From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of I Heart Brading. Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Paul Mission Controlled Decado. Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. We're going to talk about something that is sometimes a third rail in conversation for a lot of people. It's something that makes a lot of Americans uncomfortable. It's something a lot of people I'd like to ignore. It's the interaction between cops and gay hangs, and it's something that might surprise a lot of people in the audience today. But before we get into any of that, quick correction corner and a thank you for our long time conspiracy realist who helped keep us on the true path here uh. In our Eggspiracy episode, we were talking about m R in a misspoke that should be messenger RNA, not modified RNA. It's important distinction. But thankfully with the conspiracy theories we mentioned in relation to eggs are exactly as we described. Also thanks to everybody who wrote in with follow ups on this winter v and flu epidemic. I think we'll get to it uh in a listener mail segment in the future, but please stay tuned. Uh. If you haven't listened yet, check out the expiracy episode. I think we all had a lot of fun on that one. Did you see the record egg profits? Yes, the art, the petroleum industry, yeah, oh yeah, excel mobiles cleaning up everything, but the environment. You know what I mean? Uh, you know, it kind of makes me. It reminds me of this old Tim and Eric sketch with Steve Shirippa from The Sopranos, where it's like an infomercial for like this kit that you can get where it will allow you to lay eggs, And the line is with the price of eggs going through the f and roof, He's like, now I can pass a dozen eggs through my rhea and you know, and I can't. I think we may have mentioned this from me we were talking on fair but um in other parts of the world, egg shortage, egg price scouching totally not a thing, a matter of fact, I got some eggs right here. Um, I was gonna film a video about it. I think I think you guys got to it first. Check that out on Instagram and social media. Yeah, and we got to talk to a real life egg farmer or a chicken chicken dad. I think it's what you refer to him as Matt. He's well like power in the background. I am genuinely we all know that I'm scared of chickens, but I've faced my fear to a degree. Um. But he said there was a period where the hens weren't laying eggs like they used to, but once they were done molting, they said the egg yield was was better than ever. So I think we kind of nailed it at least in terms of our guess. Is that definitely some conditions, whether it be environmental or just natural processes that animals go through that could account for some of this and not nearly what you know, some folks are making it out to be in terms of some sort of you know, nefarious dealings. So that is our correction corner, and please check out the episode. Always feel free to send us clarifications, your takes, your responses, because you know honestly, folks, A lot of other podcasts might not welcome that stuff, but we very much do because we prefer we prefer the truth, unvarnished end. You know, you could say we're all one big family here, maybe even a gang. Hey, that's what you call a segue. Uh. We talked about gangs before. Was the most recent gang episode? We talked about? Was it um? Was it MS thirteen? That's what I was thinking. I was. I was gonna say, was it M I five? No, that's not the same thing. Well, yeah, that's a good point, man. You could argue that a lot of government agencies are in and of themselves somewhat clandestine gang like entities or within them have groups that function as a separate unit, right, Yeah, the Special Boys, the Special Class. Uh, and which, as it turns out, is the name of a gang, the Special Boys. Those are there and then uh yeah, gang names can get kind of silly if you don't think about what they do. Yeah, but there there's also this thing with gangs. Saying something as a gang is like saying an organization is a cult. In some ways, they come in all shapes and sizes. It can be an umbrella term their gangs all across the planet. It doesn't matter where you live, it doesn't matter how big or how small your community is. There are clicks, you know, and some of those clicks do gang like things like fascism. You could almost, I would posit defining gangs by their tactics applied rather than their specific ideology, right, because if you look at ideology, there are a lot of gangs who have absolutely nothing in common their gangs who are founded just to kill other gangs. It's wild out there. And there is a list I believe that's maintained by a government agency of known gangs. Remember that more think the FBI, remember that moment when the Juggalos got on that list, because the real uproar within the I c P community, well, because there were gang like activities occurring within that larger group, right, which is it's true, it's tough to make the distinction, but that's something we kind of have to do. The entirety of a group generally, when it's an organized system like that isn't a full gang, but then inside there you got pockets, right, Yeah, And I want to give I never thought I would end up saying this on air. Younger, Yeah, younger me would be so baffled. But props to I c P. I saw a recent interview where I think it was UM, I think was Shaggy too Dope was saying UH. I was saying that he felt terrible about using UM like homophobic slang in past I c P songs, and he said that goes against everything about the inclusiveness that we have tried to build in the global Juggalo community. And it hit me, you know, I was like, what a what a nice guy, and was like touching, there's