October 26, 2022 • 55 mins
In the early 1990's, the LA County Sheriff's station in Lennox was the birthplace of a new deadly deputy gang: The Grim Reapers.
A Tradition of Violence is hosted and executive produced by Cerise Castle. She's an award winning journalist who wrote the first ever history of deputy gangs for Knock LA, available at lasdgangs.com
Music by Yelohill and Steelz.
For breaking news and updates on deputy gangs, follow @lasdgangs on social media.
To support Cerise’s reporting, and for exclusive bonus content, subscribe to the patreon.com/lasdgangs.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Morning. This podcast can see is explicit language and details
acts of violence. Listener discretion is advised. The Los Angeles
County Sheriff's Department has historically been known for its brutal
violence against residents. In the nineteen nineties, the Vikings caught
the attention of a skeptical press for their brutal policing
(00:20):
in Lynwood and ruthless revenge plots on colleagues who would
not conform to the gang's policies. But the Vikings were
just one of their deputy gangs on the streets. In
the early nineteen nineties, in l A's Lenox neighborhood, a
gang of deputies calling themselves the Grim Reapers formed at
the local station. The Grim Reapers were originally based out
(00:44):
of the Lenox Station in South l A. The station
closed back in two thousand and ten when the brand
new South Los Angeles station opened. Members of the gang
can be found throughout the department these days, often in
powerful positions like Sheriff Alex Viy in a way of
his former chief of staff. Being a deputy gang member
(01:06):
can come with perks and career advancement, and the Grim
Reapers have used their brutal, often fatal, policing style. To
network to the top of the department. Members of the
Grim Reapers have a tattoo on their calf of a
black hooded skeleton holding a scythe. That's the medieval symbol
of death. To get a tattoo, it's alleged that deputies
(01:28):
need to participate in killing a civilian. This is a
tradition of violence. A history of deputy gangs inside the
Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. By the late nineteen eighties,
(01:53):
deputy gangs were in style within the Los Angeles County
Sheriff's Department, but only people working on the inside. For
people with a connection to a deputy, knew that they existed.
Many people thought of the l A. S D as
a place free of corruption until they saw otherwise. My
name is Randall Higgins. I worked for l A. S
(02:14):
D as a deputy sheriff. Randall joined the l A.
S D in the summer of What made you want
to become a deputy sheriff? I wanted money. I've done
a lot of faith based work with youth, mentoring youth
activities which didn't pay anything, and then I was living
(02:36):
in Moore Park, and much to my surprise, I was
looking through the want ads for another job and there
was an advertisement for l A. S D doing the
qualifying test at Moore Park College. Randall grew up in
Moore Park, a mostly white, middle class town just north
of l A. Inventura County. It's known for its Civil
(02:57):
War re enactments and Apricot Festival. Lots of police live
in the area, so growing up, the city was full
of police officers, mostly l A p D and l A.
S D. And so at the church I went to
as a kid, I knew academy staff from l A
p D. I knew transportation staff from l A s D.
(03:22):
And you know, they're good people. It took me backpacking
they you know, we did all kinds of stuff together.
So I knew these guys and I was like, this
is it. My uncle was l A p D. Retired
after thirty years, and so it was very much a family, friends, neighbors.
(03:42):
What do people do when they need a job? Joined
the Sheriff's department. So he went ahead and applied, and
those childhood connections helped. It was not particularly difficult to
get hired. I talked to some of my deputy friends
who happened to be a former partners with background investigators
who happened to pull my file out of the back
(04:04):
of their file and put it on the front of
their file. So my application process went by really fast,
and um boom, all of a sudden, I was a
debut sheriff and getting good money. Randall says the academy
wasn't particularly difficult. The department had recently shortened the length
of the program by five weeks. After graduating from the academy,
(04:26):
Randall worked at the Peter J. Pitches Detention Center in Castaic, California,
for the next nineteen months for his custody training. He
finished in July and was assigned to the Lennox Station
for patrol training. At that time, Lennox was regarded as
one of the best stations to be trained at at
(04:47):
that time Lynwood, Firestone and Lenox or the Triangle stations,
and as far as statistics, they were more felony arrests
there than anywhere else. Carson was just a big station
and kind of on the borders of the Triangle, so
you know, pretty busy. But yeah, they trained more trainees
(05:10):
and they were staffed by more deputies. Busy stations like
Lenox had informal quotas well as a deputy. You don't
have to do anything. All you have to do is
leave the station, answer your calls. If you feel like it.
You know, you can always say I answered the call
and no further action required. But there had to be
(05:35):
some evaluation, and you've got an annual evaluation, and so
if you literally showed no arrests for the entire year,
you're going to get a negative evaluation. So there's a
couple of ways you can build some kind of credibility
that you're actually doing something instead of just collecting a paycheck.
(05:58):
You're right to traffic tick. It's a day that was
like the minimum standard of production. Go out right to
traffic tickets and nobody can say you didn't do anything
because you wrote to traffic tickets. But as far as
your peer respect, especially when your peers are saying, tell
(06:22):
me about it, what did you do today? You don't
have any stories to tell. They're gonna say, what a slug,
Why don't you do something? Why don't you make an arrest?
Like Randall, most deputies were in it for the money.
That determined what kind of arrest they made you could
go and spend all day in court and you could
get eight hours of overtime pay for spending that time
(06:45):
in court. So if you arrested somebody and it resulted
in a court case, then you could literally collect eight
hours of overtime. That was just you clock in in
the morning, you clock out at eight. You know, at
the end of the day you couldn't really do more
than eight hours because the court closed. But um, that's
(07:05):
overtime pay. So there's a high motivation to get to court. Well,
the kind of cases that got to court was just
like a rock or some other felony you you wanted
a felony. Uh, guns were good because that was always
going to go to court. A rock was good because
it was always going to go to court, a rock
meaning a rock of cocaine. Randall was a deputy during
(07:29):
the height of l A's crack epidemic. He says deputies
would arrest people for possession of the drug to break
up hours and hours of overtime testifying in court. You know,
there's not too much else to do that you can
guarantee is going to go to court. Domestic violence, you know,
you make an arrest and a domestic violence call, it's
(07:50):
probably not going to go to court. They're probably gonna
resolve it. So nobody wanted to spend a whole lot
of time making an arrest. And you know, we basically
had a problem with deputies kissing off domestic violence arrests.
What was the environment like in the Lenox area at
that time. Lennox was not a bad area. Um it
(08:14):
was the most affordable area near the airport. There was
gangs Lenox Third Team, uh Serenio Hispanic gang, you know,
and it really they were really more of a social organization.
They could be violent, they could do terrible things, but
(08:37):
in reality, they were really a social organization. And they
were the guys that grew up together and they bonded
and got tattoos and did what they did and stole
suff cars and chopped cars and sold drugs and you know,
I mean, it happened, but you know, they weren't horrible.
(09:04):
And then in Vermont there was drug dealers and gang
members and the same thing, you know, but for every
hardcore gang member, there was ten people just trying to
get through high school or college and doing the best
they could. Deputies who didn't see any difference, or like,
(09:26):
if they're walking on the street, they're they're fair game
their suspect. Randall says most of the deputies he worked
with were open about their racism. At Lenox, specifically, you're
dealing with nearly all white deputies in a community of color,
(09:46):
so deputies were racist. I had very few deputies that
I actually talked to who didn't openly admit to being
a racist. And I had one partner who I said,
can you give the guy a break, He's just a
human being. He said, well, my dad is a fireman
(10:11):
and he got stabbed by an inmate on a jail call.
This inmate was sick and he pulled out a stabbing implement.
It was some kind of a razor player or something,
and stabbed my dad with it. And that justifies everything
I've ever said about any person of color. And I said,
(10:33):
you're a racist. He was also very religious. I said,
how can you go to church and say that you
hate your fellow man. He's like, it's not an issue.
I hate my fellow men. And I was just like, wow,
I guess I don't get your religion. Had another deputy
(10:55):
he constantly said because he knew. It irritated me. Just
put of a fence around the whole place. Let them
kill each other inside there, and we can just sit
on the outside and make sure none of them get out.
I'd be like, so, what do you see the boundaries
of this fence, It doesn't matter. Make it as big
as we can. Let them all kill each other in there,
(11:17):
don't let any of them out. I was just like,
you're you're the definition of racist. You know that, right?
And he said, I don't care, And he knew. I
went to church and he said, what you think God
is gonna punish you for being racist? He's not gonna
(11:38):
punish me. There is no God. And I was like, well,
but but what if there is? What if some day
you have to answer for your racism? Now, I'm not
going to answer for my racism. I have never done
anything wrong. I was like, really, even a little bit. Nope,
I don't care. I've never done anything wrong besides racism.
(11:59):
Corrupt and was also pretty rampant. But when I got there,
the Major Narcotics Task Force had just been indicted for
Arco Narco and so that had a huge effect on
the deputy behavior. Arco Narco was a huge scandal where
(12:20):
l A. S D deputies and l A Police Department
officers were caught stealing money from drug dealers. It drew
national attention. So what happened was there was there's a
trailer like a mobile home, double wide in the back
of Lenox Station in the parking lot behind the library,
(12:40):
and that was the headquarters of Major Crime Investigations detectives.
So these guys had worked at patrol stations and they'd
become task Force members. The l A s D started
looking into the task Force in October of nine. They
(13:03):
were tipped off through an anonymous letter from a deputy's
wife who said that the narcotics officers were stealing from
their suspects. The FEDS joined the investigation, and ten months
later they caught nine members of the task Force taking
ten thousand dollar bundles of cash from an alleged drug
dealers bag and putting it into one of their own.
