Embedded Law Enforcement Professionals in Iraq

Part I

Hunting Down Terrorist Bombers

Retired FBI Agent Greg Snider has spent the last year and half hunting for the most dangerous predators on earth—men using bombs to kill and terrorize. Greg, imbedded with our military units in Iraq, sifted through the debris of the latest bombing sites searching for elusive clues. He and his teammates searched for evidence that might lead military and law enforcement to identify these bomb makers and track the manufactures providing hardware and explosives to these killers.

Cold nights, scorching days, and blinding dust storms are some of the conditions Greg and his team endured in this manhunt. As they searched, they were always watching their back, wondering when they might become the hunted by those who kill indiscriminately.

Back in the states, Greg has agreed to tell us his story about the fight that is still being waged in that country and other parts of the world by our troops. No country is immune, as New Yorkers discovered again in May when a Pakistani-born man rigged an SUV with a homemade designed to explode in Times Square. Fortunately, this bomb failed.

In this three-part interview, Greg will tell us about his experiences in this search for these killers.

Danger hs never been something Greg ran away from during his career. As an FBI, he worked undercover so effectively the bureau needed to relocate him after the case finally surfaced in court. He served for many years on that agency’s SWAT, responding to call outs that he chooses not to discuss. He learned to fly, became a pilot for the bureau, and limped away from one crash only to continue flying again. He was awarded the FBI’s highest award for bravery after saving the life of another federal agent on the high seas during yet another undercover operation. I know these things about Greg, because he is my friend and partner in a number of cases. He is an unassuming gentleman who has always stayed away from the lime light. He gave this interview because we are friends.

In my book, this man is an American hero.

MARK: Thanks, Greg, for allowing us to learn a little more about what is going on overseas. It is not often we get to pull back the shades for a personal view as to what is happening in Iraq. First, tell us about how you learned about this job? I don't imagine you learned about it in the want ads. Did you know what you were going to get into?

GREG:  I first heard about this opportunity approximately nine months or so before actually learning what the real mission was all about.  It is “Saving Soldiers Lives.”  The number one killer of our Soldiers and loss limbs are due to Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), bombs!

When I first heard of this program I said “No way, are you nuts.”  Going to a war zone to work with the U. S. Army, you’ve got to be kidding.

After talking to another retired FBI agent with whom I am very well acquainted, he told me that we would be advising the battle space commanders about “investigations.”  Something they knew nothing about.  We were going to be the “experts” on how to investigate those organized criminal groups, just like the drug organizations in Mexico and the U.S., responsible for supplying the bomb materials, training the bomb makers, the manufacturing of the bombs, those placing the bombs and those triggering them.  The mission was then clear, something I’ve been doing for many years as an FBI agent.

I saw a chance to make a difference.  It was now clear that the right people might be able to have an impact in this fight.  I could be an added value to the Army.  Although my heart was now in it, I also thought this is idiotic, to say the least, to go to a war zone at my age.  How would I keep up with the 20-something year old soldiers?  It would be a challenge to say the least.

I decided to follow up and contacted Military Professional Resource, Inc. (MPRI), which was acquired by L-3 Communications about 30 years ago, regarding my qualifications and their requirements.  I further learned that their idea was to take well seasoned law enforcement individuals and embed them into a military unit as an advisor.  I would in essence become one of the Commander’s resources to use at his discretion.   There was a lot of discussion about my physical condition and whether I was medically “fit for duty.”  They mailed me the forms for the medical checkups and further descriptions of what the mission was about and requirements.  A side note, I learned that about one person per class discovered some major medical issue that they did not know they had, i.e. cancer or a heart ailment.

The reasons for the medical checkups and questions about my physical conditioning were because for all intent and purpose I was going to be a soldier.  I was going to be required to carry a gun, wear a U.S. Army uniform, and carry all the same equipment to include body armor weighing about 55 pounds before you add all the ammo and other army stuff to it.  Oh, and the heat, wearing all that equipment in the heat!  Also required were a series of inoculations for everything you can imagine and some that you would rather not.

The realization that this was going to be a huge undertaking on my part at my age (59) was now ranking at the top of the list of all the major decisions I have ever made in my life.  Not to mention the fact that I was going to be taking the same risk of death as those soldiers I would be working hand-in-hand with.  I would be in the battle space face to face with an enemy who wanted to kill you.

