Conspiracy involving gang yields 40 arrests

Credit union lost $500,000 in scheme

By Jose Luis Jiménez Union-Tribune Staff Writer

Originally published 2:00 a.m. May 14, 2009, updated 10:32 a.m., May 14, 2009

Depositing counterfeit checks and withdrawing the cash before banks discover they are fake is a common crime that happens several times a day in San Diego County.

But having a street gang behind a conspiracy that caused a credit union to lose $500,000 could be a first in state history.

State and federal law enforcement officials made that announcement yesterday morning with the arrests of 40 people in the check-cashing scheme, including some active members of the military. Twenty more people are being sought.

“This is the first time a violent street gang has been targeted for its involvement in complex bank fraud in California,” District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis said. “It clearly shows gangs are moving from street corner drug dealing and pimping to complex fraud.”

Of the 60 suspects who have been identified, 16 are documented members of a gang that claims San Diego’s Lincoln Park neighborhood as its territory, authorities said.

Many of the defendants are not in the military but are somehow affiliated, either by working on a base or through a relative. That gave them membership to Navy Federal Credit Union, which absorbed the losses.

Three members of the Marines, one member of the Army and one member of the Navy have been identified as suspects. Two have been arrested.

During a news conference, Dumanis explained that gang members would create a fraudulent check and then have a credit union member deposit it into his or her account. The member would then travel to Barona Casino and withdraw the money before the credit union could determine that the check was counterfeit.

The checks ranged from several thousand to tens of thousands of dollars, and the account holder would receive a commission of several hundred dollars.

When Navy Federal contacted the credit union member about the fraud, the account holder would say that his or her identity had been stolen and would sign an affidavit swearing to that. The credit union would then absorb the loss.

Gang members also were indicted in a mortgage-fraud scheme last month. Dumanis noted the trend of gangs getting into more sophisticated crime and vowed to prosecute them.

The credit union fraud started in 2005 and was used to pay for luxuries such as new cars, clothing and jewelry, San Diego Police Chief William Lansdowne said. Authorities do not believe the money was used to finance more crime.

“This one was surprising to us,” Lansdowne said. “There was no financial plan in this. It was take it and use it.”

In 2008, an investigator at the credit union noticed a pattern among the transactions: Most of the people were similar ages, all of the withdrawals were made at Barona Casino and the checks looked alike, Deputy District Attorney Joan Stein said.

The credit union contacted the U.S. Secret Service, which started a 10-month investigation.

Authorities said Barona was used because the ATMs there, which are not owned by the credit union or the casino, allow much larger withdrawals.

The casino’s surveillance system played an important role in the investigation, Edwin “Thorpe” Romero, chairman of the Barona Band of Mission Indians, said in a news release.

Some account holders admitted their role in the fraud, but gave agents incomplete names or nicknames to identify the ringleaders. The agents turned to San Diego police for help, and gang-unit detectives identified the leaders, Lansdowne said.

As law enforcement officers began interviewing people in December, the fraud stopped. Authorities also believe the equipment used to make the counterfeit checks was disposed of at that time.

On Tuesday, law enforcement officials spread out around the county to make arrests. Suspects were brought to the Qualcomm Stadium parking lot for processing.

Superior Court arraignments are scheduled to begin today. Account holders will probably be charged with fraud, a felony, which carries a maximum sentence of three years in prison. Because many of them have no criminal record, they will probably be sentenced, if convicted, to probation and ordered to pay back the credit union, said Stein, the prosecutor.

The implicated sailors are believed to be account holders.

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service was involved in the investigation.

The ringleaders face maximum sentences of about 17 years in prison, Stein said.

Staff writer Dana Littlefield contributed to this report.

http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/may/14/1m14gangbank234759-conspiracy-involving-gang-yield/

Friends paint different picture of Kevin Cox, suspect in the murder of Brooklyn-born Marine

By NANCY DILLON and CORKY SIEMASZKO
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS

Updated Monday, November 10th 2008, 4:46 PM

Kevin Cox (front left) and Tryone Miller (back right) at hearing into murder of Sgt. Jan Pawel Pietrzak and his wife, Quiana.

