A gang leader who orchestrated the murders of at least eight rivals, informants and his own gang has been stabbed to death in prison.
Ezequiel “Wicked” Romo ran the Blythe Street gang in Panorama City, northwest of Los Angeles, with an iron fist despite having served all but a year in prison during his reign.
Punishment for the smallest infraction, such as an unauthorized tattoo, could cost him an entire magazine of bullets as he sought to purge the gang of ‘dirty compatriots’.
“All I ask for is full control of Panorama City,” he wrote in a WhatsApp message from prison to one of his henchmen in 2017.
Romo, 47, will not order any more killings from prison after three inmates stabbed him to death at Centinela State Prison around 8 p.m. Sunday.
Ezequiel “Wicked” Romo ruled the Blythe Street gang in Panorama City, northwest of Los Angeles, with an iron fist despite serving all but a year of his reign in prison.
The killers were so ferocious that they did not stop stabbing him until guards pepper-sprayed them four times, authorities said.
Cristian Moreno, Johnny Garcia and Christian Hernandez allegedly attacked him in the dayroom of the 3,000-man jail in the Imperial County desert.
Bleeding to death on the prison floor was a fitting end for Romo after he was jailed for life without parole last year for murder, attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
The bodies began turning up in 2015, just months after Romo was released from prison in late 2014 following an 18-year sentence behind bars.
Romo had been in prison since he was just 18 in 1995 and got into a fight with fellow teenager Manuel Avila at Tommy’s Burger Stand on Roscoe Boulevard.
Ávila, 19, punched him in the face and Romo responded by shooting and killing him in front of the shocked diners.
He was jailed for 10 years and had more years added for assaults behind bars, eventually emerging a hardened crime boss on a mission.
Romo looked very different when he was arrested in 2015 for driving with a bag of methamphetamine.
Romo had made some new friends in prison, associates in the Mexican Mafia, which essentially ran the California prison system.
His plan was to prove himself worthy of membership in the syndicate by transforming the Blythe Street Gang into a feared gang.
He knew he needed to run the company with great rigor and set out to get rid of informants, addicts and dissidents, witnesses said during the trial.
“His job was to do good things for these people, do them favors, take care of people in the county jail,” one witness told the court, the LA Times reported last year.
“It sounded good, but then there was a lot of violence.”
Romo’s first murder, and the only one he organized in the open, was only to earn a few thousand dollars.
He purchased a kilogram of cocaine from drug supplier Felipe Delgado and promised to pay him later, but instead hatched a plan to simply kill him.
He first spread rumors that Delgado was talking to police, then lured him to the back of a building and eventually paid him off.
‘(Romo) wanted to kill him because he was supposedly a scrounger, but at the same time he had taken a kilo of cocaine. And he had kept that money. He had no intention of paying,’ said a witness at his trial.
Romo was wearing an ankle monitor, so he walked to the other side of the building while Delgado was shot three times in the back.
Romo was wearing an ankle monitor, so he walked around the other side of this building while a drug dealer was shot three times in the back.
After getting away with that murder, Romo managed to get himself arrested for something much more mundane two months later: driving with a bag of methamphetamine.
He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four years in prison, but this turned out to be a mere inconvenience.
Romo’s plan continued through WhatsApp messages to overworked middle managers from a contraband phone in Centinela.
Next to be shot dead was Isidro ‘Topo’ Alba, 38, after a series of confrontations with Romo, when he was lured into a fake drug transaction on August 27, 2017.
“Do you think this is a trap?” he asked his girlfriend, sitting next to him in the car when he arrived at the ambush site.
“Hurry up, dammit,” he testified he told her as he handed her the drugs.
Gang members Juan “Flaco” Ramírez and Yordin “Little Goofy” Enere riddled him with bullets almost immediately after opening the door.
His girlfriend was virtually unharmed and tried to lower the flag to a passing car to call for help, only to realize it was the killers.
Somehow, her aim was bad enough that she survived by diving back into the car, lying down, and playing dead.
The next to be shot dead was Isidro ‘Topo’ Alba, 38, after a series of confrontations with Romo, when he was tricked into a fake drug deal and shot in his car.
Romo’s right-hand man was Oscar Molina, the beleaguered, micromanaged lackey who did most of the dirty work from the outside.
He extorted marijuana dispensaries, bought drugs in Mexico and smuggled them to Los Angeles and elsewhere, charged protection money and bought guns at gun shows using fake IDs.
All the while, Romo was constantly on top of him and got angry if he took too long to respond to messages.
“Some people say I get too involved,” Romo admitted in one exchange.
Molina was careful to stay on his boss’s good side, showering him with praise in glowing messages.
“Don’t let anything change you Bee. You’re one of the few I consider a good friend and a good partner so with that being said know that your boy will always be loyal and will always have your back as long as I’m around,” she wrote in one of them.
Romo replied: ‘Thank you for your words. They are a gift I accept more than money or shiny objects.’
So when Romo told Molina to ‘take care’ of a 21-year-old wannabe gangster named Carlos Rios, he didn’t hesitate.
Rios was marked for death because he tattooed a huge letter B on his left cheek without being a full member of the gang.
“No one can have a ‘B’ on their face without earning it. This is not a game,” the court heard Romo say.
Carlos Ríos, 21, was killed because he tattooed a huge letter B on his left cheek without being a full member of the gang.
Molina arranged for Ríos to be shot in the back while he was painting graffiti in rival territory, and even finished off the boy after two shooters emptied their magazines into his body without managing to kill him.
Later in 2017, three more murders occurred: members of the rival Columbus gang were shot dead in the streets on Romo’s orders.
“Everything went perfectly once again. And Smiley was one of them,” Molina wrote to Romo to tell him the good news.
But Molina’s relationship with his boss began to fray and he increasingly used “Halloween candy” to suit Romo’s taste.
After missing messages and calls one too many times while high, Romo decided he needed a better number two.
He told the rest of the gang that Molina owed money to the wrong people, that he had been caught lying, and that he was “too, too high.”
Molina was shot dead when he opened the door to his close friend Eder Mendoza at 4 a.m. on Feb. 10, 2018, before he could pull out the revolver he was carrying on his belt.
Karen Tobar, 23, was killed because Romo believed she was talking to police about Molina’s murder.
Two men picked her up in an unlicensed bandit taxi and the next day they saw her abandoned in a park, stabbed 60 times.
He told a woman he was with that night, Karen Tobar, 23, that he would be right back when her friend came knocking on his door, and 12 days later it was her turn.
Romo ordered Tobar’s death, the last known blow of his reign of terror, because he believed she was talking to police about Molina’s murder.
Two men picked her up in an unlicensed bandit taxi and the next day they saw her abandoned in a park, stabbed 60 times.
After years of cultivating informants, prosecutors charged Romo with eight murders and a long list of other crimes, and a jury easily convicted him.
“Why would you kill your own gang members?” Deputy District Attorney Eric Siddall asked the jury in his closing argument.
“Because in Romo’s world, if you don’t fit the mold, if you don’t do what he wants, they kill you.”
On Sunday it was Romo’s turn.
