Rise in Killings May Mean Gang Truce Is Over : Violence: Surging murder rate in LAPD’s Rampart Division could be an indication the Mexican Mafia’s control has broken down, police say.

A series of shootings on the home turf of two of the city’s largest Latino gangs has brought violence west of Downtown back to record-breaking levels.

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Gang-related killings have soared in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division--with 21 murders in August--after two years of decline, according to law enforcement officials.

Rampart, which includes the Pico-Union and MacArthur Park areas, is the home of the 18th Street and Mara Salvatrucha gangs, and has more homicides than any other LAPD division. Its gang activity often foretells trouble throughout the city, officials say.

“For the last few years Rampart’s been a weather vane; when it gets busy here, it gets busy everywhere else,” said Rampart Detective Terry Wessel, a gang specialist.

The latest round of gang killings in Rampart may reveal a breakdown of the Mexican Mafia’s control over heroin sales in the area, according to a law enforcement official who monitors the prison gang. A much-vaunted Latino gang truce in the San Fernando Valley is believed to be breaking down for the same reason.

Two years ago the Mexican Mafia, which consists of incarcerated members of Latino street gangs, ordered Los Angeles’ Latino street gangs to stop drive-by shootings. The Mexican Mafia was concerned that the shootings had increased police attention to gangs, hurting street drug sales, according to police memos.

Known as La Eme, Spanish for the letter M, the Mexican Mafia had taxed drug dealers and assigned zones for heroin sales to different gangs in the Rampart area, according to a law enforcement source. With the recent death or imprisonment of several of La Eme’s enforcers who had kept order in the area, street gangs began to fight for turf.

With 99 homicides through September, Rampart has already passed last year’s total of 98, and is at the record-breaking pace of 1992, when the division had 149 homicides.

Most of the victims in the latest round of gang homicides have been members of the 18th Street gang, believed to be the largest in California, with dozens of “cliques,” or informal chapters, spread throughout California. In addition to the mostly Chicano 18th Street and the Salvadoran Mara Salvatrucha, 13 other gangs are active in the Rampart area, Wessel said.

Law enforcement officials who monitor gangs in the central city are split over the causes of the increased violence. Gang detective Wessel rejects the theory that La Eme controlledstreet gangs, and that the recent violence reflects a breakdown in their authority.

La Eme “tried to assign areas, but in many cases it didn’t work,” Wessel said.

Wessel credited the drop in gang crimes to stepped-up police presence in 1993 and 1994, and attributed the resurgence in violence to a reduction of law enforcement this year. He said departmentwide cuts in gang units mean that Rampart today has about half as many officers assigned to its gang unit as it did in 1992.

Some of the officers have been assigned to community-based policing details and others are working on recruiting efforts as the Police Department rushes to expand the size of the force.

“We just don’t have the manpower we used to have, and we can’t be as proactive as we were,” Wessel said.

In Los Angeles as a whole, gang-related killings this year are up only slightly, with 235 recorded through August, compared with 231 for the first eight months of 1994.

But the pace of killings picked up in August. The August Rampart shootings, as well as rampant late-summer Latino gang violence in the San Fernando Valley and northeast Los Angeles, brought the August gang homicide tally for the city to 47, more than double the August, 1994, total of 20. Lt. Dan Hills, commanding officer of Rampart’s detectives, noted that the method used by gangs to gun down their foes has changed since 1992. Rather than driving by in cars, gang members now approach their enemies on foot before shooting them, a practice Hills calls “walk-up shooting.”

With the arrests and deaths of many older gang members, Hills said, gang members arrested recently are far younger than those in the last two years. “A lot of them are 12- or 13-year-old kids. You look at them and think they ought to be in Boy Scouts or Cub Scouts.”

Times staff writer Robert J. Lopez contributed to this story.

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Gang Killings on the Rise

The Rampart area west of Downtown is a hotbed of Los Angeles gang crime, with 15 youth gangs active in the eight- square- mile zone. Police estimate that there are more than 4,000 gang members in the area. The number of gang killings in Rampart is now rising to record levels after falling for two years.

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Total Gang- Killings Related 1992 149 45 1993 120 28 1994 98 20 1995* 99 41

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* Figures through September, 1995.

Actual number of gang killings may be higher because police are still investigating the causes of the most recent slayings. Source: Los Angeles Police Department