Gangs

Los Angeles Police Sgt. Alex Vargas sprinted across the grass to the front of an apartment. He leaned ever so gently against the door. "It's open," he said, and his breath quickened. He locked eyes with another officer who was standing across the stoop, gun held tight against his thigh. "I'm going in," Vargas said.

Los Angeles City Hall officials are preparing to sever ties with one of the more high-profile gang intervention organizations in South L.A., a decision the agency head decried as "an injustice" -- even dangerous because of the agency's success in reducing violence between rival gangs. The city's Gang Reduction & Youth Development office plans to end its contract with Unity T.W.O. Inc. at the end of the month.

Rio drug traffickers have set up makeshift medical clinics in the slums they control so wounded gang members don't have to risk arrest by going to hospitals, police said Thursday. "It's the first time we've found clinics like this," a police spokesman said. "We can't say how long they've been used -- we assume for some time." Officers discovered the first clinic Wednesday in the Manguinhos slum in northern Rio.

A notorious Los Angeles street gang has expanded its criminal enterprises into the night life world, authorities said. The Los Angeles Police Department and federal agents said the 18th Street gang operated underground after-hours bars, using them as bases for various criminal enterprises. Authorities said the locations have been connected to homicides, drug trafficking and gambling.

The day after he stunned the city with word that he would resign as chief of police, William J. Bratton sat in the relative quiet of his office collecting his thoughts. Every minute or two his cellphone buzzed to life, alerting him to yet another call from another surprised friend or colleague that would have to be returned after the stack of messages on his desk already awaiting his attention. As aides outside the closed door spoke in hushed tones about the idea of life after Bratton, the chief reflected on the department and city he will leave behind at the end of October after nearly seven years on the job. He explained why he believes so strongly that his replacement should come from inside the Los Angeles Police Department and discussed the particular strengths he sees in each of the presumed front-runners.

Officials on Monday unveiled a federal bill that would create national standards and accountability for gang intervention workers as part of a Los Angeles-based effort to professionalize the growing and controversial field. The bill, which was introduced by U.S. Rep. Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles), is the first such national initiative to regulate intervention workers who act as liaisons between law enforcement and communities. Police and intervention workers have a long history of distrust, but authorities have come to rely on intervention workers for such matters as monitoring street gossip and preventing retaliatory shootings.

Two teams of deputies fanned out across Los Angeles County early Thursday morning, hoping to find a reputed gang member involved in the violence that broke out in June after the Lakers won the NBA championship. In the end, three alleged gang members were arrested on suspicion of parole violations unrelated to the nighttime unrest outside Staples Center, where crowds looted several stores, smashed car windows and vandalized police cars and MTA buses, authorities said. But the gang member whom deputies were seeking was not at the Porter Ranch halfway house to which he was assigned as part of his parole, said Lt. Erik Ruble of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's transit services bureau.

Authorities announced charges Thursday against a Mexican gang that took Tijuana-style violence to the upscale suburbs of San Diego County, kidnapping, torturing and killing well-to-do residents, even after some families paid large ransoms. The gang, a rogue cell of the Tijuana-based Arellano Felix drug cartel, moved across the border in 2002 and posed as U.S. law enforcement, donning FBI and police uniforms and caps while snatching victims outside homes and public places, said San Diego County prosecutors.

The leader of an embattled South Los Angeles gang intervention agency has pledged to press on with his work, even as he conceded that his agency is about to lose its contract in a second pocket of the city, two weeks after City Hall officials severed ties with him. "It's in God's hands now," said Kevin Mustafa Fletcher, a former member of the Swan gang and the executive director of Unity T.W.O., one of the city's more high-profile gang intervention agencies. In an impassioned three-hour interview at his Avalon Boulevard headquarters Wednesday, Fletcher said he had been unfairly targeted -- swept up in politics and abandoned by former allies who are themselves looking to cash in on the flood of public money that the city is setting aside for gang intervention.

For years, Donna Lozano badgered the Desert Hot Springs Police, public officials and anyone else who would listen, trying to get information about her son's killer. Henry Lozano, a popular 20-year-old ex-Marine, had been shot dead by a suspected gang member in December 2001 while driving near his home. He was dating the man's former girlfriend and had received threats to stay away. "I wanted answers. The police never called. The officer in charge of the case had never done a murder investigation," said Lozano, 65. "I said my son is dead, and I have no information."