Chapter 3
The angst over national security vulnerabilities as a result of lax immigration policies and enforcement that surrounded the 9/11 terrorist attacks, on top of reported noncooperation and “stovepiping” of intelligence between various agencies in the United States, led to the formation in 2002 of the Department of Homeland Security. The massive new federal conglomerate was patched together with eighty-seven federal agencies, including Customs and Border Protection (CBP), US Coast Guard, Secret Service, FEMA, and the new TSA.
As part of the huge overhaul of federal agencies and resources, the US Customs Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) were combined into one agency as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Included within ICE were the investigative and intelligence resources of the customs service and the criminal investigation resources of the INS and the US Federal Protective Service. The functions and jurisdictions of several border and revenue enforcement agencies were also consolidated into ICE. With over seventeen thousand employees, ICE became the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security, and the second largest contributor to the United States’ joint terrorism task force, after the FBI.
With the overhaul of his agency, Santini, who had been slogging through the mud in the Border Patrol, pursuing illegal immigrants crossing the southern border, was tapped to serve as a criminal investigator, or special agent, in the San Francisco office of the newly formed ICE Office of Investigations. Under the Homeland Security Act, the new office was empowered with broad legal authority to investigate and combat a range of national security threats—over four hundred federal laws and statutes including those addressing violent gangs, human trafficking, narcotics, weapons, and other types of smuggling, including weapons of mass destruction, as well as financial crimes, terrorism, cybercrimes, and import-export enforcement issues.
The marriage of once separate federal law enforcement agencies, predictably, did not always go smoothly. Interagency rivalries and resentments sometimes bubbled to the surface as agents from INS and the customs service, for example, were forced to work and train side by side following the merger. For decades, these agents had shared interagency rivalries and viewed one another with disdain. After 9/11, literally overnight, longtime veteran customs agents were told to show up for work at INS offices, pointed to an empty desk, and told their new badges would be ready in a few weeks. Indignation and resentment among the ranks was palpable.
And then there was the FBI, which for decades had been the preeminent federal police agency, the subject of innumerable popular movies, books and TV shows. The “G-men” had been the ones with all the juice, seemingly forever, since the early days of J. Edgar Hoover’s reign. Now, all of a sudden, there was a new kid on the block, ICE, with new combined powers of investigation and leverage in criminal cases involving citizens as well as anyone in the country who wasn’t a citizen. There were more than ten million such people in the United States, counting just those from south of the border, who were in the country without legitimate papers and subject to ICE’s “big hammer”—the threat of deportation, with the added authority to hold someone in custody indefinitely for alleged immigration violations. It was a power that even the FBI did not yet possess.
Quietly, without a lot of public awareness of what had happened, a new “super agency,” had been created in the form of ICE, along with its Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) branch, Santini’s employer. The HSI’s new investigative powers weren’t even completely understood in house, at first. It would take a real-life case, like the one Santini would pursue against the MS-13 gang in the Mission District—under the supervision of the US Attorney’s Office—to realize just how potent these new legal powers could be when put into practice.
Despite Santini’s recent takedown of the Miceros’ counterfeit ID distribution network in the Mission District, the neighborhood’s streets were edgy as ever. Blanketing the sides of buildings and alley walls, amid examples of fine Latino folk murals, crude gang graffiti marked the turf of MS-13’s 20th Street clique on one side and their sworn enemies on the other—the Norteños. The two gangs’ territories were demarcated by 23rd Street running east and west, and Van Ness Avenue running north and south.
Santini walked west along 19th, then took a right at Linda Street, heading into Mission Playground. Ahead, he spied several 20th Street members, who were posting up at their usual spot. With an approximate head count of one hundred in San Francisco, the street gang was considered by SFPD as among the most dangerous network of criminals in the city, prone to vicious acts of violence, from rape to homicide.
