Gangs Broaden Turf--and Violence : Crime: Police have identified at least 34 groups, which are warring more fiercely than ever. Officials warn that many more youths could be drawn in.

Law enforcement officials say gang violence in Ventura County is spreading at an alarming pace, with gangs increasing their mobility as well as their numbers.

Last year, gang cases in court increased by an estimated 50%, and gang members are responsible for 70% to 85% of the county’s juvenile court caseload, according to prosecutors.

“If the activity level continues, there’s going to be a dramatic increase again this year,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Peter Brown said.

Police say that Ventura County’s gangs are attracting younger members and growing more violent as they cross city borders to hit each other harder than ever before.

Police and juvenile authorities have identified at least 34 gangs that are now operating in Ventura County. Since 1989, the gangs have been linked to five murders, three of them this year.

The rash of turf-oriented gang violence--erupting most recently in the drive-by slayings of two Saticoy men last month and a Thousand Oaks mother on May 31--has prompted police to intensify their anti-gang activities.

At the same time, community groups striving to defuse the gang problem are offering youth and family counseling in nearly every city in Ventura County.

The county’s prosecutors, police and social workers agree that many hard-core gang members are so entrenched in the gang lifestyle that nothing will turn them back.

But they say that far more Ventura County teen-agers are sitting on a fence, waiting to be pushed either into or away from gang membership and crime.

“A lot of kids have one foot in the activity and one foot into school, and they’re saying, ‘Hey, I want a chance,’ ” said Roberta Payan, director of Ventura’s Westpark Community Center and a former member of the gang that now calls itself the Ventura Avenue Gangsters.

Gang members also are growing more wanton in their choice of targets, said Assistant Sheriff Oscar Fuller, chief of patrol operations, citing the Saticoy drive-bys.

“They’ve personalized their causes to where a grievance against an individual is a grievance against the whole group. It doesn’t matter who you get revenge on, so long as you have revenge against the whole group,” he said.

Casiana Hollers says members of one gang called the Satanas have been cruising past her Oxnard house almost every day since a former Satana killed her boyfriend, Manuel (Deadeye) Rodriguez.

“Putting their fingers to their head and making like a gun and laughing,” she said, watching her 19-month-old son, Manuel Jr., play in the living room. “They’re still going on with it, that their guy killed his dad and they’re proud of it.”

In November, 1989, Rodriguez shouted anti-Asian slurs at Filipino members of the Satanas gang outside Channel Islands High School--and shouted his gang name, Lemonwood Chiques, witnesses said.

When Arnel Salagubang pointed a .22-caliber derringer at his head, Rodriguez dared, “Go ahead, shoot me,” witnesses testified at Salagubang’s murder trial.

Salagubang fired once, killing Rodriguez. Now he is serving a sentence of 20 years to life for second-degree murder.

Hollers said of her son’s late father, “He told me a long time ago, if ever someone were to put a gun to his head, they’d better kill him, because if they didn’t he’d get back up and kill them.”

She paused, gazing at the empty street outside.

“I think he died for his pride.”

A powerful code governs Ventura County gang members, the same one followed by territorial gangs in Los Angeles County. And pride is a major part of it.

Ventura County gang members sum it up in a few words: “You gotta be down for the ‘hood.”

You have to be proud of your neighborhood. Spray-paint the walls with its name. Claim it as a show of loyalty when challenged, even if you are outnumbered. Fiercely protect the homeboys and homegirls who live in it. Hit back at anyone who disrespects or attacks it. Even kill.

But veteran gang members have told The Times that living by the code has ruined their lives, alienated them from their families, and left them incarcerated without even their homeboys to back them up.

Many who live by it every day say privately that they want desperately to leave their gangs--but they don’t see a way out.

Rafael Cervantes, who grew up in the community of El Rio outside Oxnard, remembers fighting for his gang, Trouble Street El Rio, since age 13.

“It’s a lifestyle,” Cervantes said of brawls with Colonia Chiques and other gangs. “Whether you win or lose doesn’t matter, it just shows you’re down for your barrio. It just shows people you belong.”

Now age 18, his nose scarred and crooked, he is midway through a 20-month sentence in the Ventura School, the California Youth Authority juvenile prison in Camarillo, for stealing televisions to support the heroin habit he acquired when he and his homeboys “outgrew the gangbanging part of it.”

Being locked up showed him what “down for the ‘hood” really means, Cervantes said.

“Your homeboys don’t visit you. Some of them don’t even bother to write you a letter,” Cervantes said. “You really find out who loves you. You find out it’s a lot less than you thought.”