(13:25):
On September one, nine nine FBI agents and other sheriff's
deputies raided the homes and offices of the Task Force
members and found more money. Nineteen days later, the l A.
S D disbanded its four elite narcotic squads. No one
was fired at first, though only transferred or suspended. Two
(13:47):
years later. In nineteen ninety, a federal grand jury indicted
the twenty six officers for stealing and estimated one point
four million dollars just over three million dollars today money
laundering and tax evasion. The men were using the money
to buy stocks, vacation homes, and boats. According to court documents,
(14:10):
one deputy bought a boat for eighteen thousand dollars. It
burned a week later, and he put seven thousand dollars
in cash down on a new one. Several of the
people indicted we're training officers for deputies new to patrol.
Those training officers used exactly the same tactics when they
were training officers as they did when they were on
(14:34):
the task force. That was back in the heyday. Crack cocaine.
So you stopped somebody in the street they had crack cocaine.
You booked it, but you kept it because you might
want to have probably cause to arrest somebody else on
another day. Randall says that it wasn't only the Arco
(14:56):
Narco officers who were planting drugs. Lots of deputies were.
There was even a term for it vision. You've got
excellent vision, which vision is being able to see the opportunity.
Uh BB sized rock of cocaine is not ever visible
(15:21):
through a person's clothing. But I don't know how many
times I saw reports or heard of deputy say I
observed bulge in the watch pocket of the suspects. Levi's
in the area where most drug addicts typically stashed there
rock of cocaine, and I recognized it as a hidden
(15:45):
rock of cocaine. I searched them in. Uh found the
evidence and that would fly at least it would get
you in court. And uh it happened all the time.
Stealing money was department wide as well. Every patrol deputy
had the same opportunity to take money, take drugs. You
(16:07):
could stash it and use it another day. The money
obviously bought some boats and dates and baby mama support
and you know all the things that deputies do with
their money. And uh so it was throughout the department
(16:31):
and everybody knew it. He saw deputies using the money
they stole to buy equipment they would use to arrest
more people to steal from. There was still deputies in
that were carrying revolvers. UH deputies had car radios, not
handheld radios, and you could buy your own handheld radio
(16:51):
for about and carry it on patrol, but that was
a tremendous expense and deputies didn't want to spend that
kind of money. UH flashlights they had the old two
D battery plastic flashlights were issued to us and they
(17:11):
were saying, wait a minute, we got rechargeable flashlights. We've
got four cell aluminum flashlights that will light up everything.
How come we don't have those flashlights. So deputies on
patrol would find somebody with a thousand dollars of UH
drug money and they'd say, well, I'm going to go
(17:33):
buy the equipment that I deserve with five dollars, and
I'm going to book the other five dollars. This was
standard procedure, so whoever was involved in the arrest got
their share. But they were like, no, we all get equal,
equal call on whatever confiscations we take. Some people were
(17:53):
manipulated out of their money by deputies. That was the
other part of it is that there was a surrender
let her. So if you got arrested with fifty dollars
driving down the street, you've probably been profiled, or maybe
somebody had actually seen you doing a drug transaction. A
deputy might actually have good information that that's drug money.
(18:18):
They make the stop and they find fifty dollars and
they said is this your money, And if the person
in the car says yeah, that's my money, they said, okay,
well we're gonna take you to jail for UH sales
because obviously you don't have a job, you don't have
(18:39):
any UH investments that you just cashed out, so you
got fifty dollars from selling drugs, so we're gonna charge
you with a crime. Well, then the driver of the
car is like, no, no, no, no, no, it's not
my money. What happens if it's not my money. And
the officer would say, well, if it's not your money,
(19:02):
we have no further business here, but that's drug money.
And so they had a waiver letter and they would
give it to the person and the person would say,
this is not my money, and they were just taken.
And nobody knows how many times where that happened. You
(19:22):
didn't really have to write a report, you just did it.
Training officers usually have a lot of influence on the station.
They are responsible for bringing the next generation of patrol
deputies up to speed. So they are generally people that
others working at the station trust. In order to become
a training officer, they have these meetings between a few
(19:44):
sergeants and all of the training officers. So this is
where a trust is built. In order to become a
training officer, you have to have the trust of the
sergeants and existing training officers, and then they vote on
who they want to allow to be a training officer.
(20:05):
So if they don't trust you, they're not gonna vote
on you and allow you to be a training officer.
So whenever they needed a training officer, they would say, okay,
everybody who wants to be a training officer, put in
your name, and there would be a list and they'd
have a meeting and they'd go down the list, Okay,
this guy, everybody, Yeah, this guy, no way, that guy's
(20:28):
a jerk. We don't want him. Randall told me that
deputies wanted to know they could freely commit crimes in
front of each other. They wanted to trust each other.
There were different things that a deputy could do to
win that trust. For instance, when you got off training,
you bought everybody beer, just your arrange. The trainees that
all got off about the same time said, oh, we're
(20:49):
doing beer at the bar, and they had a favorite
bar not too far from there. And the trainees that
put their money together, and anybody who should have detectives
or anybody who should buy him as much beer as
they wanted. So that's like showing respect, building trust. The
Grim Reapers gang was formed at one of those off
training parties in late I actually saw the invitation letter
(21:13):
that was circulated, and of course I wasn't eligible because
I wasn't off training yet, but I saw the invitation letter. Hey,
we're forming the Grim Reapers. You know, we're gonna have
a meeting at probably a bar I forget exactly. Come
down there if you want to be part of the
Grim Reapers and we'll form Grim Reapers. They thought it
was really cool. Grim Reapers. Um, yeah, you know, we
(21:37):
see a lot of deaths out here. We kill people sometimes.
Let's call ourselves the Grim Reapers. You know, we've earned it.
Let's commemorate what we've earned. Uh, we're gonna start the
Grim Reapers. We're gonna get tattoos and sounds pretty badass
to me, And it was a lot of it was
(21:57):
implied like if we all have the same tattoo, we
can trust each other to the end. If you shed
a little blood with each other, your brothers forever. And
there was this bonding slash camaraderie slash loyalty that would
last until death. So my first training officer, Vic Lopez,
(22:22):
specifically told me that he thought it was kind of
goofy and he wasn't going to join, but he also had,
you know, seniority and an age that it was like,
you know, these young kids, it's kind of a dumb idea,
but I hope they have fun. Not everybody accepted the invitation.
(22:44):
We actually had a response team which was all non
grim Reaper, and I don't think it was just a coincidence.
Every deputy in the station was on a response team,
and so if there was earthquake or riots or whatever,
you have a sergeant and a response team. What just
(23:08):
so happened that my response team had no grim Reapers
on it, which meant that we could be assigned to
details that nobody else wanted to do, or we would
be segregated from grim Reapers. And for grim Reapers that
(23:30):
was very desirable. They didn't want non grim reapers up
in their business because they didn't trust him. Randall's second
training officer, Victor Clay, asked him if he wanted a tattoo.
Clay was an alleged grim reaper himself. Today he's chief
of the Harvard University Police Department. We reached out to
(23:51):
Clay for comment and he declined. Now, my second um
training officer said, hey, you want to get a tattoo?
And I was like, I don't know. And he said, well,
if you want a tattoo, there's one thing you should know.
You have to tell them that you will do whatever
(24:12):
they tell you to do if you get a tattoo. Okay, well,
I'll take that under consideration. He said, what do you
gotta ask your wife? And I said, I really don't
think that's the question you ask your wife. I need
to make that decision on my own. A couple of
days later, he says, you can't just leave this hanging.
(24:33):
You gotta either say yes or no. And I said, no,
I don't want a tattoo. Okay, fine, But from that conversation,
I know that one of their primary interests whether you
get a tattoo, you gotta tell them you will do
whatever they tell you to do. You you will get
(24:54):
up in the middle of the night and do what
they tell you to do. You will leave of whatever
you're doing and do whatever they tell you to do.
I didn't fully understand that until years later, but I
saw over the course of time that they were serious.
They they told people to do stuff that was unthinkable.
(25:19):
It was not just a social organization. It was they're
in control of your life. They will tell you to
do whatever they want to tell you to do. And
it's not about drinking beers and going bowling. It's it's
about life and death. What sort of things did they
ask people to do? Well, you know, on the very
low end um, everybody who had court would have their
(25:45):
subpoenas in a subpoena box, and so the first person
who went to court would pick up all the subpoenas
and make sure that everybody knew they were going, and
then would go to court and clock everybody in the
beginning of the day, and then the last person who
left court or the last person who lived close enough
(26:07):
to go back to court, would clock everybody out at
the end of the day. So everybody who had a
subpoena for any day would get a full eight hours.
So that was expected task of grim reapers. Probably it
was expected of every deputy. Um, if you were down
(26:29):
with that, you know, grim reapers especially expected that to happen.
Evidence Uh, splitting up money, Uh, you know, taking a
cut out of evidence. If a grim reaper said, look,
do it this way. Dropping guns. Drop a gun, meaning
planting a gun on someone, collecting guns that had been
(26:53):
found instead of booking them as lost found property, keeping
them in case somebody is in a shooting and they
need a gun. If the victim of the shooting doesn't
have a gun, they need a gun. The deputy needs
a gun to say he had a gun. It's right here, Um,
(27:14):
drop a gun. Grim Reapers would also use their gang
affiliation to control work schedules. Lots of grim Reapers preferred
to work the late night shift. If you work in
the dark, you make more arrests. If you were in
the day, you don't mean many arrests. It was pretty
open hazing kind of thing. Uh. You could get off
(27:36):
training and if you weren't, you know, play nice with
the PM shift or the early morning shift. They would
go to the scheduling sergeant and say this guy. Put
him on day shift. We don't want to work with them.
