THE TYRANNY OF WORDS.
Police Chief Bill Bratton is in a world of hurt these days for using three words he probably wishes had never been invented. The words were "tribal," "thugs," and "terrorists." He's also on the record for calling Najee Ali a "nitwit." Ali is an activist who is under investigation for a hit-and-run charge and for identity theft. Something which in fact may qualify him as a nitwit. Early on in his tenure, a heckler yelled at Bratton to control his cops. Bratton responded with, "Control your children."

After every one of these incidents, Bratton has apologized. But the apologies only seem to stoke the fires. If I were Bratton, I'd stop apologizing.

Yesterday, July 11, Bratton, David Cunningham and Andre Birotte (both on the Police Commission) attended a meeting in Leimert Park. Also present were Danny Bakewell, Councilman Bernard Parks and Tony Muhammad from the Nation of Islam. During the meeting, they showed the video of car-thief Stanley Miller being tackled and hit with a flashlight.

It was basically Bratton's turn in the barrel where the assembled citizens and activists vented their anger at the LAPD. Among the many unpleasant things hurled at Bratton was Muhammad's claim that Bratton had the mentality of a white supremicist and that the LAPD was rooted in racism. Muhammad also said the LAPD has, "no moral authority."

First of all, anyone from the Nation of Islam should be dis-invited to any future meetings of any kind. NOI is at heart a racist and separatist organization. The fundamental belief of NOI is that at one time, there was only the black race. A black scientist created a white man in his laboratory, the experiment went sideways, the white creature escaped and went on to procreate the white race that eventually subjugated its creators. In the U.S., you're free to believe any fantasy you want. And the rest of us are also free to believe you're full of shit. NOI also despises interracial marriage. And they reserve a special animosity for Jews. Louis Farrakhan has called Judaism a "gutter religion" and is full of interesting theories about Jewish conspiracies for world domination. You know. The stuff that played so well to packed stadiums in Germany in the 1930s. NOI also has proven ties to fun guys like Lybian psycho Muammar Qaddafi. In 1987 NOI leader Louis Farrakhan introduced Jeff Fort, leader of Chicago's Blackstone Rangers gang, to Qaddafi. As a token of esteem, Qaddafi gave Fort a surface to air missile which Fort smuggled back to Chicago. No doubt it was to help bring "peace" to the streets.

If I were Bratton, I would never appear on the same stage with the Nation of Islam. Their agenda is to separate the races. Their beliefs are the mirror image of the Aryan Nations and other white supremists. They both want a final "purifying" race war and the ultimate devolution of the U.S. into what? Tribal states segrated by race.

And if I were Bratton, I would not apologize for using those three words. I don't believe Bratton has a racist cell in his body. And let's face it, "tribal" "thugs" and "terrorists" is fairly apt. In his book ALWAYS RUNNING, Luis Rodriguez' first gang was called "The Animal Tribe." They not only considered themselves tribal but also less than human. And you guys reading this know as well as anybody the names homies choose for their sets -- Locos, Diablos, Killers, Assassins, Winos, Mob and even Crazy Ass.

As for Thugs, a lot of you guys reading this hang that name on yourselves with a certain machismo pride. Some guys I know would be insulted if you didn't think were thugs. Anybody remember THUG LIFE? And KNIGHTOWL has a romantic ballad with the chorus that goes, "Daddy I'm in love with a thug, don't be mad 'cause I'm in love with a gangster." Cool song by the way. But it's self-descriptive. Nobody hung that on him.

As to terrorists, there's no doubt that doing crimes in the neighborhood terrorizes the innocent and the law-abiding. Why do cops have a hard time finding wits after a homicide or a shooting? Because the wits are afraid. And another word for fear is terror. So yeah. It fits.

The word thing cuts both ways, however. There's plenty of name calling to go around on both sides of the law. There are special police units in this city and all over the state that give themselves macho names -- GRIM REAPERS comes to mind -- that don't look so good. My sense is that they'd be a lot better off if they stuck to simple stuff like SPECIAL ENFORCEMENT UNIT and OPERATION SAFE STREETS. I mean, who could find fault with SAFE STREETS?

I can appreciate the fact that high-risk door-buster units need to create unit esprit and a cool moniker helps build the necessary cohesion. There's no argument that law enforcement is a paramilitary enterprise and trigger pullers and dynamic entry teams need more than a paycheck to get their race face on and do a job that can get them killed. Let's be honest. Most civilians would not put their skins on the line every day for the kind of money cops make. You can make a lot more money in office work and never risk anything more serious than a paper cut. But at the same time, if a cop doesn't want to be called a storm trooper, it might be a good idea to drop the unit names that would imply that kind of mentality.

LIES, DAMNED LIES AND BERNARD PARKS.
Former police chief and current city councilman BERNARD PARKS said in a radio interview that he doesn't believe the LAPD's latest crime stats. According to all official sources, violent crime is down citywide and homicides have leveled off or dropped dramatically in some parts of the city. Parks doesn't buy it. His bizarre rationale is that when a homicide occurs, it affects the whole community. So, according to him, even if homicides are down, a single homicide still impacts the neighborhood. No argument there. But hey BERNIE! Violent crime is still down! And not just in the city, but statewide. Property crimes are rising modestly, but that's probably as much a reflection of the huge spike in the California population.

This isn't the first time PARKS has had doubts about LAPD crime stats. If you remember back to the days when Parks was fighting to keep his job, the crime stats were UP. While Parks couldn't publicly argue against the stats, he had his pal NATE HOLDEN (whose council seat Parks now occupies) go in front of the cameras and defend Parks' record. I remember this clearly because it was one of the most logic defying moments in recent city history.

There were three strikes against Parks at the time. One was that LAPD recruiting had dropped lower than a FALUJAH spider hole. At the time, half the LAPD academy classes had been cancelled. Two, his approval rating among rank and file cops was in the single digits. And three, the crime rate was definitely heading north.

While Parks couldn't come out and dispute the numbers, NATE HOLDEN, the DOODLES WEAVER of the Council who was on his last term, came out in Parks' defense. Holden claimed that Parks was an effective leader. And the drop in recruitment wasn't Parks' fault. It was the result of a superheated economy that was sucking away qualified candidates into the private sector. And furthermore, the crime stats were being fabricated by white cops to make Parks look bad. And even more furthermore, Holden said if the crime rate was going up, it was because of a bad economy and there were no jobs.

The contradictions in Holden's arguments were as evident as an AMBER ALERT. In his Orwellian doublespeak world, the economy was simultaneously good and bad. And Parks was such an effective leader that he couldn't even keep his own staff from printing bogus crime stats.

Parks now has Holden's old council seat. And it looks like he also inherited Holden's Bizarro logic. Clearly Parks doesn't want Chief Bratton to succeed. A steady rise in crime and a few more flashlight incidents would probably work to Park's advantage. Not that he'd want to see more bodies in the street, but frankly a crime spike would add to his "I told you so" political capital.

Look for the Parks rhetoric to get even more loonie as his mayoral campaign starts heating up. We can't wait for Holden to come out of his life-support chamber and go on the stump for Parks. I need the material.

IF SNOOP DOGG CALLS, HANG UP.
On July 6, four parole officers working for the CDC were fired for moonlighting as armed guard for the THA DOGGFATHER. These four goofballs came to the CDC's attention when they were stopped by local LA cops after the cops observed SNOOP's caravan with heavily armed men aboard. The cops found lots and lots of guns and hundreds of rounds of ammo in the vehicles. The armed dudes turned out to be these four parole officers.

This isn't the first time SNOOP used coppers to watch his back. Last year, eight Inglewood Unified School District coppers were also fired for working security for Snoop.

You can't blame Snoop for this. All he did was wave the money. They're the ones who ran after it like MICHAEL MOORE on a pork chop. Ethics, men. Ethics. Society gave these guys a badge, a gun and the powers of arrest. They took an oath. And although it's probably not spelled out anywhere, part of the oath is that you don't go for the easy money when a guy who publicly admits that he flames up an ounce of chronic A DAY calls up and asks you to cover his ass. When you pull this crap, you forfeit all moral authority. And you make it that much harder for the good cops who don't chase the dirty bills.

There's no excuse for this. Thanks to the unlamented GRAY DAVIS, the CDC has one of the sweetest public employee deals in the state. Tons of overtime, full medical and a retirement plan that'll probably bust the state treasury one of these days. And even if they weren't well paid and looked after, getting down in the dirt with guys who they'd probably arrest if they didn't have a few million is still intolerable.

GANGSTERS IN LEAR JETS.
If you accept the definition of a gang as two or more indivduals who conspire to commit crimes for the benefit of a group, then KEN LAY, ANDY FASTOW and the rest of their crimies at ENRON qualify as gangsters. Yeah, I know, a posting about ENRON looks like it may be far afield from the main topic of INTHEHAT, but in reality, it's not. LAY and his scumbag homies probably robbed more money in a week than every gang in LA combined does in a year. While it made me feel good to see LAY cuffed up and doing the perp walk for the cameras, it would have made me feel even better if a couple of bluesuits cut loose on him with MAGLITE flashlights.

And did you notice all that polish and sophistication blow away the second LAY faced the cameras? He started squealing like a 12-year-old-girl at a Britney concert. FASTOW did it and LAY didn't know what was going on and he was just this innocent CEO who was betrayed by his homie. Sounds like any other neighborhood rata trying to lay off blame on somebody else. You can put them in suits and give them a gold pen instead of a GLOCK, but a criminal is still a criminal. MR. LAY, meet DIABLO your new cellmate. You'll be his bitch for the next fifteen years. And don't bother calling for the stafa because they're going to a union meeting.

LIBERAL GUN SAFETY.
I don't generally comment about national politics unles it has some connection to street crime. In a roundabout way, John Kerry holding a shotgun can be folded into the broader national discussion of guns, crime and politics. Click over to the DRUDGE REPORT or the AP news website and you'll see several images of John Kerry at a trap range in Minnesota. In one image, he's addressing the camera. The caption says he's commenting after missing a clay bird. (Surprised?) You'll notice, his finger is on the trigger. This is absolutely verboten. It violates rule number 3 of the four basic rules of gun safety. He is, after all, a combat vet and surely sometime during basic training some hard-assed gunny told him to, "KEEP YOUR GODDAMNED FINGER OFF THE TRIGGER UNTIL YOU'RE READY TO SHOOT, YOU PUSS-BALLED MAGGOT!" But I suppose Kerry doesn't have much call to handle guns. He's got a security detail. The rest of us proles have to muddle through life without Secret Service protection.