He has advice for the wanna-bes, the younger kids who want to be gang members. But they may not listen, he said.

“Crime doesn’t pay--you pay back for it 10 times what it’s worth, if not more. You’ll never get this time back,” he said.

Police and community leaders say they want to keep Ventura County gangs from being sucked into the vortex of crack dealing and routine murder that has swallowed Los Angeles County gangs and many neighborhoods with them.

“In comparison to many other counties, we have an insignificant gang problem,” Sheriff John V. Gillespie said. “But compared to Ventura County 10 years ago, it is not insignificant. . . . I think the change is to one of heavy violence.”

Alliances and vendettas flare suddenly and subside almost as quickly, law enforcement officials say. Fillmore’s Little Boyz are rumored to be merging with that city’s Chicanos With Attitude. Gang fights exploded recently between Simi Valley gangs and the Moorpark Locals, where none occurred a year ago. Trouble Street El Rio used to be friendly with the Ventura Avenue Gangsters. Now they are not.

Ventura police increased their gang detail last year from six to eight officers and hope to hire a detective this summer to focus on gangs and drug dealing. And the Ventura Parks and Recreation Department plans on spending $110,000 to keep its community centers open longer and to provide job and family counseling for gang members and their parents.

Oxnard police recently installed a $25,000 computer that now stores more than 300 gang members’ mug shots, nicknames and photographs of their tattoos. Rather than employ gang officers like other departments, Oxnard trains every officer on its force to respond to gang incidents.

Simi Valley police have requested money for an anti-gang officer to counsel third- and fourth-grade students, hire another gang detective and pay for a computer operator to track gang crimes.

Santa Paula police formed an anti-gang task force with Ventura police to respond better to growing tensions among gangs in both cities.

The Sheriff’s Department has established a list of 15 criteria for identifying gang members as hard-core, associate or wanna-be. The list has been adopted by other departments in the county.

The Ventura County district attorney’s office recently began keeping statistics on gang-related crimes to track trends in gang violence, Brown said. But police admit they do not yet have hard statistics on gang-related crimes being committed in Ventura County.

“Just keeping track of the heavy, violent, person-to-person crimes since this time last year, it appears that an awful lot of the stabbings, the shootings and so forth are one way or another related to gangs,” Gillespie said.

But while police efforts against gangs have risen to an unprecedented level, more needs to be done, said Sgt. Carl Handy, head of Ventura’s anti-gang team.

“It’s really not a police problem, it’s a community problem,” he said. “The kids we talk to daily, we’re not getting to them.”

Police and community leaders throughout the county agree that the key to stopping the violence is not to shatter the gang code that binds youths together, but to steer that energy and loyalty toward helping gang members off the treadmill of pride, assault and revenge--and to enlist their parents’ help.

Santa Paula police hope to use money from the forfeited assets of drug dealers to hire counselors for parents of known gang members, Chief Walt Adair said.

Parents have to be told that “the risk is that their child will be the victim of extreme violence and may even be killed,” Adair said. “They are at risk because their house is a target. Their children are losing the most productive years of their lives in terms of learning how to live with each other.”

Community service groups such as El Concilio in Oxnard, Renewed Avenue Pride in Ventura and Our Town in Moorpark are offering job counseling to gang members, and counseling to their parents on how to talk to them.

“We have 50 to 60 families come here once a month for a parenting skills workshop, and they all say, ‘We need more skills for just dealing with our kids,’ ” said Lonnie Miramontes, youth services coordinator for El Concilio.

“We have parents who say, ‘I think my kid is joining up with a gang. How can I deal with this?’ ”

Miramontes said parents should realize that children who hang out with gang members are labeled as gang members.

“Pretty soon you get so many of the 15 criteria, and you’re an associate,” he said. “Then let’s say you’re stuck with your friends and you get in a fight, and suddenly you’re a hard-core. And you may not have ever done anything but hang out with your friends.”

One fatal flaw among gang members is “that attitude that, ‘I’m too slick to get caught,’ ” former gang member Payan said.

“There are kids out here that would just rather make a name for themselves by shanking (stabbing) somebody or killing somebody or making their mark,” she said. “Their family suffers.”

Eddie Zendejas, 19, wishes he had stayed closer to his family.

He misses them, while sitting in his cell at the Ventura School. But he also misses his homeboys, even though they are part of the reason he is serving time.

Zendejas and a homeboy were cruising Saviers Road in his customized Mazda pickup truck on Easter, 1990, when people in another car drove past and “mad-dogged” him with challenging stares and shouts of “Loma Flats,” the name of another Oxnard gang.