And that's exactly what happened to me because I refused
to do some favors. Randall's schedule had been flexible while
(27:59):
he was on training, but once he finished, he wanted
to go back to a regular work week. He had
a wife, kids and wanted to be there to support
his family. The grim Reapers wanted him around to cover
their shifts, and they're like, oh, we have plans for you.
You need to work this guy's shift. You need to
do this. And I was like no, and they said, well,
(28:22):
looks to us like you're a day shift deputy. And
they went to the scheduling sergeant and said put him
on day shift. It didn't matter to me because that
meant I got home at a decent time. I saw
my kids before they went to bed, and I did
what I wanted to do. But um, you know, to
(28:43):
me that to them, they were putting me in my place.
And I didn't really react to it because I didn't
really care. But um, you know, they didn't want me around.
They were doing what they wanted to do because I
had told them, I don't need you to trust me.
(29:05):
You know. I mean when a deputy comes to you
and says wow, And I got this speech from a
prominent deputy who has remained prominent to this day. Um,
there's nobody out there for you. We are your backup.
Nobody's going to help you from this community. You need us.
(29:27):
Who's gonna back you up when you need backup? If
we don't, you need to do what we ask you
to do in the station, out of the station on patrol.
If we need you to do something, you need to
do it for us, because if you don't, you won't
have any backup. You won't have anybody helping you do
(29:47):
anything you need to do. And I said, oh, that
sounds very serious. No, I'm not gonna do what you're
asking me to do. And uh. It was tremendously frustrating
to him and his partner. But as events have turned,
(30:13):
I'm not sure that he would see the logic of
that anymore. Who was he? That was Larry Delmies and
his partner, Steve Levins, and one of their buddies, and
those were the founding members of Grim Reapers. Larry Delmies
(30:45):
would go on to become chief of staff to Sheriff
Alex by in Nueva. Steve Levins was convicted of federal
obstruction of justice charges, But we'll come back to that.
Larry Delmies and Steve Levins controlled the station. I mean
they had more influence than the captain did. They got
(31:05):
what they wanted when they wanted it. They were very
thoughtful about controlling other deputies and how they wanted to
do that. Grim reapers also used women who lived in
the neighborhood to help them cover up their crimes. Randall
remembers one deputy who went by Big Bob, who started
dating a woman close to the station. He either met
(31:27):
her at church and realized that he worked in the
same neighborhood where she lived, or this might be the
cover story she came into the station. I think he
told her to come into the station and ask for
help with drug dealing across the street from her house.
(31:49):
I think they had already started dating and then they
wanted to have a on the record h relationship, business relationship.
Big Bob would hang out at the woman's house during
his shift while his partner, Robert Johnson, drove around on patrol.
(32:10):
Johnson is currently a candidate for sheriff in Santa Clara County.
Big would go over to her house and have dinner
with her and spending evening talking while Robert Johnson was
out driving around. They had a little stash inside the
house where they would leave drugs, money, a gun. I
(32:32):
don't know, I don't know what was all in there.
She let them put a lock on a cabinet and
left it right there in her house, and so they
would stop buying, you know, hide evidence there, hide money there,
hide whatever they wanted to hide in her little cabinet,
(32:52):
and she I was like, okay, I guess. Spoke to
another woman who was too afraid to go on tape,
who had a similar experience. She lived close to the
Lenox station in the nineteen nineties and started getting sexually
harassed by deputies who patrolled in her neighborhood. They would
(33:14):
cat call her, shine lights into her windows, and make
lewd remarks toward her. Several were alleged grim reapers. She
told me that out of fear, she eventually went along
with it. In her words, if you can't make them stop,
join them. Soon more deputies started showing up at her
house at all hours of the night. They brought beer
(33:35):
with them and asked her to dance strip teases for them. Eventually,
it all got to be too much and she fled California.
Interacting with deputy gang members every day got to be
too much for Randall too. He was deeply bothered by
how the Grim Reapers viewed people living in Lennox. Randall
continued to get on the Grim reapers bad side. He
(33:57):
was named in a lawsuit where a family had been
detained by deputies in their home and had torn it
apart during an improper search. When he was called to testify,
he did the unthinkable. He told the truth. The operations
lieutenant stopped me in the hallway after that second lawsuit
and he said, look, you want to remember every fucking
(34:19):
detail of every incident. We'll put you on every lawsuit
and you can just testify in all of them. How's
that you want that kind of attention? And I was like, hmm,
there's an issue. At first, he tried to transfer to
another station. At some point somebody said why didn't she
(34:39):
transfer out of the station, And then I said, well,
put in a transfer to Malibi. They don't seem interested,
and he said, of course they're not interested. They don't
trust you. You're not gonna go anywhere in this department
because nobody trusts you. Uh. Steve Levins stopped me for
(34:59):
a friendly chat chat at the jailer's desk one day,
So let me explain something to you. There's all kinds
of people who have ideals and want to see their
ideals put forward in society, but in the sheriff's department.
(35:20):
This is the way it works. My dad's internal affairs lieutenant,
and he has developed this. All we do, all he
does is we say that you are an unusual person. Now,
what is an unusual person. It might mean you're completely insane,
(35:46):
it might mean that you have some kind of deviant behavior.
We don't have to define what an unusual person is.
If the media off l A Times comes to us
and says, why would he say all this stuff, we
just say, well, he's an unusual person, and he said
you are an unusual person, and we'll put that on
(36:10):
you anywhere you try to go. So I'm like, okay,
I'm in this job for the money, not really loving Lennox.
It's fifty three miles. I'm getting tired of the commute.
There's an increasing level of hostility towards me, maybe I
(36:32):
should move on. Randall left the l A s D
And moved to northern California. He enrolled in seminary school
and put the department behind him, but the grim Rapers
weren't ready to let him walk away. I had had
friendly conversations with a guy who was from Morinne County.
I was living in Morinne County and I said, yeah,
(36:54):
stop by. So he knew where I lived, and so
he came one day. He said, don't change your lifestyle.
And I said, what are you talking about? And he said,
don't change your lifestyle. Um Grim reavers, I want to
kill you. And they did some research and they realized
(37:19):
that you don't spend times in bars or high crime neighborhoods.
And they realized that in order to kill you, it
would be too obvious that it was a hit. I
was like, wow, that's that's just crazy. And he says, actually,
he says, the reason I came up here was they
asked me to come up here. But I like you,
and so I'm telling you this. I don't want to
(37:43):
just come up here and say that. You know, I
didn't want to come up here just because they told
me to come up here. I was up here, and
I want to be friendly with you. I wanna, you know,
give you this advice. Back in Lennox, the Grim Papers
continued their campaign of terror on residents. A man by
(38:04):
the name of Lee Bacca had taken over operations of
the station. He oversaw seventy percent of the incidents resulting
in misconduct lawsuits between and more than half of those
cost l A County at least one million dollars. None
(38:24):
of the twenty eight deputies sued were disciplined, they were promoted,
and they trained other deputies on how to become gang members.
A deputy told the Los Angeles Times that a member
of Posse, a deputy gang originating in Twin Towers Correctional Facility,
went on right along with members of the Grim Reapers.
(38:46):
That paper alleges that deputy went on to be involved
in the death of Danny Smith. Danny was a black
man who had been diagnosed with a mental illness. He
was beaten to death at the jail. One deputy said
he had gotten on his colleague's bad side for quote
mouthing off. Just nine days after Smith's death, the Times
(39:07):
reported another beating at Twin Towers where the man had
been left with flashlight marks on his back and a
bootmark on his side. Then Sheriff Sherman Block stated that
although the eight deputies involved in Smith's beating had been
relieved of duty, six other members of posse continued to
work in the jail. Lennox Station's chief Deputy Lee Bacca
(39:31):
launched a campaign for sheriff in against his mentor, Sheriff
Sherman Block. Bacca wasn't doing well in the polls, but
Block died a few days before the election. Bacca was
the winner. One of Bocca's first moves was promoting then
lieutenant and tattooed Viking Paul Tanaka to be his top aid.
(39:52):
More after the break, the Grim Reapers didn't go away.
As time went on and members transferred to other areas
(40:13):
of the department, the gang actually continued to get bigger. Well.
I tell people that the in my opinion, the Sheriff's
Department is the most brutal of all the police agencies
that I've encountered through my cases. Attorney Gary Castleman first
came face to face with deputy gangs when he worked
(40:34):
on the class action lawsuit brought by victims of the
Lynwood Vikings. When you were hearing about the Vikings for
the first time, what was your reaction, What went through
your head. It was just kind of surprising, obviously, because
it never occurred to me that there would be something
like that, and that they would glorify doing bad stuff
(40:58):
to people, and it seemed like their values were completely
upside down. Gary represented one of the seventy people who
challenged the Vikings in court with a lawsuit. Elzie coleman
On ma Elsie was walking down Antwerp Street in the
Willow Brick neighborhood of l A. Witnesses told The Los
(41:20):
Angeles Times he had just spent the evening hanging out
with family and was on his way to the grocery store.
Two Sheriff's deputies pulled up to him, Paul Archinbald and
his partner, and so my client thought that he had
a warrant out for traffic ticket or something, which unfortunately
turned out not to be true, but he ran because
(41:42):
he thought he was going to get scooped up. Elsie
was unarmed, but deputies claimed that he resembled a suspect
in a shooting. According to witnesses, Archanbald got out of
the car with his gun in his hand and started
to chase Elsie. Archanbald chased him into a dead end
walk away and fired repeatedly. Elsie was hit six times.
