Violent gangs loom large at toughest Calif. prison

CRESCENT CITY, Calif. (Reuters) - A large tattoo declaring membership in the "Mafia" decorates Raul Leon's stomach, a proud billboard of gang membership. An inmate at one America's toughest prisons, he openly acknowledges his influence from behind bars.

"We look after a lot of people, whether in here or out there," Leon, wearing baggy white pants, no shirt and his hands cuffed, said through the metal mesh of a holding cell at California's remote Pelican Bay State Prison. "A lot of friends look after me. I'm a lovable, huggable-type of guy."

Isolated in a bare concrete cell for all but 90 minutes a day when the convicted killer is allowed to exercise alone in a small concrete-bound yard, Leon is a major player in the Mexican Mafia, the state's largest prison gang, officials say.

Like many of California's most notorious gang members, he is confined to a "supermax" section of Pelican Bay, 300 miles north of San Francisco. The prison is the end of the line for society's outcasts in a remote coastal corner of the state near the Oregon border.

Yet even under the most restrictive U.S. penal conditions, gangs there order killings, deal drugs and run criminal empires inside and outside prison, inmates and experts say.

Pelican Bay's inner nucleus is the Security Housing Unit (the SHU), a prison within a prison where the most dangerous inmates are kept in dismal isolation. Their conditions are more austere than even California's Death Row at San Quentin, harsher than those meted out to notorious killers such as Charles Manson and Robert Kennedy assassin Sirhan Sirhan.

Devan Hawkes, a guard specializing in gangs, says about 900 of the 1,100 inmates at the SHU are linked to gangs such as the Mexican Mafia, the Aryan Brotherhood and the Black Guerrilla Family. And despite the obstacles, he says, many still succeed in continuing a life of crime and violence.

"It's not hard to keep up communications," said Angel, 48, an inmate with elaborate tattoos on his arms and legs who spent 17 years in top-security cells. "You've got your old ladies, you've got your girlfriends, you've got P.O. boxes."

Mail with the return address of an unsuspecting lawyer can deter prison authorities from opening letters, he said.

Gang members also use coded language. "I want to take Jimmy to the barbershop as soon as possible - let me know," wrote one gang member in a letter intercepted in January. Gang expert Hawkes said the author is requesting permission to kill.

Even isolated inmates talk to each other. At the SHU, an X-shaped facility in the middle of a larger prison facility, inmates can be heard chatting through venting pipes between their cells; others shout to neighbors in nearby cells.

LEAVING THE GANG

Angel, also an ex-Mexican Mafia member, is serving two life sentences after murdering outside and then inside prison.

Pelican Bay tells gang members they can earn their way out of the notorious SHU and reside in a less harsh area of Pelican Bay either by leaving the gang and sharing their secrets with authorities or staying inactive for six years.

Three years ago, Angel turned on his gang. Today, he asks that his last name not be used because he fears for the safety of his son who is still in a prison gang.

Duro, 37, a former San Diego area resident who made the same decision as Angel, said becoming what gang members call a snitch is risky. "Yeah, my life is in danger," he said. An earnest and well-spoken man due to be released from prison in three months, David said he once oversaw Mexican Mafia drug sales in the prison yard.

"It's not hard for business to be conducted inside a prison," he said. "If they didn't pay, they (would) get stabbed or taken out."

Relatives, friends and associates often ferry in the drugs. Inmates pay for the drugs either via contacts in the outside world or transfers from their own prison bank accounts. "I'm a convict. I'm a snake. I'm going to try to beat the system," David said of his past activities.

An unrepentant Leon soundly condemns those like Duro and Angel he calls "rats."

At a prison so tough that it has been subject to special court scrutiny, Pelican Bay officials find Leon's ability to circumvent the rules and tolerate the SHU especially troubling. In one six-month period in 1996 alone, Leon sent more than 1,000 letters, about half of which discussed crimes, using code words such as "dog food" for heroin, said prison guard Hawkes.

"They say that, but the way I see it I ain't doing nothing but helping some friends," said Leon, who was convicted of an execution-style murder as a teen-ager.

Like other inmates interviewed, he spoke in the presence of a prison official. "I'm just an individual that a lot of people listen to and respect," he said.

A former San Diego resident, Leon, 40, has been at Pelican Bay's SHU since it opened in 1989, and he expects to die there. For now, his $24,000 bank account is frozen and his mail rights suspended, but he does not regret anything and says prison has not broken him.

"Being a man says whatever comes my way I'm dealing with it," he said. "That's us, all the way, until death."