How the Mexican Mafia’s 'Pomona Mike' made L.A.’s federal jail his fiefdom

In Pomona, Michael Lerma is a “mythical” figure, his attorney says.

Lerma, 68, hasn’t walked the streets of his hometown on the eastern edge of Los Angeles County since the 1980s, when he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. But according to federal prosecutors, he controls an “empire” of gang members and drug dealers who pay him a cut of their illicit profits.

Pomona was once a haven for millionaires called “Queen of the Citrus Belt.” Today, the lemon and orange groves are gone. Warring gangs with names like Pomona Sur, Happytown, Ghetto Family, Cherryville and 12th Street have carved up its streets, killing each other over territory and old grudges.

But they all answered to Lerma, whose power “transcends rivalries,” Kyle Kahan, an assistant U.S. attorney, said in his closing argument at Lerma’s recent trial in downtown Los Angeles, where he was convicted along with three other Pomona gang members of murder and racketeering.

In Pomona and the prisons where he has spent the last 43 years of his life, Lerma has “the power to decide life or death or just plain old pain,” Kahan said.

Prosecutors alleged that Lerma — a squat man with a bald head, walrus mustache and deep bags under his eyes — is part of the Mexican Mafia, a criminal syndicate based in California’s prison system. From lockups near the Oregon border and later in downtown Los Angeles, Lerma oversaw acts of robbery, kidnapping, drug sales and extortion, an indictment charged.

Lerma’s attorney, Marri Derby, said prosecutors were perpetuating whispers in Pomona of a faraway prisoner who “owns and runs” the city. “They’ve had since 2012 to get evidence of this evil genius Michael Lerma — and there’s nothing,” she said.

Pomona wasn’t Lerma’s only fiefdom, prosecutors say. In 2018, they charged, Lerma seized control of the drug trade within a federal jail. A witness testified Lerma called the shots for Latino inmates in the Metropolitan Detention Center, dictating exercise routines, cleaning regimens — even which prisoners were allowed to hold jobs.

“Anything that happened went through him,” the witness said. “He had everything under control.”

When an inmate ran up a heroin debt that he couldn’t pay, prosecutors charged, Lerma ordered three Pomona gang members to murder him.

“If Michael Lerma wills it,” Kahan told the jury, “you will die.”

The Marine Corps, heroin and murder

Named after the Roman goddess of fruit, Pomona grew rich from the citrus groves that flourished in the Southern California sun. Among its early residents was Louis Phillips, described by The Times as the richest man in Los Angeles County in 1892. The cereal magnate W.K. Kellogg once raised Arabian horses on a 377-acre ranch that today is a campus of California State Polytechnic University.

By the time Lerma was born in 1956, Pomona was working-class. Citrus groves were replaced by cheap homes that drew families from Los Angeles. Local aerospace plants provided good jobs, but the city was no longer a refuge for millionaires.

Michael Lerma, shown in a 2018 photograph by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, has been imprisoned since 1981.

(California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation)

At a parole hearing in 2009, Lerma said he and his six siblings were raised by his mother and grandmother after his father — a heroin dealer — abandoned the family.

He wasn’t yet a teenager when he joined the 12th Street gang, he told the parole board. Before he finished high school, Lerma was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder. Released after three days in jail without being charged, Lerma enlisted in the Marine Corps.

“That year in the Marine Corps was probably the best year of my life,” Lerma told the board. He learned about discipline and “chain of command,” he said. He foresaw a “promising career.”

But one night, Lerma returned to Pomona and went cruising with his younger brother, Ruben. They drove into the turf of a rival gang, the Chino Sinners, and killed a 21-year-old man with a shotgun. Both brothers pleaded guilty to second-degree murder.

Granted parole after less than four years, Michael Lerma and his wife moved to Sacramento. He had two children to support and couldn’t find a good job, he said at the 2009 parole hearing. He’d heard in prison about the “fast, easy money” to be made by selling drugs, he said, and reconnected with his father, who taught him the trade.