Once I had wrapped my mind around taking on such a daunting task, probably the most perplexing issue was signing up for a one year tour of duty and leaving the family for such a long period.  Luckily my wife is as capable as she is understanding.  Of course I would miss her and my family tremendously.  After much discussion we agreed that this would be “Greg’s last big adventure.”

MARK:  What did you need to do to prepare for this tour of duty?

GREG: Besides making sure I met all the requirements presented above, I was already working out on a weekly basis, so I increased the intensity of my workouts and completed most of the medical requirements.  At first, MPRI was not calling me back.  After several inquiries I later learned that they were very concerned that I may be a problem because I have two prosthetic shoulders.  Would that one medical factor cause me not to be able to complete the one year required deployment, they asked?  I persisted with explanations of what my conditioning and weight bearing capabilities were and finally they acquiesced and accepted my application.  A good word from other LEPs (embedded Law Enforcement Professionals) who know me was probably the deciding factor.

MARK:  Although you’ve served your country with the FBI in a number of ways, you never served in the military. Did that take a little getting used to?

GREG:  Yes, I was not in our armed forces.  However, I was a firearms instructor, a SWAT agent, and a sniper for over 14 years with the FBI.  So, I was very familiar with the equipment and weaponry.  Of course there was going to be a requirement to pass an army firearms qualification course.  I was already familiar with the army’s 5 paragraph “Operations Order,” as we had a similar requirement in the FBI.  My knowledge of tactics and patrolling was already sound. 

Terri Blackstock

Author: Terri Blackstock

Cyberspace predators have become parents’ latest nightmare as technology breaks down the walls of privacy for unsuspecting youth. Predator—New York Times bestselling author Terri Blackstock’s latest novel—takes us into this cyber world where a vicious hunter poses as a friend to potential victims. The stalker uses a social network to hunt his next prey.

Terri Blackstock fans will not have long to wait to get their hands on her latest novel. Predator has just been released.

Terri is the award-winning author of Intervention and Double Minds, and has sold six million books worldwide.  Terri’s other works include the following series of novels—Cape Refuge, Newpointe 911, the SunCoast Chronicles, and the Restoration Series.

This author has been the recipient of many awards recognizing her gift for writing and her every-growing popularity among readers, including the announcement several weeks ago that she is a 2010 Christy Awards finalist for her novel, Intervention. Some of these awards include the 2007 winner of the Christian Retailer’s Award for General Fiction for Nightlight;  2006 Christy Awards finalist for Last Light in the suspense category; 2005 Christy Awards finalist for River’s Edge in the suspense category; 2003 Christy finalist for Covenant Child in the category of allegory. Her 2008 novel, True Light, topped the Top 50 charts for all Christian books the first month of its release. (Visit Terri’s website for more information about her other books and her writing journey).

MARK: Terri, thank you for joining us today. Your latest novel is not for the faint hearted. Tell us a little about the story of Predator and its main character, Krista Carmichael.

TERRI: Thanks for this opportunity to tell everyone about my new book, Mark. I’m really excited about the book, because it’s about the dangers of being careless with our information on the internet. In Predator, Krista Carmichael’s fourteen year old sister is found murdered, and it quickly becomes clear how easy she made it for her killer to stalk her until he had the opportunity to abduct her. Krista decides to use GrapeVyne, my fictitious social network, to create a fake profile. She makes herself bait for the killer, hoping to find him and bring him to justice. But when she manages to get his attention, Krista finds it impossible to control the outcome.

MARK: In this novel, a gap widens between what Krista says she believes about God and her innermost doubts about His love for us. She begins to question why the Almighty would allow pain and suffering to fall upon the innocent. This is a very common question in today’s troubled world, even among those who have put their faith in God. How would you answer this question without giving away Krista’s struggle or her final moment of truth?

TERRI: Krista works in a ministry that helps teen girls in a low income/high crime area. When her sister is murdered, she sort of puts on a mask so the girls will see her as this strong, unwavering Christian. She doesn’t want them to know that she has these questions, and that she’s angry at God for allowing her sister to be murdered. So she has this internal struggle between what she really feels and what she wants people to think she feels. She begins to question whether she belongs in ministry at all. But the fact is, her suffering and her honest questions qualify her even more for ministry, because she can now relate to the girls on a level she couldn’t have imagined before.

I think sometimes I have my characters ask questions that I ask in my own struggles, and I don’t feel like I have to tie up the answers in a nice little package. What I try to show my readers is that God is very complex, and His purposes are complex, and there’s so much that we don’t know about Him. He’s not a three-dimensional God who fits nicely into any human formula. He’s five-, six-, ten-dimensional, and He sees the end from the beginning, and plans the ends and the beginnings. This life is a rehearsal for something that we can’t even fathom. I just want them to explore those questions and challenge what they’ve always expected from God.

