All About Gangs

SANTA MARIA, Calif. - Santa Barbara County District Attorney Joyce Dudley says as prosecution moves forward with what she calls the biggest MS-13 case in the country she's asking for federal funding.  "We could use more resources in terms of the prosecution of the MS-13 case,” says Dudley.  She's talking about more money. She says her office continues with their work prosecuting alleged MS-13 gang members who terrorized Santa Maria allegedly killing various people in 2015 and early 2016. "If in fact the goal is to rid the country of MS-13 gang members it’s important they give local authorities what they need to do just that,” she adds.  Dudley says the funding would help pay the salaries for additional staff to work on the case like lawyers and paralegals. She says they have received limited resources from agencies like the FBI but, says that’s simply not enough. "I appreciate the fact that the President said together we will increase public sa...

Whitney Downard / The Meridian Star Michael Williams, accompanied by Meridian Police Detective Kevin Boyd, enters the Meridian City courtroom Monday for his hearing related to a quadruple shooting earlier this month. A drive-by shooting near the Highway Village Apartments earlier this month was an act of gang retaliation that wounded four innocent bystanders at a birthday party, police said.  During the preliminary hearing Monday in Meridian City Court for Michael Williams, 14, of Meridian, police described the events of July 6 when four men were injured in a drive-by shooting at the Wesley House's Playground for Jesus on 8th Avenue.  Meridian Police Officer Anthony Ball told the court that Williams stated that Kudarrius (D. Tubbs) and Cedmondray (Lewis) picked him up and gave him a gun, telling him that they were seeking retaliation for a gunshot wound one of them had suffered earlier.  A driver, who faces no charges and has not been na...

Four people have been arrested in the killings of four young Latino men on Long Island on the night of April 11, according to federal court documents that were unsealed on Monday. The documents contend that the suspects committed murder to gain entrance into the transnational gang known as MS-13, or to maintain their status in that organization. The gang, with roots in Los Angeles and El Salvador, has spread terror in immigrant communities throughout the United States. Three adults were charged by federal authorities in the murders: Alexis Hernandez, Santos Leonel Ortiz-Flores and Omar Antonio Villalta. A fourth suspect, a juvenile, was arrested but not named. Two of the four young men killed had fled the gangs in their native Honduras to find safety with their parents in the United States: Michael Lopez Banegas, 20, who lived in Brentwood, N.Y., and his cousin, Jefferson Villalobos, 18, who was visiting from Pompano Beach, Fla. The two others who were killed lived in Patchogue, N.Y...

According to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department, there are approximately 20,000 Asian gang members in Los Angeles County. Based on a survey conducted by Streetgangs.com in 2009, we have estimated that number to be substantially smaller, between 9,000 and 12,000 members county wide. We found that many of the gangs that the County regards as active have become defunct as members have matured out the gang, and other gangs were just much smaller than originally estimated. We also found that Asian gangs that are identified as being affiliated with Hispanic and Black gang structures (i.e. Bloods, Crips or Surenos) are included in the tallies of those gangs, while also being identified a second time in the Asian category. Most Asian gangs are composed of several independent identities that are mostly either Chinese, Filipino, Cambodian or Vietnamese. In Monterey Park, is where several Chinese gangs have formed which mostly included different “sides” of Wah Ching, a gang that has...

Until 4:44, Jay-Z’s albums could be understood as an indictment of the immorality of capitalism by a man luxuriating in its fruits. Jay-Z argued that there was something revolutionary in this, in a black man born in the projects proving himself a better entrepreneur than white men born into plenty, as if to suggest the infinite human potential destroyed by the circumstances he escaped. He was right. Jay-Z used the terms of finance to describe the drug trade—referring to his crew as his “staff,” his organization as his “conglomerate,” smoothly transitioning from acknowledging the violence of the trade to comparing it to the stock market (“drug prices up and down like it’s Wall Street homes, but this is worse than the Dow Jones, your brains are now blown”), and connecting the inequality of the system that shaped his life with his determination to triumph over it. Read more here:  https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/07/the-story-of-jay-z/532896/