KLAS-TV Channel 8 News Las VegasI-Team: Gangland in Las Vegas, Behind Bars
Violent, dangerous gangs have been known to take over entire neighborhoods committing robberies, murder, and infusing our streets with drugs. And Las Vegas has their fair share, more than 300 street gangs.
As feared as they are in our communities, the army they are building behind bars can be even more frightening. Metro detectives admit the local jail is almost a college for gang members, but that works both ways, as the I-Team explains.
Read Part 1: Gangland in Las Vegas, Rule by Fear
Even behind bars, a one-armed prisoner tends to stand out. The elaborate tattoos on this prisoner tell police much of what they need to know, as accurate as a road map. But to find out what happened to his arm, they had to ask him.
Matt Zucker, Clark County Detention Center Gang Intell, said, "He did tell me through a translator that his gang, he got it cut off for doing something. He wouldn't say what it was..."
The prisoner is a member of MS-13 regarded by the FBI as the most dangerous gang in the world, with 100,000 members in the U.S. and Central America. MS-13 has murdered thousands of people, performs assassinations for hire and rules with fear on the streets and inside the joint. They used a machete to lop off a man's arm, but he's still proud to be a member even though he lost his arm.
More than half of the inmates inside the Clark County Detention Center are affiliated with one street gang or another, a testament to where gang activity leads. And a majority of those are Hispanic gangs based in Southern California but now entrenched in Southern Nevada.
"Our job is to find out who they are, because if we don't, they will," Zucker said.
Matt Zucker is part of a four-man intelligence team created to study gangsters in the closed environment of the jail. The information gleaned by the team on the inside could save the lives of gang officers on the outside.
The team studies tattoos, for example, for clues about an inmate's allegiances. Even the jail isn't immune to gang graffiti, which also carries information. The team often intercepts written messages from gang members, hidden inside body cavities or cells, some of which contain strict codes of conduct for members on the inside.
"This becomes the college of the gang world. They know most of them are going to go to prison. A lot of them are going to go for awhile. So they use this time to exercise, read books, to develop themselves in the gang world, and to become leaders," Zucker continued.
Despite the constant scrutiny, gang members are able to make weapons made from pieces of the jail itself, or from items the police are required to provide them; a razor was used to teach a gang member a bloody lesson, for example. Violence and the threat of violence are means to an end for gangsters behind bars. Hispanic gangsters who might have been rivals on the streets join forces while inside, thus the feared Salvadoran gang MS-13, created to fend off the Mexican mafia, melds with the so called Surenos family once behind bars. Anyone who doesn't is on his own, a deadly choice inside.
Anyone identified as a gang kingpin gets isolated in special cells, primarily as a means to disrupt communications between members. Zucker declines to say if any gang bosses are there now and is careful about giving the other side any useful information.
He said, "They're looking for news broadcasts just like this, how we develop out intelligence, the things we look for, then they change them. So we're very careful not to give away the tricks of the trade."
Metro knows it will never solve the gang problem by making more arrests, but it can succeed in making a dent, and has using intelligence from the inside to assist those on the outside, and the officers say it's working.
Detective Carlos Acosta, with Metro Gang Intell, said, "For those that are gonna watch this tape, just know that we're coming. We're gonna come and take away what you've taken from other people. We're coming, and we're gonna getcha."
Metro declined to say whether any of the gangsters behind bars become snitches. Any gang member who did give information to police would be subject to execution.
Locally, gang violence in the Las Vegas Valley dropped more than 30-percent in 2006, in large part because residents are fed up and are willing to tell police what they know.
E-mail your comments to Chief Investigative Reporter George Knapp.
