The legend of ‘Snuffy’: Reputed Mexican Mafia figure charged in plot to kill rapper
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There is a running joke among law enforcement authorities who investigate the Mexican Mafia. In any unsolved crime remotely connected to the prison syndicate, an informant will always come forward with a familiar line:
“Snuffy did it.”
Snuffy is the nickname of Manuel Quintero, alleged by Los Angeles County prosecutors to be a member of the Mexican Mafia, a group of about 140 men who rule over Southern California’s Latino street gangs.
Quintero’s face sits atop organizational charts drawn up by task forces of federal agents, sheriff’s deputies and local police who have long suspected — but could never prove — that he was engaged in extortion, gambling and other crimes, according to law enforcement documents reviewed by The Times.
Quintero, 49, is described in the records and interviews with gang members and police as a ghost-like presence, seemingly everywhere but impossible to catch in a provable act of wrongdoing.
He has been spotted in the harbor area, meeting with members of his incarcerated half brother’s old gang. He’s been photographed crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, wearing sunglasses, behind the wheel of a Toyota Corolla. He’s been seen in the San Fernando Valley, conferring with Armenian crime figures who run illegal gaming parlors.
According to one police source who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly, an informant even claimed Quintero had faked his own death, staging a car crash with a similar-looking cadaver before disappearing into Mexico.
The story, of course, was false. After years of investigations that sputtered out without charges, one of the many task forces eyeing Quintero arrested him on June 18 on charges that he conspired to murder a rap artist. He has pleaded not guilty. His lawyer didn’t respond to phone and email messages seeking comment.
A tagger in his teenage years, Quintero graduated to his local street gang, Paramount Varrio, while imprisoned in the California Youth Authority. He served about two decades in prison for assault, car theft, possessing guns, manufacturing drugs and false imprisonment.
Outside prison, Quintero developed a direct connection to a reputed operative of the Sinaloa cartel, Mexico’s most powerful drug trafficking group, as well as contacts in Armenian organized crime networks, according to court and law enforcement records.
To gain a fuller picture of Quintero’s rise, The Times reviewed court documents, police reports and other records and interviewed law enforcement authorities and gang members who requested anonymity, either because they weren’t authorized to discuss investigations or because they feared retaliation.
Taken together, the records, testimony and interviews offer a portrait of a new kind of gangster with hands in different worlds, a savvy operator who parlayed the Mexican Mafia’s power behind bars into widening influence on the street.
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Quintero grew up in Paramount, a city of about 50,000 in the southeast end of Los Angeles County. He told a probation officer that his parents were hard-working people who raised him and his two sisters as well as their modest means allowed.
His father sterilized equipment at St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood. His mother, a housewife, sold jewelry and kitchenware on the side. The family shared a three-bedroom house with Quintero’s uncle and cousin.
Early on, Quintero showed an entrepreneurial spirit. At 11, he was selling subscriptions for the Long Beach Press-Telegram, and he later built amplifiers for an electronics company.
In 10th grade, he was expelled from Paramount High School, according to a probation report, which listed the reasons as “fighting, truancy, gang involvement, discipline problems and danger to students.”
In 1992, Quintero, then 16, was driving down Rosecrans Avenue when he spotted a teenager from a tagging group called KCC, or “Kids Committing Crimes.” Quintero belonged to a rival crew, MTC, short for “Mexicans Taking Control,” according to the probation report. His nickname was “Crak.”
Quintero ditched his car, chased the teenager over a brick wall and shot him in the leg as he hid behind a dumpster, a police report said.
Convicted of assault, Quintero was sent to the California Youth Authority. Evaluated there in 1993, Quintero said he aspired to become an electrician, mechanic or construction worker, authorities wrote in a court document. A caseworker noted he seemed to be an “introvert” who “prefers working with things rather than people.”
“He seems to pursue feelings of security and avoidance of conflict by conforming to what he perceives as an immediate power structure — that is, his gang,” the caseworker wrote.
Behind bars, Quintero began claiming his local street gang, Paramount Varrio, according to a parole report. The report listed a new nickname: “Snuff.”
Quintero was granted parole after three years. His father got him a job in the cafeteria at St. Francis, and Quintero enrolled in Long Beach and Cerritos city colleges, studying computers.