One of Lerma’s customers, Randall Craig Keastner, robbed him at gunpoint of heroin and a power tool, a parole commissioner said. Two weeks later, Keastner was sitting in his car outside a 7-Eleven in Sacramento when gunmen in a Chevrolet Monte Carlo pulled up and shot him to death.

Prosecutors charged the Lerma brothers with the murder. Michael Lerma told the parole board he struck a plea deal that sent him to prison for life but let his younger brother walk free. His brother died 12 years later, Lerma told the board.

‘Things have a way of working out in time’

In 2004, Lerma got a troubling letter from his goddaughter. Two men — “Danny Boy” and “Franky B” — were “threatening our family,” she wrote.

Frank Buelna was a member of the Mexican Mafia and extorting gang members and drug dealers in Pomona at the time of his death in 2007.

(Los Angeles County Superior Court)

According to a police report, authorities suspected she was talking about Frank Buelna, a Mexican Mafia member who was shaking down drug dealers in Pomona with his right-hand man, Daniel Prendiz.

In a letter reviewed by The Times, Lerma assured his goddaughter: “As for those a—holes, not to worry. Things have a way of working out in time.”

A year later, authorities had tapped the phones of leaders of 12th Street, Lerma’s old gang, when they overheard talk of killing Buelna. They arrested four suspects before the plot was carried out.

Three were convicted of conspiring to murder Buelna. The fourth — Darryl Castrejon, a reputed Mexican Mafia member from Ontario — posted $1-million bail and vanished, never to be seen again. Lerma was not charged in the conspiracy.

One night in 2007, Buelna went to his usual Pomona watering hole, Characters Sports Bar, and was shot to death along with a friend. Their homicides remain unsolved.

‘We’re his eyes, we’re his ears’

Lerma spent 26 years in solitary confinement at Pelican Bay, a maximum-security prison near the Oregon border. With him locked up and incommunicado, an FBI agent testified that the task of collecting “taxes” from Pomona’s gangs fell to a woman named Cheryl Perez.

Lerma told the parole board he’d known Perez, the sister of his first wife, since he was 17. Authorities said Perez acted as Lerma’s mouthpiece and handled his money, although she didn’t seem to be kicking up much.

Financial records showed Perez and her daughter deposited $570 over a three-year period into an account Lerma used to buy commissary items in prison.

“There’s zero evidence of the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Michael Lerma should have allegedly been getting from drug dealers and extortions,” his lawyer said.

Concertina wire and a guard tower are seen at Pelican Bay State Prison near Crescent City in 2011.

(Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press)

One of Perez’s associates was Seferino “Spooky” Gonzalez, who called her often in 2013 using the recorded jail phones at the North County Correctional Facility in Castaic. According to recorded calls played in court, he told his girlfriend he was desperate to make bail so he could make enough money to repay a debt he owed Perez.

“If I’m not bailed out,” he said in one call, “then I’m going to end up dead in this b—.”

FBI agent Joseph Talamantez testified that Gonzalez tried to extort money from dealers selling at a place called “The Compound.” A vacant lot filled with junked cars, its operators charged people $25 a day to sell drugs, get high or sleep in the cars, Talamantez said.

“They’re selling a hell of a lot of s— there,” Gonzalez told his brother, Jose “Swifty” Valencia Gonzalez, in a recorded call. “They’re all nothing but drug addicts.”

Seferino Gonzalez also offered Perez a Mercedes Benz sport utility vehicle that he said a fellow inmate had “donated” to him.

“That car is yours, girl,” he told Perez in a recorded call. “And I’m still going to give you what I owe.”

But when Perez showed up with Gonzalez’s brother to collect the SUV, a man tried to stop them.

“It gots to poppin’,” she told Gonzalez. “Let’s just put it that way, OK?”

Perez passed the phone to Gonzalez’s brother, who said: “I shot his a—.”

Talamantez testified the victim survived being shot in the leg. Perez and Gonzalez pleaded guilty to racketeering and firearms charges and were sentenced to 12 and 13 years in prison, respectively.

Valencia Gonzalez’s attorney, Daniel Nardoni, said his client’s crime was a “personal” one and not “committed for the Mexican Mafia or Michael Lerma.”

