Saturday, July 25, 1998

The Mexican Mafia used a simple philosophy to control its San Antonio drug enterprise -- cooperate or be killed. 

Some called it "the dime," the 10 percent of profits extorted by the Mexican Mafia from drug dealers in San Antonio. 

Those who paid stayed in business. Those who didn't were tracked down and killed, according to a federal indictment unsealed here last week. 

Last week's indictments of 16 men alleged to be high-ranking members of the Mexican Mafia disrupted the gang's brutal criminal enterprises. But some experts say it's only a first step in stamping it out. 

"This has not incapacitated the organization. But they have taken a hit," said Sammy Buentello, assistant director of the prison system's gang task force. 

He added, "If you manage to disrupt the leadership, obviously it has some impact on the group." 

Authorities say the gang is organized in a paramilitary hierarchy. Those indicted last week, following a 15-month FBI-led investigation, were an alleged general -- Robert "Beaver" Perez -- a captain, three lieutenants, three sergeants and eight soldiers. 

Perez, according to the indictment, was "primarily responsible for directing and controlling the affairs of the enterprise in San Antonio." 

The long-term significance of the arrests will be gauged early next year, when the city and county tally the total number of homicides for 1998, Marin said. 

At least one former Texas prison official, however, said the arrests likely will do little to curb the proliferation of the gang, whose known membership has grown from 653 in 1992 to 1,425 this year. 

"They have certainly put some players out of the game, but the stark reality is that this gang has doubled in size in six years," said Terry Pelz, a gang specialist who now works as a corrections consultant in Missouri City, Texas.

Some prison officials estimate a significant percentage of the system's 10,000 suspected gang members also belong to the Mexican Mafia, which accounts for 28 percent of the known gang population. 
They acknowledge imprisoned Mexican Mafia leaders for years have been able to order soldiers inside and outside prison walls to participate in criminal enterprises. 

In 1990, the homicide count in San Antonio exceeded 200 for the first time. Police laid responsibility at the feet of the Mexican Mafia for 25 to 30 of the city's 218 killings that year. 

But even that didn't tell the whole story, Bexar County Sheriff's Department Lt. Bud Baker said. In many cases, he said, the victims killed in San Antonio were dumped in isolated areas outside city limits. 
Since gang members wanted credit for the killings, their handiwork bore distinctive marks. 

Victims were stabbed and shot. Bodies were rolled in blankets. Many were bound and shot execution-style. 

Last week's 19-page indictment traced the beginning of the Mexican Mafia to Texas prisons in the mid-1980s, when gangs, organized along racial lines, fought each other and their keepers for control of the prisons. 

According to the indictment, the Mexican Mafia "sought to generate income outside the walls of the Texas prison system to help inmates with legal expenses, commissary expenses and the financial needs of inmates' families occasioned by their loved ones' incarceration." 

The indictment continued, "The Texas Mexican Mafia generated much of this income by extorting sums of money from persons engaged in selling drugs." 

Slayings inside the prisons soared to 25 that year, and officials blamed the Mexican Mafia and other gangs for the carnage. 

Eventually, the violence spilled over prison walls and onto San Antonio streets. Prison officials at the time warned police to brace for the onslaught. 

The gang's founder and president, Herbierto Huerta, and other top-ranking leaders were from San Antonio, officials said, and the gang operated primarily here and in Corpus Christi and El Paso. 

At the beginning, gang leaders demanded drug dealers pay them 10 percent of their gross income. The dealers viewed payments to the Mexican Mafia as a street tax required for them to conduct their illegal enterprise. 

They referred to the payments as "the 10 percent" or "the dime." 

If a drug dealer's body turned up beside a remote county road, police investigators often asked the victim's associates if the deceased had failed to "pay the dime." 

San Antonio police say the gang was responsible for scores of drug- related homicides over a 10-year period that climaxed with a record 229 homicides in 1993. 

The following year, a combined force from the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, San Antonio Police Department and Bexar County Sheriff's Department used federal racketeering statutes to convict gang members, sending two dozen Mexican Mafia leaders and soldiers, including Huerta, to prison. 

Law enforcement officials said it wasn't a coincidence that homicides in San Antonio began a sharp decline that year, down to 95 last year. 

But, according to the indictment, imprisoning the leader didn't end his involvement: "(Huerta) continued to direct the violent and frequently deadly activities of the Texas Mexican Mafia from the confines of his jail cell." 

Huerta is named in the indictment as an unindicted co-conspirator. 

Gang members controlled illegal drug sales in a wide area of San Antonio. But it wasn't drug dealing that got the attention when the grand jury returned its indictments last week. 

Embedded in the racketeering charges is the allegation that Mexican Mafia members were behind 14 homicides -- including the worst mass killings in recent San Antonio history. 

On Aug. 8, 1997, shotgun blasts killed five people in a West French Place apartment. From the beginning, investigators now say, they suspected the Mexican Mafia. 

Perhaps the biggest disruption in the gang's activity from last week's arrests will be felt in San Antonio, where the alleged offenders committed the majority of their crimes. 

"This made a huge impact in San Antonio and Bexar County, because these were the guys running the show in this area," said Sgt. Sal Marin, a 14-year homicide detective with the Bexar County Sheriff's Department. 

"Still, we can't ignore the fact that this is just a handful of them and that there are hundreds more," he said. 
Prison officials say communications among gang members can be greatly reduced when leaders and their soldiers are housed in different units and segregated in individual cells. 

If convicted, the leaders could be scattered among federal prisons throughout the country, further diluting their strength. 

"It makes it more difficult for them to operate. Some of these guys could be out of the loop," Buentello said. 

Making matters more disruptive, he said, will be internal strife that occurs whenever leadership is displaced. 

"There likely will be power struggles to replace the leadership. . . . Whenever there is internal strife, it makes them less effective as a group," Buentello said. 

Mexican Mafia case has 11 facing trial 
By Maro Robbins
Express-News Staff Writer 

Sunday, Jan 10, 1999

Hunted by his own gang, a Texas Mexican Mafia member apparently broke into a home and told surprised residents to pick up the phone and report an intruder. 

Another Mexican Mafia member, claiming he was marked for death by his one-time cronies, sought sanctuary in a San Antonio police substation. 

The members became informants and are among the prosecution's key witnesses in a federal racketeering trial set to start Monday. 

Enhanced security is expected at the San Antonio federal courthouse for the closely watched trail, which is scheduled to last up to six weeks. 

In July, a grand jury charged 16 people. Five have pleaded guilty. The 11 remaining defendants, who pleaded not guilty, are accused of controlling the Texas Mexican Mafia in San Antonio. 

Authorities claim that convicting them would stagger, if not cripple, the notorious cabal, while avenging the bloodiest crime in the city's recent memory. The execution of five blindfolded victims in a near West Side home in 1997 is the highest-profile crime alleged in the case.

The gang more often preyed on its own members as factions warred, loyalties faltered and suspicions flared, according to the government. 

Out of a dozen nights outlined in the charges, authorities allege seven involved Mexican Mafia members attacking — and in six cases, killing — their own. 

At least six self-professed Mexican Mafia members — including three initially charged in the indictment — are listed as government witnesses. Prosecutors have not revealed any deals made to entice their testimony. 

Put simply, the group's bloodthirsty leadership helped engineer its own prosecution, investigators allege. 

"They force members of their own gang to turn to law enforcement to protect themselves," said FBI Special Agent Mike Appleby, one of several investigators in the case. 

Defense attorneys deny their clients belong to any arch-criminal organization. 

Some question if the notorious group even exists outside of stories told by criminals desperate for something to exchange for government leniency. 

Defense attorneys argue the government's case is built on the testimony of witnesses they say should be on trial. 

Prosecution witness Frank Estrada, who government documents allege participated in six killings, is uncharged. 

"Since time immemorial (federal) prosecutors have been able to buy perjured testimony by helping guys out that have big problems," said David Sergi, attorney for alleged Mexican Mafia lieutenant Louis "Big Lou" Morales. 

By October 1997, at least five informants with criminal records were handing FBI agents, sheriff's deputies and police detectives the building blocks of this case, court documents indicate. 

Four claimed to belong to the notorious Texas Mexican Mafia, sometimes known as La Eme, as in "M," or Mexikanemi — meaning "free Mexicans." 

The informants talked mostly about the gang murdering its own members, punishments for disobeying orders and pocketing payoffs collected from drug dealers. 

At least two claimed to be targets themselves. 

Law enforcement officials declined to identify the two informants who say they escaped their own gang by seeking out authorities. 

Nobody offered eyewitness accounts of what happened inside a house in the 1100 block of West French Place on Aug. 8, 1997, the night of a slaughter considered the worst mass murder in recent San Antonio history. 

The victims were four teen-agers and a 49-year-old father. Grieving relatives were shocked that anyone would systematically target three high school seniors, a student dental assistant and a disabled man who sometimes relied on an oxygen tank. 

Accounts from three informants, who outlined events before and after the murders, suggest the gang expected to find piles of money in the home. 

Their versions are detailed in investigators' affidavits. 

Each claimed Robert "Beaver" Perez, who authorities allege is the gang's general, believed the house contained a shoebox stuffed with cash as well as large quantities of marijuana and cocaine, an FBI affidavit states. 

But the heist, expected to produce about $10,000 in cash, reportedly yielded only 5 pounds of marijuana, another informant told authorities. 

Afterward, Perez suspected that someone pocketed the cash and was furious about the senseless carnage, according to the informant, a self-professed Mexican Mafia sergeant. 

Another informant claims that Robert "Robe" Herrera, who authorities claim is the gang's captain, ordered the death of a member for "running off at the mouth about what happened on French Street where the five people got killed." 

Two people police allege were gang members died in the following weeks. 