But nearly a year after his release, a sheriff’s deputy pulled him over for blasting music. Quintero tossed a gun out of the window. He was convicted of possessing a gun as a felon — the first in a string of crimes that would put him in and out of prison for the next 20 years.
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In 2001, plainclothes detectives were staking out a store in Downey that sold car racing equipment.
The detectives were investigating methamphetamine labs. Two labs had recently exploded, and the task force learned the Downey shop had sold them methanol. Methanol can be used as racing fuel or to extract ephedrine, a component of methamphetamine.
The detectives saw Quintero and a second man exit the store carrying a gas can. They tailed the pair to a Walmart and a Stater Brothers store, where the two men bought lighter fluid, vinegar, lye, distilled water and cat litter — all known to narcotics officers as ingredients in the methamphetamine process.
The detectives obtained a warrant to search Quintero’s house, where, according to their testimony, they found a fully operating meth lab. The garage was outfitted with heating mantles, glass flasks and respirators. Plastic tubes diverted fumes from a smoking dish into a container of cat litter.
Quintero was convicted at trial of manufacturing narcotics and sentenced to 10 years in prison. The man who accompanied Quintero to the racing store, Melbe Perez, pleaded guilty to the same offense, served two years in prison and was deported to Mexico.
There, Perez allegedly began working for a leader of the Sinaloa cartel, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada. Perez, also known as Melvin Perez Cardenas, was indicted alongside Zambada in 2015, accused of shipping cocaine to Detroit and Chicago and kidnapping a trafficker who had lost a load of drugs.
Now 48, Perez is believed to be living either in Guadalajara or Culiacan, according to the FBI, which has offered a $50,000 reward for information on his whereabouts.
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Six months after Quintero was released from prison in 2010, state narcotics agents were watching an auto repair shop in Placentia.
The agents had arranged for an informant to sell 3,000 ephedrine pills to a suspected drug dealer. Through a wire worn by the informant, the agents heard the dealer say “the cook” was about to arrive.
Quintero showed up in a pickup, prosecutors wrote in a motion filed in his case. Arrested on drug offenses, he posted a $215,000 bond and was released from jail. He planned to flee to Mexico — but first, a witness later testified before a grand jury, he needed money.
The witness, a woman who made a living through credit card fraud, told a San Diego County grand jury that Quintero wanted her to drain $10,000 from a “stolen” bank account.
The Times is not naming the woman because she described being tortured and sexually assaulted.
The woman said she was introduced to Quintero through her childhood friend, Larry Trujillo, who told her Quintero was a “shot caller” in the Mexican Mafia.
The woman drove Quintero to a bank in El Cajon, Calif., where she was supposed to withdraw the cash. But after Quintero got out of the car, she panicked and drove off, leaving him stranded in the parking lot, she said.
Trujillo found the woman at her boyfriend’s house. He pistol-whipped her before dropping a “rock” of methamphetamine in her boyfriend’s hand as payment for her whereabouts, she testified.
“Good looking out, dog,” Trujillo told the boyfriend.
Trujillo took her to a hotel room, where the woman testified she was beaten, sexually abused and locked in a closet. After several days, she said, Trujillo dragged her out and asked, “Your finger or your ear?”
She testified that Trujillo said he was “taking it to Snuffy.” She chose her ear. Trujillo cut it off with a pair of scissors and took it with him, she said.
Another man in the room wrapped her head with a sheet and put a rag in her mouth. He said he was going to leave. He told the woman to wait 10 minutes, then run.
She escaped on Nov. 2, 2010.
Less than 24 hours later, Trujillo broke into the Downey home of Hermilio Franco.
A native of Sinaloa, Franco acted in low-budget Mexican movies and ran a Lynwood nightclub called El Farallon. The club became wildly popular as a venue for singers who chronicled the Mexican drug trade in ballads called narcocorridos.
Franco was sleeping next to his wife when Trujillo crept into his bedroom with a gun. Franco grabbed a chrome-plated .45 from under his mattress.
When the shooting was over, Franco and Trujillo lay on the floor of the bedroom — Franco dead from a gunshot to his chest, Trujillo paralyzed by a bullet that nicked his spine.
Narcocorridos — or drug ballads — are more popular than ever in Mexico, where a generation that came of age during the drug war has embraced songs that recount both the spoils and the excessive violence of organized crime. But the genre is increasingly under attack.
