Illegal casinos in Los Angeles are cropping up in all places from warehouses to homes and are largely benefiting incarcerated members of a jail gang called the Mexican Mafia, authorities say.
Richard Velasquez, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s detective, told the Los Angeles Times that casitas, Spanish for “little houses,” are “in all places, to be honest with you.”
“It’s hidden in plain sight. You don’t know that it’s there till that it’s there,” he said.
The casitas can herald tens of hundreds of dollars per week, as people flock to the gambling playgrounds to operate electronic machines. Velasquez told Fox News Digital that through his investigations, he heard among the gang members running the gambling operations were pulling in $80,000 per week — though that number has now fallen.
The gambling houses are also called “nets,” short for the web cafes of the early 2000s, or “tap taps” and “slap houses” for the sound heard from outside the gambling rooms as players hit buttons and joysticks on the machines.
“All of those places, someone within the Mexican Mafia has their hand over it,” Velasquez told the LA Times.
The roughly 140-person Mexican Mafia is a prison mob syndicate that oversees street gangs in Southern California. Most of the members are incarcerated, yet profit from the profits of the illegal casinos. They’re given a part of the profits for allowing the gambling houses to operate of their territories of LA.
“The way in which I see it, the Mexican Mafia isn’t much different than the Italian mob,” Velasquez told the outlet. “You open a smoke shop, you’re selling gaming software or you’ve gotten a [gambling] machine, some [gang member working for the Mexican Mafia] goes to walk in there and say, ‘Hey, you’ll be able to’t do that in our area without our permission, without our protection.’”
The LA sheriff’s detective added that contraband cellphones are pervasive across the prison system in California, which allows for the mob bosses in prison to freely speak with gangsters on the surface.
Illegal casinos have long been present in Los Angeles, but appeared to have a boom during COVID.
“Plenty of folks that we talked to, they said that there was a boom during COVID because people couldn’t really go anywhere. It’s like a social environment,” Velasquex told Fox.
He noted that California Employment Development Department (EDD) fraud throughout the pandemic helped bolster the illegal casinos.
“Plenty of folks that live in the realm where they’re operating got here into lots of money through EDD fraud, after which they went and dumped it into these machines,” he said.
The sheriff’s office said that in 2022 alone, officials executed 128 search warrants at 58 different locations related to illegal casinos, made 80 arrests, recovered 11 kilos of fentanyl.
With the gambling houses comes crime, based on authorities. The Mexican Mafia has previously killed, beaten, shot or kidnapped people accused of ripping the gang members off, the LA Times reported.
The gambling houses clientele often includes other gang members and drug-users, which has fanned the flames of crime on the operations, including assaults and shootings.
The Mexican Mafia has also been known to tax Asian or Armenian gambling operations in San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys, the outlet reported. If the illegal casino operators in LA or elsewhere don’t pay the taxes, they face the gambling house getting vandalized or their equipment stolen.
“They’re going to create the issue that you simply need protection from. After which once they have you ever, you belong to them. They’re going to maintain taking and taking,” Velasquez told the LA Times.
Velasquez told Fox News Digital that he doesn’t consider the illegal casinos are necessarily driving crime across LA, but they’re affecting the precise areas where the casinos are positioned.
“I do consider they convey more crime to the precise area where they’re operating. They’re very much like how a drug house would bring more crime into the realm by which its operating,” he said.
Despite its name, the Mexican Mafia didn’t originate in Mexico, but throughout the California Department of Corrections back within the late Nineteen Fifties, based on the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ).
“The Mexican Mafia’s major source of income is extorting drug distributors outside prison and distributing methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin and marijuana throughout the prison systems and on the surface streets,” the DOJ says of the gang.
