Gang’s Boldness Made Santa Ana Sweep Easy : Drugs: Tapes show undercover officers swarmed by dealers. ‘They believed they could not be touched.’

From a makeshift headquarters where the walls were papered with Polaroid snapshots of suspects named “Blood,” “Sneaky” and “Shorty,” law enforcement officers carried out their assault on Orange County’s most violent gang.

Elaborate charts linked members of Santa Ana’s 6th Street gang with the sales of rock cocaine, powder cocaine and heroin. Strategically placed cameras captured the illicit transactions on videotape.

Ultimately, a carefully choreographed swarm of police, numbering more than 250, netted 117 arrests in a matter of hours.

But nothing aided law enforcement officers more than the brazen nature of their targets.

Within a short time after launching the five-month investigation, police said, their undercover officers became welcome guests and frequent customers of the gang members who thought nothing of dealing their wares in broad daylight.

“At one point,” one officer said, “there were three of them with their hands in our guy’s car trying to sell him cocaine at the same time. We didn’t have any trouble at all.

“It really wasn’t some operation where it takes months to identify these people. This was a case of a gang being very aggressive and believing that they had complete control of the neighborhood. They believed they could not be touched.”

It was that increasingly bold, and vicious, behavior--sometimes right under the noses of Orange County supervisors--that gave birth to the idea for the sweep in September, 1993.

“I’ve watched it outside my windows at night while I’ve been working,” said Supervisor William G. Steiner, whose office is on the fifth floor of the county Hall of Administration. “It was destroying our community.”

The Santa Ana Police Department had just realigned its enforcement districts and Lt. William Tegeler wound up with the 6th Street gang’s turf, a battered enclave on West 3rd Street, between Bristol and Olive streets.

“The gang had decided to be a renegade,” Tegeler said. “They didn’t care what other gangs thought. They didn’t care what anyone thought.”

Besieged by calls from terrified residents, Tegeler sought the assistance of the San Diego district attorney’s office’s gang unit, where the idea of such neighborhood purges got its start five years ago.

To ensure the investigation’s secrecy, Deputy Dist. Atty. Joseph P. Smith said, the FBI rented a building outside the city limits and converted it to a “war room” for tracking the probe.

Inside the un-air-conditioned makeshift headquarters, fans blowing stale air provided the only semblance of relief to local and federal officers who coordinated the comings and goings of undercover officers from the troubled Santa Ana neighborhood.

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The process of gang infiltration, police said, was left to veteran investigators who were able to “look like them, walk like them and talk like them.”

In some cases, Police Chief Paul M. Walters said, the gang’s street salespeople became so comfortable that they dealt dope to the same undercover officers for weeks. As the investigation progressed, the officers were approached by so many sellers that once the transactions were recorded on videotape the investigators moved on to other street peddlers.

“When they got a sense of where things were happening, (the investigators) went to those places,” one investigator close to the operation said. “The trouble was that it was happening everywhere.”

Before the start of the operation, Walters said, police intentionally turned down the “intensity” in their dealings with the gang in order to bait their “trap.”

“We were surprised at how fast things happened,” Walters said. “I think we were able to create the feeling that we weren’t on their backs and they became more confident in what they were doing and who they were dealing with.”

Lt. Tegeler rounded up support from the community. A Santa Ana car dealer lent a car for undercover operations. A Norwalk insurance agent, and friend of Tegeler’s, agreed to insure equipment used in the investigation. Tegeler even persuaded two Orange County bank managers to cut property owners a break on their mortgages until the neighborhood could be made safe for renters.

“The property owners told us they would rent to people and the gang members would come and personally threaten them,” Tegeler said. “They called them ‘midnight movers’ because they’d get scared and move out in the middle of the night.”

Walters said investigators also used vacant neighborhood homes for surveillance or other activities.

Two FBI agents and Jim Donckels, the supervising agent of the Santa Ana office, signed on at the beginning when the project was found to fit perfectly into the FBI’s “Safe Streets” program, which allots funds for the bureau to assist local police agencies in fighting violent crime.

“We worked pretty much in eight-hour shifts,” Smith said. “We adjusted our work hours to the busiest times of the day (for the gang). Some days we were out there real late at night. Other times we were out there in the morning.”

For two Santa Ana patrol officers, Joe Garbutt and John Hibbison, the project was their baptism in a major undercover operation.

“It basically took over their lives,” Tegeler said. “They worked seven days a week.”

As time went by, gang members not only sold drugs to undercover officers, but they also boasted of other crimes in which they or related gangs were involved.

“We got lots of information that way,” Smith said. “By their boasting, they exposed others to criminal liability. They (undercover officers) were able to develop a certain persona.”

On some occasions, the undercover officers worked as sellers and were able to bust a number of other buyers who ranged from hard-core addicts to businessmen in fancy cars.

“I think so far there have been about 20 (buyers arrested),” Tegeler said.

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Another invaluable tool in the operation was the computerized identification system of more than 18,000 known gang members operating in Orange County.

The system, called GREAT and based in the Orange County district attorney’s office, catalogues gang members by name, physical description and other details.

