UFC welterweight Daniel Rodriguez reveals eight months sharing a cell with a cartel leader in Tijuana

Daniel Rodriguez spent eight months inside a Tijuana prison after being arrested for crossing the Mexican border with marijuana, and the UFC welterweight has now detailed the unlikely arrangement that made his time there bearable: sharing a cell with the leader of a cartel.

Rodriguez (20-5) is scheduled to headline UFC Belgrade against Uros Medic (13-3) on August 1, just months after his release. Speaking on The Joe Rogan Experience, he described the conditions he initially faced — crammed into a room with 20 other inmates and plagued by bedbugs — before word spread through the prison that a UFC fighter was among them.

A guard approached Rodriguez with an offer of better accommodation for $7,000. Before he could act on it, he was introduced to the man running things inside: a cartel leader who had secured his own cell complete with a television and a PlayStation. The leader made Rodriguez a counter-offer.

“He’s like, ‘If you want, you could come up here and get accommodated with us. But it’s gonna cost you a little bit of money, $3,000,’” Rodriguez recalled. “I looked at the guard; this guard was trying to charge me $7,000… I was like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’”

On arrival, Rodriguez was given a brand new Nike tracksuit. The dynamic between the two men quickly took on a mutual-protection quality. The cartel boss would invite Rodriguez to walk the yard alongside him, a signal to other inmates that they had each other’s backs.

“I got the impression that I’m his cellmate, I got his back, he got my back,” Rodriguez said. “I really trusted him; that’s one hard thing to do in jail.”

The cartel leader was serving time along with members of his gang for impersonating government officials and raiding drug houses. He also had a boxing background, and used his influence inside the prison to arrange gloves and hold mitts for Rodriguez during training sessions — allowing the fighter to stay in some kind of shape throughout his incarceration.

Rodriguez’s return to the octagon against Medic in Belgrade will be his first fight since the ordeal, and his first opportunity to show whether eight months behind bars has dulled or sharpened the edge of a fighter with a 20-5 professional record.