John Turscak stabbed Derek Chauvin 22 times at the Federal Correctional Institution in Tucson and said he would have killed Chauvin had correctional officers not responded so quickly, federal prosecutors said.
Known as “Stranger,” Turscak is an incarcerated former gang member, collector for the Mexican Mafia, and one-time FBI informant who was charged Friday with attempted murder in the stabbing of ex-Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin at a federal prison in Tucson, Arizona.
Turscak, serving a 30-year sentence for crimes committed while a member of the Mexican Mafia, told investigators he thought about attacking Chauvin for about a month because the former officer, convicted of murdering George Floyd, is a high-profile inmate, prosecutors said.
Turscak later denied wanting to kill Chauvin, prosecutors said.
Turscak is accused of attacking Chauvin with a makeshift knife, or shiv, in the prison’s law library around 12:30 p.m. on Nov. 24, the day after Thanksgiving. The Bureau of Prisons said employees stopped the attack and performed “life-saving measures.” Chauvin was taken to a hospital for treatment.
Turscak told FBI agents interviewing him after the assault that he attacked Chauvin on Black Friday as a symbolic connection to the Black Lives Matter movement, which garnered widespread support in the wake of Floyd’s death, and the “Black Hand” symbol associated with the Mexican Mafia, prosecutors said.
However, in contrast to what corrections officers reported, Turscak told FBI agents that even though he’d been thinking about assaulting Chauvin for a month because he is a high-profile inmate, he denied wanting to kill him.
Turscak, 52, is charged with attempted murder, assault with intent to commit murder, assault with a dangerous weapon, and assault resulting in serious bodily injury. The attempted murder and assault with intent to commit murder charges are each punishable by up to 20 years in prison. He was scheduled to complete his current 30-year sentence in 2026.
Turscak has represented himself from prison in numerous court matters making for easy access to the prison’s law library. Many prison gang members, especially the Mexican Mafia have used pro tem, or self-representation in order to call fellow gang members to court. This brought prisoners from various areas together to discuss gang business, and politics and even commit assaults and murder inmates during their transfers.
After the stabbing, Turscak was moved to an adjacent federal penitentiary in Tucson, where he remained in custody on Friday, inmate records show.
Former police officer Derek Chauvin, 47, was sent to FCI Tucson from a maximum-security Minnesota state prison in August 2022 to simultaneously serve a 21-year federal sentence for violating George Floyd’s civil rights and a 22-and-a-half-year state sentence for second-degree murder.
Chauvin’s lawyer at the time, Eric Nelson, had advocated for keeping him out of the general population and away from other inmates, anticipating he would be a target. In Minnesota, Chauvin was mainly kept in solitary confinement “largely for his own protection,” Nelson wrote in court papers last year.
Chauvin’s stabbing comes as the federal Bureau of Prisons has faced increased scrutiny in recent years following the beating death of James “Whitey” Bulger in 2018 and wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein’s jail suicide in 2019.
The attack on Chauvin was the third incident involving a high-profile federal prison inmate in the last six months. Disgraced former sports doctor Larry Nassar was stabbed in July at a federal penitentiary in Florida and “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski killed himself at a federal medical center in June.
Who is John Turscak?
Turscak led a faction of the Mexican Mafia in the Los Angeles area in the late 1990s, going by the nickname “Stranger,” according to court records. Tusrcak was initially a member of the Rockwood street gang in Los Angeles, having jumped in at the age of 13. He was first arrested for robbery at 16 years old in 1987. Similar to eMe ‘Godfather’ Joe “Peg Leg” Morgan, Turscak was not of Mexican descent but Slavic and had grown up in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Highland Park.
During his decades in prison, he was suspected of carrying out stabbing attacks on over 10 fellow prisoners at the direction of the Mexican Mafia, or La eMe of which he became a member in 1990. During his time in the Mexican Mafia, he said he authorized “assaults of individuals for infractions of Mexican Mafia rules,” and collected “taxes” from street gangs and drug dealers in “return for Mexican Mafia protection and permission to engage in narcotics trafficking.”
He also said he murdered a man in 1990 while he was incarcerated in Folsom Prison, and authorized the murder of another man in 1998, according to court documents.
eMe Faction War
Mexican Mafia dropout and cooperating witness Max “Mono” Torvisco testified regarding a conflict he described as a “war” that developed between two factions early in 1998 with an attempt on Turscak’s life. One faction, led by John “Stranger” Turscak and his associate Jesse “Shady” Detevis, confronted another faction which was led by “Chuy” Martinez, Frank “Sapo” Fernandez, Jimmy “Smokey” Sanchez, Torvisco, and others.
