Wide Injunction Sought Against 18th Street Gang

Hoping to strike at the heart of one of the nation’s largest and most violent street gangs, Los Angeles authorities are seeking a court injunction to hobble the 18th Street Gang in the stronghold of its birthplace.

The injunction covering the Pico-Union area west of downtown would target the most gang members over the widest area of any order officials have so far obtained.

At least 50 gang members who are named, and 250 still to be named, would be barred from engaging in a number of otherwise legal activities including standing, sitting, walking, driving, gathering or appearing anywhere in public in groups of three or more.

A multi-agency law enforcement task force, including LAPD officers and state parole officers, fanned out over the Pico-Union area over the weekend to serve gang members with official notices about the injunction.

The proposed action is the most far-reaching in a series of injunctions aimed at gang members filed by both city and county prosecutors in recent years. It marks the first collaboration of the Los County district attorney’s office and the Los Angeles city attorney’s office, and is the most complicated of the measures by virtue of the sheer number of gang members authorities hope to harness.

An injunction approved by the courts last month was aimed at curbing the activities of 18 members of one of the gang’s cliques in a 17-block area of Jefferson Park, a Southwest Los Angeles neighborhood that had been terrorized by the gang.

Like that injunction, the one now sought by officials would virtually ban all gang gatherings and bar the members from other activities including possessing pagers or cellular phones in any public place or acting as lookouts who whistle, yell or otherwise signal anyone that police are on their way. The court order also would impose an 8 p.m. to sunrise curfew for any gang members under the age of 18 unless they were coming to or from work, a public event or errand, or were accompanied by a parent, guardian or a spouse who is at least 18 years old.

The one-square-mile Pico-Union area has almost 28,000 residents, most of them Latino, and is not only one of the most densely developed pockets in the county but among its poorest and most crime-ridden.

Not coincidently, authorities allege, it also is the birthplace of the 18th Street group, a notorious gang that has sprawled and grown over the past 30 years.

“We are trying to get to the heart of the beast,” said Michael Genelin, who heads the district attorney’s hard-core gang division.

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Within the Pico-Union area, authorities allege, the gang has for several years engaged in large-scale drug trafficking and wholesale extortion of residents and merchants--for everything from street protection to parking spaces.

“They are terrified of the gangs,” said one law enforcement official. “They know the size of the gang. They know its capabilities. They know it controls the area.”

Mayor Richard Riordan, Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, City Atty. James Hahn, acting LAPD Chief Bayan Lewis and Councilman Mike Hernandez, whose district includes Pico-Union, have scheduled a news conference today to discuss the civil lawsuit.

The officials are confident that the injunction to be sought in Los Angeles Superior Court will be approved. A dozen such orders have already been granted to curb gang activity in Los Angeles, Inglewood, Burbank, Pasadena, Long Beach and unincorporated portions of the county.

For several years, the concept of curtailing gang activities through injunctions has been an increasingly popular law enforcement tool. Just over a month ago, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a case testing the legality of such tactics, let stand a judge’s order allowing San Jose officials to prohibit 38 young Latinos from gathering together on certain streets.

In the areas where the injunctions have been used, authorities say neighborhoods have become safer as even small groups of gang members avoid each other on the streets and have curtailed such activities as drug-dealing and tagging.

The injunction to be sought in Los Angeles is the most ambitious ever, said officials who declined to be identified.

Other injunctions, including the order granted last month against a smaller 18th Street clique in Jefferson Park, have involved far fewer defendants and been limited to small areas largely controlled by a single gang.

But in Pico-Union, dozens of warring gangs are jammed into the most densely populated neighborhood west of the Mississippi, battling block-by-block almost daily for tiny patches of turf and lucrative drug-dealing spots.

The Los Angeles Police Department counts several thousand gang members in the area, which is under the jurisdiction of the Rampart Division--a police station so busy it is ominously nicknamed the 911 Division.

Of the gang members living in the Rampart area, authorities say that about 2,100 are known to be affiliated with 18th Street. And in the nation’s gang capital, investigators at the local station often tally more gang homicides than any other police division. In the last 18 months, authorities say, 18th Street members accounted for 32 of the Rampart homicides--either as suspects or victims.

Exacerbating the conflicts, 18th Street and its bitterest rival, the Salvadoran gang Mara Salvatrucha, feed off a violent system of “taxation” and extortion involving drug dealers and others involved in illicit activities on the streets, authorities say.

While that rivalry could be altered if a court order dilutes 18th Street’s power in Pico-Union, authorities said they do not expect that the gang’s possible decline to result in more power for Mara Salvatrucha.

For one thing, they note, the Salvadoran gang’s strength is on the fringes of Pico-Union and it is not likely to increase significantly enough to stake out a new territory. “It is difficult for a gang to just sweep into a new area like that; it’s not like an army,” said one law enforcement official, who declined to be identified.

In addition, authorities noted, the increased police presence that would be necessary to enforce the court action would be a deterrent not only to 18th Street but any gang members in the area. If the action is as successful as hoped, said another official, the area should become a “dead zone” for significant gang activity.

And finally, according to another law enforcement official familiar with both gang activity and the aftermath of court orders against gangs, the proposed order could also deter other gang-related crime because it would allow both residents and merchants of the Pico-Union area time to regroup and reclaim their neighborhood.

“The gang injunction empowers residents and shop owners,” the official said. “It gives communities some breathing space to take back their streets.”

The rise of 18th Street from its Pico-Union roots 30 years ago was chronicled last year in a Times series.

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The gang, a loose-knit network of cliques bound together by visions of growth and street gang dominance, is regularly involved in murder, robbery, auto theft and drug dealing, authorities say. It has aggressively recruited young members in recent years, reaching across both jurisdictional boundaries and ethnic lines.

Cells of the gang are active in a majority the LAPD’s 18 divisions, as well as smaller cities in the southeast part of the county, the San Gabriel Valley, the South Bay, the Inland Empire and Orange County. Other branches of the gang have scattered from Oregon and Utah to Tijuana and Central America.

But the gang’s biggest, most intractable stronghold has remained Pico-Union, where surging immigration, particularly from war-torn Central America in the 1980s, expanded the pool of potential recruits.

By some accounts, a falling-out with some of the new Salvadorans within 18th Street gave birth to the ruthless Mara Salvatrucha gang. For years, 18th Street and MS have waged a bloody struggle that has spilled out of Pico-Union and into Hollywood, the San Fernando Valley and many other communities.

Critics, including some street-level gang investigators, doubt the effectiveness of injunctions, saying they simply push gang problems to new areas.

LAPD officials often have emphasized that anti-gang injunctions are very labor intensive to secure and properly enforce. Whether additional staffing will be provided to the Rampart Division in the Pico-Union area, already one busiest in the city, is unclear.