He exited Mission Playground and took a left on 20th Street. A block ahead, loitering outside the Ritmo Latino record store, three more MS-13 gang homies stood scrutinizing the sidewalk traffic passing by. The agent was sure he had seen at least one of them recently, a beefy, shaved-headed payaso with plenty of arm and neck tattoos. He wore an oversized pair of Dickie’s work pants, partly hanging down his butt. The MS-13 thug was smiling at something one of his gang “homies” just told him and watching the backside of a sweet young chica caliente as she strolled past, pushing a baby stroller.
Santini wondered where he had seen the gangbanger before—and his brain made the connection. It was in the Skylark, a neighborhood bar just a few blocks away where Santini sometimes drank on weekend nights. Just as the thug’s focus was wandering from the young woman’s ass and turning toward Santini, the agent averted his face, pretending to look at something across the street. He kept his back to the MS-13 homies and walked away down Mission Street.
Living in the same neighborhood where he was beginning to target the gang was getting too dicey. He needed to find a new pad, in a different section of the Bay Area. Beyond that, he was going to need help getting his investigation off the ground, and it needed to come from the local cops. They were the ones who encountered the gang members on a regular basis, knew their faces and street names, and had access to their criminal records.
Despite the local politics, Santini was determined to enlist the cooperation of at least a couple SFPD officers. As with the recent Card Shark investigation of the Miceros, he understood that the eyes and ears of cops who spent the majority of their workday on the streets making contact with thugs was a critical component to a successful federal investigation. Santini could roam around the Mission everyday watching MS-13, but he needed gang cops to make real progress.
One local gang cop whom Santini had already encountered during the Miceros investigation, Ricardo Cabrera, was the perfect candidate to recruit for his new project, he thought. Cabrera, originally from El Salvador, was probably the most knowledgeable police officer about MS-13 in San Francisco.
During his operation to bust the Miceros, Santini discovered that Cabrera, in an undercover capacity, was renting a fleabag hotel room with a view of Mission Street for conducting surveillance. It was an effective way to get photo and video surveillance of gang activity on the streets, and in a comfortable setting to boot. Santini badgered Cabrera relentlessly to gain access to the room for his own investigation, because it offered a perfect view of the Miceros selling IDs to patrons walking the street. Santini wanted to observe them from the hidden vantage to analyze the tricks they used to avoid police patrols, as well as gather video evidence of hand-to-hand dealing of counterfeit IDs to buyers.
Time and again, Cabrera refused to share access to the hotel room without providing a precise explanation why. Santini pressed and pressed and finally, exasperated, Cabrera just gave him the hotel key, but completely stopped using the room himself. Without saying it outright, Cabrera made it clear he did not want to be perceived within SFPD as cooperating even in the slightest with an HSI agent in violation of the city’s sanctuary policy.
It was six p.m. now, and all around the Mission, residents were straggling back home from work. Behind the wheel of an unmarked gray Chrysler parked at a curb, Cabrera sat watching and waiting.
A husky man with a large head, flat nose, dark eyes, and light brown complexion, Cabrera was staking out the residence of a known Norteño gang member. The thug was wanted for recently kidnapping and raping his ex-girlfriend, who was also the mother of his child. The suspect was living with a new girlfriend and her mother in the home Cabrera was staking out, anticipating the gangbanger could show up any minute from his day job as a construction laborer.
The 20th Street homies considered Cabrera a traitor. They hated him for being a gang cop, originally born and raised in El Salvador, as they were. He knew all about their culture, what it was like to arrive in the United States as a Central American transplant who didn’t speak the local tongue or fully understand American customs. He had been making life in the Mission more difficult for the 20th Street thugs for years, always nosing around the parks and alleyways, hassling them. Every time they turned around, there was Cabrera, scolding them about how they were messing up their lives and disgracing their families and native country. To the gangsters, Cabrera did not seem to know to leave the homies well enough alone to take care of their illicit business on the streets.
Which is why they wanted him dead.