A LITTLE BETTER
Okay. I got rid of the time share condo/guard tower image and I think I like this better. It will stay this way at least through the 4th of July weekend. I'm running out of time. There are beers to drink and grilled meat to eat.

JUST SCREWING AROUND
YIKES!
I'm trying to find some templates that will let me add a "COMMENTS" section to INTHEHAT. Well. I've now got a comment section but I don't like this look at all.

It will have to look like this for a while until I can figure out how to change it. That image to the left looks like either a prison guard tower or some dorky time share condo in Boca. Who picks this crap? Oh. It was me.

In the meantime. Feel free to vent and comment.

HOMICIDE UP IN THE VALLEY
Jason Kandel of the DAILY NEWS is fast becoming INTHEHAT's favorite crime reporter. Last week he broke the story on the capture of the infamous drug poobah, "HENRY." Genaro Rodriguez, (Henry) was this mysterious operator who apparently ran a huge smuggling and distribution operation in SOCAL. In the past Rodriguez claimed SAN FER, probably the oldest gang in the Valley. The article states that HENRY's wife EYDI GUERRERO, was murdered execution style during a home invasion robbery and HENRY was shot in the face and left for dead. He survived. The killing is attributed to EME trigger pullers who made off with $400,000 in cash that HENRY had at the house. HENRY at first fingered the shooters, but then changed his mind and is now refusing to cooperate in the investigation of his wife's murder. My sense is, this is just the tip of an iceberg whose large, unseen base is probably rooted in the SHU in PELICAN BAY.

In today's DN, Kandel reports that homicides are up 48% in the Valley, outpacing a very small increase in the rest of the city. The article quotes Valley City Councilman Dennis Zine, a retired LAPD Sergeant: "The problem is, we've got these worthless gang thugs that terrorize neighborhoods. We've got a very small gang unit. There's too many thugs and not enough gang enforcement. They're outnumbered." Hey Dennis, tell us what you really think.

You have to wonder if the murder spike in the Valley is in any way connected to HENRY's roots in SAN FER and the infusion of cash and drugs that his operation was funneling into the Valley. Just an idle hypothesis with no evidence at this point.

ANOTHER INJUNCTION
Today's LA TIMES (7/3/04) reports that City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo just imposed another gang injunction. This time against 18th STREET and the ROLLIN' 60s. The purpose of this one is to prevent 18th STREET from recruiting new members. Godd luck on that one, Rocky. It's a dopey reason because recruitment doesn't happen on the street. The Times quotes their go-to guy, Father Greg Boyle. Boyle says this particular injunction is impossible to enforce and, "It's also not how people join gangs." They don't, "set up a recruitment table at high schools and an announcement goes out: '18th STREET is recruiting today.' " Boyle is absolutely right, of course. If the real purpose of the injunction is to stop recruitment, it's a non-starter. Recruitment happens in back yards and living rooms and it starts years before the kids become visible on the street as gangsters.

Boyle is on record as actually being in favor of injunctions. In the past he said that injunctions can work. In an LA WEEKLY piece he was quoted as saying that "The day after the injunction went into effect, my office was full of kids asking for a job." He described it as the "heat and light" approach. You apply the law enforcement heat and the kids see the light.

While the anti-recruitment aspect of this injunction may be dubious, the section that deals with preventing ROLLIN' 60s homies from driving together into enemy territory may have some value. I'll use the language of the activists on this one. "If it helps save the life of one child, then it's worth it." If it can stop one carload of knuckleheads from shooting up a street corner, let's put it out there and see what happens.

Of course, all injunctions can lead to police abuse. There probably isn't a single law in the penal code that can't be abused. The key to making injunctions work is to use them like a scalpel, not a hand grenade. And the way to wield that scalpel is with what the military calls "actionable intelligence." Street coppers have to know the names, affiliations, crimies, road dogs, drug connections, family connections and personal beefs of the shot callers and crew chiefs of the sets in their jurisdiction. It's a holistic approach that has to analyze every gang and set as a functional sub-culture. That sub-culture is closed and seemingly chaotic, of course and will resist analysis. But it can be teased apart and the pieces laid out for examination.

Despite the nasty rap CRASH got thanks to Rafael Perez and his crimies, the CRASH model can work. Unfortunately, thanks to the consent decree, SEU operators can't stay on that assignment longer than three years. Which means that by the time they get really good at the job, they're shipped out to other assignments. Which means there's no "corporate memory" and it's re-inventing the wheel every time a new copper joins the unit.

It's been my experience that solving gang murders, and in some cases preventing them, is a lot easier when the street cops and detectives know the sets, the players and the set politics as well as they know their own families. The really effective cops do.

One last thing. The LA TIMES piece states that 18th STREET has spread to Mexico and Central America. Just FYI, sets claiming 18th STREET are also in places like SALT LAKE CITY, BOSTON, VANCOUVER and TORONTO. Talk about imperialist hegemonic expansion.

A BLACK DAY FOR GREG BOYLE.
In what has to be a devastating blow to Fr. Greg Boyle's anti-gang work in East LA, one of Homeboy Industries' employees was shot and killed on June 24th while painting over graffiti in the 400 block of Breed Street. As far as I know, this was the first time one of HI's employees has been killed for doing his job. According to the LAPD, the victim, Miguel Gomez was killed at approximately 5:20 AM by several gunshots while Gomez was painting out BREED set graffiti. He was in the company of two other HI employees. Although there was only one shooter, he had two accomplices with him. If we know anything about the way trigger pullers operate, the shooter is probably far, far away right now. Maybe in Mexico. Maybe in the Inland Empire or the High Desert. The other thing we can infer is that more than a few people in that neighborhood already know who the shooter is. It’s all over the set. And the name of the shooter is probably already known to Hollenbeck SEU and homicide detectives. Of course, they're not saying. We'll know when they make the arrest or convince the accomplices to rat out the shooter and post a BOLO.

The way the law is written, you can be charged with murder even if you didn’t pull the trigger. All you had to do was be there. So if I were one of the crimies, I'd be hiding from the cops and the shooter. When you’ve got a murder case with special circumstances hanging over your head, the first one to cut a deal wins. Of course, we’re assuming here that the shooter was local. This may also have been greenlight, in which case, it could have been somebody from another neighborhood putting in work and earning a stripe. We’ll know in time.

Whatever the case, there ain’t a whole lot of pride in shooting a man armed with a paintbrush.

TOOKIE WILLIAMS vs THE EME "TRUCE"
I'm just back from five days in the Midwest and once again I've got a lot of mail and reading to catch up on.

A reader wanted some information on the difference, if there was any, between the Eme-sponsored "truce" and the one that Stanley "Tookie" Williams tried to launch from jail. From what I can tell, were was a big difference. The Eme "truce" was a combination of new rules of engagement and a policy of structural organization. It was the move to vertically integrate the street gangs into the Eme.

Tookie's truce had no such stipulations. Whether he called for a truce out of genuine concern or just a cynical way to get out of his death sentence, the fact is, there were no strings attached. The Eme edict was, "Follow the new rules or we'll kill you." It's the way the Soviet Union maintained control in places like the Balkans. The Soviet edict was, "Stop killing each other, or we'll be happy to do it for you." Tookie's truce had no stick. It was all carrot. It was a straight up appeal to stop the killing.

Should he be believed? The simple truth is, Tookie did not have the power projection of the Eme. The Black Guerilla Family, the Black prison gang, doesn't have the organization, intelligence gathering and information channels of the Eme. They can't call shots from prison because they just don't have the structure. And even if the BGF had an Eme style org chart, I've never seen any proof that Williams is or was affiliated with BGF. So Tookie had no stick to beat the Bloods and Crips into an enforced truce. So in that sense, his appeal to stop the killing has to seen as a genuine appeal, his motives nothwithstanding.

There are other instances, however, most notably with the Gangster Disciples in Chicago, where black truces were nothing more than an Eme style power grab. More on that later.

TOM HAYDEN’S STREET WARS
While I applaud Tom Hayden’s effort to bring public attention to the gang culture in his new book, STREET WARS, I’ve got some problems with a lot of what he cites as "fact" and "history" and even bigger problems with some of his baffling conclusions.

Hayden has been at the forefront of a lot of radical movements, most notably his opposition to the war in Viet Nam. In his zeal to end the war, he traveled to North Viet Nam as the bullets were flying and appeared in North Vietnamese radio making statements about America that some have characterized as treasonous. His wife, Jane Fonda, allowed herself to be photographed laughing and smiling as she sat in a VC anti-aircraft gun pointed skywards. That famous picture which millions of American citizens and soldiers found revolting forever marked her in the public consciousness as HANOI JANE.

Using the millions that Fonda made in her exercise tapes, Hayden launched a political career that eventually landed him in the California State Senate.

I don’t know as much as I should about Hayden or Fonda, but I do know a whole lot about LA street gangs. So when I first heard of his gang book project a year ago, I was keenly interested to read his take. Hayden has been teaching a course about the gang culture at Occidental College while researching the book and, given the luxury of ample research time and the human resources his vast wealth can afford, I was looking forward to a lot of fresh information and insights. As my readers know, I run inthehat as a part timer. And I can only fantasize about having the sort of money and time that Hayden can afford to spend on this subject.

So when the book showed up in the mail from Amazon, I was primed for a great read and new info. Man, was I disappointed.

Up front, Hayden tells us that "This book is about what I call inner-city peacemakers." Fair enough. But there’s precious little in it about peacemakers. When he comes to the actual brokering of a peace treaty (between Santa Monica and Culver City), he drops the ball. He gets the two factions in his office, brings in Blinky Rodriguez to act as mediator, and then walks out and closes the door to let them work it out alone. The actual mechanics of brokering a truce is left completely unexamined. The LA Times review of Street Wars cites the same flaw. The reviewer was as puzzled as I am. That should have been the heart of the book. How do you get groups who have been shooting each other for decades to drop the "get even?" Hayden doesn't outline or even suggest a plan except to provide "public sector jobs" for dropout gang members. What happened in that meeting? How do you break the cycle? If it works, put in the book so others can replicate it. Sorry kids, no game plan available from Hayden.

