UFC Marketing Partner Closely Linked to Convicted 'King of Coke'?

Rudy Silva just got sentenced to 17+ years for drug trafficking. For years he claimed to be associated with Jocko Willink's Victory MMA gym. Was he?

Many readers will be familiar with influencer Jocko Willink. His Jocko Podcast, co-hosted with fellow Dean Lister black belt Echo Charles, has nearly 2 million subscribers on YouTube.

Willink is not only a Navy Seal and recipient of the Silver Star and Bronze Star, but he’s also a co-founder of official UFC marketing partner ORIGIN, “an all-American brand who manufactures their products dirt-to-shirt in their Maine and North Carolina factories.” ORIGIN is also one of the only companies producing jiu-jitsu gis in the United States.

Jocko also works with individual UFC fighters, including up-and-comer Bo Nickal.

Willink is an instructor and co-owner of San Diego’s Victory MMA — and that’s where the other subject of this piece, one Rodolfo Benjamin Silva, comes into the story.

The man that the Feds cite in court documents as the self-proclaimed “King of Coke” found himself quickly navigating a star-studded fight orbit in San Diego. And based on his plea agreement, it’s time to start asking questions about fighters, trainers, and seeming business associates who befriended Rudy Silva.

What did they know and when did they know it?

San Diego punches above its weight in the fight scene, or at least it used to as a talent hub, but in the end, like Las Vegas, it’s ultimately a relatively small city. While no one should be declared guilty by association — Rudy Silva’s crimes are ultimately his own responsibility and he and he alone must pay for his crimes — it does strain credulity to believe that his BJJ/MMA associates and training partners were completely oblivious to his criminal conduct.

Perhaps they thought Silva was just a poser or assumed he was doing a little dirty work on the side to subsidize his lifestyle. Court documents point to Silva’s involvement in drug trafficking at a pretty serious level and in association with some seriously connected people.

This is MMA meeting True Crime meeting Mexican Drug Cartels. It’s a story that checks all the boxes for a Netflix special and other than a couple of YouTube channels, no one is talking about it. Why is the fight community so silent about it?

‘The King of Coke’ aggressively promoted Victory MMA

Rodolfo “Rudy” Silva’s Facebook profile

While there is no evidence that Rudy Silva ever owned any part of Victory MMA, he actively posted multiple blogs and videos promoting the gym and wore a Victory MMA t-shirt in his official Facebook profile.

He was also “blessed to help Michael Chandler” with his “new bible app promo.”

Rudy Silva also referred to Jocko Willink as his “coach and partner” in the 2017 Facebook post linked below.

In 2014, Silva posted this promotional video of a Victory MMA “bikini car wash” (YouTube has age-restricted the video so I can’t embed it directly here but feel free to click if you’re over 18 and think you might enjoy some corny 2010s trap music and bikini car wash action).

Silva’s crimes resulted in a 17.5-year federal sentence

Unfortunately for Mr. Silva and his friends and associates, Rudy received a 210-month federal prison sentence for drug distribution conspiracy. That’s 17 and 1/2 years.

Per The San Diego Union-Tribune,“prosecutors said Rudy Silva was a prolific trafficker of meth, cocaine and fentanyl who once ordered a cartel 'sicario' to shoot an alleged drug thief in San Diego.”

Here’s how the Department of Justice wrote up Silva’s crimes and conviction

Rodolfo Benjamin Silva, a prolific cocaine, methamphetamine, and fentanyl trafficker who called himself the “King of Coke,” was sentenced in federal court today to 17.5 years in prison for distributing large quantities of illicit drugs in the U.S. and for facilitating the movement of cartel hitmen into the United States.

At today’s hearing, prosecutors described Silva as a long-time San Diego-based drug distributor who worked directly with Mexican counterparts to receive narcotic shipments from Mexico. According to his plea agreement, in October 2022, Silva provided a drug courier with 114 pounds of methamphetamine and a kilogram of fentanyl for transport to Indianapolis, but it was interdicted in Oklahoma.

Silva also admitted in his plea agreement to threatening, directing or using violence as part of his drug trafficking activities. Prosecutors told the court today that Silva assisted in bringing assassins known as “sicarios” from Mexico into the San Diego area for cartel enforcement operations. On one occasion, Silva hired a sicario from Mexico to come to San Diego where that individual attempted to fatally shoot one of Silva’s rivals, prosecutors said.

Maybe we wouldn’t have so many questions about Jocko Willink if Rudy Silva was his only “interesting” associate. While Silva’s claims to have been in business with Jocko at Victory MMA may have been the false claims of a convicted felon, there’s another convicted felon involved with Victory MMA.

Jocko’s Co-Owner at Victory MMA also has an interesting history

Eric Demming, a retired Navy Seal, who’s been making a lot of allegations about Jocko for a while, claims that Jocko’s co-founder at Victory MMA, Joe Mannino, also has a very interesting history.