One of the four Marines accused of brutally murdering their Brooklyn-raised sergeant and wife was described Monday by friends as “sweet” and “caring.”

They also described 20-year-old Pvt. Kevin Cox as a follower who was “very easily influenced.”

“I couldn’t see him doing anything like this on his own,” said Maurice McDavid, 20, a college football player who grew up with Cox in DeKalb, Ill. “In high school, they put him in classes with me to make sure he was staying out of trouble.”

RELATED: DA: NOBODY DESERVES DEATH LIKE THIS

Jamaine Armbruster, 19, a student at Cal State University in Northridge, Calif., said she dated Cox last year and was stunned when he was implicated in the murders of Sgt. Jan Pawel Pietrzak and his wife, Quiana.

“I’m totally shocked to find out Kevin had anything to do with something like this,” she said. “He was a sweet guy and very caring.”

Cox, who last lived in Tennessee, and three other Marines based at Camp Pendleton, Calif., were charged last week with breaking into the Pietrzak home on Oct. 15. They allegedly executed the newlyweds after torturing them and raping the bride repeatedly.

Investigators say the motive was robbery, but the victims’ families don’t believe it.

RELATED: CONFESSION IN MURDER, TORTURE OF MARINE

Pietrzak, 24, who was born in Poland and raised in Bensonhurst, and his 26-year-old wife, had been married for just two months when they were murdered.

Pvt. Emrys John, 18, was identified as the triggerman who killed the couple by shooting them in the back of their heads. “Chillin waitin 4 da killin,” was the caption under a photo he posted on his MySpace web site.

Lance Cpl. Tyrone Miller, 20, told investiagtors he bound and gagged the couple and then debated with John whether to kill them. Cops are checking whether Miller has ties to the violent Crips street gang.

Pvt. Kesuan Sykes, 21, is nicknamed “Psycho” and admitted that he “cut” off Quiana Jenkins-Pietrzak’s clothes, the court papers state.

All of the suspects say that Quiana Jenkins-Pietrzak was sexually assaulted, but each says it was the other three who did it, according to court records.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2008/11/10/2008-11-10_friends_paint_different_picture_of_kevin.html

I-Team Investigates Gangs In The Military

Response: Dept. Of Defense

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I-Team Investigates Gangs In The Military

Response: Dept. Of Defense

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10News I-Team Investigates Gangs In The Military

Lauren Reynolds, 10News I-Team Reporter

POSTED: 4:10 pm PDT October 30, 2008

UPDATED: 6:14 am PDT October 31, 2008

SAN DIEGO — They endure grueling tests of strength, are trained to kill, and pledge their absolute loyalty.”Bloods, Crips, Gangster Disciples, Vice Lords, Mara Salvatrucha, 18th street, all the big ones are in,” says Carter Smith, an Army veteran who spent 22 years in the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division.American street gangs have gone global, and increasingly, they’re in the service of Uncle Sam.”There are a lot of them out there, already in the ranks,” cautions Hunter Glass, a veteran and gang detective out of Nashville who now works as a consultant on gang behavior. The U.S. Air Force is among his clients.

Sailors, Marines, soldiers, even women, are flaunting their gang ties, while in uniform.”In the combat zone, they will support each other, but as soon as they are off the battle field, all bets are off,” says Glass.10News obtained video taken on base at Fort Bragg, which shows Bloods and Gangster Disciples on the dance floor. First they are throwing gang sings; then they throw punches.Glass spoke to the Army officer who took the video who was assaulted while taping it.”There is nothing glamorous about being a gang member, “Glass says. “It’s about money, it’s about profit.”He says gang members in the military have a sworn allegiance, not solely to the President of the United States, but to their gang set.

The initiations are brutal. 10News showed videotape of a jump-in, where gang members continuously beat a new recruit for six agonizing minutes. He has to take the beating. Once it’s over, the gangsters’ ritual includes a blessing over their newest member. Gangs in the military use the same initiation.

Carter Smith warns, “They’ll actually send people into the military to be recruiters in the military.”That’s what T.J. Leyden did while serving for 3 years as a Marine at Camp Pendleton. Reformed now, he was then a racist and a leader of a white power gang.”Everyone totally knew what I was doing,” says Leyden. “And I recruited 12 active members of the United States military to join a white supremacy group.”