(42:05):
Deputy has found a gun that they said belonged to Elsie.
He lived, but was charged for allegedly threatening a deputy
with that gun. Gary loves science. He relies on it
in all of his cases to make his argument and win.
This one was no different. What the d A and
the Sheriff's Department didn't know is that I spent eight
(42:26):
hours with the emergency room surgeon prior to, you know,
going to trial. Mr Coleman, among other things, had a wound.
If you this is radio, but if you hold your
right hand out and point your finger into the meaty
part of your thumb in your palm, that's where there
(42:47):
was a bullet hole, and there was obviously a hole
on the other side the wound would help. Gary proved
that the deputy has made up the entire story about
the gun, and oh, I said, well, doctor, can you
think of any way that a person holding a gun
in their hand in the usual way would get a
(43:09):
bullet wound? In the area that would be covered by
the gun, and he says no. Elsie's wounds also proved
that Archambald shot him while he was down. Elsie was
acquitted of all charges. The jury not only rendered a
not guilty verdict, but they passed a note and said
that Archambo should be in prison. Gary was able to
(43:32):
get Elsie about one million dollars in the civil case.
Just over twenty years later, Gary found himself taking on
another deputy gang, the Grim Reapers. On October seventeenth, two
thousand and twelve, deputies arrested twenty seven year old Hilberto
Gutierrez during a traffic stop for suspicion of possession of
(43:54):
a controlled substance. Hilberto was arrested, then deputies took him
to his house and searched it. Afterwards, he started to
complain about pain in his chest and was taken by
ambulance to Sentinella Hospital Medical Center around pm. Gary represented
Hilberto's family in a lawsuit. The station took him to
(44:17):
the hospital and so they examined him and there was
no medical person in the room and the deputies were
thereby with him. Around one am on the morning of
October eight deputies, David Chevez and Lawrence Swanson Jr. Beat shot,
and killed Hilberto as he lay handcuffed to a hospital bed.
(44:40):
The Guzzierra's family filed a civil rights lawsuit on behalf
of Hilberto's two young children and against l A County
and the deputies. The deputies claimed Hilberto attempted to grab
their guns and they were cleared of any wrongdoing. But
Gary looked at the science and got a different answer.
Evidence from medical ex birds showed that the deputies were
(45:01):
standing over Hilberto when they shot him. Well, what I
think happened is that they are either words or something happened.
Hilberto had a tattoo on his chest that read fuck
the Police, which was visible during the e k G
he had done. Gary thinks that may have made the
deputy's target his client. I asked the pathologist, I said,
(45:23):
can you think of anyway that a man who was
shot from this side could have a bullet entering on
this side? And he said I can't think of any
and so I thought, okay, we're good. My wife came
up with the idea. You know those styrofoam heads that
(45:44):
they put wigs on so when I took the pathologist deposition,
I had a knitting needle and I had the head,
and I said, okay, put the knitting needle in to
show the path of the bullet into the brain, into
the head. And so he did so, and so here's
the shooter over here, and here's the bullet entry. The
(46:07):
testimony of the two deputies solidified his case. So I
set the deposition of the two shooters, and then of
course I videotaped all of my depositions because nonverbal communication
is well over. And so I had this guy. I
wanted him to show me his shooting positions, so he
got into a stance. Then Gary asked about Hilbertzo's position
(46:30):
in the bed, and he described what he said his
position was. And then I was able to show, or
at least I thought I did, how this could not
have occurred. There was no way for the bullet to
have been able to travel the way the deputies were describing.
(46:50):
Evidence shows the bullet traveled downward through Hilbertzo's head, the
complete opposite direction from what the deputy said, and Gary
was able to get the shooters to admit even more.
I asked a few actors to read portions of deposition transcript.
Here's Gary questioning David Chevez. And by the way, do
you have any tattoos on yourself? Sir? Yes, I do objection.
(47:14):
It's a violation of his privacy. And on what part
of your body are they? Sir? I have a tattoo
on my ankle? And what is it of It's a
tattoo of a reaper, like a grim reaper, like a
grim reaper. Yes, And which ankle is it? Sir? It's
on my left ankle and doesn't have a number. Yes,
(47:36):
it does. What's the number n S? And when did
you receive it? It would be sometime last year after
the shooting, Yes, it was. It was a reaper. It
was described as a grim reaper. He just wants an
approximate date that you've got the tattoo, Probably about I
(47:57):
don't know. I'd say about a year ago, maybe March
of two team March of Where did you get it at? Well,
it was a tattoo shop and I really don't remember
where it was at. Well, let's start with the county.
Was it l a county? Yeah, I believe so. And
what was the name of the tattoo shop or its location.
(48:20):
I really don't remember. How did you learn about the
tattoo shop? What do you mean how did I learn
about it? Pardon me? What do you mean by how
did I learn about it? Well? Why did you pick
that particular tattoo shop? I'll object on relevance grounds, but
go ahead. I didn't pick a tattoo shop. I really
just well, you showed up there and you got a tattoo. Sir,
(48:45):
where did the idea come from to go to that shop?
Did someone tell you? No? I I really don't know
why we went to that shop. Who was with you?
You say we? I was with a couple of buddies
of mine from the Sheriff's department, some of them more. Yes,
please identify the people that you were with. I was with.
Just objection for the record that this diolates the right
(49:07):
of privacy to individuals not a party to this litigation,
they are witnesses. Go ahead, sir, I was with Deputy Swanson,
Deputy Monos, and Deputy Mesa. I see, Well, to your knowledge,
have did Mason Munos get repert tattoos? Yes? They do
(49:27):
have repertattoos? Did they get them the same day that
you and Swanson did? No? They did not. And which
of you got tattoos that day? Deputy Swanson and I
got tattoos that day, both on your left ankle. Yes, sir.
When did you get the idea to have a reapert tattoo?
(49:48):
As it's it's kind of a vague question, I mean,
can you it's not vague at all, Sir? When did
you get the idea to get a repert tattoo? I
can't make it any plainer than that objection argumentative. Just
tell him when you made the decision to get the tattoo.
I've always wanted a tattoo. What about that? Do you
(50:11):
have other tattoos? No? I do not. Okay, so you
always wanted a tattoo? Did you always want a reaper tattoo?
Not necessarily a reaper tattoo, but I always wanted a
station tattoo. I've always wanted one, a station tattoo. Okay.
What is a station tattoo? As you understand it, it's
a tattoo that people from different stations would get that
(50:33):
there would somehow they would somehow show some type of pride,
some type of It's hard to describe, but just like
if you're proud of something, something you would get to
show you're proud of chef, as his partner Lawrence Swanson
was deposed to, why did you want to get a
tattoo of Well, first of all, what is the tattoo
(50:56):
that you got? It's a tattoo of a reaper. Let
me just for this in tire section object on violation
of privacy. But go ahead and answer your ask your
questions and relevancy. Sorry, And what does that tattoo look like?
It looks like, um, like a skeleton with a robe holding. Um.
(51:19):
I don't know what the tools called a scythe scythe Yeah,
that curved blade right with a long handle or a
short handle, I guess the long handle. And does that
show what was the reason you decided to get that tattoo?
I just I've always wanted a station tattoo. Station tattoos
(51:40):
are pretty prominent in the department, and I just I
just wanted to show pride and where I work. All right,
does it have a number on it? Yes? And what's
your number? And what does that signify? The number? I
think it means on the person to get the tattoo.
(52:02):
So I think we heard that w CHEVZ was ninety
six so you got your tattoo after he got his. Yes.
In the two others, were they before you too or
after you too? Before? So they're probably ninetour I'm actually
not certain. And they all got their tattoos on the
(52:22):
same location and of the same raper, on the same
location on their body. Yeah, yes, and it was the
same design, same basic design. Yes. With all this evidence
in hand, Gary was sure he had won the case.
He felt even more reassured when the county offered him
two million dollars to settle. The offer was declined and
(52:46):
the case went to court. You know, I felt we
had the case nailed then. I mean, the county doesn't
offer that kind of money just for grins and giggles.
So they were worried about the case too. But the jury,
you know, it was a Friday evening and they wanted
to go home, and they were, you know, in my opinion,
not terribly impressed with the case we put on. And
(53:08):
the county's attorney was almost nine months pregnant while she's
trying the case, so who knows what the chemistry of
all those factors were. But it was a defense verdict,
and I was absolutely sick, and uh, I still don't
feel well about it. I have the boxes in my
(53:28):
garage and I look at them and just, you know,
kind of mentally shake my head, you know, what could
have been? And I left those people down. I felt
that I had Hilberto's family got nothing. David Chevez and
Lawrence Swanson were never disciplined, and both still appear to
be working for the l A. S D. In fact,
they've been promoted. They're not the only deputies and the
(53:51):
grim Reapers to see career advancement after something horrible. Current
Sheriff Alex Vanueva had at least two working with him
through his campaign in and since he's been in office.
That's coming up next week. I used to a low
(54:16):
Lida who hood, No, fuck the police. I'm a fucking trophy.
