147 Gang Members Charged After Inquiry in Calif.
Federal and local authorities said they confiscated dozens of firearms in raids this week on the Varrio Hawaiian Gardens gang.
LOS ANGELES — Federal prosecutors have charged 147 members of a predominantly Latino street gang that has long ruled the streets of Hawaiian Gardens, a city of 14,000 east of Long Beach, with making racial attacks on African-Americans and drug dealing.
Prosecutors said the Varrio Hawaiian Gardens gang, with approximately 1,000 members and associates, carried out racially motivated shootings to enforce its territory and to intimidate black residents.
Gang members were also responsible for shooting to death a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy in 2005, according to a 193-page indictment released Thursday.
Federal and local law enforcement officers have arrested 99 Varrio gang members in raids and said that they had confiscated $100,000 in cash and dozens of firearms. Forty-eight are fugitives being sought.
The sweep this week brought to a close a nearly four-year investigation of a gang that the authorities described as a disciplined organization that follows a centralized leadership and that itself takes orders from the Mexican Mafia, a powerful gang based in prison with ties to international drug cartels.
Prosecutors said the Varrio gang had its own code of ethics; drive-by shootings from moving cars are forbidden and breaches of gang hierarchies are brutally punished. Members also broadcast animosity toward blacks by regarding themselves as the “Hate Gang.”
“Their general message was that if you were in this city, you’d better not be African-American,” said Thomas P. O’Brien, the United States attorney for the Central District of California.
The federal investigation began in 2005, after Jerry Ortiz, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, was killed by a Varrio gang member named Jose Luis Orozco, who was a suspect in the shooting of a black man.
The indictment describes how a gang member told investigators that the killing of Deputy Ortiz put the Varrio gang “back on the map” and earned the respect of rival gangs.
Mr. Orozco is on death row for the killing, the only member prosecuted so far in the killing.
Federal agents used hundreds of hours of wiretaps and other surveillance to map the gang’s leadership and illicit enterprises, said Daniel McMullen, head of the criminal division of the Los Angeles office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“We established their leadership, how they organized, their code of conduct and how they enforced it,” Agent McMullen said. “The point is to cut off the head. Will it grow back? Maybe, but we knew that, and we’ll continue to investigate. All of this leads back to the Mexican Mafia."
Law enforcement officials said the gang had operated in Hawaiian Gardens for more than 50 years and was in its third generation of membership.
The authorities said they had arrested more than 10 percent of the organization on suspicion of selling cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine and heroin.
The federal indictment also describes shootings into the houses of black residents, kidnappings, carjackings, robberies, witness intimidation and at least one assault on a sheriff’s deputy.
Some of the crimes were committed as gang members shouted racial epithets, according to federal authorities.
In the indictment, prosecutors described how the gangsters used codes in an effort to avoid detection while conducting illegal deals over the phone. They refer to crack cocaine as “cookies” and to one another with names like Buddha, Catfish, Hamburger, Milkbone, Sketchy and Wimpy.
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