Cardinal’s Slaying Had Ties to San Diego Barrio : Crime: Deadly shootout uncovers unprecedented alliance between Mexican drug lords and a U.S. gang.

SAN DIEGO —  Spooky, Puma, Popeye: the homeboys of the Calle Treinta gang earned their monikers in the old San Diego barrio of Logan Heights, a working-class enclave hemmed in by freeways, docks and a warehouse wasteland.

Stealing cars, dealing PCP, dueling for control of narrow streets, they established themselves as a fierce but unremarkable Latino street gang. That was until about two years ago, when the gangsters who hung out at the park on 30th Street underwent a chilling metamorphosis.

Recruited by a Mexican drug cartel, they plunged into an even more ruthless world south of the border, authorities say: They became traveling hired guns, international hit men sporting AK-47s and grenade launchers.

In May, Tijuana’s Arellano drug lords dispatched an assassination team of about a dozen Logan Heights gangsters to Guadalajara to kill a rival narcotics boss, with the promise of a $30,000 bounty to whoever fired the fatal shot. In a crime that has convulsed Mexico, they instead killed a Roman Catholic cardinal during a chaotic airport shootout, police say.

Six suspected San Diego gang members have been arrested. Mexican police, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies are working around the clock to locate more than a dozen fugitives and determine the extent of the unprecedented alliance between Mexican drug mafias and the U.S. gang members.

“This is the first time we actually have had hard evidence that a Hispanic street gang was recruited by a drug cartel to act as bodyguards, guard safehouses and carry out killings,” said William J. Esposito, special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Diego office. He added: “It makes apprehension and prosecution difficult when you get people running across borders.”

Lured by the money and the action, as many as 30 Logan Heights gang members served as soldiers in a swaggering entourage of the Arellanos, four flamboyant brothers from the state of Sinaloa who ran drug trafficking in northwest Mexico, according to U.S. federal officials.

“People get a picture of gangs very much located in pockets within a city,” said Julius Beretta, special agent in charge of the DEA in San Diego. “This gives a whole new implication to gangs in America. This gang is international now.”

Logan Heights is known for more than crime and poverty: It has cultivated innovative youth programs, a renowned public health center and bastions of small-business prosperity.

The towering Coronado Bay Bridge dominates the largely industrial landscape of the Mexican-American enclave of barred little stores and houses. The turf ruled by Calle Treinta (30th Street) centers on Memorial Park, near a tight corridor where dealers and gaunt, crack-addicted prostitutes pose and stagger. Defaced traffic signs pledge allegiance to the gang: “Can’t STOP 30.”

Police, counselors, friends and educators knew of the gang members’ capacity for violence but express disbelief at the revelation of their ties to Mexican drug lords.

“Usually they are feuding for geographic reasons, for real or imagined conflicts,” said Lt. Adolfo Gonzalez of the San Diego Police Department’s gang unit. “They shoot to kill for their barrio, not so much for dope or money.”

Those arrested or implicated are as young as 17. “Puma”--an 18-year-old named Juan-Enrique Vazcones--surrendered to Mexican police in Tijuana about a week after the shooting, according to U. S. officials. In the neighborhood, Puma is described as a tall, thin, high school dropout from an impoverished immigrant family who was not necessarily beyond redemption.

“He was an OK kid,” said a longtime neighbor. “But I knew he was not going in the right way. I used to tell him ‘What’s up, lowlife? What’s up, hoodlum?’ ”

Anita Morgan, a counselor who tried to get Vazcones to go back to school, described him as being “lost” and “easily lured by money.” But she recalled how Vazcones, hobbling on crutches after being wounded by a drive-by shotgun blast at the park, worked last year at the local Boys Club in a summer job. That image is hard to reconcile with the alleged desperado who, according to Mexican authorities, admits firing his pistol at rivals at the Guadalajara airport.

“If he was involved, how could he be involved in something so big?” Morgan said. “I can’t see him being there.”