There are huge problems with this book beyond that. He gets stuff factually wrong. For instance, he states that "under gang injunctions, there is no right to a lawyer for the indigent." This is false. The indigent always have rights to a lawyer. In fact, at a time when the LA County DA’s office has a hiring freeze and the County closed 27 courts and laid off 250 staffers, the Public Defender’s office has had one staff loss (due to attrition and not a lay off) and the budget has remained the same. In addition, elsewhere in the book he states that indigent defendants don’t have government-paid investigators until the Federal appellate process. This is also false. In cases of sufficient gravity like murder or ADW, indigents can get free investigators right at the County level during the original court case. They don’t have to wait for the federal appeals process to qualify for an investigator.

And there are countless large and small errors, either of omission or worse. The one that really got me scratching my head was his take on the EME’s policy initiative of vertical integration that started in the early 90s.

One of Hayden’s peacemakers, Manny Lares from MS (Mara Salvatrucha) attended the famous EME come-to-Jesus meetings in September 1993 in Elysian Park organized by Ernesto "Chuco" Castro. First of all, Hayden only acknowledges that single meeting in September. The fact is, Chuco organized numerous meetings. Hayden kind of fudges the sequence of events and the purpose of the meetings.

According to Hayden, the Eme called the meetings of street gang representatives to lay down the law about ending drive-by shootings. Which is correct. But that was only one of the items on that Eme policy initiative. There were others. First off, the law was "no more drive-bys." But that didn’t mean no more killings. It was not a truce of any kind. It was the new rules of engagement. The full story was that killings, whether personal or business related, were now to be done at close range and face to face. "Walk-ups," in the language of gangs. In Hayden’s language, Chuco was sent by the EME to "manage the widening war." The key word here is "manage," not "stop."

The rest of the items on the Eme agenda Hayden covers off by quoting Lares who simply says that Chuco Castro was talking, "a lot of high-powered bullshit." Well the "bullshit" was this. Chuco told the assembled gangsters that from that day on, all gangs in Southern California had to become Surenos, which meant swearing allegiance to the Eme. Furthermore, all gangs had to pay tribute (street taxes) to Eme shot callers in their neighborhoods. The Eme wanted complete vertical integration, from the street all the way up to the SHU in Pelican Bay. It was a move to consolidate power. Hayden mentions none of this. And in one instance, distorts the purpose of the Eme meetings beyond recognition.

Hayden says that the Eme’s demand that the MS cough up $5000 to them in order to take the greenlight off MS was a "moment of inclusion." When somebody asks you to pay up or be killed, it’s not an opportunity for "inclusion," whatever that is. It’s pure extortion. This is the way Hayden describes extortion. "Lifting the greenlight meant that the first tentative ‘moment of inclusion’ (his quotes) was allowed by Mexican gangs toward their rivals among Salvadoran immigrants in places like Pico-Union." How much more wrong could Hayden get it? He makes it sound like an outreach program. It was pure and simple extortion. Pay up or get wasted.

A lot of neighborhoods resisted, including the MS. Maravilla was a long-time hold out as was Lowell, Opal and TRGs. They remained "always verde," always green and subject to "enforcement" by any Sureno that wanted to put in work and earn a stripe. Later some Maravilla sets were taken off the hit list because they became Surenos and ditufully paid their tribute.

That resistance to taxation and allegiance led to more violence, not less, because there was now an official Eme policy and failure to obey meant open season.

Hayden’s characterization of the meeting is, "The message of the day was to stop the violence, which Manny’s neighborhood already had begun to do." Wrong again, the message of the day was 1) walk ups, 2) allegiance to Eme, 3) taxation. In fact, if Hayden had done his homework, he would know that in an FBI surveillance tape, Dan "Black Dan" Barella said succinctly. "If you want to down them, down them. All I’m saying is don’t drive by." Barella and a lot of other Carnals met almost weekly with Ernie Castro in a motel in Rosemead. Castro's edicts to the street gangs came right out of these policy meetings with the Big Homies.

Hayden just barely touches on this change in the rules of engagement. "If there was business to take care of, it would follow the older tradition of one-on-one battles." Which is correct but also contradicts his earlier statement that the "message of the day was to stop the violence." Has anybody proof read this book?

In November of 1993, Chuco Castro was arrested for a parole violation that would have landed him in Federal prison for life. This is Hayden’s description of the event. "In November 1993, shortly after the Elysian Park gathering, police raided Chuco’s Alhambra home, shovels in hand, and dug up guns buried beneath the place. Perhaps the guns were his, perhaps not, but Chuco was in big trouble as an ex-con, drug addict, and active member of La Eme since 1983."

There’s some factual errors here and a thorough lack of research into the crucial event that precipitated the biggest Federal RICO case in LA history against the Eme. First of all, the cops didn’t need shovels to find the guns. The guns, along with dope, wilas, greenlight lists and thousands of dollars in cash were stashed in a cement-lined bunker under a trap door in Castro’s bedroom closet. The raid cops never had shovels. And Hayden never mentions the dope, documents and cash. And indeed the guns were Chuco’s. One of the weapons, a full-auto MAC 10, was confiscated by CHUCO at one of the Elysian Park meetings from an ARMENIAN POWER shot caller in attendance. CHUCO’s palace guard disarmed everybody before they went into the park. He didn't want any objections to taxation and allegiance by means of bullets directed at the speaker. CHUCO actually gangster-slapped the AP homie after the MAC 10 was confiscated. The cops know all this because they were there recording everything that happened. Video footage of the Elysian Park meeting showed up on local LA TV soon after. And, contrary to Hayden’s claim that information about Chuco is "shrouded in mystery," the surveillance tapes were entered into evidence at the RICO trial and are available to any citizen from the Federal Court in downtown LA for the sum of $20. It’s public information.

Worse yet, Hayden is implying that the cops planted the guns in Chuco’s house. I interviewed the cops on that raid. I’ve seen the property report of the items confiscated. I’ve seen the pictures. Again, all part of the discovery evidence used in the trial and also public information. Throwing mud at cops when it’s undeserved is just sleazy. And just to round out the picture, most of the cops on that raid were Hispanic, and a lot of them grew up in the same neighborhoods as the homies they arrest. One of those cops that Hayden implicitly accuses of planting evidence, has been a foster father to 17 at-risk kids plucked from abusive gang families. He took them into his home and with the help of his wife and natural children, steered them away from the gang life that was ready to destroy them. You know, the typical evil cop who only wants to slam kids in prison.

Hayden’s book is so chock full of this kind of misinformation, incomplete information, factual mistakes and sleazy implications that it would take a whole book to set him straight. I’ll probably post more about this book, but in general, STREET WARS does a real disservice to the reader, the cops, the genuine peacekeepers and ultimately, to the very people Hayden professes to care about, the kids catching bullets.

The gang culture is operating at full throttle. Kids -- black, brown, white, asian, innocent and not so -- are dying every day, not just in LA but all over the country. It has to stop. Everybody agrees on that. Especially the young people on the barrel end of the gun.

Gangsters aren’t born evil. They’re manufactured. The big question is by whom, why and how do we stop it. To fix the problem, let’s at least start with not distorting history. Laying out conspiracy theories, falsehoods and bogus accusations to advance a political agenda, as Hayden clearly does, should qualify as its own crime.

OXNARD OKAYS THE INJUNCTION
Just before I left for the wilds of Utah, the DA in Oxnard was fighting to have a gang injunction imposed against the COLONIA CHIQUES. There was some doubt it would happen. Going through my backlog of clippings and downloads, apparently the injunction was imposed and coppers started handing out copies to individual gang members. As of June 9, seven individuals have been given copies of the injunction that bars them from gathering in public within a specified "safety zone." To be enforced, a copy of the injunction has to be served to individuals and they have to sign for it so there's proof they've been informed. As a result, a lot of CCs are making themselves scarce. If you can't find them, you can't serve them.

Cops and the DA claim that by individuals disappearing, the injunction is already having a positive effect by getting active members off the streets, even if it isn't served to everyone on the list. Injunction violators can face a $1000 fine and 6 months in county.

This injunction is temporary, but the DA will appear before a judge in August to try to make it permanent. We'll see how it works out.

In the past, the LAPD claims success when they applied injunctions to Blythe Street, 18th Street and other neighborhoods. Some people, most notably civil libertarians, activists and gang advocates, claim that injunctions infringe on civil rights. One objection is that an injunction makes it illegal for cousins or relatives to even hang out in a bar if they're members of the same neighborhood. Or that an ex-banger doing gang intervention work is technically breaking the law by going around the 'hood trying to talk sense to the homies from his former set. These are valid points.

Interestingly, though, Father Greg Boyle, who's been a long-time opponent to injunctions had a change of heart some time back. When Chief Bratton asked for and got an injunction covering an East LA neighborhood, Boyle blessed it as a good thing. He said the day after the injunction was issued, his office was filled with homies asking for jobs and claiming to quit the set. My sense is that these guys weren't so much "scared" into dropping out but actually relieved to have a way out without a lot of negative set politics and loss of pride. As in, "I can't kick it with you no more because I can't afford to go to jail." It's an easy back door out and sort of a graceful exit. Let's face it. If you're banging for any amount of time, the anxiety, fear, and constantly having to prove how down you are gets fucking old. Especially when you see the hardest, downest, illest, brick-hard pelons end up in prison, dead or in a wheelchair for life. If I've heard this from one guy, I've heard it from a hundred. It's a shit life and if they see an injunction as a semi-honorable way out, then it may be a worthwhile tool. Even if it crunches right up against Constitutional rights.

BACK FROM THE ROAD
No, I haven't been abducted by aliens. Thanks for all the concerned emails from regular readers. I'm fine and back in LA after almost two weeks of traveling around the Southwest. I've been working on non-gang related projects and I can see by the emails that I've got a lot of catching up to do. I especially appreciate the kind words from my European readers. And I don't mean just you Brits. I thank the European educational system for creating multi-lingual, interested readers from Denmark, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland and Romania. Oddly, I've yet to hear from a French or German reader.

