by Matt Kennard
As an upstanding soldier, Stoleson thought that if he raised this with his superiors they would take action or at least investigate. He was wrong. “I brought it up a couple times, but I was told to leave it alone, that they [gang members] were doing a good job et cetera,” he says, adding, “but for who and what flag? Not the red, white and blue.” Things got more serious when Stoleson started seeing military gear begin to go missing—mainly parts for weapons systems, mounts, optics, and small things that were easy to hide or ship. The command still weren’t interested. “At first they blew it off and said to leave it alone, it’s not your job,” he says. But Stoleson had taken an oath to protect his country from terrorists domestic and foreign, so he went to the press. “When the CID got a hold of me after the story got out in the Chicago Sun-Times, the 2-Star General wanted my ass on a platter,” he says. “Then it got messy.” The military sent an agent from California who was a gang specialist for the San Bernardino Sheriff Department in California. Two agents sat Stoleson down and spent a whole day going through his documentation which included hundreds of pictures. “My captain came through and was amazed when the CID agents looked at him and said his sergeant was right: they had a problem and he had a set of balls for what he did.”
But Stoleson wasn’t treated like the hero he was; he was ostracized. “I was not allowed to do convoys for forty-five days because there were death threats up north on military bases on me,” he says. “Nice from your own troops, eh?” The command sent him south into Kuwait instead, and on his first day there he saw gang graffiti nearby. “Then I went to a place we called Area 51 which was 90 percent covered with gang graffiti and after taking pictures only then did I call the CID agents and within two days it was closed.” But soon the case was given to another CID agent. “He wasn’t so agreeing with the pictures,” says Stoleson. “Go figure,” he adds, “it’s not what they wanted to hear.” The new CID agent called the commander of Stoleson’s unit and told him he was coming over to inspect the soldiers in it in three days time. “That’s like a cop telling a drug dealer ‘hey, drug bust tomorrow at 3 p.m.,’” says Stoleson. The commander merely cleared out anyone suspicious and made sure others were on a mission. Soon after, the commander of the unit called Stoleson’s captain and said that Stoleson’s safety could no longer be guaranteed. It was a diversion tactic. “In fact, the unit had been brought under investigation several times already while in country for false documents relating to firefights, but they were sealed.” When they finally let him go home, Stoleson was sent several memos from the Central Command stating that he was under threat of court-martial, loss of rank, and imprisonment if he did not realize that what he had seen and documented was classified and secret and he must never speak about it. “I even had a captain tell me he would see that I would be thrown out and disgraced and never be allowed to talk about it,” he says. “I was told I would never be promoted, had my job threatened, my life, my daughter’s life threatened. I got a price on my head on the streets.” The pressure of the threats to his family eventually led to his divorce. “When they need info about it it’s OK, then they call and expect me to give it. But of course, no way, I am non-cooperative; I am doing this for myself, not watered down so it is what they want to hear.”
Stoleson is not optimistic about how this will end. “Now the cartels are in our military and have proven they can and will use their power,” he says. “Just look at the murders recently at Fort Bliss, Texas, by troops . . . They say 10 percent of the military is gangs. I say 15 or a little more just because they are becoming a more educated bunch, not showing the tattoos and flying the colors . . . It’s bad, don’t even fool yourself,” he continues. “Law enforcement isn’t taking this any more serious than ever. The DOD has told us to leave the bikers alone, which are some of the most dangerous and fly full colors and are involved in white power groups.” He adds, “There is no room for any gang member prior or present in the military. If they are allowed, the cancer of our streets here in the States may one day run the most violent army in the world.” But the military only ever punished Stoleson for his bravery in speaking up. “Oh Jeff, they tried to destroy him,” Hunter Glass tells me. “They wanted him gone, he was showing them up.” They were nearly successful. When I last speak to Stoleson he tells me he has just been approved for admittance to the VA for nine weeks of treatment for PTSD.