Moreover, the slaying of a Mexican clergyman strikes a deep cultural nerve in Logan Heights. Father Richard Brown, for 25 years the priest of the picturesque Our Lady of Guadalupe Church by Interstate 5, said he was shaken at the news.

“I know a lot of gang members and they are always respectful to me,” he said. “No matter how far a Mexican boy or girl will go, they have a great respect for the priesthood. . . . Just because he’s a gang member doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a soul.”

Older, hardened neighborhood veterans served as the nexus to the Tijuana cartel--men like 32-year-old Alfredo Araujo, known as Popeye, an alleged organizer of the fateful Guadalajara expedition.

Araujo’s past paints a history of the Calle Treinta gang during the 1980s, according to court records and authorities. His first arrest as an adult, according to records, came 10 years ago for a brawl in which he took on 14 adversaries and left one with 10 stitches in the head. A lawyer appealed for leniency, describing Araujo, a U. S. citizen, as an upholstery worker and city college student.

But records show Araujo returning repeatedly to jail: for carrying a dagger, associating with gang members, violating probation, using and dealing PCP, carrying a false ID. He was at the thick of the war with hated neighbors such as Barrio Sherman and Shelltown; he witnessed at least two homeboys killed in shootings near his house across from Memorial Park, according to records and police.

Police describe the gang as one of the most dangerous and active in the city.

“They are the worst gang in San Diego,” Officer David Contreras said. “The most violent.”

But in the past, the gangsters strayed from their turf only as far as Compton, to purchase PCP, which they dealt in small quantities, police said.

Like other Latino gang members, they generally regarded Tijuana as a place to carouse, especially Avenue Revolucion, the garish tourist strip. Except for occasional skirmishes when rivals crossed paths at discos, a healthy fear of hard-nosed Mexican police kept them out of trouble south of the border.

That began to change about two years ago. Authorities say a legendary, tough ex-convict known as “Charlie,” a veterano in his 30s who moved back and forth across the border frequently, became a lieutenant of the Arellanos.

Ordered to recruit gunmen, Charlie returned to the Logan Heights neighborhood. He and Araujo sought out younger homeboys, police say. The qualifications were apparently basic.

“They are shooters,” said San Diego’s Lt. Gonzalez. “They are not afraid to pull a trigger.”

“Spooky” was typical, authorities say. Described as an angry 24-year-old, Ramon Torrres Mendez had served time for drug sales, weapons violations and a 1992 assault in which he fired at a man trying to stop gang members from stealing his car at a beach, according to records.

Those who ended up on the Arellano payroll came mostly from Calle Treinta, although a few belonged to other Logan Heights gangs. They received weekly retainers of up to $1,000 and special training with an arsenal of AK-47s (popular assault rifles in Mexico known as “goat horns” because of the curved ammunition clips), grenade launchers and other military hardware. Bonuses for specific jobs ranged into the thousands of dollars.

Since early 1992, an unprecedented wave of drug-related shootings has flared on both sides of the border as the Arellanos warred with rival factions. San Diego gangsters are suspected in numerous killings, according to law enforcement officials, including drive-by murders in Tijuana in which victims were sprayed from passing cars; the torture-slayings of six Sinaloan traffickers in Tijuana last year, and the recent shooting in a San Diego alley of a Logan gang member for an unknown transgression against the cartel.

Arellano mercenaries also traveled throughout Mexico on contract hits, investigators said. Rumors even link them to the April slaying of Rafael Aguilar Guajardo, a Juarez-based kingpin who was on vacation in Cancun when six assailants with automatic rifles cut him down, according to a law enforcement source. The fusillade also killed a woman tourist from Illinois standing next to Aguilar.

The San Diego gangsters gained enough status to serve as personal bodyguards for cartel leaders.

“When the Arellanos traveled throughout Mexico, from six to 10 guys always accompanied them,” a law enforcement official said.

Corrupt cops and rich Mexican youths, known as “Juniors,” rounded out the entourage. The homeboys hung out at the Arellanos’ ranch on the outskirts of Tijuana, a palace of hoodlum-chic with a private menagerie and billiard tables. Parties filled the night with Sinaloan cowboy music and automatic weapons fire, according to neighbors.

