Teen Gangs Measuring ‘Bad’ by Size of Firepower

The volley of gunfire was brief, but in the span of a few minutes, the rust-colored Toyota was methodically shot up as it careened north on Crenshaw Boulevard.

A tire was reduced to strands of rubber. Windows became shards of glass. By the time the Toyota stopped at a service station, it had been hit by more than 40 shots fired from another speeding car. Bullet holes riddled the Toyota’s right side, and some of the shots tore exit holes on the car’s left side.

The fire fight, which killed Terry Alexander Jackson, 16, of Compton and wounded two older companions in the car nine days ago, was among the most recent episodes of gang violence in Los Angeles, which has resulted in more than 100 deaths this year.

But the shoot-out had an exotic, if deadly, component that has become all too familiar to police over the last few years. Several blocks away, investigators found two rifles discarded near where the Toyota had weaved through a supermarket parking lot. The guns were foreign-made replicas of the Soviet AK-47 assault rifle, a weapon prized by guerrillas and soldiers and powerful enough to puncture metal at close range.

With increasing frequency, law enforcement authorities and youth workers say, the city’s street gangs have been settling their scores with military-style, semiautomatic weapons--guns that fire once for every squeeze of the trigger and can hold as many as 50 large rounds of ammunition.

As Israeli-made Uzis and civilian versions of the M-16 U.S. Army rifle become the weapons of choice among gang members, those who fire the guns are often teen-agers, who hoard and display their lethal toys the way other adolescents show off skateboards and bicycles.

“There is a standard that has crept into the game that the bigger your guns get, the badder you are,” said Tony Massengale, assistant director of the Community Youth Gang Services Project.

There are practical reasons as well. Often, the weapons are collapsible and can be hidden under a jacket. They are heavier than handguns, so there is less recoil, making the guns easier to fire.

But the most important consideration for street gangs, police say, is their need to bulk up on heavier firepower as they prepare to carve out new markets in rock cocaine and other narcotics. Trying to eliminate rival drug dealers or worried about the security of their own members, street gangs need to match or surpass the firepower of their opponents.

“It’s an arms race,” said Sheriff’s Deputy Roy Nunez of Firestone Station near Watts. “No one wants to be left behind.”

Gang members are not the only victims of the escalation. On July 12, Pauline Moore, a Lynwood grandmother, was killed by semiautomatic rounds that smashed through her door. On June 24, 9-year-old DeAndre Brown was caught in the middle of a gun battle at a South-Central Los Angeles park and slain, reportedly by a civilian version of an M-16 rifle. Two days earlier, Los Angeles Police Officer James Pagliotti was gunned down in Sylmar by a semiautomatic weapon fired by a 17-year-old gang member.

“These kids fire at anything that moves,” said Thomas Paul Chumley, a special agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. “They’ll pull up for a street gang pay-back and just spray the area. Those bullets don’t just have the victim’s name on them. It’s like they’re marked ‘for whom it may concern.’ ”

Semiautomatic Rifles

Common handguns, shotguns and hunting rifles--stolen from private homes or bought easily from gun stores--still account for the majority of the hundreds of weapons confiscated each year from gang members. But over the last few years, as gun stores have sold more exotic weaponry, law enforcement agencies say they have seized greater numbers of semiautomatic rifles.

At the Firestone Station, deputies in the Operation Safe Streets unit are confiscating as many as five assault rifles every month. A year ago, Deputy Paul Bradley said, “we were lucky to get one or two a month.”

Police who patrol South Los Angeles decline to provide numbers for the semiautomatic weapons they run across, but they say their seizures are also rising this year.

“We didn’t see too many of these guns until last summer,” said Lt. Willie Pannell, commander of the Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums South Bureau. “Now we’re seeing a lot. You show up at the scene of a shoot-out, and it’s not unusual to find 30 or 40 semiautomatic casings on the ground.”

Gang workers throughout the city report increased contacts with gang members toting semiautomatics, Massengale said. The most frequent reports, though, have come out of South and East Los Angeles neighborhoods.

When police responded to a gun battle between rival gangs at 58th Place and Normandie Avenue two weeks ago, Pannell said, they found several dozen spent casings from 9-millimeter rounds, often fired by Uzi semiautomatic guns. A week ago, deputies arrested a member of the 89 East Coast Crips after stopping him for a traffic infraction and finding an Uzi semiautomatic rifle on the seat next to him.

Found Receipt

Deputies had known about the existence of the gun about eight months earlier. During a raid at an East Coast Crips’ party last year, deputies found a receipt for the Uzi registered in the name of a Lawndale woman.

When deputies went to the woman’s apartment, they found she had moved without leaving a forwarding address. It was not until deputies arrested her East Coast Crips boyfriend that they learned how the gun was purchased.

“He told us it was her gun and he was just borrowing it,” Bradley said. “When we questioned her, she told us that he wanted the gun because he had been shot a year and a half ago and wanted more protection.

“But he had a jail record, which would have prevented him from buying the gun. So he gave her some money, and she added some welfare money of her own, and she went to a sporting goods store and bought it without a hitch.”

Pannell and other police officials say that as long as gang members can find buyers who are 18 years old and willing to sign a federal weapons transaction form, semiautomatic rifles are easily purchased. The going price at most gun shops, police say, is about $500.

Confiscate Weapons

Gun shop managers like Tom Noroian of Art’s Guns in Reseda insist that gang members get most of their semiautomatic guns “on the street,” usually through thefts. Law enforcement officials counter that most of the guns they confiscate from gang members have been bought legally by legal-age friends or relatives.

Often, parents of gang members are stunned to discover that their sons are hiding Uzis under their beds. But some parents know more than they let on.

One South Los Angeles father protested recently when police searched his son’s room and found an Uzi semiautomatic.

“Then we saw a family portrait in the living room, with the father posing proudly with the kid’s Uzi,” Pannell said. “He shut up after we pointed it out to him.”