Jesus Cintron went to Anderson Park to get beat down by his Blood brothers. The 27-year-old man had violated a gang code: He wanted out after the gang shot his friend.
Cintron then violated another rule: He stopped getting up during the discipline. Darryl Christmas, 30, the reputed leader of Atlanta’s Nine-Trey Bloods, ordered him shot for showing weakness, prosecutors say. When a 15-year-old friend of Cintron protested, he, too, was killed in the west Atlanta park.
That night, a carload of Bloods rolled up to the home of Cintron’s girlfriend after she threatened to call police. They kicked in her door, then killed her 17-year-old son and her dog. She escaped when a gun jammed.
This murderous spree last October “should have sent chills through every person in Fulton County,” said District Attorney Paul Howard. It was one more example of what he says has been an overlooked yet growing menace in the city — gangs.
Howard has called for a summit next month to bring together law enforcement officials and community members and outline a plan to attack gangs. That effort comes on the heels of high-profile crimes blamed on gangs and a promise last month by Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington to bring them under control.
The new focus on gangs raises questions about just how significant the gang problem is in Atlanta. In the past, authorities downplayed the reach of gangs in the city. More often, they were viewed simply as packs of thugs committing opportunistic crimes.
It is unclear just how many gangs or gang members exist in Atlanta. Evidence of increased gang activity seems anecdotal. Specific numbers are as sketchy as the gangs themselves.
Still, authorities say city-based gangs have become more violent, organized and entrenched. Investigations of crimes over the past two years indicate gangs are drawing members not only from poor neighborhoods but also middle-class homes, allegedly even the stepson of a prominent politician and a respected Morehouse College student.
Atlanta has a growing gang problem in part, Howard said, because police and prosecutors didn’t see it coming. The perpetually undermanned APD had understaffed its gang unit and lacked intelligence about developing gangs. Authorities didn’t connect the dots between certain crimes. Robberies and homicides were seen as random events, not a pattern of profit-making and retaliation.
Out-organizing police?
Pennington said in late July he is more than quadrupling the department’s gang unit to 26 officers in hope of repeating the success against gangs the department saw in the 1990s.
The chief’s announcement, made at a news conference with Mayor Shirley Franklin, followed the carjacking of City Councilman Ceasar Mitchell and the shooting death of former boxing champ Vernon Forrest, killed in a robbery. Three men were arrested in the killing; police have not said if they were gang members.
The year began with the killing of popular Grant Park bartender John Henderson, who police say was shot by Jonathan Redding, a 17-year-old member of a gang called 30 Deep.
Howard says 30 Deep, based in the Mechanicsville neighborhood south of downtown, is a well-oiled enterprise, controlled by adults who recruit young teens. He described them as a prolific gang that has plagued retailers, carrying out smash-and-grab robberies that have netted thousands of dollars worth of merchandise. Outraged boutique owners dubbed them the “Bluejean Bandits.”
“They are more organized than the police,” Howard said.
30 Deep had actually been on APD’s radar since at least 2005, when the gang unit linked it to thefts, robberies and drug dealing. But the unit, which was just starting to develop a computerized system to track gangs, had only one officer investigating them.
Former Atlanta City Councilman Derrick Boazman said the lack of police pressure allowed 30 Deep, the Nine-Trey Bloods and other gangs to grow.
“We had a gang unit with six officers doing shift work. That lets you know gangs were not a priority for the police department,” said Boazman, now a community activist. “The gangs outsmarted us and our police department. They have become more ruthless and are willing to take life. It is really a reign of terror.”
‘We’ll hit them hard’
Atlanta police did not totally ignore gangs, but most investigations bringing indictments in recent years came while teaming up with federal authorities.
Two years ago, a homicide detective noticed a pattern of brazen killings that had been seen as unconnected crimes. That led to the roundup of the International Robbing Crew, a New Orleans-born group that authorities later blamed for a spike in Atlanta’s murder rate.
The Robbing Crew was so violent that drug dealers — often their robbery targets — told an investigator: “You got to do something about them — get them off the street,” Howard said.
Shortly afterward, Howard created a unit to begin prosecuting suspected members under a gang statute that enables joint prosecutions and tougher sentencing. His office said it has about 60 gang members under indictment.
Maj. Debra Williams, who oversees APD’s newly beefed-up gang unit, said officers will identify gang members, follow them, photograph them and round them up for questioning.
The tactics, she said, will resemble those of the force’s hard-nosed Red Dog unit, which targets open-air drug markets with repeated raids and arrests.
“We’ll hit them hard — our presence will be known,” said Williams.
She said the unit has identified 50 gangs in Atlanta and is in operating in overdrive. Its officers had made gang-related arrests before Pennington’s news conference, she said. Since then, it has arrested 73 more, she said.
Focus on suburbs
For years, officials contended gangs were largely a suburban problem. Hispanic and Asian gangs — some with national affiliations and massive drug-dealing operations — had set up in immigrant communities in DeKalb, Gwinnett and Cobb counties.