From the emails, I gather that while every Euro knows about the Bloods and Crips, there's very little coverage of Hispanic street gangs and prison gangs like the EME, NUESTRA FAMILIA, FRESNO BULLDOGS and white prison gangs like the NAZI LOW RIDERS and ARYAN BROTHERHOOD. I suspect the popularity of black gangster rap is probably the main reason for the high level of awareness of black gangs. As I mentioned in the past, Hispanic gangster rap has yet to make it into the public consciousness here in the U.S. so it stands to reason it hasn't made it to Europe. Maybe KNIGHTOWL and LIL CUETE should organize a European tour and put SURENO RAP on the European cultural landscape.

Stay tuned. As soon as I get a chance to go through some of the electronic and paper mail, I'll be back shortly with some fresh posts.

RETURN WITH US NOW TO SLEEPY LAGOON
If you fancy yourself a gang scholar or historian of street crime and criminal organizations, the Sleepy Lagoon murder case looms large as a defining moment in the creation of the gang culture as we know it. If you go up to the 17th Floor of the Criminal Courts Building, the floor where most of the DAs toil, along with the photo murals of the Black Dahlia case, Charles Manson, and the Keating Savings and Loan case, you'll also see images of the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial.

A lot of disturbing realities arose from that murder prosecution. One was the less that wonderful police work done by the LAPD. It was a time in American history before Miranda rights, free public defenders and when cops used their fists to "encourage" suspects to confess.

The other disturbing thing LA citizens learned from the trial coverage was the budding gang culture.

The combination of cops behaving in an extra-judicial manner and street gangs behaving in their usual anti-social ways makes it almost impossible for a modern researcher to figure out exactly what happened the night of August 1, 1942 and who killed JOSE DIAZ. The investigation and court proceedings were anything but orderly by modern standards. Add to that mix the social activists and defense lawyers (in some cases they were one and the same) who blamed the murder on everyone from William Randolph Hearst, to Mexican Sinarquists and Adolf Hitler and what you’re left with is an impenetrable stew of facts, conjecture and hare-brained opinions. Remember, the case ran from August 1942 until early 1943. At the time, given the fear of Japanese gas attacks, real German saboteurs, racist Isolationists, openly Communist organizations with their own post-war agenda, war profiteers, hoarders and every color of the political spectrum screaming for attention, people were seeing conspiracies inside every linen closet.

While activists and social commentators were busy looking for the "big" reasons behind the murder of Jose Diaz and fans of Uncle Joe Stalin were looking for the underlying "American imperialist pathology" to explain the actions of what ultimately was acknowledged as a 38th Street gang rumble, nobody at the time seemed to notice that the gang culture had arrived. And it wasn’t going away.

Back then, Hispanic gangsters were called Pachucos. And in contrast to today’s shave-headed, tattooed street soldiers, the Pachuco gangsters opted for the flashy Zoo Suit as their outward symbol of affiliation.

Granted, not everybody who wore a Zoot was a criminal. Lots of jazz musicians, including Cab Calloway wore the Zoot as a hipster’s icon. So did a lot of jazz fans. Same things goes today, of course. Not everybody with a shaved head and wife-beater T-shirt is a gangster.


Only through the benefit of hindsight do we see that the people who first rang the alarm about organized street gangs were correct in their assessment. And the alarm ringers weren’t just cops. A lot of them were Hispanic social organizations that viewed Hispanic street gangs as a threat to the Hispanic community’s progress towards assimilation.


It’s hard to imagine, but at the time, activists, reformers and others refused to acknowledge these youth groups as gangs. They actively resisted the term. People like Guy Endore and Carey MacWilliams described the young people in the neighborhoods as "frolicsome youth," "high-spirited youngsters," "downy-cheeked youngsters," and they described the ongoing gang fights as "nights of revelry." Endore never budged from his opinion even after events like the 1942 murder of Frank Torres from Clanton Street. Three suspects from a rival neighborhood shot him outside the LA Coliseum after an all-city track meet. A riot broke out between neighborhoods and while Torres was the only fatality, a lot of heads were broken before cops restored order. Clanton, as we know, is still an active gang with a lot of sets. The term "frolicsome" and murder are rarely uttered in the same breath.

By the time of Diaz’ homicide, the reality of "neighborhoods" and neighborhood warfare was already well-established. The people who were accused of killing Jose Diaz called themselves 38th Street and sometimes as the P-38s, in honor of the twin-engined fighter aircraft that was wreaking havoc in the skies over Germany and the Pacific. At the time of Diaz’ killing, 38th Street was already feuding with Downey. 38th Street is still around today. Downey morphed into a number of different neighborhoods.

The neighborhoods that went to war against the servicemen during the downtown Zoot Suit riots of 1943 were Alpine Street, Temple Street, 8th Street and Boyle Heights. Temple, 8th Street and Boyle Heights are still around. I have no information if Alpine is still around or has morphed into some other neighborhood.

The big tantalizing question, of course, is what, if anything could have been done back then to blunt the growth of gangs. As we know, in the sixty odd years since the Jose Diaz homicide, thousands of young hispanics have joined him in early graves. And that handful of original neighborhoods has grown into hundreds of quarrelsome, Balkanized tribes of warring factions. While there’s plenty of blame to through around, no one has ever come up with a solution. Even the Eme’s Draconian policy initiatives of a creating a united Sureno nation failed miserably. As did the failed attempt at creating the Generation of United Nortenos in Norcal.

If history is anything to go by, it would appear that intra- and inter-gang warfare is only going to get worse. If you were to plot the growth and body count of gangs from 1942 to the present, the arrows on the chart would point straight up like a triple diamond ski slope. And I don’t see anything on the radar that’s going to change the upward progress

HIGH DESERT GANGSTERS

If you’ve been following the local crime news lately, you’ve probably noticed that Oxnard and the Antelope Valley are experiencing a big spike in gang-related crimes, shootings and murders. Oxnard LE is alarmed enough by the spike that the DA wants to file a gang injunction against the COLONIA CHIQUES, an Oxnard gang. This is a homegrown neighborhood that’s been around for years.

Further inland in the Antelope Valley, there’s an interesting development taking place. A 19-year-old, AARON MATHEU, just pleaded no contest to an attempt murder charge. He was already serving 25 to life on a carjacking beef and the nine years will be served concurrently. One of his crimies, JUAN RODRIGUEZ, was just hit with an attempt murder filing for a drive-by shooting.

BYRON MATHEU, older brother to AARON, is currently at large but wanted for allegedly committing a murder in FEBRUARY.

These three suspects wouldn’t merit a mention except that they’re all members of VNE (VARRIO NEUVO ESTRADA), a really deep EAST LA GANG that goes back generations. Gang fans will probably remember that ERNIE "CHUCO" CASTRO came out of VNE. And VNE has been trying to live that down since 1995 when CASTRO became INFORMANT numero uno in the first of three big FEDERAL RICO cases. CASTRO is living under an assumed identity in parts unknown.

If you’re reading this from out of town, the geography means nothing to you. Locals, however, know that the ANTELOPE VALLEY is way out there in the high desert. It’s the home of the B2 bomber, Edwards Air Force Base and a lot of aerospace contractors. Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier over the Valley in 1947. So what are homies who claim VNE doing way out there in the puckerbrush far from their ELA homeland? For that matter, you can also ask what are Crips, Bloods, El Sereno, Cuatro Flats, Avenues and other traditional big city gangs doing out there? The answer seems to be SECTION 8 housing.

For those who aren’t familiar with Section 8 housing, this is a government program where poor families pay a maximum of 30% of their household income for rent and the government covers the rest.

What’s happening with the gang spike in the Antelope Valley is a result of the end of the Cold War. During the height of defense spending, the Antelope Valley was the fastest growing community in the country. The influx of highly paid engineers and technicians working on Pentagon-financed galactic hot rods created a demand for upscale housing which the private sector was all too ready to provide. Two story tract housing with three car garages went up faster than you can say "Joint Strike Fighter."

Just when the housing market reached the saturation point, the Soviet Union took the air out of the bubble and decided to conveniently implode. Great news for the Free World. Bad news for the defense business and its employees.

Mass lay offs in the Valley were quickly followed by an exodus of engineers and space techs and that left a lot of really nice houses suddenly empty. Developers walked away from half finished communities, a lot of them still in the framing stage. What was left were brand new, centrally air-conditioned ghost towns.

In an effort to get out from under, developers went looking for buyers or renters. In steps the government with Section 8 vouchers. Anybody in the County who qualified for Section 8 was eligible to move to the recently vacated ghost towns. While they weren’t getting market value, developers were happy to have any kind of income.

If you’re a mother with six kids living in a two bedroom rat hole in Long Beach, East LA, South Central or Pacoima, the idea of 2000 square feet, brand new everything, front and back yards and a three car garage sounds like paradise. And it’s especially tempting if you can take your kids out of a risky, gang-oriented environment. The poor moved out by the hundreds and then the thousands.

But as history has shown, you can take the kid out of the neighborhood, but you often can’t take the neighborhood out of the kid. Unfortunately, along with the furniture and Nintendo games, the gang culture was also packed into the U-Hauls and car trunks. The tattoos and attitudes don’t fall away when you cross the LA City line. Mom wanted a fresh start someplace better, but the kids brought it all with them.

From a purely sociological point of view, an interesting dynamic is taking place amidst the cactus and Russian Thistle of the AV. Old rivalries haven’t been transplanted. At least not yet. You’ve got Bloods and Crips living in a state of détente on the same block. Same thing with the Hispanic gangs. Some LEOs I’ve spoken to think that the reason old rivalries aren’t resurrected is that gangs lack the critical mass of the old hoods. The individuals are too scattered to really form an active neighborhood. And a lot of the homies are still fairly young and inexperienced. For instance, the carjacking that sent AARON MATHEU to jail for 25 to life was a training mission conducted under the tutelage of MARIO GARCIA, a VNE veterano.

The other interesting phenomenon is that Valley drug dealers have yet to feel the sting of the EME’s tax collectors. One LEO told me the Valley is still a 100% tax-free zone and in terms of drug dealing, it’s a Wild West of entrepreneurs who work independently and outside the long reach of the Big Homies and shot callers from the old neighborhood. This may change in time, but for now, it’s every pusher for himself. A DA told me he recently filed on a single mother of six and an ELA transplant, for dealing meth out of her kitchen. She employed runners to go out and solicit and the customers would come to the house to buy. She didn’t pay taxes to anybody. An operation of this size anywhere in East LA would certainly draw the attention of the Homies and you can bet your last rock she would we kicking up or get put out of business.

