John "Boxer" Mendoza is a former high-ranking member of the Nuestra Familia. He was part of the organization from 1994 to 2007 and was incarcerated at various California prisons, such as San Quentin, Pelican Bay, and Corcoran. He was a member of the Nuestra Raza before rising to the rank of commander in the Nuestra Familia. Nowadays, he has a YouTube channel called Paradigm Media News, where he does interviews with other former gang members and talks about life since leaving prison. He is the author of "Nuestra Familia."
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00:00 My name's John Mendoza.
00:01 I was a former member of the Nuestra Familia Prison Gang.
00:04 I was a regimental commander in San Quentin,
00:07 and this is how crime works.
00:09 You got Death Row over there.
00:14 You got a main line, you got a reception center.
00:16 It's a pretty old prison.
00:18 I was there during the 1989, the earthquake.
00:21 It's old, I thought that place was coming down.
00:23 I thought for sure that it was gonna crumble.
00:27 [motor whirring]
00:30 The first time I went to prison,
00:33 San Quentin was the reception center.
00:35 So I remember driving in, 18 years old,
00:38 and on that bus, they call it the Gray Goose,
00:41 driving in real slow and just sizing everybody up.
00:45 I seen a lot of guys on the field,
00:46 out there playing soccer, baseball, things like that.
00:50 At that time, they also had a weight pile.
00:52 Seeing all these guys out there,
00:54 I know it sounds kind of crazy,
00:55 but I was like, "This doesn't look that bad."
00:57 You know, the streets kind of hardened me at 18,
01:00 and all it took for me to really, to feel comfortable
01:04 after getting there is when I got off the bus,
01:06 a couple of my homies were on the weight pile.
01:08 I remember they called, "Hey B, what's up, boy?"
01:10 And I looked over and I seen 'em,
01:13 and that's all it took was for me to see somebody
01:16 that I knew, and it was like, I was right at home.
01:18 I was like, "Man, this ain't that bad, man.
01:20 "It's kind of cool."
01:21 And it's crazy, you know?
01:23 There's a lot of guys that look at prison
01:25 as being an accomplishment, like I finally made it,
01:28 because you get that credibility under your belt.
01:30 It wasn't like that for me, you know?
01:32 In 1994, I was approached by two high-ranking NF members,
01:36 Smiley from Salinas and Mike Eel from Salinas.
01:40 They put you on a 90-day probationary period.
01:43 You go through an indoctrination process
01:45 where you learn some of their concepts, their bylaws.
01:48 You have a sponsor,
01:50 and you have the guy that actually pulls you.
01:52 They're responsible for you.
01:54 When your membership is sanctioned,
01:57 there's no big ceremony.
01:59 They'll get together with you,
02:01 maybe in a group setting out there on the yard.
02:03 They'll say something like,
02:05 "Today, we're welcoming the brother boxer in."
02:08 Me, I was right there in San Quentin on the yard,
02:10 and it was done similar.
02:12 "Hey, this brother's a carnal now.
02:14 "You know he's a familiano from this point on.
02:16 "He's a member of the mob.
02:17 "That's how we get introduced
02:19 "to the rest of the Norteños."
02:20 It's pretty big amongst them, 'cause they're like,
02:22 "Damn, he made it."
02:24 [drilling]
02:26 The NF is built, it's constructed or built
02:33 under a paramilitary structure.
02:36 A lot of the old NF members came from the Marines.
02:39 They're ex-Marines.
02:41 I was a regimental commander in San Quentin.
02:43 A day for me will, it depends.
02:46 San Quentin is the worst place to be
02:48 as far as being a leader.
02:51 You're running H unit, and North block, West block.
02:54 So you're getting daily filters or weekly filters
02:58 from all these different blocks.
03:00 I would have to sit there and answer some investigations.
03:04 When a new arrival will come in,
03:06 we'll get his information, we'll get all his vitals.
03:09 We'll get his name, his CDC number.
03:12 We'll get a little bit about his history.
03:13 We'll get things like his AKA, his age,
03:16 his neighborhood, what they called him.
03:19 We'll look on the BNL to make sure he's not on the BNL.
03:22 The bad news list, I'll send a filter out
03:24 to all the members that are in that household.
03:27 And I'll ask everybody,
03:28 have you done time with this individual?
03:30 This guy just drove up.
03:32 Do you know him?
03:32 Any good or bad information, that'll get filtered out.
03:35 If nothing comes back, we'll embrace him.
03:38 He'll be given a care package.