Back in the US it was the same story of shooting the messenger. At Fort Sill the problem again raised its head when Specialist Gregory Darnell King, a reservist in the 177th Field Artillery Battalion, was arrested six times by local police for a variety of offenses, including drugs possession. He was seen showing the hand signs for the 107 Hoover Crips and was believed to be a member. The head of the police gang investigations team, Lieutenant Darnell Southerland, warned, “People don’t want to face the truth but it’s true. Fort Sill still has a problem with gangs. We see it every Friday and Saturday nights on the streets. But nobody wants to listen.”60 The army didn’t want to know and shot the messenger again. Southerland, the brave whistle-blower, was “completely inaccurate and totally outdated,” an army spokesman said.61 They went further to say that none of their soldiers had been arrested on “gang-related charges” that year. It was the same tactic of plausible deniability that the military used in relation to white supremacists.
Even when cases did make it into the law courts, there was a strange aversion to convictions. Army Private Jamal Rashad Davis of the Eleventh Air Defense Brigade was alleged to have shot and killed nineteen-year-old Jurell Battles during a Christmas Day fight in northeast El Paso in 2004. Investigators believed that the murder was gang related because of Davis’s close connections with the Folk Nation gang. Another man who had been shot in the incident identified Davis in a police line-up and the soldier received a general discharge from the army in February 2005, although the military denied this was related to the murder case. After his arrest, Davis’s case took four years to move towards trial stage. But before that could happen, District Attorney Jaime Esparza dismissed the murder case in October 2009, citing lack of sufficient evidence to obtain a conviction. It was clear something had gone very wrong with the investigation, as there were no other suspects. John L. Williams, Davis’s attorney, denied that his client had been associated with the Folk Nation, saying by way of extenuation, “My guy was in the military. He was a Louisiana choirboy and his stepdad is in law enforcement.” Davis was sent back to college where he was studying engineering.
Rearing Its Head
With so little being done by the military and law enforcement, the situation started to spiral out of control. By early 2006 it was seriously impacting on the military’s plans for basic domestic troop movements. When the army unveiled its plan to reposition a tranche of soldiers to El Paso, Texas, as part of an efficiency savings program, law enforcement officials feared that it “could trigger a battle the military has not trained for—a turf war between violent criminal gangs.”62 The military wanted to move between ten and twenty thousand troops, but in that group there was a large contingent suspected of belonging to the Folk Nation, the umbrella group for a collection of Chicago-based street gangs. The El Paso area, however, was already home to another sizeable and powerful criminal outfit by the name of Barrio Azteca, a Texas-based prison gang. The DOD was so concerned it set up a special office in El Paso with the sole remit of weeding out Folk Nation members from the new soldiers who arrived. An FBI agent confided with serious understatement: “Our understanding is that Folk Nation has a presence in the military.” She predicted that about 800 people were linked to the gang in El Paso, of which about 80, including military personnel and members of their families, were actively committing crimes. “It is my understanding that the police department in Killeen [in Texas] has reported a gang problem where military-affiliated people are involved,” she added. There were two problems that sounded ominous—the spread of gangs to the young in the area, and weapons training. “The intelligence that we have
thus far indicates that they may try to recruit young people who have clean records and encourage them to keep their record clean to get into the military,” she said. “They would get great weapons training and other types of training and access to weapons and arms, and be able to use that knowledge.” The military denied it, with Nancy Hutchinson, public affairs officer for the Army Recruiting Battalion-Phoenix Headquarters that includes the El Paso area, saying simply that gang members or those with gang tattoos are barred from the military.
