LOS ANGELES — Federal authorities on Thursday announced a sweeping racketeering indictment accusing a Los Angeles County street gang of a litany of crimes, including killing a sheriff’s deputy and committing hate crimes against blacks in order to rid them from the gang’s turf.
The indictment, along with several related ones, charges more than 100 members of the Varrio Hawaiian Gardens gang with murder, attempted murder, drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, extortion, kidnapping and witness intimidation.
U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O’Brien touted it as the “largest gang takedown in United States history.”
The gang investigation began in 2005 after sheriff’s Deputy Jerry Ortiz was fatally shot in Hawaiian Gardens, a gritty, largely Latino city southeast of downtown Los Angeles.
The shooter was a member of the Varrio Hawaiian Gardens gang who has since been sentenced to death.
Authorities said the gang was formed in the 1950s or early ’60s and today has more than 1,000 members spanning several generations, many of them with connections to the Mexican Mafia.
The gang started with street robberies, drug dealing and turf wars with other gangs, but it has since escalated its level of violence, authorities allege. The indictment details several alleged attacks on blacks, most of them shootings.
The gang members — with monikers such as Slasher, Shady, Diablo and Menace — boasted about being racist, referring to themselves as the Hate Gang, according to the 93-page indictment that outlines the racketeering case.
“VHG gang members have expressed a desire to rid the city of Hawaiian Gardens of all African Americans and have engaged in a systematic effort to achieve that result,” the document states.
The indictment details 476 “overt acts” that prosecutors say gang members committed as part of the alleged racketeering conspiracy between 1996 and 2009.
