U.S. Mounts Sweeping Crackdown on L.A. Gangs : Crime: Federal agencies pool resources to try to disrupt activities. But some question the timing and tactics.

Even as Los Angeles street gangs work to maintain a two-month truce, federal agents are pouring into the city, part of the most sweeping federal attack ever mounted against gangs and the violence that surrounds them.

The campaign involves a cadre of federal agencies and began before the rioting broke out April 29. But the effort has been redoubled in recent weeks, partly because the riots have put pressure on Washington to devote more resources to fighting violent crime.

“This is, frankly, the biggest (gang) effort ever, federally,” said Jerry D. Thornton, an assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office. “It reflects the recognition that this is simply an overwhelming community problem, and the riots reinforced that.”

No agency is playing a more important role than the FBI. Atty. Gen. William P. Barr last month announced that the Los Angeles office would receive an additional 26 agents to fight gangs. Once they are in place, the number of Los Angeles FBI agents who investigate gangs or gang-related crimes will be nearly 100. That is more FBI agents than most American cities have assigned to all federal crimes.

The U.S. attorney’s office is shipping a highly touted gang prosecutor, William Hogan from Chicago, to Los Angeles this month. The local office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms last week announced plans to hire 10 agents, largely to investigate gang members.

Meanwhile, in a nondescript Westside office building, scores of federal agents and local investigators--including representatives of the FBI, ATF and Drug Enforcement Administration--are pressing ahead with investigations of riot crimes, many of which involve gangs.

Already, federal agents have helped identify alleged gang members charged in the April 29 attack on truck driver Reginald O. Denny. Thursday, they also arrested leaders of an organization that the FBI says has been supplying Los Angeles street gangs with huge amounts of cocaine and crack cocaine for years.

But those arrests represent just the first wave in a complex set of investigations focused on a double-barreled goal: to jail the upper echelon of the city’s gangs and to break the backs of their organizations with federal racketeering laws.

Federal officials acknowledge that accomplishing that could take years, but they say the team being assembled will pool the resources of the federal government with those of police departments, streamline gang prosecutions and help turn the corner in law enforcement’s long quest to bring Los Angeles gangs under control.

Key to the effort is a powerful federal racketeering law known as RICO. That statute has been used elsewhere, most notably in prosecuting New York’s ruling Mafia families and Chicago’s El Rukn crime organization. Prosecutors hope to emulate those successes here.

“Is this going to end crime in Los Angeles? No,” said Hogan, who handled the case in Chicago that resulted in the jailing of leaders of the El Rukn street gang. “Is it going to put a lot of these career criminals in jail, hurt their organizations and deter others from committing crimes? You bet.”

Still, some observers question the new push, calling it ill-timed and doomed to failure. The situation in Los Angeles is different from that in New York or Chicago, those critics say, with gangs here too numerous for a few high-level prosecutions to seriously weaken them.

“In New York, you could put away the family leaders and do a lot of damage,” said Bruce Kelton, a former assistant chief of the Los Angeles Organized Crime Strike Force and now a defense lawyer. “Here, it’s like trying to spit in the ocean.”

Moreover, some critics add that the new push could not come at a worse time. The past two months have seen the first noticeable downturn in gang violence in many years, which is attributed to the widely publicized truce between the Crips and Bloods, the city’s two best-known street gangs.

“Now that we’re chilling, they want to attack us,” said an inactive member of the Eight Tray Gangster Crips who goes by the name Li’l Monster. “Isn’t that ironic?”

The push by the federal government will be met with a backlash as residents and gangs resist the efforts to infiltrate their communities, warned Li’l Monster, an ardent backer of the truce.

“This is the agents of repression,” Li’l Monster said. “Here they come again.”

Federal officials remain skeptical about the gang truce. Just because gang members stop shooting each other, they say, does not mean that they will curb their bank robberies or drug sales. In fact, so-called “takeover” bank robberies, violent holdups that often involve gang members, have risen sharply, suggesting that the truce has not spread to that arena.

Drug trafficking also shows no sign of slowing because of the truce, authorities say.

“As law enforcement, we have to think about community safety,” Thornton said. “Even if the truce does hold, that doesn’t mean these gang members have stopped endangering that safety.”

As the federal government plunges into gang investigations, it brings its own approach. Traditionally, most prosecutions of gang members have been focused on criminal acts. A Crip who deals drugs might be charged with possession of narcotics with intent to sell them.

That approach is direct, but has weaknesses. Most assaults, robberies, murders and drug offenses are state crimes, and prison overcrowding in California means that even if criminals are convicted, their sentences almost invariably are cut short.

“What’s worse,” Hogan said, “is that for a lot of these guys, you lock them up in state prison, and it’s like going to college. They see their families, they deal drugs, they kill people.”

But the federal system is another matter. Sentences are much tougher, and there is no federal probation, so convicted criminals serve their full time. Gang members also can be spread across the federal system, rather than housed in state prisons where they know many of the inmates.

Additionally, RICO, the federal racketeering law, allows prosecutors to charge suspects with committing crimes as part of a continuing criminal enterprise. In essence, that lets the government put the gang on trial.

That makes it possible to try dozens of gang leaders at once and to present juries with information not just about a bank robbery or a drug deal but about the gang as a criminal organization. The result is a flexible and enormously powerful tool in the hands of prosecutors.

“Before RICO, you were not even allowed to utter a word about La Cosa Nostra in a courtroom,” said Edward McDonald, a New York defense lawyer and former chief of the Brooklyn-based Organized Crime Strike Force. “But with RICO, not only are you allowed to talk about the criminal organization, you’re required to prove the existence of it.”

That information can have a powerful effect on juries. John Gotti, the Mafia kingpin who long eluded prosecutors, was sentenced to life in prison last month after he was found guilty of racketeering and other offenses. Dozens of El Rukn gang members received the same fate.

That is good news for prosecutors, but it worries some defense advocates, who say that suspects in RICO cases are often tarred by association.

“The idea of these mega-trials is that the jury gets to see all these drugs and all these guns, and they hear about all these awful things that the gang did,” said Deborah Gubin, a Chicago lawyer who defended one of the suspects in the El Rukn case. “They (jury members) freak out. Then they convict everybody.”

There are obvious differences between the Mafia or El Rukn and Los Angeles street gangs, such as the Bloods and Crips. Unlike the Mafia, street gangs tend to be made up of younger criminals, more loosely organized and more poorly disciplined.

As even investigators acknowledge, gang members often commit crimes for themselves, not for the benefit of the gang. It can be a time-consuming and expensive process to prove that the gang is a criminal enterprise.

Extensive wiretaps often are needed to establish links among gang members, as are confidential informants and testimony by gang members who turn against each other.

Getting all that information can take years. In the El Rukn case, the federal investigation began in 1987, the gang’s leaders were indicted in 1989, and the various trials are only now concluding.

Likewise, the organized crime cases concluding in New York and Philadelphia were many years in the making. Still, prosecutors and investigators say the federal government’s new attack on gangs is being undertaken with the same seriousness and commitment long devoted to the Mafia.

And they insist that it will pay dividends.

“It took a long time, but we’ve really altered organized crime in this country,” Thornton said. “If we can keep this effort going, I think we can make a big difference here, too. We may not see it in three months, but it will happen.”

GANGS’ CORPORATION: Bloods and Crips form a corporation to provide an opening to the American dream. B1