Back in the barrio, residents began to hear rumors and noticed that gangsters disappeared for weeks at a time. Popeye Araujo was among those who relocated to Tijuana, authorities say. Vazcones was tooling around in a new car, living it up.

“He was going to Puerto Vallarta, Cancun, Mazatlan,” a neighbor said. “He had his little cellular phone, a pager, people with nice cars coming over. I thought, ‘This guy is getting into it big time.’ ”

Although the cartel’s free-flowing bankroll neutralized Mexican law enforcement, the forces of rival Mexican drug lord Joaquin (Chapo) Guzman represented a constant danger. A photo of Guzman adorned the wall of the bodyguards’ crash pad in Colonia Chapultepec, a fashionable Tijuana neighborhood. “Don’t forget this face,” the homeboys were told.

One suspected gang member, Juan-Carlos Mendoza Castillo, told police that Araujo hired him in March at a disco on Avenue Revolucion. On May 18, Charlie and Araujo organized a trip. As they passed out plane tickets at the Tijuana airport, Vazcones said “they were going to Guadalajara to kill Chapo,” according to Mendoza, a 21-year-old illegal immigrant whom DEA agents arrested in San Diego this month and returned to Mexico.

Ramon Arellano, 27, led as many as 14 gunmen on the trip, mostly confirmed or suspected Logan Heights gang members inspired by the bounty on Guzman’s head, according to U.S. officials. But after stalking Guzman without success for several days, the hit team went to the airport to catch a Tijuana flight on the afternoon of May 24.

The subsequent events remain shrouded in confusion and conspiracy theories. Statements to police by those arrested support the official version: that Arellano and Guzman forces ran into each other by chance at the airport and drew guns.

According to Mexican press accounts, Vazcones said he was tending to a drunk companion in the terminal when he heard shots outside, saw a man he thought was Guzman and fired his pistol at him. Torres also told investigators that he shot at Guzman, who was accompanied by armed escorts wearing federal police badges. Charlie and a man known as Guero, also believed to be a Logan Heights gang member, ran out to the parking lot firing automatic weapons, Mendoza said.

Simultaneously, authorities say, Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo was arriving at the airport to meet an emissary from the Vatican. As the cardinal emerged from his car, a gunman mowed him down with a point-blank volley, according to authorities and Mexican press accounts.

At least eight of the Arellano contingent escaped with the help of airport officials in Guadalajara and Tijuana. Upon returning to Tijuana, Mendoza told police, he learned from another henchman that Guero had mistakenly shot the cardinal.

Conflicting reports cause many Mexicans to question how the cardinal, clad in his clerical collar and black clothes, could have been mistaken for Guzman, who survived the fray but was later captured in Guatemala.

Nonetheless, some U.S. law enforcement officials can envision the suspects making such an error.

“You aren’t talking about a military strike force; you’re talking about a bunch of gangsters,” an official said.

One man, Jesus Alberto Bayardo Robles, was arrested falling-down drunk in Guadalajara the night of the shooting, according to Mexican authorities. Vazcones and Torres surrendered in Tijuana after the Arellanos promised handsome compensation for their families if the two took the heat, according to officials.

And police in the San Diego area arrested two more suspects in the shooting last week--Mexican nationals affiliated with Calle Treinta. They are being held on immigration-related charges, officials said.

In a sign of the unusual cooperation produced by Mexico’s current crackdown on drug traffickers, a team of FBI agents flew to Guadalajara last month to interview suspects, according to officials. Investigators from several U.S. agencies continue trying to identify and hunt down more than a dozen fugitives, including the Arellanos and the gunman alleged to have shot the cardinal.

Despite the tragedy of Guadalajara, some younger gang members apparently have taken a perverse pride in the notoriety. A Logan Heights teen-ager approached recently by a police officer threw a gang sign and bragged that, among all the gangs in the city, the Mexican cartel had chosen his homeboys as their hired guns.

“If the mafia needs us,” he said, “we’re here.”