Although publicly there was a deafening silence from the military community, the murmurs from inside were increasing and filtering up to the lawmakers. In a Congress of 535 elected officials, just one lone Congressman, Representative Mike Thomson (D-CA) decided that enough was enough and introduced an amendment to the 2008 National Defense Authorization Bill which stated that the DOD would have to “prescribe regulations to prohibit the active participation of military personnel in street gangs.”63 The bill passed through the House and Senate with the amendment, but was eventually vetoed by Bush, one of twelve presidential vetoes during his time in power. Thomson’s reasoning for sticking his head above the parapet was simple: he didn’t believe the military was doing its job. “I’ve heard from police officers across the country that there are problems with gangs on posts,” he said. “The FBI suggests there are problems not only in the states but on bases abroad. So somebody hasn’t been serious enough.”64 It was clear who he was talking about. His aim, he said, was to make sure different agencies were sharing their information in order to close down the opportunities for gang members to enlist, calling the problem “a serious danger to society.”65 That danger was clear in the statement he posted with the amendment: “This is an important amendment that is a first step in solving a very serious problem on our military bases both here in the States and abroad; and it is a problem that, unfortunately, spills over into our communities. This is the issue of members of criminal street gangs joining the military and getting the training that they get in the military and now, unfortunately, on the battlefield, and then bringing that back into the community and deploying those tactics on the streets in our neighborhood.”66
In 2009, another FBI report, this time focusing on the threat gangs posed to the US, registered the effect of the military’s willingness to turn a blind eye: “Gang migration from larger cities to suburban and rural areas is an ongoing concern for law enforcement,” it said. Its data showed that the percentage of law enforcement agencies in the United States reporting gang activity in their jurisdictions increased from 45 percent in 2004 to 58 percent in 2008. Gang membership was estimated conservatively at 1 million members in 2009, a 25 percent increase from 800,000 in 2005.67 By 2007, the army reported seventy-nine separate gang incidents in the year, crimes which included drug dealing, homicide, and robbery—and these gangs were not just terrorizing each other. The report noted: “Military-trained gang members . . . present an emerging threat to law enforcement officers patrolling the streets of US cities.”68 For the gangs, this was always the desired endgame. Those serving in the desert may have paid lip-service to their love of US-style freedom and democracy, but in truth the military was a training camp for the skills they required to combat law enforcement agencies and their gangland enemies back home. The FBI said as much in its report: “Military training could ultimately result in more sophisticated and deadly gangs.”69 “Gangs are gaining strength across the United States,” added Hunter Glass. “The numbers are increasing like crazy around the US and adding this extra fuel is just not going to help matters.”70 It was fuelling crime all over America, with 80 percent of offenses being committed by gang members in some communities.71 An FBI agent confided that gangs “will hand pick [recruits], ask them to keep their record clear so that they can enlist in the military and then once they’re in the military, they want them to try and gain access to weapons and explosives and basically try to filter that back to the street level.”72
One potent warning about how this would end came early on, one evening in January 2005: A call came in to the local Ceres, California, police department from someone who claimed to be a store employee and requesting help from a single police officer at Sequoia Market. Soon after a second call came from the area with a report that a man was lurking and acting suspiciously with a gun. A short time later, three policemen showed up. Waiting for them was Andres Raya, a nineteen-year-old veteran who had spent seven months in Iraq in 2004 but hadn’t seen any combat. On this night he was determined to make up for it, and had armed himself with a high-powered assault rifle for the task. When the policemen arrived, Raya started shooting. Trainee Chris Melton managed to take cover, but his colleague Sam Ryno was hit, sustaining what turned out to be career-ending injuries. The other policeman, Sergeant Howard Stevenson, then fired off eight rounds before taking bullets in the back and leg. Raya walked slowly towards him and unloaded two bullets into his head at point blank range. Later that evening Raya was killed in a firefight with another set of police officers. Taking out two armed police officers is no easy task and would likely not have been possible without Raya’s military training. It was later revealed that before the attack Raya had bragged to his friends in the Marines that he would use the assault rifle because of its ability to pierce police body armor, knowledge he probably gained in Iraq. He also used a marine technique known as “cutting the pie” whereby he went on the attack instead of retreating. In the subsequent investigation, it was revealed he was member of the powerful Norteño organization, a group of Latino gangs out of northern California. A police report concluded: “Although—while in Iraq—the gang member had not experienced any combat, he used his military training to shoot out the windows of a nearby vehicle to use as a shield in his attack against officers.”73 Ceres Police Chief Art de Werk said: “It was so rare, an almost unheard-of, brazen attack.”74
But this was 2005. America was about to change. The aftermath of the murder brought the already tense relationship between the police and the local Latin population to a new low as police conducted a series of “sweeps” for suspected gang members as well as drugs and weapons in Ceres and south Modesto. It fundamentally altered how law enforcement agencies viewed the threat from gangs on the streets of the US. They were now dealing with fully trained warriors. “Gang members have enlisted since the 1980s,” said a police report.75 “However, following the January 9, 2005 attack of two police officers, law enforcement authorities began paying closer attention to gang members in the military and discovering skills and knowledge in the tactics, and access to military weapons were also being used to benefit gang members.” But law enforcement was helpless when confronted with a military establishment desperate for more wood to throw into the fire in the Middle East, so nothing was done to address the situation. By late 2009, the heavily armed gang problem had got so bad in Salinas, California, that city officials turned to the military for help. They started working with combat veterans and lecturers at the Naval Postgraduate School to devise a counterinsurgency operation likened by the veterans to those fought against insurgents on the streets of Mogadishu or Fallujah. In April 2010 the National Guard was called out to police the streets of Chicago. Local lawmakers said they were needed to “stabilize communities,” just as had been done in the Middle East occupations.