On Aug. 14, authorities found Robert De Los Santos, choked, throat slashed, and run over by a car. Adam Tenorio's decomposing body was discovered wrapped in a blanket Aug. 21. 

Perez and Herrera have pleaded not guilty to all charges. 

The informants' stories helped officers persuade a judge to issue 22 search warrants, beginning in October 1997. 

On Allsup Street at a rear apartment monitored by security cameras, the only knock came from a battering ram. 

The agents emerged from the brown house carrying $6,000 cash, a rifle, revolver and electronic scale. 
With a second sweep in July, the combined searches yielded boxes of evidence, including $48,708 scattered among eight houses, a bulletproof vest and 12 firearms. 

They gathered correspondence with incarcerated Mexican Mafia members and alleged truces between the Mexikanemi and rivals like the Texas Syndicate and Pistolero Latinos. 

Authorities also claim they uncovered a constitution that spells in elaborate handwriting the group's illicit aims. 

"We deal in drugs, contracts of assassination, prostitution, robberies of the highest degree, gambling, extortion, weapons or any and every other thing criminally imaginable," the manifesto, quoted in an amended indictment, states. 

Unsigned, the document is hardly a confession and makes weak evidence, defense attorneys say. 
"It could be the figment of anyone's imagination," said Blair McLeod, the lawyer for Perez, who authorities claim is the gang's general. 

To win convictions, prosecutors must prove the Mexican Mafia exists. 

The complex racketeering law, used to lock up notorious mobsters such as John "The Teflon Don" Gotti, also requires proof the defendants committed at least two crimes each as part of the larger conspiracy. 

Defense attorneys insist the government is cobbling together a racketeering conspiracy from separate slayings that could not be tried successfully as individual murder cases. 

Normally, murder charges would be handled in state court, where, legal experts say, Texas law requires more than snitches' accusations for convictions. 

Federal courts, however, regularly use informants to point accusing fingers at their accomplices and to establish conspiracies. 

Large conspiracy cases give the government an edge, said Geary Reamey, a St. Mary's University law professor. 

The distinctions between defendants may blur for jurors sitting through a lengthy trial. And federal prosecutors often win by dividing defendants among themselves, Reamey said. 

"They know exactly how to play this thing like a fiddle," he said. 

This is the second time federal prosecutors squared off against the so-called Texas Mexican Mafia. 
In 1994, prosecutors convicted 25 members, including the group's founder, the charismatic Heriberto "Herb" Huerta. 

The current case opens where the first one ended, according to the prosecutors, assistant U.S. attorneys Bill Baumann and David Counts. 

Huerta, held some 700 miles from San Antonio in a high-security federal lockup in Colorado where mail and phone calls are monitored, started to lose his grip on the group. So, prosecutors allege, he ordered the deaths of disloyal members in San Antonio. 

The bloody power struggle claimed at least four victims, the charges allege. 

Inside a courtroom, letters authorities allege were penned by Huerta may answer doubts about a conspiracy. Outside, the government's claims raise at least one question: What is solved by putting members of a prison-spawned gang behind bars? 

The gang appears to have survived in prison, perhaps better than on San Antonio streets. 

The Texas Mexican Mafia has 1,445 confirmed members in state penitentiaries, up 18 percent from 1994. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons does not issue similar figures, but officials acknowledge the gang is considered a "disruptive group" in its facilities. 

"My greatest fear is that (racketeering) prosecutions will make them stronger," said Terry Pelz, a former prison warden and gang specialist. 

In a perverse way, rigorous prosecutions and the publicity they attract embellish the fearsome reputations that attract new gang members, Pelz said. 

Unchallenged, however, gangs are sure to grow bolder, he added. 

Pelz said the fight against prison gangs does not stop with courtroom verdicts. He said it must continue on streets and behind bars. 

In San Antonio, where authorities twice have targeted Mexican Mafia leadership, investigators also take a long view of their work. 

Said FBI agent Appleby: "Once in a while you have to put a thumb on these guys and knock them down." he said.

Houston Post 01/09/94

GANG MEMBERS 'FEEL LIKE THEIR LIVES HAVE VERY LITTLE VALUE'

By DEBORAH QUINN HENSEL, OF THE HOUSTON POST STAFF
 

Beth Pelz has studied teen-age gang members for the last three years.

The University of Houston criminology professor has probed their minds and questioned their motives. She's heard stories that would horrify most people.

One girl, a 14-year-old who moved here recently from Florida, told her once that Houston gang members are stupid because they leave their dead victims behind for police to find.

Back home, gangs take the bodies to the swamp and dump them.

The girl was a member of a Florida middle-school gang that beat and stabbed their seventh-grade teacher.

"People are always asking me, 'How is it possible that a 14- or 15-year-old can value life so lightly?' " said Pelz , who's interviewed 100 gang members for a federally funded study that's expected to be released in October.

"I always say it's astonishing to me that they have just physically survived, let alone value my life or yours - or theirs. And they feel like their lives have very little value."

Almost all of them, her study shows, come from poor minority families. About 40 percent say their mothers are prostitutes or drug traffickers, and most say their fathers aren't around anymore.

The gang is their family now: 90 percent of them say the gang provides unconditional support and understanding that families don't.

But it's a family unit armed with firepower - 80 percent say they carry guns daily. And they use them.

Taking a life means no more to a gang member, Pelz said, than the perpetual "splatting" of Wile E. Coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon.

"They know they (the victims) are dead," she said. "It's just not serious to them."

Pelz and her fellow researcher Beth McConnell of Southwest Texas State University have been studying the growing instances of youth gang violence in Texas since 1990.

Besides interviewing gang members, she's surveyed law enforcement officers, probation officers, district attorneys, school superintendents and high school drug counselors to understand youth gangs.

Responses to a comprehensive, 90-question survey - covering gang activity, criminal offenses, weapons, drugs, sexual history and family life - give sobering insight into the thought processes of these youths.

Conversations about killing, Pelz said, are nonchalant:

Interviewer: Did you have guns?

Gang member: Yeah.

Interviewer: Did you use them?

Gang member: Yeah.

Interviewer: Did you intend to kill?

Gang member: Sure.

Interviewer: Are you fearful of being killed?

Gang member: Why? It happens.

Interviewer: When you do a drive-by shooting, do you worry that little kids are in that house?

Gang member: You can't think about that.

The attitude prevails even when the violent death of a family member or friend touches them directly. They're in denial, Pelz said.

When 6-year-old Edward de la Garza was shot while sleeping in his bed during a drive-by shooting in November, youths in the southeast Houston neighborhood lined his coffin with gang-related mementos. Pelz said they don't see his death as result of gang violence, but a reason to retaliate.

There are about 200 identifiable gangs in Houston now, Pelz estimates, with a total membership of about 2,300.

Those numbers have jumped from 10 known gangs in 1986, Pelz said, and the level of violence has skyrocketed.

It isn't because more "bad seeds" are being born, she said, and it isn't unique to Houston. The root of the problem is in the rapid economic, demographic and social evolution of the city itself.

"Houston just keeps reaching out and grabbing chunks of land and bringing them in without offering social services that come with being part of an urban area," she said.

Other cities have their gang problem contained by zoning; Houston doesn't, Pelz said, adding she is not necessarily a zoning advocate.

In poorer neighborhoods, people can't see that doing what's right results in anything positive for them, so they don't bond to those societal norms, Pelz said.

"They think 'What the hell . . . I might as well do something else that appears to give me status,' " she said.

Now, those neighborhoods are all over the city, Pelz added, and the youth population has bought into another set of goals.

"Having a high-powered weapon in their hands, shooting it a zillion times, scaring people or being part of a serious crime enhances their status," Pelz said.

Gang violence in Houston may have scared enough people for Houston police to declare war. On Thursday, Houston Police Chief Sam Nuchia announced the appropriation of $1.6 million in seized drug money to fund a 60-man task force.

But that's not enough, Pelz said.

"We have these very violent people out there we have to address," she said. "We do have to keep up surveillance and we do have to keep up suppression. But, pure suppression is not going to do it by itself."

"It's a multifaceted problem. And we're going to have to have a multifaceted solution."

We have to be willing, she said, to pour just as much money into the other end of the problem: prevention.

And that means building self-esteem and values, beginning in preschool, she said.

"The most frightening interview I have ever done was with a gang member whose parents died when he was 10 or 11," Pelz said.

He lived on the streets for a while, then a very violent gang with a national reputation took him in and became his family.

"Now he feels like it is his vocation in life to go out on the streets of the city and 'save' homeless children by bringing them into his gang," Pelz said.

"What we, as a society, are not providing for these kids, he is."

Houston Post 01/07/94

HPD SETS UP SPECIAL FORCE TO BATTLE GANGS 
 

By TESSIE BORDEN, OF THE HOUSTON POST STAFF 
Post reporter Robert Stanton contributed to this report.

Police Chief Sam Nuchia on Thursday unveiled a $1.6 million plan that will field a force of 60 officers to take on Houston's 2,645 gang members.

The move is a response to the "continuous concern in our city about gang violence," said Nuchia, but it is not an acknowledgment that previous efforts to fight gangs have proved insufficient.

Nuchia has several times complained that media coverage of the gang problem in Houston has exaggerated the problem. But on Thursday, Nuchia extended an olive branch, saying the media portrayal is now more realistic.

Nuchia said he believes the city's gang problem has peaked in the last two years, and he hopes the new initiative will "make it very uncomfortable" for gangs to stay.

In a report last year to the mayor and City Council, Nuchia quoted an internal report on gang activity that there are about 196 gangs and about 2,645 gang members in Houston.

The new plan will initially assign 20 patrol officers to southwest Houston neighborhoods, where gang activity is high, solely to handle gang-related crime and to monitor suspicious gang activity.

