Convicts Held Bottle Parties In Their Cells

Taupo Times, Volume VI, Issue 283, 12 July 1957, Page 12

Convicts Held Bottle Parties In Their Cells

On the outskirts of Mexico City stands a huge pile of brick and stone known officially as Lecumberri Penitentiary. It is known by other names in Mexico's underworld — The | University, The Country Club and Palace. It is the most eorrupt prison in the world. A dilapidated building designed for 800 inmates, Lecumberri to-day has an average population of 4000. Sorne 300 of these are women — and there are even 30 infants serving out time with mothers who bore them behind | prison walls. A well-organised gang of "fences" was found to be actually operating inside Lecumberri. Head of the ring was a hardened criminal known as the "Mayor of Cell Block One", Stolen goods brought to him by phoney visitors were paid for in cash. Guards were then cowed into di3posing of the merchandise on the outside.

"The Mayor" is not the only crook to ply his trade within the prison walls. A counterfeiter was siezed in his cell turning out f ake moneyorders. And an entire gang was found printing and forging Government cheques. This outfit was uncovered when a guard tried to palm off a bad cheque for £500 at the largest bank in Mexico City. Small-time prisoners are often driven to become the tools of the criminal czars whose word is law in Lecumberri. The way these privileged hoodlums live makes a mockery of justice. They hold parties in their "apartments" with wine, women and song very much in evidence. They have their own gambling and smoking rooms. Reefers used to be actually manufactured inside the prison. Now I most of the stuff is smuggled in. | Head of this drug traffic is a conj vict working in the prison bakery who has the use of a guard captain's car and is free to come and go as he pleases.

One of the most vicious criminals in Lecumberri, a confesed slayer nicknamed "The Prog," recently asked and received permission to be married within the prison. A week after the wedding £eremony, "The Frog" was in the prison hospital. Another convict, known as "Meat Pie", had ordered his assassination for trying to chisel in on a minor racket in another cell block. The most bestial atrocity of all was the savage rape of two young girls within the prison walls. The girls who had been admitted to visit a prisoner, were brutally attacked by three of the inmates who also robbed them of a wriswatch. This outrage so incensed the prison's new warden — honest, wellmeaning General Florencio Loya — that he immediately ordered a rigid tightening-up. When the last cell had been searched, the haul was staggering — over 25 tons of knives, scissors, I blackjacks and guns.