The Cancer Spreads
Meanwhile, on the southern border of the US another problem was flaring up. In December 2006, Mexican President Felipe Calderón sent the nation’s military to get a grip on the drug-related violence that was ripping apart towns on the northern border. The campaign’s success over the ensuing years was muted to say the least: the number of people killed increased every year subsequently. In 2009 alone there were 6,500 drug-related murders in the country. To put that in perspective: after eight years of continuous war, 5,600 Americans had fallen in Iraq and Afghanistan.76 Both are tragically high figures, but the links were rarely pointed out. One of the manifold problems that the proliferation of criminal gangs
in the military has exacerbated in the US, and by extension Mexico, is the drug trade. The illegal drug industry is wholly administered by street gangs, which operate on both sides of the border to get drugs onto the streets of America and cash the gargantuan profits. The military environment is a godsend for such operations, for obvious reasons. The ability to move around, the relative protection afforded by being a soldier, and the ability to work in large concentrations all suit the needs of a drug trafficker. As the FBI cautioned in 2009, a “rising number of U.S.-based gangs are seemingly intent on developing working relationships with U.S.- and foreign-based drug trafficking organizations and other criminal organizations to gain direct access to foreign sources of illicit drugs.”77 It continued, “gangs have . . . been known to use active-duty service members to distribute drugs.” The Justice Department reported that members of the Latin Kings gang in Midland, Texas, purchase cocaine from Mexican traffickers for between $16,000 and $18,000 a kilogram. It is then shipped on to Chicago where a kilogram may cost up to $30,000.78 Elements in the US military are often used as a conduit. The situation became so serious that in 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in Mexico City that gangs “are fighting against both of our governments” before pledging $1.6 billion in US aid for the Merida Initiative aimed at fighting drug cartels. She told the Mexican government: “This new agenda expands our focus beyond disrupting drug organizations” to include “strengthening a 21st Century border, and building strong, resilient communities.”79 She didn’t mention the sterling work the US’s own military has been doing in training the traffickers. One of these alleged military-trained cartel soldiers was eighteen-year-old Army Private Michael Jackson Apodaca, based at Fort Bliss, Texas, the center of a lot of the activity. In August 2009 he was charged with the murder of a lieutenant in the Juarez drug cartel, José Daniel Gonzalez Galeana, who was shot eight times in El Paso outside his luxurious $365,000 Mediterranean villa, complete with tile roof and swimming pool. Apodaca was allegedly hired alongside another man in the contract killing by a member of the same cartel.80 The LA Times reported that the “killing was prompted by suspicions that Gonzalez was either an informant or had trade alliances amid the Juarez cartel’s violent battle with rival drug gangs for control of Ciudad Juarez, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso.”81 A spokeswoman for Fort Bliss merely stated: “Anytime someone does something like this, and a soldier in our case, it’s terrible.”82 But it wasn’t terrible enough for the military to take a look in the mirror.