The first sign of trouble for Cudahy City Council candidate Tony Mendoza was a pair of thong panties mailed to 
his wife, with a note telling her to watch her husband’s back. Then came the phone calls — and the death threats.

A political novice in a tiny city of Mexican immigrants that hasn’t had an election since 1999, Mendoza had 
expected dirty tricks.   But to his dismay, the caller, who spoke poor English and called every day for three
days, said Mendoza would be killed if he did not leave Cudahy, a 1.2-square-mile city 10 miles southeast of 
downtown Los Angeles. After the third call, Mendoza pulled out of the March 6 race. “I have my family to 
think about,” he said.

Running for council seats against a slate of incumbents in a city infested with gangs and drugs, Danny 
Cota and Luis Garcia faced similar tactics.
A truck owned by Garcia, a former city employee, was painted with graffiti, and ex-felon and Cudahy 
city employee Gerardo Vallejo sought a restraining order against Garcia for criminal threats. A judge
tossed the complaint, but Garcia’s campaign was rattled.

In late December, at a holiday gathering at the City Club in downtown Los Angeles hosted by Mayor 
Antonio Villaraigosa, Cota ran into Bell Gardens City Councilman Mario Beltran, who was perplexed 
to see Cota, a 29-year-old teacher, hobnobbing and being photographed with Villaraigosa and others.

“Who brought him here?” Councilman Beltran asked onlookers, some of whom are friends of Cudahy’s 
Vice Mayor, Osvaldo Conde, who is running for re-election. “You better watch out,” Beltran warned 
Cota, the bright-eyed challenger. “Conde will take care of you with his cuerno de chivo.”

Though Beltran was smiling as he tossed off some Mexican slang for an AK-47, Cota says he did 
not appreciate such talk. A witness, Maywood Mayor Sergio Calderon, a friend of Cota’s, says, 
“It was a joke, a tasteless joke.”

Cudahy is a strange little city; some say a scary one. In 2003, city leaders fired the L.A. County Sheriff’s 
Department — which had policed Cudahy for 14 years, focusing on gang and drug crime — in favor of a nearby 
municipal police force that recently erupted over public allegations of police brutality and kickbacks to police 
and city officials from a towing company.

In Cudahy, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has seized almost 20 times more cocaine over the past five years 
than in Bell, a bordering city of similar size, and the city suffers more crime per capita than small towns nearby. 
It’s a city with 200 active gang members, where shootings are common though homicide rare — that is, until 11
killings occurred in the wake of the sheriff’s departure in 2003.

Cudahy leaders seem satisfied. Consider the tone-deaf reaction of Cudahy City Manager George Perez in 
early February, after the news broke on KNBC Channel 4 and in La Opinión, a Spanish-language daily, that the
city of Maywood, currently under a $2-million-a-year contract to police Cudahy, was facing a state takeover
because the police department — the Maywood-Cudahy Police Department — is so out of control.

“Police problems in Maywood have nothing to do with us,” said Perez. “Our city council is happy, and our 
citizens are too.”
 

Cudahy resembles a Mexican border town more than it does a Los Angeles      suburb.      Entrenched      gangs and Mexican drug trafficking have trapped       working-class legal and      illegal immigrants in a cycle of      violence and fear, in       a city where less than a quarter of the 28,000 residents are eligible to vote. An       uneducated city council, a deeply troubled police force imported from Maywood      two towns over, and the raw power of the 18th Street Gang — a complex criminal       organization with a knack for setting up business fronts and obscuring underground       drug activity — make Cudahy residents seem like hostages in their own city.           By most accounts, Cudahy City Council members — two retired union managers,       an insurance salesman, a waitress and a grocer — do not run the city as they       were elected to do. Rather, they defer to City Manager Perez, a former janitor       who is known to favor revenue traps such as DUI and driver’s license checkpoints       over aggressive tactics that make gangs and drug dealers less comfortable.

Known as a ruthless political boss, Perez is not running for city council in the upcoming March 6 election, but he 
is deserving of scrutiny. After all, he calls the shots in Cudahy.

