The Mother of The Avenues

In Part one (1) of this video, we take a first look at the life of Maria “Chata” Leon and her army of sons who went to war on behalf of the Drew Street Avenues gang. Over a period of a decade Maria built the Drew street gang into a perennial powerhouse.

The gang got so big and dangerous the FEDs had to step in. Watch this first video.

Maria Leon sat like the queen spider in a web spun across the border from north to south—head of a massive criminal enterprise of drug-dealing and murder.

This call, however, was for a “special job.”

Maria “Chata” Leon, the then-44-year-old mother of 13 children, and the much-feared head of a drug-dealing dynasty, was stuck in the border town of Mexicali. It was one of her children, Danny “Clever” Leon, who, wielding an AK-47, had died in the 2008 shoot-out with police, and now she wanted to attend his funeral in the United States.

Eventually, she would get her way—paying respect to her son at the cemetery where Michael Jackson and Walt Disney are also buried—right in front of LAPD gang officers. As politicians on all sides of the political spectrum argue about illegal immigration, an ongoing federal case in Los Angeles, prompted by an earlier investigation into the Leon family’s criminal activities, shows the extent to which some gang members and human smugglers in Southern California have established a parallel—and largely invisible—reality, shifting like shadows across the Mexican border, eluding capture for crimes committed on both sides.

In this world, law enforcement officials say, gang members collaborate closely with human smugglers, and those smuggled across the border, sometimes end up on the streets, trying to pay off their debts to these coyotes by dealing drugs.

Before she got stuck in Mexicali, Maria Leon sat like the queen spider in a web spun across the border from north to south—head of a massive criminal enterprise of drug-dealing and murder, some of it backed by the militant revolutionary group known as the Mexican Mafia, according to investigators.