Through the car’s windshield, Cabrera spotted Santini approaching on foot. The SFPD cop was expecting him. After weeks of Santini’s persistent requests for a meet-up to discuss the current situation with MS-13 in the Mission, Cabrera had finally agreed—but only after Santini contacted his lieutenant, who in turn gave Cabrera the okay for the meeting. The HSI agent simply refused to go away.
The two men nodded to each other through the windshield and Cabrera flipped the car’s automatic door lock open. Santini slid into the backseat and immediately began to pump Cabrera with questions about the 20th Street clique.
“Almost every day the crew is stabbing or shooting or robbing somebody,” Cabrera said. He described how living conditions for Mission District residents were destabilized by 20th Street, who Cabrera said were at least as violent as the most ruthless African American gangs based in the city’s Hunters Point neighborhood. “I know of a dozen or more recent cases of serious violence in the Mission alone—many homicides—that 20th Street was probably behind,” he said.
From memory, he rattled off an impressively long litany of details about recent stabbings, clubbings, and shootings in the Mission that he suspected 20th Street had committed. Cabrera indicated the gang was well established, with over ten years of presence on the streets.
“Man, that’s a hell of a lot of dirt to keep track of,” Santini said, trying to scratch notes on a small pad. “How do you remember all that?”
Cabrera shrugged.
He reached for a small piece of paper tucked into a dashboard slot and handed it back to Santini. It was a funeral card with a photo of the deceased—a thirteen-year-old boy named Brian Martinez. At the bottom was a plea for information about who had committed the murder.
“His father is posting these all over the neighborhood,” Cabrera said. “The kid was just walking down the sidewalk and somebody drove by and put a bullet in him. He wasn’t even involved with a gang.”
The photo showed a smiling, sweet-faced kid, still full of boyish optimism. Snuffed out forever now by a senseless, random murder. Cabrera explained that he had interviewed the family after the murder and was hard-pressed to obtain information about the perpetrators. Likely another murder orchestrated by MS-13.
“You know the FBI is already targeting these guys, right?” Cabrera said, as Santini got ready to hop out of the car and leave him to continue the solitary stakeout. “They’ve already got a task force assigned to MS-13 in the city.”
Cabrera could tell from Santini’s obvious double-take that the FBI’s investigation was news to him. “No,” he said. “I didn’t know about the Bureau.”
What Santini did know was that the FBI and US Attorney’s Office in San Francisco had recently burned through an estimated $60 million on a RICO case targeting two African American gangs in the city, including the Big Block crew.
Working in conjunction with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, along with SFPD, the FBI had publicly trumpeted the investigation as a major victory for law enforcement. The reality was the case fizzled badly when it went to trial. Only a couple individuals received minimal jail time, while some extremely violent gang members who cooperated with the investigation as informants were already back on the streets, free and clear, thanks to their generous plea bargains.
“Well, Ricardo,” Santini said, “I really appreciate the meet and I hope you and I and the GTF [Gang Task Force] can work together to tackle this MS-13 plague. If you can stop hiding from me, that is!” Santini laughed.
“Seriously,” he added, “I know about your restrictions with policy, but I can assure you that this is going to be strictly a federal criminal investigation, not an immigration caper.”
Cabrera smiled. “With the lieutenant’s blessing, the GTF will be full speed ahead with you,” he said.
“Absolutely,” Santini said over his shoulder, as he climbed out of the unmarked car. “Thanks again for all the 411.”
In his rear-view mirror, Cabrera watched Santini walk away. There goes another federal crusader, he thought. These guys come and go, always looking to make a big name for themselves, move up the chain, and on to their next big post somewhere else in the country. Meanwhile, SFPD answered the 911 calls, interviewed the victims’ families, watched the next crop of neighborhood kids recruited into gang life, ruined.
Nothing ever seemed to change. But Cabrera sensed Santini might be different.