Forty more officers will be reassigned to gang duty within the next month in north and southeast Houston neighborhoods.

The officers will not leave their current beats, but will be assigned to keep track of gangs full time with special shifts, Nuchia said. The department will spend $1.6 million in drug forfeiture funds to pay overtime to other patrol officers who will take over regular patrol duties for them.

 The new system differs from previous initiatives in that the force has had intelligence-gathering task forces at the different substations, with a coordinator and lieutenant to oversee them at central headquarters.

Nuchia said the field force will complement them by providing enforcement muscle.

"Our goal is to make it as uncomfortable as possible for gang members to be active in any way in this city," he said. "If they want to look gangy, paint gangy things and wear gangy clothes, we're going to make it so uncomfortable for them to stay on the street that they won't want to do it."

Nuchia's proposal drew mixed reviews from gang experts.

"To simply reassign officers does not handle the problem," said Dr. Mary E. Pelz , associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Houston-Downtown.

She said the plan may do some good if the reassigned officers interact positively with youths instead of (*** NOTE CORRECTION IN MEMO ***- in addition to) focusing on criminal intelligence.

Jim Young, a detective with the Harris County Gang Task Force, called the proposal a "waste of funds" and "improper placement of personnel."

What is needed instead, Young said, is a centrally located task force that concentrates on specific "hot spots" at a time.

Young said Nuchia's approach lacks a long-term focus and asked, "What happens when the $1.6 million runs out?"

"We hope to be there longer than the gangs," Nuchia said when asked the question at a news conference.

A story on page A-1 of Thursday's Houston Post incorrectly quoted Dr. Mary E. Pelz , associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Houston-Downtown.

In comments about the Houston police officers to be assigned to a special gang force, Pelz said the plan would do some good if the officers interact positively with the youths in addition to focusing on criminal intelligence.

Houston Post 12/13/93

RADACK SEEKS LOWER AGE FOR PROSECUTION AS ADULTS

By DEBORAH QUINN HENSEL, OF THE HOUSTON POST STAFF

Harris County Commissioner Steve Radack has an answer for young criminals who find little to fear in the state's juvenile justice system.

Radack said he wants the state legislature to lower the age at which offenders can be prosecuted as adults from 17 years to 14 years.

The state's current juvenile justice system is operating under laws that are "archaic," Radack said.

When existing laws were written, the courts were dealing with problems like truancy, misbehaving in school and joy riding, he said.

"Those days are not realistic anymore," he said. "The number of sexual assaults and murders committed by 14, 15 and 16-year-olds is overwhelming."

Radack said his proposal would put the decision in the hands of judges and jurors, giving them the option to decide on a case-by-case basis whether an offender would be sent to the Texas Youth Commission or serve time as an adult in a state prison or county jail.

Beth Pelz , a criminology professor at the University of Houston Downtown who studies gang activity, said she understands it's difficult to change a youth at age 14.

"But, I'm not ready to give up on them," she said. "I'm not ready to treat them as adults."

The state's existing certification process provides adequate prosecution of the most serious cases, she said.

Mike McMahan, a victim's rights advocate, said he supports the idea of lowering the age at which juveniles can be automatically certified as adults to 15 years and lowering the court's certification age to 14 years.

But the idea of wholesale certification of 14-year-olds as adults is a ludicrous proposition except in extreme cases like homicide, armed robbery and aggravated sexual assault, he said.

"They are still kids," McMahan said. "Not everybody in the juvenile detention center is a killer."

He said Radack's recommendation will add to the overcrowded prison systems.

McMahan said the county has the means to handle burgeoning numbers of juvenile offenders.

While the county takes two years to build a proposed $17 million juvenile facility to house 470 offenders, juvenile crime statistics will continue to go through the ceiling, McMahan said. Tent camps and boot camps to handle 500 juveniles can be built in 120 days at one-tenth the cost, he said.

Houston Post 11/15/93
                                        
VIOLENT YOUTHS 'WOULD AS SOON KILL YOU AS LOOK AT YOU' 

By WILLIAM PACK, OF THE HOUSTON POST STAFF                         

Houston and America are producing an alarming number of youths who show no concern for other individuals, can kill innocent victims without remorse and are incapable of linking their actions with consequences, experts contend.

The number, some agree, may even be growing.

Ninfa Cavazos, a psychiatrist with the Harris County Juvenile Probation Department, said she has seen more youngsters she calls "unattached children" who are adrift in society, unconstrained by traditional bonds and values.

Those are youths who "would just as soon kill you as look at you," Cavazos said.

"The tendency seems to be . . . an increase in crime in which violators show little, if any, remorse," Cavazos said. "Society has to deal with it."

Beth Pelz , an assistant professor at the University of Houston-Downtown who is studying gang activities across Texas, said it is not gangs themselves that are the cause of so much concern but "the violent character and senseless nature" of gang activities that are shocking communities.

For proof, just look at some of Houston's more shocking crimes over the past few years. In 1991, a mistakenly planned drive-by shooting resulted in the death of a 12-year-old Alief area girl who was attending a birthday party. This summer, two northwest Houston girls were raped and strangled as they walked home. 

Gang initiation activities may have played a part in those slayings.

Last week, a 6-year-old east Houston boy was killed in his sleep during a drive-by shooting. The shooting was not associated with gang activity but two teen-agers in custody for the slaying have admitted being gang members.

Cavazos, who evaluates juvenile suspects as part of the process that determines if they should be tried as adults, said the worst crimes are committed by those who have lost all sense of conscience, who "don't feel they owe anyone anything."

The attitude comes from a variety of influences but perhaps none more important than something Cavazos called "bonding attachment deficit." A youth at some point during his or her formative years failed to develop appropriate emotional bonds with his or her parents and eventually lost the ability to give or receive love, Cavazos said.

She said those feelings oftentimes are already developed by the time a youth enters school.

Gangs are the vehicles many of those children chose to give their lives meaning and worth. Cavazos said gangs allow youths to exchange their individual egos for a group ego that appears more powerful.

Pelz , who is working with a professor from Southwest Texas State University on a federally financed, four-year study of Texas gangs, said human life is cheaply valued by many gang members because their own lives have not had much value.

Gang members she has interviewed have an immature view of life and an incomplete understanding of death, Pelz said. Killings and other acts of violence "become kind of a game," she said.

"It's just not real to them," said Pelz .

She blames broad social and economic forces for sapping the country's vitality. The ways we live and work are changing so rapidly, individuals have a hard time coping and families have a hard time surviving, Pelz said.

As families and communities dissolve, so has our ability to convey traditional values and to help children learn right from wrong, the social sciences professor said.

Pelz said what the country needs is to re-establish a bond with society and its values "so that when someone else hurts, you hurt."

Houston Chronicle 06/21/98

Hatred behind bars /Fear, rage breed racial tensions asinmates seek security of gangs 

By KATHY WALT, ALLAN TURNER
Staff 
 

HUNTSVILLE - Tim had been in prison less than 48 hours when he was first approached by another convict hoping to make the baby-faced teen-ager his girlfriend.

"I stuck a whole bunch of holes in him, and word got out that this white boy took out a (black man)," said Tim, using a racial slur.

Tim, now a 30-year-old parolee who asked that his last name be withheld, talked about how he stabbed the other convict with a handmade knife, a "shank" in prison lingo. In a terse, matter-of-fact tone filled with vulgarities, he described the rage that builds behind bars in the nation's second-largest prison system and explained what drives some felons to join gangs.

"It's the white guys that are solid," he said. "They are the most dangerous, because they are the most violent . . . in the system. They'll kill in a heartbeat."

His words are chilling for the hatred they portend and their frightening similarity to the types of racial epithets that relatives and longtime acquaintances of Russell Brewer and Bill King say those young men learned in prison.

Brewer and King, along with a third man, Shawn Berry, are charged with murder in the savage dragging death two weeks ago of James Byrd Jr. of Jasper.

Police say Byrd, a 49-year-old black man, was beaten and chained to the bumper of a pickup, then dragged almost three miles along a winding, bumpy back road by the three white suspects. Byrd's head and right arm were torn off in the process.

And while many who know Brewer and King say the pair never exhibited any overt racial prejudices before they did hard time in Texas prisons, Jasper and federal authorities have labeled the gruesome killing a racially motivated hate crime.

Sammy Buentello, the chief expert on prison gangs for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, said that none of the men had so-called "badges," prison terminology for gang-related tattoos, when they entered prison. (The TDCJ routinely inventories incoming prisoners for tattoos.)

Berry, who gave police a detailed confession in the Byrd case, implicating Brewer and King as the main culprits, still has no visible tattoos.

But photographs provided by Jasper officials after their arrests show that Brewer and King both have tattoos indicating membership in the Ku Klux Klan and the white supremacist Confederate Knights of America, Buentello said.

He said he doesn't know if Brewer and King got the tattoos in prison or after their release, but that both men were monitored while they were at the Beto I Unit in Tennessee Colony for possible membership in the KKK and CKA.

Whether Brewer and King learned to hate other races while in prison may never be known. But what happens behind bars that can turn even previously unremarkable petty criminals into killers so calloused that the viciousness of the crime is unfathomable?

"You almost have to live in a cell block to understand," said Chuck, a 55-year-old parolee who also asked that his last name be withheld.

Buentello identifies 10 major gangs operating inside Texas prisons, including the Aryan Brotherhood, with about 425 members; the Mexican Mafia, the largest with an estimated membership of more than 1,400; the Texas Syndicate, another Hispanic group whose membership is estimated at 800; and the predominantly black Bloods, with about 170 members, and Crips, with about 660 members. In all, Buentello estimates that 4,900 Texas convicts belong to gangs, less than 4 percent of the 140,000 state prisoners.

