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.

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.

Gangs

Part II—Gang Investigations

Interview: Brian Parry

Consultant, FBI's National Gang Intelligence Center

Evil does exists behind the walls of our prisons. Mystery writers strive to capture these human hunters on pages of fiction, these predatory creatures that prey on the weak and helpless. We return today for a closer look at a problem that is welling up behind the walls of these institutions and spilling into the streets of our communities. Understanding the problem will allow fiction writers to write with more clarity, capturing the heart of this problem in stories that entertain, educate and ring with authenticity. 


On our last gang post, prison gang expert Brian Parry shared with us some of the challenges and success of the FBI’s National Gang Intelligence Center (NGIC) headquartered in Washington, DC. In this interview, Brian will give us a closer look at these prison gang organizations and the trouble their members carry into our communities.

Brian Parry has lived and breathed prison gang intelligence for years. He is currently a consultant to the FBI’s NGIC, providing expertise on the federal State Correctional Gang Intelligence Initiative. He sits on the Executive Leadership Council-National Major Gang Task Force, providing consultation and direction to an informational gang task force representing fifty states, Canada, and Puerto Rico. Since his retirement in 2002 as Assistant Director of the California Department of Corrections (CDC) , Brian consults with state and federal correctional facilities across the nation on prison gang issues. He has testified as an expert in many state and federal trials, including a case for the Attorney General in the State of Washington.

Brian witnessed many of these gangs rise to power, and he has been on the front lines trying to stem their tide of brutality and bloodshed. He began his law enforcement career on the streets of Los Angeles as a parole officer, and later as a supervisor and Special Agent in Charge of CDC’s Special Service Unit while liaison with national  criminal-intelligence units across the country. In his position as Assistant Director of CDC, Brian managed and directed all that agency’s investigative units consisting of over one hundred staff in eight field offices and gang investigators in thirty-three prisons.

MARK:  Brian, let’s begin with a quick history lessons as to how the prison gangs emerged in California and who they are?

BRIAN: The prison gangs started in the California prison system in the 1950’s. The Mexican Mafia was the first gang to form. They originally began with the leaders of fifteen to sixteen street gangs from Los Angeles. They wanted to become the gang of gangs. They wanted to control all of the prison rackets including drugs, contraband, prostitution, gambling and extortion. Later, they decided to move to control the drugs on the streets. The Nuestra Familia (NF) formed to protect itself against the Mexican Mafia. Most of the original NF members were from rural communities across California. 

These two gangs clashed in the 1960’s and have been at war with one another since. The warfare between the Surenos and Nortenos in California dates back to the problems between the Mexican Mafia and the NF. 

The Aryan Brotherhood also formed to protect the white inmates from the blacks and Hispanics. They were originally called the “Diamond Tooth “gang or the “Blue Birds”. Some of the original members had pieces of glass embedded between their front teeth and some had the tattoo of a bird on their necks. Some of the original members were biker types. 

The Black Guerilla Family (BGF) was formed to protect themselves from the other gangs and to organize the black inmates. The BGF was formed from a number of splinter groups which were active in the country. The BGF considered themselves as political prisoners and developed a Marxist philosophy. Later, other gangs formed including the Texas Syndicate, Northern Structure and Nazi Low Riders. In the late 1980’s the emergence of the street gangs such as Crips, Bloods, and Hispanic gangs only exasperated the gang problem.

MARK:  What is the status of these gangs today? For example, there have been many state and federal RICO prosecutions of these gang leaders who’ve subsequently transferred to the federal system. What challenges has this raised in law enforcement?

BRIAN: Despite vigorous suppression efforts these gangs continue to wreak havoc on the prison population and of course the communities in the state. Part of the problem is a seemingly unlimited supply of young street gang members who aspire to be in prison gangs and are more than willing to put in the work necessary to gain recognition and acceptance. And of course the work includes violence and drugs. Another problem which was unanticipated occurred when a number of gang leaders from the Mexican Mafia and NF went to federal prison. A division or rift now occurs between the leaders in the California prison system and the ones now in the federal prison system. So that has become a new challenge.

MARK:  How does CDC work to limit gang influence once these gang members enter the prison system? How have the prisons evolved to house these gangsters?

BRIAN: The policy that initially worked was to identify and isolate the leadership from the rest of the prison population. That worked for awhile. But, the gang leaders recruited the street gangs to do their work in the communities and on the main lines in most of the California prisons. So the leaders now could direst the gangs activity from some of the most secure prisons in the country. The number of street gang members entering the system is overwhelming. The prison system is dangerously overcrowded and is at 200% capacity. And it is estimated that at least half the California prison population is involved to some degree with the gangs. So the housing options for controlling gang members have diminished tremendously rendering the system very dangerous.