a global Juggalo community. Yeah, then I found I know, I know, and there's they're also in the train kid community too. So oh and speaking of train kids and off the grid cultures, check out City of the Rails. I believe it's called UH, produced by our pal Julian Weller. Moving moving on, though, you know, we've got I think all all of us have some pretty pretty intense opinions and perspectives about this idea of gangs. We've just outlined some of the tricky things there. But for a lot of people, there's one there's one entity that would probably not be a gang, or probably not be affiliated in a friendly way with gangs, at least in the public mind, and that is law enforcement. The natural enemy of the gang is law enforcement, just like the mongoose is the natural enemy of the cobra. So it would see, here are the facts. Nobody knows when gangs got to the US. Nobody knows because you can't really define what makes a gang ideologically, It's got to be the tactics. So we're the people at the Boston Tea Party. Were they a gang? They were doing some gangland stuff, you know, And like, what's the distinction between a gang and a mob or or a terrorist organization. It's almost like it's a hierarchy, because a mob is something that kind of just springs up with maybe minor amounts of planning, but it doesn't have like by laws and like you know, meets regularly. It's only more of like a temporary gang kind of right, So I would argue, But but but Boston Tea Party definitely had some serious planning that went into it. It's that, I mean, to your point, Matt, it is a distinction that's important to make, but one that can often be a little blurry. I think, well, you guys correct me if I'm wrong here. I think generally a gang is a group of people that conspire to profit from some illegal activity. Right, so like, there's generally a profit mode of associated with a gang, well ultimately right when it evolves. But we have to remember in the early days of uh, Like, we have to remember this is stomic structures that force people into gangs, Like with the MS thirteen example, they were banding together so that they did not get victimized themselves. So I would say survival first and then profit. But you know, profit and survival they're very closely linked, uh because people want to survive, but obviously, given the choice, you would prefer not to survive poor. Uh So, still, I think we're going to be going back and forth over this definition of gangs for a while. You can see all kinds of official documentation about it in the world of criminal justice, academic world of criminology, and so on. But they don't, I think a lot of them, if they're being honest, acknowledge the oh my gosh, acknowledge the liminal space of the definition whatever. Uh Look, the it's tough to nail down when gangs actually emerged in the US, but we do know this to your earlier pointnal. The b I does try to keep track and currently estimates that in the US and US territories and all that jazz, there are around thirty three thousand active violent street gangs or motorcycle gangs and prison gangs in the US. And when we see gangs here, we're not talking about like the Apple Dumpling gang. These are kids knocking Yeah, they're not knocking down mailboxes throwing toilet paper and Halloween or eggs. That's like a brand really expensive crime. Bull Frog races. Yeah, this is like it's like a felon need to throw eggs now? Right, So, uh, law enforcement and gangs have always officially been nemesses. But as we talked about previously, anybody who's seen the wire, right, you know that you you become familiar with your regulars, right. Think of you could almost think of like some cops with a beat as bartenders who have regular customers. It's just their customers are people who regularly commit street level crime. So they start to know, you know, shaky oats or whatever, the guys going by. And we know that that familiarity can be a kind of leverage. Even the FEDS have cooperated with the mob before to try to like kill Castro or talked about this on Ridiculous History wage a campaign in Italy in World War Two. But I don't know, man, that's the question. Okay, So Miles and Jack over at Daily See Guys taught me a great word, copaganda. So propaganda, I mean, what is it just the idea of like creating an image for the police that is not necessarily based on reality, like Law and Order. Yeah, oh yeah, and no, that's cop I've heard that though, that the police love Law and Order because it it portrays them in such a positive light as as truly being the good guys. And then also the creators are like, yeah, we based this on the real stories and this is really how it's done. But they don't really show any of the you know, kind of more CD underbelly. They don't really show defense attorneys, agents of the people. They're always kind of depicted as smarmie jerks. And someone's like and you know, there's uh, there's a detective who's trying really harder d A. And they're saying, look, we've got your guy dead to rights. We have all the evidence. And they're like, oh man, we didn't seem if you can prove it. Copaganda means, you know exactly what we're describing, trying to trying to make the police look good, brushing over serious issues. But even in that stuff you see things that are pa in fact, like the idea of informants. Yeah. Well, and there are also television shows like the recent We Own This City that show the opposite side. Right, So it does exist. But the capaganda, as you put it, is there too. It's interesting how the uh, popular media kind of like tries to I guess, tries to have all of it together at once. But I guess it's what you choose to put into your head maybe forms your opinion on the