18thStreetGang

"...Out of the membership estimated to be as high as 20,000, about 60% of them are illegal immigrants, according to a confidential report last year by the state Department of Justice..."

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COLUMN ONE; An Inside Look at 18th St.'s Menace; Its size and ability to recruit across ethnic lines make the L.A.-based network one of the most prolific gangs in the nation, authorities say. Series: 18th STREET: Southern California's Largest Gang Aims for Dominance. First in a three-part series

The Los Angeles Times (Pre-1997 Fulltext)

Los Angeles, Calif.; Nov 17, 1996; RICH CONNELL; ROBERT J. LOPEZ;

Abstract:

A band of unruly outcasts when it formed in the 1960s, 18th Street has become an ominous prototype. Although primarily Latino, 18th Street has broken with gang tradition, opening its ranks to comers of all races from many working-class neighborhoods in a calculated move to boost its numbers. Its primary recruitment targets: immigrant youngsters.

Although 18th Street's primary impact has been in central Los Angeles County, the gang has taken root on the Westside, the San Gabriel [Kovnator] Valley, Orange County, the South Bay and the San Fernando Valley. Transplanted 18th Streeters also have exported their criminal ways to other states and countries.

"Within the past two or three years, I've heard more and more gang cops telling me, '18th Street, 18th Street,' " says Sgt. Ron Stallworth, the state's top gang intelligence officer. "If these guys are here to the extent we think they are, we have to extend some very serious resources to get our ducks lined up."

Full Text:

It is the biggest and deadliest street gang to rise from the nation's gang capital, reshaping Los Angeles' criminal underworld.

With as many as 20,000 members in Southern California alone, the gang called 18th Street is 20 times the size of the region's typical gang, dwarfing even the notorious Bloods and Crips.

"We recognize them as one of the most violent street gangs and one of the most prolific in the United States," says George Rodriguez, who until his retirement this month oversaw investigations for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Wherever 18th Street surfaces, the quality of life inevitably suffers, bringing despair to residents and presenting law enforcement authorities with challenges they seem unable to conquer.

Cars are stolen, homes burglarized. On average, someone in Los Angeles County is assaulted or robbed by 18th Streeters every day. The gang has left a bloody trail of more than 100 homicides in the city of Los Angeles since 1990--a pace three times that of many of the city's most active gangs.

Police say 18th Street--with its tight ties to the Mexican Mafia prison gang--has become so influential in narcotics circles that it now deals directly with the Mexican and Colombian cartels. Eighteenth Street also has pioneered a disturbing trend in gangs: renting street corners--sometimes in hourly shifts--to non-gang dope peddlers, who are forced to pay "taxes."

"They're worse than a cancer. A cancer you can kill. These guys keep growing," says gang expert Gabriel Kovnator of the California Youth Authority, where 18th Streeters constitute the largest group of gang members in custody.

Although 18th Street's primary impact has been in central Los Angeles County, the gang has taken root on the Westside, the San Gabriel Valley, Orange County, the South Bay and the San Fernando Valley. Transplanted 18th Streeters also have exported their criminal ways to other states and countries.

In Utah, officials say 18th Street has arrived with a vengeance.

Eighteenth Street has become the largest and fastest-growing gang in Oregon. Its members have tried to assert control over the state prison narcotics trade and are blamed for one of Salem's worst gang slayings: A 15-year-old 18th Streeter, who wanted out, was gunned down by his homeboys.

"It's just phenomenal what's happening here {with the gang}," says Ron Weaver of the Oregon Youth Authority.

In El Salvador, church leaders have been working to broker a truce between 18th Street and its rivals. Authorities from Honduras, meanwhile, recently visited Los Angeles seeking advice from law enforcement on the gang.

"Eighteenth Street is like a many-headed hydra," says Assistant U.S. Atty. Gregory W. Jessner, who oversees a prosecutorial task force targeting the gang.

A Children's Army

There is no 18th Street godfather.