But Gonzalez was heard on a recorded call describing to Perez their work for the Pomona godfather: “We’re his eyes, we’re his ears. We’re everywhere and everything.”

‘Let him rest’

In 2018, Lerma was brought to the Metropolitan Detention Center to face racketeering charges.

He and his co-defendants were held in a wing of the jail called Six North that looked more like a college dormitory than a cell block, according to photographs shown in court. Cells had wooden doors with windows, not bars. Inmates decorated their walls with posters of scantily clad women.

Among the other detainees was Jose Martinez, who testified he collected “taxes” from Pomona drug dealers before being indicted with Lerma.

Restraints hanging from a bar over a bench at a prisoner holding area inside the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles in 2011.

(Los Angeles Times)

Martinez, who pleaded guilty to racketeering, drug trafficking and gun crimes and is serving a 13-year term, said Lerma set the tone for Latino inmates at Six North.

They were expected to wake up early, work out and “keep the house clean,” he testified. Inmates who didn’t follow “the program” were beaten or stabbed, he testified.

During the pandemic, Martinez said, Lerma and his associates secured coveted orderly jobs that allowed them to roam the jail to clean and deliver food while others were locked down, let out of their cells for just 15 minutes a day.

According to Martinez, Lerma controlled the trade of meth, heroin and synthetic cannabis called “spice” within Six North. The markups were substantial: A gram of meth that cost $20 on the street cost up to $250 inside the jail, Martinez testified. A $25 gram of heroin sold for $200.

Inmates who couldn’t cover their debts were stabbed, Martinez testified.

Martinez said he was $300 in debt when two inmates grabbed him and brought him to a cell where Lerma and Valencia Gonzalez were waiting.

The two prisoners held his arms as Valencia Gonzalez stabbed him 12 times, Martinez testified.

Lerma didn’t allow inmates to get medical treatment after being stabbed because it would draw attention from the guards, Martinez said. He smeared coffee grounds into his wounds and stayed for two days in the cell that he shared with Steve Bencom, a member of the King Kobras gang called “Risky.”

Bencom, addicted to heroin, had run up a $4,500 debt to Lerma, Martinez said. The afternoon of June 28, 2020, Bencom used his 15 minutes out of the cell to work the phone, trying to reach someone who could pay his debt, Martinez testified.

Martinez testified he saw Bencom hang up the phone and get pushed into their cell by Juan “Squeaks” Sanchez, a Pomona gang member housed with Lerma. Valencia Gonzalez and his third brother, Carlos “Popeye” Gonzalez, followed them inside, according to Martinez.

As he returned to his cell, Martinez said he passed Lerma, who told him: “Your celly’s a little bit tired. Go ahead and let him rest.”

Martinez said he found Bencom unresponsive on the bottom bunk in their cell. The Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner determined Bencom was strangled and stabbed in the heart and eye.

Martinez testified Valencia Gonzalez came to his door and told him: “Keep your mouth shut.”

According to Martinez, guards did not require him — or Bencom — to stand for two routine counts that evening. He was forced to remain in the cell overnight until Bencom’s body began to bloat, he said.

“I was hysterical,” he recalled. “I had to sleep the whole night with a dead body. My friend. It’s not normal to sleep with a dead body.”

When correctional officers let out Martinez the next morning to take a shower, he told them his cellmate was “man down.” A guard walked in the cell. “He came out screaming,” Martinez recalled.

Defense attorneys argued it was Martinez who killed Bencom in a drug-induced rage. “He’s a sophisticated, manipulative junkie,” Carlos Gonzalez’s attorney, Richard Novak, said of Martinez, “and you can’t believe a word he says.”

There was no DNA or fingerprint evidence tying the defendants to Bencom’s homicide. And defense lawyers pointed to the records of correctional officers who attested, in routine counts, that Bencom was alive on the day that Martinez said he was killed.

Kahan, the prosecutor, said this was because the guards at the Metropolitan Detention Center kept poor records and didn’t follow their own protocols.

The trial has “blown the lid off the worst-kept secret” in the Metropolitan Detention Center, Kahan said. “The Mexican Mafia rules it. Not the guards. Not the Bureau of Prisons.”