A second intruder, who has never been identified, ran out a back sliding door, a witness testified at Trujillo’s preliminary hearing in 2012.
The motive was robbery, according to a sheriff’s deputy who rode with Trujillo in the ambulance. Thinking he was about to die and wanting to “make things right,” Trujillo said he’d heard Franco had a large amount of cash, the deputy testified.
Wheeled into court on a gurney, Trujillo pleaded no contest to murder and was sentenced to 25 years to life.
Quintero remained a fugitive until 2012, when Mexican police arrested him in Tijuana. He admitted manufacturing drugs and false imprisonment, according to no contest pleas he signed in Orange and San Diego counties. He served less than two years and was released in 2014.
Back on the street, Quintero went to work for an imprisoned Mexican Mafia member who was building an empire in Los Angeles County.
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Michael Torres had not set foot in Los Angeles since 2007, when he was sentenced to life for attempting to murder a man who falsely claimed to be part of the Mexican Mafia.
That did not stop Torres, nicknamed “Mosca,” from collecting money from drug sales, extortion schemes and “taxes” paid by street gangs, law enforcement officials have testified.
In 2017, agents intercepted a conference call that Torres arranged with Quintero and the leaders of Paramount’s gangs.
“Snuffy’s still in charge of collecting the money,” Torres said. “He’s putting it away like I asked him to. It’s not being touched.”
On the heels of the death of Michael Torres, a Mexican Mafia member known as “Mosca,” a woman he referred to as his wife was gunned down. Was it a hit?
By 2020, Quintero was described in law enforcement investigation reports as a full-blown Mexican Mafia member. According to a gang member who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, it was Torres who brought Quintero into the organization.
Quintero’s reach extended to the San Fernando Valley, where a team of federal agents watched him meet with Vrezh Terastvatsatryan, an Armenian national who’d served prison time for drug possession, burglary and grand theft.
The agents suspected Terastvatsatryan, 50, was helping Quintero shake down Armenian business owners and operators of illegal gambling parlors, according to a law enforcement report. In 2020, Terastvatsatryan was gunned down in North Hollywood by two ski-masked shooters in a still-unsolved killing.
Quintero also was eyed by San Bernardino County authorities investigating the death of Donald “Little Man” Ortiz. On the Mexican Mafia’s hit list for decades, Ortiz was shot to death in Chino by an assassin disguised as a detective on Nov. 19, 2021.
Quintero gave a truck to the alleged killer, who was possibly his cousin, detectives testified at a preliminary hearing. Quintero was not charged in the case. But in Los Angeles, a task force of FBI agents and sheriff’s deputies was building the case that would land Quintero behind bars.
It began with an attack on an up-and-coming rapper from Quintero’s hometown.
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On New Year’s Eve in 2022, an informant met with an alleged subordinate of Quintero, Giuseppe “Clever” Leyva, Los Angeles County prosecutors alleged.
According to a complaint, Leyva said there was a hit out on Nelson Abrego, a Paramount gang member who rapped under the name Swifty Blue.
“Snuffs is mad at him, huh?” the informant asked.
Authorities charged a reputed member of the Mexican Mafia with plotting to kill Swifty Blue, a rapper who allegedly crossed the prison-based syndicate.
“F— him,” Leyva allegedly replied.
It wasn’t clear why Quintero was allegedly angry at Abrego, who could not be reached for comment. In a 2024 interview, the rapper refused to discuss what he called “jailhouse politics.”
The morning of Nov. 27, 2023, three inmates beat and slashed Abrego in his cell at Men’s Central Jail, according to the complaint.
Prosecutors alleged that Quintero sanctioned the attack, and a judge authorized a warrant for conspiring to commit murder. Police arrested Quintero in a house on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles, where they seized three guns and a “distribution amount” of heroin, a detective wrote in an affidavit. He remains in Men’s Central Jail after authorities claimed he could use “illicit proceeds” to post bail and flee.
The house where he was arrested was not Quintero’s primary residence, the affidavit said.
According to the document and satellite imagery, the boy who grew up sharing a three-bedroom home with his extended family had acquired a four-acre walled “compound” in Hesperia, complete with a swimming pool and a pond spanned by a bridge.
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