Aurora police Lt. Jim Welton summed up perfectly the largest gang bust in metro Denver’s history.
“It was a really good day for our community and a really bad day for gangsters,” Welton said of the 18-month probe that ended last week with the arrest of 49 members and business partners of the Rollin’ 30s Crips and the Tre Tre Crips.
Welton directs the Metro Gang Task Force. He was spot on. The Rollin’ 30s and Tre Tres are predatory scum who make money selling drugs and guns. They are murderous merchants of misery. If you need a measure of how bad these actors are in comparison to your run-of-the-mill gang bangers, consider this: U.S. Attorney Troy Eid said the 450 cops who raided locations Thursday didn’t just recover assault rifles and semiautomatic pistols.
They also found hand grenades.
The federal, state and local law enforcement agencies that teamed up to jail what the cops call “the worst of the worst” deserve a huge shout-out.
As Denver Police Chief Gerry Whitman said when the arrests were announced: “It takes a lot of people, and it takes a lot of money.”
What’s left to determine is the return on investment. If, as the rumor mill suggests, Broncos cornerback Darrent Williams was killed by a Tre Tre Crip after a confrontation at a downtown nightclub, this sweep offers great potential to break the case on one of Denver’s most high-profile unsolved murders.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathee Tafoya said every gun seized will be screened against open cases. Tafoya and Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey also hope to press prisoners for leads.
The investigation continues. Eid said he favors “the Al Capone approach,” referring to the violent Chicago mobster whose prison term came not for murder, but tax evasion. You charge people with what you can in order to get them off the street, said Eid. Then, you work to build as big a case as you can against them.
It’s a good philosophy. But it works on only one side of the problem. Even if every one of those arrested Thursday never sees another day of freedom, even if the people charged but not yet in custody can be found, the dent made by this unprecedented effort came in the supply side.
The demand for illegal drugs and weapons continues.
Eid is relying on “the signal this sends to other gangs. We can do this over and over again. And we will.”
That’s the wild card in every operation of this scope. What the cops see as a deterrent, gangsters might see as an opportunity.
“You go for the most violent, and this (group) is different in terms of the kind of violence,” Eid said. “So if you can decapitate that, you send a signal to the ones who are not quite as crazed as this group is.”
Sadly, it might have as much to do with potential profits as craziness.
“Not everyone was taken off today,” DA Morrissey acknowledged after Thursday’s news conference. “That’s something you have to watch. A part of this is that there is a demand. And there are people that will fill the void. Why we did this on the grand scale is we want to try to contain it. Then, when they try to fill the void, they’re not nearly as organized or as complex.”
Just as the bust was very bad news for gangsters, Morrissey’s reasoning was sound. But the wads of cash seized in raids and displayed in evidence photographs behind him told a parallel tale. That story is about the need for much greater investments in drug-abuse prevention, gang alternative programs and family planning. It is about money and manpower spent to make schools that work.
In addition to jailing the worst of the worst, the risk-rewards ratio must change on both sides of the equation.
The Rollin’ 30s and Tre Tres bust produced $1.65 million in contraband cash, according to law enforcement officials. That’s still a whopping lot of incentive for young people who think their professional alternatives are welfare, day labor or flipping burgers at Mickey D’s.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 303-954-1771, jspencer@denverpost.com or blogs.denverpost.com/spencer.
