- I'd received a phone call.
"You need to turn on the television."
And there was one of our partners
on a gurney, having his chest pumped.
And he was obviously not going to make it.
- 35-year-old, Jerry Ortiz,
shot and killed in the line of duty Friday night.
- Executed is the way I would describe that.
- Following the murder of Deputy Ortiz,
the Sherif's department sought Federal and Local assistance
to help destroy the Hawaiian Garden's gang.
- They said, "We'd like you to handle the investigation."
And I said, "I'd be honoured."
- You're talking about creating a task force
that has a singular mission.
And that mission is to bring them to their knees.
- We knew that a representative from the FBI was coming in there.
And to tell you the truth, we needed it.
- Thank you very much, everybody.
- We realized,
"Man, we're looking at over 1000 law enforcement officers."
- When we picked that spot and we showed up,
we thought, "This is going to be huge."
- This is the thin blue line. This is what it looks like.
- FBI! Open the door!
[narration]: In the FBI, we make a lot of headlines.
Drug busts, mob stings,
terrorist takedowns.
[indistinct communication]
[narration]: We understand why people want to tell stories about us.
- Freeze! - FBI.
- FBI! - Action!
- But they don't know the half of it.
What really goes down,
we save that for each other,
when we're talking agent to agent.
This is FBI True.
[tense music]
- The Varrio Hawaiian Gardens is a gang out of Southern California.
And even though Hawaiian Gardens the city is one square mile,
he did have at least 1,200 documented gang members out of there
and at least 200 affiliates.
- Gary Sloan worked as a Deputy
with the Los Angeles County Sherif's Department for 30 years.
17 of which he worked as a homicide investigator and gang detective.
- I have to stop you. So it's one square mile
and you have how many documented gang members?
- 1200. - Okay, that's unbelievable.
- Kristy Kottis is a 24-year veteran of the FBI.
She worked gangs, crimes against children
as well as human and drug trafficking.
- Multiple murders, multiple robberies.
The whole fear within the community
was exactly textbook when it comes
to what the gang life is truly, truly all about.
And that's to put the fear into the community,
take what you want when you want.
Believe it or not,
the rules of the street are actually set in State Prison.
And the State Prisons are segregated.
Blacks do not get along with Hispanics,
Hispanics do not get along with Blacks.
[eerie music]
And that tone then trickles down
into the street when it comes to etiquette
and when it comes to rules.
Mexican Mafia...
who is going to run all of Southern California's Hispanic street gangs
sets the tone as to what you can and can't do.
And not only are you going to retaliate against an African-American
who is involved in a criminal street gang,
you're also going to target any African-American
because they are not allowed within their community.
- Police say Latino gang membes were looking for a Black perso,
any Black person, to shoot and they found one."
On the day she was killed, Cheryl Green was 14 years old.
- And this is what brought it to another level for all of us.
We felt that, you know, this isn't one criminal against another criminal.
- Maureen O'Connell grew up on the Southside of Chicago
and comes from an entire family of first responders.
She was a special agent with the FBI for 25 years.
She worked white-collar crimes, violent street gangs,
and major narcotics.
- This is a bunch of predatory thugs
against innocent citizens in our community.
And that's something we're not standing for.
- They were known as the "Hate Gang."
This is a self-proclaimed name that they gave themselves.
The reason being is because they targeted African-Americans.
- The victims in Hawaiian Gardens, the black victims,
they were not gang members.
We're talking about just civilians
who wanted to just live in the city.
- Michael S. Lowe was a prosecutor
for the U.S. Attorney's offices in Eastern Pennsylvania
and the Central District of California, in Los Angeles
for 25 years.
- That's one of the reasons that VHG called themselves "The Hate Gang"
because they had an avowed mission
to rid Hawaiian Gardens of Black people.
By the time we were involved in our investigation,
there were very few Black people living in Hawaiian Gardens.
- Orozco was... He was a gang member
and had been since he was 11 years old.
[tense music]
He's wanted for attempted murder
and assault with a deadly weapon.
Orozco had shot an African-American
who had been hired to do some yard work.