03:40 Soap, shampoo, coffee, toothpaste, things like that.
03:43 [drilling]
03:47 [clicking]
03:50 Let's say somebody came on the tier,
03:51 I was on the tier in the ad seg or something,
03:54 and he was like six cells down.
03:56 I'd make verbal contact with him.
03:58 I'd yell down there, "Hey, homie, that just came in.
04:00 "Hey, once you get situated, go ahead and make a line
04:03 "so that I can get at you."
04:06 Making a line is where you take the elastic from your boxers
04:10 or from the strands from your sheet.
04:12 You'll make a line and you'll tie them together
04:15 so that you can put a weight at the end of it,
04:18 and then you'll throw it down the tier.
04:20 It's just like a way to get back and forth to the cells.
04:23 So he'll tie the kite on there and I'll pull it in
04:25 and I'll read it and then I'll respond to it
04:28 and he'll pull it back.
04:29 Covert communications, there's a language
04:33 that we use in there, it's called Nahuatl.
04:35 It's an Aztec language and there's different dialects,
04:37 but we use it so that if we're on a tier
04:40 and we need to communicate and there's other officers,
04:44 there's officers on the tier, we can talk on the tier
04:47 in front of them and they're not gonna know what we say.
04:49 There's very few people that know the whole actual,
04:52 the whole language, they'll just know certain words
04:55 like weapon, drugs, CO, hit, green light, things like that.
05:00 The biggest thing in prison, county jails,
05:04 the biggest, the currency in there is soups.
05:07 Everybody loves soups, top ramen.
05:10 That's like a prison or jail currency right there.
05:13 But you know, obviously then you got weed, tobacco,
05:16 then the hardcore drugs and things like that.
05:18 White lightning, you know, like a cup of that,
05:20 it can go for like $50, but you're talking about
05:23 like a cup of something that's like vodka.
05:25 The main rivals for the NF are the Mexican Mafia,
05:35 they're following the Surreños,
05:37 and then you have the Aryan Brotherhood
05:39 and they're following the whites.
05:41 But on the main line, it's mixed.
05:43 Everybody's mixed out there, the Norteños, the Surreños,
05:47 the blacks, everybody's mixed.
05:49 If you're talking about in an ad-seg type of environment,
05:53 a shoe program, everybody's kind of segregated.
05:56 Since like '68 is when the NF first came into inception.
06:01 From that time on, that's when they took a stand
06:04 against the Mexican Mafia in South Block, San Quentin.
06:08 This is basically when the NF banded together,
06:11 decided that they weren't gonna be abused
06:13 by the Mexican Mafia anymore.
06:14 And from that point on, that's when the war started.
06:17 So for almost the next five decades,
06:21 that war was in effect.
06:23 There's a lot of different places out there on the yards
06:25 to bury weapons, inside the buildings,
06:27 up on the, like in the little rafters.
06:30 I can make a stabbing instrument out of 15 pieces of paper.
06:33 It's all about how you roll it
06:34 and then how you put the point on.
06:36 I was in San Quentin when Character got killed,
06:39 Jimmy Palma, he was one of the ones that was involved
06:42 in that, I believe it's the Maxim Street murders.
06:46 The media was, they made the Mexican Mafia look bad.
06:48 You know, as a result of that, Jimmy Palma,
06:50 when he came in there, he got the death penalty.
06:52 I was in the adjustment center when they killed him.
06:55 Yeah, that's one incident.
06:56 You know, there was another incident that I was,
06:58 as a leader, where I put a green light
07:00 on all the whites from Coco County
07:03 because they jumped on a North Daniel
07:07 in one of the ad say, one of the ad say yards
07:09 and we had an agreement that that wouldn't happen
07:13 and they violated that agreement.
07:15 70 white guys got hit, their shot callers,
07:18 their leaders, you know, got at me and were like,
07:20 "Come on, bro, call that off, man.
07:22 "There's dudes that are not even involved."
07:25 I ended up rescinding that green light,
07:27 but it went on for two weeks
07:29 and it was a pretty major incident that happened over there.
07:32 I wasn't that type of guy that let power get to my head.
07:36 I would actually try to help somebody
07:37 faster than to try to end their career
07:39 or to try to hit 'em.
07:40 When somebody would end up getting in trouble or something,
07:43 I would thoroughly investigate it
07:44 before I would go as far as putting a green light on 'em.
07:48 Yeah, there is a lot of power that comes with it, though.