The feud arose after Martinez, “who already had territories in East Los Angeles, began moving into several other areas of the city and was considered to be getting too big” by Turscak and others in the gang, a former member-turned-informant named Max “Mono” Torvisco would later tell the FBI, court records show.
The schism led to violence, distrust, and several murder attempts. At one point during the Spring of 1998, Turscak plotted to kidnap an ally of Martinez named Rolo Ontiveros by luring him to a vehicle where hitmen were waiting, according to Torvisco’s statement to the FBI.
On Easter Sunday, 1998, Turscak was at a family gathering in Atwater Village when two Mexican Mafia foot soldiers drove up and sprayed him and his family members with bullets. No one was killed in the shooting, and Turscak avoided gunfire by ducking under a vehicle. Torvisco would later testify he was angry at the shooters because they weren’t Mexican Mafia members and, therefore, didn’t have the right to kill someone who was.
Torvisco added, though, that he was so angry at Turscak at the time that Torvisco wanted to kill him personally, according to a transcript of the hearing. He testified there were other attempts to kill Turscak, including one where two hitmen waited for him with guns and walkie-talkies at an area he was known to frequent, but he never showed up.
After the Easter Sunday shooting, Martinez left a voicemail on the phone of one of Turscak’s close friends in which he laughs and references his “Easter Salundas,” according to an unsealed FBI report.
Former FBI Informant
He became an FBI informant in 1997, providing information about the gang and producing recordings of conversations he had with other Mexican Mafia members and associates. The FBI agreed to pay $2,000 a month for his cooperation. The investigation led to more than 40 indictments.
About midway through the trial, the FBI dropped Turscak as an informant because he was still dealing drugs, extorting money, and authorizing assaults. Prosecutors then charged him along with the other Mexican Mafia members and associates.
According to court papers, Turscak plotted attacks on rival gang members and was accused of attempting to kill a leader of a rival Mexican Mafia faction while also being targeted himself. Turscak pleaded guilty in 2001 to racketeering and conspiring to kill a rival Mexican Mafia member. The government presented evidence that Martinez, Fernandez, and Sanchez had approved the murders of Turscak and Detevis and had discussed plans to carry them out. On Easter Sunday in 1998, Torvisco, Rochin, and others actually made an unsuccessful attempt to murder Turscak.
The government also presented evidence of a conspiracy to commit murder unrelated to the Turscak dispute. That conspiracy involved Fernandez, Martinez, and Gonzales, who discussed killing James “Bouncer” Lopez because of Lopez’s interference with the collection of drug taxes in the Valley.
On appeal, according to court documents, the appellants claimed that various aspects of the government’s involvement with and reliance on informant John “Stranger” Turscak resulted in conduct so improper that their due process rights were violated.
30 Year Sentence
He said he believed that cooperating with the FBI would have earned a lighter sentence. “I didn’t commit those crimes for kicks,” Turscak said, according to news reports about his sentencing.
“I did them because I had to if I wanted to stay alive. I told that to the FBI agents and they just said, ‘Do what you have to do.”‘ He was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison. He initially served his time in federal prison at USP Atlanta. But was removed from the general population and into the SHU for security reasons in 2002. He was attacked in 2003 by his cellmate.
Turscak was attacked by his cellmate after paperwork confirming his government cooperation was widely distributed, he wrote in a lawsuit filed two years later. He wrote that he was housed in the same yard as a co-defendant who knew of his cooperation and that after being stabbed and spending a week in the hospital, no one tried to interview him, “although I have expressed a desire to press criminal charges.”
“I ask the court to grant this petition in all fairness before I end up murdered or lose my sanity waiting for the BOP to transfer me,” Turscak wrote.
He petitioned for a transfer out of that prison, fearing he would be targeted as a “snitch.” He stated he was being housed with other Mexican Mafia members in the SHU, including the one who had previously attacked him. He wished to be transferred back into California state custody in their dropout or “Special Needs Yard.” He was moved to a solitary unit in North Carolina before complaining of the conditions and was transferred to Tucson.
“Turscak harbored obvious animosity toward the government due to the government’s decision to prosecute him for the unauthorized criminal conduct he engaged in while an FBI informant,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Dugdale wrote in an August 2008 legal filing.
His sentence was up in 2026, less than 3 years from now. He would have been able to enter a halfway house in 2025 but is looking at decades more, if not life, in prison. It is possible he committed the stabbing in order to remain in federal prison, and gain notoriety.
It is likely, having committed an attempted murder while in federal prison, he would be transferred to a prison like ADX, the federal Supermax USP Florence, Colorado that houses high profile inmates such as “El Chapo” and, oddly enough, Turscak’s old rival Frank “Sapo” Hernandez who is serving his life sentence there.
Sources AP News, CBS, LA Times, NPR, Find Law, DOJ, Court Listener
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