I'm here to tell you right now,
if you have ever, ever met pure evil,
this is pure evil.
- He had devil tattoos on his forehead.
- Deputy Sherif Jerry Ortiz was doing a standard patrol.
He was going to all these targeted areas,
and sure enough, he saw Orozco.
And they locked eyes
and Orozco took off running down an alley
that was just adjacent to this apartment complex.
Jerry got out of his car,
he walked up to the open door threshold there.
He saw what possibly could have been the suspect
and he asked that person to come over
and talk to him at the threshold of the door.
Jerry asked for the ID of the person
and the guy cooperated.
Also, sitting there was two young little girls.
There were right around seven and nine years of age.
- Little ones, right. - Yes.
Unfortunately,
Orozco was standing behind the door.
- Ugh...
Between the door frame and the door, there was a small little crack.
He raised a .38-caliber pistol...
[gunshot]
Orozco had fired one round that struck Jerry in the side of the head.
And Jerry was dead before he ever even hit the ground.
- It's so horrible. Murdered, assassinated.
- Executed. - Yeah.
- Executed is the way I would describe that.
One of those girls tried to tend to Jerry.
And as that person that Jerry was initially speaking to was leaving,
he looked back at the girl and said,
"Don't help that [bleep] pig."
- Friday afternoon, hundreds of officers descended on this neighborhood
after investigators say 27-year-old Jose Orozco,
known as a gang member,
shot Deputy Jerry Ortiz point-blank in the face.
- So basically, within 24 hours of the murder of Ortiz,
we're executing search warrants for arrest...
- Correct. - ...on Orozco.
- ...here on Norwalk and Carson and much of Hawaiian Gardens tonight
is on a virtual lockdown
as they search door-to-door for the suspect.
- They were able to find Orozco, cowardly.
And I say, "cowardly." - Yeah.
Lying down in a bathtub
trying to, you know, resist arrest.
He was handcuffed, taken out of there.
- You're forgetting an important part.
Mr. Tough Guy wet his pants.
- Jerry was just married three weeks prior.
[emotional music]
Thousands of people showed up to his funeral.
- Without ever having met Jerry,
I went to the funeral
because I would not have missed that funeral.
Having suffered a few duty deaths in my own family,
I cried for him like he was my brother that day.
- So after Jerry Ortiz was murdered,
the Sherif's Department,
they saw a lot of overt pride
being demonstrated for the murder.
Shrines to Orozco found during search warrants.
"HG kills cops,"
these are graffitied on Sherif's patrol cars.
"HG kills pigs," "Rest in Piz, Ortiz."
The Sherif's department eventually went to my office.
And they said, We want to create a task force.
Let's invite every Federal Agency to participate.
And then we'll use every Federal Law, Criminal Law, we can.
And we'll take as many of these gang members off the street as possible.
- And the reason why we named this operation "Knockout"
is because Jerry was a boxer on the Los Angeles County boxing team.
[clamouring]
- The FBI came along, like, right at the beginning.
- I was thrilled to be on it
because I wanted to be part of the solution.
I wanted to take these people down.
I was willing to go after them with everything I had
and I wasn't going to leave anything on the field
by the time I was done with this case.
- What was your understanding of your role when the Bureau said,
"Hey, look, we need you to go over VHG task force
that the United States attorney is pulling together?"
- They said, "Maureen, see whatever they need
and figure out a way to get it to them."
And I said, "No problem."
I will say that when I walked in
and being the only female in the big conference room,
there may or may not have been
a collective group of eye rolls from him and others.
- I don't remember that at all, I got to tell you.
- Go ahead, Maureen.
- Sergeant Rivera asked Gary to show me around.
He brought me all around Hawaiian Gardens, showed me where everyone lived.
We're driving down the street and he said,
"Now, this guy here, he's been in the wind for..."
it was a couple of months.
So as we turn the corner in his white Corolla,
there's our boy that they've been looking for, for months. - There he is!
- I undid my seatbelt, opened my door,
held it slightly. And he goes, "What are you doing?"
I said, "I'm going to tackle his ass when he comes through this house."
And he goes, "We're going to along just fine."
We were building packets for a takedown
pretty much from the very beginning.