07:51 You know, to be the one to hold court
07:54 and make a determination on somebody's career, that's huge.
07:59 [machinery whirring]
08:02 Corruption, it's rampant in the county jails.
08:09 I mean, you see a lot of relationships that happen
08:12 where female officers are getting into relationships
08:16 with inmates.
08:17 The next thing you know, they're bringing in drugs.
08:19 They're not getting that kind of stuff into the visiting.
08:22 They're getting it through corrupt COs.
08:24 In prison, one of the things that is a huge problem
08:28 are the cell phones that are coming in.
08:29 But it's a huge business for COs.
08:31 They can make anywhere from $1,000 to 4,000
08:36 bringing in a phone, a cell phone.
08:38 Sometimes if they see us cleaning house
08:41 or just hitting one of ours,
08:42 they might go in there and really try to break it up
08:44 because they don't really have a vested interest in it.
08:46 But if it's somebody that they know
08:48 that is disrespectful to them, too,
08:51 I've seen 'em drag somebody out there
08:53 and literally physically push 'em into the yard
08:57 to get dealt with.
08:58 [laughs]
08:59 You know, so it just depends.
09:01 I think corruption is always gonna exist on some level.
09:04 I think a lot of it is the lack of training.
09:07 I think if they start policing their own
09:10 and start telling, "Hey, you wanna be
09:12 "on the five o'clock news tonight?"
09:13 [train whistling]
09:16 The truce actually started back in the SHU program
09:23 in Pelican Bay, the end of hostilities, their agreement.
09:26 Again, the whole purpose of it was,
09:29 for a lot of these guys that had been in the SHU program
09:31 for, some of 'em, three decades,
09:34 it was to get back out to the mainlines
09:36 and to basically show CDC that they could, you know,
09:40 live on the same yard without killing each other.
09:43 This lasted.
09:44 I mean, honestly, I never thought in my lifetime
09:47 that I would ever see the day when Norteños and Surreños
09:51 would be out there on the same yards
09:53 playing basketball with each other,
09:55 walking laps with each other,
09:57 and even going further than that,
09:59 even sometimes going out to the streets and networking.
10:03 But at the same time, there was a lot of house cleaning.
10:06 Guys that had issues, internal issues,
10:10 within their respective gang were getting dealt with.
10:12 Whether it was over misconduct,
10:15 something came up in their past or something like that,
10:17 there was a lot of house cleaning.
10:19 And then there was a lot of guys that didn't agree
10:21 with the peace treaty.
10:22 They felt like, "You know what?
10:24 "I didn't sign up for this.
10:25 "Man, you know, what are we doing?
10:28 "What about all the brothers
10:29 "that have spilled blood in the past?"
10:32 I think the violence is worse.
10:34 They would rather eat their own right now,
10:37 stab some of their own people.
10:39 I mean, it's crazy.
10:40 The politics that are going on right now,
10:42 everything's going backwards.
10:44 California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
10:47 I don't see none of the rehabilitation programs
10:50 that they're talking about.
10:51 They might have a couple programs here and there,
10:53 but really rehabilitating anybody.
10:56 You know, I talk to a lot of people that do time.
10:59 Right now, they're coming out with the same types of habits
11:03 that they went in with, if not worse.
11:05 Prison is just a, it's like a university for criminals.
11:08 I don't know what they're using that money for.
11:11 Maybe to open up a classroom or something,
11:14 and guys come in and get their GED.
11:16 It's good they're talking about it,
11:17 but really implementing it and it coming to fruition,
11:21 I just don't see it.
11:22 [motor whirring]
11:25 The name of the book is called
11:30 "New Western Familia, A Broken Paradigm."
11:32 And so I started doing a YouTube channel,
11:35 Paradigm Media News.
11:36 I got a series on my channel.
11:38 One's called "Inner Demons,"
11:40 and the other one's called "War Stories."
11:42 It's also therapeutical to talk about it,
11:45 you know, to try to help some of these youngsters
11:48 that might be headed for that type of lifestyle.
11:52 I give them the fine print that they don't hear about
11:55 until it's too late, until they make a commitment
11:58 and they find themselves in that situation.
12:00 I've seen a lot of my homeboys die throughout the years.
12:03 Most of them are gone.
12:05 There's only three roads you're gonna travel
12:07 in this lifestyle.
12:08 You're either gonna spend the rest of your life in prison,
12:12 you're gonna die trying to push
12:15 the organization's advancement forward,
12:18 or you're gonna turn your back.
12:20 You know, there's no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
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