In Atlanta, those claiming to be in gangs like the Crips, Bloods or Gangster Disciples were discounted as wannabes. This made the killings, home invasions and robberies carried out by such criminals seem haphazard and not as threatening.
Gang unit documents suggest that because of its small staffing, officers focused on federal investigations into gangs, such as the ultra-violent-13, a national gang with roots in Latin America.
“Most departments are very vigilant about gangs,” said Georgia State professor Volkan Topalli, who studies violent crime. “Once established, they’re hard to get rid of. They’re like cockroaches.”
By 2005, APD had identified 18 gangs with 300 members operating in the city, although the actual number is anyone’s guess. Still, outgoing U.S. Attorney David Nahmias said last week that most gang operations in Atlanta are too small to warrant federal prosecution.
“They pick up names like Crips and Bloods, but our experience is they’re not connected to national gangs,” Nahmias said. “I have always been surprised, frankly, that the city of Atlanta has not developed big, sophisticated gangs.”
Old order upset
Topalli said Atlanta’s gangs are generally not the structured, hierarchical types found in places like Chicago or Los Angeles.
“There’s a long tradition of independence in Atlanta,” said Topalli, who interviews admitted street criminals. “It has more to do with your neighborhood. With your block, with your housing project.
“Maybe these loose affiliations will turn into more hierarchical configurations, but I don’t see that now,” he said.
Topalli cites two factors in the seeming upsurge in gang activity: gentrification of former low-income areas and the demolition of public housing projects. Razing the projects has caused local, established gangs to move, “which rearranges and upsets the territorial balances the gangs had.” And more affluent people moving into urban areas puts them in higher-crime areas.
Gabe Banks, who heads the DA’s gang unit, believes national gangs have gained a toehold in Atlanta. The Nine-Trey Bloods gang, he said, was formed by New Jersey and New York transplants. Its leader, Christmas, was on the phone with someone in New Jersey just before ordering the 2008 Anderson Park murders, Banks said.
“I think he was trying to receive instructions,” he said.
Residents see threat
Bill Cannon, a lifelong west side resident, said gangs in his neighborhood are “highly structured, militaristic, almost corporate.”
He said groups of 30 or more young men sometimes mass at intersections, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Joseph E. Lowery boulevards. Wearing matching shirts and bandanas, they walk in a single direction as a show of force.
“They are knowledgeable about the community,” he said. “When they want to be highly visible, they are. When they want to be invisible, they are.”
Cannon, who heads the Booker T. Washington community organization, thinks residents should be similarly organized. He recently put together several neighborhood groups to form a community watch.
For residents, it doesn’t matter whether those calling themselves “Bloods” and spray-painting gang graffiti are nationally affiliated. They see them as a threat.
Pam Grier, who lives in south Atlanta near Cleveland Avenue, sees a growing gang presence in her neighborhood.
“Ride down the street, you see the red rags, you see the Mohawks; it looks like the intro to a movie,” said Grier, who sells candy and food in her apartment complex and has the ear of the young people. “We’re seeing a lot more break-ins. Doors are getting kicked in.”
‘Everybody’s problem’
Defense lawyer Mawuli Malcolm Davis, who grew up in Gangster Disciple territory in Chicago, said many Atlanta “gang bangers” with no real ties claim membership in national gangs. But being copycats doesn’t make them less dangerous, he said.
Davis said more middle-class kids were being drawn into gangs, which he partly blamed on the media-generated “thug culture.” “It is almost like a kid who is embarrassed by his privilege, trying to show he is as hard as those guys,” he said.
For instance, State Rep. Tyrone Brooks’ stepson Matthew Mitchell, a former college basketball player, is charged with murder. On Sept. 20, 2007, prosecutors say, Mitchell and five other men fired 70 shots at Christopher “Noonie” Copeland, who died from bullets that struck him, literally, from head to toe.
Mitchell’s lawyer says he had nothing to do with the shooting. Prosecutors contend it was revenge for a home invasion of Mitchell’s residence five days earlier by the International Robbing Crew, a group associated with Copeland.
Atlanta detention officer Bruce Griggs said middle-class youths are drawn to gangs for the same reasons as project kids: protection, power, money and a glorification of gang culture. “It used to be a ’hood problem,” he said. “Now it’s everybody’s problem.”
That point was driven home to Morehouse College history professor Augustine Konneh last March when he testified at a bond hearing for a star student charged with murder.
Derek Davis, 27, a former Morehouse student from an accomplished family, is accused of joining another family: Prosecutors say he participated in the Nine-Trey Bloods’ “discipline” of Cintron and is among those charged with his murder.
Konneh came to the hearing believing he knew his favored student well and that the charges would be dismissed. After all, Davis’ mother was a banker, his father was a counselor dealing with deviant behavior and his stepfather was a school board president in Texas.
After hearing the case against Davis, the professor no longer knew what to believe.
“When the prosecutor said there were other members of the gang at Atlanta University Center, that really scared me,” he said. “I left that place trembling.”
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