In an SFPD conference room full of city, state, and federal police officers, Santini tried his best to conceal his impatience as the Mission Station captain stood in front, reciting San Francisco’s City of Refuge ordinance word for word, straight off the page: “Executive directive zero-seven-dash-one states that no department, agency, commission, officer or employee of the City and County of San Francisco shall use any city funds or resources to assist in the enforcement of federal immigration law or to gather or disseminate information regarding the immigration status of individuals in the City and County of San Francisco. . . .”
Because of his successful takedown of the Miceros, Santini had already made a splash as an investigator in the city. Most of the San Francisco gang cops knew who he was, although a few of them didn’t appreciate his aggressive approach. A few others applauded his success. SFPD had been grappling with problems associated with the Miceros crew for years and Santini had rolled in and dismantled the entire organization in slightly over a year, utilizing a unique mix of federal authorities, including immigration enforcement. Street cops working the Mission appreciated the results, but anything beyond expressing basic professional courtesy for an HSI special agent risked career-crushing retribution from the city’s highly politicized bureaucracy, which enforced the sanctuary policy with a vengeance. HSI was part of ICE, which represented a big problem for the local police.
This was San Francisco, world-renowned Mecca for aging hippies, activist gays, and assorted die-hard lefties, who were instinctively inclined to side with the dispossessed and downtrodden of society. Enforcing bedrock principles of social justice, as they defined them, trumped any effort to target a distinctly ethnic criminal gang from south of the border.
Santini thought the local cops in the pre-op briefing mostly looked nervous about rubbing up against the sanctuary policy, but they also seemed eager and willing at the same time. They knew firsthand the kind of serious threat to public safety that the 20th Street gang posed.
He glanced across the briefing room at Cabrera and his partner Sean Gibson, a tall redhead who had grown up in working-class San Francisco, with the big shoulders and slight paunch of a former football player sliding gently into middle age. For years, Cabrera and Gibson were warned to steer clear of federal immigration law enforcement. Now, they were receiving a slightly modulated message. There appeared to be some official wiggle room that might allow them to swing a bigger club in their fight against MS-13 through an alliance (although limited) with the feds from Homeland Security.
For Santini and his HSI colleagues, this interagency political education session was an exercise that had to be endured for the sake of Operation Mission Possible, Santini’s plan to flood the Mission District’s streets with an overwhelming number of local cops, state troopers, and federal agents all at once. They planned to cut off all escape routes and round up gang members to gather intelligence and bust them on whatever they could—everything except immigration violations, as far as SFPD’s official cooperation was concerned.
Adopted in 1989, San Francisco’s “City of Refuge” ordinance was intended to protect refugees of vicious civil wars in Central America from deportation. The idea was simple: Leave the poor folks alone, let them build new lives for themselves, free from police harassment and the threat of being sent back to the violent hellholes their home countries had become. According to proponents of sanctuary policy, if local police cooperated with federal immigration law enforcement it would result in a “chilling effect” on crime victims or witnesses in the city who were illegal immigrants. Such individuals would be hesitant to report crimes or provide testimony to the cops for fear of being arrested and deported, creating an environment in which crime could flourish due to lack of trust between the community and police. Or so the argument went.
Opponents of sanctuary city policies claimed there was no evidence to support the claim it led to less cooperation with police. On the contrary, they argued, the policy merely left huge loopholes in the legal system for repeat serious offenders to game the system and remain on American city streets.
In a previous series of meetings with Jim Sawyer, head of SFPD’s Gang Task Force, Santini persuaded him to obtain approval for the operation from higher-ups in the local police department. Sawyer was in good standing with his department and had earned some collateral credit for the recent disruption of the Miceros. Sawyer’s superiors in SFPD granted their okay for Operation Mission Possible, with the strict caveat there would be absolutely no immigration enforcement involved.
Despite SFPD’s official policy, while Santini kept quiet about it during the pre-op briefing, he was holding the immigration enforcement option in his back pocket. He had a bigger plan than just Mission Possible brewing in his mind. If hooking and booking the MS-13 crew on immigration charges could somehow further a potentially larger criminal case against them, he was determined to use HSI’s enforcement authority.
