Slick 50’s Is a Gang, Prosecutor Tells Jury

Four South County teenagers and a 21-year-old charged in last summer’s near-fatal stabbing of an Aliso Viejo youth were members of a nontraditional street gang that had been increasingly active for months before the attack, a prosecutor said in court Thursday.

That is the crux of the case against members of the so-called Slick 50’s who are facing charges of attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon and gang membership in the Aug. 11 fight, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Marc Kelly.

If the jury agrees that the group does meet the legal definition of a street gang, all five will be held culpable for the same charges, regardless of the level of their individual involvement in the attack. Defense attorneys said that the group has been wrongly labeled as a gang by overzealous sheriff’s officials and that the boys have maintained that the Slick 50’s was simply a circle of friends who wear “greaser style” clothing and enjoy music and memorabilia from the 1950s.

The defendants--Steve Crader, 17, of Aliso Viejo; Kurtis Pinedo, 17, of Laguna Hills; Joshua Riazi, 16, of Dana Point; Jesse Grist, 17, of Laguna Niguel; and Josh Carlsen, 21, of Dana Point--each face up to 15 years in prison if convicted. The Times is identifying the minors by name because they are charged as adults.

“This was not your traditional street gang like the Bloods and Crips in L.A.,” Kelly said in his opening statement. “They didn’t spray-paint graffiti all over the place. They weren’t territorial. But they were gang members nonetheless.”

Kelly said south Orange County sheriff’s investigators had known of the Slick 50’s movements up to seven months before the fight, which broke out at an unsupervised high school party in Aliso Viejo. The group’s members had a reputation for crashing parties, choosing a target and then “savagely beating the tar out of him,” Kelly said.

While not uncommon in the county’s more urban areas, the gang allegation shook the sprawling communities where the boys live and sparked widespread debate. Some residents believe officials overreacted, but sheriff’s deputies said the charges were warranted, even though the Slick 50’s defies the stereotype of a gang. They refer to the group as a “bully gang” and say its members are part of a new breed of suburban gangs.

“This gang had been finding its roots and making itself known and making a statement down in South Orange County” before the August incident, which left 16-year-old Galen Thorne near death, Kelly said.

The prosecutor described the fight as a “vicious, unprovoked signature Slick 50’s-style beating,” but defense attorneys disputed his claim that the group had distinguished itself as being violent or combative. None of the teenagers has a criminal record.

Anthony Sessa, who is representing Grist, also said that details of the Aug. 11 assault are unclear and unreliable because they come from “a bunch of drunken teenagers” who were at the party. The victim admitted that he drank vodka and smoked marijuana with several friends before the Slick 50’s group, who had also been drinking, showed up that night.

“You have a group of people--kids--drinking alcohol, doing drugs, going to and fro, all of these factors in place,” Sessa told the jury. “And you’re going to be asked to decide whether [the defendants] planned to kill somebody when they got to this party. I mean, these were a bunch of drunken teenagers who . . . couldn’t plan anything, couldn’t plan what they were going to do from one minute to the next, much less a homicide.”

Three of the five defense lawyers did not present opening statements on Thursday. Both Sessa and Patrick Rossetti, who is representing Crader, assured jurors that the Slick 50’s was not a gang and promised evidence from gang experts to support their claim.

“You will see big, big differences between [the Slick 50’s] actions and what they do and those of a real gang,” Rossetti said.

The prosecutor’s first witness was Thorne, the victim, who testified that he couldn’t be sure which of his attackers stabbed him because he never saw the knife. He showed jurors a trio of stab wounds to his side and back, and Kelly pointed out a jagged scar on Thorne’s cheek, which was caused when someone broke a beer bottle over his head.

Thorne said he knew two of the defendants only casually before the attack and the others not at all. He said he was surprised when the group started swinging at him and remembers asking several times why they had singled him out.

“I kept saying, ‘Why are you doing this? I know who you are,’ ” said Thorne, now 17. “I thought it must have been some kind of misunderstanding . . . like they thought I was someone else or something.”

Testimony will continue today. Superior Court Judge Robert R. Fitzgerald said the trial could take several weeks.