Local LE is concerned that over time, the critical mass will be reached. Right now, LE is seeing active recruitment. The gangs are in the building stage. Veteranos are checking out the local talent, building a foundation out of the best from the farm team and probably in time, they’ll ramp up to start claiming neighborhoods. No one can tell, of course, if old allegiances hold or new neighborhoods develop their own identity. We’ll know first from the tags. If we start seeing things like VNE-AV (VARRIO NEUVO ESTRADA – ANTELOPE VALLEY) or VNE-PD (VARRIO NUEVO ESTRADA-PALMDALE) then we’ll have the start of a trans-county structure. If the new gangsters reject the old neighborhoods and their roots then there may be trouble in the colonies. In either case, the Antelope Valley will definitely experience some interesting times in the next decade.

WHAT IS BALLISTICS EVIDENCE?
I got some emails regarding ballistics evidence in reponse to my previous blog on the LAT's story about the LAPD crime lab. One of the readers wanted to know if gun "fingerprinting" that he'd read about was as unique as human fingerprints. Another asked a more basic question about what exactly a crime tech does to identify a shell casing or spent projectile.

While a complete answer could fill a book, I'll address both as briefly as possible.

First off, a loaded round consists of four components: the projectile, the shell casing, the powder charge and the primer that ignites the powder. The projectile is found either in the victim, buried in a car, wall or whattever, and the powder is completely consumed in firing. What's left for analysis is the casing and the primer. The projectile is a separate discussion I'll leave for another time. Right now we're talking about shell casing analysis.

There are two basics types of handguns. Semi-autos and revolvers. When a semi-auto is fired, the slide ejects the spent round (shell casing) and automatically feeds a fresh round into the chamber. A revolver on the other hand, retains the spent shell casing in the cylinder. If a revolver is fired at a crime scene, chances are, there will be no spent shell casings on the ground. That is, unless it was a long firefight and the combatant(s) shot dry and then reloaded. This is highly unusual.

Semi-autos are used way more frequently and the spent shell casings are what's under all those paper tents you see on TV at crime scenes.

When a round is fired, the shell casing is subjected to a number of forces that leave scratch marks on its surface. The shell casing is generally made of brass, a material that's softer than the steel of the gun. Because it's softer, it's imprinted with the tool marks and other marks unique to the gun. Think of it as pushing modeling clay into a mold and lifting out the clay. What you have on the clay is the imprint of the mold.

After firing, the shell casing has the firing pin mark on the primer, the mark of the gun's extractor on the rim of the shell casing, scratch marks from the chamber of the gun and imprints of the gun's breechface on the base of the shell casing. These imprints and scratches are the result of the tool marks put on the gun during the manufacturing process. An analyst can determine with a high degree of accuracy if shell casings from different crimes all came from the same gun. The one caveat is that the gun has not been altered between crimes.

Unless you're dealing with a fairly sophisticated criminal, guns are rarely altered. However, it's not unheard of. I've sat in enough court trials where informants have admitted to receiving guns used in a crime and altered them before the next use.

How is that done? It's not that hard. The firing pin and extractor can be easily replaced. Even though these new parts are the same brand as the original, the tool marks are probably different enough to change the "fingerprint" of the firing pin and extractor. As to the chamber, which is part of the barrel, that too can be replaced or altered. Like the chamber, the breechface can also be altered with nothing more sophisticated that sandpaper and elbow grease. If you want to get fancy, you can by a $40 Dremel tool and a polishing stone attachment and completely change the "fingerprint" of the breechface.

So to answer the two readers, shell casings can be analyzed and traced back to a specific gun thanks to the toolmarks. If, that is, the gun hasn't been altered as I outlined. And this speaks directly to the second question about uniqueness of gun "prints." Gun fingerprints, unlike human prints, can change either through use of the gun (all that rubbing and pressure will in time have an effect on the toolmarks) or deliberately altered.

And that leads to my personal opinion on the proposed nationwide "printing" of all guns prior to sale. Lawmakers wanted to create a nationwide database of gun prints cross-referenced with the serial number of the gun and the name of the purchaser. It's ultimately an exercise that can be rendered pointless by the use of sandpaper and/or replacement parts. Gun prints are not permanent and that whole database will amount to nothing more than an elaborate and expensive collection of useless scratches.

LEOVY REDEEMS HERSELF
The last Jill Leovy gang piece I read in the LAT gave me vertigo. It read like it was edited through a shredder. You can read my comments in the archives, but basically it was about a couple of guns that were used in a bunch of shootings and the shootings may or may not have been done by the same "cell of shooters" or different groups of people and then the people were arrested and the guns confiscated but the shootings continued - - - and that's when I felt like Jimmy Stewart chasing Kim Novak up the bell tower.

Her latest (5/5/04) doesn't move the confuso-meter needle at all. It partially addresses an issue that's been hamstringing detectives for years -- the glacially slow processing of ballistics evidence by the LAPD crime lab. Years ago, a D2 told me he once waited nine months to get a lab report on a murder weapon.

Chief Bratton and the city council have addressed the problems with the crime lab and help is on the way. But in the meantime, detectives patiently wait and hope their wits and informants don't die of old age before the lab results come back.

Leovy's article reported on the lab's new WALK-IN-WEDNESDAY policy. Every Wednesday, detectives from all over the city can bring in evidence and get nearly instantaneous service. This to short circuit a process that currently has a backlog of 2400 firearms tests. Another detective told me that cases are literally dying on the vine thanks to the backlog. Unlike TV shows, investigators don't get lab results back after the next commercial break. They get them at the next ice age. This is the reality of LA style crime-fighting.

Don't start blaming government workers, though. The lab techs are not skateboarding through the halls and watching TV on city time. There just aren't enough of them. And the equipment is old. And the pay isn't very good. An entry level gun tech gets paid around $27,000 a year. And you need a minimum of a BS to qualify for that breathtaking salary. Imagine the recruiting pitch. "The pay sucks, the equipment you'll be using was already old in the first season of Adam-12 and you'll have lots and lots of unpaid overtime. Sign right here."

As Leovy relates in her article, WALK-IN-WEDNESDAY is already producing results. Read it to find out how. But imagine what the positive fallout might be if fast lab results were the rule rather than a once a week exception.

The other part of her article profiles the crime lab's ace shell casing analyst, RICHARD SMITH. Smith, a sworn officer, sort of fell into the job after 11 years on the street. And he discovered he was terrific at analyzing spent brass. He's now considered one of the best in the country.

Unlike her "cell of shooters" article, this one didn't make the room spin.

BOOK NOTES
I recently read "THE RISE AND FALL OF THE NUESTRA FAMILIA" written by Nina Fuentes. While there are numerous problems with the book, there's a lot of information an interested reader will find useful. Most of the gang books on the market generally fall into one of two categories -- the confessional and the academic. Examples of the confessional are BLOOD IN, BLOOD OUT by ART BLAJOS, MONSTER by Cody Scott, MY BLOODY LIFE by REYMUNDO SANCHEZ and others. These personal histories give you insight into one person's experience and peripherally into the gang culture. They're good for context but don't provide the reader with the broad scale of the gang phenomenon or the organization and policies of criminals organizations like the NF or the EME.

The academic books, most notably those written by JAMES DIEGO VIGIL, are just that. Academic to the point of boredom. Riddled with sociology department jargon, they create the MEGO effect -- MY EYES GLAZE OVER. The average reader will get precious little understanding of gang culture or the motivations of the players. In the world of the sociologist, individuals are viewed with the same detachment that a doctor looks at blood cells -- biological units with no internal dialogue, motivation, passion, lust, love or revenge. They act merely in response to their environment. While it looks neat and tidy to the sociologist, this approach bears little resemblance to reality. If individuals are nothing more than responses to stimuli, how do you explain the fact that a lot of cops grew up in the same neighborhoods and even in the same families as gangsters. According to the socio-economic models of the academics, there would be no cops coming out of the same environment that produces gangsters. It also doesn't explain the even stranger phenomenon of the upper-middle-class Asian gangsters who carry A averages, receive BMWs the minute they turn sixteen and are as overprivileged as any Beverly Hills teenager.

The confessionals written by reformed gangsters are sometimes useful, sometimes self-serving and almost always end up glorifying, intentionally or otherwise, the life they left behind.

In contrast to these two genres, Feuntes' book is written by a non-academic and an outsider. She does a great job of identifying invididuals and articulating their crimes and prison experiences. As the title implies, the people she writes about are all NORTENOS, NF members, NUESTRA RAZA members or familianos in street gangs. The core of the book is the personal history of BOB GRATTON, an Anglo who worked himself up into the NF ranks and had the keys to MODESTO, CA. Through him, we see the structure and organization of the NF, the members of LA MESA (the NF board of directors) and how the NF projects power to the streets. GRATTON eventually dropped out and became an FBI informant in exchange for a reduced sentence. GRATTON also went on to create TAG, TEACHING ABOUT GANGS, a gang intervention and suppression organization that works closely with law enforcement.

There are side roads in the book that explore the decades-long fight with the EME and the failed policy initiative that created and then disbanded the Nuestra Raza, a cover organization that was supposed to keep the heat away from the NF. This is all good historical stuff that should be mandatory reading for anybody who wants to be more than casually familiar with the gang culture.

The major flaws of the book have to do with Fuentes' limitations as a writer. The prose is clunky, cliche-ridden and there's precious little analysis. She just lays out a mountain of facts. Sometimes all those names and shootings become a giant blur and you have to go back and figure out what exactly happened. The most tedious parts of the book are the court documents reproduced in their entirety. This stuff is interesting only if you're a fan of legal speak. The book could do without it. It would have been more useful if Fuentes had spent some time analyzing the documents and give the reader a capsule summary. Court documents are part of a writer's research, not part of the narrative. On the other hand, she reproduces the NF CHARTER and a number of WILAS. These give you a real sense of the organization and the amount of time and effort the NF spends on creating a self-sustaining structure that, at least theoretically, should function effectively even if the shot callers and top homies are taken out of power.

Her failure to go beyond the facts has the ultimate effect of turning all the people she talks about into cardboard cutouts. We don't see the individuals, just the shooting and scheming. While that's enlightening to some degree, it really leaves you wanting to know more. The other topic that leaves you wanting more is OPERATION BLACK WIDOW. This was the operation launched by an FBI, DOJ and local law enforcement in NORCAL. Knowing how extensive that operation was, how little it cost in actual dollars and manpower and how many gangsters it took off the street, OBW is a subject that deserves an entire book to itself.

