18th Street is considered the largest gang in Los Angeles, California, and is a strong armed transnational Latino criminal gang. It is estimated that there are thousands of members in Los Angeles County alone. There are approximately 200 separate individual autonomous gangs operating under the same label within separate barrios in the San Fernando Valley, the San Gabriel Valley, the South Bay, South Los Angeles, Downtown Los Angeles, Pico Union, Inglewood, Cudahy, and Orange County, according to the latest figures from the NDIC. Their wide-ranging activities and elevated status has even caught the eye of the FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who recently initiated wide-scale raids against known and suspected gang members netting hundreds of arrests across the country.Although most members are Mexican, membership is open to other backgrounds, including Central American, Middle Eastern, Asian, African American and Caucasian. 18th Street have an organized hierarchy. It is unknown who is at the top. On the streets, there are the Shotcallers, their Lieutenants, and the foot-soldiers beneath them. Although the gang is well networked throughout the Los Angeles, there is no known central leadership nationally or internationally. Cliques generally function independently, but will join forces when combating rival gangs or law enforcement.
18th Street gang members are required to abide by a strict set of rules. Failure to obey the word of a gang leader, or to show proper respect to a fellow gang member, may result in an 18-second beating, or even execution for more serious offenses.[1]
According to the FBI, some factions of the 18th Street gang have developed a high level of sophistication and organization. The 18th Street gang is of Hispanic origin and was formed by Mexican-American youth who were not accepted in the existing Mexican-American gangs.
The 18th Street gang is occasionally referred to as the "Children's Army" because of its recruitment of elementary and middle-school aged youth.[2]
18th Street is a well established gang that is involved in all areas of street-crime (as opposed to corporate crime). Some members have even become involved in producing fraudulent Immigration and Customs Enforcementfood stamps. Several 18th Street gang members have evolved into a higher level of sophistication and organization than other gangs. They also have been linked to occurrences of murder, murder-for-hire, assaults, drug trafficking, extortion, vandalism, drug smuggling, prostitution, robbery, and weapons trafficking, as well as other crimes. identification cards and
18th Street Gang has been implicated in the high-profile kidnapping and murder of the 16 year old brother of internationally renowned Honduran soccer player Wilson Palacios. [3]
The majority of 18th Street cliques operating throughout California and are the result of Los Angeles members migrating to other areas and establishing cliques under their leadership. Members originally from Los Angeles tend to be more respected than those in other areas. 18th Street cliques have been identified in 32 states and the District of Columbia in the United States, as well as foreign countries such as Mexico, Central America, South America, Canada, even in Australia and other countries.
One of the first cliques created in the Southeast Los Angeles area is the Maywood Park Tiny Locos and has influence in the city.