One of the things we did,
which was at the very beginning of social media,
is we went through every single solitary photograph we could find.
Officers were told,
"If you find any gang photos, bring them to us."
We would look at all the FI cards
and we would go from station to station to station to station,
and ask for any FI cards for Hispanic gangs.
We would compare and contrast that with the list that we had in our possession.
- We went up on our first wiretap in December 2005.
- First person that we came across
and thought was going to be the best information for us
was a guy by the name of George Flores.
George Flores was a long-standing Varrio Hawaiian Gardens original gangster.
Called OGs.
All the dope was going to George's house.
[suspenseful music]
- The way these wiretaps - any wiretap generally works -
is you find out who the... who you have access to.
You keep trying to move up the chain
so you intercept the lower phone,
you see who it's calling, you get the phone calls.
- Wiretaps would only last for 30 days. - Right.
- Sometimes, we would re-up on the same person
because the information was so great coming out of it,
but for the most part, 30 days,
we would get our indictable offences,
and we would get our next target.
Sometimes, that turned into two more targets.
- So they just talked on the phone?
- Like you couldn't believe. - In code.
But when you have the level of intelligence,
when you have a few informants,
when you have these years on the streets working with these guys,
you understand what these things mean.
- We had intercepts where he was talking about gang business.
Meetings that would be held,
what beefs were going on
between this gang member and that gang member.
All stuff that helps us establish that this is a real RICO enterprise.
The whole key to RICO is being able to prove that there's a criminal enterprise
through a pattern of racketeering activity.
So it was a really good wiretap. - What happens next?
- We were continuing to make arrests.
Make drug seizures.
Make gun seizures.
We were getting cases charged and convictions
on the Federal side, on the State side.
- At one point and time,
we got some people detained
and they said, "When is this going to stop?"
And the homicide detective,
who was in charge of Jerry's murder,
he goes over, he opens up that door,
he looks in there, and he says,
"This is never going to end. Ever."
- We were showing results month after month.
- Now the Federal takedown is coming.
The gang community, they know what's going to come
after there is a police officer shot or killed.
They know it's going to come hard to them.
- Maureen, what's the FBI doing as we plan this takedown?
- We were trying to determine, first of all, the manpower that we're going to need.
And we realized, we don't have enough SWAT teams in L.A. County.
- Right. - We don't have enough in the seven-county A.O.R.
that Los Angels handles.
We had to bring in SWAT from San Diego and San Francisco,
and we had to tap into all of our friends
and all these other smaller departments.
[suspenseful music]
We had all the big federal agencies.
We realized, "Man, we're looking at over 1000 law enforcement officers."
In addition to that, one of my training agents
was a former HRT guy
who was on the FBI L.A. SWAT team.
When I briefed him, I said,
"I need resources and I need a lot of them."
And they said they would love to come and support this endeavor
because this was important to all of us.
And so, now, we've got HRT coming out
and everybody else, and every smaller department.
All the smaller departments wanted in, too.
Because Jerry was their brother.
This is the thin blue line. This is what it looks like.
[suspenseful music]
- This is a logistical nightmare.
And we had to literally write down
every team that was flying in or coming in,
where they were going to stage,
and what route they actually could take.
[suspenseful music]
- We decided that Los Alamitos' military base
would be the best place for us to go.
It's close enough to Hawaiian Gardens.
And it's big enough to house all the big boys.
It's ramped up to a level you can't even imagine.
- This is the largest search warrant
that's ever been written in the history of the United States.
This is going to be huge.
- First of all, thank you very much, everybody.
Thank you very much for coming.
- This is a controlled chaos.
- There are federal arrest warrants for everybody that we're going after.
- Just take into consideration,
this is 150 locations being hit all at the same time.
This is unprecedented.
It will probably never happen again.
- We had to hit at the same time
because we can't let anyone make phone calls.
We can't let anyone get the word out.
We can't let this guy call that bad guy or that bad guy.
Don't think for one second that we didn't think
that another cop could get killed in this operation.
- So you guys were at the front of this group.
And you're looking at your brothers and sisters in Law enforcement.
