An
alleged “Captain of Captains” in the Mexican Mafia, a Texas prison gang which
operates on the outside, has been arrested in San Antonio and will face murder
charges. Martin Barrera Balboa, Jr. was
set to face charges last spring before a key witness against him was gunned
down in her driveway with his sons watching, while she was on the way to
church.
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| Martin Balboa |
On
October 1, jury selection was set to begin in a Bexar County courtroom
regarding the cold-case killing of J.D. Delgado. It was alleged that Balboa was the getaway
driver when Delgado was shot four times by a masked man as he played basketball
at a South Side (San Antonio) community Center in 2003.
The
key witness, Julie Ann Rodriguez, had been set to testify, but Balboa had been
appearing at her church and work intending to coerce her not to testify. His bond was revoked, then reinstated and an
order was put in place for him to stay away from her work and place of
worship. Little good that did.
Faced
with the loss of the key witness in the Delgado killing, the feds decided
instead to go ahead with a drug trafficking charge. The San Antonio Express-News Reports that:
In
April, agents learned that the gang — and Balboa specifically — had been
receiving shipments of heroin and other drugs. Agents searched his new
girlfriend's home in the 700 block of Southwest 34th Street, where Balboa had
been staying, and recovered more than a pound of street-ready heroin, just less
than a pound of black tar heroin, 11/2 ounces of methamphetamine, a tenth of an
ounce of cocaine, 2 ounces of marijuana and two semi-automatic handguns, the affidavit
said.
His criminal past may prevent him from getting bail in his federal case. He has been arrested 17 times and served 14 months in a military jail for rape and forced sodomy while he was in the Army in 1989.
It
looks like the feds decided to bring him in and put him back in jail with whatever
charges they have, then reassess how they can charge him with the Delgado
murder, if they can at all, now that the witness is dead. Apparently, Balboa wasn’t high enough up for
Rodriguez to get witness protection. It
will certainly make it harder for the feds to get other witnesses to come
forward against the gang.
Full story and photo credit: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/article/Mexican-Mafia-captain-of-captains-arrested-by-4914593.php#photo-827139
This was my mother. Thank you for posting this. Everything happened when I was 13, and now that I am 21 I now see the truth to everything that was going on when I was a kid.
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