Many of the members are incarcerated, yet benefit from the profits of the illegal casinos. The roughly 140-person Mexican Mafia is a prison mob syndicate that oversees street gangs in Southern California.

“All of these places, someone in the Mexican Mafia has their hand over it,” Velasquez told the LA Times. The gambling houses are also called “nets,” short for the internet cafes of the early 2000s, or “tap taps” and “slap houses” for the sound heard from outside the gambling rooms as players hit buttons and joysticks on the machines. Velasquez told Fox News Digital that through his investigations, he heard some of the gang members running the gambling operations were pulling in $80,000 a week - though that number has now fallen.

The casitas can bring in tens of thousands of dollars per week, as people flock to the gambling playgrounds to operate electronic machines. You don’t know that it’s there till you know that it’s there,” he said. Richard Velasquez, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s detective, told the Los Angeles Times that casitas, Spanish for “little houses,” are “everywhere, to be honest with you.” Illegal casinos in Los Angeles are cropping up everywhere from warehouses to homes and are largely benefiting incarcerated members of a prison gang called the Mexican Mafia, authorities say. Mansion in Canada operated as 'high-end illegal casino,' police sayĭelaware Police Raid Home-Based Casino Dealing in Nudity, Illegal Gambling Illegal gambling operation bust nets 5 arrests, allegedly operated by NY crime family

Casinos in los angeles area