You've been listening to a tradition of violence. The history
of deputy Gangs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department
hosted an executive produced by Seris Castle, voice acting from
Mike Green, Alex Fumero, Steve Hernandez, and Kindle May. Music
(54:37):
by Yellow Hill and Steels for breaking news and updates
and deputy gangs follow at l A. S D. Gangs
on social media. The support series is reporting and for
exclusive bonus content, subscribe to the l s D Gangs
Patriot on the
Morning. This podcast can see is explicit language and details
acts of violence. Listener discretion is advised. The Los Angeles
County Sheriff's Department has historically been known for its brutal
violence against residents. In the nineteen nineties, the Vikings caught
the attention of a skeptical press for their brutal policing
(00:20):
in Lynwood and ruthless revenge plots on colleagues who would
not conform to the gang's policies. But the Vikings were
just one of their deputy gangs on the streets. In
the early nineteen nineties, in l A's Lenox neighborhood, a
gang of deputies calling themselves the Grim Reapers formed at
the local station. The Grim Reapers were originally based out
(00:44):
of the Lenox Station in South l A. The station
closed back in two thousand and ten when the brand
new South Los Angeles station opened. Members of the gang
can be found throughout the department these days, often in
powerful positions like Sheriff Alex Viy in a way of
his former chief of staff. Being a deputy gang member
(01:06):
can come with perks and career advancement, and the Grim
Reapers have used their brutal, often fatal, policing style. To
network to the top of the department. Members of the
Grim Reapers have a tattoo on their calf of a
black hooded skeleton holding a scythe. That's the medieval symbol
of death. To get a tattoo, it's alleged that deputies
(01:28):
need to participate in killing a civilian. This is a
tradition of violence. A history of deputy gangs inside the
Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. By the late nineteen eighties,
(01:53):
deputy gangs were in style within the Los Angeles County
Sheriff's Department, but only people working on the inside. For
people with a connection to a deputy, knew that they existed.
Many people thought of the l A. S D as
a place free of corruption until they saw otherwise. My
name is Randall Higgins. I worked for l A. S
(02:14):
D as a deputy sheriff. Randall joined the l A.
S D in the summer of What made you want
to become a deputy sheriff? I wanted money. I've done
a lot of faith based work with youth, mentoring youth
activities which didn't pay anything, and then I was living
(02:36):
in Moore Park, and much to my surprise, I was
looking through the want ads for another job and there
was an advertisement for l A. S D doing the
qualifying test at Moore Park College. Randall grew up in
Moore Park, a mostly white, middle class town just north
of l A. Inventura County. It's known for its Civil
(02:57):
War re enactments and Apricot Festival. Lots of police live
in the area, so growing up, the city was full
of police officers, mostly l A p D and l A.
S D. And so at the church I went to
as a kid, I knew academy staff from l A
p D. I knew transportation staff from l A s D.
(03:22):
And you know, they're good people. It took me backpacking
they you know, we did all kinds of stuff together.
So I knew these guys and I was like, this
is it. My uncle was l A p D. Retired
after thirty years, and so it was very much a family, friends, neighbors.
(03:42):
What do people do when they need a job? Joined
the Sheriff's department. So he went ahead and applied, and
those childhood connections helped. It was not particularly difficult to
get hired. I talked to some of my deputy friends
who happened to be a former partners with background investigators
who happened to pull my file out of the back
(04:04):
of their file and put it on the front of
their file. So my application process went by really fast,
and um boom, all of a sudden, I was a
debut sheriff and getting good money. Randall says the academy
wasn't particularly difficult. The department had recently shortened the length
of the program by five weeks. After graduating from the academy,
(04:26):
Randall worked at the Peter J. Pitches Detention Center in Castaic, California,
for the next nineteen months for his custody training. He
finished in July and was assigned to the Lennox Station
for patrol training. At that time, Lennox was regarded as
one of the best stations to be trained at at
(04:47):
that time Lynwood, Firestone and Lenox or the Triangle stations,
and as far as statistics, they were more felony arrests
there than anywhere else. Carson was just a big station
and kind of on the borders of the Triangle, so
you know, pretty busy. But yeah, they trained more trainees
(05:10):
and they were staffed by more deputies. Busy stations like
Lenox had informal quotas well as a deputy. You don't
have to do anything. All you have to do is
leave the station, answer your calls. If you feel like it.
You know, you can always say I answered the call
and no further action required. But there had to be
(05:35):
some evaluation, and you've got an annual evaluation, and so
if you literally showed no arrests for the entire year,
you're going to get a negative evaluation. So there's a
couple of ways you can build some kind of credibility
that you're actually doing something instead of just collecting a paycheck.
(05:58):
You're right to traffic tick. It's a day that was
like the minimum standard of production. Go out right to
traffic tickets and nobody can say you didn't do anything
because you wrote to traffic tickets. But as far as
your peer respect, especially when your peers are saying, tell
(06:22):
me about it, what did you do today? You don't
have any stories to tell. They're gonna say, what a slug,
Why don't you do something? Why don't you make an arrest?
Like Randall, most deputies were in it for the money.
That determined what kind of arrest they made you could
go and spend all day in court and you could
get eight hours of overtime pay for spending that time
(06:45):
in court. So if you arrested somebody and it resulted
in a court case, then you could literally collect eight
hours of overtime. That was just you clock in in
the morning, you clock out at eight. You know, at
the end of the day you couldn't really do more
than eight hours because the court closed. But um, that's
(07:05):
overtime pay. So there's a high motivation to get to court. Well,
the kind of cases that got to court was just
like a rock or some other felony you you wanted
a felony. Uh, guns were good because that was always
going to go to court. A rock was good because
it was always going to go to court, a rock
meaning a rock of cocaine. Randall was a deputy during
(07:29):
the height of l A's crack epidemic. He says deputies
would arrest people for possession of the drug to break
up hours and hours of overtime testifying in court. You know,
there's not too much else to do that you can
guarantee is going to go to court. Domestic violence, you know,
you make an arrest and a domestic violence call, it's
(07:50):
probably not going to go to court. They're probably gonna
resolve it. So nobody wanted to spend a whole lot
of time making an arrest. And you know, we basically
had a problem with deputies kissing off domestic violence arrests.
What was the environment like in the Lenox area at
that time. Lennox was not a bad area. Um it
(08:14):
was the most affordable area near the airport. There was
gangs Lenox Third Team, uh Serenio Hispanic gang, you know,
and it really they were really more of a social organization.
They could be violent, they could do terrible things, but
(08:37):
in reality, they were really a social organization. And they
were the guys that grew up together and they bonded
and got tattoos and did what they did and stole
suff cars and chopped cars and sold drugs and you know,
I mean, it happened, but you know, they weren't horrible.
(09:04):
And then in Vermont there was drug dealers and gang
members and the same thing, you know, but for every
hardcore gang member, there was ten people just trying to
get through high school or college and doing the best
they could. Deputies who didn't see any difference, or like,
(09:26):
if they're walking on the street, they're they're fair game
their suspect. Randall says most of the deputies he worked
with were open about their racism. At Lenox, specifically, you're
dealing with nearly all white deputies in a community of color,
(09:46):
so deputies were racist. I had very few deputies that
I actually talked to who didn't openly admit to being
a racist. And I had one partner who I said,
can you give the guy a break, He's just a
human being. He said, well, my dad is a fireman
(10:11):
and he got stabbed by an inmate on a jail call.
This inmate was sick and he pulled out a stabbing implement.
It was some kind of a razor player or something,
and stabbed my dad with it. And that justifies everything
I've ever said about any person of color. And I said,
(10:33):
you're a racist. He was also very religious. I said,
how can you go to church and say that you
hate your fellow man. He's like, it's not an issue.
I hate my fellow men. And I was just like, wow,
I guess I don't get your religion. Had another deputy
(10:55):
he constantly said because he knew. It irritated me. Just
put of a fence around the whole place. Let them
kill each other inside there, and we can just sit
on the outside and make sure none of them get out.
I'd be like, so, what do you see the boundaries
of this fence, It doesn't matter. Make it as big
as we can. Let them all kill each other in there,
(11:17):
don't let any of them out. I was just like,
you're you're the definition of racist. You know that, right?
And he said, I don't care, And he knew. I
went to church and he said, what you think God
is gonna punish you for being racist? He's not gonna
(11:38):
punish me. There is no God. And I was like, well,
but but what if there is? What if some day
you have to answer for your racism? Now, I'm not
going to answer for my racism. I have never done
anything wrong. I was like, really, even a little bit. Nope,
I don't care. I've never done anything wrong besides racism.
(11:59):
Corrupt and was also pretty rampant. But when I got there,
the Major Narcotics Task Force had just been indicted for
Arco Narco and so that had a huge effect on
the deputy behavior. Arco Narco was a huge scandal where
(12:20):
l A. S D deputies and l A Police Department
officers were caught stealing money from drug dealers. It drew
national attention. So what happened was there was there's a
trailer like a mobile home, double wide in the back
of Lenox Station in the parking lot behind the library,
(12:40):
and that was the headquarters of Major Crime Investigations detectives.
So these guys had worked at patrol stations and they'd
become task Force members. The l A s D started
looking into the task Force in October of nine. They
(13:03):
were tipped off through an anonymous letter from a deputy's
wife who said that the narcotics officers were stealing from
their suspects. The FEDS joined the investigation, and ten months
later they caught nine members of the task Force taking
ten thousand dollar bundles of cash from an alleged drug
dealers bag and putting it into one of their own.
(13:25):
On September one, nine nine FBI agents and other sheriff's
deputies raided the homes and offices of the Task Force
members and found more money. Nineteen days later, the l A.
