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.