MARK:  Many readers and writers are avid users of the social networking system—Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and many other sites. And we’ve seen where parents have allowed their children to use this technology to reach out to their friends and to make new friends. Did you come across any surprises about this technology as you researched the subject? Any advice for parents trying to protect their children against the perils of social networking and online invasion of privacy?

TERRI: When I was researching the book, I was stunned at all the articles I came across about people who were dead or missing, or women who’d been stalked and raped, because of relationships they forged online. Or they gave too much information, and predators put those puzzle pieces together to find out things about them that they never would have given out under ordinary circumstances. We teach our children not to talk to strangers, yet we haven’t educated them enough about the strangers they choose as their “friends” on social networks. And the reason the parents aren’t educating them is that they’re doing it themselves. I saw a statistic that 75% of grown women who use the internet are involved in social networking. And they’re as careless as the kids are.

I think a great exercise is to get a friend to write down everything they can figure out about you from your profiles. Predators can learn things from your pictures, the groups you belong to, your status updates, tweets and moods, and most of all, your friends. You may be very careful with your information, but stalkers can usually see your friends’ pages, too. And a friend may be much less careful with information about you. Once you’ve had a friend write down all those things, then take them off. And make sure you tell your friends to remove personal things about you. There are good uses for social networks, so it’s unrealistic to tell everyone to close their accounts. But we shouldn’t post anything that we wouldn’t tell a total stranger face-to-face.

Operation Black Widow

Part II--Operation Black Widow

Gang Expert: George Collord

Santa Rosa Police Department Detective (retired)

Gang instructor, FBI's national in-service training for field agents

Ever wanted to know what goes on behind the headlines of the major crime stories of today? Here is an opportunity to take that journey, to put faces and emotions to those who combat gang violence. This is the second part of the Operation Black Widow interview with gang expert George Collord.

Gang violence rocked the city of Santa Rosa in the late 1990s, shaking up this wine country community an hour’s drive north of San Francisco. Shootings, stabbings and fights erupted throughout the city, reflecting the level of violence in a number of California communities throughout the Golden state. Gang detectives from Santa Rosa Police Department (SRPD) became exhausted trying to clamp down on this bloodshed. The fight seemed hopeless.

Then something began that evolved into one of the largest and most penetrating gang investigations in California. It began small and slowly spread until local state and federal investigators collaboratively took down one of the most powerful prison gangs to ever emerge from the large penal system in the nation. These gangsters called themselves Nuesta Familia (Our Family). This is the story of Operation Black Widow, a joint task force that penetrated the very core of this gang and shook up California gangland worse than any earthquake.

The story begins in 1997. It is a story told by one police officer who was there at the beginning and stayed to the end. It is a story of determination, danger, and personal sacrifice. It is a story of team work between law enforcement agencies throughout the State of California—local, state and federal. It is a story of a case that took five years to bring federal indictments against the leadership of the gang.

It is my pleasure to introduce my friend and former partner, George Collord, currently a gang instructor at the FBI’s Quantico training facility and a consultant to a number of law enforcement agencies and prosecutors in this ever-changing war against gang violence. He has been called to provide consultation to a number of television, movie and media outlets regarding their effort to accurately portray the gang threat in California and other parts of the nation. George retired from SPRD a few years ago and continues to work with law enforcement regarding gang issues.

MARK: Give us some understanding of the breadth and width of this investigation. Ultimately, how many agencies and how many investigators became involved in this effort?

GEORGE: Including federal state and local, there were at least thirty agencies that had parts, some more integral than others. The main local agencies were Santa Rosa PD, Salinas PD, Modesto PD, Stockton PD, and San Jose PD. The Sheriff’s offices were Sonoma and Monterey. The DA’s offices were Sonoma, Santa Clara and Monterey Counties. The state agencies were California Department of Corrections, California Highway Patrol and to a lesser extent the California Department of Justice. Federally, and without them we’d have been nowhere, was the FBI.  The main core of investigators numbered about ten with a dozen or so others in support positions.

MARK: Can you share with us some of the statistics of this operation?

