Members of nationally infamous gang arrested in St. Bernard Parish

wwltv ^ | 03/08/06 | wwl

[caryatid]

Pre-Katrina gangs were all neighborhood and housing project outfits, not necessarily connected to anything bigger.

Help me out on this. I have been gone a long time. By gangs do you mean just the run of the mill hoodlums that roamed the city terrorizing every neighborhood? What about the drug dealers? Is that another story? I have long heard that they were big-time and very organized ... not just boyz from the hood at all ... Just wondering.

[caryatid]

... these guys are more likely to get into knife fights than gun fights, compared to the thugs we used to have here.

From what I have read ... it's not just knives ... they seem to favor machetes ... deadly, but easy to buy in any hardware store without raising eyebrows or the awareness of the authorities, etc.

[Gordongekko909]

The dealers operated independantly. Their distributors were connected to bigger operations, but those weren't necessarily New Orleans-based. From what I understand, most of the dope that come into New Orleans originally entered the country through either Texas or Florida. Distributors would pick up a shipment there, then run it across the Southeast, selling pieces of it to local distributors as they went, who would then pass it down the chain to street-corner dope peddlers.

The actual street dealers were, well, independant contractors. Any gangs they were protected by were neighborhood operations.

The closest thing to an umbrella "organized crime syndicate" that New Orleans had in the 20th century was the Marcello family, and they went legit a while ago. They're involved in video poker now.

Other cities have had massive, well-organized gangs; Chicago, New York, and LA come to mind pretty quickly. But the New Orleans hoods never quite managed to get their acts together to a sufficient degree to put something like that together.

[caryatid]

Perhaps they are looking for a fairly well destroyed place, thinking it will not be very organized and patrolled by LEOs yet ... to establish a base of operations. In the main, they probably do not require the level of goods and services that we ordinarily think of as "normal" ... a quiet place [virtually destroyed] where they won't attract much notice might appeal to them. On the other hand, if I had to guess I would say that St. Bernard, before Katrina, was probably 80-90% white ... not a racial gumbo like N.O., at all, and it seems that they would stick out like a sore thumb.

Welcome to the Louisiana Ping List, JDB.

[Gordongekko909]

*shrug* the cops that come into my dad's drycleaning shop say "knives." Kind of hard to sneak a machete into a bar, I imagine.

[Gordongekko909]

Definitely possible. But I don't even think that the MS 13 vatos have made this decision themselves yet.

[caryatid]

Yeah, I see what you mean ... I had just read generic descriptions of their activities in other areas in newspapers.

[Gordongekko909]

There is probably plenty of machete action going on, too. It's just that the cops I talk to probably aren't getting the calls for that stuff.

[Conservababe]

Last week, I saw a segment on Court TV Cops, about these gangs. The arresting officers found dozens of local high school rings in the car of one of this gang members.

He said the gang members stole and wore them to blend in.

[MonroeDNA]

We all know what to do when we see those tats.

[Schwaeky]

Sounds like law abiding citizens, the Minutemen, and a certain group founded by General N.B. Forrest might have common cause to rid that fair state of a new threat...