Despite the flaws, this is must-have book for anyone who wants to know more about the NF and California's gang culture. With a 2003 copyright, the information is still fresh and relevant. You can get the book for $25 from www.knowgangs.com.

THIRTEEN IS THE MAGIC NUMBER
In response to my last posting about prison comms between inmates and the number thirteen, a very astute reader asked if there was any connection to the X3 tag she's observed around LA. There is.

The X in X3 is the roman number 10. So X and 3 add up to 13. She further asked if the letters that precede X3 is the actual gang name. And once again she's right.

Generally speaking there are two broad categories of tags. There are those done by tagging crews who may or may not yet be affiliated with a gang. They'll generally have the name of the crew on top and the monikers of the individual crew members stacked below that. On occasion, you might see a tagging crew that also affixes the 13 or X3 suffix to their crew name. This may be an indication of allegiance to an actual gang who in turn is a SURENO gang. You may also find SUR or SUR13 added to the gang name.

A pure gang tag will follow roughly the same protocol -- gang name on top, maybe the 13 or SUR suffix and then the names of the gang members. However, by the time individuals are actually jumped in, they're well-known enough by law enforcement that they don't need or want to advertise their gang association. That's just common sense. Why give the cops another piece of evidence that you're a banger. So you'll just see the the gang name and sometimes the X3 or 13.

For instance, the reader noticed a CPAX3 on a pedestrian overpass to the beach in Santa Monica and wondered what it meant. She said it had no other names with it. If I'm not mistaken, CPA is CANOGA PARK ALABAMA and X3 of course, is 13. Santa Monica is a long, long way from CANOGA PARK. I don't think whoever put it there is claiming Santa Monica for CPA. Probably a youngster just screwing around.

Some gangs, of course, are resistance gangs also known as tax-free gangs. They're locked in eternal combat with Eme over taxation and will never put a 13 suffix on their name. More later.

LAT GETS IT RIGHT. AGAIN.
I hope this becomes a habit with the LAT. In today's edition (4/5/04) staff writer RICHARD FAUSSET had a great story on gang communication inside the jail system. He focused mainly on birthday cards sent to inmates by their homies in the same prison and went into considerable detail about how the information in the B-DAY cards (monikers and gang names) help CDC gang officers track gang affiliations and individual's standing in the gangs. Great stuff. Props to Fausset and the editor who assigned him the story. READ it online.

I had a long conversation about this very topic with a CDC gang coordinator about a year ago. At the time, this lieutenant asked that I not run anything about the cards because he feared public knowledge might put a stop to the greeting cards and deprive him of a valuable source of gang information. So I obliged. Now that the cat's out of the bag, I guess I can't get blamed if the cards stop. Which they probably won't.

Here's some specifics and background on how the CDC operates their gang intelligence system. The LAT didn't get into this kind of detail, but we'll give them a pass on it. They can't be expected to deliver this kind of minutiae.

The CDC has an elaborate system of determining an inmate's membership in a street or prison gang. As with any bureacracy, especially one that comes to the attention of defense lawyers and civil rights groups, it has to demonstrate scrupulous attention to detail. In other words, they just can't call an inmate a gang or prison gang member on a whim or by the presence or absence of tattoos or the crimes committed inside or outside of prison. There's paperwork to fill out, the lifeblood of bureaucracies and the law.

The entire process of naming an individual as a gang member is called VALIDATION. And the validation procedure needs to have at least three independent sources. Those three sources have to comply with the 13 items articulated in section 3378 CRITICAL CASE INFORMATION of the CDC operations manual. The 13 items are as follows:

A) Self admission. That's self explanatory.
B) Tattoos and symbols. If you're all inked up with a gang name, that's a strong indicator of membership.
C) Written material. The greeting card would fall under this category.
D) Photographs. If you're in a picture standing with a goup of known gangsters, you may be a gangster.
E) Staff information. If CDC staff sees or hears you, or someone else, implicating you in gang membership.
F) Other agencies. Another agency may cite you as a gangster, but that information itself has to pass scrutiny.
G) Association. Any information that proves your association with validated gangsters.
H) Informants. This is sort of double layered. An informant could name you as a gangster, but that informant himself has to pass through the whole DEBRIEFING process which could take months and months to accomplish. The CDC doesn't just take somebody'd word for it. After all, the informant may have a personal beef with you. I'll post something a little later about the whole debriefing process.
I) Offenses. If the nature of your crime was such that it leads them to think that it was part of gang activity. And this has its own validation and verification procedure.
J) Legal documents. If it was proven in court that you're a prison or street gang member.
K) Visitors. I'll quote the CDC on this one. "Visits from persons who are documented as gang "runners" or community affiliates, or members of an organization which associates with a gang."
L) Communications. This includes phone taps, notes, or coded messages.
M) Debriefing. This is the extensive process where you decide to drop out and become an information and admit to having been a street or prison gang member.

As I said earlier, the CDC has to have at least three items on that list to VALIDATE you as a gang member. And once they have, there's form 812 to fill out. There are three flavors of 812 -- a, b and c. An inmate may qualify for one, or all three of those.

You can see how valuable a simple greeting card can be. On one card, they can add one validation criteria to dozens of inmates. The irony of have 13 items in the validation process I'm sure isn't lost on the Mexican Mafia. M is the thirteenth letter of the alphabet and you see an awful lot of 13 tattoos on Eme carnals, affiliates and average street gangsters. There's an awful lot of 13 grafitti as well.

IS A GANGSTER A TERRORIST?
I got a very interesting email yesterday from a regular reader. He mentioned the young Palestinian boy with the explosive vest who was stopped by Israeli checkpoint troopers. The reader made a comparison between HAMAS using easily-controlled kids to do their bidding and our own local gangsters who do the same.

He wondered if we couldn’t apply the term “terrorist” to our home-grown gangsters since they seem to employ the same tactics as terrorist groups. At least when it comes to manipulating impressionable young people to do dirty deeds.

That’s a tough one. Agreed, some of the tactics are the same. Like the PLO, and others, gangs intimidate and victimize their neighbors and everyone in the neighborhoods they claim. That’s a chronic problem when law enforcement comes knocking for eyewitnesses to a crime. Nobody sees or knows anything.

So in a way, you could say that gangs use terror to further their goals. But so do the Italian Mafia and every other criminal organization. Terror is the currency of criminals. But my sense is that the term “TERRORIST” should be reserved exclusively for islamo-fascists and other groups who have an agenda far more ambitious than the aims of street gangs. Street gangs don’t want to bring down a government. In fact, they like this one just fine the way it is. Under most other justice systems, there’s no such thing as a jury trial, free lawyers, sentencing guidelines or appeals for murder convictions. Even a drug conviction can get you executed in Red China and many parts of the Middle East. Here, the County sends a car to your house to bring you to the treatment center if you can't get a ride.

Like liquor and antibiotics, the term TERRORIST should be used sparingly and only when absolutely necessary. Throwing it around too loosely dilutes the impact to the point that it becomes meaningless.

OVERCOMING WRITER'S CELL BLOCK
I took the LAT to task in my last post for that meandering piece JILL LEOVY did on -- well I'm not sure what it was about except an AK-47, lots of shootings and something about elusive gangsters.

Today, I've got to thank the TIMES for alerting me to two bills that passed committee in the State Assembly and the Senate. JENIFER WARREN has the byline. Both bills would make it easier to visit state inmates. And boy, could it ever be made easier. In a word, prison visits are a pain in the ass.

Here's how it works. Once you contact an inmate by mail and he agrees to talk to you, you fill out a form and mail it to the particular institution. The prison then sends the paperwork over to the CALIFORNIA DEPT. OF JUSTICE where they do a background check on you. That process can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. On one hair-pulling, teeth gnashing, phone slamming occasion, it took me nine -- count 'em nine -- months to get the DOJ clearance. Of course, they'd cleared me numerous times before but somehow they couldn't find my paperwork. They kindly offered to have me PAY to get fingerprinted again. I don't mind the fingerprint part. It's the paying for it AGAIN that pissed me off. I'm hoping they're better at tracking terrorists than they are at finding people who pester them twice a week, every week, for nine months.

Once you do get clearance to visit an inmate, that permission is apparently only good at that institution. I've had several occasions where I got permission to vist a guy in SUSANVILLE let's say. Then found out he'd been moved to MULE CREEK. The SUSANVILLE permission wasn't good at MULE CREEK so I had to apply all over again. Technically, all the CDC institutions are supposed to be linked to the same visitor database and the system should be the same all over the state. In reality, each institution is a sovereign entity and doesn't have to recognize policies from other institutions.

Once you do get to visit, the TIMES piece correctly points out that you're not allowed to bring a notebook or a writing instrument. I can understand the reason for that. One way of smuggling drugs into a prison is to soak paper in anything from liquid meth to LSD. And it's easy to pass an innocent looking sheet of paper to an inmate in a CONTACT VISIT situation. Same thing with a pen. Even a .39 cent BIC can make a devastating stabbing weapon if delivered somewhere soft and jellatinoid like an eyeball. So yeah, these are real concerns for prison officials.

The facility sometimes provide you with a few sheets of paper and the tiny nub of a pencil. The reason for the tiny pencil, of course, is that it's tough to use as a stabbing device. I can understand that. So why don't they let us bring a laptop. I've never heard of anyone getting stabbed or shot with a laptop. And what's with the no recording device?

On NO CONTACT visits, (the glass walls and phones you've seen on TV) I have been allowed to bring a notebook and pen. But no tape recorder or laptop. Trust me, there's nothing you can pass through those walls except looks.

I sympathize with the CDC. One of the big problems they have is information flowing into and out of jails. I'm not talking about the kind of information writers and journos are after but the kind that can get people killed on the street or in other prisons -- GREENLIGHTS, ORDERS etc. So if the CDC wants to monitor my conversation, have at it. They'll be reading about it anyway. Same goes for letters. This is a very serious concern for the prisons and dropping the standards for easier access is just one more avenue the bad guys can exploit for evil purposes. Even with the strict regulations, the prisons are already as leaky as a HAITIAN refugee boat. And the gangster intelligence net is impressively effective and robust. Giving bad guys another communication channel will not serve society.

