Gang

LOS ANGELES -- The 40th president of the United States, Ronald Wilson Reagan, recently turned 88 years old, and a lot of the old gang gathered out in the Simi Valley here where his neo-Taco Bell library dominates a landscape of rolling and totally arid hills.It is so easy to make fun of Mr. Reagan, the cowboy actor become cowboy president. I did it deliberately in these first sentences, as I used to do it regularly when he was in power. Attacking him was simple, wounding him difficult, forgetting him impossible.

Federal, local, and state law enforcement officers said they dismantled a violent drug gang yesterday, arresting 10 suspects during a series of early-morning raids in Baltimore city and county.The sweep was part of Operation Safe Neighborhoods, a coalition formed in May 1998 to drastically reduce the city's murder rate, which has exceeded 300 every year this decade.The first phase of the crackdown occurred in July, when 22 people were arrested in Southeast Baltimore on drug and weapons charges.

An investigation of drug trafficking and gang violence at the maximum-security Maryland House of Correction has turned up a surprise -- inmates using cellular phones.Four cellular telephones and a watch with a pager attachment, apparently smuggled into the Jessup prison, were found in recent searches of areas used by convicts. Corrections officers found nearly 2 ounces of marijuana, a half-ounce of heroin and a third of an ounce of crack cocaine in the cell of one gang member, prison officials said.

LOS ANGELES -- The 40th president of the United States, Ronald Wilson Reagan, recently turned 88 years old, and a lot of the old gang gathered out in the Simi Valley here where his neo-Taco Bell library dominates a landscape of rolling and totally arid hills.It is so easy to make fun of Mr. Reagan, the cowboy actor become cowboy president. I did it deliberately in these first sentences, as I used to do it regularly when he was in power. Attacking him was simple, wounding him difficult, forgetting him impossible.

Six members of the East Baltimore Nickel Boys gang, which violently protected the lucrative crack-dealing turf it had staked out in the O'Donnell Heights public housing complex, were convicted in U.S. District Court yesterday of several counts of drug conspiracy, murder conspiracy and federal handgun charges.One battle over turf led to the killing two years ago of Northern High School quarterback Rocco Cash, who was allegedly shot by rival gang members who mistook him for a Nickel Boys enforcer.

"The Slick Boys," by Eric Davis, James Martin, Randy Holcomb, with Luchina Fisher. Simon and Schuster. 225 pages. $25.The appropriate response to "gangsta rap" should be "cop rap." Well, three undercover Chicago police officers thought so. They formed their group, "The Slick Boys," after hearing the NWA rap song "F*CK the Police" blasting from car stereos and the buildings in the Chicago housing projects where they worked.Eric Davis, James Martin and Randy Holcomb have performed before school groups and community groups.

They don't look so tough now. Not here, shepherded into a middle school auditorium, surrounded by police, parole agents and judges.Twenty young men ages 16 to 24 -- young but street-tough, on probation or parole for serious crimes -- were back at school in South Baltimore's Cherry Hill last night, this time for a lesson in deterrence. The visual aids were mug shots of the neighborhood's alleged Veronica Avenue Boys, until recently a drug-trafficking gang presumably more violent, more terrifying than anyone in the auditorium.

Federal prosecutors unsealed indictments yesterday charging 13 people with participating in two warring drug gangs that terrorized an East Baltimore neighborhood and killed at least four people, including a Northern High School all-star quarterback.The quarterback, 18-year-old Rocco Colavito Cash, was killed in an August 1997 drive-by shooting when a member of one of the gangs mistook him for a rival enforcer who had been targeted for execution, prosecutors said in U.S. District Court in Baltimore.

A witness who testified before a federal grand jury investigating a powerful East Baltimore drug gang was killed in February -- found shot in the head in his dining room, according to newly filed court documents.Police have not determined a motive in the Feb. 27 killing of John Jones, 40, but federal law enforcement sources say investigators think the slaying was one of a series of retaliatory measures against witnesses in the trial scheduled for this fall.Last week, six members of the drug organization allegedly run by Anthony Ayeni Jones were indicted in U.S. District Court on charges related to the killing of John Jones, who authorities think is Anthony Jones' uncle.

A veteran Baltimore police officer who patrolled the crime-weary east side was an integral part of a violent drug gang and conspired to help murder a rival drug lord, according to federal indictments.The charges are among indictments against 10 defendants handed up by a federal grand jury in Baltimore.They close out a lengthy investigation into two drug organizations whose feud, police say, led to dozens of shootings and slayings in East Baltimore.The officer's alleged role in the drug gang previously was described as tangential.

