Gang

Bryshon Nellum was nearing top form when a shotgun blast severely damaged his most valuable assets, his legs. It was about 2 a.m. on Oct. 31, 2008, and Nellum, a star quarter-miler, was walking to his car after attending a party near USC when, police say, a car pulled up next to him, a gang slogan was yelled out, and he was fired upon. Nellum says he's still not sure why. He had been preparing for what he hoped would be a breakout season with the Trojans' track and field team.

SAN DIEGO —Two members of a Mexican organized crime group that terrorized border communities were found guilty Wednesday of taking part in the strangling deaths of two men whose bodies were later dissolved in lye and dumped at a ranch outside San Diego. The mens' ruthless tactics were the trademark of a gang that broke off from the drug cartel waging war in Tijuana nearly a decade ago, according to prosecutors. The Palillos, or Toothpicks, came to the San Diego area in 2003 after splitting from the notorious Arellano Felix drug cartel.

Three suspects in the alleged gang rape of a lesbian woman in Richmond pleaded not guilty Thursday and were likely to remain jailed until a judge decides whether there's enough evidence to put them on trial. Lawyers for Humberto Hernandez Salvador, 31, Josue Gonzalez, 21, and Darrell Hodges, 16, entered the pleas to charges that included kidnapping, carjacking, gang rape and sodomy in the Dec. 13 attack.

Seven deputies from the Los Angeles County sheriff's gang unit have been placed on leave on suspicion that they belong to a secret clique that celebrates shootings and brands its members with matching tattoos, sources confirmed. The move is a sign of the intensifying nature of the investigation of the "Jump Out Boys. " Suspicion about the group's existence was sparked several weeks ago when a supervisor found a pamphlet describing the group's creed, which promoted aggressive policing and portrayed officer shootings in a positive light.

Calvin Hodges insists he is not angry at the men who shot him. "I'm angry at the mind-set," Hodges said on a recent afternoon in Nickerson Gardens, the Watts public housing complex where he grew up, and nearly died. At 35, he's seen it from all sides now during a journey that has taken him from repeated run-ins with the police to being praised by them as a hero. In the three months since Hodges was shot, leaving him partly paralyzed, he has become an emblem of all that is risky about the city's campaign to interlace traditional policing with gang intervention and street outreach.

The legendary British post-punk group Gang of Four has influenced such luminaries as R.E.M., U2 and Franz Ferdinand, but it hasn't graced a stage in its original lineup since 1981. The band has finally given fans what they want, with a new studio album, "Content," and a North American tour. The purveyors of stripped-down punk, funk and dub reggae land in the Southland for two dates, at House of Blues Anaheim on Sunday and the Music Box on Monday. House of Blues Anaheim, 1530 S. Disneyland Drive.

As attackers gang-raped a 15-year-old San Francisco Bay Area student, a female called police and said the victim was "naked" and "probably intoxicated" and that witnesses didn't want to alert authorities, according to a copy of the 911 tape released Thursday. "Nobody wants to call the cops. So we decided to call," said the female, who identified herself as Maggie. The victim was repeatedly raped, beaten and robbed Oct. 24 after she left a homecoming dance at Richmond High School -- a crime that sparked outrage and focused national attention on the city northeast of San Francisco.

Los Angeles police officials have launched a formal investigation into concerns that officers in one of the city's most gang-plagued areas are intimidating other cops from signing a controversial financial disclosure form that is required to join the department's anti-gang units. So far, five officers have been removed from their field assignments at the LAPD's 77th Street Division and will be transferred out of the area for their roles in two recent incidents. The inquiry at the 77th Street Division comes six months after department leaders suspended anti-gang operations there and at a handful of other stations in order to rebuild units vacated entirely by officers who refused to comply with the disclosure rule.

It began, as mortal disputes sometimes do in South Los Angeles, over a girl. On one side were the Main Street Crips, one of the more muscular gangs in the neighborhood. Main Streeters commanded respect, if only because they had a bit of money to throw around, even their own small record label. On the other side were the Hoover Criminals. The Hoovers were big, with turf that stretched from Vernon Avenue down past Century Boulevard and into "the hundreds," as the streets are known locally.

Two reputed leaders of a drug cartel that waged a years-long campaign of terror in Tijuana were arrested Monday in the Baja California port city of La Paz, according to U.S. authorities. Raydel Lopez Uriarte and Manuel Garcia Simental are believed to be top lieutenants of a gang blamed for a string of massacres, police killings, beheadings and kidnappings that has caused many residents to flee the border city. The arrests by Mexican federal police, coming a month after the capture of alleged cartel leader Teodoro Garcia Simental, are the latest blows against the gang.

