Jose Landa-Rodriguez, Alleged Mexican Mafia Member, Pleads No Contest
To hear prosecutors tell it, Jose Landa-Rodriguez was public enemy No.1.
A reputed Mexican Mafia member called “Fox,” Landa-Rodriguez was charged in three cases between 2011 and 2018. The allegations included a murder plot, overseeing rackets in the Los Angeles County jails and pursuing an alliance between his U.S. prison gang and a drug cartel from his home state of Michoacán.
For the record:
2025/09/27 06:56 a.m.The original version of this story misstated Landa-Rodriguez’s sentence. He will serve two more years in prison, not seven.
Landa-Rodriguez, 60, was acquitted in one federal case. But still facing life on state charges, he struck a plea deal that will see him deported back to Mexico after serving two more years in prison.
On Thursday, Landa-rodriguez pleaded no contest in Los Angeles County superior Court to making criminal threats and was sentenced to time served, his lawyer Nicholas Rosenberg said.
L.A.County prosecutors had charged that Landa-Rodriguez, while incarcerated in a federal penitentiary for illegally reentering the country, sanctioned the killing of a rival’s underling.
According to trial testimony, Landa-Rodriguez was locked in a power struggle with another reputed Mexican Mafia member, Arthur “Turi” Estrada, over who would collect money from drug sales on California prison yards.
Landa-Rodriguez used coded language in an email to order a hit on an Estrada underling, prosecutors alleged. “Do not let him get into our backyards,” he wrote, according to prosecutors.
Federal authorities alleged landa-Rodriguez set his sights on a racket far more lucrative than prison drug deals. In 2013, he was accused of trying to establish a methamphetamine pipeline with a cartel from his home state in western Mexico, La Familia Michoacana.
According to recorded phone calls, La Familia’s leaders feared extradition and wanted the Mexican Mafia to protect them if they ended up in U.S. prisons. In exchange, the cartel promised a bottomless supply of cheap drugs that the Mexican Mafia could sell on American streets.
Landa-Rodriguez was discussing the deal with a cartel representative in recorded prison calls when another Mexican