Recently, he had run across an article published in the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin titled “Enterprise Theory of Investigation,” which succinctly laid out how to apply the federal (RICO) statute, designed to systematically dismantle a criminal network. The RICO approach had been used effectively by the FBI against the Gambino crime family, by the DEA against the Colombian Cali Cartel, and by the ATF against the Hells Angels outlaw motorcycle gang.
A successful RICO case usually entailed close cooperation between federal and state or local law enforcement, attacking a criminal organization at every possible level of its structure, with the goal of taking down its leaders. Instead of treating criminal acts as isolated crimes, the enterprise theory of investigation attempted to demonstrate that the targeted individuals committed crimes “in furtherance of the criminal enterprise itself.”
Implementing the investigative attack plan for a RICO case often took a relatively long time—a luxury that local police, who were constantly reacting to 911 calls, didn’t have. But Santini did. He knew MS-13 was proving difficult for the local cops to combat, largely due to the gang’s insularity as a Spanish-speaking criminal subculture. SFPD cops, constrained by the city’s sanctuary city policy, were practically fighting the gang with both hands tied behind their backs.
The most common strategy for criminal investigators to take down a gang entailed flipping inside informants in exchange for money or lessened sentences. SFPD’s Gang Task Force had succeeded in arm-twisting small bits of intelligence from a few desperate 20th Street members here and there over the years, but the local cops were clearly losing the war. To defeat the gang in San Francisco, it would take a much more prolonged and better resourced attack, which was precisely what Santini intended to do—with whatever help he could muster from SFPD.
In developing the plan for Mission Possible, Cabrera and Gibson had provided Santini with a target list of a couple dozen known 20th Street members, as well as several locations where gang members were known to loiter or “post up” to control turf, including Mission Dolores and Alioto Parks. Several of the clique members were also known to troll popular tourist areas such as Golden Gate Park and Fisherman’s Wharf, picking wallets from the pockets of distracted out-of-towners, or snatching valuables such as cameras, sunglasses, and laptops from unattended cars. All the locations were included in the plan to “drain the swamp” in and around the Mission.
In general, 20th Street members controlled their turf in Mission Playground by posting up a constant presence at the park. But if they wanted a quick hiatus, they would sometimes take a walk along Mission Street, or smoke some weed in one of the other nearby parks, loitering among the docile citizens enjoying the bay breezes or walking their dogs. This tendency of the clique to roam every which way through the neighborhood naturally complicated the job of netting them all in one swoop.
The operation commenced with a swarm of almost sixty SFPD cops, CA DOJ agents, and HSI special agents split into small teams and simultaneously hitting the streets, alleys, and parks of the Mission, scouting for 20th Street members. Dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt, Santini joined another HSI agent, along with Cabrera, Gibson, and two plainclothes state cops, forming one of several cross-agency units participating in the sweep.
It wasn’t long before Santini’s squad made their first contact with a group of gangbangers sporting their trademark Sureño blue clothing accessories, loitering in front of Jocelyn’s El Salvadoran Bakery at Lexington and 20th Streets. Jocelyn’s catered to Central Americans in the neighborhood with the foods they liked, prepared the way it was done back home.
Owned and operated by a Salvadoran family, the bakery was a favorite hangout for the 20th Street crew. The local cops knew the gang lingered here regularly while a group of crooks often fenced stolen goods such as car stereos, ridiculously expensive, decorative wheel rims and spinners, and other accoutrements of the well-equipped homie’s gangsta ride. In addition to grabbing a bite at Jocelyn’s, the 20th Street clique—some of whom specialized in car theft—could turn a fast buck selling their spoils from their thefts and burglaries.
Approaching the crew from 20th Street, Santini thought they looked shifty and dangerous. None of them seemed particularly concerned about the group of cops who were heading straight their way. The mostly young homies seemed slightly amused, making wise cracks to one another in Spanish, laughing, and smiling cockily. They all sported gang colors with sports jerseys with the number 20 or 13 and blue belts, belt buckles molded in the number 20 and blue accents on everything. They even had MS-13 jewelry, such as earrings that included blue MS letters.