S D disbanded its four elite narcotic squads. No one
was fired at first, though only transferred or suspended. Two
(13:47):
years later. In nineteen ninety, a federal grand jury indicted
the twenty six officers for stealing and estimated one point
four million dollars just over three million dollars today money
laundering and tax evasion. The men were using the money
to buy stocks, vacation homes, and boats. According to court documents,
(14:10):
one deputy bought a boat for eighteen thousand dollars. It
burned a week later, and he put seven thousand dollars
in cash down on a new one. Several of the
people indicted we're training officers for deputies new to patrol.
Those training officers used exactly the same tactics when they
were training officers as they did when they were on
(14:34):
the task force. That was back in the heyday. Crack cocaine.
So you stopped somebody in the street they had crack cocaine.
You booked it, but you kept it because you might
want to have probably cause to arrest somebody else on
another day. Randall says that it wasn't only the Arco
(14:56):
Narco officers who were planting drugs. Lots of deputies were.
There was even a term for it vision. You've got
excellent vision, which vision is being able to see the opportunity.
Uh BB sized rock of cocaine is not ever visible
(15:21):
through a person's clothing. But I don't know how many
times I saw reports or heard of deputy say I
observed bulge in the watch pocket of the suspects. Levi's
in the area where most drug addicts typically stashed there
rock of cocaine, and I recognized it as a hidden
(15:45):
rock of cocaine. I searched them in. Uh found the
evidence and that would fly at least it would get
you in court. And uh it happened all the time.
Stealing money was department wide as well. Every patrol deputy
had the same opportunity to take money, take drugs. You
(16:07):
could stash it and use it another day. The money
obviously bought some boats and dates and baby mama support
and you know all the things that deputies do with
their money. And uh so it was throughout the department
(16:31):
and everybody knew it. He saw deputies using the money
they stole to buy equipment they would use to arrest
more people to steal from. There was still deputies in
that were carrying revolvers. UH deputies had car radios, not
handheld radios, and you could buy your own handheld radio
(16:51):
for about and carry it on patrol, but that was
a tremendous expense and deputies didn't want to spend that
kind of money. UH flashlights they had the old two
D battery plastic flashlights were issued to us and they
(17:11):
were saying, wait a minute, we got rechargeable flashlights. We've
got four cell aluminum flashlights that will light up everything.
How come we don't have those flashlights. So deputies on
patrol would find somebody with a thousand dollars of UH
drug money and they'd say, well, I'm going to go
(17:33):
buy the equipment that I deserve with five dollars, and
I'm going to book the other five dollars. This was
standard procedure, so whoever was involved in the arrest got
their share. But they were like, no, we all get equal,
equal call on whatever confiscations we take. Some people were
(17:53):
manipulated out of their money by deputies. That was the
other part of it is that there was a surrender
let her. So if you got arrested with fifty dollars
driving down the street, you've probably been profiled, or maybe
somebody had actually seen you doing a drug transaction. A
deputy might actually have good information that that's drug money.
(18:18):
They make the stop and they find fifty dollars and
they said is this your money, And if the person
in the car says yeah, that's my money, they said, okay,
well we're gonna take you to jail for UH sales
because obviously you don't have a job, you don't have
(18:39):
any UH investments that you just cashed out, so you
got fifty dollars from selling drugs, so we're gonna charge
you with a crime. Well, then the driver of the
car is like, no, no, no, no, no, it's not
my money. What happens if it's not my money. And
the officer would say, well, if it's not your money,
(19:02):
we have no further business here, but that's drug money.
And so they had a waiver letter and they would
give it to the person and the person would say,
this is not my money, and they were just taken.
And nobody knows how many times where that happened. You
(19:22):
didn't really have to write a report, you just did it.
Training officers usually have a lot of influence on the station.
They are responsible for bringing the next generation of patrol
deputies up to speed. So they are generally people that
others working at the station trust. In order to become
a training officer, they have these meetings between a few
(19:44):
sergeants and all of the training officers. So this is
where a trust is built. In order to become a
training officer, you have to have the trust of the
sergeants and existing training officers, and then they vote on
who they want to allow to be a training officer.
(20:05):
So if they don't trust you, they're not gonna vote
on you and allow you to be a training officer.
So whenever they needed a training officer, they would say, okay,
everybody who wants to be a training officer, put in
your name, and there would be a list and they'd
have a meeting and they'd go down the list, Okay,
this guy, everybody, Yeah, this guy, no way, that guy's
(20:28):
a jerk. We don't want him. Randall told me that
deputies wanted to know they could freely commit crimes in
front of each other. They wanted to trust each other.
There were different things that a deputy could do to
win that trust. For instance, when you got off training,
you bought everybody beer, just your arrange. The trainees that
all got off about the same time said, oh, we're
(20:49):
doing beer at the bar, and they had a favorite
bar not too far from there. And the trainees that
put their money together, and anybody who should have detectives
or anybody who should buy him as much beer as
they wanted. So that's like showing respect, building trust. The
Grim Reapers gang was formed at one of those off
training parties in late I actually saw the invitation letter
(21:13):
that was circulated, and of course I wasn't eligible because
I wasn't off training yet, but I saw the invitation letter. Hey,
we're forming the Grim Reapers. You know, we're gonna have
a meeting at probably a bar I forget exactly. Come
down there if you want to be part of the
Grim Reapers and we'll form Grim Reapers. They thought it
was really cool. Grim Reapers. Um, yeah, you know, we
(21:37):
see a lot of deaths out here. We kill people sometimes.
Let's call ourselves the Grim Reapers. You know, we've earned it.
Let's commemorate what we've earned. Uh, we're gonna start the
Grim Reapers. We're gonna get tattoos and sounds pretty badass
to me, And it was a lot of it was
(21:57):
implied like if we all have the same tattoo, we
can trust each other to the end. If you shed
a little blood with each other, your brothers forever. And
there was this bonding slash camaraderie slash loyalty that would
last until death. So my first training officer, Vic Lopez,
(22:22):
specifically told me that he thought it was kind of
goofy and he wasn't going to join, but he also had,
you know, seniority and an age that it was like,
you know, these young kids, it's kind of a dumb idea,
but I hope they have fun. Not everybody accepted the invitation.
(22:44):
We actually had a response team which was all non
grim Reaper, and I don't think it was just a coincidence.
Every deputy in the station was on a response team,
and so if there was earthquake or riots or whatever,
you have a sergeant and a response team. What just
(23:08):
so happened that my response team had no grim Reapers
on it, which meant that we could be assigned to
details that nobody else wanted to do, or we would
be segregated from grim Reapers. And for grim Reapers that
(23:30):
was very desirable. They didn't want non grim reapers up
in their business because they didn't trust him. Randall's second
training officer, Victor Clay, asked him if he wanted a tattoo.
Clay was an alleged grim reaper himself. Today he's chief
of the Harvard University Police Department. We reached out to
(23:51):
Clay for comment and he declined. Now, my second um
training officer said, hey, you want to get a tattoo?
And I was like, I don't know. And he said, well,
if you want a tattoo, there's one thing you should know.
You have to tell them that you will do whatever
(24:12):
they tell you to do if you get a tattoo. Okay, well,
I'll take that under consideration. He said, what do you
gotta ask your wife? And I said, I really don't
think that's the question you ask your wife. I need
to make that decision on my own. A couple of
days later, he says, you can't just leave this hanging.
(24:33):
You gotta either say yes or no. And I said, no,
I don't want a tattoo. Okay, fine, But from that conversation,
I know that one of their primary interests whether you
get a tattoo, you gotta tell them you will do
whatever they tell you to do. You you will get
(24:54):
up in the middle of the night and do what
they tell you to do. You will leave of whatever
you're doing and do whatever they tell you to do.
I didn't fully understand that until years later, but I
saw over the course of time that they were serious.
They they told people to do stuff that was unthinkable.
(25:19):
It was not just a social organization. It was they're
in control of your life. They will tell you to
do whatever they want to tell you to do. And
it's not about drinking beers and going bowling. It's it's
about life and death. What sort of things did they
ask people to do? Well, you know, on the very
low end um, everybody who had court would have their
(25:45):
subpoenas in a subpoena box, and so the first person
who went to court would pick up all the subpoenas
and make sure that everybody knew they were going, and
then would go to court and clock everybody in the
beginning of the day, and then the last person who
left court or the last person who lived close enough
(26:07):
to go back to court, would clock everybody out at
the end of the day. So everybody who had a
subpoena for any day would get a full eight hours.
So that was expected task of grim reapers. Probably it
was expected of every deputy. Um, if you were down
(26:29):
with that, you know, grim reapers especially expected that to happen.
Evidence Uh, splitting up money, Uh, you know, taking a
cut out of evidence. If a grim reaper said, look,
do it this way. Dropping guns. Drop a gun, meaning
planting a gun on someone, collecting guns that had been
(26:53):
found instead of booking them as lost found property, keeping
them in case somebody is in a shooting and they
need a gun. If the victim of the shooting doesn't
have a gun, they need a gun. The deputy needs
a gun to say he had a gun. It's right here, Um,
(27:14):
drop a gun. Grim Reapers would also use their gang
affiliation to control work schedules. Lots of grim Reapers preferred
to work the late night shift. If you work in
the dark, you make more arrests. If you were in
the day, you don't mean many arrests. It was pretty
open hazing kind of thing. Uh. You could get off
(27:36):
training and if you weren't, you know, play nice with
the PM shift or the early morning shift. They would
go to the scheduling sergeant and say this guy. Put
him on day shift. We don't want to work with them.
And that's exactly what happened to me because I refused
to do some favors. Randall's schedule had been flexible while
(27:59):
he was on training, but once he finished, he wanted
to go back to a regular work week. He had
a wife, kids and wanted to be there to support
his family. The grim Reapers wanted him around to cover
their shifts, and they're like, oh, we have plans for you.