subject. True. Yeah, as in all things right, and so we know that if you put aside all the Hollywood stuff, there are a couple of different paths where the mongoose and the cobra meat here. Um, I'll put down that comparison later. I don't know it's working. Uh. So you know you've got the official c I right, confidential informant not necessarily a criminal. It's anybody who provides useful, credible information. But then you've got that off the books kind of transactional thing. Hey, shaky oats or whatever. You know, Um, I could take into the station, or you could just tell me where you got the blow, you know, or the heroin or whatever. Um. That kind of stuff happens, and sometimes it's just people doing favors for each other, you know, despite their official positions, people can and do build familiarity. You can get involved in quid pro quoes, but everybody still knows gangs are a problem. And that's where we lead to some of the stuff that you foreshadow just a few minutes ago, Matt. The idea of these kind of specific units like the Special Boys, Um, one of the big ones are anti gang units. The more dressed up term for them is gang intelligence units or g I use because you add intelligence to something to make it sound smarter. Just like a lot of criminals where glasses when they go into court. He couldn't have done that. Look at those spectacles kind of picturing this being to some degree what's portrayed in the movie Training Day, where um Denzel Washington's characters. Obviously he's like a crooked cop, but his cover story is that he is essentially, you know, in with these gangs as a means of you know, getting information and being embedded and kind of having you know, the word on the street and all of that. Well, I mean, there are undercover office officers in most major cities and in some small towns, there are undercover officers right now on the street, operating and gaining intelligence right on what's happening on the street level. But there are also these anti gang units, which are specialty units of police officers that cracked down on uh often often gang activity, sometimes just it's like drug enforcement kind of thing, which those two go together often handed hand. And there's other stuff like violent crime units that are just specialty units that are supposed to respond maybe more aggressively and swiftly than other units within a police department. M M. Yeah, that there would be UM specifically trained or tasked with doing the doing the police work in known high crime areas. So someone would have probably a table as stats for a few years or a few months and say this is where we put our response unit. And they might not call them headcrackers, but this is where we put people who are going to have UM more training or more familiarity with escalation tactics and with responding to violence from civilians. The this happens when fear of gangs rises at different points in history, and it's be cyclical. Uh. The National Gang Intelligence Center wasn't created by the FBI until two thousand and five. But these task forces something like them have been around for a long long time. They were used to break strikes right in the in the days of the Depression, in the in the days of Joe Hill, and other times, you know, the times that your history textbooks ignore these days. Uh. The very first anti gang unit, specifically anti gang as nineteen sixty seven in Chicago. It is specifically to target people of color. It start getting black street gangs. More and more of these units or some derivation of them come up in the nine nineties, and a lot of it happens, you know. During the Clinton administration, there was this huge um acceleration in the militarization of police, and part of it was based on studies, like there was this federal study that said, Okay, we got three thousand, four hundred and forty different law enforcement agencies to report to us, and of them, more than half say that a lot of their criminal issues are coming from youth gangs. So everybody said gangs are a problem, and they just didn't know exactly how to deal with it, so they decided to respond with lots of money and lots of violence. And that's how you get things like um, I think that's how you get a lot of those specialized units, right, because we have to remember that in the sixties, some of those things Chicago was calling gangs were just activist groups who are not committing terrorism. You know. They weren't shaken down the moms and pops or dealing drugs. They were fighting for more equality in the United States, and Chicago p D said some of them were that, but then there were also violent, dangerous street gangs. So it's like, you know, it all existed, but you can't. You can't hit every problem with a hammer, right, And that's kind of what these groups were, at least in my mind. It makes me think about Goody Mob's Dirty South, and I know you guys are familiar with that song. One of the first lines in there is about how Clinton is supplying keylows of drugs to one of the guys so that he can turn a profit. So Clinton can turn a profit, you know, but via this guy's work. Um. And it's also when they mentioned red Dogs the the Union in Atlanta, the specialty anti gang unit. They were in the news recently, right, just for like highly aggressive tactics. Well they they're in the news as a comparison, and that we're gonna get to in this episode in a little bit. But they they stood for run every drug dealer out of Georgia, and it's something that got shut down in two thousand eleven. So yeah, it was in the news, but only as a comparison, and they were they were also just I love that you're pointing out good game up there, because they were also deploying, deployed the same tactics gangs