[Music] In June 2023, two members were killed within weeks of each other in South Los Angeles. Not rival gang members, not innocent bystanders, but brothers in the same organization killed by their own shot caller. This is the story of Celerino busy Harammo and how loyalty and force through death became the downfall of one of LA’s most notorious street gangs.
Florence Avenue cuts through South Los Angeles like a scar. It’s here along this stretch of concrete and broken dreams that Florencia 13 was born in the 1940s. What started as a neighborhood crew of Mexican-American youth protecting their turf has evolved into something far more sinister. Today, F-13 controls several square miles of territory with an iron fist commanding between two and 3,000 soldiers.
They’re not just a street gang anymore. They’re a criminal enterprise with direct ties to the Mexican mafia la. the puppet masters pulling strings from behind prison walls. To understand what happened in 2023, you need to understand the structure. Florencia 13 operates like a corporation, but one where termination means something entirely different.
At the top sit the shot callers, men who’ve earned their stripes through violence and proven their loyalty through blood. Below them, tax collectors who squeeze money from drug dealers operating in F-13 territory. Then the soldiers, the young homies trying to make a name. And at the bottom, the associates, the wannabes, the expendable.
The rules are simple but absolute. Pay your taxes. Respect the hierarchy. Never cooperate with law enforcement. Show weakness. Show disloyalty. Break the code. And you answer to men like busy. There’s no appeals process in this court. No second chances, just judgment, swift and final. Celerino Harmo earned his nickname busy because he was always busy.
Busy collecting taxes, busy enforcing order, busy making examples of those who stepped out of line. By 2022, he’d risen to become one of F-13’s most feared shot callers. A man whose calm demeanor masked a capacity for violence that even hardened gang members found disturbing. He didn’t just enforce the rules. It was the rules.
Judge, jury, and when necessary, executioner. But Bizzy wasn’t operating in a vacuum. He was part of a system, a methodology of control perfected over decades. This wasn’t random violence. This was systematic, calculated, purposeful. Every beating, every shooting, every murder served a purpose.
Maintaining the power structure that kept money flowing up the chain to LA aim. The Mexican mafia doesn’t care about street beefs or neighborhood pride. They care about one thing, profit. And men like Bizzy ensure that profit never stops. To understand the violence of 2023, we need to go back to 2007, Operation Joker’s Wild.
102 members of Florencia 13 dictated by the federal government. The charges read like a horror novel. 20 targeted attacks between 2004 and 2007. Black residents targeted simply for existing in F-13 territory. Families forced to pay rent to live in their own homes. The message was clear. Florencia 13 owned these streets and everyone else was just visiting.
The operation should have crippled the gang. It didn’t. Like cutting heads off a hydra, new leaders emerged. Lessons were learned. Don’t leave witnesses. Don’t talk on phones. Handle problems internally before they attract federal attention. By 2022, F-13 had rebuilt, reorganized, and returned to business as usual.
But maintaining that business required discipline. Enter busy. October 17th, 2022. Outside a bar in South LA. The victim whose name we’ll withhold had broken a cardinal rule. Maybe he kept money he should have kicked up. Maybe he showed disrespect to the wrong person. The specifics don’t matter.
What matters is what happened next. Busy arrived with Jonathan Reyes, known on the streets as Creeper. They didn’t come to talk. The attack was brutal. Even by gang standards, baseball bats swinging in the darkness. When the victim fell, they didn’t stop. The assault continued, making sure everyone watching understood this wasn’t just punishment.
This was a violent message to the neighborhood. The victim survived barely. He’d carry those scars forever. Walking reminders to everyone in the neighborhood. This is what happens when you cross Florencia. 13. But busy was just getting started. The beating bar was a warm-up, a preview of coming attractions.
Because by early 2023, the word had come down from above. Too many people were getting comfortable. Too many soldiers were forgetting their place. Too many rules were being bent, if not broken. It was time to remind everyone why F-13 had survived for over 50 years. Fear. Pure, unfiltered fear. June 19th, 2023.