GEORGE: Are we talking about how much overtime I made or how much weight I gained eating fast food in darkened parking lots? Didn’t think so. We arrested and convicted in the neighborhood of about seventy-five gangsters in both federal and state court. Of course that doesn’t tell the whole story since there were, and continue to be, spin-off cases that have nabbed dozens of others throughout California.

MARK:  Many of our readers are mystery writers and readers. Can you paint a picture of a gangster that would be true and authentic? If you were to create a fictional character—a gang leader—on paper, what are some of the attributes and characteristics you might choose to create this character? 

GEORGE: My training/speaking partner with whom I travel the country lecturing is Daniel “Lizard” Hernandez, a veteran of savage battles both in and out of the pen. He was and is definitely gang “shot caller” material. Over the nine years that I’ve been around him I’ve come to appreciate his specific characteristics that made him a feared leader. So, I’ll use him as an example. First, he is highly intelligent and reasonably educated, even though he never made it past 8^th grade. Instead, he educated himself in prison libraries. I remember when he told me how important it was for his gang writings to contain proper syntax, Hey, I thought syntax was something the IRS collected in Vegas.

Next, he is fearless. He proved this through years of gunfights, knife fights and takeover robberies in which the next second could be your last. “Manipulative” is how I’d describe another constant characteristic in those of his ilk. He could, through writings and verbal messages, make someone a thousand miles away do his bidding—and basically thank him for the opportunity to serve the organization. Charisma drips from gang leaders.

Lizard speaks and law enforcement officers crowd around to listen, whether it’s during a lecture, or later around a beer. Gang leaders must be extremely charismatic because of the constant need to either recruit or convince others of your point of view in a world so brutal it would turn most men to pudding. Being decisive is a necessity for survival in the gang world. He who hesitates gets his wind taken by a sharpened turkey bone. And you cannot underestimate a good old sense of smell. Gang leaders can smell a set-up for miles (unless it’s a sneaky spider web being spun!). It’s the only way they have survived to get to the top. I was lucky enough to surreptitiously observe these guys in their natural habitats and would say they are as driven and competent as some of our better known CEOs in this country. It’s just that in their world, a hostile takeover is a little more serious.

MARK:  Tell us about the GUNS CD and the story behind this part of the investigation

GEORGE: Generations of United Nortenos was a music disc and brainchild of three Nuestra Familia members in The Bay. They were Gerald “Cuete” Rubalcaba, my pal Lizard Hernandez, and Robert “Huero” Gratton. The idea was to create a music CD that would appeal to young Latinos and help recruit them into the ranks of the Nortenos, the breeding ground for hate toward the soldados of the Mexican Mafia.  Gratton got out of the pen and hooked up with a rapper in Tracy, California known as Sir Dyno. They put together an illegal record label and produced the CD with 13 songs.

The lyrics were all about killing as many “scraps” (derogatory term for Surenos) as one could in a statewide war. If you were to join this war with the southerners, you’d be part of a huge army that would have your back on the streets and in the joint. It was very appealing to a lot of dysfunctional kids out there looking for a cause and a family to accept them and their violenct tendencies. Ultimately, we recruited both Lizard and Gratton as witnesses.

John Lescroart

Author Interview: John Lescroart

The day he found the body, Mickey Dade woke up under a tree on Mount Tamalpais. (Treasure Hunt, Dutton, 2010)

This is the opening line to New York Times bestselling author John Lescroart’s latest novel, Treasure Hunt, a whodunit tunneling beneath the layers of San Francisco’s fictional world of nonprofit greed and corruption. Like many Lescroart novels, this novel delves into more than story, plot and character—it thematically links us to the real world. In this story, money and power corrupts those entrusted by society to care for people in need.

And, of course, someone dies.

John Lescroart (pronounced “less-kwah) is a man of many talents and experiences. While attending U.C. Berkeley, he wrote his first novel when most university students there simply worried about passing the next exam. He finished a second novel after graduating in 1970, but he would not try to publish them for another fourteen years.

In the meantime, John crammed his life with experience.

John struggled as a musician and song writer in his twenties, realizing as he neared thirty his dream of success in music seemed unlikely. In his thirties, John continued to teach himself to write while eking out a living as a house painter, slinging drinks at the bar, and a host of other jobs.

At age 41, John faced a near-death experience after which he became more focused on his writing career.  This renewed attention led to his seventh published novel, The 13^th Juror, becoming John’s first bestseller. At age, 46, this novelist began to consecutively create NYT bestsellers. Some twenty-one Lescroart novels have been translated into sixteen languages in seventy-five countries at last count. That number is rising. (You can learn more about John's world by going to his web site). 

