The prison was the domain of Samuel Villalba.

Inside, he was the Artesia Negro, a Mexican mobster whose word was law for the thousands of Latino gang members who fell under the syndicate’s influence.

Outside of prison, he was an ex-convict with a failing liver and a dark past. His once muscular body, tattooed with the black hand of the Mexican Mafia, had emaciated. At home was a tent on the side of a highway.

Sometime during his 16 years in federal prison, Villalba was kicked out of the Mexican Mafia for assaulting a colleague. The sentence was death. It was carried out by two men who crept through the homeless camp where Villalba lived on the evening of January 10, 2021, carrying guns in gloved hands.

The case remained unsolved until last month, when the Long Beach Police Department arrested one of the alleged shooters. Andrew Reyna, 48, has pleaded not guilty to the murder charges. His lawyer declined to comment.

Villalba, 64, was inducted into the Mexican mob more than three decades ago while being held at Folsom for drug possession, according to prison records reviewed by The Times. His life and death were defined by his membership in an organization whose reach is as long as its memory.

Released in the late 1980s, Villalba came home to Southeast LA County, where he took part in a drive by the Mexican Mafia to bring the region’s street gangs under their control. Summoned to meetings in parks and community centers, throngs of gang members learned they were now required to pay “fees,” an investigation by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the FBI found. Anyone who resisted would be given the “green light”, meaning they would be shot in the streets and stabbed behind bars.

Villalba also built a life away from the gang. After he got out of prison, he went to see an old friend inside. The friend introduced him to Villalba’s mother.

Pearl Villalba recalled seeing her husband-to-be pull up to their house in a truck wearing “ragged” clothes.

“I wasn’t interested at all,” she told The Times.

Villalba, 17 years younger than her, asked her out on a date. She refused. He asked her every time he saw her. Finally she gave in.

They went to Ports O’Call, Redondo Beach and Long Beach. He took her to Las Vegas and asked her if she would marry him. She said no. The second time they went to Vegas, she said yes.

Pearl liked that he was kind to her children from a previous marriage. She knew he was involved in prison gangs — “He had a big ‘M’ on him,” she said, gesturing to her chest — but she didn’t ask.

“He would say, ‘Don’t worry, honey,'” she recalled. “That was their job. Nothing was ever mentioned.”

In Artesia, Villalba got into a nasty argument with younger members of his gang who refused to listen to the older ex-convict, according to a secretly recorded 1995 meeting reviewed by The Times.

The upstarts were the sons of Luis “Huero Buff” Flores, one of the founders of the Mexican Mafia. “All the rules we live by today, he’s the one who started them,” another Mexican Mafia member, Raymond Shryock, told the meeting. “But his family thinks I’m above reproach.”

Shryock, Villalba and about a dozen other members of the Mexican mob had gathered in a motel room to talk business. Little did they know that the FBI and Sheriff’s Department had tapped the room with hidden cameras and tape recorders.

Shryock said Flores’ sons “wanted to kill the black man because they thought the black man was disrespecting him.”

“I know that family,” Shryock continued. “I grew up with them and I know how they think. So I stayed boss down. I seated the young men. I said, “Look, man. You will respect Sammy. I said, “You’re going to do what you’re told. You won’t step on his toes. And I said, “If you do, I’ll be the first to come here and do something to you.”

Shryock then turned to Villalba. He had been accused of sending a gunman to kill a fellow member of the Mexican Mafia without the organization’s support. If true, Shryock warned Villalba, “that’s an automatic death sentence.”

Villalba denied; Shryock said he believed him. Later that year, both men were indicted in the first racketeering case brought against the Mexican Mafia.

Villalba fled to Arizona, splitting time between Tucson and short trips to see family in Southern California, his wife said.

“The feds were following us all the time,” she said. Once, she said, the FBI sent a “rat” to the house to inquire about her husband.

After five months on the run, agents caught Villalba at a Buena Park motel.

Federal prosecutors charged that he voted to kill three members of the Mexican mob who had fallen out of favor: Conrad “Big D” Garcia, a born-again Christian. Charles “Charlie Brown” Manriquez, an informal adviser to the 1992 film “American Me,” which angered the Mexican mob with its depiction of a sodomized founding member. And Donald “Little Man” Ortiz, targeted for the vague crime of “disrespecting” the Mexican Mafia.

Garcia died of natural causes in 2012. Manriquez was shot in the Ramona Gardens housing project in 1992. Ortiz survived several attacks in prison before a gunman disguised as a detective killed him in Chino in 2021.

Villalba pleaded guilty to racketeering in 1996. While he was serving a 16-year sentence, gangs in southeast LA County continued to support him, records show.

US Drug Enforcement Administration agents tapped the phones of the Varrio Hawaiian Gardens gang in 2006 when they heard two of their targets complain that Villalba’s wife was asking for money. The gang members agreed to send her $400, reasoning that if they gave her too much, she would expect that amount every time, an agent wrote in an affidavit.

But a year later, Villalba was marked for death after assaulting a fellow Mexican Mafia member without the organization’s sanction, according to law enforcement records reviewed by The Times.

His mistakes “could not be undone,” an inmate at the federal penitentiary in Victorville said in a recorded phone call. “He’s been skating on thin ice for a long time anyway.”

Villalba was exercising in the yard at Victorville when an inmate punched him, according to video reviewed by The Times. Two other inmates beat, kicked and ligatured Villalba, stopping only after guards sprayed them with chemical spray.

Villalba left prison in 2012. He had sent his wife hand-drawn cards for every Valentine’s Day, anniversary and birthday. She kept the correspondence in a scrapbook along with her letters and pencil drawings of Mexican revolutionaries and Aztec warriors.

But after he got out, she said, Villalba got engaged to a new woman. “I’ve been waiting for him all these years,” she said. “For him to betray me like that, no.”

However, the two remained cordial, Pearl said. He visited her from time to time, bringing coffee or flowers. Sometimes he slept on her couch. He spent his days riding a bicycle around the neighborhood and hanging out at a liquor store, Pearl said. Heard he lived in a camp in the San Gabriel River bed.

By 2021, Villalba had moved his tent off the 91 Freeway in northern Long Beach. He suffered from cirrhosis and open wounds to his hips, according to a medical examiner’s report. He had tried to treat them with a makeshift bandage of paper and tape.

On the night of Jan. 10, two men approached the camp on foot, prosecutors alleged in a complaint. One was Reyna, who had spoken to an unnamed inmate on the phone and promised to “take care of Town Southeast” — a reference to Villalba’s hometown in southeast LA County, prosecutors wrote in the complaint.

A member of the Eastside Paramount gang called “Boxer,” Reyna worked under the Mexican Mafia but was not a full member, according to a law enforcement official who was not authorized to speak publicly.

The second suspect was not identified in the complaint. Both men wore nitrile gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints or DNA, the document said.

The two entered the camp by crawling through a hole in a chain link fence. According to the complaint, they questioned Villalba, found him and shot him in the tent.