The summer heat was already oppressive in South LA when they found the first body. We’ll call him RA. Though on the streets, he had another name, a nickname earned through years of putting in work for Florencia 13. RA wasn’t some newcomer. He was a veteran, someone who should have known better. But somewhere along the line, he’d made a fatal mistake.
Maybe he was skimming from the taxes he collected. Maybe he was talking to the wrong people. people wearing badges. [Music] Or maybe he just showed weakness at the wrong moment. In the world of Florencia 13, the why matters less than the what. And what happened was this. Bizzy made a decision. Ra had to go.
The killing was planned. Bizzy didn’t act alone. Oscar Hernandez, known as Drex, was there too. Together, they carried out the act. No trials, no defense attorney, no jury of peers, just the ultimate enforcement of gang law. When RA’s body was found, the message rippled through F-13 territory like a shockwave.
If Bizzy could kill a veteran, someone who’d been down for years, then no one was safe. The gang’s reaction was immediate and predictable. Heads down, mouths shut, taxes paid on time. Everyone suddenly very interested in following every rule to the letter because everyone knew busy wasn’t finished.
This wasn’t an isolated incident. This was the beginning of a purge. 2 weeks. That’s all the time that passed before the second member was killed. July 2023, the height of summer, and another F-13 member was marked for death. We’ll call him DE. Another soldier who’ forgotten that in this life loyalty isn’t just expected, it’s mandatory.
The pattern was emerging, clear as day to anyone paying attention. Busy was cleaning house. This time, Hugo Paneda joined in the killing. Street name, threat, and threatening he was. The death of DE wasn’t just another murder. It was a masterclass in gang terrorism. Not terrorism against rivals or civilians, but intimidation directed inward at their own members.
The message couldn’t have been clearer. We will kill our own brothers if they step out of line. Imagine the psychological impact. Imagine going to sleep every night wondering if tomorrow you’ll be the one who’s made some unknowable mistake if tomorrow busy comes for you. By late July 2023, Florencia 13 was operating under a reign of terror.
But it was a terror that served a purpose. Tax collections were up. Internal disputes disappeared. Everyone fell in line. From perspective, from the perspective of the Mexican mafia shot callers he answered to, the murders were a success. Order had been restored. The machine was running smoothly again.
But here’s the thing about ruling through fear. It works until it doesn’t. Every killing, every assault, every act of violence creates witnesses, create evidence, creates opportunities for someone to break. And in the shadows, watching, waiting, building their case were the ones should have feared most. Not rival gangs, not his own soldiers, but the federal government.
The FBI had been watching Florencia 13 for years, and Bizzy’s Violent Summer had given them exactly what they needed. The FBI doesn’t work like street gangs. They don’t need to make examples. They don’t need to inspire fear. They just need evidence. And by the summer of 2023, Bizzy and his crew were practically gift wrapping it for them.
Every murder leaves traces. Every witness who survives remembers. Every phone call, every text message, every meeting in a car they thought was clean. It was all being cataloged, analyzed, built into something unbreakable. A federal Reicho case. RICO, the racketeer, Influence, and Corrupt Organizations Act.
It’s the nuclear weapon of federal prosecution. You don’t need to prove someone pulled the trigger. You just need to prove they were part of the organization that pulled the trigger. And Florencia 13 with its structured hierarchy, its tax system, his enforcement mechanisms was a Rico prosecutor’s dream. Every beating Bizzy ordered, every murder he committed, every dollar he collected, it all fed into the same narrative. This wasn’t a gang.
It was organized crime. The surveillance had actually started long before the summer murders. The FBI had been building their case methodically, patiently. Informants were cultivated, some freaked out after arrest for lesser crimes, others motivated by fear or revenge. Wire taps were approved carefully, legally, every procedural box checked.
They watched Bizzy and his associates like scientists studying predators in the wild. They mapped the organization, identified the key players, traced the money flows. Then came the murders of RA and DE. From Busy’s perspective, he was solving problems. From the FBI’s perspective, he was providing them with the final pieces of their puzzle.
