By Melinda Rogers
The Salt Lake Tribune
SALT LAKE CITY — Prison walls couldn’t keep Tyrese Sharod Smith from calling the shots on the street.
The founder of the King Mafia Disciples had established a violent reputation in Salt Lake City in the early 1990s as he sought to make the gang he founded while serving time in juvenile detention the most powerful in the region.
As KMD tried to build notoriety through robberies, drug deals and attacks on rival gangs, Smith’s rap sheet grew. He landed in prison in 1994 for a drive-by shooting -- and then arguably committed his most violent acts from behind bars.
Gang members operating on Smith’s orders in February 1996 shot 19-year-old Joey Miera through an open window as the teenager slept on the floor of his cousin’s Salt Lake City home. Miera, who had no gang ties, was killed in a case of mistaken identity.
The brutal case spotlighted an aspect of security in Utah’s corrections system that has found renewed importance with a recent spike in gang membership and violence: how to keep gangsters in lockup from contributing to crime on the streets.
Vigilant watchfulness
It’s a job far more complicated than just keeping a gang member behind bars until his or her sentence is completed, and one both the prison system and Salt Lake County Jail have devoted more resources and officers to in recent years.
“Most of the public, they look at it like the guy has been picked up, he’s gone through the court process and now, everything is good,” said Pete Walters, who oversees the gang unit at the Utah State Prison and is president of the Utah Gang Investigators Association. “They get to make phone calls. They are all allowed to get and send letters. The majority of them have visits. … They, a lot of times, still have an influence over some of the groups in the neighborhood.”
Walters’ job, and that of other gang investigators in the corrections system, is to figure just how much influence certain gang members have and how the information officers gather on the inmates could thwart plans gang members may be making from inside their cells.
In an activity known as “fishing,” inmates can pass messages between their cells by way of make-shift delivery devices called kites, made with a piece of string, a note and a weight. Letters can contain hidden code words, symbols, or drawings to signal an attack on a rival. Phone calls could also contain hidden messages.
Corrections gang officers are trained to intercept and decode the hidden messages. The officers chat up inmates to find out which gangs are feuding, and, most importantly, talk with local law enforcement agencies.
Street not so far removed
Retaliation for a gang event on the street can play out in prison or jail; or an incident that occurs in the corrections system can have ramifications in neighborhoods.
“You still have people trying to deal drugs, you still have extortion, you still have assaults,” said Jeremy Sharp, a gang officer with the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office who works at the jail. “They continue to do it here.”
Both the Salt Lake County Jail and Utah State Prison in Draper have added more gang officers in the past few years and have put a greater focus on communicating among agencies, including tracking those on parole, said Walters and Sharp.
The prison created a unit of gang investigators in 2001, while the Salt Lake County Jail started a special gang unit in 2005, in part because of several assaults carried out by gang members on staff members, Sharp said. Since then, assaults have dropped.
Ten to 15 percent of the Salt Lake County Jail’s inmates are documented gang members, Sharp said. At the prison, about 15 percent of the 4,000 inmates in Draper are gang members, Walters said. The prison’s percentage of gang members falls in line with averages across the country, he said.
Classifying inmates
While Utahns might not think the state has the same gang problems as larger cities such as Los Angeles or Chicago, the corrections system faces the same challenges in containing gang activity, Walters said.
New inmates undergo mental health and physical evaluations, and checking for gang affiliations is a part of the evaluations, Walters said. Some are forthcoming about their gang ties, others deny it despite telling tattoos on their bodies, he said.
Some gang members determined to be a threat are placed in high security housing. Whether someone is housed with the general prison population or in the security threat unit often depends on the inmate’s behavior, Walters said.
Gang tensions can run high or wane in lockup depending on which gang leaders are in prison -- or the missed opportunity to grab their favorite dessert. Sharp said rival gangs can brawl over something as mundane as a piece of a cake.
Learning lessons
Walters said the KMD case is proof a solid force of gang investigators is needed in the correction system.
“You had a leader who was locked up and he was still able to reach out to the community and get something done,” Walters said, noting the sophistication of gang intelligence methods have improved since the time of Smith’s case.
Smith was prosecuted for the murder and is serving a life sentence in a maximum-security federal prison. At the time of his crime, a move to create programs for dealing with security threat groups like gang members had been under way. But the murder solidified the need for change, said corrections spokeswoman Angie Welling.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard McKelvie, who prosecuted the KMD case in federal court, said gang investigators in the corrections system have helped to convict inmates in several cases since then. He cited their work in building the 2003 case against several members of the Soldiers of the Aryan Culture, a white supremacist gang, who were charged under the federal racketeering statutes for operating a methamphetamine ring both inside and outside Utah prisons.
Programming in the corrections system offers some gang members the chance to get out of their lifestyle. The opportunity to get an education, complete life skills courses, therapy in anger management and substance abuse treatment can be a catalyst for gang members to leave their criminal habits behind.
For others, the lure of the street is too much to overcome. That keeps gang investigators trying to stay one step ahead of possible gang activity.
“In this game it’s all about catching (signs of gang problems) really quick to minimize the damage,” Sharp said. “If you can catch it before they can really get organized … it doesn’t have a chance to snowball into something greater.”
Copyright 2009 The Salt Lake Tribune