Gangs

Part I—Gang Investigations

Interview: Brian Parry
Consultant, FBI's National Gang Intelligence Center

My friend Brian Parry is currently a consultant  with the FBI’s National Gang Intelligence Center in Washington D.C.; and serves on the Executive Leadership Counsel—National Major Gang Task Force, providing direction and assistance to informational gang task forces representing fifty states, Canada and Puerto Rico.  Brian retired as Assistant Director of the California Department of Corrections in 2002, after thirty years of service. During his tenure at CDC, he supervised over one hundred staff members in eight field office and gang investigators in thirty-three prisons. These special agents handled investigations of parole violators, gang members, narcotics trafficking and apprehended fugitives. In addition, these agents conducted threat assessments, investigated officer-involved shootings, provided executive protection, and staffed the department’s criminal intelligence unit. Brian worked his way up the ranks of CDC, starting as a parole agent on the streets of Southern California. He brings a lifetime of experience to bear upon criminal prison gang investigations.

Gang violence has been the staple of many television shows, movies and novels over the years. One has only to pick up today’s newspaper or click on today’s news show to see some form of gang activity surfacing in our cities. Killings, robberies, drug rips. As a nation, we’ve almost grown to accept this gang epidemic as the cost of living here—unless you happen to live in one of the neighborhoods plagued by these thugs, become a victim of their violence, or become one of those on the thin blue line trying to protect us from them.

This will be the first of a two-part interview. Today we will focus on the challenges faced by law enforcement on the national and international level pertaining to prison gangs and criminal street gangs, and the transmigration of these organizations across our national borders. Since the early 1990s, when law enforcement began ejecting known gang members — illegally in the U.S.— back to their native countries, a crisis began developing which has spread across national borders. These gang members — who acquired their criminal skills on the streets of Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York— learned to cross national borders with their expertise and language skill. They are returning in growing numbers, bringing their drugs, human trafficking victims, and violence back to our cities.

Part II of this interview will focus on state and regional issues pertaining to prison gangs, and their affect on our communities.

Brian, it is a pleasure to have you visit us here today and provide us with insight into a growing national and international problem—transmigration of criminal gangs between nations. 

Q:  Many of our readers are writers and readers of mystery crime fiction. This fiction, however, is often based upon real life situations within our society, events we read or listen to on the news. With that in mind, what do you see as one of the most pressing issues regarding prison and street gangs on the national level?

PARRY: There are a couple of very pressing issues on the national level. The first one being the increased level of violence by gangs. The violence is fueled by the transportation and selling of drugs. The profits from drug sales is contributing to the increased competition and control of drugs in this country. Gangs and drugs go hand in hand. The second issue is gang migration. A number of prison systems are dominated by gangs from Los Angeles and Chicago. They in turn control street gangs. The third is the street gang imitation of Los Angeles based gangs. The Sureno gangs have proliferated across the country. Most of them are not from Los Angeles but are imitating the LA gangs.

Q: Tell us a about the FBI’s National Gang Intelligence Center (NGIC). What is its purpose? Who is involved? What do they hope to achieve?

PARRY: The NGIC is a multi-agency organization designed to support on- going investigative and prosecution efforts of gangs across the country. The NGIC is run by the FBI but consists of nine federal law enforcement agencies including ATF, DEA, US Marshalls, Homeland Security, Federal Bureau of Prison, US Army and others. The NGIC has three components: Intelligence, investigative and prosecution. The basic idea behind the forming of the NGIC was to coordinate and support a national effort to reduce violent gang crime by sharing gang intelligence and by providing investigative and prosecutorial support to agencies.

Q:  What are NGIC’s day-to-day operations like? If I was writing a novel and trying to capture my protagonist in this organization, what might I want to put down on paper?

PARRY: The NGIC is collecting intelligence on the most violent gangs in the country on a daily basis. This information is shared on a need to know basis. There are intelligence analysts assigned to the most violent gangs in the country. They collect intelligence from a number of sources and distribute the information. There are agents assigned to support and de-conflict active investigations. The lawyers provide additional support.

Q:  In your role as a consultant to the FBI’s NGIC, what do you see as challenges faced by this group in terms of prison and criminal street gangs? Other challenges?

PARRY: The challenges are many. There is an overwhelming amount of information about gangs. This information has to be gathered, analyzed and disseminated in a timely manner. There is no one national data base for prison and street gang information. And there are so many different and incompatible data bases in the country it is difficult to share the information electronically. And of course the fear that some intelligence will not be shared or the dots connected in a timely manner in order to prevent a violent act.

Q:  Can you share some of the successes of NGIC? Specific cases?

PARRY: In general terms the NGIC has supported a number of large, complex investigations of gangs that are considered transnational, meaning they operate in several states and in some foreign countries.

Q:  How did this transmigration-of-gangs problem come to be? Is it a global threat?

PARRY: Gang members started migrating to locate new areas for drug markets. Gangs are a global threat. There are outlaw motorcycle gangs operating across the world. There are several gangs operating in Central and South America. There are Asian gangs involved in drug trafficking and in human trafficking throughout the world with connections in the US.