By Kris Axtman, The Christian Science Monitor
SAN MARCOS, Texas - The full weight of who he had become hit him, startlingly, when he saw that one little grin. Inside a public-housing project in San Antonio, Oscar Esparza says he watched the grin snake across the face of a fellow gang member who had just admitted killing one of his oldest and closest friends.
At that moment, Esparza realized he had joined a gang that was about far more than just kicking back during the day and hitting clubs at night. “At first I thought he was just playing around, but then I saw his face,” he says. “Now I don’t talk to none of them anymore.”
In a Texas courtroom last week, Esparza closed the final chapter of his life as a member of the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation. He was a star witness in the case against Paul De La Rosa, who was convicted of murdering fellow gang member Christopher Guillen in an internal power struggle.
The trial provided a terrifying glimpse into the culture of one of the nation’s oldest and most highly structured street gangs, where rules are considered paramount to the group’s survival and any violation is met with beatings and even death.
Strikingly similar to the Mafia in organization, the Latin Kings blend criminal activity with mysticism and tribalism - and inside that world, a member’s biggest fear is not rival gangs but crossing his own colleagues.
While the largest chapters are in Chicago and New York, the trial in central Texas shows how the Latin Kings are gaining power and prominence in other parts of the country. As the gang’s influence grows, other gangs are studying its tactics and organizational chart.
“Gangs are finding that, to stay in business, they need some type of structure,” says Wes Daily, president of the East Coast Gang Investigators Association in New York. “And many are looking at the Latin Kings and trying to mimic that structure, because this gang gets things done.”
The tale of Guillen’s murder began two years ago on March 2, 2001, when about 20 Texas members of the Latin Kings were summoned to a council meeting at the San Antonio housing project.
They accused Guillen of wanting to assassinate Jose Beltran, known to members as “Step One,” the leader of the Austin and San Antonio tribes. Prosecutors said Guillen wanted to wrest power from Beltran and thought the head of the regional 210 Lions Tribe should be from San Antonio, not Austin, where Beltran lived.
Thinking he was paying loyalty to the gang, Esparza, nicknamed “King Oro,” told Beltran what Guillen was saying. “I thought they were just gonna beat him up and that’s it,” Esparza said at the trial.
Instead, Beltran told De La Rosa to “terminate” Guillen, whose bullet-ridden body was later found in a ditch.
De La Rosa’s lawyer, Alexandra Gauthier, did not deny that her client killed Guillen, but said it was under duress: He was acting on the orders of his boss, and his own life would have been in jeopardy if he didn’t follow them. “You can tell how terrified these people are just by looking in their eyes,” she said.
The jury wasn’t convinced and convicted him of capital murder on Friday after a few hours of deliberation. He received an automatic life sentence.
Born on Chicago’s south side in the late 1940s, the Latin Kings began as a Hispanic social organization. It evolved into one of the nation’s largest and most violent street gangs, with 25,000 current members in Chicago alone, according to police estimates.
The gang’s rapid growth occurred in the late 1980s and ‘90s, when incarceration rates quadrupled. Inside prison walls, members enlisted new recruits and refined their rules.
“They got very well-organized, with manifestoes and organizational charts,” says Dwight Conquergood, an ethnographer at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., who is writing a book on the Latin Kings. “They could give seminars to MBA students.”
Behind bars, Conquergood says, the Latin Kings set up taco stands and provided welcome kits - complete with soap, toothpaste and shampoo - for recently imprisoned gang members. On the outside, they dispensed winter coats and free medical services. After living among Latin King gang members for five years in researching his book, Conquergood says the structure is a product of “extreme humiliation and day-to-day grinding poverty.”
“These kids are never going to make any fraternity or key club in mainstream society and are trying to fill a basic human need for support,” he says. “These are people who are living in states of emergency. The irony is that the complex web of mutual support that helps them in the short term is the very thing that locks them out of the mainstream.”
Esparza, for instance, said he joined the gang at 16 because “my family wasn’t really around. My father was really abusive to me and my mother, and I needed somebody to be there for me. In the Latin Kings, I had all the protection I wanted.”
Because the Latin Kings have such a defined chain of command and written operating procedures - including formal constitutions, bylaws and charters - authorities have had an easier time charging members under federal racketeering laws.
“Some of their instructional booklets are 92 pages long,” says Daily, who refers to the Latin Kings as nontraditional organized crime. “We’ve done a good job of taking out the Mafia. We need to do a better job of taking out these street thugs who are operating like organized-crime groups.”
Other street gangs, such as the Los Angeles-based Bloods, are a federation of smaller groups that share rituals and bylaws but have no real affiliation. Some cities and states have no formal leaders at all.
As is the case for most gangs, Latin King criminal activity revolves around drug trafficking. Loyalty is valued - and enforced - above all else.
Even though Esparza believes he will be killed for his court testimony, he says he is trying to clear his conscience for his role in his friend’s death. He says he finally realized the error of his ways when he heard De La Rosa confess to the shooting.
“I was partly responsible, because if I wouldn’t have told ‘Step One’ about what he said, nothing would have happened,” he says. “I was loyal to the gang. Now I want to be loyal to Christopher.”