When his passenger pulled out a loaded sawed-off shotgun that Zendejas had stored behind a speaker, Zendejas balked. He pulled off the strip to park on A Street. With 17 traffic tickets already riding on the truck, he wanted no more attention from police.

But when the other car reappeared, he said he reconsidered and took the gun.

“They were driving towards us,” Zendejas recalled. “He goes, ‘Here they come.’ I said, ‘Why not?’ ”

Zendejas said he fired out of his window. The buckshot shattered the other car’s windshield and raked its hood, dashboard and steering wheel. “We were laughing, we thought it was fun,” he said. “I really didn’t care. If I hit him, I hit him.”

Unhurt, the other driver sped off. Zendejas jammed the gun into a trash can and cruised back to Saviers Road. Police arrested him within minutes. He was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon.

Now, seven months into his eight-year sentence, he still claims membership in Colonia Chiques. But he says the name of his Oxnard gang is worth little against hard-core Los Angeles County gang members locked up with him, who far outnumber the handful of local gang members.

Memories of fighting for the honor of Colonia alongside his homeboys since eighth grade--with brass knuckles, pipe and fists--gave way to reality.

“I should have got into a car club,” Zendejas said flatly. “It’s not a good thing. There’s no life in it. It dies out. Just look at the old homeboys, look at where they’re at: dead, prison, strung out on drugs. . . . It was all fun and games and then the hard stuff happens--doing the time.”

To the younger ones, it still is a game.

“The little pequenos sitting around seeing the older gang members getting out of the joint with their tattoos and playing handball, they say, ‘Wow, it’s like cowboys and Indians,” Payan said.

Some parents don’t know or don’t care what their children are doing, said Eddie Cue, a corrections officer for the California Youth Authority.

“Like any sickness, there’s denial,” Cue said. “The parents deny it, the kids deny it. All of a sudden it’s a weed and it grows bigger. We’ve gotta stop it when it’s a small seed.”

Increasingly, younger children are getting involved with gangs, Ventura Police Sgt. Handy said.

“We’ve had 8-year-olds challenging police officers,” he said. “This young kid, 8 years old, told an officer he’d kick his ass if he told him to go home again.”

Parents are somewhat to blame, prosecutor Brown said.

“A lot of the people involved in gangs would not be involved in gangs if they had an influence at home which was a little stricter. . . . They should want to know why they dress the way they dress, why they hang out with the people they hang out with, why they come home after dark,” he said.

Many gang members live with parents who simply do not think they are doing anything wrong, Brown said. But others grew up in broken homes and used their gang families as substitutes for real families, he said.

Maribell Villagrana, 15, said people used to think she was a nice girl. No gang ties, no drugs, maybe a little drinking with her friends.

Then in 1990, the last of her seven older brothers and sisters moved out of the house and she fought more often with her mother. When Maribell’s boyfriend got arrested for gang activity, things got worse.

“Everything was getting to me. People started telling my mom I was doing drugs. She started believing it,” she said.

Maribell said she finally gave up denying things she had not done and began doing them. She hung out with the Colonia Chiques, smoked marijuana and stole cars.

Now she is locked up at Ventura County Juvenile Hall for car theft--and wondering if she’ll be able to stop “claiming” Colonia Chiques when she gets out in August.

Korina Gaeta, 15, of Santa Paula sat next to Maribell and another gang member, Brenda Hernandez, thinking aloud. Thinking about how she probably shouldn’t have hung around with the Crimies and the Party Boyz, two hometown gangs.

Drunk one night--very drunk, she said--Korina and her boyfriend and some fellow gang members stole her grandparents’ car and broke into their Santa Paula eyeglass store.

Finding no money, they stole sunglasses and colored contact lenses--just to see how they looked--and zoomed off to Las Vegas, where they partied all night.

Asked why she targeted her own family, she smirked. “I didn’t know what I was doing, I was gone, man,” Korina said, shrugging. “I was to the curb .”

Korina’s father, Frank Gaeta, said: “She was always an extremely sensitive, loving child.” But she began bucking his authority after turning 12, and by age 14, she was running away for a week at a time to hang out with gang members she had met.

After Korina’s crime spree--which happened while she was AWOL from Juvenile Hall for a sentence on other charges--her father brought the hammer down. He stopped bringing her clothes and toiletries so she would know how life felt with no family support. Together they are undergoing counseling.