It is a pleasure to visit with John here on Hook’em and Book’em as we learn about his latest novel, Treasure Hunt.

MARK: Thank you for joining us, John. Tell us about Treasure Hunt and your main character, Wyatt Hunt, a San Francisco private investigator. What do  your readers need to know about this novel as they get caught up in another Hunt investigation?

JOHN:  One of the things I try to do in each novel is to make it a stand-alone experience, so my readers don’t need to bring much to the party in terms of background.  I try to supply what’s needed.  That said, of course Hunt does have a developed backstory.  He was an orphan/adopted child who spent time in foster homes when he was young.  He was in Iraq I, then worked in San Francisco for over a decade in Child Protective Services.  All of these elements come into play in Treasure Hunt.

MARK:  What are some of the motivating factors in Hunt’s past that drive him?

JOHN:  Like many of my characters, Hunt is a justice freak.  Especially when the injustice he’s up against concerns the downtrodden.  In this story, several non-profit organizations are skimming lots and lots of money from the people they purport to help.  And then, of course, the main suspect turns out to be a woman who, like Hunt, was a former foster child.  Lots of resonance there.

MARK: Can you share with us what inspired or prompted this story?

JOHN:  The initial impetus came from a headline in the Sacramento Bee – many of my stories are based on true-life scenarios.  It seems that one of our largest local charities, City of Hope, with close ties to the Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson, was coming under indictment for misappropriation of funds.  Its federal money was going to be cut off.  As soon as I saw this, I thought it had the germ of a terrific story in it.

MARK: What research did you have to do make this story so believable?

JOHN:  I did what I usually do, since I usually start off knowing little or nothing about what I’m going to write about.  I called up the Sac Bee reporter who’d written the City of Hope piece and she not only gave me a lot of insights into the non-profit work, but suggested that abuses in San Francisco were even greater than they apparently were in Sacramento.  So I called some people in San Francisco and just got a ton of raw info, much of it compelling.  Then I followed up with standard Google searches and newspaper stories.  There was just a plethora of information, and I knew I was on to something good.

MARK: If one of your readers traveled to San Francisco today, would they find any of the sites mentioned in Treasure Hunt actually in existence? For example, the Little Shamrock where your characters hang out?

JOHN:  Many, many of the locales that I use in San Francisco actually exist.  The Little Shamrock is a real bar where I used to bartend.  It really is at 9^th Ave. and Lincoln, just where I put it in the book.  Same goes for many if not most of the restaurants, although Lou the Greeks is fictional.  Anyway, my real San Francisco stuff is one of the hallmarks of my books, and one of my favorite parts.

MARK: The City of San Francisco always seems to hang in the background of your novels, almost as if the city itself becomes one of your characters. What does San Francisco mean to you?

JOHN:  As I just noted above, San Francisco is my spiritual home.  It’s just such a great town to write about because of so many things:  a goofy political climate, absolutely bizarre weather, gorgeous physical settings, water, wind, and fog.  It’s the perfect mystery writer’s city, and I love it.

MARK: Which of your characters are you most closely drawn to? Which one contains more of John Lescroart than all the others?

JOHN:  People always try to guess about this.  Clearly, Dismas Hardy shares a lot with me, especially in the early books.  He’s got a wife who’s ten years younger than him, he’s in his second marriage, he’s got two kids, etc.  All that started out similar to me.  But as the books have progressed, Hardy has become less like me and more like himself.  Nowadays, the person with whom I most closely identify is Wes Farrell – although I wish I had hair I could decide to grow long!  I don’t.

Operation Black Widow

Part I-Operation Black Widow

Gang Expert: George Collord

Santa Rosa Police Department Detective (retired)
Gang instructor, FBI's national in-service training for field agents

Gang violence rocked the city of Santa Rosa in the late 1990s, shaking up this wine country community an hour’s drive north of San Francisco. Shootings, stabbings and fights erupted throughout the city, reflecting the violence erupting in a number of California communities throughout the golden state. Gang detectives from Santa Rosa Police Department (SRPD) became exhausted trying to clamp down on this bloodshed. The fight seemed hopeless.

Then something began that evolved into one of the largest and most penetrating gang investigations ever tackled in California. It began small, slowly spreading until local state and federal investigators joined hands to take down one of the most powerful prison gangs to ever emerge from the largest penal system in the nation. These gangsters called themselves Nuestra Familia (Our Family). This is the story of Operation Black Widow, a joint task force that penetrated the very core of this gang and shook up California gangland worse than any earthquake.

