Gangs Finding New Turf

Anthony, a brawny Sacramento teenager who hangs with the Nortenos street gang, was casually surfing the Web one day and was stunned when he stumbled on a smattering of home pages posted by members of the Sureno gang, the Nortenos’ sworn and sometimes bloody rival.

It became a matter of pride for Anthony, an 18-year-old high school graduate, to learn enough about building a Web site to represent his gang online.

“NORTENOS!” blares his SacTown Gangstas Web site, decorated with pictures of a modified United Farm Workers logo, a gleaming red Impala, an automatic pistol, two pit bull terriers and a cheery Web button inviting visitors to “e-mail me.”

“I’m doing it for all the Nortenos that are uneducated on the computer,” said Anthony, who declined to give his last name because he fears reprisals from police. “They live through me.”

Real-world street gang turf wars have spread to cyberspace. The result has been a host of unexpected consequences for law enforcement, gang members and even corporate advertisers, who have found themselves unwitting sponsors.

“There are literally thousands of gang-related Web sites,” said Chuck Zeglin, a Los Angeles police detective who monitors online gang activity. “I’ve been dealing with gangs for 17 years, and two years ago we never would have expected any type of gang member to be sophisticated enough to get on the Internet.”

“Yeah, gangbangers do know how to use a computer,” replied Mr. Bandit, an 18-year-old Web master from the Mid City Stoners 13 gang in Los Angeles who declined to give his real name. “Gangbangers do got talents.”

The emergence of gang sites is largely a phenomenon of the last year, driven by plummeting computer prices, easy Internet access and the proliferation of companies offering free space on the Web.

Internet search engines indicate there are thousands of gang-themed Web sites, although experts say a significant portion of them are run by basically strait-laced kids who simply think the gang lifestyle is cool. Dozens of the most appealing Web addresses--including https://www.bloods.com, https://www.crips.com, and https://www.latinkings.com--belong to a self-described “former slum lord” in the Missouri Ozarks who is crusading to steer at-risk youths away from gang life.

The gang sites are part high school yearbook, part church eulogy for departed friends and part art gallery of airbrushed cars, naked women and various semiautomatic weapons. Images of sign-flashing gang members and prized weapons collections adorn the sites like the snapshots of needlepoint patterns and family pets on other Web sites.

Although there are no street corners or neighborhoods to fight over, the virtual turf of the online world has become just as precious as any real-world block for young gang members who have grown up with the Internet.

The gangs have transformed their tiny corners of the Internet into a kind of infinite electronic swath of freeway overpasses and railroad trestles waiting to be marked by the techno version of spray-painted gang tags.

“We’re taking over your [neighborhoods] and you can’t do [anything] about it,” reads a message posted by a Sureno on the Land of the Nortenos site. “What’s up with those fools thinking they’re hard with those cap guns, what are we supposed to be, scared?”

The Nortenos fired back with a torrent of expletives. “The big NORTE will always put it down on you punk RATS. You can’t fade OR EVEN HANG WITH THE PURO NORTH SIDE MAFIA!”

On rare occasions, gang members escalate the conflict by hacking into each other’s sites. One of the victims was a Surena with the moniker “Mz. Smiley.”

“Well due to some haters who . . . hacked into mah page and well my site is gonna be down,” is all her site says now.

But in a realm where no real blood has ever been spilled, the gang sites also show a different side of street life often obscured in the harsh bluster of crime reports and gangsta rap. Here, young artists recount the pain of first love. They sing the praises of ancient Chevrolets and pit bulls amid pages adorned with kewpie-like couples exchanging flowers.

On Anthony’s site, one poet wrote:

No one could ever hurt me quite as much as you,

When I said I loved, every word I spoke was true.

Now I’m feeling brokedown, cold and alone . . . not

Knowing what to do, left only with memories.

“A lot of people, they think that gang members are bad, but not all of them are,” said Edwin, a Sureno with a Web site named Puro Brown Pride, which has links to dozens of drawings reflecting both the “madness and the sadness” of gang life.

In many ways, the gang sites are a sign of the crumbling digital divide. Already, more than 50% of American homes have computers. For the young, access is even easier, given the number of computers in schools, libraries and workplaces. The Internet has become as natural a part of life for young gang members as television, cars and beepers were to an earlier generation.

So far, most of the gangs’ online activity is perfectly legal. It isn’t against the law to belong to a gang, nor is it illegal to discuss one’s gang affiliations on the Net.

But the quick spread of gang sites has put law enforcement on alert. The Drug Enforcement Administration is putting together a unit focused on online gang activity.

“They’re just testing the waters now, but it’s inevitable” that gangs will begin selling drugs using the Internet, Zeglin said.

The most-organized criminal groups already are conducting some of their business on the Internet, according to Barry Glick, a psychologist who is on the Gang Advisory Committee for the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention.

Although Glick does not believe that they sell drugs directly over the Net, they have set up “systems for drug distribution, and they use the Internet and chat rooms for that,” he said.