In the Santa Ana case, Walters said, officers frequently tapped into the system, sometimes with barely more than a physical description, tattoo or a nickname, and the system was able to produce instant identifications and, in some cases, digital color photographs.

“That system saved us thousands of hours of work,” Walters said. “We used it extensively in this case.”

Every drug buy and friendly conversation only seemed to enhance the gang’s comfort level and erase any suspicion that officers had infiltrated the streets. And not once in five months were officers ever in danger of having their cover blown, police said.

The closest call came, Smith said, when a nosy postal worker began investigating why no mail had ever been delivered to the busy building that authorities were using as their remote headquarters.

“When the postal worker began investigating, we had to assure her that we were the good guys,” the prosecutor said.

Another layer of secrecy was added with the impaneling of a special grand jury Aug. 1. The first of its kind in Orange County, the 19-member jury was created exclusively to consider evidence in the case and return sealed indictments to reduce chances of suspects fleeing before their arrest.

Jean A. Moore, forewoman of the jury, said Thursday that members were “astounded by how much was going on. We were all pretty amazed at how blatant it was.” Over a 16-day period, prosecutors presented videotapes of drug and gun sales and eyewitness accounts implicating 122 suspects, she said. All were indicted.

Moore said the racially mixed jury was led to believe they also would be hearing a homicide case linked to this investigation, but were told prosecutors were having problems persuading witnesses to testify.

In one videotape, an undercover investigator was in the process of making a buy when another buyer walked into the middle, snatched the drugs and dropped some money into the seller’s hand, Moore said. In other tapes, crowds of sellers swarmed the car of an investigator offering rock cocaine and heroin.

“He’d just pick one and say ‘I only have $20’ or ‘I already said I’d buy from this guy,’ ” said Moore, 51, a Huntington Beach telecommunications analyst.

And if the seller didn’t have the drugs the undercover agents asked for, Moore said, the seller would “jump in the car and they’d drive over somewhere else and get it.”

Moore said many of the sellers appeared to be under the influence of drugs and asked for portions of the drugs as partial payment. And there were sad moments, Moore said, “especially when we saw a 10-year-old and a 12-year-old on the streets dealing drugs.”

Moore said one of the officers in the operation had gotten to know one of the children through the investigation.

“He was very upset. He wanted to make sure we understood they did not want to prosecute him but to save him from that being their way of life.”

Robert Butcher, principal of Willard Intermediate School, was one of the witnesses called before the secret panel.

Butcher said his testimony was used to establish that school was in session or children were on the campus when some suspects were dealing drugs. The information could add three to five years in prison to the sentences of 25 people arrested and charged with selling drugs within 1,000 feet of five local schools, including Willard.

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“The gangs, especially the violence, was getting to people in the neighborhood,” Butcher said. “At school, I know we are constantly on the lookout for trouble.”

A measure of the task force’s rabid adherence to secrecy came after Wednesday’s mass arrests when some suspects expressed surprise that they had shared their turf with police for the past five months.

“They were all surprised,” Tegeler said. “They didn’t have any idea we were there.”

Perhaps the most dramatic act in the covert operation came Wednesday when officers from eight separate law enforcement agencies gathered in the pre-dawn hours and fanned out across the county to net 117 suspects out of 130 who were indicted by the secret grand jury.

Thursday, the arrests slowed to a trickle and only a handful of additional suspects had been picked up by late afternoon. Police arrested one of them who was spotted pedaling his bike down a Santa Ana street as officers were on their way to a lunch break.

Another, who had moved from the neighborhood to Tustin, actually phoned police to inform them of his whereabouts and ask where he should surrender.

“He heard we were looking for him,” Walters said. “I think it’s the first time it has ever happened. But we’ll take it.”

It remains to be seen if the massive drug sweep will have a lasting impact on the West 3rd Street neighborhood. Local authorities were guided by the San Diego district attorney’s office, which began conducting such neighborhood purges five years ago.

Since that time, cities such as Austin, Tex., Seattle, Oakland, Pittsburgh and Riverside have used the San Diego model, which includes the strategy of secretly impaneling a second or alternate grand jury, while the primary grand jury goes about its usual business.

“The idea is to target certain individuals you know are causing certain major crimes, problems in the community,” said Keith Burt, chief of San Diego office’s gang prosecution unit.

“You find the Achilles’ heel, in this case drugs, and you use it to remove the core of criminality. The neighborhood then has some breathing room (and) the Boy Scouts, schools, churches and businesses have a chance to fight back, to retake their area.”

In most cases the results have been mixed. The sweeps allow cities to put away suspects on drug charges who are suspected of committing other violent crimes. The subsequent felony convictions add crucial “strikes” to career criminals who may be nearing the threshold for mandatory life prison sentences. But many of those arrested are back on the streets in less than a year.

Meanwhile, residents are pressured to restore their communities before the criminals come home.

“These projects are good for certain kinds of things,” Burt said. “They are not the panacea.”

Tegeler agrees. “We have to empower that community. We can’t put a police officer on the corner forever.”