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Talk of Takoma • by Howard Kohn
Chief to gang taggers: Don't tread here
TP Police Chief Ricucci is determined to erradicate gang tags like the one above.
Gang graffiti is still a rare enough sight in Takoma Park that when Bruce Williams, campaigning for mayor, walked Sherman Avenue on a Sunday afternoon in October he got an earful about the crude script in black paint that had shown up on a cement path and on playground timbers in nearby Opal Daniels Park.
The graffiti-makers announced themselves as loyalists of East Side Loco, a gang with origins in Los Angeles, and left a taunt to a rival, also with an LA name —“Fuck Bloods.”
The next morning Bruce consulted with Police Chief Ron Ricucci, and soon after the park was restored to its usual look. There remained, though, the task of figuring out how to deal with the young men who in a small-town landscape have taken on some of the voguish, palooka affectations of the notorious California gang-bangers.
For Chief Ricucci, still in his first year on the job, the solution is twofold. “We act quickly to clean up the graffiti. And I’m also publicizing the problem, which wasn’t done before. I want them to know, ‘Hey, we’re aware of you, and you’re not welcome.’”
Shortly after dawn on a morning in early summer Terry Seamens, the Ward Four rep on City Council, was informed by phone about MS-13 gang taggings along two blocks of Maple Avenue. He walked to the scene and took photographs. By noon the paint had been scrubbed off. “That’s the whole idea,” Terry says. “Immediately reclaim the street.”
In both the Opal Daniels and Maple Avenue graffiti sprees there were references to a well-established but generally non-confrontational Takoma Park gang, the Maple Avenue Crew, whose members sometimes toss tied-together pairs of sneakers onto overhead wires in the center of their street. In the past the sneakers may have hung on the wires for weeks, but no longer. “We don’t want any of them to feel they can mark out a territory,” Chief Ricucci says.
Since the home turf of the Crew is hardly a secret, even if unmarked, the intrusion by East Side Loco and MS-13 taggers suggests some sort of territorial jawing, but thus far Takoma Park has experienced nothing resembling the violence of the hardcore gang life in California a decade ago – the car explosions and vicious assaults that serve as initiations or the street killings for bragging rights and vengeance. “We’ve had a few robberies and a few fights that might be gang-related,” the chief says. “That’s about it.”
Just over the city limits there are neighborhoods where teenagers with gang affiliations, most of them from apartments or small overpopulated houses, are a more intimidating presence. As Nora Cartland, a PTA leader at Rolling Terrace Elementary, in the Long Branch neighborhood, left school one recent afternoon she encountered several boys in their early teens kneeling on the front sidewalk. They had paint cans in their hands. “They were spraying a gang message right there in broad daylight,” she says. “The bravado involved in that makes most adults very uncomfortable, and they just walk away.”
The school is a hangout for boys using the gang name Locos Patos. Their graffiti has appeared on school walls and on cars parked nearby. Tires on the cars were slashed. Students and teachers have found a machete, a cane knife and five unspent bullets buried a few inches below the surface of the school playground. “It’s one of their repositories,” says Nora. “They stash their weapons there in case they get stopped by the police.”
Some of the Locos Patos members, according to Montgomery County police who attempt to monitor the gangs, were previously involved with MS-13, a group mainly of Salvadoran immigrants who are slightly older and who have staked out Langley Park as a locale for their operations. Among local gangs, the MS-13 members have a record for the most serious criminal behavior. They have been implicated in at least two retaliatory murders, a slew of muggings and organized drug dealings.
The proximity of these crimes is part of what’s behind the resolve of Chief Ricucci, who has assigned an officer to be the city’s fulltime gang patrol. “Gangs will always be an issue, but we intend to stay on top of things,” he says. “They should be aware that we’re aware.”
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