Law enforcement has little hard evidence of such activities because the gangs’ methods are difficult to unravel. They can use innocuous keywords to refer to illicit goods and encrypt messages using programs available to any consumer. Experts are certain they employ “the same security functions you would have if you wanted to get into a Smith Barney account,” Glick said.

Far more common, though, are the often crude home pages for neighborhood gangs. Their primary purpose is to create a sense of community among allies.

Laura Alviso, a 24-year-old junior studying creative writing at Eastern Washington University in Cheney, Wash., said she created her Web site for a “set” of Surenos known as Florencias. She wanted the site to a be a tribute to her boyfriend, a Florencia who is serving time on a robbery conviction at Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.

“There’s a whole underground of these Web sites,” she said. “Internet Web sites have become the place. It’s like graffiti on the wall; there’s graffiti on the Internet.”

Alviso grew up among gang members in Washington’s Yakima Valley, but she said she didn’t respect the “cholos” until she realized “they do more than just hang around in the neighborhood and drink.” Though she isn’t a member herself, she has come to identify with gang culture and says her Florencia site is a matter of pride and brotherhood that transcends street rivalries.

She once complimented a gang Web master by the name of Scarface on the artistry of his home page for a branch of the rival 18th Street gang.

“I want to model my site after Scarface’s,” she said.

But old rivalries die hard. Alviso received a stinging message back from him: “Don’t you get it? Florencias don’t get along with 18th Streeters.”

Although there has been no bloodshed over this online strife, the gang sites have spawned some unexpected conflicts, including an embarrassing one with corporate America.

Gang members typically make their cyberhomes on sites operated by companies such as Angelfire, Homestead and Express Page, which offer free Web space and place ads on the sites to make money.

That arrangement has led several blue-chip firms to become unwitting financial sponsors of sites such as Crips.com, Sacramento Almighty Latin Kings Nation and others. Microsoft, Dell Computer and Best Buy have found their banner ads splashed across gang sites, along with such unlikely firms as ModernBride.com and Silicon Investor.

Companies such as Silicon Investor rely on marketing firms to distribute their ads around the Internet. Advertisers usually specify certain criteria to ensure that their ads reach their target audience, but it isn’t a foolproof system.

“This doesn’t sound like our typical Silicon Investor customer,” quipped spokesman Steve Stratz upon learning that ads for the stock market Web site were placed atop a page for a Latin Kings gang. “I guess we’re at least reaching a tech-savvy gang member.”

Network Solutions, the company that manages the Internet’s critical naming system, was so upset to learn that one of its ads had appeared on the site of a San Diego-based member of the Sureno gang that it had the site shut down.

But for the most part, gang sites are still only an obscure corner of the Web. The most notorious names in all of the gang world already have been taken--by a middle-age father of two in rural Cassville, Mo.

Dirk Lemmons isn’t in any gang, but his roster of Web sites includes Crips.com, Bloods.com, Sureno.com, 18thSt.com and LatinKings.com. Not content with just a full complement of street gangs, Lemmons also owns Russian-Mafia.com, Mexicanmafia.com, Italian-Mafia.com and even Mobmusic.com.

Lemmons, 43, spent the early part of his career in a depressed area of St. Louis, where he said he roamed the streets with “a gun shoved down my waistband and a gun in my ankle.” He sold security equipment such as iron window bars and managed apartment buildings in the highest-crime, most drug-infested areas of St. Louis.

All around him, he saw “very bright and intelligent kids that society had earmarked as worthless,” he said. “I thought that at their age, they had the ability to turn their lives around.”

So in 1998, he began building a series of gang intervention sites. Part of his strategy was to seize the most notorious names on the Web so they would not fall into the wrong hands.

“All we ask is that you [gang members] use this site as a place to get away from all the violence,” reads a message on the Crips.com site.

After luring visitors, the site steers them to a “reality check” section that includes gruesome photos of murdered gang members, newspaper stories about victims of gang violence and e-mail from former gangbangers, including this poem:

Little man all dressed in red.

Where you think you going with that flag on your head?

Came from a good mother why make her cry?

Leave this house and you’ll surly [sic] die.

Just seen little man all dressed in blue.

He looks like he wants revenge for something that doesn’t even involve you.

The Internet already has begun to swing Anthony, the Sacramento Web master, away from the streets. He devotes at least four hours a day to the SacTown Gangsta site, and now he doesn’t have as much time to hang out with his friends.

Though he insists he is supporting himself just fine by selling CDs and other merchandise, he has begun to contemplate a real career in computer graphics. But the edginess in his voice makes it clear that he is worlds away from the dot-com life that lured so many talented young people to nearby Silicon Valley.

The messages left for him by 700 people who have visited his Web sites underscore the difference between his piece of cyberturf and the millions of more routine Internet outposts.

“Some people give me love,” he said, “and some people say they want to kill me and find out where I live.”