For a decade after his 1999 federal grand jury racketeering indictment, Los Angeles-based gangster Rolando Ontiveros (AKA “Rolo”) escaped justice for his prolific, murderous career as an international cocaine dealer in the Mexican Mafia.
Law enforcement intelligence placed Ontiveros in Mexico and living as a wealthy businessman.
In 2009, federal agents nabbed the fugitive, longtime leader of the Lott Stoners 13 street gang hiding in a pot-growing house in LA.
Three years later inside the Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse an Orange County jury found him guilty on all 10 charges.
Since February, Ontiveros has been waiting to officially learn his fate.
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This month, U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter in Santa
Ana rendered punishment after listening to a federal prosecutor describe
the defendant's “horrific” conduct and unrepentant attitude.
Once the
39-year-old and onetime Cal State LA business student dies in prison in
this life and returns to serve another full life term, he'll still owe
society another 300 months of incarceration.
According to records reviewed by the Weekly, federal
agents used extensive wiretaps, confidential informants and
surveillance to break Ontiveros' extortion/narcotics/guns/murder
operation that terrorized citizens (and other Mexican Mafia hoodlums)
throughout Southern California in the 1990s.
Ontiveros–who became a natty-dressing, multimillionaire in the underworld–remains in the custody of U.S. marshals inside the Santa Ana Jail, but will soon take his one-way trip to a federal prison.
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CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.