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
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 8th 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.
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.