use when they hit when they hit a rival drug spot, like the same thing. Yeah, and this this isn't pretty. Of course, if you're being objective, why are those tactics deployed by gangs and uh folks who are supposed to be watching gangs. Because those tactics work just like assassination. That's the reason no government is gonna ever take assassination or targeted killing off the table until you bust open the door of the wrong house and you shoot a ninety two year old woman five times and she dies, and then your unit gets disbanded. Right, your unit gets gets disbanded, and then other people in the world of law enforcement who are not going extremist, other people who are just trying to do their jobs, they're the ones who deal with the consequences there and the like in the case of Red Dog, which we're quite close to living in Atlanta at the time. In the case of Red Dog, there aren't a lot of consequences. That's another difference. Anyway. We see that, we see that the lines get um blurred in a very uncomfortable Robin Thick way. For die hard supporters of conventional policing, you know, you'll hear hear everybody again agreeing there's a problem. There's a problem with gangs, right, and then there's a problem with um the power and lack of oversight given to law enforcement that's supposed to fight back about against these gangs. For a lot of die hard supporters of conventional police work in the US, the answer is stuff like more funding, more oversight, and more gang intelligence units, more task force initiatives, and so on. But these are still incredibly controversial, and history has proven that innocent people inevitably get caught up in the process and corruption inevitably seems to come into play. I'm talking about the ongoing case regarding the murder of an activist in Atlanta, in Cops City, right in the Atlanta Forest. And to add all this together, there's another problem, a noxious conspiratorial cherry on top of this extraordinarily dangerous Sunday Series real life conspiracies. What happens when the law says, hey, let's start a gang of arrow Well, we'll tell you after a quick word from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy. We don't always get to say this, but guess the conspiracy is true. The conspiracies are true. Your local law enforcement. I don't want to paint with the broadbrush. We can't speak on them specifically, but it's a local law enforcement in the United States is riddled with gangs on the inside. Yeah, and and well, let's make the distinction right now, Ben, are we saying, um, like there's a unit of the Bloods that infiltrated a police department or that the police department or sheriff's office formed a gang within it. Uh, kind of both. Let's let's focus on the ladder because and we can you know what, Yeah, let's go ahead and get that out of the way. That's an important distinction. So we know that. Uh, they're like, we're talking about infiltration versus what we could call maybe home grown. So exist gangs infiltrating aspects of law enforcement the legal system. Usually what they're going to be doing is trying to get into related parts of legal system. You want to control prison guards, right, that's a way you can get contraband into the system. That's how you can help cover up crimes like retribution murders are different rackets. You could get somebody in the courtroom aspects of it too. I could get you some favors. But yeah, law enforcement, if you could get them, that would be great. And you know, there's so many fictional crime dramas about just that, right, Like that's a big spoiler alert. That's a big plot point of The Departed, isn't it that we've got we've got our boy on the inside. Who wouldn't want that? Um Now, I don't know how often that really happens though, Yeah, And and minor spoilers for a like fifteen year old movie. It turns out that the big bad of the movie, Jack Nicholson's character is also an informant on the payroll, um, and essentially acting in his own best interest while also reporting to higher ups like I think it's to the FBI. So it's it's very it's very complicated because you've got folks that are trying to infiltrate his organization to get to him, but all the while he's actually reporting to somebody even further up the chain. It's it's the spider Man meme again. Right, you're an informant. Wait uh okay, So if we're saying, we've already probably ruffled some feathers here right by saying, yes, the conspiracies are true, there are gangs in law enforcement. They are home grown and they're doing gang stuff. Um, and you know, okay, let's take the let's you know, let's take the opposite. Let's devil's advocate, like we talked about in our skepticism episodes. Okay, how why are we saying that? Um, couldn't you just say, hey, what if it's a club of coworkers hanging out, right, if they're not doing anything illegal, is that their business? Right there? Their public servants. But if they're not at work and just their private lives, well there's a very big difference I think between hanging out at a local dive bar after work and getting a drink or something you know, with your friends from your work, versus carrying out a legal activities after work. You know, um where you're all in the know, you all know what you're doing, and you've got each other's backs to prevent anyone from getting in trouble, and you know that if there's something that goes sideways, you can probably count on your bosses to help, you know, to help smooth things over right, and pretty soon there won't even be a crack in the wall where you were exposed. That's a really at point the the thin blue line, which is, you know, a thing that some people debate but I don't know why. It feels like loyalty is so highly