 years in federal jail for orchestrating a 2023 gambling operation and heading up an inventory of extortion schemes.
The person recognized as Luis Ramirez, head of the Los Angeles Riverside County-based road gang, has been discovered to have organized the criminal activity whereas already incarcerated on separate fees.
Gang chief sentenced for extortion plot
U.S. District Choose Stanley Blumenfeld Jr., who ordered that Ramirez’s federal time period run consecutively to his current life sentence in California state jail, decided that he broke a number of legal guidelines while incarcerated.
Ramirez allegedly continued to prepare and management the Westside Riva (WSR), a Jurupa Valley-based road gang, and carried out the acts as a part of a wider swathe of violence and prison intimidation.
Chief of Inland Empire 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 included, says the Division of Justice (DoJ) publication, that the WSR underneath his command “performed, managed, and supervised an unlawful playing enterprise inside its territory. It required different playing companies working inside its territory to pay a portion of income for the gang’s permission to function.”
Courtroom filings and experiences by the LA Times have indicated that the WSR has, at occasions, explored a bunch of alleged actions past drug trafficking and extortion, together with unlawful playing operations and, within the case of Ramirez, extortion.
Ramirez’s deal exhibits VICAR plea
The plea deal and the court docket paperwork offered additionally present that the WSR, underneath Ramirez’s instruction, demanded “taxes” be paid in change for cover.
This extortion of native companies was a protracted record of prison behaviour that the WSR allegedly dedicated in a area they’d designated as “territory.”
The gang leader, in Choose Blumenfield Jr’s choice, accepted the exercise he orchestrated in reference to violent crime in assist of racketeering (VICAR).
Ramirez’s plea, in keeping with the DoJ, exhibits his ordering of the 2023 kidnapping of a sufferer recognized as “Individual 1.”
Prosecutors mentioned two gang associates kidnapped and held the sufferer inside a Riverside clothes retailer for a number of days with out common entry to meals or treatment earlier than she escaped on October 1, 2023.
Each co-defendants, Jose Jonathan Rubalcaba Alarcon, 23, and Gilbert Rey Martinez, 22, later pleaded responsible and obtained federal jail sentences of 46 months and 41 months, respectively.
Featured picture: California Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation
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