Gilbert Cosme aka Ricky Banderas aka El Mesias aka Judas Mesias was born in 1975 in Bayamon, Puerto Rico. Cosme has said that the name “Ricky Banderas” came from taking the first name of Ricky Martin and combining it with the last name of Antonio Banderas. He began his wrestling career in the IWA in 1999 but has been training since 1996 and at one point was hired by the WWE to help develop the talent of Hispanic superstars. He has spent most of his wrestling career in the IWA up to this point. He held many titles in the IWA, including the World Heavyweight Championship on five different occasions and has held “lesser” titles fifteen different times and officially left the company in 2006.

Banderas has also wrestled for ECW for two years when ECW was Extreme and wrestled in a dark match in the WWE. After leaving the IWA, he went on to AAA in Mexico where he debuted as Muerte Cibernetica and was involved in a storyline where his character was killed. He was also the second and last champion in the now defunct Wrestling Society X Company that was on MTV. Speaking of lame story lines, on June 17, 2007, Wrestling Society X apparently issued a press release stating that Banderas was stripped of the championship belt for “actions unbecoming a champion”. He was listed as a “person of interest” by the Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania police in the “death” of Vince McMahon when McMahon’s limousine blew up, the week before on Raw. A detective from the police department said that Banderas has worked with explosives before and is how he won the WSX title from Vampiro by rigging a coffin with explosives. Death sure seems to follow Banderas around.

He went back to AAA in Mexico and was billed as Mesias and became the first wrestler to capture the new AAA World Heavyweight Championship. This time while with AAA, he also had a short lived storyline in TNA Impact as the son of James Mitchell and had a feud with Abyss. Hmmm…that storyline sounds a tad familiar. He was released from his TNA contract in March of 2007 but returned on December 2007 for a taping where he cut himself with barbed wire and used barbed wire to choke Abyss out.

Ricky Banderas is a very good technical wrestler but can also play a monster just as well. He is truly an asset to any wrestling company. For more on Ricky Banderas check out the product link on this page and the video links at the bottom of this article.