Police Raids

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.

Ending a years-long manhunt, troops in Colombia have found the corpse of Pedro "the Knife" Guerrero, one of the country's top right-wing paramilitary leaders and drug traffickers, President Juan Manuel Santos said Wednesday. Guerrero, whose nickname refers to the weapon he favored while terrifying peasants he suspected of aiding leftist rebels, was believed to have been mortally wounded in a gun battle Christmas morning when 120 helicopter-borne commandos of the special Junglas anti-narcotics police force raided his camp near the remote town of Mapiripan in Meta state.

Hundreds of law enforcement officers took part in a massive sweep against the leadership of Riverside's most notorious gang Wednesday, making 50 arrests and confiscating armor-piercing bullets, assault rifles, knives and two caged rattlesnakes. "The weapons you see are a small sample of what is out there on the street," said Riverside Police Chief Russ Leach, standing by a table displaying guns, machetes and bullets at a Riverside news conference. "The gangs don't run the streets, the citizens do."

Ova di wall, Ova di wall Put yuh AK ova di wall… Blood a go run Like Dunns River Fall. Blood flowing like waterfalls. Brains floating like feathers out of a torn pillow. Women submitting to the whims of neighborhood "dons." The images are typical of dancehall, a popular Jamaican music style that has sparked a furious debate over whether it merely reflects an increasingly violent society or somehow contributes to the mayhem. Some of dancehall's most popular performers, including Elephant Man, who wrote "Ova di Wall," use hyperviolent lyrics that chronicle the exploits of "badmanism," the cult of gun-toting gangs.

For more than 30 years, the Blood street gang known as East Side Pain has participated in gun and drug sales in an area of Wilmington known as Ghosttown. Nine families in the neighborhood have members in the gang and control drug sales, which bring customers from Long Beach, Harbor Gateway and San Pedro, authorities said.

L. Ron Hubbard enjoyed being pampered. He surrounded himself with teen-age followers, whom he indoctrinated, treated like servants and cherished as though they were his own children. He called them the "Commodore's messengers." " 'Messenger!' " he would boom in the morning. "And we'd pull him out of bed," one recalled. The youngsters, whose parents belonged to Hubbard's Church of Scientology, would lay out his clothes, run his shower and help him dress.

Larry Madrid, 63, says he wakes up every morning at 4:30 a.m. sharp, gets out of bed and checks his front door. Four months have passed since police busted down the door to the small Atwater Village home his family has owned for generations, handcuffing him and his son as part of an early-morning gang sweep. But the feelings of violation are still fresh. "You can't imagine how belittling it was," said Madrid, a soft-spoken Vietnam-era veteran with a graying mustache and a fatherly paunch.

Re "Pot Plantation Poses Big Risk for Authorities," Aug. 31: In forests all over the state, there are sites identified almost reverentially as bootleggers' encampments from the Prohibition era. Today we have whole cities going unprotected while the entire police force is out in the woods pulling up pot plants. All of the environmental damage, booby traps, guns and threats to rangers and innocent hikers are effects of the drug war, not justification for it. When do we end our drug war?

Los Angeles cop Juan Aguilar has been battling the Avenues hoodlums long enough to have seen the gang at its most vicious. During his five years working an anti-gang detail on streets the Avenues claim as their own in the city's northeastern reaches, gang members are accused of gunning down a man in broad daylight as he held his 2-year-old granddaughter's hand, opening fire on LAPD officers with an assault rifle and killing a Los Angeles County...

An 81-year-old woman was among 27 alleged crack cocaine dealers arrested in police raids in Mobile County. Bayou La Batre Police Chief John Joyner said police received information from an informant that Margie Steiner was dealing drugs. She was placed under surveillance and was videotaped selling crack cocaine, officers said.

Police on horseback and in sport utility vehicles swept across Venice Beach in the darkness Friday morning, arresting nearly 50 people, many homeless, on warrants and felony violations, authorities said. The sweep was part of an effort to address a recent spike in crime and a jump in the number of transients sleeping on the beach after it closes at midnight, LAPD officials said. Friday's action marked the first time the beach curfew task force had combined a sweep with outreach efforts, officials said.

Larry Madrid, 63, says he wakes up every morning at 4:30 a.m. sharp, gets out of bed and checks his front door. Four months have passed since police busted down the door to the small Atwater Village home his family has owned for generations, handcuffing him and his son as part of an early-morning gang sweep. But the feelings of violation are still fresh. "You can't imagine how belittling it was," said Madrid, a soft-spoken Vietnam-era veteran with a graying mustache and a fatherly paunch.

In highly orchestrated raids around the world this week, Interpol officers in Europe, drug agents in the United States and task forces from Sweden to Singapore confiscated counterfeit prescription drugs in an attempt to stem a rapidly growing criminal business that preys on financially pressed consumers looking for bargains. The operation, code-named Pangea, is an effort to fight back against fraudulent prescription drug businesses, which have become a $28-million industry in the United States alone.

For about the last eight months, several suspects allegedly ran a sophisticated marijuana operation in a warehouse just 25 feet from the Los Angeles Police Department's Topanga Station in Canoga Park, police said Wednesday. Three men were taken into custody after officers served a search warrant on the warehouse in the 8400 block of Canoga Avenue. "It was very sophisticated," said LAPD Officer Karen Raynor. She said the growers used insulation material to seal cracks in the building.

Investigators in New York raided circulation offices at some of the nation's largest newspapers as part of a union corruption probe, a law enforcement official said. Police officers working with the Manhattan district attorney's office searched circulation offices of the New York Times in Queens, the New York Post and the Daily News in Manhattan, and El Diario in Brooklyn, the official said. Investigators were seeking paperwork related to the Newspaper and Mail Deliverers Union.

Federal authorities Wednesday arrested several members of a radical Sunni Islamic group in the U.S., killing one of its leaders in a shootout at a Dearborn, Mich., warehouse, the U.S. attorney's office said. Agents were trying to arrest Luqman Ameen Abdullah, 53, on charges that included conspiracy to sell stolen goods and illegal possession and sale of firearms. Authorities also conducted raids elsewhere to try to round up 10 followers named in a federal complaint. No one was charged with terrorism.

About 200 police raided Copenhagen's hippie enclave and detained 53 people in a crackdown on the sale of hashish. The drug is illegal in Denmark, but authorities have tolerated its sale in Christiania, a counterculture area with no government, cars or police.

Los Angeles police seized more than 130 allegedly rigged "Original Hollywood Crane" arcade games Saturday in a series of raids on the machine's manufacturer in Sun Valley and at convenience stores, coin laundries and bars. More than 60 vice detectives served warrants at Hollywood Crane Merchandising Inc. on Lankershim Boulevard and at most of the locations where the firm has placed about 160 of the machines, said Detective John Lindsay.

Reporting from Mexico City and Tegucigalpa, Honduras -- The de facto Honduran government has silenced two dissident broadcasters, part of a crackdown on civil liberties aimed at undermining support for ousted President Manuel Zelaya. Soldiers and police before dawn today raided Radio Globo, a national broadcaster sympathetic to Zelaya. Late Sunday, Channel 36 television was yanked from the air. The two stations frequently carry interviews with Zelaya and his supporters -- voices given short shrift in most other Honduran media.