“I told her, ‘I don’t think it’s sunk into you what you’ve done,’ ” Gaeta said. “ ‘You’re a 15-year-old kid, you’re damaging people’s lives and property and you don’t think bad of it.’ ”

Even sitting beside her homegirls in Juvenile Hall, Korina admits she blew it.

“What I really wanna do is get things straight with my family,” said Korina, now four months into her sentence. “You lose a lot of respect from people. Guys don’t like girls who are locked up.”

But she waves at the young gang members playing basketball inside the Juvenile Hall courtyard, who whistle and smack their lips as she walks past.

And she is not sure she can handle the pressure when she gets out.

Brenda, 16, who claims Colonia Chiques as her gang, is unrepentant.

She and her homeboys and homegirls would hit motorists with pipes and take their cars, sometimes to go on joy rides, sometimes to get party money by stripping the cars and selling the parts, she said.

“I thought it was fun. I still think it’s fun now,” said Brenda, serving time at Ventura County Juvenile Hall after she was arrested in March outside a Ventura Avenue Gangsters party at the wheel of a stolen Buick Regal. “Sometimes we do it for beer, a couple rocks, coke, just to have a party.”

As the other girls fantasized about finishing school, settling down with their boyfriends, going straight, Brenda admitted she also thinks about getting her diploma. But then, she said, “sometimes I think I’m gonna live on welfare.”

And her eyes flashed with anger as she pictured meeting rival gang members upon her release. “If they’re disrespecting the ‘hood, I’ll box them,” she said. “Just . . . whip my fist in them.”

“They just try to survive,” said Lonnie Miramontes of El Concilio. “A lot of it, from graffiti to drive-bys to vandalism, it’s a form of screaming for help.”

Society should put the emphasis on encouraging good acts, not forbidding bad ones, he said.

“If you keep telling them, ‘Don’t cross the street, don’t cross the street . . . ‘ eventually they will because they’re convinced there’s something there,” Miramontes said. “If we say, ‘Oh look over here, let’s do a mural, or let’s do a conference,’ get them involved, then they will change their focus.”

Cervantes, the 18-year-old serving time at Ventura School, is studying for a college degree through the Ventura School. He wonders if he can stay off heroin and avoid gang activity without losing the respect of his homeboys.

“I want to go back out there and straighten my life out. This ain’t no joke. I’m wasting my life,” he said earnestly.

He looked around at the sterile brick walls of the lockup’s cafeteria.

“Instead of these parents blaming ‘all these gangbangers outside doing it to my kids,’ maybe they ought to take a look at themselves and say, ‘If I gave my kids more love, maybe they wouldn’t do this.’ ”

Ventura County Gangs

Camarillo

Barry Street

El Rio

Trouble Street

Fillmore

Chicanos With Attitude (CWA)

Little Boyz (LBZ)

Moorpark

Moorpark Locals (MPLS or

“Morphus”)

Oxnard

Chiques Trece

Colonia Chiques

Eastcoast Crips

Lemonwood Chiques

Loma Flats

Northside Gangster Crips

Satanas

Southside Crips

Squires

Surenos Town

Santa Paula

Crazy Boyz

Crimies

Party Boyz

Saticoy

Campos

Simi Valley

Skinheads

LVM (Luzon, Visayas, Mindanao)

BNG (Bahala Na Gang, Tagalog for “Whatever Happens, Happens”)

VSV (Varrio Simi Valley)

Thousand Oaks

Small Town Hoods (STH)

Thousand Oaks California Sur (TOCAS)

Houston Hoods (HH)

Ventura

Avenue Gangsters

Haoles

Hells Angels

Montalvo

Pierpont Rats

Skinheads

East Side Saticoy (ESS)

Warlords

WHAT IS A GANG MEMBER?

Ventura County police agencies use 15 criteria for identifying youths as gang members. The criteria are:

* Gang tattoos.

* Gang garb.

* Gang markings or slogans on personal property or clothing.

* Possessing gang literature that indicates membership.

* Admitting gang membership.

* Being arrested with known gang members.

* Attending functions sponsored by the gang or known gang members.

* Information from a reliable informant.

* Statements from relatives identifying the youth as a gang member.

* Indication from other law enforcement agencies that a youth is a gang member.

* Behavior fitting police profiles of gang-related drug dealing.

* Being stopped by police with a known gang member.

* Loitering, riding or meeting with a known gang member.

* Selling or distributing drugs for a known gang member.

* Helping a known gang member commit a crime.

NOTE: It takes only one of these to be considered a gang wanna-be or hanger-on; two can result in a youth being labeled an associate gang member, and five or more can cause police to label someone as a hard-core gang member.