Chapter 18
Laura Gwinn, a fifty-one-year-old federal prosecutor with red hair and piercing blue eyes, arrived at the San Francisco Airport, exhausted. Not just tired from the cross-country flight, she was worn out from all the recent weeks of preparing a prosecution of two MS-13 thugs in Maryland. Then there was the thirteen-day trial, not to mention five days of waiting while the jury deliberated over the charges of “racketeering and conspiracy to commit murder to further the racketeering enterprise.”
The jury had convicted both defendants, but victory in the courtroom did not equal a badly needed rest for Gwinn.
She had been going after MS-13 gang members in the Washington, D.C., area for several years now and was considered a leading expert in the field. As an assistant state’s attorney in Prince Georges County, Maryland, she was assigned in 2003 to prosecute two suspects in the nonfatal shooting of a student near High Point High School. In a subsequent case, she persuaded a county jury in 2005 to convict an MS-13 member named Mario Ayala of first-degree murder in the beating death of a man in a Maryland cemetery. After that, the US Attorney’s Office invited Gwinn to join their team, which was dealing with an expanding presence of MS-13 cliques throughout the D.C. region.
For months now, Gwinn had been splitting her time between the office of the state’s attorney in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, and the federal courthouse in Greenbelt, Maryland, effectively working two jobs. It was taking a toll on her. Even as she stepped off the plane in San Francisco, there was another pending murder trial back home that required her attention—the double murder of a married couple, both veterinarians, whose throats were slit during a robbery at their clinic.
Although fatigued, when Gwinn was presented with the case file on Operation Devil Horns in San Francisco, it stirred the natural-born fighter in her. She was keenly aware of MS-13 gang members’ violent nature and their threat to public safety, and she knew from experience how to put together a successful RICO prosecution. It was too tempting for Gwinn, a divorced mother of two grown children, not to pick up the case. It’s what she knew how to do best.
Tired to the bone, she wheeled her luggage through the airport and headed for the street to hail a cab. Well, she thought, here we go again.
Santini hurried through the lobby of the federal building on Golden Gate Avenue to meet with the new prosecutor assigned by Main Justice to his case for the first time. He was excited. Gwinn’s reputation of success against MS-13 on the East Coast preceded her. Santini hoped she could build solid RICO convictions and prison sentences from the untold hours he and his fellow agents had spent over nearly three years of cajoling informants, hidden-surveillance operations, and controlled purchases of drugs, guns, and stolen cars.
At the receptionist’s desk, he asked where he could find Gwinn, who was expecting him. Santini was not a particularly popular person in these offices. He was the guy who had gone over the local DOJ office’s heads. Gwinn was the visible embodiment of that effort now, a big gun sent from headquarters to handle his case. Any powwow between Santini and Gwinn in clear view of everyone was a reminder of the major case that the local US Attorney’s Office had stonewalled, repeatedly. Now they were forced to share it with Main Justice in Washington.
Gwinn was received professionally and cordially by local DOJ staff and provided an office to occupy in their headquarters. She soon concluded, however, there was scant enthusiasm to support a RICO case against 20th Street. Before long she would elect to decamp to a desk at the HSI office in the Financial District, where Santini was based, for the duration of the investigation.
Santini poked his head into Gwinn’s office doorway. She was hard at work on some documents, a determined-looking professional. He rapped his knuckles softly on the doorjamb.
“Laura?” he said, “Michael Santini.”
He stuck out his hand to shake. She sized him up with a quick, keen glance. After the standard polite introductions and questions about travel and lodging accommodations, she got right down to business.
“I’ve reviewed the reports of investigation and you have obviously done a lot of great work, Michael,” she said.
He liked what he was hearing so far.
She pointed at the stack of reports on the desk in front her. “You’ve worked the guns, the dope, and the cars,” she said.
“We worked every angle we could think of,” he said.
She nodded. “I think we have to work the violence angle harder,” she said. “These thugs are regularly committing acts of violence which are predicate offenses for RICO. Some of the evidence is already here.”
“Yes, it is,” Santini agreed.
“If we can nail them for murder in the aid of racketeering, we can put them away longer,” she said.
In her steady gaze, Santini read a woman on a mission. Just like he was. He sensed a new confidence about the likelihood that his investigation was going to amount to something big.
Santini lacked experience in investigating murders, however. The feds usually left those cases to state and local police, as they had teams of detectives with specialized training. Gwinn was inferring that Santini and his team would need to investigate homicides. He was nervous, but excited.
Over the course of his investigation, Santini had come to realize just how deep the gang’s psychological inculcation ran for its members. Standing in the rooms where some of them lived and slept, he saw how they surrounded themselves with gang icons and insignia—the Satanic symbols, the baseball bats inscribed with MS-13 mottos, and photos of fellow gang members flashing devil-horn salutes. Their deepest identities in life came from the gang. The gang was who these guys were.
