Ross Kemp On Gangs - Series 4 episode guide
Ross Kemp and his award-winning team return to Sky1 on Monday 1st September 2008 for a fourth series of Ross Kemp On Gangs to travel the globe, securing access to the brutal gangs who terrorise their communities in Liverpool, Los Angeles, Bulgaria and Belize.
Episode 1: Liverpool
Monday 1st September 2008
In August last year, news of the senseless killing of 11-year-old Rhys Jones sent shock waves throughout the country. Prime Minister Gordon Brown described it as a "heinous crime that shocked the whole of the country".
The root of the murder lies in the turf wars between two gangs who share same postcode – Liverpool 11. The feuding between gangs from Norris Green and Croxteth, two suburbs in the north of the city extends back several years. Most of the youngsters involved went to the same senior schools as each other in the area.
In this programme Ross Kemp meets some of the main players involved in the gang warfare and tries to understand what motivates their murderous hatred for one another. He also meets an ex-gangster turned anti-gun campaigner, he speaks to the police trying to combat the problem on the streets; a young man trying to leave the gang life behind; the mother of a teenager shot dead in an argument over a £200 debt and the person charged with sorting the whole problem out, Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith.
Ross asks whether Liverpool deserves its reputation for gang and gun violence and, seeks to discover what lies behind the code of silence that makes police work so difficult in the city, a code so strong that it is actually influencing the way police and the law operates in gang-related cases.
Episode 2: Los Angeles
Monday 8th September 2008
Antonio Villaraigosa, the mayor of Los Angeles, describes his city as the “gang capital of the world”. In the Los Angeles Times in January 2007 he stated “We agreed that Los Angeles is the epicenter of the nation’s gang crisis and an effective assault on gang crime will require increased suppression, intervention and prevention measures,”
In March 2008 the LA International Chiefs of Police held a summit on Gangs.
“Though violent crime is down in Los Angeles, the notorious birthplace of many gangs, the city is under siege by the constant threat of gangs, many of whose membership has grown to global proportions,” said Salvador Hernandez, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI in Los Angeles.
“We in law enforcement are committed locally and internationally to suppressing violence in all its forms,” said Sheriff of Los Angeles County, Leroy Baca. “The high number of deaths from gang activity has reached a crisis point. Over the last decade, in Los Angeles County, we've lost more than 5,800 people to gang violence in comparison to less than 500 people to natural disasters.
"Drug and gang violence continue to break apart families and communities," said Special Agent in Charge of DEA Los Angeles Timothy J. Landrum.
With LA admitting they have a crisis Ross travel to Los Angeles, home to over 700 gangs to investigate why this city is a touch paper for gang violence.
For decades, LA’s gang scene was dominated by the Crips and Bloods who for the best part of three decades fought a turf war. From the 1940s through to the early 1990s Hispanic and Black gangs rarely engaged in conflict. But something changed in the early 1990s. A massive upsurge in illegal migration across the Mexican border meant that by 2004 Latinos had become the largest minority in the US. Today the areas in LA with the highest rate of gang murders are all areas shared by blacks and Hispanics, with many in the black community claiming to be victims of what amounts to a campaign of ethnic cleansing by Hispanic gangs.
No one knows how it started. Some blame demographic changes, some say its down to a drug rip-off almost ten years ago, but experts agree that the city’s black and Hispanic gangs are at war, and that it’s the Hispanic’s who are in the ascendant. More organized than the Bloods and Crips the Latino gangs are allegedly acting on direct orders from the Mexican Mafia prison gang, to cleanse their neighborhoods of African-American gang and non-gang members.
Ross Kemp arrives in the midst of a turf war pitching the Crips and Bloods, the biggest black gangs in the US, against the Latino gangs.
Ross discovers extreme racism between the Latino and Black Gangs. Latino gangs openly express their hatred towards the Blacks. His journey leads him to Joker, a key member of the Latino ‘Sureno’ or Southside, who control and operate in an area in LA called Riverside. He discovers that the Latino Gangs are controlled by a mafia called La Eme, otherwise known as the Mexican Mafia. He meets with an ex-associate of La Eme who explains that they work in a military fashion with a hierarchy of control.