Before we get to that, I had to quote this Instagram post describing the working relationship between Willink and Mannino because it amused me for a variety of reasons:

Jocko ordered brand new Jiu-Jitsu mats, and when the former Commander of three SEAL Teams says to order new mats for Victory students, you order new mats. Use to be that @jockowillink would even install the mats himself, but since he wrote 10 New York Time’s best selling books, and reaches millions of listeners through the Jocko Pod Cast, his talents are better utilized motivating people to be great Americans. Mats and other menial tasks are left to his much less talented and humble business partner Joe Mannino, who manages Victory MMA, and provides old school customer service to our valued Victory members. And Jocko also ordered no price increases due to Covid. Jiu-Jitsu still at $99 a month or less, with no contracts and no Cancelation fees. Come get after it at Victory MMA and Fitness.

I also want to quote from this 2012 interview with the Franchise Chatter website where Mannino discusses how he came to be in business with Willink:

Franchise Chatter (FC): Can you tell us how Victory MMA and Fitness got its start?

John Mannino, CEO of Victory MMA and Fitness: I owned a 25,000 square foot health club in San Diego for many years. With a health club on every corner, the profit margins weren’t as exciting as they used to be, so I began to explore other options.

I was approached by two 20 year veteran Navy Seals with a proposal to convert the club into a Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) Fitness Center. They are MMA coaches with Jiu Jitsu and grappling backgrounds who understood the MMA market, and saw the explosive growth of the sport and MMA training centers.

Here’s where Mannino’s background gets interesting. According to this report in The San Diego Reader, he was known in New York as Paul Mannino where he “was indicted on drug, firearms and racketeering charges in New York in 1980, was convicted and went to prison. FBI documents suggest that he was a member of the New York Genovese crime family.”

Here’s how The New York Times covered the story in 1979:

Mannino’s New York history became widely known in San Diego because of a whistle-blower lawsuit by a former City of San Diego employee named Scott Kessler. Kessler alleged that “he was fired by the City for cooperating with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the San Diego Police in its investigation of possible corruption of Little Italy mover and shaker Marco Li Mandri and Paul (Joe) Mannino, a convicted felon.”

San Diego authorities declined to move forward with the case and Kessler lost his job with the city.

Ultimately the City of San Diego settled with Kessler for $200,000, but not before it was revealed that someone involved in the case allegedly had some very interesting connections in New York:

Under the Freedom of Information Act, civic activist Mel Shapiro requested more facts on the case from the FBI. He got very little, but what he did get was eye-opening. On the FBI report, the initials used in the title are OC/DI. Former FBI officials tell me that means "organized crime/drug investigation." Below are these initials: "LCN - Genovese." An FBI agent told Shapiro, and former FBI agents told me, that this means that the investigation focused on La Cosa Nostra, or Mafia, and the Genovese family, one of the five major organized crime families in New York City, rivaled in power only by the Gambino family and the Chicago outfit.

The FBI report goes on to state that the investigation was by the bureau and San Diego police, but the San Diego district attorney "declined prosecution of the above-captioned case."

Testimony in the case also revealed some alleged details about Mannino’s behavior toward Mr. Kessler:

Daniel Vile, the police detective who, with the FBI, did a major study on alleged corruption by Little Italy powerhouse Marco Li Mandri and felon Paul (Joe) Mannino, in a deposition April 8 testified that he "vaguely" recalled a Mannino threat against Scott Kessler and his family.

Mannino served his time and has every right to be out in the world doing (legal) business. The Kessler lawsuit featured some ugly allegations against Mannino but nothing that resulted in criminal charges.

Likewise, none of this implicates Jocko Willink in any criminal conduct, but he sure does keep some interesting company. And he’s not the only one.

It’s time to ask some questions

That’s Rudy Silva with the beard two seats over from UFC vet Phil Davis and what appears to be directly across from MMA coach Eric Del Fierro

It shouldn’t be a shock to long-time MMA observers that Dominick Cruz and his coach Eric Del Fierro don’t always keep the best company — the infamous Lloyd Irvin was involved with Del Fierro’s Alliance MMA until 2021.

But it still raises a LOT of questions, like:

• What, if anything did Davis, Del Fierro, and/or Dominick Cruz know about Rudy Silva’s criminal activities?

• What did UFC fighters and coaches get out of associating with Silva?

• What kinds of things did Silva do to ingratiate himself in the BJJ/MMA scene in San Diego?

• Were any fighters involved in any of Silva’s illicit activities?

• Is anyone at the UFC or TKO or Endeavor aware of Rudy Silva’s recent conviction and his long-time association with Jocko Willink’s gym?

• What kind of due diligence did the UFC do on Jocko and ORIGIN before becoming official partners with the apparel company?

• What is Jocko’s relationship with Dana White?

And how is any of this different than people in the fight business being associated with someone like Daniel Kinahan?

The criminal element has often been involved in fight sports — from the old mobs in New York’s boxing scene to the yakuza in PRIDE, but how is THIS story going under the radar?

Is TKO’s UFC really so interested in appealing to military-age young men that they’re willing to look past Jocko Willink’s unsavory associations just to be in business with a huge influencer with Navy Seal credentials?

Nate Wilcox is Editor-in-Chief of The MMA Draw newsletter on Substack.