State and federal prisons are playing a key role in transforming local neighborhood street gangs into active branches of violent national criminal networks, according to a training session on gang patterns at the recent IACP annual conference in Orlando.
As a result, you may be facing an upsurge in violence, drug trafficking, and other dangerous lawbreaking on your beat.
Explaining the trend and offering tips on gathering valuable gang intel was Don Gill, a gang intelligence officer with the DOJ’s National Gang Targeting, Enforcement & Coordination Center (GangTECC) in Washington, D.C. Gill has spent 26 years with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, concentrating since 2006 exclusively on gang problems in its 116 institutions.
“That environment is full of gangs, including some you have never heard of,” he said. “The recruitment and migration of powerful national gangs is taking place in prisons all across the U.S. Local law enforcement officers need to be looking out for this.” Here’s how it works.
Typical Transformation
Many of the estimated 7,000 different gangs in this country are “small, neighborhood-based” operations that control limited turf, are well-known to local law enforcers, and are relatively stabilized in their criminality, predominately small-time drug trafficking.
When one or more of their members go to prison, they may not have other fellow members there to align with. For protection and benefits, they hook up with a national gang that has a strong prison presence. Now they’re affiliated with a large national organization — the Latin Kings, for example — and when they return home they convert their neighborhood group into a new branch of that criminal enterprise. Now you have Latin Kings (or whatever) in your community, and you’re facing a whole new ballgame.
“Contact with local gang members in prison gives national gangs new chances to establish themselves in fresh areas,” Gill explained. “You may notice an influx of out-of-towners” into the newly affiliated locale. The local gangbangers “don’t interact with the local cops they way they used to. Things change.”
You may encounter gang members in larger groups than before. You’ll notice unfamiliar graffiti, tattoos, or “colors.” There tend to be more assaults and other violence. Drug seizures and field stops go up. Interstate gun trafficking is likely to rise (“Guns and gangs go together”). Intelligence conduits you’ve relied on may get shut down. “The whole dynamics of the neighborhood changes,” Gill said. “This is not a coincidence.”
In short, your contacts with the gang become more dangerous.
Tax Payments
“Prison gangs exploit street gangs for money and other resources,” Gill said. “Local affiliates pay a percentage of their proceeds as a tax to national prison gangs, and in exchange their members are physically protected while incarcerated.” For example, he said, they are guaranteed a safe table for meals in the dining hall, territory that is typically marked off according to gang affiliation.
Covert Communication Sources
Attorneys are often used as couriers for delivering money and carrying communications between inside and outside gangs, Gill reported. Lawyers visiting individual inmate clients across a string of institutions constitute a “major, protected communications network” among incarcerated gang leaders.
Encoded and encrypted gang information is also included in legal mail between lawyers and prisoners, thus evading the usual screening of correspondence. This allows gang shot-callers to continue to pass orders, direct hits, and conduct other criminal business while behind bars.
“Some well-organized gangs put people through law school to become attorneys,” because of the benefits associated with their special status, Gill said.
Females on visitation lists are also used as agents for covert communications. “A Latin King ‘wife’ of one prisoner may visit 22 other Latin Kings members in various facilities,” Gill explained. “She becomes a ‘hub’ for transferring information that facilitates the smooth running of the enterprise.”
Imprisoned gangbangers also manipulate the postal system in order to communicate between different facilities, via the “mail loop-back.” Here, an inmate puts a letter with an encrypted message into an envelope that is addressed to a fictitious recipient at a nonexistent address. For the return address, he puts the name and address of the person he really wants to receive the envelope. Then he affixes insufficient postage. When the postal service sends the letter “back” to the supposed “sender” as undeliverable, the service is unwittingly delivering the message to the inmate’s intended contact.
Through these and other means, “there’s a seamless flow of criminality in and out, all inter-related,” Gill said.
Hidden Messages
If you understand gangbanger methods, what you see or find on suspects can reveal important information about their prison- or street-gang affiliation and activities.
1.) Tattoos are an obvious example. Gang-identifier tatts are blatant and flaunted inside the walls for the esteem and protection they provoke there, while on the street they may be hidden, especially from police detection, Gill said. The skin art often incorporates coded messages.