Instead, the gang's central nervous system consists of older members--veteranos--who oversee a loose-knit network of cliques, whose members share an intense loyalty to the gang's values and ambitions.

In clandestine meetings, the veteranos exchange guns, plot strategies, target enemies and share information on police.

Although 18th Street's structure has insulated it from racketeering prosecutions, authorities say it also has stopped the gang--so far--from becoming a traditional criminal syndicate.

The gang is "probably not as developed or sophisticated, but I think you see many of the same roots you saw in early organized crime," says veteran Det. Kevin Rogers of the Los Angeles Police Department's West Bureau.

On the street, in sharp contrast, the gang resembles a kind of children's army--one of 18th Street's most striking signatures. While the veteranos remain in the shadows, youngsters are recruited to bolster the gang's numbers and carry out its criminal activity.

A Santa Ana recruiter for the gang says he scouts middle schools for kids 11 to 13 who appear to be on the fringes of gang life. He confronts them, instilling fear, then backs off. The next time, he softens the approach, making his unsteady targets believe that he is now their friend, their protector.

With their resistance eroded, he promises action and excitement as part of the region's largest street gang. "I tell them you can get guns and drugs. You get {women}. . . . You get backup."

The key, he says, is to "make it look glamorous," avoiding mention of jail and violence. "You'll scare them off," he says. "You've got to kind of bait them into it."

"Lil' Rusty" was a robust middle school student in the Fairfax district when his graffiti crew was drawn into 18th Street. Soon, he was hustling the gang's crack cocaine on the curbs of the Pico-Union area. By 14, he was a stick-thin addict.

His mother often travels on the bus searching for her son in hopes of bringing him back to the house and the adolescence he left behind.

It's a hot afternoon when she catches up with him at a Pico-Union community center frequented by 18th Streeters. In a moment laden with pain and possibility, she perches inches away from him on a ragged couch, wincing back tears. "I love you," she says to her withering boy, who has lost 30 pounds. "Please come home. There's food at home."

He tenses and glares. "Why don't you go home," he says, storming outside, then disappearing into the low-rent hotel he shares with prostitutes and junkies.

Heading home, the heartsick woman says 18th Street has stolen her son's soul. "They're using him to sell drugs," she says. "He follows the cholos. He doesn't follow me."

Gang members and workers at the community center say they have tried to help the young addict, but that the magnetism of the gang and the drugs is too powerful. He did return home once, his mother says, but he was gone within days. "I cradled him in my arms," she recalls, "and told him I loved him so much."

Youth indoctrination starts early, as gang members too young to shave pass their values to a generation too young to tie their shoes.

Strutting into a Huntington Park recreation center after an assault on a rival gang member, a knot of 18th Street teens proudly shows off its "little homey"--a 4-year-old known as "Baby Midget."

At an age when most children are learning ABCs in preschool, this toddler with the shaved head, and others like him, are learning to flash the gang's "E" sign. When asked where he is from, his small voice proclaims: "Southside 18th Street."

The young homeboys impart to Baby Midget the lessons of gang life. When asked whether he likes school and police, he shakes his head and says, "No."

Baby Midget's 21-year-old mother, an 18th Street associate who calls herself "Speedy," sees nothing terribly wrong with any of this--although she does concede that it sometimes makes her uncomfortable "because he is just a little boy."

Mirror of the City

Called Dieciocho by its Spanish-speaking members, the gang is a quintessential Los Angeles phenomenon: sprawling, multiethnic, a product of the region's changing economics and demographics.

"It's the gang of the 21st century . . . an anomaly that breaks all traditions of the ethnic gang," says Jose Lopez, a Cal State Long Beach Chicano studies professor who has researched 18th Street.

Although predominantly Latino, the gang has opened its arms to blacks, Samoans, Middle Easterners and whites.

"If you think 10 or 15 years from now . . . it ain't gonna be no brown this, black that," says one gang leader. "It'll be about who's got the numbers."

"Lucky," 17, is a Native American, a product of the gang's equal opportunity recruiting.

