It began with the whisperings of confidential informants.
The Hilltop Crips were making a play to exert their force on the city again, sources told members of the South Sound Gang Task Force last year. They were robbing, shooting, beating and stealing to win turf, make money and reinforce their fearsome reputation.
It was a familiar and worrisome refrain to police and prosecutors who’ve spent years pursuing Tacoma gangs, including the Hilltop Crips, the city’s oldest and its most active gang in the past 18 months.
This time, authorities were in position to make a play of their own.
Armed with a novel legal approach, resources to throw at the case and inside information from a Crips member with stories to tell, they decided to try to gut the gang in one fell swoop.
“Everything fell into place,” said Pierce County deputy prosecutor Gregory Greer, who put forward the criminal conspiracy theory under which targeted members of the gang will be prosecuted.
Now, they’ll try to prove in court what they’ve pronounced in charging papers and at a news conference: that members of the gang engaged in a criminal conspiracy to make money through illegal means.
It’s thought to be the first time state prosecutors have tried to make a conspiracy case against a street gang in Washington, and there are no guarantees of success.
“There’s a lot of uncharted territory,” Greer said.
Authorities earlier this month launched their assault by serving search warrants across Tacoma and charging 32 suspected gang members with 51 felony charges that range from car theft to attempted first-degree murder.
All 32 are charged with – and nine solely with – criminal conspiracy, the charge that will be the crux of the prosecution. Most already have been arraigned and pleaded not guilty.
The defendants have begun demanding to see the evidence against them, evidence some of their relatives and friends have said is thin at best and racially motivated at worst. Most of the defendants are black.
David Gehrke, defendant Eugene Leonard Henderson’s attorney, intends to make a motion to dismiss the claims against his client, who’s charged solely with conspiracy, for lack of evidence.
Investigators and prosecutors deny both assertions.
“It doesn’t matter the color,” said Carlos Mojica, the FBI supervisor in Tacoma. “It just so happens these people are the most violent. … To say we are targeting African Americans is outrageous.”
Pierce County Prosecutor Mark Lindquist defended the depth and motives of the investigation.
“We charged what we can prove,” he said, adding, “Our goal is to make everybody’s community safer.”
Lindquist also denied that the investigation was racially motived.
“We’re going to aggressively prosecute any gang that is violent and breaking the law,” he said. “We want to reduce gang violence throughout the community.”
Tacoma Police Chief Don Ramsdell took pains at a Feb. 10 news conference to point out that the case isn’t about the Hilltop but a gang that took its name.
Residents of the Hilltop put in a lot of work to reduce crime in the neighborhood in recent years, said Ramsdell, who pointed out that the defendants in the case allegedly committed some of their crimes and live in other areas of the city.
“The name of the Hilltop has been tarnished over the years because of the gang activity and the drugs and the violence that’s been associated with that community,” Ramsdell said. “And I want to make a statement today that that’s no longer true.
“Nevertheless, as evidenced by this investigation, the Hilltop Crips are still a very active and dangerous group, operating throughout the city, involved in violent assaults, robberies, burglaries, thefts and various other crimes. Because of their threat to the safety and well-being of our city, the Hilltop Crips became a focus of the investigation.”
A PATTERN FORMS
Last summer, tips trickled in to the South Sound Gang Task Force. Hilltop Crips were beating up patrons at nightclubs, ripping gold chains from their necks and snagging their car keys in parking lot tussles, informants reported.
The task force – eight investigators from six local, state and federal law enforcement agencies – was created in 2003 and is based in the FBI’s downtown Tacoma office.
It routinely gets information from informants about gang activity, unreported crimes and who’s having problems with whom. At the time, investigators were hearing about individual members of several gangs. But most of the intelligence – from tipsters and through police contacts – was about the Hilltop Crips.
Other gangs, which previously had been involved in spates of violence, were hanging low, said task force member John Ringer, a Tacoma police detective.
The information about the Crips was repeating itself, said Ringer, who’s spent the better part of two decades investigating Tacoma’s gangs.
“The same names came up time and time again,” he said. “We were seeing this pattern form.”
Tipsters reported that gang members were working in teams during robberies in parking lots at the nightspots. Some of the team would rob and beat the victim while the others stood guard.
Strong-arm robberies are not usually on the task force’s radar, but the task force decided to take a closer look.
“We talked to some legitimate people who go to these clubs and when they see these guys, they’d leave,” Ringer said. “Without hesitation, they were going in and targeting people.”
