Violent Latino gangs come ever closer


Latino gang graffiti across William Street from Henderson Middle School.
Latino gang markings cover a wall across William Street from Henderson Middle School.

Henderson has avoided the onslaught of the Latino gangs that have taken hold across the nation since the 1980s, but the handwriting — or the spray paint — is on the walls and signs around town.

For Hendersonians, that was the main message of a three-hour training session on those gangs Wednesday morning in the second-floor community room at the Aycock Recreation Complex.

Nearly 150 law officers, educators, youth advocates, ministers and others from Vance, Granville, Warren and Franklin counties gathered to hear the insights of two officers from the Durham gang investigation unit, Sgt. Howard Alexander (a weekend away from a promotion to lieutenant) and Cpl. V.B. Pearsall.

It was the third in an occasional series of gang sessions sponsored by the Juvenile Crime Prevention Councils of the 9th Judicial District.

In a little more than a decade, North Carolina’s Hispanic population has grown 600 percent. Most of them are hardworking, Alexander said, but the impoverished areas where many immigrants from Latin America live are fertile recruiting grounds for gangs.

Alexander said Durham gangs can be highly selective because they have so many applicants.

As dynamic as Alexander and Pearsall can be in their presentation, the people who descended on Aycock didn’t need to be told that Latino gangs pose a serious, long-term, growing threat in North Carolina. It was the perception of that threat that brought out Henderson and Oxford police, Vance and Franklin sheriff’s deputies, state park rangers, and a Department of Correction officer; the principals of Northern Vance, Southern Vance and Western Vance high schools, among other school administrators; such Vance County Coalition Against Violence members as Marolyn Rasheed, Margaret Ellis and Cornell Manning; and even a group of seven young men from the four-county VWGF Day Reporting Center.

The mix of blue, gray, green, white and brown uniforms on officers who cooperate across jurisdictional lines provided a natural counterpoint to Alexander’s discussion of the splintered world of Latino gangs. Each gang has its own clothing colors ( the Latin Kings, for example, like Pittsburgh Steelers clothing because the Latin Kings, like the Steelers, wear black and gold), its own symbols and signals, its own bitter enemies (the MS-13 and 18th Street gangs kill each other on sight), and its own graffiti to mark territory.

A slide show prepared by Henderson police Officer Angela Feingold showed examples of gang graffiti around Henderson, from David Street in the north to Orville Street in the south. The slide show included Northern Vance, Southern Vance and Henderson Middle School, plus a “Dead End” sign on Shank Street and a Flint Hill hit list of law enforcement officers.

What’s not clear from those photos is whether members of the real gangs are here, or whether Henderson has copycats only.

Police Chief Glen Allen said the mistakes in some of the graffiti — creating the wrong number of points in a crown, for example — expose many of the taggers as phonies or wannabes, but that doesn’t mean Henderson is free of gang activity.

Allen said the Henderson police have developed organization charts for four or five locally based drug gangs, most of which lack names. One the chief did name is called E40.

As with the national gangs Alexander discussed, the organizing principle of the Henderson gangs is to make money, Allen said. They do that by dealing drugs, mostly crack cocaine.

“The gang activity here is nowhere near as bad as Durham,” the chief said.

But that’s small comfort if you’re a victim of violence or intimidation from gang members. When Allen said, “It’s all drugs,” referring to the local gangs, Team Vance leader Rasheed shouted from her seat: “And murder! And murder!”

Rasheed’s son was killed at his home last year in a case that remains unsolved.

Allen acknowledged after the seminar that the drug gangs do not limit themselves to violations of the state’s Controlled Substances Act. They follow the lead of the national gangs in their willingness to use violence.

But Alexander said there are no drug sales unless there’s a demand. “We have to look at ourselves as the problem.”

Led by the rise of Mara Salvatruchas, or MS-13, a gang that grew out of refugees from El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s, Latino gangs crashed into cities along the East Coast that some experts had considered gang-proof, such as Baltimore, Washington and Richmond, Alexander said.

He said the experience along the East Coast is further proof that regardless of national affiliations, “gangs bang differently from place to place.”

The gangs are particularly powerful in prisons, he said, because all prisoners need a network of friends to survive. The Durham officer said the leadership of the Latino gangs forces intense discipline when they are in prison.

Now MS-13 is suspected of developing ties to al-Qaida.

“It’s not going away,” Alexander said of the gang problem. He said the Bloods are the dominant gang in North Carolina now, but that dominance will crack under the pressure of the Latino gangs.

Still, after the Durham officers’ presentation, a panel discussed ways to slow, if not stop, the spread of Hispanic gangs. The panel consisted of Allen, Judge Daniel Finch, Buddy Howell of the National Youth Gang Center in Florida, Susan Whitten of the state Department of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention in Raleigh, and Ron Gregory, an assistant superintendent for Vance County Schools.

Howell, Whitten and Gregory agreed that a major part of deterring gangs is creating a better place for young people to live. That means better economic and family conditions and outreach from the community and the schools to make young Hispanics feel like they belong.

“Everybody wants to be somebody,” said Gregory, who noted that 7 percent of the Vance school population is Hispanic. He said the lack of announcements in Spanish about Wednesday’s gang seminar reflected a general failure on the part of the community to reach out to Hispanics.

City Manager Eric Williams, who moderated the panel discussion with written questions from the audience, urged everyone not to give up hope.

As for graffiti, Allen said the markings come in two types: gang-related symbols meant to mark territory, and taggers’ efforts at artistry. Either kind could be a harbinger.

“There is no more country,” Alexander said. “There is no more safe haven.”