2006 .. FBI says U.S. criminal gangs are using military to spread their reach
By Seth Robson Stars and Stripes Published: December 7, 2006
GRAFENWÖHR, Germany — U.S. criminal gangs have gained a foothold in the U.S. military and are using overseas deployments to spread tentacles around the globe, according to the FBI.
FBI gang investigator Jennifer Simon said in an e-mail to Stars and Stripes this week that gang members have been documented on or near U.S. military bases in Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea and Iraq.
“It’s no secret that gang members are prevalent in the armed forces, including internationally,” Simon said, adding that the FBI is preparing to release a report on gangs in the military.
Among the cases:
¶ In Iraq, armored vehicles, concrete barricades and bathroom walls have served as canvasses for spray-painted gang art. At Camp Cedar II, about 185 miles southeast of Baghdad, a guard shack was recently defaced with “GDN” for Gangster Disciple Nation, along with the gang’s six-pointed star and the word “Chitown,” according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
¶ In Germany, a soldier is being prosecuted this week for the murder of Sgt. Juwan Johnson, beaten to death on July 4, 2005, allegedly during a Gangster Disciple initiation in Kaiserslautern.
¶ In September, Department of Defense Dependents Schools in Europe warned teachers and parents to watch out for signs of gang activity, including the deadly MS-13 gang. At the time, DODDS-Europe public affairs officer David Ruderman said there had been two incidents in the past 18 months that involved students fighting, wearing gang colors or claiming to be members of gangs. In one of the incidents, a student’s family member may have been a gang member, he said.
¶ Earlier this year, Kadena Air Base on Okinawa established a joint service task force to investigate gang-related activity involving high school teens linked through the Web site MySpace.com.
Last year, the U.S. Army conducted 11 felony investigations into gang activity, one of those being the death of Johnson, said Christopher Grey, a spokesman for the Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) in Virginia. Three of the incidents, including the Johnson case, took place in Europe, Grey said.
“We investigate all credible reports of gang activity,” Grey said, adding that CID has programs to combat gang activity in the Army.
Soldiers are reluctant to talk openly about gang problems. However, Spc. Bautista Kylock, 21, of the 2nd Cavalry (Stryker) Regiment in Vilseck, Germany, said last week that there are gang members within his unit.
Kylock blamed recent violence around Vilseck on soldiers affiliated with the Crips and Bloods street gangs.
Scott Barfield, a former Defense Department gang detective at 2nd Cav’s last duty station, Fort Lewis, Wash., told the Sun-Times earlier this year that he had identified more than 300 soldiers at the base as gang members.
“I think that’s the tip of the iceberg,” he said.
However, Vilseck Provost Marshal Maj. Robert Ray said there is not a big gang problem in Vilseck and he has no information on gang members within 2nd Cav.
“The military comes from all walks of lives, from rich to poor, and with that comes the ‘society,’” Ray said. “Are there members of the military that belong to gangs? No doubt about it. But the military is not rampant with gang members.
“The military chain of commands do not tolerate things like that and do their best to weed out problems,” he said.
There are no official statistics on gang membership in the military, but some experts have estimated that 1 percent to 2 percent of the U.S. military are gang members, Simon said. That compares with just 0.02 percent of the U.S. population believed to be gang members, she wrote.
“Gang membership in the U.S. armed forces is disproportional to the U.S. population,” she added.
Jim Kouri, vice president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, wrote recently that, in addition to the Gangster Disciples, other Chicago gangs such as the Latin Kings and Vice Lords have infiltrated the military along with neo-Nazi groups.
Although there are no numbers to back it up, Simon believes gang member presence in the U.S. military is increasing.
“The U.S. Army has reported an increase in gang-related activity in the military, although their numbers are low,” she said.
Gang-related activity in the military is highly underreported, and the Army is the only branch of the military that collects gang-related statistics, she wrote.
“It’s often in the military’s best interest to keep these incidents quiet, given low recruitment numbers and recent negative publicity. The relaxation of recruiting standards, recruiter misconduct and the military’s lack of enforcement (gang membership is not prohibited in the Army) have compounded the problem and allowed gang member presence in the military to proliferate,” Simon said.
Does the FBI Know What a Gang Sign Is? By Max Fisher
Oct 27 2011, 3:45 PM ET 11
The Bureau's report on gang members infiltrating the military illustrates its case with less than damning evidence ....................................... ....................................... Page 37 of the FBI's National Gang Threat Assessment
The FBI's annual National Gang Threat Assessment, an in-depth study of U.S. criminal gangs and their role in society, makes an unusual claim this year. Gangs, it says, are infiltrating the U.S. military, expanding their territory abroad and using military training in gang warfare at home. It sounds scary, but is it as bad as it sounds?