The gang went after people who showed signs of wealth – by their dress, by their cars or by flashing wads of cash.
Investigators were concerned about the seemingly small-time crimes for reasons beside the gang connections.
They were told that the snatching of gold necklaces at nightclubs had sparked two deadly shootings in the Tacoma area – the Dec. 27, 2008, death of 28-year-old James Guillory Jr. and the May 31 death of 27-year-old Jonathan Ragland.
Charges have been filed in Ragland’s death.
Guillory’s killing remains unsolved. Investigators noted in court documents that members of the Hilltop Crips were present at a fight outside a Lakewood bar shortly before Guillory’s death and at least one was present during a second fight in the moments just before Guillory was shot.
There also was information that members of the gang were involved in other recent violence, including a car-to-car shooting that wounded a 16-year-old in the head Feb. 7, 2009, and a shooting Feb. 24, 2009, at McCabe’s American Music Cafe that left one man seriously injured.
Informants also tipped Ringer to other unreported shootings and robberies. Some victims were rival gang members; others were residents minding their own business.
Task force members also heard that the gang, which rose to prominence in the early 1990s but became fragmented later in the decade, were recruiting new members and talking about getting back on top, said FBI special agent Todd Bakken.
“We were seeing something that was a lot bigger than we thought it was,” he said. “This group was responsible for a disproportionate amount of violent crime in Tacoma.”
CONNECTIONS
Over the summer, task force investigators started seeking connections among the crimes they’d learned of.
They reviewed surveillance footage from a Dec. 6, 2008, melee inside a South End Denny’s restaurant known as a gathering place for the Hilltop Crips. It showed at least 10 people coming in and attacking three patrons. A security guard tried to break up one of the fights and was hit.
The scuffle lasted about a minute and then the group quickly left. In the parking lot, gunshots rang out from vehicles as they sped off. Officers collected 28 shell casings at the scene.
Footage from another robbery outside a South Tacoma bar showed a similar scene.
Investigators recognized some of the attackers in the videos.
“They were all Hilltop Crips and were working in conjunction with each other,” Bakken said.
Investigators began to pull records on all police contacts with members of the gang dating back to mid-2008. They wound up with thousands of pages from hundreds of contacts. They put the reports into binders and looked for links among the names.
Through the fall, the task force worked the cases where Hilltop Crips were suspects. They interviewed victims and witnesses, put together photo montages and submitted shell casings to the Washington State Patrol crime lab.
Meanwhile, crimes connected to the Crips continued.
On Sept. 9, a cocaine dealer who’d had problems with the gang was paralyzed from the waist down after being shot. Four gang members have been charged with attempted first-degree murder in connection with the shooting as part of the conspiracy case.
Ten days later, three young men suspected of belonging to the gang approached two soldiers who’d just bought food at the Fish House, a popular take-out joint near St. Joseph Medical Center.
The young men asked the soldiers if they had any marijuana for sale. The soldiers said no. One of the young men then stuck a handgun to one soldier’s head, took his keys and cell phone and stole the victim’s car.
CONSPIRACY CHARGES
Given the number of crimes, how the gang members were working together and the surveillance footage, the task force started to ponder whether it had the makings of a conspiracy case.
The task force had investigated another Tacoma gang – the Seven Deuce Mob – in 2004. Federal prosecutors charged 10 gang members with conspiracy to distribute drugs and filed other charges. All eventually were convicted of various crimes. Three were convicted of conspiracy to sell drugs and other charges.
Last September, there were discussions with the U.S. Attorney’s Office about bringing a conspiracy case against the Crips. The decision was made to pursue the case at the state level, through Pierce County prosecutors.
In late September, Ringer approached deputy prosecutor Greer with his evidence.
Greer was ready.
In May 2009, the anti-crime organization Safe Streets received a $1 million grant from the federal government to help pay for gang-fighting efforts in Pierce County. About $200,000 of the money went to the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, which used it to form a gang unit.
Greer, a 15-year prosecutor who has spent the bulk of the last few years prosecuting gang members in Superior Court, was assigned to the unit.
He’d studied how other jurisdictions tackle street gangs, including in Florida, where authorities use racketeering and conspiracy laws to go after gangs. The tactic allowed Sunshine State prosecutors to charge large swaths of a gang’s membership for crimes that maybe only a handful of the members committed.