In 2005, leaders of a gang that sold crack and other drugs near MacArthur Park decided to add a new business venture: extorting the vendors who crowd the streets each evening, selling clothes, pirated DVDs and electronics to supplement a hardscrabble existence. The new effort led to a bloody consequence in September 2007, when an 18-year-old tasked with gunning down a defiant vendor accidentally shot to death a 3-week-old infant. The baby's death triggered a large-scale crackdown on the clique that culminated with a two-month trial that began in March.

It's a heroic narrative that Carmen Trutanich has used while running for election: As a young prosecutor nearly three decades ago, he was investigating a murder in a South Los Angeles park when he was surrounded by gang members who fired shots at him. "Even faced with the gang members, Carmen Trutanich wasn't afraid," retired district attorney's Senior Investigator Jim Bell says in an online campaign video titled "Tru Stories. " Trutanich has touted that experience of coming under fire in a voter mailer, at a candidates' debate and on campaign videos during his campaigns for city attorney and now district attorney.

His mother said a quiet prayer of thanks. His father dropped his head and rubbed his eyes. Four years after Los Angeles High School football star Jamiel Shaw II's death, the gang member accused of gunning him down because he was carrying a red Spider-Man backpack was convicted Wednesday of first-degree murder. Jurors deliberated for barely half a day before returning the guilty verdict against Pedro Espinoza, now 23. The panel found to be true allegations that Espinoza committed the crime in association with a gang and that he personally discharged a firearm.

Several violent incidents, including the shooting of a 13-year-old boy, have sparked worries of renewed gang activity in a northeast Los Angeles neighborhood where city authorities have invested many resources to combat a notorious gang. Years after a largely successful effort to clear a subgroup of the Avenues gang from Drew Street in Glassell Park, authorities say it appears that rival gangs are looking to exact revenge on, or humiliate, a once powerful and predatory enemy. "I think there's payback a little bit there," said LAPD Lt. David Kowalski, supervisor of the Northeast Division's gang unit.

The 17-year-old football star's skin was black and his backpack red. Were it not for those colors, a prosecutor told jurors Tuesday, Jamiel Shaw II might never have been murdered by an 18th Street gang member eager to earn his stripes. Deputy Dist. Atty. Allyson Ostrowski said Pedro Espinoza, now 23, shot Shaw execution-style in 2008 thinking he was a Bloods gang member because he was African American and was carrying a red Spider-Man backpack. Shaw, who played for Los Angeles High School, was killed in March of that year just a few houses away from his Arlington Heights home.

Orange County Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas has spent three years defending an indefensible tactic that denies individuals the right to due process before they are named in a gang injunction. A federal judge has ruled it unconstitutional, but Rackauckas has now appealed that decision. He should abandon this costly and misguided legal battle that is little more than an attempt to bend the rules. Injunctions are powerful tools that can help law enforcement combat gangs. The theory is that by placing restrictions on the conduct of gang members - such as imposing curfews on them or limiting where they can congregate - the injunction will undercut a gang's ability to control the streets and commit crimes.

In recent months, 17 people were killed and 55 wounded in the dirty race war conducted by gangs in the Venice-Oakwood area. Citizens must be encouraged to speak up against violence--assert their civil rights and not be intimidated by gangs. A Times' article (July 22) stated that I was "sternly criticized for calling Venice gang members 'termites.' " Those who would coddle and defend the gangs in face of their atrocities confuse other youngsters not yet affiliated with gang-like activity.

Members of the Hemet-San Jacinto Valley Gang Task Force discovered a diverted gas line that was routed through their office Thursday morning, Hemet police officials said. Had the gas line been ignited by static or a lit cigarette, it could have leveled the building and killed anyone in it, Lt. Duane Wisehart said. Police initially described the threat as an explosive device. Task force members discovered the gas line about 8:30 a.m. "and immediately realizing something wasn't right . . . they backed out of the office and made a call," Wisehart said.

When he came to, Giovanni Macedo was fast tumbling down the side of an embankment somewhere along a road between Tijuana and Mexicali. It was a few seconds before he remembered what had happened. Fleeing to Mexico after a botched shooting. Downing a bottle of vodka and teetering up and down Avenida Revolucion in Tijuana. Reaching a second too late to deflect a rope as it was slung over his neck. A week earlier, the 18-year-old had been "putting in work" in the name of the 18th Street gang in 2007 when he fired shots in the middle of a bustling Westlake street, accidentally killing a 3-week-old infant.

Los Angeles County sheriff's detectives have launched a probe into what appears to be a secret deputy clique within the department's elite gang unit, an investigation triggered by the discovery of a document suggesting the group embraces shootings as a badge of honor. The document described a code of conduct for the Jump Out Boys, a clique of hard-charging, aggressive deputies who gain more respect after being involved in a shooting, according to sources with knowledge of the investigation.