Joker, the government informant now assigned by Tigre as the clique’s new treasurer, was signed on with the government on a probationary basis, only. Santini had serious reservations about whether Joker had any genuine desire to escape the world of MS-13 and start building a “legit” life.
Joker was smart, but he had been deeply steeped in the ways of La Mara. He had done hard time cooped up with the homies in jail. What it took for a hardened marero to break free psychologically from the cult-like grip of MS-13 was not to be underestimated, Santini had learned by now.
One night, not long after the Polo Grounds confrontation between the old dogs and new booties and his appointment as clique treasurer, Joker hitched a ride with Kapone and his girlfriend from Daly City to the Mission District. They all planned to hook up and party at Blondies, along with Puppet and another gang member named Menace.
Located near 16th and Valencia Streets, Blondies was a small club with an open sidewalk façade that exposed a long wooden bar, usually tended by scantily clad women sporting full-sleeve tats and face piercings. One of the place’s main claims to fame was a humongous, eleven-dollar martini that drew in people elbow-to-elbow on weekend nights.
Santini occasionally patronized the place himself, prior to the start of his 20th Street investigation, when he came to realize it was a regular hangout for the gang. The bar was frequented by all types, including Mission District gangbangers who cruised the diverse clientele for white chicks and customers for their dime bags of weed and coke.
When Joker arrived at Blondies, sporting a blue ball cap and T-shirt, someone in the back of the crowded barroom stood up and yelled, “Scraps not welcome here!”
It was a Norteño, using his gang’s derogatory term for Sureños, which included MS-13. Enraged, Joker began weaving his way through the crowd toward the Norteño, but Kapone and Puppet grabbed him and held him back, distracting him by pointing out the bartender’s large breasts and offering to buy him a drink. While the MS-13 trio were being served their beverages, they scowled darkly at the offending Norteño and his sidekick, as the two walked past them and exited the bar.
What Joker and his crew didn’t realize was that a half dozen more Norteños were keeping a low profile in the rear of the club. When Kapone and his girlfriend walked across the street to grab a quick slice of pizza, Joker was caught alone smoking a cigarette on the sidewalk out front by the Norteño crew, who attacked him and stabbed him several times with knives. Joker stumbled and fell on the sidewalk with wounds to his neck, arms, and back. He was transported by emergency medical personnel in critical condition to San Francisco General Hospital.
Joker was lucky enough to survive the vicious attack, which was all caught on surveillance cameras and turned over to SFPD officers Gibson and Cabrera. Though he lived, he permanently lost the use of his left arm as a result of wounds to his neck, which severed the spinal region that controls movement from the shoulder down.
Joker’s days as an informant were done, but not because of his paralyzed arm. It had become clear to Santini his would-be informant was too tied up in the whole MS-13 gangster lifestyle. He couldn’t play it cool when necessary, to stay out of a fight.
Playing the part of an informant wasn’t for everyone. It took the right blend of street smarts and strategic calculation, in addition to a true desire to eventually get out of the gang life. Joker obviously did not possess the needed combination of character traits to make him useful, Santini realized.
Joker was done as an informant, as far as Santini was concerned. Unfortunately, it meant the agent’s plan to use Joker as a tool for getting at Chachi, the clique’s main drug dealer, wouldn’t pan out as he had hoped.
For 20th Street, the Norteños’ attack on Joker prompted a wave of retaliation over the next two days. Casper reported to Santini that Chachi offered to Cyco and the rest of the new booties access to his firearms arsenal to use in revenge attacks, including two .38 caliber handguns and an M4 machine gun.
According to what Peloncito told Casper, one 20th Street member named Sapo didn’t need any of Chachi’s guns to exact his revenge. An ice pick was good enough for Sapo, who claimed he stalked a lone Norteño walking down a dark alley adjacent to Alabama Street and jammed the long steel pin into his eye. Peloncito told Casper he decided on a less up-close-and-personal approach. He said he shot a couple Norteños as they stood at the corner of Silver Avenue and Alemany Boulevard.
The accelerating pace of violence committed by 20th Street’s new booties, which Santini dreaded in the wake of the Polo Grounds confrontation, was in fact happening. Every day the federal investigation continued without arrests of key leaders in the clique was another day someone was more likely to get killed, either a rival gang member or an innocent bystander. The SFPD and the Gang Task Force were obviously overwhelmed and unable to effectively stem the violence.
Still, the federal takedown needed to be conducted strategically and at sufficient scale if the clique was to be smashed beyond its ability to recover. The goal was not to disrupt the 20th Street gang’s activities, it was to dismantle and eliminate the entire organization.