On July 10, 2012, notorious Orange County gangster Ralph Castaneda with a fellow hoodlum and a customer conducted an Anaheim alley meeting that resulted in the illegal, $750 sale of a Ruger M77 bolt-action rifle as well as a Duffle bag loaded with ammunition.
Days later Castaneda sold the same buyer three sawed-off shotguns for $1,000.
Because the Eastside Anaheim gangster didn’t realize the buyer worked for law enforcement, the process repeated a week later when Castaneda sold a 12-gauge Mossberg pump-action shotgun and a Norinco semi-automatic rifle for $1,200.
Triple oops.
Last week inside Orange County’s Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse, Castaneda’s defense lawyer hoped U.S. District Court Judge Andrew J. Guilford would partially ignore his client’s 25-year, criminal history that included cocaine sales, assault with a firearm, street terrorism, lying to police, possession of narcotics, DUI, numerous parole violations and a drive-by shooting.
Castaneda is a longtime drug addict who grew up on welfare without meaningful parental guidance, but Assistant United States Attorney Robert J. Keenan believed this defendant’s repeated trips to prison hadn’t made a strong enough impression to drive him from a life of crime and recommended a 110-month punishment.
Guilford agreed.
It’s a serious crime for a convicted felon–especially a gang member–to possess any weapon.
The 41-year-old Castaneda is presently serving his sentence inside the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles.
He’ll undergo supervised probation for three years when he emerges back into society about nine years from now and, per Guilford’s order, is permanently banned from associating again with the Eastside Anaheim gang or wearing their “emblems, badges, buttons, caps, hats, jackets [or] shoes.”
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.