Murder and aid of racketeering. Murder to maintain control of a criminal enterprise. These weren’t just state charges anymore. These were federal crimes carrying potential life sentences. The interesting thing about federal investigations is how quiet they are until they’re not. While busy was enforcing his brutal version of order on the streets, federal agents were presenting evidence to a grand jury.
Witnesses were testifying, some in person, some via video link from secure locations. Documents were being reviewed. Connections were being drawn. The grand jury was seeing the full picture. Florencia 13 wasn’t just a street gang. It was a criminal organization that used murder as a business tool. August 2024, over a year after the violent summer, Bizzy probably thought he’d gotten away with it.
The streets were quiet. The money was flowing. The organization was running smoothly. Then, in the pre-dawn darkness, everything changed. Simultaneous raids across South Los Angeles. FBI agents and tactical gear. Local law enforcement and support. Doors kicked in. Flashbang grenades. Suspects dragged from their beds.
The scope of the operation was massive. 37 members of Florencia 13 indicted. 23 arrested in the raids. Six already in custody on other charges. Eight still at large. Their faces soon to appear on wanted posters. But the arrests were just part of the story. It was what they found during the raids that really told the tale of what Florencia 13 had become.
21 pounds of methamphetamine, 9 lb of fentinyl, 6 12 lb of heroin. These weren’t personal use amounts. This was distribution level weight. This was the fuel that kept the entire operation running. the drugs that generated the money that needed to be taxed, that created the disputes that needed to be settled, that justified the violence that men like Bizzy dispensed.
25 firearms recovered, handguns, rifles, shotguns, some legal, most not. Some with filed off serial numbers, some stolen, some that ballistics would later match to unsolved shootings going back years. Each weapon another charge, another piece of evidence, another nail in the coffin, $70,000 in cash, not millions, not the fortune you might expect from Hollywood portrayals, but enough.
Enough to show the operation was profitable. Enough to prove the enterprise existed. Enough to justify everything the FBI had been saying. This was organized crime. But the centerpiece of the indictment wasn’t the drugs or the guns or the money. It was the murders. Bizzy’s name appeared again and again in the federal documents.
The October 2022 assault, the June 2023 murder of RA, the July 2023 murder of DE. Each incident meticulously documented, supported by witness testimony, physical evidence, surveillance footage, phone records. The FBI had built their case brick by brick and now the wall was complete. The charges were devastating.
Conspiracy to violate RICO, murder in aid of racketeering, conspiracy to distribute controlled substances, use of firearms in furtherance of drug trafficking crimes, assault with a dangerous weapon. Each charge carrying years, some carrying decades, some carrying life. Stacked them all together and Bizzy was looking at dying in federal prison.
His codefendants weren’t in much better shape. Oscar Drex Hernandez charged with the murder of RA Hugo Menace Peneda charged with the murder of De Jonathan Creeper Reyes charged with the October assault and dozens more each facing their own constellation of charges, their own calculation of years. The federal government had done what Bizzy never thought possible.
They’d penetrated the code of silence. They turned his own methods against him. Every act of violence he’d committed to maintain order had become evidence of the conspiracy. Every murder he’d authorized to enforce discipline had become a federal case. The very structure he killed to protect was now the structure that would bury him.
But here’s the thing about taking down organisms like Florencia 13. is like trying to kill a weed by cutting off the flower. The roots remain. Even as Bizzy and his associates were being processed into federal custody, even as they were being assigned inmate numbers and defense attorneys, the gang continued.
New shot callers were already emerging. New soldiers were being recruited. The territory remained. The taxes would continue to be collected. The violence would continue to be dispensed. To understand Celerino busy Harammo, you have to understand the psychology of an enforcer. This wasn’t a man who killed for pleasure.
This wasn’t random violence or crimes of passion. In Busy’s mind, every act of violence was justified, necessary, even noble. He was protecting the organization. He was maintaining order. He was upholding traditions that went back generations. In the twisted logic of gang loyalty, he wasn’t a murderer. He was a guardian.