But that doesn't count the groups in which King and Brewer were believed involved. TDCJ doesn't classify KKK, CKA and Aryan Circle - all white supremacy organizations - as gangs. Nor does it count many street gangs, whose members may loosely organize behind bars.

But such inmates and groups are monitored. A group does not become a gang, according to TDCJ, unless it has a written constitution or rules and engages in violent prison activities.

Experts say three crucial federal court rulings in the 1970s and 1980s created the climate for rampant development of gangs and similar groups. Those are the 1976 Guajardo case which resulted in a ruling that allowed gang members at different prisons to freely write each other; the 1979 LaMar ruling that desegregated prison cells, exacerbating the racial tensions common in prisons everywhere; and a 1982 court order in the Ruiz prison reform lawsuit which abolished the building tender system.

Building tenders - usually older, white inmates - functioned as guards and spies. They maintained the social order among felons through intimidation and coercion, and snitching on lower-ranking inmates. When TDCJ could not hire guards fast enough to keep the order that the old building tenders had, gangs sprang up to fill the void, experts say.

Chuck and Tim - as well as prison administrators, lawyers and criminologists - say fear, along with a need for family, is a primary reason prisoners join gangs.

There is the fear of being raped, beaten or killed; of being locked away for years or your entire life; of casting your eyes the wrong way; of not learning fast enough the appropriate prison body language - the stature that says you're neither submissive nor aggressive.

That fear, combined with crowded living conditions among thousands of criminals who already have shown an inability to abide by society's rules, gives rise to rage. Normally minor irritations, such as the volume of a radio or the choice of a TV show, are quickly amplified into major affronts, Chuck said.

"There's all this damn noise going on, there's nothing good happening to you and nothing to look forward to," Tim says. "So you sit up there and scheme and hate. And hatred is going to breed hatred."

He turned his hatred primarily toward blacks.

"I really hated them," he said. "There were just too damn many of them. You come to hate them."

He insists he was not prejudiced when he entered prison, but learned to hate there. Despite his continued use of racial slurs, Tim said he has overcome that hatred, thanks in part to intensive peer counseling, in the 20 months he has been out.

That racial hatred is not an uncommon reaction, said University of Houston criminologist Beth Pelz , a former inmate counselor in the Texas prisons who extensively researched prison gangs for her doctoral dissertation.

"It's not like everyone's sitting in their cells and looking at their feet and saying, `Gosh, I hate African-Americans or blacks,' or `I hate Hispanics or whatever,' " she said. "Because in reality they get along some of the time quite well."

But circumstances in prison are magnified, she said. When people are looking for someone to blame, whether in prison or not, the tendency is to point the finger at people who are different.

And in prison, where blacks make up the largest group, white inmates, who perceive they have lost social status because they are suddenly a racial minority, the blame is often placed on blacks, she said.

According to TDCJ figures for 1997, African-American felons made up 45 percent of the inmate population, 28 percent were Anglos and 27 percent were Hispanic.

Pelz believes that gang affiliation has a lot to do with inmates' backgrounds.

"The particular groups they tend to be involved with have a lot to do with their attitudes and values before they got to prison," she said. "There was a time when most of the gang members in Texas prisons were gang members who had joined in prison.

But now the street gang members who are being incarcerated actually outnumber what we were historically calling prison gang members."

While white supremacist gangs and groups like the Aryan Brotherhood form along ideological lines, others tend to organize for criminal activity purposes, and in prison that means trafficking in drugs, tobacco products, sex and other illegal activities.

Despite the current focus on white supremacy groups as a result of the Jasper case, prison gangs today - unlike the mid-1980s when violence was at a peak - tend to coexist in a tense truce, according to some current inmate-members of the mostly black Crips.

The prison world they know is a finely tuned balance of terror, where "respect" is the key to multiple gangs coexisting as each nurtures its behind-bars market in cigarettes, drugs and other contraband.

Crips members, who did not want to be identified, note that even white supremacist groups like the Aryan Brotherhood generally refrain from collective attacks on blacks.

"If they respect us, we respect them," one Crip said. "It's when they disrespect us that trouble begins."

Prison gangs have a de facto negotiation system to defuse potential conflicts, black gang members said. If members of rival gangs tangle over a personal issue, in theory the isolated combatants are permitted to resolve their differences without gang interference.

But violence often strikes like lightning. Diplomacy fails.

"We saw this white jump on a black," said a 23-year-old Houston man serving 10 years for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. "So we acted. We stabbed him. I don't remember exactly how many were involved - 15, 20. That was in Beto."

"Sometimes we don't have time (to figure things out), we just shove off."

"Shoot, all told, I've seen a dozen riots, whites, blacks, all," said a 22-year-old Houston man who has served six years of a 20-year term for murder. "There will be 20 or more, hitting, stabbing. It depends on the gang and what started the problem."

Another gang member, a 24-year-old Houston man doing time for aggravated assault, recalled a riot at a San Antonio prison in which at least 40 inmates, some armed with locks and improvised knives, fought a bloody battle over a pair of contraband dice.

The members of the Crips agree they would die for their gang, and some would be willing to kill.

"Basically it's a person looking for love," the 23-year-old said. "My mother died, my father died, my auntie did everything she could for me. But the Crips offered love. That's the gang appeal. That's why just about everybody joins.

"They had open arms."

HOUSTON CHRONICLE 01/31/94

Violent Times/In local gang world, violence has different meaning 

By SUSAN WARREN
Staff 

To look at him, Shorty doesn't seem like he'd be all that important.

He's just a kid -- barely 16. Five feet 3 inches tall and not more than 110 pounds after lunch. He slouches in his chair, skinny arms stretched out and smudged with blue-inked tattoos. You have to lean close to understand his rapid-fire mumble, full of
 street slang and sloppy grammar.

But Shorty commands attention: sociologists want to understand him, police want to stop him, social workers want to change him, parents want to control him, and the media want to interview him.

Because, though Shorty may look like just a little punk, a gang has given him status, and a gun has made him powerful.

Shorty is the living example of a problem experts from all parts of the nation are desperately trying to get a handle on, and one the city of Houston has only recently begun to attack publicly and aggressively.

A peek into the mind of Shorty is a lesson in just how complex and difficult the task of gang control will be. 

"Shorty" is the street name of a teen-age gangster who is on probation for aggravated assault -- a shooting that he would describe as self-protection.

Shorty's family recently moved to a new neighborhood, and the local gang has been giving him a hard time.

You have to earn your respect, Shorty will tell you. You have to prove you are brave, or you won't survive. So Shorty pulled out a long-barreled .22-caliber "cowboy" gun one day on the street and shot at his rivals.

He didn't hit anyone, but he got their respect.

"The only way you can understand it, is to live it," Shorty says.

Everybody who lives it knows the rules. It's a violent way of life, with beatings and shootings all in a day's work. Life is cheap in a crowd that can't see its future. They want to grab what they can get while they're still young.

"If a guy get's shot, so what?" Shorty asks.

Hispanics go after the blacks. Blacks go after the whites. Whites go after the Hispanics. And they all go after each other.

But it's not about hate.

"We call it no-love. We got no love for you."

In Shorty's world, stealing cars, using drugs, robbing people, beating up and shooting other gangsters, isn't really a bad way of life.

"Just because you do things like that, it doesn't mean you're not a good person," he says.

Shorty has no trouble understanding gangs or why kids wind up in them. For him, it started when he was 12, hanging out with his friends around an apartment complex in Spring Branch. His friends all had older brothers, members of the local gang. There was nothing else to do.

He got his first tattoo when he was 13. Not long after that, he got his first gun.

"You just kind of grow into it," he says.

"It's about your friends. It's about your neighborhood."

Violence is the litmus test, separating those with heart from those who don't have what it takes. Guns are cheap and easy to come by, often traded among friends. At times, Shorty has had five to six guns hidden away in his room at home.

"You don't take fists to a gunfight," he says with practiced bravado. Scrawny little Shorty's face lights up when he talks about guns. With a gun comes power. It makes you bad.

"Small as I am, I can talk to the biggest bad guy out there," he says. "When you're holding a gun, it's like you've got someone's life right in your hands." 

Mary "Beth" Pelz , a sociologist at the University of Houston-Downtown, has been studying gangs in Texas for four years.

During that time, she has watched as Texas cities have first denied the problem, then grudgingly acknowledged it, and finally scrambled to put out the flames.

Compared to cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, which have been wrestling with gang violence for decades, it has taken longer for a widespread gang problem to take root in Texas' major cities.

"Texas as a whole doesn't have a rich history of street gangs, so it's kind of new to us," Pelz said.

But that's not to say there isn't a long tradition of gangs in Houston. Social workers and leaders in the minority community point out that there have always been gangs in the city's poorest neighborhoods.

"We've always had people knocking each other in the head, but not much was done about it because it was just among "those people,' " said Jim Young, an officer with the Alief school district who works with the Harris County Gang Task Force and grew up in the Fifth Ward.

Sometime in the mid-1980s, Pelz said, the gangs began to branch out, spreading from the inner city to the outer city, and then catching fire in suburbs like Alief, Katy and Aldine. The gangs became more visible, adopting all the traits and symbols popularly associated with gangs: tough names, tattoos, special clothing, and grafitti-scrawled buildings marking out their territory.

The police blotter, too, began to reflect the spread of gangs. Juvenile crime skyrocketed. Gang rivalries and initiation rites led to brutality, even murder. And drive-by shootings became the terror of gang-infested neighborhoods.

Police say many gangs get their start when a gang member moves to a new city with his family and begins recruiting the locals. Heavy blame for the rapid spread of gangs in recent years is put on the media, for glamorizing the life.

"Gangs have always been around, but it seems that gangs are more in vogue now. We have gang dress, gang music, gang films.

