SPRINGDALE — Steve Sturm still wonders about the planning of a local gang that broke into his pistol range in January and stole more than 30 guns.
Surveillance tapes show the first burglar in the door, carrying a tire iron in one hand and a pistol in the other. The man must have known Sturm or his dog might have been inside, Sturm said.
Once inside, the group skipped over a case of .22-caliber handguns, grabbing larger caliber revolvers and semiautomatics from an adjoining display. They took a variety of hunting and assault-style rifles, but left the shotguns mostly alone.
“They did take one .410 shotgun, which I’m thinking they mistook for a rifle in the dark,” Sturm said. “At the same time, they grabbed some relatively cheap handguns, but left far more expensive models.”
The burglars also grabbed whatever ammunition was handy, including some that didn’t fit any of the stolen guns.
“It seems like they had a plan to steal guns but no good idea what to steal,” Sturm said.
Police looked at the surveillance video and saw something else.
“The video pretty clearly showed several of these guys’ faces, and right away, we thought, ‘We know those guys,’” said Ben Townsend, a detective with the Springdale Police Department. “And that wasn’t a good thing.”
“Those guys” included Ronald Carranza of Lowell, Ricardo Vega and Omar Martinez of Rogers, along with several juveniles whose names haven’t been released, Townsend said. Area police knew them as members of the Wicked Brown Suspects, a gang that operates in Rogers, Springdale, Lowell and Bethel Heights. Now they had more than 30 stolen weapons.
Most of the weapons were recovered over the next several weeks as police tracked other members of the gang. Some members told police they stole the weapons either to use in a war with other gangs or to sell for profit that would go into a gang “fund” for bail money and other group uses, according to arrest reports.
“What we had was a bunch of very well-armed young men who could have caused a lot of trouble if they so chose,” said Capt. Mike Peters of the Springdale police’s Criminal Investigations Division. “It was the biggest single action by a gang group we’ve seen in a long time.”
Gang-Related
The Sturm’s burglary wasn’t the first time area police suspected gangs of breaking into a place seeking guns, but it was by far the biggest haul. That, along with the statements the guns would be sold for gang profit, convinced police the burglary was clearly gang-related.
“A lot of gang crime is based on inference. One guy’s acting alone to impress the other members, that can be hard to define or categorize,” said James Howell of the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Gang Center in Tallahassee, Fla. “This sounds pretty cut and dry.”
The appearance of gangs cannot be denied any more, said Kelley Cradduck, a former sergeant with the Rogers Police Department and a candidate for Benton County Sheriff. Cradduck led the Rogers department’s Gang Suppression Unit until it was disbanded, and now teaches and consults on gang issues.
“Part of the problem is that we didn’t want to acknowledge for a long time that we had a gang problem,” he said. “Calling them a ‘trouble group’ instead didn’t help, because they still fit the definition of a gang. Whether or not we in law enforcement did or do think they’re a gang, the members do think that way, and that’s how they’re going to behave.”
The names and membership of local gangs tends to fluctuate, Peters said. When leaders of one group are imprisoned, younger members of the gang tend to either fall out of the gang scene or join up with a different group, he said. Among younger members, alliances can also change when their family moves to a new area with different gangs and territories, he said.
When several leaders of the Savage Street Gang in Springdale were handed stiff prison sentences in 2009 and 2010, the group fell off the radar quickly, Townsend said.
“Some of them dropped out, others moved away, and a few took up with other groups,” he said. “After a while, there were no leaders and few if any of them even lived on Savage anymore, so the group pretty much disbanded.”
The Wicked Brown Suspects and the Family Street Gang became more noticeable at the same time, and the Southside Devils continued to maintain a presence in the area.
Peters hopes the commercial burglary and theft of property charges facing the Sturm’s suspects help break up the Wicked Brown Suspects organization as well.
Attorneys for Carranza and Martinez declined to discuss the case.
While police deal with the leaders and older members of local gangs, Jay Amargos focuses on keeping the next generation of gang members from ever joining up.
“A lot of kids, they just want to belong to something,” said Amargos, vice president of operations for the ALPFA Institute, a branch of the Association of Latino Professionals in Finance and Accounting. The advocacy group’s state headquarters is in the University of Arkansas’s business school.
The institute emphasizes higher education and is geared toward Hispanic students, but also helps other at-risk kids.