Perez shrugs at allegations of foul play on the campaign trail, or any possibility that his minions could be involved. 
“I’ve talked with Mendoza,” he says of death threats that knocked the would-be candidate out of the running.
“He apologized for talking bad about me.”

Since his revolving-door ascent from the council to city manager in 2000, Perez’s salary has risen by $30,000 — 
more than most residents make in a year — to $120,000. Meanwhile, the city’s problems remain dire: poverty, 
density, gangs and drugs. One-third of residents are under 14 — a vulnerable population. Out in front of Cudahy 
City Hall one November day, 16-year-old Erica summed up Cudahy this way: “It’s small, so everything is close 
by.     But it’s ugly, and there are shootings.”

Victor, a 16-year-old honor student who plays varsity football, runs track and holds down a part-time job, 
says, “Some streets are too ghetto. There’s lots of violence. My mother has been going to community 
meetings to ask about this, but it always seems to stay the same.” Victor liked it better where his family 
used to live: Compton, one of L.A.’s notorious trouble spots. “There should be more police here in 
Cudahy.       Kids don’t play outside. People don’t feel safe.”

With its narrow, deep lots — the result of an agricultural past that is long gone — its glut of rundown 
apartment buildings and its lack of economic growth, Cudahy offers a good example of how Mexican 
drug cartels, the prison-based Mexican mafia and gangs like 18th Street are attracted to the Los 
Angeles–adjacent industrial sprawl populated by poor immigrants.

Do these criminal elements influence Cudahy’s leaders, with city officials answering to someone other 
than the public or the rule of law, in a town policed by another town’s troubled police force? 
The answer is unknown.

Neither the DEA nor the FBI has ever established a connection between city officials and business fronts 
in the United States’ $65 billion illegal-drug market. Beyond the street crime, behind the scenes, groups
finance border tunnels and run other drug-trafficking gateways that have helped make Southern 
California the highest-intensity drug-distribution center in the United States.

Who is actually responding to that? Local cities’ law enforcers have their hands full with violent street
crime. Local gang-and drug-task-force police officers who talked to the Weekly on condition of anonymity 
say they are busy with three criminal groups: traffickers, who are not always involved in gangs; the 
Mexican mafia, which can be involved in either gangs or drug cartels; and gangs such as 18th Street, 
which specialize in drug transportation, distribution, money laundering and muscle.

Some cops say they lack confidence in the feds to clean house at the civic level, where drug traffickers 
rely on distribution fronts, money-laundering businesses and tainted law enforcement. “You hear about 
all kinds of scandalous shit,” says a local veteran detective. “But federal agents don’t have the street
knowledge to figure out what’s going on. They rely on us.”

DEA agent Sarah Pullen says drug trafficking “has crept into society” via cash businesses, real estate 
deals and otherwise legitimate civic leaders with interests in both. “Southeast L.A. County has always 
been heavily involved in all levels of drug trafficking,” says Pullen, who pursued Cudahy-based 
targets in six of 12 cases in the past few years.

When asked by the L.A. Weekly why Cudahy has shown up so frequently in eye-popping drug busts 
from the 1980s to the present — sometimes with as much as 500 pounds of cocaine seized at a 
time — Pullen says her agency doesn’t track drug seizures by city. It tracks drug organizations, 
which aren’t confined by borders.

But after doing some research, Pullen was able to determine that from 2002 to 2007, the DEA 
seized 27.5 pounds of cocaine from the city of Bell, Cudahy’s neighbor directly to the north. 
In comparison, during that same time period, the agency seized 486 pounds of cocaine in 
Cudahy — more than 17 times the amount seized in Bell.

Mostly, Pullen says, gangs and traffickers go where they feel most comfortable. She cautions, “Once 
it gets past drugs and money, we turn it over to the FBI. We don’t have the tools to connect all the dots.” 
For its part, the FBI will not confirm public-corruption probes, much less whether any such probes involve 
drug trafficking or money laundering. When asked, FBI agent Laura Eimiller snaps, “I can’t talk about 
that. It could compromise ongoing investigations.”