Even if it's in an indirect way, it seems to promote gang subculture," said Nestor Rodriguez, a sociologist at the University of Houston.

"The message is to not belong to a gang because it could kill you, but the characters are all tough characters like Clint Eastwood, and who doesn't want to be like Clint Eastwood?"

Every city has its own flavor of gang problem, shaped by such factors as the economy, geography, and urban decay and expansion. But a favorite theory in gang studies is that gangs take root in areas of change -- unstable neighborhoods with shifting populations or fortunes.

Houston's exploding economy and rapid expansion during the '70s made many neighborhoods grow too much, too fast, Rodriguez says. Neighborhoods were built with row upon row of houses, but with little in the way of community services or recreation facilities for youth.

For a time, the suburbs in Houston were the refuge of the white, middle-class, who fled there to escape the crime and violence of the inner city. But when the economy went bust in the early '80s, housing prices sank, and the rent on cheaply built apartment complexes plummeted.

Gangs, says Young, crept into the suburbs right behind the cheaper rents. As inner-city residents moved out into the fringes of Houston, they brought with them frustration, disillusionment, poverty, and their children, streetwise and hardened to a high-crime way of life.

"It was exported, just like Moammar Gadhafi exports terrorism," Young said. "You brought in people who don't have any discipline, people who were already totally out of control. And then you have predominantly white people who had no idea how to deal with them. It was a cakewalk" for the gangs. 

While gangs began to flourish in Houston, police and city officials adopted a kind of speak-no-evil policy. In 1990, then-Police Chief Elizabeth M. Watson explained to a law enforcement conference that Houston police were refusing to admit the existence of gangs to the public because she felt that giving the gangs attention would only encourage them.

Denial is a common response in cities just beginning to grapple with the prospect of gangs, according to Sgt. Wes McBride, a member of the gang task force in Los Angeles County. One school of thought holds that, as Watson believed, to give them publicity is to help them grow.

On the wall of his West Coast office, McBride has hung a map of the United States, dotted all over with red flags marking the spots where gangs are known to be.

"The reason they're there is because they were ignored when they arrived," McBride said.

But McBride, who has been battling Los Angeles gangs for 13 years and written books on the subject, doesn't believe that's the right approach.

"Gangs do not go away because they are ignored. They thrive on that. They get so embedded into that community that you can't blow them out with dynamite."

In Houston, Jim Young was doing all one man could do.

"I saw them coming," he said, "And I tried to do everything I knew to stop them."

Young says he watched kids get sucked into the gang life in three stages: first was growing disrespect for authority, from parents to teachers to police. Second was a decline in academic skills, an inability to do even simple math or grammar.

Finally, he said, the kids began to solve their problems with violence.

About five years ago in Alief and Fort Bend County, "You could see it slowly coming through," he said.

A former Houston Oiler and a coach at Wheatley High School, Young spent many years in the schools talking to students, trying to convince them that education was the key to success, and that they could make a positive contribution to society. But he says he was battling against a growing trend in television, movies and rock videos that made the gangster life and rebellion seem like the only respectable way out.

"They showed that the more of a criminal you were, the more of a real person you were. And that if you tried to get an education, you were a sucker, and you were scared of them white folk," he said.

These days, Young doesn't try talking anymore.

"I've given that up. Nobody's paying attention," he said.

Now Young believes the only answer is in enforcement: hard and fast rules, and tough consequences if those rules are broken.

Police, schools, politicians, social workers, scholars -- all have their own ideas about what to do about gangs. Some believe prevention is the key, while others say locking up the gangsters is the best solution.

Shorty says he joined a gang because it was the only thing to do. Maybe, he said, if someone had given him an alternative, he could have stayed out of trouble.

"If people really cared, they'd do a little more to keep us in line," he said. "They'd ask us, "what do you like to do?' A lot of us don't have money to do the things we want."

In the end, most experts meet in the middle, suggesting a combination approach that joins the community, schools, parents and police. The ideal approach, many agree, is one that focuses on young children to prevent them from entering gangs, and punishes those who do. 

But before a city can attack the problem, it needs to know what, and who, it's attacking. When Pelz began her research on gangs, she sent out questionnaires to law enforcement and probation offices around the state asking what they knew about gangs in their area.

"We got back 645 responses, and there were about 645 different definitions of gangs," she said.

The experts caution against being too quick to label kids as gangsters, or crime as gang-related. Police must figure out what distinguishes a bona fide gang member from a "wannabe" -- a kid that dresses like a gangster and hangs out on the fringes. And if a known gang member commits a crime, does that automatically mean it's a gang-related crime, even if he acted independently?

Sociologists, meanwhile, seek the key to why kids join gangs in the first place. The idea that gangs thrive only in poor neighborhoods among disadvantaged youths is a myth. Driving through northwest Houston, Harris County Juvenile probation officer Johnny Camp can point to a run-down neighborhood of impoverished homes where gangs flourish among the minority residents.

About a mile away, he points to another gang area, where two-story brick homes and manicured lawns line the cleanly-paved streets of a well-to-do, predominantly white neighborhood.

Some experts theorize that young teens look to gangs to find acceptance and support that they aren't getting elsewhere. They can be a loser in school or at home, but they might be a leader within their gang.

Cheryl Maxson, director of the Center for Criminal and Social Control at the University of Southern California, says simple boredom is sometimes a factor.

Capt. Mike Fleharty of the Omaha Police Department sees drugs, money and glamour drawing in a lot of kids.

As children enter their teens, their friends become a more important part of their lives. Gangs, like any other peer group, can provide a bridge between dependency on parents and the independence of adulthood, explains Dr. Richard Pesikoff, a professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine.

Gangs form their own subculture, where members operate under their own rules and create their own set of values. Behavior that society at-large condemns is considered normal, and is even encouraged, by the gang.

So Shorty's belief that a gangster can do bad things, but still be a good person, makes sense within his world, Pesikoff says.

"What the gang really does is it provides a substitute conscience. He's telling the truth: you can be a good boy at home and still go out and do all these terrible things."

Pelz has observed that most gang members have no stake in the community, and feel the world has little to offer them.

"For these kids to shoot somebody or be shot, is nothing. That's because they feel that society values them very little." 

Parents come under fire for ignoring signs that their children are involved in gangs. When Omaha first began to get its gang problem -- about the same time as Houston -- parents failed to recognize that their children were at risk.

"A lot of parents were very strongly in the denial stage about their children being involved in this activity," Fleharty said. "They knew it was going on, but they could not accept that their child was a part of it."

Gang membership can be a kind of inheritance, passed down from brother to brother, or even from parent to child.

"Somebody asked me recently, "When is a youth at risk to become a gang member?' And I said "In some families, at conception,' " said Sgt. McBride of the L.A. gang task force.

Once a youth becomes involved in a gang's criminal activity, aggressive enforcement becomes the favored weapon. Police in both Dallas and Houston recently unveiled plans for special units and tactics to crack down on gangs.

But every approach creates its own potential problems.

Heavy policing, and proposals such as dropping the age for adult prosecutions to 14, threaten to crush an already overwhelmed judicial system. Prisons and youth centers are overflowing, and alternative programs such as boot camps and house arrest are not yet proven to work.

Maxson says aggressive law enforcement can even aggravate gang problems by reinforcing youths' gang identities. When a group feels under siege, they tend to hang together tighter, and may cling to the life longer.

Special community programs can be taken over by gangs, who run off anyone who isn't one of them, police say. And officers like McBride, who have long experience with gang members, object to the idea of rewarding gangsters for bad behavior, while equally impoverished kids who stay out of trouble go without.

Lately, the trend seems to be moving more in the direction of community-oriented prevention, and Maxson believes that's a good thing. But she points out that there have been no studies yet that show either approach is particularly effective.

Once a city admits it has a gang problem, the gangs become a kind of resource, or business, says Irving Spergel, a sociologist and longtime gang scholar at the University of Chicago. Everyone thinks they have the answer, and institutions begin to compete for funding, attention and equipment.

Politicians all over the nation are jumping on crime and violence as the main issue of 1994, with Texas politicians pinpointing gang and juvenile violence as their main concern.

The Texas Legislature in recent years has debated and passed legislation aimed at making it easier for police to bring gang members to justice. Even tougher measures are on the way, legislators promise. 

While scholars go on studying, elected officials go on preaching, and the police stay busy drawing up new action plans, mothers like Joanna are left to a more private struggle.

Joanna, not her real name, moved her family across town last summer to try to get her son, Shorty, away from the gangs and the violence in their former neighborhood, where the family's apartment was the target of several drive-by shootings.

It was peaceful for a while, but soon Shorty began to run afoul of the local gang members, who easily pegged him as a gangster from another part of town.

Shorty hasn't shied from the trouble. He stays true to his old neighborhood, dressing in his old gang colors and sometimes writing his gang's name on T-shirts and on the skin of his hand.

Joanna has had to watch as her only son was sucked into the gang life. Within two years, his school grades fell from A's to F's.

But Joanna refuses to give up on her son. She sees the softer side of the young boy who wants so badly to be tough.

"At home he's sweet. He's good to me, he's lovable. He kisses me and he hugs me and he jokes around with his sisters. I'm glad of that, because he's 16 years old and he still kisses me -- he even gives me a kiss in front of his friends when he leaves."

He's too young and too restless to keep at home, so Joanna prays that he stays safe, and clings to her belief that her sweet son wouldn't be involved in anything truly bad.

"It makes him very angry if someone accuses him of doing bad things," she says, "Because he says he doesn't do bad things.

They do things for fun, and he just doesn't realize that some of those things aren't acceptable." 