important in law enforcement that you know, that kind of protection is often likely going to be offered to someone within the organization right, not necessarily to cover up major illegal things, because we've seen examples where those major illegal things get out it at some point the question is is is it outed, is it talked about? Is it prosecuted only at when some thresholds met where it doesn't benefit the entire force anymore. I don't know, why does everybody hate internal affairs? Right? And like what if you're not doing anything wrong? This these are these are important questions. I mean, if we're waxing poetic a bit, then there's almost something like heart of Darkness Colonel Kurtz about it, about the worst extremes, the idea that in hunting monsters, some members of the law adopted too many of the same tactics, they drink too deeply from the same cup and became monsters themselves, right right, Yeah, there we go. And and some of the same groups that are meant to combat gang activity have for gangs of their own. Honestly, we're talking about this just a little bit off air. There are too many examples to cover in a single episode here, which shows you the scope of the problem. There's too much stuff going on, right, So we can look maybe at some specific examples, knowing this is just the surface of some very deep water, and then we can extrapolate from there some very troubling things about other conspiracies that we may not know about today. Uh let's start in los ange lists, you know. Uh, let's specifically start with some fantastic work by a journalist named series Castle Over at Knock l a. So as we look into all of this together, we want to make sure that everyone thinks about the kinds of tactics that you may see deployed where you live, including stuff like the officers of Scorpion sending photos via text after beating Tyrene Nichols to death. Uh. Castle, as you mentioned, Men in knock l a UM did a fifteen part series that dives into gangs existing within the l A County Sheriff's Department UM, which is the largest department of its kind in the entire United States. You know, Los Angeles is a massive metro area and what Castle found was beyond brutal. Yeah. Yeah, so at least and so Castle's investigation, like you said, no it is, it's a long read. Uh. This comes out in March, so it's a couple of years old, now almost two years old. But it's fantastic reporting and it's incredibly disturbing. Castle finds that at least nineteen people have died at the hands of these gangs, and all these gang members are employed by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. And despite all those deaths, there have been there at that point been no real internal investigation, no policy changes, nothing. Thankfully this has changed a little bit. Maybe we'll get to it. Also, by the way, all of these nineteen murder victims were non white males. And if you go into Castle points this out in the reporting too. If you go into the history of the Sheriff's department there, even on their own website, they say, Okay, things were kind of crazy in the beginning when we first started out. You know, we might not have had uniforms, not everybody knew what was going on, but we tried our best and now we're way better. Um. They also knew about gangs inside the Sheriff's department way before they told the public. They knew about it more than fifty years ago. Is beat me here, Paul, it's being crazy. Yeah, Um, it doesn't sound real to me. It sounds this sounds like a fiction story you'd watch on HBO. So in Vy there's a journalist that gets killed. Person's name is Ruben Salazar. It's like a video game. This is that's why this is what it is. It's a video game and you find this clue or whatever that leads you to the next thing. Um, there's a memo from three years later, and on this memo we see a printed description of this group called it's a weird name quote Little Devils, which is kind of apple dumpling gang. Right. Um, if a member of the Little Devils hadn't been the person who through the tear gas can that killed Ruben Salazar when he and his folks were inside this store cafe area drinking and beer during this massive public protest um, but yeah, they targeted him. They specifically went in there. You can say detained, but I would say they went in there to kill him. So the question is who are these Little Devils? Right? Who are these Little Devils? Is that just is that just a weird phrase that the the author of this memorandum writes, No, it's the name of a gang and they've revealed it. The captain at that's time R. D. Campbell drew up a list of known members of this gang. Little Devils listed forty seven people, almost fifty deep this gang, and each of these people had a specific red devil tattoo. And right now, in three more than fifty years later, we don't know whether anybody was disciplined at all. We know no one was charged, including the guy who killed Salazar Z. But we do know it was brought to the public's attention, right theory. I mean, it was at least printed somewhere. Hey, uh there's a gang. I don't know. I didn't see that it was like actually printed in a newspaper or something. I think, Well, the problem is that a lot of these stories of um of abuse from these gangs using the using the protection of the legal system, a lot of this abuse never or makes it to the news then or today, you know. So it's something that it's kind of like a street knowledge, right, Like if you live in the wrong neighborhood, you know very well who these people are, and you know that they are organized, But you also know a reporter or another cop isn't going to pay attention to you, right, And if it gets back to those guys, then they also know where you live, right, They