We're ready to execute. - You could hear a pin drop.
- Sergent Rivera is talking,
"This is what we worked for.
All these years and I want every one of you to understand
that when one of us gets killed,
when these people are operating with this type of impunity,
we will stand tall
and do whatever it takes to stop them."
- We're making a stand against the VHG
who are taking over this small community.
With crime, and murder, and mayhem.
- I'm getting the chills just now thinking about it.
Then we tell everybody,
"This is where you're going to be.
We will not be talking to you anymore.
You go to your staged location." Where we have set them up.
- For officer safety,
one of the crucial things we did,
which brings in the FBI a little more deeply is
I assigned an FBI agent to each location,
for any team that was coming from out of the area.
- And by 4:30 in the morning,
we were able to actually announce
that there's a green light.
[rhythmic music]
Be able to be on the radio
and officially make that announcement
to 1500 law enforcement officers...
[rhythmic music]
Nothing that's ever been done before.
Actually... - Descend.
- Just descend onto this one square mile.
And to hear the sounds of the knocks.
[knocking]
- FBI, warrant, open the door.
- You hear the announcements.
- Anybody else in the house; identify yourself.
- To see the doors being smashed open.
[glass shattering]
- Hallway's clear.
[indistinct communication]
- We got three more coming out.
- Get down on your knees, hands on the back of your head.
[rhythmic music]
- Such a collaboration of such professionalism,
but so much emotions.
We made sure Jerry's wife, Chela, was there.
It was unbelievable to have her there
because all you would hear over and over,
"Code four, target in custody."
She sat there and wept the entire time.
She just sat there and cried.
[rhythmic music]
- They found meth everywhere. - Excellent.
- Baggies all over-- Everyone was being punks
so they hooked everybody up and I'm bringing them all back here.
These people are getting walked in, like he said, arrested,
being brought in by the teams.
They're walking into this place thinking, "Holy [bleep]."
"That's my neighbor, that's my neighbor, that's a gangster.
That's a guy I sold to."
We would tell a lot of them,
when they're walking out from being interviewed,
"Look to the ground, do not look up.
Do not look up no matter what."
Part of that was FBI PSYOPS.
So when they walked out, looking down,
the gangsters are like, "Son of a bitch, they talked."
- So during this massive takedown, how many shots fired
or incidents of violence occurred?
- Zero. - Zero?
- No. - Wow, that's unbelievable.
- Everyone one of them went down and complied.
We didn't even have one use of force.
Not one.
- It's being called the largest gang takedown of the U.S.
- Doing something like this is really the only way we can have a major impact.
They've controlled the flow of drugs in that community.
They basically run crime in Hawaiian Gardens.
- Today, we have unsealed five Federal indictments
that name a total of 147 defendants.
This morning, 63 of those defendants named in the indictment were arrested.
- This was the largest gang prosecution in U.S. history.
We charged 212 defendants federally.
- What did Flores get? Do you remember?
- Flores got 30 years on a guilty plea.
- 30 years on a guilty plea?
That's pretty intense.
Imagine, you're pleading guilty to 30 years.
- In Hawaiian Gardens,
they were saying that, first time in years,
first time in memory for some of them,
they could walk down the street
and not be confronted, and just, you know,
treated warmly as a lot of these citizens were.
We also talked a lot about the reduction in crime.
- It was upwards close to 90%.
- You have to feel happy about that?
- It's absolutely huge to be able to have that sort of an impact
on something that these people have been dealing with for decades.
- I was never more thrilled with the results that we got for everyone involved.
From Chela to the vulnerable people of the community
to everybody else.
And the relationships that we all forged
that we hold so dear to this day.
And doing it together
and doing it with people that you really love, respect, and admire.
It was a gift, it was a blessing.
[shutter sounds]
[typewrite clicking]
- After Jerry was murdered,
his wife, Chela,
then put together the Jerry Ortiz Memorial Boxing Ring.
[emotional music]
[clamouring]
- Right hand, Jerry, let it go!
Let it go, Jerry!
- Here's to Jerry. - Here's to Jerry.
- To Jerry. - To Jerry.
Subtitles : difuze