Suit Seeks to Limit Langdon Street Gang Activity

Targeting what he considers the hub of the rock cocaine trade in the San Fernando Valley, City Atty. James Hahn revealed Monday that he has filed a court injunction against the Langdon Street gang in North Hills, his eighth such lawsuit.

“This is the center of the crack cocaine trade in the San Fernando Valley and we want to strike at the heart of it and put this gang out of business,” Hahn said in an interview.

He said the Los Angeles Police Department last year made 4,000 narcotics arrests in the Sepulveda corridor area dominated by the gang--one-third of all narcotics arrests made in the San Fernando Valley.

The suit seeks to bar the gang and 31 alleged members with street names such as “Lil Termite,” “Fester,” “Triste” and “Lil Monster” from associating in public, hanging out on private property, flagging down cars, using walkie-talkies and other activities. It also seeks to impose a 9 p.m. curfew on the gang, which the city attorney alleges has ties to the Mexican Mafia.

The gang, which authorities say has been around for about 15 years, has been a serious problem in the North Hills neighborhood. Law enforcement officials said the injunction was prompted by increasing violence by the gang, attributed in part to a street war with another gang, the Bryant Street gang. This has resulted in a number of shootings by and of members of the gang, authorities said.

In the latest shooting six months ago, a Bryant Street gang member and Langdon Street gang members got into a fight at a public bus stop outside James Monroe High School as several other students stood nearby. One innocent bystander was shot in the foot, LAPD Capt. Joseph Curreri said.

He said aggravated assaults and robberies have also increased recently.

“They rule by intimidation in that area,” Curreri said. “They kind of feel that they’re above the law and rule that area.”

Civil libertarians openly criticize the lawsuits, saying that they are ineffective and needlessly trample the defendants’ 1st Amendment rights.

“First of all, there are already laws on the books to arrest people for all the crimes enumerated” in the lawsuit, said Elizabeth Schroeder, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. “We have a strong concern that [the injunctions] violate the 1st Amendment right of association.”

The injunction was quietly filed on Friday. Hahn said he did not release details until Monday to allow officers to find gang members and serve them with copies of the lawsuit. A little more than half had been served by Monday afternoon, according to police.

A hearing has been set for next month before a judge, who will decide whether to grant the injunction. To win court approval, the city must prove that “traditional law enforcement” has not worked to resolve a gang problem.

All seven previous nuisance injunctions filed by the city attorney’s office have been granted by the courts.

Schroeder, of the ACLU, said a study conducted by the organization a few years ago found that injunctions do not stop crime; they simply shift it to the surrounding neighborhoods. City officials disagree, citing an injunction against some members of the 18th Street gang in the Pico-Union district resulted in a 50% drop in gang-related crime.

“The initial reports that we get back for areas where injunctions are in place indicate that crime is dropping faster than in other parts of the city,” Hahn said.

The lawsuit against the Langdon Street gang focuses on neighborhoods on both sides of the San Diego Freeway, as far north as Tupper Street in one area and as far south as Roscoe Boulevard in another.

In 1997, a series of stories in The Times chronicled life in one of the neighborhoods controlled by the Langdon Street gang, on Orion Avenue. Two journalists lived in the neighborhood for several months and concluded that law-abiding residents were essentially prisoners in their homes, afraid to venture out or let their children play outside for fear of the street gang, which ran a successful open-air drug market.

Hahn said the drug trade in the area has continued despite numerous arrests of gang members and crackdowns, including one recently carried out by the federal Drug Enforcement Agency.

One of the gang members made $70,000 selling drugs last year, according to Hahn’s staff.

The lawsuit filed Friday is the second in the Valley. An injunction for Blythe Street was approved previously, and is credited with helping to clean up and stabilize one of the Valley’s worst neighborhoods.

The city attorney plans to announce the lawsuit formally today at a news conference on Orion Avenue, in the heart of the turf claimed by the gang.