Mexican Mafia member found dead in California state prison cell
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Set us as preferred Richard Buchanan, a reputed Mexican Mafia from the San Diego area, died in prison Tuesday morning, authorities said.Guards found Buchanan unresponsive in his cell at Kern Valley State Prison, said Terri Hardy, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
The Kern County Coroner’s office will determine his cause of death, Hardy said.Buchanan, 72, had been incarcerated since 2004 for kidnapping a convict who was harassing a corrupt prison guard.
From behind bars, he kept a hand in drug sales, illicit gambling, shakedowns and murder plots in San Diego County, according to court records and law enforcement officials who track the Mexican Mafia.Buchanan grew up in the San Ysidro and Otay Mesa neighborhoods just north of the U.S.-Mexico border, he said in a deposition.
He denied he was affiliated with the Mexican Mafia, but a prison official testified he was deemed a member in 1989.Authorities believed he earned his admission by stabbing an inmate, Manuel Rebeles, in a San Diego County jail in 1987.
California The FBI said six people were arrested Wednesday for allegedly extorting money from a business in Pomona and ordering the shooting of a man who owned a debt to gangsters affiliated with the Mexican Mafia.Rebeles was a former member of the Nuestra Familia, a rival prison gang to the Mexican Mafia.He was lifting weights on the rooftop exercise yard when Buchanan stabbed him three times in the chest, investigators wrote in a report.
Rebeles survived.Prosecutors argued the attack was ordered by two Mexican Mafia members from National City, Ronaldo and Hector Ayala.
Buchanan was not convicted of the attack, but he spent much of the next two decades in prison for robbery, escape and other crimes.Whenever he got out, he didn’t last long on the streets.
In 2004, he was wor...