“There’s a socio-economic component to it, and we want these kids to know there are other ways to climb out of that hole,” Amargos said.
“If we can provide them with the tools, resources and role models to show them there are other opportunities in life, they might never get into gang activity,” she said.
Connections, Armaments
Several members of the Wicked Brown Suspects have family ties to the Los Angeles area, and the group claims affiliation with the Surenos, a L.A.-area prison-based gang group, according to police. The local gang wears the dark blue colors and displays the ‘13’ symbol associated with the Surenos, but doesn’t appear to have any active connections to the larger umbrella organization, police said.
“That might be imitation, or a hope, rather than reality,” Howell said. “It’s possible there are some family or other limited connections, but often the affiliation claimed by smaller groups outside a gang’s base area is a tenuous connection at best, if not outright false.”
Several patterns concern local police and national gang authorities, including statements from the Sturm’s suspects the guns would be sold to raise money to cover bail or other costs when members were arrested for other crimes.
“They’re planning ahead, expecting that members will be getting arrested for things, and that shows organization,” Peters said.
The fact the Wicked Brown Suspects chose to traffic in guns is also surprising, especially for a smaller gang operating outside a major metropolitan area, Howell said.
“Guns are an easy, portable target in any burglary, so if just one or two are taken, it could be gang-related or simple opportunity,” he said. “When they’re organized enough to steal and turn a large load of weapons for profit, that speaks to their boldness. This level of involvement in firearms is unusual for a small gang.”
Springdale police confirmed Carranza and Martinez are among a group seen holding weapons and displaying gang symbols in a series of rap videos posted on YouTube. Parts of the lyrics include praise for the Southside Devils and degrading remarks about the Family Street Gang. Collaboration or alliances between different gangs is also a cause for concern, Cradduck said.
“If they’re working together, that’s a major issue,” he said. “If they’re cross-sharing more information between gang groups than we are between different law enforcement agencies, we’re at a disadvantage right off the bat.”
The videos were posted in 2011, before the Sturm’s burglary.
“That tells us these guys aren’t just recently starting to think about guns,” Peters said. “They’ve been armed for some time.”
Drug Connections?
The YouTube videos also show several images of marijuana, but Northwest Arkansas gangs aren’t known to be connected to large-scale drug trafficking or national drug gangs, according to police.
“If they’re dealing, it’s low-level stuff, and if they’re doing any sort of delivery, it’s strictly as a mule, somebody expendable to the real traffickers,” Cradduck said.
Police do believe local members of one gang have drug trafficking ties, but the group works hard to stay under the radar, Peters said. MS-13 is a Central American-based gang with heavy drug ties and a reputation for violence in Central America and the Los Angeles region.
“We know there are members here, but they avoid contact with police. They lay low and don’t engage in the kind of things that can get them caught like the local gangs do,” he said.
MS-13 requires members to have served previous prison time and is known to kill members who try to leave the gang, and they’re also smart enough to ask members to hold jobs and blend into their surroundings and are discouraging the use of tattoos as identifying marks, Cradduck said.
“They’re organized, smart and ruthless, and that’s a scary combination. So far, we’ve mostly not seen them cause trouble, but we know they do have a presence,” he said.
Problems, Solutions
The street gangs who generate the most public notice tend to be heavily Latino, with some non-Latino members, Cradduck said. The black, Asian and Marshallese populations don’t appear to have much in the way of gang activity in Northwest Arkansas, but several white-supremacy groups have attracted the attention of police. The most prevalent appear to be the Peckerwoods and the White Aryan Race, based on tattoos and statements from members arrested around the region, he said.
Gangs have become a part of life in Northwest Arkansas and will remain a problem until police share more information regionally, officers get more training on the signs of gang membership and activity, and schools, churches and civic groups help keep younger members from ever joining the gang culture, Cradduck said.
“One thing we can do is displace them, make it uncomfortable enough in Northwest Arkansas that the true gang leaders look for somewhere more attractive,” Cradduck said. “We can’t just arrest this problem away anymore. We had that chance, but passed it years ago.”
Amargos agrees.
“The more we talk about gangs, the more people think there’s a major problem, and the more legitimate the gangs feel,” she said. “I’ve never thought we have a massive gang problem here like there is in L.A. or New York, but there’s no denying there are gangs in Northwest Arkansas.”