Crackdown on Street Gang Leads to 21 Arrests

Cracking down on a street gang that authorities say has terrorized a Latino neighborhood in South-Central Los Angeles, Los Angeles Police Department officers and federal agents swept through the small community early Wednesday, arresting 21 men and women and confiscating guns, drugs and cash.

The arrests capped a three-month investigation into the activities of the Bloodstone Villains, whose members were allegedly headquartered in a run-down Central Avenue apartment and using it as a base for illegal acts. Suspects arrested Wednesday were booked on charges ranging from drug possession to spousal battery, robbery and attempted murder.

At one location, police said, they found a sleeping baby with drug money stashed in a plastic bag beneath its head. At the foot of the baby’s bed was a diaper bag, and inside the bag was crack cocaine, officers added.

Police say the suspects, some of whom were handcuffed to benches at the Newton Street station early Wednesday, terrorized Latino residents, stealing money from them and getting away with it because many victims were in the country illegally and afraid to report the thefts.

“It’s a common problem,” said Det. Greg McKnight, who worked the case for three months. “These people get robbed all the time and they don’t report it. We talked to people about it, and once we did, we said, ‘Enough is enough, we need to take care of this.’ ”

In one case, two suspects approached a pair of Latino men who had just bought beer, robbed them and then shot them in the back as they ran away, McKnight said. Those suspects were booked on suspicion of attempted murder.

Along Central Avenue, residents and merchants long fearful of the gang’s activities expressed relief Wednesday morning. Most declined to give their names for fear of retribution by other members of the street gang, but person after person said the group had long wreaked havoc in the neighborhood.

“We’re all scared,” said one woman who works in a nearby market. “They had a shotgun on the roof the other day. They were shooting it.”

That woman and two of her colleagues said members of the gang also preyed on people waiting for the bus, which stops just outside the apartment where police said the gang had its headquarters. Graffiti cover walls, pay telephones and street signs in that stretch, and two men waiting for a bus Wednesday morning watched nervously as friends of some of the arrested men shouted from the roof of the neighboring apartment building.

For much of its length, Central Avenue teems with vendors selling ice cream, fruit and other commodities, authorities said, but merchants conspicuously avoid the area near where police made the arrests. That, officials say, is because the vendors have been held up so often that they do not dare go back.

On Wednesday morning, no vendors were in the area near 55th Street, and merchants confirmed that they rarely venture into the area. One man, walking with his daughter, said he had not seen ice cream vendors in the neighborhood for months, and added that he had been glad to see police cars in the area earlier that day.

“It’s about time,” he said, pulling his daughter across the street so that she would not hear the taunts of the young men and women on top of the apartment.

But those men and women denied that they were involved with the gang, and they accused police of ransacking their home for no reason other than to strike fear.

“I need to make a statement that [police] did some wrong stuff here,” said Trinika Ramsey, adding that she had lived in the apartment until about a month ago. “They broke things. They caught the room on fire. They used tear gas.”

Her cousin, Nettie Ramsey, agreed: “They were shooting that stuff in here. My dresser and my curtains caught fire.”

Lt. Jim Voge, the commanding officer of Newton Division detectives, acknowledged that there had been a small fire when SWAT officers entered the building, but said it was quickly put out with a fire extinguisher. “We didn’t tear anything up,” Voge said.

One of the women at the Central Avenue building also blamed police for frightening her baby. Voge said that was the same baby found sleeping on a stash of drug money, and he said the baby slept through the entire raid.

Voge described the raids as a smoothly professional operation assisted by the LAPD’s SWAT team.

Voge said officers fanned out before dawn, armed with 20 search and arrest warrants. The warrants were concentrated in an area with a quarter-mile radius in South-Central, and some of the searches were so close together that officers entering one house could hear colleagues a few doors down doing the same; five of the searches, for instance, were of houses in a single block.

There were no injuries to suspects or officers, Voge and other police said. None of the suspects handcuffed to a bench at Newton Division later that morning appeared to be hurt; some complained that they had been misidentified and arrested by mistake, but they chuckled when officers played a practical joke on a visitor, and they did not complain of pain or injuries.

By midmorning, most of the police activity had been completed, and 21 suspects were in custody. Four more were at large, authorities said. McKnight said the missing suspects are believed to be in the area.

In addition to the arrests, police seized several pounds of marijuana growing in the yard of one house, and they recovered a small amount of crack from the Central Avenue building. Many of the suspects were armed, and police confiscated 19 different types of weapons, including handguns, shotguns and a semiautomatic weapon, along with many rounds of ammunition.

Although drugs and guns dominated the police seizures, they also carted off photographs from several of the buildings they searched. The photographs were of young men--and occasionally women--flashing gang signs and sometimes brandishing weapons for the camera. One was made into a fake wanted poster, and others showed groups of glowering faces, bandannas and gang insignias.

“The photos were confiscated,” said Voge, “because they illustrated the kind of people we’re dealing with.”