Ross travels to Kern Valley State Prison where he is shown the horrific and bloody violence metered out by gang members on each other for refusing to obey orders. He is also shown how those who run La Eme get their orders out to the street gangs. By using a practiced form of mini writing, messages are written on small pieces of paper that are transported to the outside via the anal cavity.
Finally, Ross is invited back to Riverside by Joker. Here he witnesses a Latino Gang tradition, a ‘jumping in’ ceremony whereby young recruits, some as young as 12 and 13, are baptized into the gang.
Episode 3: Bulgaria
Monday 15th September 2008
With an estimated population of 12 million, the Roma gypsies are the biggest ethnic minority in Europe. The poorest of the poor they’re an often marginalized minority reportedly involved in drug trafficking, pick pocketing and human traffic.
Ross travels to Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital, to uncover the truth about one of the most despised ethnic groups in Europe. He is there to find out if the allegations against them are true, and if they are true, what impact the gypsy gangs are having on the streets of Britain.
Ross’ journey starts in London. When Bulgaria joined the EU in January 2007 London saw an increase in crimes across the capital with 250 gypsy crimes per week. The popular press was filled with horror stories predicting thousands of benefit-hungry gypsies arriving in Britain and bringing a crime wave with them.
Ross joins the London Transport Police, who recognise that they have a growing problem with Gypsy Gangs from Bulgaria and Romania. It is reported that they have a deal between them; the Romanian’s take everything above ground, the Bulgarian’s everything below ground.
He then travels to Bulgaria, hoping to get access to the secretive world of Europe’s most maligned minority. More than 90% of the unemployed in Bulgaria are Roma, they suffer severe segregation and live in over crowded inner-city ghettos, gypsies are despised by most Bulgarians and branded as criminals by the media. They’re often used a punch bag by Bulgarian far right politicians eager to turn anti-Roma sentiment into electoral gain
He meets several Gypsy gangs, some of whom have worked on the streets of London and the UK. The leader of the Euro Roma party believes the problem to be so big that £200 million pounds are being taken from the UK every year.
Episode 4: Belize
Monday 22nd September 2008
Belize is the smallest country in the whole of the Americas with a population of just over 300,000, but since becoming a major transit point for cocaine trafficked from Colombia to the US in the late 1980s, it’s developed a serious gang problem and become one of the most dangerous places on the planet.
Until recently, guns and cocaine were practically unheard of in Belize. Today the country is facing a massive crack cocaine problem, there are hundreds of semi-automatic weapons in the hands of gangs and the country has a per capita murder rate 5 times higher than the US, 98% of it gang-related.
Ross meets reformed gangsters who introduce him to the dangerous streets of Belize City and the gangs that control them. Ross gets to see a fraction of the weapons that make this city so violent, including grenades and high explosives, the new weapon of choice for the dozens of gangs which control Belize City.
Ross teams up with the police as they try to tackle the problem that has its epicentre in the few square miles of the notorious Southside of Belize City. He takes part in a dawn raid but ends up seeing the other tragic side of Belize’s gang story, meeting gang members crippled for life despite being barely out of their teens.
Belize’s Coastguards consist mainly of captured Columbian smugglers boats that are reconditioned and then used to protect the miles of coastline. Ross joins the armed guards as they intercept and search suspect vessels, and sees captured planes used by the cartels to ferry drugs through Belize.
Finally his journey leads him to the George Street Crew, the most feared gang in the city and the local enforcers for the Mexican and Colombian drug cartels. In 2004 the gang’s leader was sentenced to 33 years in a Miami prison for smuggling more than 10 tonnes of cocaine into the US. Ross meets Jason Brown, the current leader of George Street, along with a collection of his lieutenants. The head of the country’s gang unit warns Ross that each of the men he meets will have committed at least one murder. But as Ross wins the trust of the gang’s leader, he is given an insight into the reality of gang life that poses as many questions as it gives answers.
