Brother of Mafia Informant Killed Years After Testimony and Arrest

The van drove around the block of Boyle Heights, as if looking for someone, when it stopped next to a man on a bicycle.

A gunman pulled a .45 caliber handgun out the passenger side window and shot Eduardo “Eddie Boy” Castro six times.

Castro, 59, had been a member of the Mexican Mafia since the early 1990s, and law enforcement officials and underground sources said there were many possible motives for his killing. He had refused to take sides in the prison-based union's perpetual wars and had sparked resentment among the organization's imprisoned members who pointed out that he himself was rarely locked up.

But there was also his brother Ernesto – perhaps the most damaging witness in the history of the Mexican Mafia, responsible for helping prosecutors convict a dozen of his colleagues in the first racketeering case brought against the organization .

Last week, five years after the assassination of Eduardo Castro, detectives arrested his suspected killer.

Vincent “Spanky” Armendariz, 60, was charged Monday with Castro’s murder. A reputed member of a small East Los Angeles gang called Winter Gardens, Armendariz did not enter a plea during his court appearance Monday. His attorney referred questions to the Los Angeles County Public Defender's Media Office, which did not respond to a request for comment.

As a teenager, Eduardo Castro followed his older brother Ernesto into Varrio Nuevo Estrada, a gang based in the Estrada Courts housing project in Boyle Heights. Built in 1942, the project's two-story buildings are painted with scenes from Mexican and Chicano history. A mural shows two hands holding up the letters “VNE,” with an eagle resting on them with a banner in its beak that reads: “In memory of a homeboy.”

Ernesto, whose nickname was Chuco, was a different man from his brother, said Richard Valdemar, a retired Los Angeles County sheriff's sergeant who eventually convinced him to defect.

“I would say Chuco was more, well, intellectual. Learn more about the ideas of the Mexican Mafia. Chuco's goal was to make money and do business. Eddie was more of a gangster, an enforcer.

In 1993, Ernesto Castro was arrested after police discovered a cache of weapons hidden under his Alhambra home. Tired of the infighting within the Mexican Mafia and reluctant to return to prison, he spent the next two years carrying a microphone.

The resulting case went to trial in 1997. In a scene that mirrored the attempt to silence defector Frank Pentangeli in The Godfather II, Eduardo glared from the front row of the courtroom when his brother came to the witness stand.

Ernesto was upset, Valdemar remembers. “Your brother looks at you, knowing that he is a member of the very organization you are betraying. This sounds a lot like The Godfather.

Unlike the fictional Pentangeli, Ernesto has not changed his mind. He underwent six weeks of cross-examination by lawyers for the defendants, all but one of whom were found guilty.

Ernesto was consumed with guilt over the situation he had left his loved ones in — some of whom renounced him and refused witness protection, Valdemar said. “He was tearing himself away from half his family. He had become what his gang would call a coward and a snitch. It tore him apart.

Valdemar said that under Mexican Mafia code, Eduardo would have been obligated to kill his brother if he ever saw him again or learned of his whereabouts.

“They call it cleaning your own butt,” Valdemar said.

Eduardo would always carry the shame of his brother's betrayal, Max Torvisco, another Varrio Nuevo Estrada member, testified years later. Even though Eduardo never cooperated with the government, “people stayed away from him,” Torvisco said.

In 1998, a year after his brother's testimony, Eduardo found himself in the middle of war. The Mexican Mafia was divided into two factions: a group loyal to Benjamin “Topo” Peters, one of the defendants Ernesto helped convict, and an upstart group that called itself “the majority.”

A member of the “majority”, John “Stranger” Turscak, asked Eduardo in 1998 to help him organize the murder of a Peters loyalist, Mariano “Chuy” Martinez. Eduardo agreed to lure Martinez, another Varrio Nuevo Estrada member, into a meeting — only to double-cross Turscak and inform Martinez of the plot, according to an FBI report reviewed by The Times.

Martinez was looking for his revenge on Easter Sunday. He assembled a team of seven men at Estrada Courts, where he distributed weapons and walkie-talkies before riding in a three-car caravan to the Atwater village home of Turscak's mother, a witness said .