know where your kids go to school, you know what time your mom comes home or your spouse. Uh. So it's it gets dangerous really quickly, which again, these are some of the same tactics that out and criminal gangs use. The public exposure of the devil's then doesn't do a lot to stop the development of these in the system, others keep developing, and members of these gangs rise through the ranks. They find themselves in positions of power, you know what I mean. And you start you start having to ask yourself, well, if somebody is the deputy and they used to be you know, uh, the leader of the three Thousand Boys, which is a real L S L A S D gang name. Um, we'll get to the gang names in a second. Then are they going to crack down on their own people? It's very rare for folks to do that, uh, which is why whistleblowers become a genre all of their own. You know, them boys do get up to some trouble, but dad gumming, they're effective at their jobs exactly. You know, if he was that bad, why wouldes barbecues be so much fun? Or why would a rest rate you know, be so good or whatever? The department m Yeah, exactly. You know why Some have described him as a violent man, But I think of him as a I think of him as an artists. He's a little devil. Is is a scamp, isn't he? I think we've all I think we're channeling True Detective Season one, pretty hard right here, you know. Um, but we should talk about whistleblowers because that's how a lot of this news comes out. It comes out through former employees. One in particular, a guy in Art Gonzalez, who gives a firsthand look at gang culture in the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department and it's not good. Yeah. Gonzalis essentially says that gang culture is deeply ingrained within law enforcement, specifically in Los Angeles and in that area, the greater area of Los Angeles. And and he's saying what we're basically saying here. It's actively maybe not assisted, maybe just enabled is a good word to use by the higher up because it's it's almost like a known thing. The closer knit my officers are, if you're somebody at the top levels of one of these law enforcement agencies, the closer knit my my folks are, the more effective they're going to be at their jobs, the more they're gonna have each other's backs. Uh. It's kind of disturbing to think about. Yeah, yeah, it's like, well, I mean you're also really really heavy psychological situation. You have to trust someone that you're not related to biologically with your life, and um that that has a huge impact on the human mind. You know, Gonzalez talks about how these folks have all the hallmarks of the stuff you imagine gangs doing. We mentioned tattoos, their initiation rights, you know what I mean, get beat in, get beat out, maybe you have to kill someone, maybe you have to do us specific sort of a thing. And then you know, they also have a lot of behind the scenes like consigliari influence on the day to day activities of the department. The leaders of the higher ups in the in the gang system, which is like a shadow command structure, right, the higher ups are called shot callers, and there are shot keepers excuse me, and they're the ones who are um able to decide things like who gets assigned where, right, or you know, who is up for promotion, things like that. Yeah, it really does make me think back to to that David Simon series, you know, We Own the City. Um, I haven't finished yet, but you know the idea of like it's almost like a rip and run kind of drug raids that are you know, disguised as kind of like you know, on a seizure, but it ultimately is just kind of like one gang robbing from another. Yeah, and then think like okay, So here's another example of just how corrupt the situation became. Gonzalez as a crisis of faith, right and decides to do the right thing, even though it means he knows it means to some of his colleagues, crossing that thin blue line, and he calls a secret whistle blower hotline. These have gone, These have become very popular in a lot of large organizations. You know, to be candid, our parent company has a secret whistle blower hotline. Uh that I suppose is for people who make a lot more money than we do. But there's a So he calls this whistle lower hotline and his identity is leaked in less than twenty four hours to the entirety of his of his co workers. Someone scrawls a rat on his locker. The retaliation begin ends. But so he made a heavy sacrifice and because of his because this one guy decided to do the right thing, he got punished, but he brought other people down the right path, and somewhere like a little less than a dozen or so folks followed in his footsteps. Law enforcement coming out and saying, yeah, we can confirm this gang activity and it includes criminal activity. Uh there there are thousands of people in the l S. L A s D and other police departments have suffered from corruption. Other police gangs have existed in other places. Obviously New Orleans, right had some going pretty deep, but Los Angeles Sheriff's departments seems to be the most riddled. And we're not basing this on just one piece of admittedly amazing reporting. There are other reporters who have talked about this as as well as academics. This conspiracy is confirmed. Oh yes, yes it is. I just want to mention something I think is tangential to this, but it is also important. Uh. In the ninet nineties, Los Angeles Police Department, so not the Sheriff's department, but the police department had one of these red dog like units that was functioning out there in Los Angeles. It was the L A p D Rampart Divisions Crash Unit so c R a s H, which by the way stood for Community Resources against Street Hoodlums. Isn't that nice? Uh? So this was