You need to work this guy's shift. You need to
do this. And I was like no, and they said, well,
(28:22):
looks to us like you're a day shift deputy. And
they went to the scheduling sergeant and said put him
on day shift. It didn't matter to me because that
meant I got home at a decent time. I saw
my kids before they went to bed, and I did
what I wanted to do. But um, you know, to
(28:43):
me that to them, they were putting me in my place.
And I didn't really react to it because I didn't
really care. But um, you know, they didn't want me around.
They were doing what they wanted to do because I
had told them, I don't need you to trust me.
(29:05):
You know. I mean when a deputy comes to you
and says wow, And I got this speech from a
prominent deputy who has remained prominent to this day. Um,
there's nobody out there for you. We are your backup.
Nobody's going to help you from this community. You need us.
(29:27):
Who's gonna back you up when you need backup? If
we don't, you need to do what we ask you
to do in the station, out of the station on patrol.
If we need you to do something, you need to
do it for us, because if you don't, you won't
have any backup. You won't have anybody helping you do
(29:47):
anything you need to do. And I said, oh, that
sounds very serious. No, I'm not gonna do what you're
asking me to do. And uh. It was tremendously frustrating
to him and his partner. But as events have turned,
(30:13):
I'm not sure that he would see the logic of
that anymore. Who was he? That was Larry Delmies and
his partner, Steve Levins, and one of their buddies, and
those were the founding members of Grim Reapers. Larry Delmies
(30:45):
would go on to become chief of staff to Sheriff
Alex by in Nueva. Steve Levins was convicted of federal
obstruction of justice charges, But we'll come back to that.
Larry Delmies and Steve Levins controlled the station. I mean
they had more influence than the captain did. They got
(31:05):
what they wanted when they wanted it. They were very
thoughtful about controlling other deputies and how they wanted to
do that. Grim reapers also used women who lived in
the neighborhood to help them cover up their crimes. Randall
remembers one deputy who went by Big Bob, who started
dating a woman close to the station. He either met
(31:27):
her at church and realized that he worked in the
same neighborhood where she lived, or this might be the
cover story she came into the station. I think he
told her to come into the station and ask for
help with drug dealing across the street from her house.
(31:49):
I think they had already started dating and then they
wanted to have a on the record h relationship, business relationship.
Big Bob would hang out at the woman's house during
his shift while his partner, Robert Johnson, drove around on patrol.
(32:10):
Johnson is currently a candidate for sheriff in Santa Clara County.
Big would go over to her house and have dinner
with her and spending evening talking while Robert Johnson was
out driving around. They had a little stash inside the
house where they would leave drugs, money, a gun. I
(32:32):
don't know, I don't know what was all in there.
She let them put a lock on a cabinet and
left it right there in her house, and so they
would stop buying, you know, hide evidence there, hide money there,
hide whatever they wanted to hide in her little cabinet,
(32:52):
and she I was like, okay, I guess. Spoke to
another woman who was too afraid to go on tape,
who had a similar experience. She lived close to the
Lenox station in the nineteen nineties and started getting sexually
harassed by deputies who patrolled in her neighborhood. They would
(33:14):
cat call her, shine lights into her windows, and make
lewd remarks toward her. Several were alleged grim reapers. She
told me that out of fear, she eventually went along
with it. In her words, if you can't make them stop,
join them. Soon more deputies started showing up at her
house at all hours of the night. They brought beer
(33:35):
with them and asked her to dance strip teases for them. Eventually,
it all got to be too much and she fled California.
Interacting with deputy gang members every day got to be
too much for Randall too. He was deeply bothered by
how the Grim Reapers viewed people living in Lennox. Randall
continued to get on the Grim reapers bad side. He
(33:57):
was named in a lawsuit where a family had been
detained by deputies in their home and had torn it
apart during an improper search. When he was called to testify,
he did the unthinkable. He told the truth. The operations
lieutenant stopped me in the hallway after that second lawsuit
and he said, look, you want to remember every fucking
(34:19):
detail of every incident. We'll put you on every lawsuit
and you can just testify in all of them. How's
that you want that kind of attention? And I was like, hmm,
there's an issue. At first, he tried to transfer to
another station. At some point somebody said why didn't she
(34:39):
transfer out of the station, And then I said, well,
put in a transfer to Malibi. They don't seem interested,
and he said, of course they're not interested. They don't
trust you. You're not gonna go anywhere in this department
because nobody trusts you. Uh. Steve Levins stopped me for
(34:59):
a friendly chat chat at the jailer's desk one day,
So let me explain something to you. There's all kinds
of people who have ideals and want to see their
ideals put forward in society, but in the sheriff's department.
(35:20):
This is the way it works. My dad's internal affairs lieutenant,
and he has developed this. All we do, all he
does is we say that you are an unusual person. Now,
what is an unusual person. It might mean you're completely insane,
(35:46):
it might mean that you have some kind of deviant behavior.
We don't have to define what an unusual person is.
If the media off l A Times comes to us
and says, why would he say all this stuff, we
just say, well, he's an unusual person, and he said
you are an unusual person, and we'll put that on
(36:10):
you anywhere you try to go. So I'm like, okay,
I'm in this job for the money, not really loving Lennox.
It's fifty three miles. I'm getting tired of the commute.
There's an increasing level of hostility towards me, maybe I
(36:32):
should move on. Randall left the l A s D
And moved to northern California. He enrolled in seminary school
and put the department behind him, but the grim Rapers
weren't ready to let him walk away. I had had
friendly conversations with a guy who was from Morinne County.
I was living in Morinne County and I said, yeah,
(36:54):
stop by. So he knew where I lived, and so
he came one day. He said, don't change your lifestyle.
And I said, what are you talking about? And he said,
don't change your lifestyle. Um Grim reavers, I want to
kill you. And they did some research and they realized
(37:19):
that you don't spend times in bars or high crime neighborhoods.
And they realized that in order to kill you, it
would be too obvious that it was a hit. I
was like, wow, that's that's just crazy. And he says, actually,
he says, the reason I came up here was they
asked me to come up here. But I like you,
and so I'm telling you this. I don't want to
(37:43):
just come up here and say that. You know, I
didn't want to come up here just because they told
me to come up here. I was up here, and
I want to be friendly with you. I wanna, you know,
give you this advice. Back in Lennox, the Grim Papers
continued their campaign of terror on residents. A man by
(38:04):
the name of Lee Bacca had taken over operations of
the station. He oversaw seventy percent of the incidents resulting
in misconduct lawsuits between and more than half of those
cost l A County at least one million dollars. None
(38:24):
of the twenty eight deputies sued were disciplined, they were promoted,
and they trained other deputies on how to become gang members.
A deputy told the Los Angeles Times that a member
of Posse, a deputy gang originating in Twin Towers Correctional Facility,
went on right along with members of the Grim Reapers.
(38:46):
That paper alleges that deputy went on to be involved
in the death of Danny Smith. Danny was a black
man who had been diagnosed with a mental illness. He
was beaten to death at the jail. One deputy said
he had gotten on his colleague's bad side for quote
mouthing off. Just nine days after Smith's death, the Times
(39:07):
reported another beating at Twin Towers where the man had
been left with flashlight marks on his back and a
bootmark on his side. Then Sheriff Sherman Block stated that
although the eight deputies involved in Smith's beating had been
relieved of duty, six other members of posse continued to
work in the jail. Lennox Station's chief Deputy Lee Bacca
(39:31):
launched a campaign for sheriff in against his mentor, Sheriff
Sherman Block. Bacca wasn't doing well in the polls, but
Block died a few days before the election. Bacca was
the winner. One of Bocca's first moves was promoting then
lieutenant and tattooed Viking Paul Tanaka to be his top aid.
(39:52):
More after the break, the Grim Reapers didn't go away.
As time went on and members transferred to other areas
(40:13):
of the department, the gang actually continued to get bigger. Well.
I tell people that the in my opinion, the Sheriff's
Department is the most brutal of all the police agencies
that I've encountered through my cases. Attorney Gary Castleman first
came face to face with deputy gangs when he worked
(40:34):
on the class action lawsuit brought by victims of the
Lynwood Vikings. When you were hearing about the Vikings for
the first time, what was your reaction, What went through
your head. It was just kind of surprising, obviously, because
it never occurred to me that there would be something
like that, and that they would glorify doing bad stuff
(40:58):
to people, and it seemed like their values were completely
upside down. Gary represented one of the seventy people who
challenged the Vikings in court with a lawsuit. Elzie coleman
On ma Elsie was walking down Antwerp Street in the
Willow Brick neighborhood of l A. Witnesses told The Los
(41:20):
Angeles Times he had just spent the evening hanging out
with family and was on his way to the grocery store.
Two Sheriff's deputies pulled up to him, Paul Archinbald and
his partner, and so my client thought that he had
a warrant out for traffic ticket or something, which unfortunately
turned out not to be true, but he ran because
(41:42):
he thought he was going to get scooped up. Elsie
was unarmed, but deputies claimed that he resembled a suspect
in a shooting. According to witnesses, Archanbald got out of
the car with his gun in his hand and started
to chase Elsie. Archanbald chased him into a dead end
walk away and fired repeatedly. Elsie was hit six times.
(42:05):
Deputy has found a gun that they said belonged to Elsie.
He lived, but was charged for allegedly threatening a deputy
with that gun. Gary loves science. He relies on it
in all of his cases to make his argument and win.
This one was no different. What the d A and
the Sheriff's Department didn't know is that I spent eight
(42:26):
hours with the emergency room surgeon prior to, you know,
going to trial. Mr Coleman, among other things, had a wound.