When Turscak walked through the front door, followed by his wife and their 2-month-old baby in his arms, Martinez gave the order via walkie-talkie to kill him, according to the testimony of Torvisco, his right-hand man.

A shooter's weapon jammed. The other fired wildly at Turscak, who ran back inside the house, Torvisco said. Nobody was hit. A year later, Turscak, Martinez and dozens of others from both sides of the war were behind bars for parole violations and racketeering charges — but not Eduardo.

Underworld figures who knew the younger Castro described him as a middle-of-the-road presence who never seemed to cause trouble. According to an associate who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, Castro ate breakfast every morning at Dino's, a hamburger stand on Main Street in Lincoln Heights, passing the hours with a cup of coffee and puzzles from the newspaper. .

In 2009, Eduardo was going through a difficult time. Ralph Rocha, a Mexican Mafia member turned informant, told authorities he had heard that Castro was living in a car.

According to Rocha's statement to authorities, two brothers from the Evergreen gang were shaking down nightclub owners, claiming Eduardo had integrated them into the Mexican Mafia.

Rocha said he asked Eduardo how he was broke when the brothers had amassed a boat, a mansion in San Diego and a racehorse named Down Low. Rocha said Castro dismissed his concerns and refused to help find the brothers.

Rocha told authorities that when he heard a rumor that Ernesto had been spotted in Estrada's courts, he sent an underling to request a meeting with Eduardo. The emissary was shot dead in his car.

“We just took it as him saying, ‘F— you. Come get me,'” Rocha said, according to a recording reviewed by The Times.

Rocha gave Varrio Nuevo Estrada the “green light” – a standing order to attack its members in the streets and in prison – until Eduardo agreed to meet. An informant who saw Rocha give the order told the FBI that he encouraged a crowd of gang members to “shoot practice” on Castro's former crew.

The conflict subsided when Rocha was arrested for extortion. However, in 2015, Eduardo's position within his organization remained precarious.

Some 300 miles from Los Angeles, at Centinela State Prison in the Imperial County desert, an inmate named Sergio Sanchez was selling drugs without paying the usual one-third tax to the Mexican Mafia.

According to testimony before a Los Angeles County grand jury, Sanchez argued that he should not have to pay the tax because he worked for “Eddie Boy.” This sparked a series of calls between inmates using contraband cell phones and associates outside the prison, all of whom were trying to determine Castro's situation.

In a five-person conference call intercepted by authorities through a wiretap, a man loyal to Eduardo angrily said: “Someone was spreading a rumor that they ripped off my buddy E's wings” – that Castro was no longer recognized as a member of the Mexican Mafia.

“Eddie Boy,” he said, was “fed up with it all.”

“He reached out to the Bay” – a reference to the Pelican Bay maximum security prison – “and everywhere he could. And he wants to know who says that.

Many conference calls later, Castro's status was confirmed: “EB is not good,” a man on the streets of Wilmington told a Centinela prisoner.

Two days later, Sánchez – the inmate who had invoked Eduardo's name for protection – was stabbed 16 times by two prisoners, according to testimony. He only survived after being airlifted to a hospital.

In 2016, the younger Castro refused to participate in the assassination of Dominick “Solo” Gonzales, who had angered members of the Mexican Mafia in the California prison system by encroaching on their collection racket activities in the Valley of San Fernando, according to testimony at a recent racketeering trial. .

Eduardo's problems made him an easy target for a smear campaign by rivals who wanted his turf, said Valdemar, the retired sheriff's sergeant who made Ernesto a witness. “They would play politics against Eddie,” Valdemar said, “and it would be very easy because he had all these attacks on him.”

Armendariz, the man accused of killing Castro, has a criminal record dating to 1987 that includes convictions for murder, robbery, selling drugs and possessing guns and ammunition as a felon, according to court records.

Sheriff's deputies suspected Armendariz ran a gambling parlor called casitas on the Eastside, according to a search warrant affidavit reviewed by The Times. He also collected money from smokehouses that sold illegal gaming software under names like RiverSweeps, FireKirin, SkillMine and VegasX, allowing players to play blackjack, poker and pai gow on their phones, wrote one detective in the affidavit.

According to the affidavit, Armendariz collected money from the gambling houses. and smoking rooms to two imprisoned members of the Mexican Mafia.