one of these anti gang, anti drug, anti violence units that was functioning pretty much in the way we're describing here as a gang. It wasn't necessarily a gang in the same way with specific tattoos, with specific you know, science gangs lines and other things like that. But that unit itself, the majority of its members ended up getting caught up in an internal investigation that got most of them in big trouble. Uh, you could read all about this. You should read about it. And I think we should do a whole episode on the Crash Unit because they did everything from guys. They were robbing banks. They at least robbed one bank to aid get in situations. Sure, but they robbed one bank to aid their criminal their other criminal activities. It's not It was nuts, I've got it. That My My favorite response for a while Albert's high, because I know him over using it, is to just say, oh, you're getting situations to many things. It's true, but that's not the same thing as saying police should rob banks. Well, exactly, very clear on that way. But I will say, at least to my understanding, and maybe I'm way off based on this, the reason why this group start doing so many legal activities I think stems from their directive. Uh, that's not really their directive. Maybe it's their internal directive or they believe their mission was and that was literally quote arrest gang members by any means necessary, which led, you know, a slippery slope to like, oh, well we we can you know, maybe we if we have to perjure ourselves on the stand just to make sure this person that we know did bad things goes away, maybe we'll do it. Well, if we have to plant evidence on somebody, maybe we'll do it, you know, down the line, greater good argument all every way, like every step of the way. Yeah, and this is this is dangerous. Um and this this again is important ongoing conspiracy. Uh. And the ongoing part is the part that should bother you the most, folks. I suggest we pause for words from our sponsor and then we return with something from the present day. All right, we've returned. We mentioned some of the reporting here. In addition to Castle's work, Uh, there's a great piece by Andrew Buncomb writing for The Guardian in one and uh this Uh. In this piece we see confirmation about the extent of gang activity within the Sheriff's Department, as well as learning a little bit more about the culture of these things, of these organizations. You can see there an example of the individual tattoos. Um. Well, there's one that kind of looks like a skeleton with a machine gun and something that's either a pith helmet or a maybe a German World War two era helmet. It's not a cutting look, but it but it does identify this person as a member of a gang called the Executioners. And yet you know it ranges these kinds of tattoos and symbols ranged like skeletons is very popular and bones, it's very popular. A lot of the pirate symbols are popular. But you know, you've also got things like numbers you just see like a random number. Oh wait that those numbers together just mean you're gang. Okay, mm hmmm mm hmmm. Yeah. Oh and it's specifically collision and cough. Sorry. Yeah, So the when they do have the twenty eight written there these these are the Compton Executioners. Uh, and a lot of their activities mirror prison gangs. I don't. I still think we haven't done the We haven't done an episode on the South Africa him prison gangs. We might have to, but it needs a disclaimer for sure. Anyway. Uh. These journalists, their work is also supported by academics like Sean Kennedy at the Loyola Law School Center for Juvenile Law and Policy. Uh, he was able to trace the existence of at least eighteen police gangs in l A alone back to the seventies. And they've got names that we should probably round robin. Um. They've got names like the band Yeah, the Bandidos, the Buffalo Soldiers, the Caveman, the Cowboys, the Grim Reapers, the jump Out Boys my favorite. Yeah, it's like I got you, hey, spook. Yeah, that's a really scary thing. I was. I was watching videos on the Red Dog Unit here in Atlanta, and just the tactic of being in cars waiting for something happened. Then all of these police jump out of cars at one time, like unmarked cars and just chase people down the street. It's terrifying. Uh. We've also got the Pirates, the Posse and the Rattlesnakes, the Regulators, the Spartans, that Tasmanian Devils, the three thousand Boys, the two thousand, not quite as always, the three thousand and the two thousand boys. We're saying, let's be reasonable, three thousands a lot. That's like a block, right, of course, that's exactly I'm sure that's exactly right. Um, let's see the vikings, the wayside whities and and how and how can we forget about our pals, the executioners who have definitely been you know in the news of late. Yeah, there's a real connotation there with that name, uh rattlesnake, dangerous, fomous. Well, and they only do one thing right, right, And and we also know the providence of some of these names. For example, the caveman gay comes from their awesome beards. It comes from a place I think they're more mustache crowd, you know, call of facial air, right, but they law enforcement loves mustaches. It's weird anyway. But the it comes from a room where uh, male law enforcement guys would rest before they had to go testify in court, and people start calling it the cave and then they start calling the cave men. And then of course, if you are called the court a lot of pretty often because you push in the line, then you become a caveman. And now we're a gang and we know each other. Um. So that's one. That's one example of how the stuff evolves. The big, the big difference between these groups and out and out