The first hints that this might not be quite as big of a danger as the FBI might think are the two photos that the reports presents as illustrations of the problem. The first of the two photos, above, appears to show nothing more than an unidentified black soldier making a 'W' sign with his hand. (Or it might be an 'E.') That might have been a gang sign back in 1992 during the East Coast-West Coast rap wars, but ever since Tupac died it's become so common among bourgeois college kids that the trend was documented in a popular 2006 YouTube video called "White Chicks and Gang Signs." .. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKTDRqQtPO8 .. [insert: video from link]
The FBI is probably not going to issue a report on criminal gangs infiltrating Kappa Kappa Gamma, of course, but it's worth considering what assumptions informed the decision that the above photo would be appropriate for this report.
The FBI's other photographic demonstration, shown
right, documents some English-language graffiti on an Iraqi truck, probably left by an American servicemember. The Hell's Angels are a real gang, of course, but they're so omnipresent in American pop culture that it seems like a bit of a leap to assume that any reference to them is evidence of a gang presence.
Despite these somewhat cringe-inducing photos, the FBI is a serious organization and it's worth looking more closely at the actual text of this report. Here's how the Bureau introduces its three-page section on gangs in the military:
Gang recruitment of active duty military personnel constitutes a significant criminal threat to the US military. Members of nearly every major street gang, as well as some prison gangs and OMGs, have been reported on both domestic and international military installations, according to NGiC analysis and multiple law enforcement reporting. Through transfers and deployments, military-affiliated gang members expand their culture and operations to new regions nationwide and world-wide, undermining security and law enforcement efforts to combat crime. Gang members with military training pose a unique threat to law enforcement personnel because of their distinctive weapons and combat training skills and their ability to transfer these skills to fellow gang members.
(If the Crips really are moving to expand their domain from South Central Los Angeles to South Central Baghdad, then I wish them lots of luck competing with the Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army for turf.)
Many street gang members join the military to escape the gang lifestyle or as an alternative to incarceration, but often revert back to their gang associations once they encounter other gang members in the military. Other gangs target the US military and defense systems to expand their territory, facilitate criminal activity such as weapons and drug trafficking, or to receive weapons and combat training that they may transfer back to their gang. Incidents of weapons theft and trafficking may have a negative impact on public safety or pose a threat to law enforcement officials.
So what this appears to boil down to is that a significant number of people in the military have some record of association, though not necessarily violent, with a criminal gang. The report has extensive research to back this up, and the trend looks to be across branches. But where it gets a little more difficult to follow is the report's conclusion that this is part of a deliberate and orchestrated effort by the gangs as part of a mission to achieve some larger gang missions. Here's an example of the FBI's logic:
Younger gang members without criminal records are attempting to join the military, as well as concealing tattoos and gang affiliation during the recruitment process, according to NGiC reporting.
Maybe there's something nefarious about this, but it doesn't seem like much more than young people trying to get a decent paying job. If someone hides a tattoos to try and get hired by a prospective employer, that doesn't necessarily seem like an example of criminal infiltration so much as an effort to make a living wage.
It sounds like what's really happening is that sometimes people who are associated with U.S. gangs are also ending up in the U.S. military, and that shouldn't be surprising. Unemployment is sky high, especially among young, minority, urban, lower-to-middle class men. This demographic can't seem to get a job in today's America, but it is heavily sought by gangs in certain communities and by military recruiters nationwide.
But being in a gang is a terrible job; while military service is incredibly dangerous, it also pays much better and includes good benefits. That young men might go from a street corner to an army recruitment center is not shocking. It's also not evidence of an orchestrated campaign to take over the Green Zone as Crip territory.
Maybe the FBI knows something it couldn't include in this report, but this seems to be an example where the correlation might not necessarily prove the suspected causation. But it is an important reminder of a much bigger problem: the U.S. military is stretched really, really thin. The Bush administration increased its size by 100,000 members by, among other things, lowering recruitment standards. Troops are getting burned out by stop-loss programs, four or five war-zone tours, and a chain of difficult deployments from the chaos of 2005-2007 Iraq to the chaos of Afghanistan today. And it's becoming more difficult to justify retiring with the civilian job market so bad.
Gangs are, as the report convincingly outlines, an enormous threat to Americans; they play a major role in drug trafficking, human trafficking, and violent crime. The report finds a "high level" of gang involvement in 17.1 percent of U.S. homicides -- that's about 2,500 deaths per year. The FBI's effort to keep the U.S. safe from gangs is one of the less glamorous but more important of U.S. law enforcement's many mission. But the supposed gang infiltration of the U.S. military might not be one of the bigger threats facing America today.
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