Probation officer 

"These kids really want somebody who's going to stay on top of them. They want somebody who is going to give them some direction in their life. I have kids who have gotten off of probation and they will call me and tell me the negative things they're doing, and it's like they want that little lecture. I'll give them what they want, and I'll usually hear "Yeah, you're right, I'll stop doing that.'

"It's great to see when a kid has a good report card, and he'll bring in the report card for me to see. 

They want that positive reinforcement. They want all those things that we are used to getting from our parents, but that they don't get for whatever reason.

"I'm dealing with a caseload of 70 kids, and my concentration has to go to each of those 70. It's really hard to give them the time that's necessary in order to wean them away from (gangs). But if we had agencies or programs doing that, I think it could be so successful." 

HENRY GONZALES, Harris County Juvenile Probation officer, Fifth Ward, Denver Harbor, East Side. 

Counselor 

"Schools have the responsibility (to combat gangs), but communities must have responsibility, too. There comes a point in any community, large or small, that it has to accept responsibility and do something about the problem.

"We need an attitude conveyed throughout the city -- like supporting the Oilers -- that we need to unite against gangs.

"I'm optimistic. I think gangs are always going to be there, but not to the extent that they are in Los Angeles.

"The kids watch all these gang movies and they think they want to be a part of that. If you point out to them that these kids were killed in the movie because of gangs, they just say "That's because they messed up. I wouldn't mess up.' So I guess it's what you see in it. For them, it's like a lesson in how not to mess up." 

ALBERT GALLEGOS, counselor at George I. Sanchez School for at-risk teens, a private school run by the Association for the Advancement of Mexican-Americans. 

Student 

"The gangs here have taken a big toll.

A lot of our rights have been taken away. We can't go outside for lunch, we can't carry certain back packs or wear certain things. They've really torn the school up, and personally I'm scared to walk in the school alone because I'm scared of what they might do if they catch me alone.

It's not fun. I don't like school anymore. I don't even want to go to college anymore, and I had planned on being a doctor.

The teachers have changed, too. Almost all my teachers are scared of the students. So they're not as reprimanding, because they're scared that the students will do something to them.

All of a sudden gangs just took over.

Everybody's pretty much scared.

How can you do good when you're worried the whole time? You just think about all the gangs and them knowing where you live and you're scared of what might happen at night or during school or where you live and you can't concentrate.

I've talked to my parents a lot about this, and they want me to try to hang on and finish out. But it's gotten so bad I just can't take it. I've thought about quitting school, but I know my parents would be very upset. And I want something for my life ahead.

The last three years, I guess, all of my priorities have changed. Now my priority is to just get out. I don't care what my grades are, I'm just trying to pass my classes and get out." 

 A 17-year-old senior at Northbrook High School, Spring Branch Independent School District.

HOUSTON CHRONICLE 08/29/93

GIRLS IN THE `HOOD/They seek status, security through gang membership 

By MELISSA FLETCHER STOELTJE
Staff 
 

As dusk falls, most Houston teen-agers are finishing their homework or settling in for an evening of television. But for one 16-year-old girl, the night is just beginning. She twists the top off a bottle of Budweiser, lights a cigarette, pushes her mane of dark hair away from her pretty face and waits for her 18-year-old, unemployed, high-school-dropout boyfriend.

She is on probation, and getting caught drinking beer in this abandoned housing-project apartment would not endear her to the judge. But she doesn't care about that. She doesn't care about much of anything. Except fighting. She likes fighting.

"Man, s---, I don't know why," she says, brushing off a question that, for her, holds all the relevance of the bashed-in console TV resting in the corner. "I just like it. I'm good at it. And people be afraid of my a--, man. Nobody f---- with me."

The color of her T-shirt and the flannel shirt covering it identify her as belonging to one of two predominant youth gangs in her neighborhood, two groups seemingly constantly at war with each other.

Whether this makes her a bona-fide gangster is up for dispute. Police would say that since she wears colors and commits crimes, she's a girl gangster. Social workers would say she's just a wannabe, a confused kid from disadvantaged circumstances acting out her frustrations on her peers and society at large. Houston doesn't really have gangs, they will tell you. Not like Chicago and New York and Los Angeles.

Most local and national experts do, however, agree on one thing: Girls are increasingly becoming involved in gang activity that is growing more violent, more aggressive and more dangerous.

A 1991 National Institutes of Justice survey found girl gang involvement steadily increasing, with 40 of the largest U.S. cities reporting a total of 7,205 female gang members. According to the survey, a growing number of girls are forming their own gangs, independent of males. Local consensus holds, however, that most girls, like this teen, tend to affiliate themselves with members of male gangs, co-opting their colors, gang signs and criminal proclivities.

This girl and her cohorts don't talk in the vernacular of sociologists and police officers - rarely does the word "gang" crop up in their conversation. To one another, they're simply family. From one another they draw those intangibles - self-esteem, loyalty, a sense of identity - in short supply in often brutal neighborhoods.

But they offer each other something even more elemental: survival. 

You gotta have some kind of back," the 16-year-old explains in the lexicon of a street fighter.

"I just take it day to day. I'll go down for (defend) her, and she'll go down for me. If I take a bullet, I take a bullet," says the girl's best friend, evoking the weird mix of teen-age invincibility and barrio fatalism common to gang members. The best friend says that when she was little she used to dream about being an astronaut. But not anymore.

"Everything's all messed up now. I got too many enemies now. But me and my friend, we make everybody scared of us."

She is a vivacious young woman with a crucifix dangling around her hickey-covered neck and deep scars from earlier fights. Together, the two girls are the leading duo in the group of girls who associate with the boyfriend's gang. According to a former gang member, they are "ruthless, crazy" fighters who command fear and respect from their peers. "None of the girls do anything without checking with them first," she says.

The boyfriend shows up with a group of his friends, a melange of lanky Hispanic and African-American young men dressed in gang-colored T-shirts and L.A. Gear lace-up tennis shoes. They haul in a blaring boom box and more beer. One of them wears a beeper; another proudly displays a 5-inch scar on his stomach and shotgun pellets embedded in his neck, stripes earned in an undeclared urban war.

Someone passes around a book of photographs - a family album of sorts - revealing gang members in a variety of poses, flashing signs and smiling amiably, semiautomatic weapons nestled in their arms.

The girl turns coquettish upon her boyfriend's arrival, giggling, slapping him on the arm and flirting like any 16-year-old. Yet she remains all toughness and blustery bravado, her rapid-fire speech almost unintelligible except for its wealth of expletives.

The group wants to go party at a parking lot. The youths file out of the apartment, past an improbably blooming rosebush in the front yard. The girl lingers behind for a moment. Before walking out, almost under her breath, she mutters that she's in an honors English class at the high school she attends. 

Role is changing 

In the entrenched world of urban youth gangs, girls have long served as status symbols for males. Males gained status by fighting over them; females gained status by forming romantic alliances with strong males.

This all may be changing, according to a spate of research and the opinion of professionals who work in the gang milieu. The sense is that girls are moving away from their mainly ornamental function as "social partners" and into more active gang roles - committing burglaries, carrying drugs and weapons (because they can't be as easily searched by police), selling drugs, participating in drive-by shootings, and fighting with girls from other gangs, sometimes even with male members. Female gang members are known to fight with fists, knives, rocks, broken bottles and guns.

Like males, say experts, they have begun earning status through violence.

"Those girls are just as violent as the guys," says Jocelyn E. Garriga, who counsels female adolescents involved in gangs at the Chicano Family Center in the Magnolia area. "A couple of weeks ago a girl was saying something bad about this other girl's friend, so she beat her up. She got shot at during a drive-by at her house but was unhurt. Her parents didn't even report it."

"You don't hear too much about guys fighting anymore," says one former female gang member. "There are so many guns now, they just shoot each other. The fistfighting is pretty much left up to the girls."

"The girls are just like the guys," says Phillip de la Rosa, community development director for the YMCA and its Teen Court program, where law-breaking teens receive sentences from a court of their peers.

"They fight side by side with the guys; they do the initiations where they beat up new members. I don't know of any girls actually doing drive-bys, but a girl will hold a gun to your head, you bet." De la Rosa says girls now outnumber boys in Teen Court, a trend that began in early 1993. He says there are hard-core independent female gangs in Houston and rattles off a list of their names.

Still, most will agree that girls continue to gain entree into the gang world through boyfriends.

"It's a sex thing, a dating thing," says a former girl gang member. "And it's easier to get things done, to gain power, with guys backing you up. Without guys, you can't throw around the phrase, `I'm going to tell so-and-so.' "

According to those who work with gangs, girls frequently play a pivotal role in the violence that occurs between male gangs, purposefully stirring up jealousies and other slights for which the males must retaliate to protect their reputations.

"It's a way for them (girls) to get attention, to say, `Look at all this fighting over me,' " says Sandra Pudifin, one of seven Houston Police Department officers in the city's Youth Gang Task Force charged with investigating and monitoring gang members.

"We have murder cases growing out of a guy walking with a certain girl."

Indeed, it is impossible to separate the phenomenon of female gangs from male gangs; the two are intertwined. Yet, historically, male gangs have received the lion's share of research money and community programs, a gender bias spawned by the perception that male gang members are far more numerous and destructive.

But this perception, too, may be changing. Since the '70s, academic interest in female delinquency has grown; in 1990, a host of federally funded research projects were established in gang hot spots around the nation to specifically address girl-gang involvement. Does this interest come from an actual growth in female gang-related crime? No one knows for sure.

Two problems sabotage any attempt to grasp the real scope of girls involved in gangs, in the Houston area and elsewhere - slippery numbers and even more slippery semantics. According to former Youth Gang Task Force coordinator Capt. Jerry DeFoor, the city's current database reflects 2,000 confirmed gang members, approximately 100 of whom are girls. This is unquestionably an underestimate, he says.