Another issue the TIMES raises is the possibility of glorifying criminals through interviews with media. This is an argument made by victims groups and LAW ENFORCEMENT. This is another legitimate point. You can imagine what some supermarket tabloid or "reality" media would do with audio and video access to people like DAHMER, NG and that psycho with the BOB MARLEY hair that killed his wives/daughters and his children/grandchildren. It's bad enough having a loved one murdered. Seeing the murderer on TV sandwiched between a segment on J-LO's ring and COURTNEY LOVE's boob flashing is just a heartless opening of wounds. This is a tough issue and I'm not sure if anyone can construct a policy that would prevent disgusting exploitation and still allow even-handed access. SB1164, the bill under discussion would allow cameras, notebooks and recording devices in jail interviews. Good luck on threading through that minefield. It would make my work easier but it could turn into NBC's NATURAL BORN KILLER OF THE WEEK SHOW.

Clearly, I've got a dog in this fight and I'd like to have access that's more streamlined and one that makes it easier to do my work. I'd like to have a still camera and a tape recorder. I wish it would happen. And I hope those who might abuse the privilege don't make me regret that my wish came true.

OVERCOMING WRITER'S CELL BLOCK
I took the LAT to task in my last post for that meandering piece JILL LEOVY did on -- well I'm not sure what it was about except an AK-47, lots of shootings and something about elusive gangsters.

Today, I've got to thank the TIMES for alerting me to two bills that passed committee in the State Assembly and the Senate. JENIFER WARREN has the byline. Both bills would make it easier to visit state inmates. And boy, could it ever be made easier. In a word, prison visits are a pain in the ass.

Here's how it works. Once you contact an inmate by mail and he agrees to talk to you, you fill out a form and mail it to the particular institution. The prison then sends the paperwork over to the CALIFORNIA DEPT. OF JUSTICE where they do a background check on you. That process can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. On one hair-pulling, teeth gnashing, phone slamming occasion, it took me nine -- count 'em nine -- months to get the DOJ clearance. Of course, they'd cleared me numerous times before but somehow they couldn't find my paperwork. They kindly offered to have me PAY to get fingerprinted again. I don't mind the fingerprint part. It's the paying for it AGAIN that pissed me off. I'm hoping they're better at tracking terrorists than they are at finding people who pester them twice a week, every week, for nine months.

Once you do get clearance to visit an inmate, that permission is apparently only good at that institution. I've had several occasions where I got permission to vist a guy in SUSANVILLE let's say. Then found out he'd been moved to MULE CREEK. The SUSANVILLE permission wasn't good at MULE CREEK so I had to apply all over again. Technically, all the CDC institutions are supposed to be linked to the same visitor database and the system should be the same all over the state. In reality, each institution is a sovereign entity and doesn't have to recognize policies from other institutions.

Once you do get to visit, the TIMES piece correctly points out that you're not allowed to bring a notebook or a writing instrument. I can understand the reason for that. One way of smuggling drugs into a prison is to soak paper in anything from liquid meth to LSD. And it's easy to pass an innocent looking sheet of paper to an inmate in a CONTACT VISIT situation. Same thing with a pen. Even a .39 cent BIC can make a devastating stabbing weapon if delivered somewhere soft and jellatinoid like an eyeball. So yeah, these are real concerns for prison officials.

The facility sometimes provide you with a few sheets of paper and the tiny nub of a pencil. The reason for the tiny pencil, of course, is that it's tough to use as a stabbing device. I can understand that. So why don't they let us bring a laptop. I've never heard of anyone getting stabbed or shot with a laptop. And what's with the no recording device?

On NO CONTACT visits, (the glass walls and phones you've seen on TV) I have been allowed to bring a notebook and pen. But no tape recorder or laptop. Trust me, there's nothing you can pass through those walls except looks.

I sympathize with the CDC. One of the big problems they have is information flowing into and out of jails. I'm not talking about the kind of information writers and journos are after but the kind that can get people killed on the street or in other prisons -- GREENLIGHTS, ORDERS etc. So if the CDC wants to monitor my conversation, have at it. They'll be reading about it anyway. Same goes for letters. This is a very serious concern for the prisons and dropping the standards for easier access is just one more avenue the bad guys can exploit for evil purposes. Even with the strict regulations, the prisons are already as leaky as a HAITIAN refugee boat. And the gangster intelligence net is impressively effective and robust. Giving bad guys another communication channel will not serve society.

Another issue the TIMES raises is the possibility of glorifying criminals through interviews with media. This is an argument made by victims groups and LAW ENFORCEMENT. This is another legitimate point. You can imagine what some supermarket tabloid or "reality" media would do with audio and video access to people like DAHMER, NG and that psycho with the BOB MARLEY hair that killed his wives/daughters and his children/grandchildren. It's bad enough having a loved one murdered. Seeing the murderer on TV sandwiched between a segment on J-LO's ring and COURTNEY LOVE's boob flashing is just a heartless opening of wounds. This is a tough issue and I'm not sure if anyone can construct a policy that would prevent disgusting exploitation and still allow even-handed access. SB1164, the bill under discussion would allow cameras, notebooks and recording devices in jail interviews. Good luck on threading through that minefield. It would make my work easier but it could turn into NBC's NATURAL BORN KILLER OF THE WEEK SHOW.

Clearly, I've got a dog in this fight and I'd like to have access that's more streamlined and one that makes it easier to do my work. I'd like to have a still camera and a tape recorder. I wish it would happen. And I hope those who might abuse the privilege don't make me regret that my wish came true.

OVERCOMING WRITER'S CELL BLOCK
I took the LAT to task in my last post for that meandering piece JILL LEOVY did on -- well I'm not sure what it was about except an AK-47, lots of shootings and something about elusive gangsters.

Today, I've got to thank the TIMES for alerting me to two bills that passed committee in the State Assembly and the Senate. JENIFER WARREN has the byline. Both bills would make it easier to visit state inmates. And boy, could it ever be made easier. In a word, prison visits are a pain in the ass.

Here's how it works. Once you contact an inmate by mail and he agrees to talk to you, you fill out a form and mail it to the particular institution. The prison then sends the paperwork over to the CALIFORNIA DEPT. OF JUSTICE where they do a background check on you. That process can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. On one hair-pulling, teeth gnashing, phone slamming occasion, it took me nine -- count 'em nine -- months to get the DOJ clearance. Of course, they'd cleared me numerous times before but somehow they couldn't find my paperwork. They kindly offered to have me PAY to get fingerprinted again. I don't mind the fingerprint part. It's the paying for it AGAIN that pissed me off. I'm hoping they're better at tracking terrorists than they are at finding people who pester them twice a week, every week, for nine months.

Once you do get clearance to visit an inmate, that permission is apparently only good at that institution. I've had several occasions where I got permission to vist a guy in SUSANVILLE let's say. Then found out he'd been moved to MULE CREEK. The SUSANVILLE permission wasn't good at MULE CREEK so I had to apply all over again. Technically, all the CDC institutions are supposed to be linked to the same visitor database and the system should be the same all over the state. In reality, each institution is a sovereign entity and doesn't have to recognize policies from other institutions.

Once you do get to visit, the TIMES piece correctly points out that you're not allowed to bring a notebook or a writing instrument. I can understand the reason for that. One way of smuggling drugs into a prison is to soak paper in anything from liquid meth to LSD. And it's easy to pass an innocent looking sheet of paper to an inmate in a CONTACT VISIT situation. Same thing with a pen. Even a .39 cent BIC can make a devastating stabbing weapon if delivered somewhere soft and jellatinoid like an eyeball. So yeah, these are real concerns for prison officials.

The facility sometimes provide you with a few sheets of paper and the tiny nub of a pencil. The reason for the tiny pencil, of course, is that it's tough to use as a stabbing device. I can understand that. So why don't they let us bring a laptop. I've never heard of anyone getting stabbed or shot with a laptop. And what's with the no recording device?

On NO CONTACT visits, (the glass walls and phones you've seen on TV) I have been allowed to bring a notebook and pen. But no tape recorder or laptop. Trust me, there's nothing you can pass through those walls except looks.

I sympathize with the CDC. One of the big problems they have is information flowing into and out of jails. I'm not talking about the kind of information writers and journos are after but the kind that can get people killed on the street or in other prisons -- GREENLIGHTS, ORDERS etc. So if the CDC wants to monitor my conversation, have at it. They'll be reading about it anyway. Same goes for letters. This is a very serious concern for the prisons and dropping the standards for easier access is just one more avenue the bad guys can exploit for evil purposes. Even with the strict regulations, the prisons are already as leaky as a HAITIAN refugee boat. And the gangster intelligence net is impressively effective and robust. Giving bad guys another communication channel will not serve society.

Another issue the TIMES raises is the possibility of glorifying criminals through interviews with media. This is an argument made by victims groups and LAW ENFORCEMENT. This is another legitimate point. You can imagine what some supermarket tabloid or "reality" media would do with audio and video access to people like DAHMER, NG and that psycho with the BOB MARLEY hair that killed his wives/daughters and his children/grandchildren. It's bad enough having a loved one murdered. Seeing the murderer on TV sandwiched between a segment on J-LO's ring and COURTNEY LOVE's boob flashing is just a heartless opening of wounds. This is a tough issue and I'm not sure if anyone can construct a policy that would prevent disgusting exploitation and still allow even-handed access. SB1164, the bill under discussion would allow cameras, notebooks and recording devices in jail interviews. Good luck on threading through that minefield. It would make my work easier but it could turn into NBC's NATURAL BORN KILLER OF THE WEEK SHOW.

Clearly, I've got a dog in this fight and I'd like to have access that's more streamlined and one that makes it easier to do my work. I'd like to have a still camera and a tape recorder. I wish it would happen. And I hope those who might abuse the privilege don't make me regret that my wish came true.

CONFUSED BY THE LA TIMES? ME TOO.

In the March 22 LA TIMES, JILL LEOVY has one of her patented confuse-o-rama gang pieces, the kind that leave you less informed at the end than you were at the start.

Let’s start with the headline and sub-head. It reads as follows:

WEB OF CRIME PROVES TOUGH TO UNTANGLE

A small, changing gang cell appears responsible for some of the worst violence in South L.A.

Wow. Knock out story. I thought this was going to be a piece about the SOUTH LA equivalent of MURDER INC., the infamous Italian MAFIA murder-for-hire squad. The first three sentences certainly seem to point in that direction. Multiple murders, same area, same weapon. Whoah. Sounds like hard-core gunslingers taking out enemies either for fun or profit. .