Think about it from his perspective. Florencia 13 had survived for over 60 years. It had weathered police crackdowns, federal operations, rival gang wars, demographic changes, economic collapses. And he had survived because of men like him. Men willing to do what others wouldn’t.
Men who understood that in a world without law, fear becomes law, violence becomes governance, death becomes justice. When busy killed RA and DE, he wasn’t acting out of personal anger. He was executing policy. Someone above him, maybe in prison, maybe on the streets had decided these men had violated the code.
and busy as a shot caller, as an enforcer carried out the act. To refuse would have been to violate the code itself. To show weakness would have been to invite his own execution. In the brutal mathematics of gang life, killing his brothers was an act of self-preservation. But there’s something deeper here. Something about the nature of loyalty itself.
Busy believed in Florencia, 13 believed in it the way others believe in religion or country. The gang had given him identity, purpose, power, family. Everything he was, everything he had came from F13. So when the organization demanded blood, even the blood of its own members, he gave it not reluctantly but willingly because to him the organization was bigger than any individual, including himself.
This is the paradox of gang enforcement. The very violence meant to preserve the organization ultimately destroys it. Every murder creates enemies, not just outside, but inside. Every execution breeds resentment, fear, the desire for revenge. The violent summer that busy orchestrated didn’t strengthen Florencia 13.
It revealed its fundamental weakness. An organization that must kill its own members to survive is already dying. But let’s not forget the victims. RA and DE weren’t just gang members. They were human beings. RA had a mother who still doesn’t understand why her son had to die. A girlfriend who wakes up alone. Children who will grow up without a father.
Carrying the burden of his choices and his fate. The trauma ripples outward, touching lives that had nothing to do with gang business. De’s story is equally tragic. Friends describe him as someone who was trying to change, trying to find a way out. Maybe that’s why he was killed. In the world of Florencia 13, wanting out is the ultimate betrayal.
The gang life is supposed to be forever. Blood in, blood out, they say. But what they don’t tell you is that sometimes the blood that gets you out is your own. These weren’t soldiers dying in some noble cause. These were young men, mostly poor, mostly uneducated, mostly without real opportunities, who’d made bad choices that led to worse choices that led to final choices.
The cycle of violence that claimed them continues to spin, pulling in new generations, creating new victims, new enforcers, new busies. The families left behind struggle with complicated grievance. How do you mourn someone who lived by violence and died by it? How do you explain to children that their father was killed by his own gang? How do you find meaning in such meaningless death? There are no grievance counselors trained for this.
No support groups for families of gang members killed by their own. Just silence, stigma, and sorrow. And what about the community? South Los Angeles has been living under gang occupation for generations. Residents who have nothing to do with gang life are forced to navigate its rules, pay its taxes, suffer its violence.
Every murder, whether internal or external, adds to the trauma that blankets these neighborhoods like smog. Children grow up with PTSD before they learn to read. Mothers develop anxiety disorders from the constant fear. Fathers feel the weight of their inability to protect their families.
The August 2024 federal raid was celebrated by law enforcement as a victory. 37 dangerous criminals off the streets. Pounds of deadly drugs seized. Guns that would have claimed lives now in evidence lockers. And they’re not wrong. Lives were undoubtedly saved by this operation. future victims separated, future violence prevented.
But in the neighborhoods, Florencia 13 controls, the reaction was more complicated. Yes, there was relief. The reign of terror was over, at least temporarily. But there was also fear, not of the gang, but of what comes next. Because when you remove one power structure without replacing it with something better, you create a vacuum.
And in South Los Angeles, vacuums don’t stay empty for long. Within days of the raids, the scramble for power began. Younger members of F-13 saw opportunity in the chaos. Rival gangs sensed weakness. The Mexican mafia began selecting new shot callers from the prison population. The structure that Bizzy had killed to protect began reforming like a broken bone healing crooked.
As I record this, Bizzy sits in federal custody awaiting trial. His attorney will likely argue that he was just a soldier following orders, that the real culprits are the Mexican mafia shot callers who ordered the hits from prison. That Bizzy is a victim, too, of poverty, of limited opportunities, of a system that failed him long before he failed it.
