Clashes Between Latino, Black Gangs Increase

After decades of operating in separate worlds, black and Latino gangs have begun to clash over turf and drugs, sparking a series of violent interracial battles that authorities say signals an ominous turn in the region’s gang warfare.

In communities from Venice to Riverside, gangs that once coexisted peacefully--sometimes even allying themselves to fend off outsiders--have become rivals in a power struggle that is linked to racial conflicts inside the jails and prisons, officials say.

“We’ve got a problem that, Jesus, if it explodes, won’t compare to anything we’ve seen before,” said Miguel (Mike) Duran, a gang specialist with the Los Angeles County Probation Department, who has worked to promote understanding between black and Latino gang members. “We’ve got to deal with it. You can’t run and hide.”

Nowhere has the clash been more fierce than on the Westside, where 13 people have been slain this year in a retaliatory cycle of bloodshed between two Latino gangs and one black gang that erupted in Venice’s Oakwood district and spread east to the Mar Vista Gardens housing project.

Since October, in a square-mile area, more than 30 people have been shot, several of whom were innocent victims apparently mistaken for gang members. In Mar Vista Gardens, Latino gang members are suspected of firebombing three units where African American families lived, while racist threats were left on the doors of half a dozen others. For two weeks, teachers at an Oakwood preschool refused to even let youngsters play outside.

“Once a Hispanic gets killed, they come back and take revenge on the blacks--just back and forth, back and forth,” said Nina Patterson-Lewis, whose 25-year-old brother, Jeremey LeShawn Patterson, was gunned down last month in Venice as he walked home from his job as a hospital orderly. “They had no reason to kill him. They didn’t even know him. They just saw a black man walking down the street and shot.”

In a confidential intelligence report prepared by the Housing Authority Police Department, officers contend that the violence on the Westside is not isolated, but part of large-scale battle between prison gangs to control narcotics trafficking on the streets.

The memo states that members of the Mexican Mafia, which has attempted to organize Latino gangs by calling for a halt to drive-by shootings, were paroled recently to the Mar Vista area. It adds that members of rival prison gangs, including the Black Guerrilla Family, also have been released to the community in the last few months--just about the time the street gangs turned on each other.

“On the surface, the ongoing problem in Mar Vista appears to be a local black-brown gang feud over territory,” says the report, a copy of which was obtained by The Times. “In fact, the problem is much larger and vastly more complex. The fight is not racial or territorial, but financial. The local gangs are proxies in a larger war.”

Although the battle may be over money, authorities concede that race is intimately woven into the struggle.

The prison gangs encouraging the fight are steeped in a separatist mentality forged from years of confrontations behind bars. With the number of Latino inmates surpassing the number of blacks, an escalating cycle of racial tension has racked the Los Angeles County Jail system; so far this year, there have been 53 brawls, some of which have involved as many as 800 inmates, at the Peter J. Pitchess Honor Rancho.

Indications that the battle may be economically and racially motivated were evident at a Mexican Mafia meeting in July at Ernest E. Debs Regional Park in Montecito Heights. In an intelligence report prepared after the meeting, Los Angeles Police Department anti-gang officers concluded that the Mexican Mafia was trying to organize the gangs to dominate narcotics trafficking on the West Coast.

But in a foreboding note, the confidential memo also added: “The information received was there will be an upcoming race war between blacks and Hispanics.”

What has made the conflict so disturbing to residents of Venice and Mar Vista is that the gangs involved, like most of the county’s estimated 570 Latino gangs and 315 black gangs, had managed to coexist for years without perceiving each other as threats.

Oakwood’s principal Latino gang, Venice 13, has long shared the same streets with the Venice Shoreline Crips, often spray-painting their monikers side-by-side. In Mar Vista Gardens, drug-dealing turf was divvied up between the Crips and the project’s larger Latino gang, the Culver City Boys.

“We were never afraid,” said Rosie Rodriguez, whose 19-year-old brother, Braulio, was shot to death last month, allegedly by Crips who mistook him for a Venice 13 member. “My brother talked to everybody. He had no enemies. He was innocent.”

In fact, police say, most of the violence in those neighborhoods historically has stemmed from friction between the two Latino gangs, which just last year agreed to a truce and have now united against the Crips. It is one of the odd, self-destructive traits of street gangs that the alienated young men who claim membership tend to direct their violence against those most like themselves.

But in recent years, a complex mix of demographic, economic and criminal forces has begun to reshape those rivalries, bringing black and Latino gangs into greater competition for the scarce resources of their impoverished neighborhoods. If a full-scale war were ever to break out along racial lines, authorities fear, the combined firepower of the gangs would be catastrophic.

“There is no gang, brown or black, that does not understand how expensive it would be,” said Jim Galipeau, a deputy probation officer in the county’s Metropolitan Specialized Gang Unit. “There may not be love, but neither side is stupid.”

In that atmosphere, a spark can ignite an inferno. Police believe the entire gang feud in Venice started last February when two friends--one Latino and one black--fought over a crack cocaine pipe.

