Benjamin Richard Garcia's parents were both Orange County drug addicts who possessed no parenting skills and died early.
In his neighborhood, Garica associated with F-Troop gangsters growing up, turned to illegal narcotics (heroin), attended Santa Ana High School until the 10th grade, lost his spleen in a stabbing and fathered a daughter with a girlfriend.
For income, Garcia worked at places like Wal-Mart or landscaping services and sold illegal narcotics for numerous years on the streets of central OC for the Mexican Mafia.
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Undercover federal law enforcement agents conducting telephone wiretaps and physical surveillance eventually caught him selling 100 grams of heroin and a 2011 federal grand jury issued a massive indictment involving more than 10 individuals, including Glenn Navarro (a.k.a. “Frosted Flakes”).
Garcia pleaded guilty and hoped for a punishment of no more than 60 months, a stance Assistant United States Attorney Amanda N. Liskamm deemed soft. The government pushed for a 92-month term as more appropriate.
This week inside the Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse in Santa Ana, U.S. District Court Judge James V. Selna sided with Liskamm and ordered that Garcia also undergo supervised probation for five years when he returns to society.
Next week, Garcia–who is being housed in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles–will celebrate his 54th birthday.
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CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.