"We've got some names, but we don't have them all. But those are hard numbers; we don't just see a kid standing on a corner, find out his nickname and put him down as a gang member. Unless a gang of kids is involved in real criminal activity or malicious mischief, we don't keep track of them, even if they are a little bit threatening by the fact that they exist and all dress
the same."

But some would question the criteria used in the police definition. A 14-year-old who breaks into houses shouldn't be lumped into the same category as murderous thugs from highly organized, drug-dealing street gangs that got their start in prison, critics say.

"We don't have organized gangs in Houston; we don't have organized s--- here in Houston," says Ronnie Howell, coordinator of Outreach, a program that addresses HIV infection among the homeless.

"We can't even get organized to get jobs or to get drugs out of our community or to get the school system right. What you're saying is, we've got these youngsters coming out of the same situations who have enough sense to get organized into a gang? "It's absolutely absurd."

Semantics aside, most agree that, while male and female gangs are not limited to any one racial or socio-economic group, they proliferate in low-income, minority neighborhoods. The seeds of gang activity - for both males and females - are planted in elementary school and flourish in middle school. Gang activity is chiefly a junior-high-school phenomenon, the roots taking hold sometime around fifth or sixth grade. It is a combustible mixture: family dysfunction, poverty, puberty, peer pressure.

Female gang members who actually make it to high school may outgrow gangs. Gang activity is about cohesion, identity and attention, says officer Pudifin; those committing crimes at older ages would just as soon avoid the limelight. But for many girl gangsters, the late teen years bring a treadmill existence marked by public assistance, a criminal record and illiteracy. While it
seems incontrovertible that male gang members are more likely to die or be sent to prison than female ones, Pudifin and others believe girl gang members in some ways suffer more in the long run than their male peers.

"These gangs are very sexually oriented," she says. "These girls are having sex at 13, 14 years old, getting passed around to all the different guys in the gang. Then they're getting pregnant and getting saddled with all these children. 

"We had one girl who was 16 with four children. So while the guys get older and maybe decide to go on with something else, the girls drop out of school. They can't afford a sitter, and their parents won't take care of their mistakes. So that's it for them." 

Future tough to envision 

What are you scared of?

Nothin'. Wait - losing a good friend when they die.

What are you good at?

Fightin'.

Why do you fight?

`Cause it's fun.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

Naw, man, I ain't got no idea 'bout that s---.

- female gang member, 16. 

The young girl has creamy, flawless skin. Wipe off the heavy makeup and she could play the role of the Virgin Mary in the church Christmas pageant. And so when the words come out of her mouth, it's a disquieting sensation, like watching a movie with the wrong soundtrack.

"I'm real good with butterfly knives; I don't have a gun, but I know where I can get one. The only time I would shoot somebody is if they were messing with my family. Yes, I like to fight. This guy grabbed me once and I got him in a headlock and just started beating him. I had handfuls of blood on my shirt, blood all over my rings. But I did what I had to do."

She explains that she was sexually molested by an uncle when she was 6, so she's had to learn to protect herself. She is one of the hybrid girls you'll find hanging out in gangs: She makes good grades in school, but she feels an allegiance to the people in her neighborhood, so she wears the colors.

The same dynamics bring girls and boys alike into gang membership. One worker in a gang-prevention program summed it up as "a chronic lack of attention." But it is a rich soil indeed that breeds youngsters who go ballistic on society once they enter the middle-school years - poverty, isolation, alienation, child abuse, domestic violence, parents mired in alcohol and substance-abuse problems.

"All the kids we work with have been abused in some way - emotionally, physically or sexually," says Janet Stansbury, director of Goose Creek Independent School District's Gang Activity Prevention (GAP) program in Baytown, a pilot project based on early intervention and the use of reformed gang members as positive role models.

Social workers are quick to point out that many parents of gang members love their kids but cannot provide adequate supervision and attention. Many are single parents - usually mothers - who must work several jobs to keep things afloat. The youngsters, then, are left to their own devices. And in impoverished, gone-to-seed neighborhoods, often there is not much to do besides hang out in the park. Besides financial need, the main reason given by gang members for why they commit crimes is boredom.

Stansbury says that kids who join gangs do not find acceptance anywhere - not at home, not at school, not with the more competent, mainstream youngsters. The normal process of growing away from the family then takes on an exaggerated importance: Friends become family. Couple this with the irresistible adolescent desire to form bonds and fit in, and you have the workings of a gang.

While experts say gangs really have more to do with a specific developmental stage than with gender, it's possible that the pull to join may be even stronger for girls. A report by the American Association of University Women found many girls between the ages of 9 and 15 experience a crisis in confidence; the extenuating circumstances of poverty and family problems only serve to heighten this stress. One study on heroin-using Chicanos in Los Angeles found that girls from cholo (dysfunctional or
streetwise) families were more likely to enter gangs and use drugs.

While gangs are not limited to any one racial group, few would argue that gangs have strong historical roots in the Hispanic community. Some contend that growing gang membership among Hispanic females may be a reaction to the passivity inherent in marianismo, a cultural tradition that idealizes and cloisters women. Girls may grow up to rebel against this oversheltering, in
essence a culturally sanctioned stripping of personal power. Some lay blame for an increase in female gang activity on the women's movement - an idea debunked by still others.

"While it may be easier for young women to involve themselves in this type of thing because women today are encouraged to think for themselves and not always be an appendage of the male, I don't think the women's movement is causing this," says Beth Pelz , coordinator of the downtown University of Houston's criminal justice program who is conducting a mammoth study on gangs in Texas. "It may be the reason women are channeling their delinquency a particular way, but it's not causing it."

Some simply point to an escalation of violence on American streets.

"We're living in a country where people would just as soon shoot you as tell you to f--- off," says David Dawley, chairman of the National Center for Gang Policy. "We're all influenced by the values and behavior around us, and there's no reason why women would be any less influenced than men." 

Changing her lifestyle 

The two young female gang members walk across a sodden field toward a parking lot of a boarded-up school as male gang members ride bikes, swill beer and loiter on a basketball court that has no hoops.

A former gang member, her nickname tattooed across her neck, watches as the two girls approach. The woman could serve as an archetype for what happens to girls when they get involved in gangs. At 23 she has three children, two of whom have never seen their father. He's a gang member doing time in prison for kidnapping, robbery, assault and grand theft-auto. She herself was recently released from the county jail after doing a year for credit-card fraud, a crime she says she didn't commit. She is on parole and nervous about being out here in the open with a bunch of drinking minors. But she has sworn off gang life for good, she says, and wants to talk about why.

As the sky darkens and her 3 -year-old son crawls over a beat-up old sedan, eating M&Ms and drinking a Slice, the woman conducts an amazing litany that goes something like this:

"They're stupid, man, those two. These young chicks, they're troublemakers. I was in (gang name) but I'm out of it now. Man, I cooled it. I'm tired of it. I've got two kids who haven't even seen their dad, one who barely remembers him. I ain't going to spend my life sitting in jail for this kind of s---, man, no, f------ no way, it's not worth it. I'm tired of putting my kids in the line of fire. These chicks are headin' straight for it, man. They're headed for trouble and they're gonna get it, too. Me, man, I'm a three-time loser. I'm turning my shoulder on all of it. I've lost too many friends to death and to prison. Too many friends."

But this tale of penitence slips too easily into an account of the good old days, when she and fellow girl gangsters would lure well-off white girls into friendships so male gang members could burglarize their houses when they were away, or when they would pimp for male members by arranging oral sex with nongang girls.

The two younger girls arrive, and the woman falls silent. The two tease each other, posturing and slapping hands. Occasionally a car will drive by and for an instant all eyes in the group lift to peer into its interior. It has become an ingrained, automatic response, it seems: checking for the colors of those riding inside. When a staccato fireburst goes off behind the school - a gun
maybe, or perhaps a firecracker - no one even flinches.

The kids spy a police car a full two blocks away. Beer bottles are hurled, smashing, against the wall and a handful of male gang members skitter away like so many fall leaves. The moment the police officer emerges from his car, the dark-haired girl starts in with the tart mouth that will undoubtedly cause her great woe one day.

Where are those fellows running to, he asks?

"They're just getting some good exercise," she says. Then: "Hey officer, you want to pose for a picture with me?"

He leaves after being assured that, for tonight at least, there will be no gang fight. 

Girls are short-changed 

A plethora of agencies, churches and community centers in Houston have developed programs aimed at keeping kids out of gangs. Most, however, operate on shoestring budgets; none appears to have programs specifically targeting adolescent female gang members.

The San Jacinto Girl Scout Council - itself a wholesome gang - has developed a number of innovative programs to reach out to disadvantaged inner-city girls with some success, but coordinators struggle with a dearth of parent volunteers. Many who work with gangs bemoan the lack of attention paid to girls.

"We have basketball and other sports for the guys, but what do we have for the girls?" asks Garriga of the Chicano Family Center. "I've gone out and tried to get aerobics teachers and other volunteers, but I can't get any of them to come here."

"We must start paying attention and putting money into separate programs for girls," says Maria T. Candamil of the Family and Youth Services Bureau in Washington.

"You look at most programs, and 70 to 80 percent of the focus is on the boys; the rest is on the girls, like an afterthought. If we're going to ultimately stop gang activity, we must look at who is going to be raising the future generations of kids, and it's going to be the girls."

Like many large urban areas, Houston is increasingly becoming home to multigenerational gang households, where children are raised in a gang environment by parents who are or were themselves gang members. Studies show many gang members follow
older siblings into gang life. Almost all the girls interviewed for this story had elder siblings involved in gangs.

The answer for either sex, most agree, is not jails; prisons have a greenhouse effect on gang behavior, helping it to grow and thrive. The answer is early intervention, getting to kids at the preschool level, teaching their parents good parenting skills. To wait until junior high or even the later elementary school years is too late.