Dianna Calhoun, 35, an associate of the Venice Shoreline Crips, fatally stabbed Mark Herrera, 32, a Venice 13 member, after they argued over who would take the first puff, according to investigators. Calhoun, who was released after prosecutors determined that she acted in self-defense, was slain several weeks later in a drive-by.

“The stupid part is that this all started almost as a domestic dispute,” said Lt. Brad Merritt, who heads the LAPD’s Westside anti-gang unit. “But because it inflamed neighborhood passions, or their sense of machismo, the gangs took it up as a cause.”

The Westside rivalry may be among the most intense, but it is not the only one.

In South-Central Los Angeles, a bloody seesaw battle between one of the oldest Crips gangs and a rapidly expanding Latino gang has claimed more than 20 lives since a prison dispute sparked the feud nearly three years ago, officers say.

In Riverside, according to police, the Mexican Mafia ordered a Latino gang to sever its alliance with a black gang that shares the same turf. After some hesitation, the Latino gang eventually turned against the Crips, inciting a racially charged battle that last month took the life of an 18-year-old Latino gang member--a youth who detectives say was among those most resistant to opening a rift with the black gang.

And at the Pico-Aliso housing projects in Boyle Heights, where eight gangs--seven Latino and one black--were jammed into a two-square-mile complex, authorities say the Latino gangs united this year against a common enemy, using gunfire and intimidation to effectively run the Crips faction out of the development.

Ironically, police note, the charge was led by a youthful Latino gang that once had been closely allied with the Crips, welcoming numerous black members and adopting their tastes in fashion, music and slang. Derided by other Latino gangs for betraying their culture, the racially mixed gang felt it had to turn against the Crips to finally win respect.

“It offended us because a lot of people said we acted black and dressed black,” said one 20-year-old Latino from the gang. “We had to show that we were true Chicanos.”

He acknowledged that the rift with the Crips had made relations tense with the few remaining black members of his gang, even though he still values their friendship. “We play the role, like we all get along and everything’s fine,” he said. “But I know it won’t always be like that.”

The tension, officials believe, stems partly from a shift in the balance of power that has given new strength to Latino gangs, which took root on Los Angeles’ Eastside nearly half a century before Bloods and Crips came into existence.

Although black gangs have slowed down since the 1980s, when the proliferation of semiautomatic weapons and the burgeoning rock cocaine trade ushered in a gruesome phase of violence, Latino gangs have been rejuvenated by a new generation of Mexican and Central American immigrants. On the streets and behind bars, they have to come to the realization that--if only through sheer numbers--they have the potential to dominate the underworld.

“Hispanic gang members are becoming very aware of their power and are beginning to exercise it in their own particular way,” said Housing Authority Police Officer Kent Keyfauver, who has patrolled gang-plagued projects from the Eastside to Westside. “They’re the dominant population and I think the feeling is: Why appease any other group when you can just take things over yourself?”

But the opportunism cuts both ways. Where black gangs can, police contend, they too are using their muscle, intensifying the racial rifts.

While a truce between Bloods and Crips has brought gang-on-gang killings to a virtual halt in Watts, detectives have become troubled by what they consider a pattern of robberies committed by black gang members against poor Latino immigrants.

Amid charges by Latinos that they are being targeted for attack, the LAPD recently analyzed six months of robbery reports, which indicated that Latinos and African Americans in South-Central Los Angeles were equally likely to be victims. But the report also noted that African Americans were eight to 10 times more likely to be suspects.

Capt. Willie L. Pannell, commander of the LAPD’s Southeast Division, downplayed the ethnic distinctions. Instead, he said, criminals may view Latinos as attractive targets because of their propensity for carrying cash, their immigration status, their rural background and their distrust of police.

“These are crimes of opportunity, not racism,” said Lt. Sergio Robleto, commander of the LAPD’s South Bureau homicide detail, where detectives this year have investigated more than 70 murders committed in the course of robberies. “It’s the poor scrounging on the poor.”

But Robleto also contended that Crips and Bloods, especially some of those involved in the truce, have taken advantage of the lull in their rivalries to prey on members of the community. “There’s no question about that,” he said. “They’ve redirected their efforts toward other criminal enterprises that are just as deadly--if not more so.”

Proponents of the truce deny the charge. Moreover, they say, it is unfair to hold them accountable for every young man with gang connections who tries to meet his financial needs with a gun.

“If they’re acting in a negative way to our brown brothers, then they’re acting totally independently,” said the Rev. Carl Washington, a truce negotiator who serves as a deputy to county Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke. “It has nothing to do with gangs.”

In the end, say leaders in both the Latino and African American communities, it has everything to do with economics.

The demographic shift that saw the Latino population in South-Central Los Angeles jump 119% during the 1980s was largely a function of the area’s inexpensive housing. Drug dealing has become viewed by some as a parallel economy for those who can’t or won’t find decent work in a shrinking job market.

“Everyone wants to say race war, but no one wants to talk about how it got to this stage,” said Shirley Spearman, president of the residents’ council at the 598-unit Mar Vista housing project, where she handed out 100 free turkeys last week to the most impoverished tenants. “We’re not going to find a solution until people start talking about the big picture.”

* VIOLENCE CONTINUES: For Latino gangs in the Valley, peace has been difficult. B1