The elder of the group, Blackie, was a Salvadoran with a shaved head decked out in all blue, including blue laces in his Nike Air Jordans. He had a patch over his left eye, which he lost a few years ago in a knife fight, making him look like a seasoned gangster pirate. Blackie attempted to slide away inconspicuously down the street, while the others put on an ostentatious show of fearlessness, standing their ground in the face of the police heat bearing down.
“Hey!” Gibson called to Blackie, “C’mere a minute.” The homie stopped and turned, disgust crossing his face. He blew out a hiss of frustration and walked back toward the front of the bakery. The rest of the gang maintained their poses of contempt for the cops, meeting their gazes and glaring back with open scorn. Santini was struck by how thuggish they were. He had encountered plenty of mean hombres during his time with the border patrol and to him these guys were obviously hardcore street criminals, especially Blackie.
“Let me see some ID,” Gibson told Blackie, while keeping an eye on the others, who were boxed in by two SFPD officers as well as Santini and his HSI partner. Blackie reached into his jacket pocket and extracted a driver’s license. He handed it to Gibson, who scanned it briefly and passed it over to Santini, who in turn gave the ID to his partner to run a check.
“Hold tight right there,” Gibson told Blackie, as he moved down the line to the next homie.
“ID?” Gibson said.
Spanky, a portly thug with a “2” tattooed on one forearm and a “0” on the other, pulled out his wallet and removed a driver’s license for Gibson, who eyeballed it closely. Something about it didn’t look right. He handed it to a plainclothes California DOJ agent who was providing backup.
The homies’ confidence seemed to be fading under this unfamiliar protocol. They had been shaken down by SFPD cops too many times to remember, but this was different. There were several cops they didn’t recognize, and they were paying extra close attention to their IDs. “He’s got a prior deport,” Santini’s partner told him after the check was done on Blackie’s driver license. “His immigration status is illegal.”
At the mention of immigration, spoken loud enough for the homies to hear, Santini watched the gangbangers’ faces drop. In an instant, they went from mildly impatient and contemptuous, to clearly worried. All the homies had jobs or girlfriends or children in the States, and the possibility of being deported would seriously screw up their lives. The cops in Honduras or El Salvador might want them for felonies in their home countries. Even if they weren’t arrested upon arrival and locked up for something, returning to the States to resume their lives in San Francisco could easily take several weeks but more likely months, probably meaning they’d lose their jobs. A night in the San Francisco County Jail was no problem, but a ticket home was a serious detriment.
The original intent of Mission Possible—the way it was sold by Santini to the SFPD chain of command—was an intelligence-gathering operation only. There was to be no enforcement of immigration laws. But busting these thugs was too tempting. Santini wanted them off the street, immediately.
“What do you think?” he said to Gibson. “Should I go ahead and lock them up? Their asses will be deported for sure. I promise to ask the US Attorney’s Office if they would consider a reentry prosecution too, but at the minimum, they will be shipped.”
Gibson exchanged looks with Cabrera. Both knew it could cause some serious problems for them if word got out that SFPD was helping ICE to round up, detain, and deport illegals. Still, the Gang Task Force officers were sick of the thugs running roughshod in the neighborhood. If HSI had a tool in their arsenal that could remove these menacing thugs from the neighborhood, both the citizens of the city and the police would benefit.
Santini suggested that Cabrera and Gibson leave the gangsters with him and his HSI partners, while the local cops continued patrolling the neighborhood. Cabrera and Gibson nodded in ascent and headed toward their patrol car. After they pulled away, it was Santini’s show.
“Let’s haul them in,” he told his partner.
They ran immigration checks on the rest of the homies outside Jocelyn’s. One turned out to be in possession of a fake green card, which was a deportable offense. Another admitted to being in the country illegally. In total, five of them were busted on illegal immigration charges and taken into custody by ICE.