It was a violent recruitment into a gang which cost Stephanie Cockrell her son, Army Sgt. Juwan Johnson.”What did I do? What should I have done? What happened? What went wrong?” she still asks herself.Juwan Johnson grew up on the tough streets of Baltimore. His mother warned him over the years to say away from the gangsters hanging out on the corner. She never thought to repeat that warning when he joined the U.S. Army.”

There are gangs here in the streets,” she says. “But in the military? I was in the military, I don’t remember a gang in the military!”She spent five years in the Army herself, and thought the experience would be a good one for her son. Sgt. Johnson spent 6 years in the Army and served 18 months in Iraq. His mom still watches the home video she took of him during a brief visit home.”Thank you, and I love you all,” he says on camera to his large extended family, during a family picnic.He had only two weeks left in the service when offers to join a gang swayed him. So he ended up in a park outside a base in Germany, where his life would end as he was “jumped in” to the Gangster Disciples. They beat him to death. Eleven soldiers and airmen took part.”And after they beat him to death, they took him back to the barracks, and they went out to clubs to dance,” exclaims Cockrell, with disbelief.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been a drain on the U.S. military, forcing relaxation of standards, “moral waivers”, to join. More service personnel have criminal records and gang ties than in years past.” My concern is when they get out,” adds Carter Smith.In the 1990’s, while working as an Army criminal intelligence officer, he was one of the first to uncover the growth of street gangs in the ranks. He says the general estimate is that about 1 percent of the U.S. Armed Forces are gang members, 13,000 to 14,000 of them, roughly the population of Solana Beach.”

They will have been trained to do lots of things from the basic support, logistics, and transportation, to the use of weapons,” he warns. According to the National Gang Intelligence Center and the Army Criminal Investigation Command, “Gang related activity in the U.S. military is increasing … posing a threat to law enforcement officials and national security.” The gang activity ranges from graffiti you can see in pictures from Iraq, to shootouts and murder much closer to home.”Crimes involving military soldiers have been on the rise, and violent crimes at that,” says Hunter Glass.In San Diego, an ex-Marine marksman, Nathanial Guillen, and active member of the Bloods, shot a rival gang member to death in La Mesa. He was found guilty of murder in 2006.In Northern California, a Camp Pendleton Marine and gang member named Andres Raya ambushed police with military tactics and a high power riffle, murdering police Sgt. Howard Stevenson. Raya was killed in the shoot out.

Those are only two examples.”They’re gang members at heart, they’re not going to be changing. It’s what they live for, what they believe,” says Glass.Officially, no branch of the service allows gangs. However, criminal courts are reducing felony charges to misdemeanors, allowing gangsters who promise to reform to join the military rather than go to prison.Glass adds, “Are they good in a fight? Yes that’s right, but when dog fighting becomes illegal, what do you do with the dogs?”

Previous Stories:

• October 30, 2008: I-Team: White Supremacists Found Online, In Military Ranks

The following is a response from an official with the Department of Defense regarding the I-Team’s Military Gangs story:The Department of Defense does not believe it has a problem with criminal gangs among its ranks. Although the Department’s statistics do not support the conclusion that gang problems in the military are pervasive or significantly on the rise, anything that negatively affects readiness or undermines military values is of concern. The Department is working closely with its criminal investigative agencies and the FBI to ensure that gang activity in the military is aggressively investigated and appropriately prosecuted and that new accessions are rigorously screened to deny entry to those who do not renounce participation in criminal gangs and activities. Coordination with the FBI is leading to efforts to better screen accessions for gang affiliation by means of better access to FBI gang databases.

http://www.10news.com/news/17852021/detail.html

Can you prevent membership in organized criminal groups if you are the SecDef?

With more than 750,000 criminal street gang members in the United States (approximately the population of Austin, TX), government officials at all levels are searching for ways to restrict the negative impact of gang-related activity on the community. Many of these attempts have been challenged in the courts, in academia, and the media, having been deemed overly broad in scope, though specifically limiting solutions have been used with some success.