criminal gangs is that law enforcement gangs have a much more a robust ability to cover their tracks to avoid accountability. Right. In short, it is tough to arrest the people who themselves arrest people who watches the Watchman and so on, and without accountability, these issues continue to metasta size, like the cancer that they truly are. The public knows about this. You see politicians in Los Angeles saying, hey, before they found out I was in politics, I was terrified because, you know, like nine sheriff cars rolled up on me insisting I had run a red light and I know I didn't. Uh Like it's it's terrifying, you know. Uh. And there are also some pretty solid accusations about how they're profiling and targeting certain people based on what they present like right, what their race looks like, what their gender looks like, and so on. And as a result, gangs became a huge focal point in the t shareff election in Los Angeles because sheriff's are elected. Uh, this is where we got to look at the incumbent sheriff, alex Via Nueva, who was very much part of the problem. Yeah, because Alex said, guys, gangs aren't a problem, and the police force, come on, we solve that that's done. That's not even an issue anymore. And you're gonna call groups of these officers gangs. That is racist. Shame on you. Yeah yeah, calling them gangs is racist. And they would say stuff like, hey, I'm the first sheriff and over a hundred years who speaks fluent Spanish. You guys are racist. You're racist against my people, his people being, of course, the employees of the Sheriff's department. Anyway, he lost the election to a guy named Robert Luna. Robert Luna has vowed to tackle the ongoing internal gang issue with this conspiracy. We'll see, um. But as of last month January, as we're recording this, Los Angeles decided that Via Nueva could not be compelled to cooperate in the new probe of deputy gangs l A. So good news, l A is doing an investigation. Bad news, they're not requiring the people who could be the most helpful in it to help. And to be fair, of the person who could have been the most helpful is the one who said this isn't a problem. Oh yeah, right, right exactly. So we'll see how it goes. I mean, as we said at the top, defining a gang can be murky. They are shadow organizations. Uh, the ones that we're talking about today certainly don't like the term, but various parts of law enforcement have been called gangs by the public, and in this case, the court of public opinion is basing that definition on the actions that they see in the street by these individuals in these groups, things like Scorpions and Memphis recently demanded, uh disbanded, Red Dogs in Atlanta disbanded. But there's an interesting little red string we have to connect these two. The strings name is c J. Yeah, Sarah Lynn c J. Davis. And if this name sounds familiar, we had mentioned earlier in the show how there was a news hook about the Red Dogs, and Matt you had mentioned it was kind of as part of another news story that really was sort of the focus, and that was the murder of Tyree Nichols. The same police chief that headed up the Red Dogs in Atlanta, which was disbanded, went on to head up the very similar type of unit in Memphis during the time where Tyree Davis was murdered. So, Cyrilan c J. Davis, is that string, that red thread that you're talking about, Matt, Yeah, it's very upsetting. I want to point out here that ap D, while Red Dogs or Red Dog was disbanded, there is a new unit of a similar style group I guess that's happening right now in Atlanta called the Titan Unit, and there's very little reporting on this unit what it's doing. We haven't seen anybody, you know, on the ground level of reporter learning about what the Titan Unit is doing in Atlanta right now. They've been in operation since. If you have information on that, we'd love to hear from you. Yes, absolutely, because again, you know, without sounding too cynical, it's almost like, oh, the Burger King has closed and the Sandwich Emperor has opened. It's brand new, it's totally different. Never mind that it's in the same building and the same people work there, you know what I mean. Like it's it's the name shifting stuff, very black Rock, Very Academi or x C or whatever they're calling themselves this week. And if the public doesn't hold these organizations accountable to the best of their ability, then there will be no impetus to change because people like power with this. We want to hear your thoughts, you know, is this I mean for a lot of people listening today, These active, ongoing conspiracies indicate a need for course correction. Right, maybe better policies can address the problem, can save innocent lives for others. This is only shining a light on a long running, terrifying aspect of life in America, known all too well by many of our fellow listeners today. I mean, look, since we put a good mob at the top, why don't we end with TUPAC. Not for nothing? Did TUPAC su cor say police are the biggest gang in America? What do you think about that statement? You know, we we we're being objective here. We're just giving giving the facts and tracing the evolution of this conspiracy. But how would you recommend fixing the problem? What's something that more people need to know. We're asking both our conspiracy realist in the crowd who are civilians, and our conspiracy realist in the crowd who work in law enforcement themselves. We'd love to hear from you. We try to be easy to find on uh the Internet, I was doing so well, stumbled, Well, if you're an officer, you can just look up our names probably and find our address. As you said, ben so, just over the bridge that's right. 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