If you this is radio, but if you hold your
right hand out and point your finger into the meaty
part of your thumb in your palm, that's where there
(42:47):
was a bullet hole, and there was obviously a hole
on the other side the wound would help. Gary proved
that the deputy has made up the entire story about
the gun, and oh, I said, well, doctor, can you
think of any way that a person holding a gun
in their hand in the usual way would get a
(43:09):
bullet wound? In the area that would be covered by
the gun, and he says no. Elsie's wounds also proved
that Archambald shot him while he was down. Elsie was
acquitted of all charges. The jury not only rendered a
not guilty verdict, but they passed a note and said
that Archambo should be in prison. Gary was able to
(43:32):
get Elsie about one million dollars in the civil case.
Just over twenty years later, Gary found himself taking on
another deputy gang, the Grim Reapers. On October seventeenth, two
thousand and twelve, deputies arrested twenty seven year old Hilberto
Gutierrez during a traffic stop for suspicion of possession of
(43:54):
a controlled substance. Hilberto was arrested, then deputies took him
to his house and searched it. Afterwards, he started to
complain about pain in his chest and was taken by
ambulance to Sentinella Hospital Medical Center around pm. Gary represented
Hilberto's family in a lawsuit. The station took him to
(44:17):
the hospital and so they examined him and there was
no medical person in the room and the deputies were
thereby with him. Around one am on the morning of
October eight deputies, David Chevez and Lawrence Swanson Jr. Beat shot,
and killed Hilberto as he lay handcuffed to a hospital bed.
(44:40):
The Guzzierra's family filed a civil rights lawsuit on behalf
of Hilberto's two young children and against l A County
and the deputies. The deputies claimed Hilberto attempted to grab
their guns and they were cleared of any wrongdoing. But
Gary looked at the science and got a different answer.
Evidence from medical ex birds showed that the deputies were
(45:01):
standing over Hilberto when they shot him. Well, what I
think happened is that they are either words or something happened.
Hilberto had a tattoo on his chest that read fuck
the Police, which was visible during the e k G
he had done. Gary thinks that may have made the
deputy's target his client. I asked the pathologist, I said,
(45:23):
can you think of anyway that a man who was
shot from this side could have a bullet entering on
this side? And he said I can't think of any
and so I thought, okay, we're good. My wife came
up with the idea. You know those styrofoam heads that
(45:44):
they put wigs on so when I took the pathologist deposition,
I had a knitting needle and I had the head,
and I said, okay, put the knitting needle in to
show the path of the bullet into the brain, into
the head. And so he did so, and so here's
the shooter over here, and here's the bullet entry. The
(46:07):
testimony of the two deputies solidified his case. So I
set the deposition of the two shooters, and then of
course I videotaped all of my depositions because nonverbal communication
is well over. And so I had this guy. I
wanted him to show me his shooting positions, so he
got into a stance. Then Gary asked about Hilbertzo's position
(46:30):
in the bed, and he described what he said his
position was. And then I was able to show, or
at least I thought I did, how this could not
have occurred. There was no way for the bullet to
have been able to travel the way the deputies were describing.
(46:50):
Evidence shows the bullet traveled downward through Hilbertzo's head, the
complete opposite direction from what the deputy said, and Gary
was able to get the shooters to admit even more.
I asked a few actors to read portions of deposition transcript.
Here's Gary questioning David Chevez. And by the way, do
you have any tattoos on yourself? Sir? Yes, I do objection.
(47:14):
It's a violation of his privacy. And on what part
of your body are they? Sir? I have a tattoo
on my ankle? And what is it of It's a
tattoo of a reaper, like a grim reaper, like a
grim reaper. Yes, And which ankle is it? Sir? It's
on my left ankle and doesn't have a number. Yes,
(47:36):
it does. What's the number n S? And when did
you receive it? It would be sometime last year after
the shooting, Yes, it was. It was a reaper. It
was described as a grim reaper. He just wants an
approximate date that you've got the tattoo, Probably about I
(47:57):
don't know. I'd say about a year ago, maybe March
of two team March of Where did you get it at? Well,
it was a tattoo shop and I really don't remember
where it was at. Well, let's start with the county.
Was it l a county? Yeah, I believe so. And
what was the name of the tattoo shop or its location.
(48:20):
I really don't remember. How did you learn about the
tattoo shop? What do you mean how did I learn
about it? Pardon me? What do you mean by how
did I learn about it? Well? Why did you pick
that particular tattoo shop? I'll object on relevance grounds, but
go ahead. I didn't pick a tattoo shop. I really
just well, you showed up there and you got a tattoo. Sir,
(48:45):
where did the idea come from to go to that shop?
Did someone tell you? No? I I really don't know
why we went to that shop. Who was with you?
You say we? I was with a couple of buddies
of mine from the Sheriff's department, some of them more. Yes,
please identify the people that you were with. I was with.
Just objection for the record that this diolates the right
(49:07):
of privacy to individuals not a party to this litigation,
they are witnesses. Go ahead, sir, I was with Deputy Swanson,
Deputy Monos, and Deputy Mesa. I see, Well, to your knowledge,
have did Mason Munos get repert tattoos? Yes? They do
(49:27):
have repertattoos? Did they get them the same day that
you and Swanson did? No? They did not. And which
of you got tattoos that day? Deputy Swanson and I
got tattoos that day, both on your left ankle. Yes, sir.
When did you get the idea to have a reapert tattoo?
(49:48):
As it's it's kind of a vague question, I mean,
can you it's not vague at all, Sir? When did
you get the idea to get a repert tattoo? I
can't make it any plainer than that objection argumentative. Just
tell him when you made the decision to get the tattoo.
I've always wanted a tattoo. What about that? Do you
(50:11):
have other tattoos? No? I do not. Okay, so you
always wanted a tattoo? Did you always want a reaper tattoo?
Not necessarily a reaper tattoo, but I always wanted a
station tattoo. I've always wanted one, a station tattoo. Okay.
What is a station tattoo? As you understand it, it's
a tattoo that people from different stations would get that
(50:33):
there would somehow they would somehow show some type of pride,
some type of It's hard to describe, but just like
if you're proud of something, something you would get to
show you're proud of chef, as his partner Lawrence Swanson
was deposed to, why did you want to get a
tattoo of Well, first of all, what is the tattoo
(50:56):
that you got? It's a tattoo of a reaper. Let
me just for this in tire section object on violation
of privacy. But go ahead and answer your ask your
questions and relevancy. Sorry, And what does that tattoo look like?
It looks like, um, like a skeleton with a robe holding. Um.
(51:19):
I don't know what the tools called a scythe scythe Yeah,
that curved blade right with a long handle or a
short handle, I guess the long handle. And does that
show what was the reason you decided to get that tattoo?
I just I've always wanted a station tattoo. Station tattoos
(51:40):
are pretty prominent in the department, and I just I
just wanted to show pride and where I work. All right,
does it have a number on it? Yes? And what's
your number? And what does that signify? The number? I
think it means on the person to get the tattoo.
(52:02):
So I think we heard that w CHEVZ was ninety
six so you got your tattoo after he got his. Yes.
In the two others, were they before you too or
after you too? Before? So they're probably ninetour I'm actually
not certain. And they all got their tattoos on the
(52:22):
same location and of the same raper, on the same
location on their body. Yeah, yes, and it was the
same design, same basic design. Yes. With all this evidence
in hand, Gary was sure he had won the case.
He felt even more reassured when the county offered him
two million dollars to settle. The offer was declined and
(52:46):
the case went to court. You know, I felt we
had the case nailed then. I mean, the county doesn't
offer that kind of money just for grins and giggles.
So they were worried about the case too. But the jury,
you know, it was a Friday evening and they wanted
to go home, and they were, you know, in my opinion,
not terribly impressed with the case we put on. And
(53:08):
the county's attorney was almost nine months pregnant while she's
trying the case, so who knows what the chemistry of
all those factors were. But it was a defense verdict,
and I was absolutely sick, and uh, I still don't
feel well about it. I have the boxes in my
(53:28):
garage and I look at them and just, you know,
kind of mentally shake my head, you know, what could
have been? And I left those people down. I felt
that I had Hilberto's family got nothing. David Chevez and
Lawrence Swanson were never disciplined, and both still appear to
be working for the l A. S D. In fact,
they've been promoted. They're not the only deputies and the
(53:51):
grim Reapers to see career advancement after something horrible. Current
Sheriff Alex Vanueva had at least two working with him
through his campaign in and since he's been in office.
That's coming up next week. I used to a low
(54:16):
Lida who hood, No, fuck the police. I'm a fucking trophy.
You've been listening to a tradition of violence. The history
of deputy Gangs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department
hosted an executive produced by Seris Castle, voice acting from
Mike Green, Alex Fumero, Steve Hernandez, and Kindle May. Music
(54:37):
by Yellow Hill and Steels for breaking news and updates
and deputy gangs follow at l A. S D. Gangs
on social media. The support series is reporting and for
exclusive bonus content, subscribe to the l s D Gangs
Patriot on the
Popular Podcasts
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Decisions, Decisions
Welcome to "Decisions, Decisions," the podcast where boundaries are pushed, and conversations get candid! Join your favorite hosts, Mandii B and WeezyWTF, as they dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often-taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. Every Monday, Mandii and Weezy invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, they share their personal journeys navigating their 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engaging in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that resonate with your experiences, "Decisions, Decisions" is your go-to source for open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections—tune in and join the conversation!