The Gangster Matriarch of L.A.

by Christine Pelisek Info

Christine Pelisek is a reporter at the LA Weekly, where she has been covering crime for the last five years. In 2008, she won three Los Angeles Press Club awards, one for her investigative story on the Grim Sleeper.

Maria ‘Chata’ Leon Maria 'Chata' Leon, mother of 13 kids, ruled over a criminal empire with connections to a human smuggling ring. The Daily Beast’s new L.A.-based crime reporter, Christine Pelisek, who won three Los Angeles Press Club awards, one for her investigative story on the Grim Sleeper, investigates the case.

Five days after a wild gun battle in Los Angeles that sent school children streaming out of their classrooms, and left a gang member dead in the street, the phone rang at the home of Eduardo Alvarez-Marquez.

The reputed mastermind behind a human smuggling ring, Alvarez-Marquez had brought many unlikely deliveries across the Mexican border, including a three-month-old baby and a truckload of Chinese workers hidden in a freezer truck.

Maria Leon sat like the queen spider in a web spun across the border from north to south—head of a massive criminal enterprise of drug-dealing and murder.

This call, however, was for a "special job."

Maria "Chata" Leon, the then-44-year-old mother of 13 children, and the much-feared head of a drug-dealing dynasty, was stuck in the border town of Mexicali. It was one of her children, Danny "Clever" Leon, who, wielding an AK-47, had died in the 2008 shoot-out with police, and now she wanted to attend his funeral in the United States.

Eventually, she would get her way—paying respect to her son at the cemetery where Michael Jackson and Walt Disney are also buried—right in front of LAPD gang officers. As politicians on all sides of the political spectrum argue about illegal immigration, an ongoing federal case in Los Angeles, prompted by an earlier investigation into the Leon family's criminal activities, shows the extent to which some gang members and human smugglers in Southern California have established a parallel—and largely invisible—reality, shifting like shadows across the Mexican border, eluding capture for crimes committed on both sides.

In this world, law enforcement officials say, gang members collaborate closely with human smugglers, and those smuggled across the border, sometimes end up on the streets, trying to pay off their debts to these coyotes by dealing drugs.

Before she got stuck in Mexicali, Maria Leon sat like the queen spider in a web spun across the border from north to south—head of a massive criminal enterprise of drug-dealing and murder, some of it backed by the militant revolutionary group known as the Mexican Mafia, according to investigators.

Eduardo Alvarez Marquez (AP Photo) For decades, the Los Angeles Police Department sought to dismantle the power of the gangland matriarch, and her extended family but, ensconced in a heavily fortified house on Drew Street in northeastern L.A., in a notorious, gang-infested neighborhood filled with mostly single-family homes and gang-controlled apartments, the gang seemed almost impossible to dislodge.

When officers finally raided the Drew Street compound, they discovered a shrine to the patron saint of narco trafficking, Jesus Malverde as well as surveillance cameras and an extensive weapons stash that included a Tech 9 machine gun, a Smith Corona Rifle, a bag of explosive devices, and a “Muscle Manâ€