In the small southeast Los Angeles County city of Cudahy, Lucky and a dozen 18th Street homeboys drop down into the concrete channel of the Los Angeles River. Hiding from passing patrol cars, they gather for Lucky's brutal initiation.

On hand are his mother--an 18th Street associate known as "Sky"--and his stepfather, "Diablo," a 20-year veteran of the gang.

As Sky asks who is going to be the timekeeper for the beating, which is supposed to last 18 seconds, a handful of gangsters begin yanking off their shirts. They are muscled, covered with 18th Street tattoos.

Four of them jump Lucky, slugging furiously. He spins, breaking free, and swings back with full force. They lunge at him, landing dozens of blows to his ribs, head and shoulders. Lucky goes down hard on the cement, but battles back to his feet.

"That's my baby!" his mother cheers, as blood trickles down her son's face.

When the rite ends, Lucky is embraced by his new homeboys. His mother calls for a celebratory toast of high-octane wine. "Let's bring the Night Train out!" she shouts.

The next day, his face scabbed and swollen, Lucky reflects on his decision to join 18th Street. It was this, he says, or return to live with his sister on a Wyoming reservation.

"I felt like I'd have the brothers I never had," Lucky says of his gang friends.

At one point he jokes about the criminal adventures awaiting him. Like robbing unlicensed pushcart vendors. "They don't have permits," he says. "They can't report it."

But is this how such hard-working people and their families should be treated?

"We're not supposed to feel for them," he says. "If you do, you're gonna feel bad. You're gonna feel weak. We don't want weak."

Once they join, many of the gang's members say they are in "por vida"--for life. So strong is the bond that no amount of violence can tear gangster from gang.

At 19, "Spike" hobbles around like an octogenarian. His body is a monument to the ravages of a life invested in 18th Street.

A thick gnarled scar runs down the middle of his stomach, ending in a pink open wound. To speak, Spike raises an index finger to cover the hole in his throat where a tracheotomy tube is inserted. He has been shot on four occasions. The worst damage occurred last year when a rival walked up to Spike's car at a red light, pumping seven slugs into his torso and leg.

"Each bullet felt like Mike Tyson was hitting me," Spike says inside his South-Central living room. He is pressing his baggy pants in preparation for another visit to the hospital, where he will undergo plastic surgery.

The irony of the scene escapes him. He laments the violent course of his gang life. But as his 9-month-old boy watches, Spike pauses and then notes excitedly that a song playing on his tape deck is the gang's anthem: "Soy {I am} 18 with a bullet/ I got my finger on the trigger/ I'm gonna pull it."

Long Arm of the Gang

Eighteenth Street was born more than 30 years ago in the impoverished but fertile neighborhood where the Santa Monica and Harbor freeways intersect, near 18th Street and Union Avenue. The area--Pico-Union--has long been a landing spot for newly arrived immigrants.

As these settlers moved out in search of better lives, 18th Street cliques sprouted in new neighborhoods. In time, the gang had branches across the county, essentially organizing itself in quadrants--west side, north side, east side and south side.

Membership surged in the 1980s, when Central American and Mexican immigrants flocked to the Pico-Union and Westlake districts. They were shunned and attacked by Chicano gangs, who viewed the new arrivals as inferior.

With 18th Street, they found refuge--and protection.

"They taught kids who came from other countries how to survive in {Los Angeles}," says Manuel Valenzuela, a veteran of the county's Community Youth Gang Services. "Eighteenth Street empowered a lot of kids {telling them}: 'This is how you do it in America.' "

Out of the membership estimated to be as high as 20,000, about 60% of them are illegal immigrants, according to a confidential report last year by the state Department of Justice.

In sections of South-Central Los Angeles--once almost entirely African American and home to some of the oldest Crips and Bloods sets--18th Street took over without firing a shot, thanks to the dramatic surge in the immigrant population.

"It's just demographics," says veteran South-Central probation officer Jim Galipeau. "Without anything ever going down, in terms of a gang fight, it just became 18th Street."