H.R. 4986: National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 Section 544 – became law (Public Law 110-181), and requires the Secretary of Defense to prescribe regulations to prohibit the active participation of military personnel in street gangs.

The bill was passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President back in January, yet here we are, more than six months later, with no changes to military policy on gang membership.

It didn’t take that long to pass the USAPATRIOT Act.

Perhaps we are being more careful. Or, perhaps we are trying to see if denial works yet . . .

Gangs aren’t a new blip on the radar screen — over twelve years ago, the Secretary of the Army and the Secretary of Defense were told, “Gang-related activities appear to be more pervasive than extremist activities as defined in Army Regulation 600-20.”

This was from an investigative Task Force formed in response to an Extremist-related killing that was looking to see if there was a problem with Extremists in the Army. The task force visited 28 major Army installations in the United States, Germany, and Korea during January and February 1996. After conducting over 7,000 interviews and 17,080 written surveys, the task force concluded that there was minimal evidence of extremist-group activity in the Army . . .

They did note there was more of a “security concern” with street gangs.

They said “Yes, But . . .” when responding to the Secretary. Their response essentially was “Yes, there are a few more of those hate-mongers in the military, but there’s a related problem that you really ought to pay attention to — street gangs!”

That’s akin to inspecting a car for someone who asked you to see if the car needed belts, tires, fluids and you respond with, “Yes, we need to schedule all that, but you need to know that the tread on your front tires is dangerously low.” Or, imagine asking a private investigator to see if your spouse is visiting the racetrack and he responds with, “She bets on the horses about once a week, but she visits a hotel room with a different guy every Tuesday and Friday while you are working.”

Do you wait twelve years to process this new information?

So here we are twelve years later, Congress AND the President agreed with the Task Force’s report, and after six months . . . nothing. The NFL gets it, why not the Secretary of Defense?

What’s it going to take?

Can you prevent membership in organized criminal groups if you are the SecDef?

With more than 750,000 criminal street gang members in the United States (approximately the population of Austin, TX), government officials at all levels are searching for ways to restrict the negative impact of gang-related activity on the community. Many of these attempts have been challenged in the courts, in academia, and the media, having been deemed overly broad in scope, though specifically limiting solutions have been used with some success.

H.R. 4986: National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 Section 544 – became law (Public Law 110-181), and requires the Secretary of Defense to prescribe regulations to prohibit the active participation of military personnel in street gangs.

The bill was passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President back in January, yet here we are, more than six months later, with no changes to military policy on gang membership.

It didn’t take that long to pass the USAPATRIOT Act.

Perhaps we are being more careful. Or, perhaps we are trying to see if denial works yet . . .

Gangs aren’t a new blip on the radar screen — over twelve years ago, the Secretary of the Army and the Secretary of Defense were told, “Gang-related activities appear to be more pervasive than extremist activities as defined in Army Regulation 600-20.”

This was from an investigative Task Force formed in response to an Extremist-related killing that was looking to see if there was a problem with Extremists in the Army. The task force visited 28 major Army installations in the United States, Germany, and Korea during January and February 1996. After conducting over 7,000 interviews and 17,080 written surveys, the task force concluded that there was minimal evidence of extremist-group activity in the Army . . .

They did note there was more of a “security concern” with street gangs.

They said “Yes, But . . .” when responding to the Secretary. Their response essentially was “Yes, there are a few more of those hate-mongers in the military, but there’s a related problem that you really ought to pay attention to — street gangs!”

That’s akin to inspecting a car for someone who asked you to see if the car needed belts, tires, fluids and you respond with, “Yes, we need to schedule all that, but you need to know that the tread on your front tires is dangerously low.” Or, imagine asking a private investigator to see if your spouse is visiting the racetrack and he responds with, “She bets on the horses about once a week, but she visits a hotel room with a different guy every Tuesday and Friday while you are working.”

Do you wait twelve years to process this new information?

So here we are twelve years later, Congress AND the President agreed with the Task Force’s report, and after six months . . . nothing. The NFL gets it, why not the Secretary of Defense?

What’s it going to take?

Gangland : Basic Training 1-5

For showtimes, see the History Channel.

What do you think?

Gangland : Basic Training 1-5

For showtimes, see the History Channel.

What do you think?