"The people you see shooting people in high school - most of what happened to them happened before the third grade," says Steve Green, program coordinator for Baytown's Gang Activity Prevention program.

"Until we start dealing with these kids as something other than criminals, nothing's going to change," says Stansbury. 

Calling it a night

The two girls decide to call it an early night. There's no fight, and the beer is gone. Walking back to the car, the dark-haired one smokes another cigarette. One senses that, handed a different life script, she might have become a debating team captain or maybe a student-body president. Before getting in the car, she remarks casually that during the daytime she works with
children.

"Yeah, man, I like kids," she says.

Gangs and U.S. Criminal Justice 
 
April 1996

* Task force sessions Monday and Tuesday are closed. Media interviews will only be conducted on Sunday, April 28. 

Hundreds of law enforcement officials from across the nation will meet April 29-May 1 in Houston for the second annual training conference of the National Major Gang Task Force, an intelligence group created to share gang-related information across jurisdictional lines and to control prison-gang recruitment and membership. 

The National Major Gang Task Force, also known as NMGTF, began in 1993 following a workshop on prison gangs at the University of Houston-Downtown. Its first national conference was conducted in August 1995 in Hartford, Conn., and was attended by 400 police, prosecutors and other law enforcement officials. 

The second national conference in Houston is co-sponsored by UH-Downtown's criminal justice department and the City of Houston. Task force training conference topics include African-American, Asian and Hispanic gangs, as well as white supremacist groups. Current intelligence on street and prison gang activities will also be shared. 

Conference sessions are restricted to criminal justice participants. Sunday's noon press conference has been scheduled to provide media access to the task force's board of directors and other experts. 

Press conference panelists will address national and regional trends in gang recruitment, membership and activity. Panelists will include: UH-Downtown Professor Beth Pelz, a task force organizer and co-founder; Houston Mayor's Anti-Gang Office Director Kimbra Ogg; and Task Force Executive Director and co-founder A. Dale Welling. 

The  Paper of South Texas
August 30, 2006

 Killing Fields

By David Robledo

With two former students on death row and another awaiting trial for massacre, PSJA school officials offer $93,000 anger management contract to mayor’s son.
 
Two former students from PSJA are on death row and another awaits trial for murders committed in 2003. The story of the Monte Cristo Road massacre has been told many times: a group of Tri-City Bombers gang members (from the Pharr-San Juan-Alamo tri-cities) raided a rival gang’s Edinburg nest looking to steal  marijuana. When the drugs weren’t found, the gang opened fire with high-powered weapons, killing six.
    Thirteen men from throughout the Rio Grande Valley were blamed. All but one were established members of the TCB gang (or Las Bombitas), a violent organization that started off as an innocent PSJA break-dancing crew in the ’80s.
   Now, instead of parachute pants and wrist-worn bandanas, the TCB proliferates drug hustling and gun smuggling — part of an increasing gang presence throughout this border zone.
   The two PSJA death-row inmates – Rodolfo “Kreeper” Medrano and Robert “Bones” Garza — were also accused in a 2002 massacre in Donna that left four women dead.

MORE TO THE STORY
The PSJA students involved in the Monte Cristo crime seem a distant memory amid the surge of violent outbursts that district students have since been involved with. In 2004, Jason C. Gonzalez, at the time a 16-year-old who attended PSJA North High School, stabbed and killed classmate Lianna Olmeda. And throughout last year, school district and city police quelled several fights, one that verged on a riot and involved at least 20 students.
   Police and administrators at the time said that there was no serious threat, that the largest of the conflicts was simply a food fight that got out of hand. But not everyone in this community accepts that explanation.
    Grupo PODER — a watchdog organization that keeps tabs on the PSJA ISD — says that there’s a serious problem that’s been growing in this community for more than a decade. While the school district’s state educational ratings have been consistently dropping, high-profile youth violence has been on the rise. There may be a connection here between the district’s low scores and youth violence, but it’s one that PODER (Por Otros Decidimos Escuchar y Responder) says administrators and school leaders ignore while they continue to mismanage public funds.
  
PARANOID FOR A REASON
The words nepotism and corruption roll off Sofia Valdez’s lips like conjunctions when she talks about the PSJA ISD. Valdez is a professor at The University of Texas-Pan American in Edinburg and one of the most active members of Grupo PODER.
   Valdez, 5’4” with the no-nonsense look of someone tired of excuses, said that people used to think that she and other PODER members were paranoid and that their criticism of the district was unjustified — until the FBI arrested former school board member Guadalupe Jaime Santa Maria and a PSJA contractor in July 2005 on conspiracy and bribery charges.
   The arrest instantly gave PODER credibility, and for a while at least seemed to stop the district’s nepotistic ways, Valdez said.
    “It was amazing that for a time the board actually seemed to be discussing improving education,” she said.
    “But it didn’t last long”.
  
WATCHING AND LISTENING
Just before Santa Maria was arrested, Superintendent Arturo Guajardo was connected to a maintenance contract that earned tens-of-thousands a year for a business he may have co-owned. Guajardo dismissed the claims that he was earning money off the deal, asserting that his brother owned the business and that he merely owned its building. But with a federal eye on district finances and a board member who’d been thrown in the slammer, Guajardo agreed to offer his resignation.
   In May this year, Guajardo formally announced that he would be abandoning his post — a move that PODER and other critics say was long overdue.
    “With the growing gang problem, plummeting school ratings and a federal investigation into the district, what more could possibly happen under one man’s leadership,” Valdez said.
    Instead of quickly hiring someone who could lead PSJA out of the mire of broken public confidence and poor educational performance, the school board, however, decided to continue employing Guajardo at his $176,000 a year salary, apparently allowing him to simultaneously cash in on his state retirement money.
    So instead of demanding Guajardo’s exit, the board instead rewarded him with a total salary (retirement included) that could edge somewhere near $300,000 a year, plus benefits.

NAME YOUR PRICE
The stealth re-hiring of Guajardo might be a hard-enough circumstance to accept in an apparently failing district. But PODER says that the school board has regained confidence since no new indictments followed Santa Maria’s arrest. As a result, PODER says, school board members are reverting to their old ways of cronyism. As if to give PODER a perfect example, the school board voted to award a $93,000 “anger management” counseling contract to the Hector Palacios, the son of Pharr’s mayor Polo Palacios — yet another Palacios family member at the top of the school district’s food chain, joining Assistant Superintendent Berta Palacios and Director of Nutritional Services Imelda Palacios whose combined salaries are estimated at $160,000.
  
YANK THE PHONE FROM THE WALL
Board members, superintendent Guajardo and Hector Palacios seemed intent to avoid speaking with The Paper of South Texas. Unlike most school districts, which usually consider it a responsibility to allow the community multiple avenues to communicate with the board and administrators, the PSJA ISD appears to value the exact opposite. The Paper started by calling the district to ask for phone numbers to district officials. The school board secretary, however, told us that the district does not release that information. Then we asked for any district email addresses where we might be able to track down board members, but that information is equally guarded, the secretary told us. Then The Paper faxed questions concerning the Palacios contract to board members and the superintendent, but still we received no response. The Paper took to the phone, rounding up a few school board members’ home numbers. Though we left messages when we could, and provided both phone numbers and email addresses where The Paper could be reached, we received no response before our stated Sunday deadline.
   The Paper did manage to speak with a family member of Hector Palacios, who offered that “his father” only recently started working with at-risk youth.
     The Paper hoped to ask the superintendent and board members if they made any effort to seek the best possible person, organization or company to handle the anger management counseling contract, in accordance with state law that governs contracts for professional services. State Government Code Chapter 2254 requires “the giving of notice to all potential consultants of the need for and opportunity to provide consulting services.”
   A review of PSJA’s recent school board meeting agendas revealed that the district had not given any potential consultants notice of the contract. The district claimed during the vote that they were hiring Palacios according to a professional services code that allows school districts to hire whom they chose without a search. But that code also is clear that it allows school districts to evade the bidding process in order to contract the best possible personnel, not simply whomever a district might feel like employing.
   One professional consultant who actually specializes in gang problems, Terry Pelz from the statewide CJconsultant.com, said that his consulting group was not notified of PSJA’s potential contract, even though his  group has performed some of the hard prison investigations that unraveled the history and power structure of Pharr’s Tri-City Bombers.
  It may be true that Hector Palacios is a licensed social worker, but Pelz said that offering anger management courses in a community saturated with gang activity is a joke.
   “It’s an unfortunate mistake to assume that these youth simply don’t know how to control their anger,” Pelz said in an interview with The Paper.
   “Gang members commit crimes out of loyalty to groups, not out of anger,” Pelz said.
    In the communities that comprise the PSJA school district, which have seen gang activity take strong root, the problems are complex. Some parents themselves are gang members, and the community may be dissatisfied with the schools. To lessen gang problems, school leaders have to go to the source — to the heart of the community — and try to gain acceptance. Without community support and outcry from community residents who want change, there’s no hope for school programs that try to eradicate gang violence, Pelz said.

TARDY TO CLASS
Besides the planned anger management courses for at-risk students, PSJA has also approved a $400,000 surveillance system to keep tabs on student activities.
   But with a former board member and contractor arrested by the feds, and district contracts and jobs being handed out like secret invitations to exclusive parties, that $400,000 surveillance system would probably be better used to keep tabs on administrators and board members themselves. PSJA officials might feel shielded by their system of murky government, but they should make no mistake that the consequences involved in this educational fun-house are high. Two former gang-member students are soon to be put to death. That should be enough of a reason to take the district’s problems seriously and seek the most competent administrators and consultants available to bring immediate change.
   The bell has been ringing for years. But it doesn’t look like PSJA’s administrators or board members have shown up for class.