Gang

An East Baltimore man who authorities said was responsible for the machine-gun killing of a gang rival in 2000 was sentenced yesterday to 30 years in federal prison on a drug charge. Prosecutors said Kevin "Manny" Glenn, 25, belonged to a violent East Baltimore gang that was responsible for at least five city killings, including a brazen block party shooting that killed the girlfriend of a rival gang leader. Court papers identified Glenn as the trigger man in the Nov. 11, 2000, machine-gun killing of Keith "Bones" Hamlet.

Of the various city homicides attributed by federal authorities to the violent East Baltimore gang known as the Hot Boys, the death of Darrin "D-Nice" Griffin on Sept. 16, 2000, was among the least noticed. A friend of some of the gang's leaders, Griffin was shot to death in a wooded area off Clifton Road because they believed he had stolen drugs and money from a stash house they controlled. To Griffin's mother, who helped raise and often cooked meals for some of the young men eventually implicated in her son's death, it was a loss that crystallized the senselessness of Baltimore's violent street culture, in which victims frequently know their killers well and the smallest slights can prove deadly.

Baltimore police said they shattered one of the city's most ruthless drug gangs yesterday in a series of raids targeting a ring that city police and federal agents link to at least 30 shootings and several slayings.The alleged leader, Ronald Mitchell, 24, was arrested at his $1,000-a-month Baltimore County apartment and charged with distributing cocaine and heroin and conspiracy to commit murder. He was being held last night on a preset $500,000 bond.Thirty-five gang members were indicted on drug charges.

GREENBELT -- Mata, viola, controla. The Spanish words for "murder," "rape" and "control" are the battle cry for La Mara Salvatrucha, a violent street gang known as MS-13 and responsible for a recent wave of attacks across Southern Maryland, according to federal prosecutors. The racketeering conspiracy trial against two alleged MS-13 members - Edgar Alberto Ayala, known as "Pony," and Oscar Ramos Velasquez, known as "Casper" - started yesterday with allegations that the men participated in a well-oiled criminal organization responsible for at least six homicides and five attempted killings.

Shamaar Guess is sure he sees evidence of criminal gangs marking their turf in Edgewood: the red bandanas dangling from former classmates' jeans, a middle-school girl displaying a bullet casing to prove she was a "Blood." "You have those that do it as intimidation: `If you mess with me, you mess with my gang members as well,'" said Guess, whose father, Derald Howard Guess, 37, was killed in his taxicab last month in what police and family members suspect was a gang-initiation rite. Dozens of young people have joined home-grown gangs in Harford County in recent years, their dealings largely confined to the illegal drug trade, police said.

Carroll County officials acknowledge that the county has a gang problem that has involved the Crips, the Bloods, MS-13 and Vatos Locos. Gang incidents have been largely intertwined with expanding illegal drug operations in the county during the last few years, officials said. "They're very much interrelated," said Jennifer L. Darby, a senior assistant state's attorney for the county. "Not every drug dealer is a gang member; not every gang member is a drug dealer. But they do go hand in hand."

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 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.

A federal grand jury here has indicted five members of an alleged drug gang that is suspected of operating in Pimlico in Northwest Baltimore, charging one member with slaying a street-level distributor and attempting to kill a potential witness in the case, court records show.Quentin Morgan, 33, could be eligible for the death penalty if he is convicted of slaying Angelo Howard, 31, of the 5200 block of Denmore Ave., who was gunned down in June. Morgan was also charged with the attempted murder of the potential witness in August, according to the indictments, made public Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Baltimore.

LOS ANGELES -- In a show of muscle that has brought an uneasy calm to some of this city's violent barrios, the Mexican Mafia prison gang has warned hundreds of Latino street gangs that if they do not halt drive-by shootings they will be killed by the syndicate behind bars.The edict has been delivered in recent months at tightly guarded meetings, including a summit Sept. 17 that drew more than 1,000 gang members. Under the new rule, gangs may still attack rivals with whom they have a grievance, but they must do so face-to-face, taking care not to harm bystanders.