There’s truth in those arguments, but they won’t save him. The federal system has conviction rates above 90%. Busy will almost certainly die in prison. His codefendants face similar fates. Some will cooperate, trading information for reduced sentences. Others will maintain the code of silence even as it condemns them to life behind bars.
The organization they killed for, sacrificed for, gave their lives to will forget them. New faces will take their places. New names will be spray painted on walls. The machine will continue grinding. So, here we are at the end of busy story, but not the end of the story. Because in South Los Angeles on Florence Avenue in the territories controlled by Florencia 13, life goes on.
The federal raids made headlines for a day, maybe two. Politicians claimed victory. Law enforcement held press conferences. Then the news cycle moved on and the streets returned to their brutal normal. The core question that haunts this entire case is this. In a world where loyalty is enforced through death, what does brotherhood really mean? Busy would tell you he was a loyal soldier, that everything he did was for his brothers, for his neighborhood, for his gang.
But how can you claim brotherhood while executing your brothers? How can you protect a family by destroying it from within? The paradox goes deeper. Bizzy genuinely believed he was maintaining order. In his worldview, the murders of RA and DE weren’t acts of destruction, but acts of preservation. By killing those who violated the code, he was saving the organization.
By inspiring fear, he was creating respect. By enforcing brutal discipline, he was preventing chaos. But what he actually created was the very chaos he sought to prevent. The federal investigation, the raids, the power vacuum, the ongoing violence. His cure became the disease. Right now, as you listen to this, there’s a 13-year-old kid in South LA facing the same choices that led Bizzy to Florencia 13.
His school is underfunded. His father is absent or incarcerated. His mother works three jobs and still can’t make rent. The gang offers him protection, identity, money, family, what we call a criminal organization. He calls opportunity. What we call violence, he calls survival. This kid doesn’t know name.
Doesn’t know about RA or DE. doesn’t know about the federal raids, but he knows the older homies have money. He knows they have respect. He knows that in a world that seems to offer him nothing, the gang offers him something. And unless something fundamental changes, he’ll make the same choice Bizzy made.
And in 20 years, we’ll be telling his story, too. The truth is, Florencia 13 will survive Bizzy’s downfall, just as it survived Operation Joker’s Wild, just as it survived countless other attempts to destroy it. New shot callers are already emerging from the ranks. They’ve learned from his mistakes.
Don’t kill your own unless absolutely necessary. Don’t leave witnesses. Don’t create patterns the feds can follow. What makes this story particularly tragic is that everyone involved knows how it ends. Every gang member knows that there are only three destinations in this life. Prison, death, or if you’re extraordinarily lucky, irrelevance.
They know this and yet they continue. Because when you’re born into certain zip codes in America, when your options are limited to various forms of suffering, sometimes the suffering that comes with power and respect seems better than the suffering that comes with powerlessness and invisibility. Busy power thing, he thing to be feared rather than forgotten.
He chose to be the one delivering violence rather than receiving it. And for a while it worked. He rose through the ranks. He commanded respect. He wielded life and death power over others. He was somebody in a world that told him he was nobody. But that power was always an illusion, a temporary loan from forces bigger than himself.
This story isn’t just about one gang or one enforcer. is about understanding the complex web of loyalty, violence, and survival that defines street culture in America. What drives someone to become judge and executioner for their own brothers? Is it power, fear, a twisted sense of duty, or is it simply the logical endpoint of a life that offered no better options? The only real answer lies in prevention.
in reaching that 13-year-old kid before the gang does and providing alternatives that are more attractive than the streets. But that’s not a story of violence and raids and federal indictments. That’s a story of slow, patient, unglamorous work that doesn’t make headlines. As you go about your day, remember that Bizzy’s world exists parallel to yours, separated by geography, economics, opportunity, or sometimes just luck.
Remember that the violence we’ve discussed isn’t abstract. It’s happening right now in communities across America. And remember that until we address the conditions that create enforcers like Bizzy, we’re condemned to keep telling versions of the same story over and over, generation after generation.
The streets remain, the code continues, the cycle spins on.