To prove a conspiracy case in Washington state, prosecutors must show evidence that at least two people agreed to a plan to commit a crime and that at least one of them took a substantive step toward carrying it out.
Greer thought he might be able to prove that joining a gang was enough to prove at least “a circumstantial agreement” among its members to commit crimes. Then he could use any crimes committed by anyone in the group as a “sort of glue that holds them together,” he said in an interview earlier this month.
AN INSIDER
The task force had something else that added viability to the effort: a long-time member of the gang willing to name names.
Court reports and prosecutors have identified the insider as an eight-time felon who purportedly joined the Crips as a boy. Court documents indicate that as a teenager he hustled crack cocaine, and he has convictions for robbery and illegally carrying a gun.
He was one of several suspected Crips picked up during a raid on a Tacoma house in September. State Department of Corrections officers had gone to the house to see if the insider was following the rules of his supervision after he was released from prison.
He decided to dish dirt.
“Through countless hours of interviews … he detailed the workings of the Hilltop Crip gang,” Ringer wrote in an affidavit seeking a search warrant in the case. “He identified members of the gang, told of their criminal activities and provided details on their residences, vehicles and families.”
Bakken said the conspiracy case wasn’t made solely on information provided by one person. The victims involved in different incidents and other informants also identified Hilltop Crips members as their attackers, he said.
“He’s a piece of the puzzle,” Bakken said of the insider, whom The News Tribune is not identifying to protect him from retaliation.
The information helped investigators make connections, confirm hunches and build their conspiracy case, according to court documents and prosecutors.
“We had a break when an insider started talking and giving us the information necessary to make a conspiracy case,” Lindquist said.
In the process, the insider implicated himself in more than a dozen Crips-related crimes and has been charged with multiple felonies.
He also made himself a marked man.
Word circulated among Hilltop Crips not long after his arrest that he was “snitching,” according to court documents. Intimidation and threats followed.
The insider “was confronted in public on several occasions by members of the HTCs and forced to fight his way out of the area,” according to court records. “As information comes out about his involvement, there will most certainly be attempts made on his person or those close to him.”
Authorities are keeping him under guard at an undisclosed location.
“We will do what we can to protect him,” Lindquist said.
SURVEILLANCE
In late October, with more connections to the Crips surfacing, the task force installed a surveillance camera in an alley behind a home in the 2500 block of South M Street. The alley was a popular gathering spot for gang members.
Task force members watched the camera feed.
It allowed investigators “to see associations between various members of the Hilltop Crips, view specific clothing that they were wearing and record the vehicles that they traveled in,” court records state.
Meanwhile, investigators began arresting some gang members in connection with other incidents.
“If someone was out there that was dangerous, we were getting them in custody,” Bakken said.
The investigation was put on hold in late November when four Lakewood police officers were gunned down in a Parkland coffee shop. Many of the task force investigators were diverted to help investigate that case.
When they returned to their task force duties, they confirmed what their informants, including their insider, had been telling them: The Hilltop Crips were running rampant across the city.
In the early hours of Feb. 9, more than 100 law enforcement officers conducted a series of sweeps. They served search warrants on seven residences and combed through several cars.
By the end of the day, they’d arrested 12 of the Hilltop Crips. Three were on the loose. The others were in custody on other charges. One of those three since has been taken into custody.
During the searches, law enforcement officers confiscated guns, ammunition, cell phones, cameras, camcorders, computers, photographs, suspected drugs, hats, wallets and documents.
They also found the book “Gang Leader for a Day” in one home.
ONGOING INVESTIGATION
The task force’s investigation into the Hilltop Crips is not finished, Ringer and Bakken say.
Part of the task force is wrapping up cases that have been charged and is looking at others, including several robberies, that haven’t been solved. Ringer said other Hilltop Crips have expressed interest in helping.
Other members of the task force are working on cases against suspected members of other gangs and preparing for trial in previously charged investigations.
The task force still has funding and will look at targeting other gangs suspected of committing violence in the community.
“There are groups coming up that are worthy of being looked at in the conspiracy light,” Ringer said.
Previous task forces have ended after the gang activity simmered down and arrests were made. So far, this task force has no end date.
Bakken hopes it stays that way.
“Unless you have a group monitoring gang activity and gang violence,” he said, “you are missing the boat.”
Stacey Mulick: 253-597-8268
stacey.mulick@thenewstribune.com
Adam Lynn: 253-597-8644