The story begins in 1997. It is a story told by one police officer who was there at the beginning and stayed to the end. It is a story of determination, danger, and personal sacrifice. It is a story of team work between law enforcement agencies throughout the State of California—local, state and federal. It is a story of a case that took five years to bring federal indictments against the leadership of the gang.

And after all this effort and expense, don’t look for a happy ending.

It is my pleasure to introduce my friend and former partner, George Collord. He is currently a gang instructor at the FBI Headquarter’s in-service nationwide training program for field agents. He is also a consultant to a number of law enforcement agencies and prosecutors in this ever-changing war against gang violence. He has been called to provide consultation to a number of television, movie and media outlets regarding their effort to accurately portray the gang threat in California and other parts of the nation. George retired from SPRD a few years ago and continues to work with law enforcement regarding gang issues.

MARK: To understand Operation Black Widow (OBW), help us understand what gang detectives were up against in 1997.

GEORGE: Mark, thanks for the opportunity to inform your readers. We were up against it as a community and as a police department. We’d been caught slippin’, as they say, by a wave of gang violence that started in the late 1980’s and hit its stride in the early 1990’s. At first it was groups of what I call “fad” gangsters, fringe kids who fell in with the gang life style as a result of films such as Colors, Boyz in the Hood and Menace to Society. But once the fad faded, we were left with two main opposing forces, younger latino kids in huge groups, one wearing red, the other wearing blue. The colors had nothing to do with Crips and Bloods, though we did not know that at the time. We had assaults (beat downs, stabbings, shootings) and murder that jumped off in the schools, malls, streets and housing projects. We could not figure out what caused it.  The board of supervisors, city council and community leaders were alarmed to say the least. They were opposed to the term “gang-related” because that meant a threat to tourist dollar coming into the Sonoma/Napa wine country. But there was no denying the wounded and dead bodies. So the police departments were charged with coming up with ways to stop the violence.

MARK: How did the Nuestra Familia (NF) come to be? Why were they formed? Who were they?

GEORGE: Well, the NF started as a defensive organization in the California Department of Corrections. You have to back up to just after World War II. In the pen there were no gangs, just inmates. But in 1957, a small group of latino inmates from Southern California, who’d been affiliated on the outside with one another in LA and Bakersfield, came together for protection at Duell Vocational Institute in Tracy, California. They called themselves the Mexican Mafia or La Eme.

Essentially, they wanted to protect themselves from bigger, meaner white and black inmates. The idea caught on and their numbers swelled. The black inmates soon came together in a gang known as the BGF, Black Guerilla Family. The whites came together as the Aryan Brotherhood.

This left one large unaffiliated group, latino farmer worker types who’d come from the Central Valley, San Jose, and Salinas who had no gang affiliation on the street. They found themselves the object of extreme abuse from rape to extortion.

In the mid 1960’s, due to physical and mental problems among military serving in Viet Nam War, a number of latino soldiers wound up in the pen. Some of them found their way into numbers of the unaffiliated latino inmates who came from the farms. They,  along with some disaffected Mexican Mafia members, helped to organize the rural latinos into a self protection group known as La Nuestra Familia. The NF formerly announced its existence with a series of vicious attacks on La Eme starting on Mexican Independence Day, September 16, 1968. The war that ensued cost the lives of nearly 300 inmates in the prisons of California. The CDC began separating inmates from Northern California from those in Southern California in a bid to stop the violence, hence the North-South conflict we have today.

MARK: How much of this did you know before Operation Black Widow began?

GEORGE: Very little. I’d gone through the Oakland Police Academy in 1982-1983 and there was absolutely nothing on this prison problem in our classroom instruction because it was not relevant at the time on the streets of Northern California.

MARK: How much power do Nuestra Familia (NF) leaders wield?

GEORGE: The leaders’ words are the difference between life and death. They can control, via proxy, thousands of inmates in state pens, county jails and juvenile halls. They control the streets via older more influential street gang members or parolees from that gang.

MARK: What is the organizational structure of the NF?

GEORGE: The organizational structure is set forth in their constitution. They have an Overall Governing Board (OGB) that acts as a check and balance for three generals, ten captains and a series of regimental commanders. Under them they have what I call a farm team, the Northern Structure (or Nuestra Raza). Under them they have thousands of street nortenos and norteno sympathizers. Their organization looks like a great pyramid from Egypt.