Examples: Clown faces tend to be symbols of the gang life meaning roughly, “I’m going to do what I want, smile at the time, and pay the consequences later.” The numbers 14/88, for example, connote affiliation with a white supremacist group. The 14 refers to the “14 rules of white supremacy” and the 88 references the eighth letter of the alphabet (H) and the salute “Heil Hitler.” The number 13 or a Roman numeral X with three dots may relate to the powerful Mexican Mafia (M is the 13th letter of the alphabet) or its affiliate MS-13, the particularly vicious criminal band that originally migrated here from El Salvador.
“Don’t take them lightly,” Gill warned. “They are well-trained and know what they are doing” when it comes to ruthless violence.
2.) Written encryption is common. “Ghost writing” is one version. The creator of a letter, either inside or outside the joint, punches in his covert message on a typewriter without a ribbon or uses a blunt pencil stub with the lead broken out. The letters are indented in the paper but not inked in. Then he hand-writes some innocuous correspondence over the covert typing or writing to get past the censors. The recipient merely rubs a lead pencil over the note to bring out the concave writing. If you can feel bumps on the backside of a written document, you may be dealing with ghost writing, Gill advised.
A variation involves writing or drawing a hidden message with a mixture of urine and lemon juice, then covering it with “innocent” information. The paper ends up looking somewhat “waterlogged,” Gill said, but if you put a heat source under it (“not too close”), it “activates acid in the urine and juice” and the “real” message becomes visible.
Gangs also use a wide variety of frequently changing written codes, including numbers substituted for letters, dots inside right-angled boxes to represent letters, foreign languages not easily recognized (such as Swahili, ancient Aztec, and Celtic), numeric tags that tell a reader to highlight certain words in written correspondence to receive the secret message, and so on.
3.) Snapshots are another important gang communications medium. Naïve officers sometimes ridicule “yard photos” of inmates posing together as “vacation pictures” for hapless criminals, but gang experts recognize them as rich lodes of intelligence.
“These are often the equivalent of ID cards,” Gill said. “They can indicate rank in a group, notify outsiders of new members, indicate members who are in bad standing, announce treaties with other gangs, any number of things.” He showed and interpreted several samples.
In one snapshot, every inmate in the picture was facing the camera—except for one who was standing in profile at the edge of the group, looking in at the others. “He’s a prospect,” Gill explained. “This photo will be sent to gang members at other institutions and outside to see if anyone has anything bad to say about him before he is accepted into membership.”
A photo with an “X” drawn across the face of one inmate indicates that he’s targeted for a hit (“in the hat,” in prison parlance); “that picture will go out to everyone,” Gil said. Photos of inmates sporting long, bushy moustaches reinforce that these are long-time members in high standing. In group photos, subjects with arms folded in “tough guy” poses are usually gang enforcers, and so on.
4.) Miscellaneous media. Virtually anything that can be heard or seen can be used for encryption. Some gangs use radio call-in shows to give coded “shout-outs” to members. Gill showed a bar of soap with a swastika, twin lightning bolts, and the numbers 4232 carefully carved into it. Counting the alphabet, 4 = D, 23 = W, and 2 = B: DWB, or Dirty White Boys, “a vicious Texas-based supremacist gang.” “That would be a valuable piece of intelligence for local investigators,” he said.
“Gangs encrypt messages on the outside as well as in prisons and jails. Anything we can find in a cell, you can find in pocket trash, a vehicle inventory, and other street sources. Somewhere the key to a gang’s code will be written down. Officers should watch for that.”
When you run across encrypted material, “you may not know exactly what you are looking at, but you’ll know it’s not right,” Gill said. He advised photographing suspected material, along with unfamiliar tattoos of all arrestees, and seeking out gang experts who can evaluate this potential evidence.
Handle With Care
Helpful resources may include the GangTECC office at 800-366-9501 or 703-414-8500 and the Federal Bureau of Prisons Intelligence Office at 202-514-5855.
Gill emphasized an important officer-safety reminder in his presentation. Remember that membership in both prison gangs and street gangs is all about respect. “Do your job, but the way you handle these people is important,” he cautioned. “Treat them respectfully.
“Disrespect can get you in a lot of trouble. With any kind of disrespect, national gang members will go right to guns.”