After shaking down the gang at the bakery and loading the five thugs into an ICE van, Santini reconnected with Gibson and Cabrera. They proceeded to execute a probation search at the residence of another 20th Street member named Maurice Montega, aka Colmillo, Spanish for “Fang.”
Colmillo was on probation for an assault charge stemming from an altercation with a rival gangster a year prior. He lived with his mother and some other family members in a two-bedroom apartment a few blocks from Mission Playground. As the task force approached the apartment building, they spotted MS-13 graffiti painted all over the sidewalk out front, on the mailboxes inside the entrance, and in the elevator on the way up to the fourth floor. Nobody answered the knock at Colmillo’s apartment door, so the SFPD team contacted a building manager who arrived shortly with a master key.
Inside, the residence was clean and well kept. Everywhere were testaments to Colmillo’s mother’s Christian devotion, with numerous sacred icons and pictures of crucifixes. Multiple Virgin Marys decorated the living room walls and shelves.
The search team went straight to Colmillo’s bedroom, which Gibson was familiar with from previous visits to the home. It was obvious as soon as they entered that “Fang” was hardcore MS-13. Gang paraphernalia was everywhere. There was a collection of blue bandannas, ball caps, belts, and sneakers, as well as letters to Colmillo from various gang members in prison. There was also an aluminum baseball bat with gang symbols scribbled in magic marker. A framed photo on the wall showed a couple dozen 20th Street members assembled in Mission Playground immediately after a murdered homie’s funeral, all of them wearing gang blues. They were lined up in three rows as if in a soccer team photo, smiling and throwing devil-horn hand signs for the camera.
Santini thought: These guys obviously feel like they own the neighborhood!
On the nightstand was a photo of Colmillo inside a cheap frame bordered with crayon stick figures and smiley faces and an inscription that read, “Me and My Daddy.” Colmillo was holding his young son, flashing a proud smile and donned in his best MS-13 ceremonial blues. He held the boy in one arm, while flashing the devil-horns salute with the other. The baby was dressed in a Sureño blue onesie. Observing the father-and-son photo, Santini was struck by how it so clearly illustrated the tragedy of generational allegiance within the gang. Little boys grew up watching their fathers, uncles, cousins, and older siblings as role models living the life of a marero. Influenced so heavily from an early age, the odds were stacked high against the boys breaking the cycle of criminality. The kids were practically set up for failure.
An SFPD cop gathered up Colmillo’s gang swag and spread it out on the bed to take photos as evidence of his parole violations. Meanwhile, Gibson rummaged through the furniture . . . and bingo! In the center drawer of a battered, wooden dresser, tucked under a pile of mismatched socks, he found a loaded black, .45 caliber handgun and two boxes of ammunition.
“I’m sure this hasn’t been used in any crimes,” Gibson cracked, wearing surgical gloves and holding the gun up for the others to see.
They bagged and tagged the gun and gang paraphernalia, while Gibson called Colmillo’s mom to ask where her son was. She indicated he was working at a construction site in Daly City and would be home by five o’clock that afternoon. Gibson asked her to have Colmillo give him a call, and told her it was likely her son would be spending the night in county jail for violating the terms of his parole.
“He’ll probably be out in a day or two,” Gibson told Santini, after hanging up with Colmillo’s mother.
Gibson knew from years of frustrating experience with San Francisco’s justice system Colmillo would be assigned a public defender and plead not guilty, claiming ignorance about the gun in his dresser drawer. Chances were high he would be granted bail and the DA would eventually drop the charges.
For Santini and his HSI partners, observing the gang’s criminal culture up close and personal during the Mission Possible operation provided a unique glimpse of San Francisco’s underworld. It also served to focus their list of 20th Street members to target. But the only way to truly take apart the gang was from inside the ranks, Santini knew. And for that he would need a reliable informant, a trusted marero with access to 20th Street’s network of thugs.