But then you get to the meat of the piece and realize this is just LEOVY’S undigested, poorly-thought out and confused take on the criminal life. It turn out that an AK-47 semi-auto rifle, a .45 and a 9 mm handgun, in various combinations, were connected to a dozen shootings.

But then the AK-47 was confiscated and some of the shooters arrested and – SURPRISE, SURPRISE – other shootings and murders happened that involved semi-auto AK-style rifles and handguns. What gives?

The whole premise of the piece starts falling apart and then completely goes off the rails when LEOVY starts citing statistics that a third of murder defendants have no previous criminal record. Where'd that come from?

Then the piece really crashes and burns when she quotes South Bureau DC EARL PAYSINGER who says that chasing the guns is less important than finding the shooters. After all, he says, “people pull the trigger.” So what happened to the connection with the magic gun that did all the shooting? Nothing about this piece tracked. Just like her disconnected interview on PACIFICA RADIO some months back.

JILL, just FYI, here’s the deal with guns and gangsters.

Let’s start with the basics. There are two categories of guns we’re talking about here. First is the purely defensive carry gun. This could be anything from a tiny .22 to full-house .45 ACP.

Generally speaking, the carry piece is clean. And concealable, natch. It may have been used in a crime somewhere, sometime in the past, but the current owner probably doesn’t know about that. Given a choice, a criminal would much rather carry a clean gun than a dirty one. Just in case he's stopped by cops and they find it. Common sense.

The carry piece, as I said, is a DEFENSIVE firearm. It’s carried for that “Oh SHIT!” moment when the owner encounters a rival gangster or is suddenly drawn down on by a drive by shooter. In the military they call this surprise firefight a “meeting engagement.” In fact, last week two known gangsters walked on a murder charge because they fired in self-defense in response to a drive-by. See earlier post.

These are broad strokes I’m taking here, but generally speaking, gangs have a stash of OFFENSIVE guns. It could be a single gun or a closet full. Whether or not she’s aware of it, the subject of LEOVY’s story is the OFFENSIVE weapon. This is a weapon a shooter would “draw” from the ARMORY, if you will, to do a mission. The term ARMORY is not something a gangster would use, but in effect, that’s what it is. Most of the time, OFFENSIVE guns are long guns – rifles and shotguns. Handguns, unless used in short range situations, are a bad choice for a drive by or if you’re planning on firing into a car or through the walls of a house. Again, this is speaking generally. Sometimes handguns are used by secondary shooters as suppression fire weapons to keep opponents heads down while the primary shooter cuts loose with the long gun. In truth, virtually every kind of gun you can imagine has been used in drive-bys, but here LEOVY was talking about an AK-47.

It’s no surprise that a single long gun like the one in her piece would be used multiple times because chances are, that gun is "controlled" by a big homie. It could be stashed in the homie’s house or at the house of someone he trusts. The ARMORY, if you will. The armory "supervisor" may not even be a gang member but may be just an affiliate or somebody that owes the gang something.

Drive by shootings are planned, as opposed to the “meeting engagement” mentioned earlier. Some are planned better that others. Read “MONSTER” by CODY SCOTT or talk to gangsters and you’ll learn that part of the most minimal planning process is “how we strapped?” Which means what guns are available, who’s got them, where’s the ammo and who takes the guns back after we’re done?

Sometimes, the guns in the ARMORY are traded for other weapons which may have just as bad a history but come from another part of the county. The ARMORY stock is fluid. Guns come and go. They’re used as currency to buy drugs or buy a knucklehead out of a tough spot. If you owe your dealer a wad, he’ll probably take a gun in payment or partial payment. And that gun will get traded around or bought or just change hands when some homie gets arrested and goes to jail.

OFFENSIVE long guns, unlike the cheapo throwaway .22s and .380, don’t get dumped in ECHO PARK LAKE or into somebody’s back yard. They’re too valuable for that. They get returned and recycled for other operations even if they’re super hot with lots of crimes to their credit. In fact, a gun with a long criminal history can be an asset to the defense in court.

Think of this scenario. You’re a 16-year-old active gangster who’s just been connected to a homicide. You don’t have much of a criminal history as is the case with 30% of murder defendants, according to LEOVY’S piece. You’re arrested. The bullet(s) recovered from your victim match(es) the bullets found in five or six other homicides. The defense attorney, because he knows the gun’s history through the full discovery process, stands up in front of the jury during the argument phase and tells them, “The prosecution is asking you to believe that my young client, with no criminal history, is responsible not only for this heinous murder, but also for a string of shootings and six other homicides. This is preposterous. If this were the case, this young man would be the most notorious criminal since BILLY THE KID. He wasn’t even on the streets when three of those shootings happened. He was serving time in Youth Authority.” If handled right, being connected to a gun that’s really, really dirty can be an easy “NOT GUILTY” verdict. No jury is going to believe that any single person could possibly have committed so many murders.

Trust me on this one. I’ve seen it happen. So you see, JILL, a single gun with a lot of history is nothing new. It’s not some highly motivated “cell” as she calls it, committing a lot of homicides and operating like some death squad. It’s just a lot of active shooters taking lives and destroying neighborhoods and knowing how to work the system.

While I won’t say that her piece was totally without merit, I just don’t see what her point was. I mean, listen to this one. “But it is not just the shifting of guns that makes solving gang crime difficult. Suspects are a fluid, elusive group.” Yeah, Jill. That’s why they call themselves criminals. After they do something bad, they don’t immediately surrender to authorities. They try to evade suspicion and capture. That makes them elusive. Day in, day out, the LA TIMES is committed to the relentless pursuit of the obvious.

THE UNSEEN COST OF CRIME
A reader recently emailed me wondering if I could provide a figure on the dollar cost that street gangs impose on society. Great question. And I wish I had the answer. In fact, I've been trying to pull together as much as I can on this topic and every time I think I have it, there's more.

In a future posting, I'll list some obvious costs like the budgets for the DA's office and how much of that resource is devoted to street gang prosecutions. Ditto for the public defender's office, the County jail system, the State prison system, and the welfare system that frankly pays to feed, house and take care of the wives and children of convicted and unconvicted street gangsters. In addition to that though, are the unseen costs that can never be calculated. One bears scrutiny.

In all the interviews I've done with victims, families of victims and regular citizens in communities savaged by street gangs, to a person, have all either moved to other parts of the county or state or plan to do so as soon as possible. Here's just one case.

This guy, I'll call him ROBERTO, moved from ECHO PARK all the way out to FONTANA. He's a family guy with three kids and a wife that works as well. He works in SANTA MONICA as a building custodian. He got out of ECHO PARK, which he liked a lot and was close to his family, because, according to him, the CHOLOS were trying to influence his kids to join gangs. He did what any person would do. He moved.

To save them, he took the family to the most affordable place he could find -- FONTANA. Now here's this guy who doesn't make a lot of money who has to leave his house in FONTANA at 5:30 in the morning to make it to SANTA MONICA by 7:30. Anybody who's been on the 10 WESTBOUND in the morning and EASTBOUND in the afternoon knows what clusterfuck the 10 is. He's burning up a lot more bucks in gas and wear and tear on the car than he would otherwise need to if he could still live in ECHO PARK. These are dollars he could be spending on improving his life and the lives of his kids. But to save his kids, he makes the sacrifice in time, money and resources. Scale this man's experience up by the thousands and tens of thousands and we're talking billions of dollars a year -- fuel, wasted man hours, pollution, time away from his family, money better spent on other things like books or whatever. The negative impact on society can never be adequately calculated.

Just something to think about the next time somebody tells you that smoking the occasional doobie or snorting a line is a victimless crime. The country of full of victims. They just don't have "activists" looking out for their interests.

SELF DEFENSE FOR ALL.
Two readers have asked me to comment on the story that ran in the Times yesterday in which two gangsters accidentaly killed a woman in her house while in the course of returning fire against two other gangsters who were shooting at them.

If you remember the case from late last year, LAUDELINA SALAZAR was shot in the neck while hanging ornaments on a Christmas tree in her living room. The bullet came from a block away. Sometime later, ANTHONY SHELTON and DANIEL MAYO, two convicted felons, were arrested for her shooting.

Yesterday, the DA decided not to file murder charges against the two because they shot in self defense. Naturally, this is unwelcome news to the detectives or the family.

As unpleasant as it may be for law enforcement, the DA made the right call on this one. Granted, they were gangsters and they were carrying concealed weapons. But despite all that, the law concerning self-defense applies to them as well as to any law-abiding citizen. It can't make distinctions.

The DA could, of course, prosecute them as felons in possession of a firearm or for breaking CAL PC12050, the law banning carrying concealed without a license. But that would be small potatoes. And any defense attorney would make a prosecutor look silly pressing ahead with a charge. If history is a gauge of this, they'll probably be liable for a parole violation at most.

Yeah it sucks. And yeah, the incident itself may have been sparked by some unknown action on their part sometime prior to the shooting. In other words, they may have had that drive-by coming for something they did earlier. You almost never know for sure when you're dealing with street gangs. But there's no "they-had-it-coming" statute in the PENAL CODE.

In truth, this isn't the first time a known gangster walked on a shooting by claiming self-defense. One of the first I remember writing about happened in 1982 in, I believe, BALBOA PARK in the SF VALLEY. I don't remember the names of the players but I think the "victim" claimed SAN FER and the shooters were from over the hill. At any rate, it was a stand up gunfight, all being on foot when the rivals let go on him. He surprised them by pulling out a sawed off lever action MARLIN rifle (I remember the gun because it's such a weirdly archaic weapon to carry) and actually killed one of the attackers. The victim walked on that one and was never prosecuted for illegal carry or for being a felon with a firearm. So this latest case has precedents. What's different in this case, of course, is the fact that an innocent bystander was killed. But according to the law, an accidental death as the result of a righteous self-defense shooting does not carry any penalty.

This is small comfort to SALAZAR's family or to the detectives who I know for a fact, become emotionally invested in cases of this nature.

But the big wheel does keep on turning. MAYO and SHELTON may walk on this one, but don't be too surprised if they get theirs in some unexpected but thoroughly deserved way. One way or another, justice will be served. If they were smart, they'd break camp and head for safer parts. If they were smart.