As soon as Maryland's Gang Prosecution Act went into effect in 2007, prosecutors in Harford County tested it, filing charges against a group that had stabbed and beaten a man. But when prosecutors couldn't show how the attack had furthered a criminal conspiracy, as required under the new law, the judge balked. They had to drop the gang charges and move forward with simple assault. "It's a very unworkable statute. ... Most prosecutors haven't really bothered to do anything with it," said Harford County State's Attorney Joseph I. Cassilly, who contends that the law is watered-down and useless.

Recognizing Baltimore's feuding gangs should be easy: Red for Bloods. Blue for Crips. But it's no longer as simple as looking for different-colored bandannas hanging from the back pockets of jeans. Gang identifiers, in addition to traditional signs and tattoos, can be almost anything, manifested in wardrobes of significant variety. A blue belt. Red rosary beads. Pockets turned inside out. The 'C' in a Colorado Rockies baseball cap. The red in a Cincinnati Reds hat. There's no set uniform, according to a law enforcement expert, but there are recognized symbols that gang members incorporate into their everyday attire.

A 16-year-old Columbia youth and alleged gang affiliate accused as an adult in a May attack on a security guard near the Long Reach Village Center was ordered detained Wednesday as a public safety risk, but also had his case returned to juvenile court. Darnell Rasheen Furby had been free on $35,000 bail until Howard County Circuit Judge Richard S. Bernhardt decided the teen should be treated as a juvenile instead of facing adult charges of assault, theft, and use of a handgun in commission of a felony in the May 13 attack in the 8800 block Flowerstock Row. Furby lives in that same block.

Terrance Richardson is a bad dude, according to federal agents. He's accused of being a Baltimore Bloods gang leader and ordering beatings and murders from jail while awaiting trial on 2008 gun charges. Since then, he's added racketeering and drug distribution to his alleged federal crimes. So, what do most people call him? "Squeaky." Naturally. Street nicknames, many of which were given during childhood, are the main means of identification among gang members of every level, from the neighborhood drug operations to the big, bad Bloods.

Peter Hermann's "Crime Scenes" is a reported feature that provides context about many of the incidents that take place on the streets of Baltimore and beyond. The last shots in the decades-long feud between the Old York and Cator Avenue Boys and the McCabe Avenue Boys might have been fired years ago. Arrests, violent deaths and attrition have rendered these once-notorious neighborhood groups nothing more than street-corner legend. Graffiti and tennis shoes that once hung from power lines marking turf no longer mar the urban landscape that defines North Baltimore's Pen Lucy neighborhood, though its main street, Old York Road, remains a desolate, narrow passageway lined with empty, gated storefronts, one where a South Korean merchant was killed in a robbery in 1997.

A man identified in court documents as a gang leader who had fallen out of favor with the organization has been charged by Baltimore police with a September killing after being picked up last week by federal authorities. Frank Williams, 25, also known as Lee Kelly, was one of more than 30 people rounded up last week as part of a racketeering indictment targeting the Maryland and California leadership of the Pasadena Denver Lanes unit of the Bloods gang. Authorities say the gang is responsible for a host of violent incidents, and Baltimore police announced Tuesday that they have placed a detainer on Williams linking him to the fatal shooting of Tyrone Bowie, 26, on Sept.

A jury will resume deliberating today the fate of a 19-year-old Owings Mills man accused of murder in what prosecutors called a gang-related killing in Columbia last year. Daymar Wimbish, the defendant, is an admitted Bloods gang member; his attorney argued he was merely present at a botched robbery attempt in the early hours of May 17, 2008, that ended in the shooting death of Jason Batts, 23. "The whole gang theme was a substitute for motive," Wimbish's attorney, Spencer Hecht, said in closing arguments to the jury on Tuesday.

Two city educators whose endorsements appear on the back of what federal authorities describe as a gang handbook recommended the leader's teachings to Mayor Sheila Dixon's education liaison. The mayor's office refused to elaborate on the meeting, saying it did not pursue the suggestion and has no knowledge of the book or Eric Brown, 40, the man authorities say is the leader of the Black Guerrilla Family. But the disclosure sheds light on how Brown's efforts might have been disseminated from behind prison walls.

A member of the Black Guerrilla Family gang was convicted Friday of first-degree murder in the killing of an 18-year-old man who had just run away from a group home and had turned to gang members for income and a place to stay. Bryant Williams volunteered to take Darius Harmon "under his wing," a witness testified. But within 48 hours of meeting him, Williams executed the teenager in an abandoned house in the 2200 block of Barclay St. because he had made mistakes in handling drug money, the jury found.

The morning before Kevin Gary was supposed to appear on a radio program to talk about thwarting violence in Baltimore, he was arrested and charged with gang conspiracy, symbolizing in a single moment the contradiction he was used to living. He bought turkeys for the poor at Christmastime, yet he was also a member of a local Bloods gang called Tree Top Piru, known for his signature red contact lenses and for dealing drugs, according to a statement of facts he signed as part of his January guilty plea agreement.