Rene "Boxer" Enriquez (born July 7, 1962 in Artesia, California) is a former Mexican-American prison gang member and major organized crime figure.
His father tried to teach him how to run the family business, but Enriquez preferred stealing with his friend Johnny Mancillas, who channeled his ambitions into the local street gang Artesia 13/Arta 13.
[5][page needed] In 2015, Enriquez testified that Marc and other members of Artesia 13/Arta 13 savagely beat him up behind a gas station as a gang initiation.
He projected the Mexican Mafia into a status of unprecedented organizational structure with a base army of approximately 60,000 heavily armed gang members who controlled the prison system and a large part of California crime.
"[7] In 1989, Enriquez was released on parole and began extorting street tax from drug dealers and other criminals in the territory the Mexican Mafia had assigned to him.
He put out a contract on alleged drug dealer Cynthia Gavaldon, whom Enriquez believed was holding back street tax from La Eme.
Enriquez was arrested and charged with Cynthia Galvadon's murder, to which he later pled guilty in return for a life imprisonment, rather than facing the death penalty.
In 1991, Enriquez and another man assaulted Mexican Mafia leader Salvador "Mon" Buenrostro at a lawyers' interview room in the Los Angeles County Jail.
[9] Since he was a prison gang member, Enriquez was locked in a windowless isolation cell in the Security Housing Unit, or SHU.
There inmates spend 23 hours a day alone without seeing the outside world, except during their yard time in which they are transferred to a small cage outside filled with workout equipment.
[10] Since then, he has provided intelligence and other information to help law enforcement, acting as an expert witness in dozens of State murder and Federal racketeering trials and has spoken at a number of conferences and training sessions.
"[citation needed] In February 2015, Enriquez told the parole board that if released, he would enter the Federal Government's Witness Protection Program because he remains on the Mexican Mafia's hit list more than a decade after his 2003 cooperation with law enforcement.