After 18 years in prison, he took over his old LA gang. A string of murders followed

LOS ANGELES -- Ezequiel Romo had been gone a long time.

He went to prison in 1996. When he returned to Panorama City 18 years later, he didn’t like what he saw.

He was going to “clean out house,” Romo told another veteran of his gang. He would rid the neighborhood of rivals, of informants, of drug addicts and the do-nothings he considered dead weight.

Prosecutors said the 45-year-old made good on that promise: On Romo’s orders, members of his gang, Blythe Street, turned on and killed one another in a string of murders that left eight dead, according to evidence presented at a months-long trial that began in March in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Romo used Blythe Street to raise his own standing within the Mexican Mafia, the prison-based syndicate whose ranks he hoped to join, witnesses testified. He put members of his gang to work selling the Mexican Mafia’s drugs, collecting their debts and eliminating their enemies. Anyone who didn’t go along, prosecutors said, was eliminated.

Testimony and Romo’s text messages created the portrait of a micromanager who knew just one response to petty slights and suspicions. Get an unsanctioned tattoo? “Take care of it,” Romo told his lieutenant. When the lieutenant, who dutifully orchestrated that murder and several more, got strung out and stopped returning Romo’s calls, it was his turn to go.

And if you had something Romo wanted, like a kilogram of cocaine, why pay for it? His dealer got the same treatment: a bullet in the back.

“Why would you kill your own gang members?” Deputy Dist. Atty. Eric Siddall asked in his closing argument. “Because in Romo’s world, if you don’t fit the mold, if you don’t do what he wants, you get killed.”

‘All I ask for is complete control’

Blythe Street takes its name from a few blocks between Van Nuys Boulevard and Brimfield Avenue in Panorama City. Successions of police task forces and anti-gang programs have never managed to shake its reputation as a drug market or weaken the gang’s pull on generations of children who grow up in the apartment complexes that crowd one another behind tall metal fences.

Members of Blythe Street tend to use the same word to describe the gang: “You feel like