417. . . Man With a Gun

By Diane Araujo, Charles Araujo and James Jacobs

This historical account is based on the memories and stories of two successful men, both on the side of law enforcement and prosecution. The first is a detective for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department (LASD) Gang Unit, (SEB) Special Enforcement Bureau and Homicide (Charles Araujo), and the other is a tenacious Deputy District Attorney (

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chadijim Press
• Release date: Sep 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9798218267810

Diane Araujo

Dr. Diane Araujo holds a Master's degree in Public Administration (MPA) and a doctorate degree in education from the Universities of California, Irvine and Los Angeles. Diane served as an administrator at the University of Southern California (USC) and a College Professor at California State University, Los Angeles. She taught for several years at Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena, California. During this time she also had a consulting business and was appointed as a City and County Commissioner in Los Angeles, where she has served over a period of many years. Diane's time as an Airport Commissioner led her to discuss policy issues of security and rights of way, globally while representing the City of her birth, Los Angeles. She presently devotes her time as co-owner and manager of a realestate holding company.

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Prologue

About the title: 417 is the California Penal Code for man with a gun. The contents of this story are a recollection of memories that occurred long ago and may therefore be inaccurate. Thus, we apologize ahead of time. It is therefore up to the reader to decide if this is a true crime story.

Actually, as I was writing a paragraph for this book I yelled out, What’s a 417? Charlie (who can’t remember what he had for lunch) responded immediately, Man with a gun. Our son Michael, who was with him, thought, That would be a good title for the book. And so it is!

Highly intelligent individuals, Charlie and Jimmie joined forces after disputing whether an epiphany or a kind of hard-charging, blind leading the blind, or learning-by-doing led to a better method of prosecuting violent gang members. Their joint ability to translate totally divergent realms, on one hand street gangs and on the other the very specific understanding of laws and court suits, set them apart from the normal of their time. They seemed to be at the right place and at the right time, creating processes that would change the whole methodology of how criminals, specifically violent gang members, would be dealt with. They believe this was the first time a permanent unit, which included the district attorney and law enforcement, took a committee approach to work together for the prosecution of this violent population.

It was a unique arrangement with experienced people seeking justice. It was the vertical gang prosecution process that preceded Operation Safe Streets of which much has been written. The District Attorney utilized this process, named for the suburban area of the eastern portion of Los Angeles County’s San Gabriel Valley and headquartered in the Pomona Superior Courthouse, from July 1978 to January 1981, when the Task Force was absorbed by the District Attorney’s Operation Hardcore, a federally funded, countywide special prosecution unit. During the writing of this book, Operation Hardcore has been significantly cut back by the current District Attorney.

My interest was sparked as Detective Charlie Araujo talked about a chance meeting with Deputy District Attorney Jimmie Jacobs in a courtroom one day, back in the ’70s. They were both frustrated and determined that cases were falling through the cracks and needed to be prosecuted more systematically in order to prevent future murders from happening. According to Charlie, they needed to find a way to have the same DA file the case and put on the preliminary hearing in Municipal Court. If the case was continued to Superior Court, the same DA and detective should follow it through the trial for continuity. County Municipal Court Judges agreed. After a discussion amongst themselves, they would allow all East San Gabriel Valley (ESGV) Taskforce preliminary hearings and arraignments to be held in the Pomona Municipal Courts, even if they were out of the Pomona area. This was an unusual occurrence that had never happened in their collective years of Los Angeles County employment.

As the story unraveled, former Investigator Charlie Araujo called former Deputy District Attorney Jimmie Jacobs, who as luck would have it, kept most of the articles he had written. This included one he and Charlie had published in 1978. There were also several albums, articles with photos, and an eighty-page brief with a discussion on double homicides which added to their collections.

After listening to their many experiences, and as a doctor of education, retired college professor, and Charlie’s wife, Charlie, Jimmie, and I decided we should collaborate. We started our journey with weekly meetings, during which they would share vignettes of cases with newspaper clippings, photographs, and articles that jogged their collective memories. Both men agreed to share from their perspectives. Sometimes this meant writing and sometimes it was relaying a segment to me and I added my own two cents as narrator.

With all this ammunition as fodder, the next step was to chronicle what led to a change from a disjointed prosecution to a cohesive vertical one. Gang cases were chronicled by the players who made them happen by virtue of their involvement from the street to the courtroom. At the precipice of their careers, a cop and a prosecutor from fairly low levels of enforcement changed courtroom behavior to its highest levels of prosecution.

As this book is being written, the climate across the nation is one of distrust of government and law enforcement. In Los Angeles County, with the election of a new district attorney in 2020, deterrents that were successful for many decades in dealing with violent gangs were being attacked. Vertical gang prosecutions continue to this day, while three strikes laws and enhancements are being challenged. The courts recently ruled in favor of a lawsuit filed by the Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorneys against their boss, the district attorney The allegation was that the order given by the DA to undo the three strikes law and enhancements was unconstitutional and in contrast to California State Law, for which the people voted. ¹ It tied the hands of the department’s prosecutors attempting to find justice for victims and their families, particularly where gang members were involved. The district attorney was under the pressure of two recall efforts. Though unsuccessful, many California voters are dissatisfied with the cuts in jail time spent by convicted criminals.

The district attorney is reviewing murder cases, even those already taken before the California Supreme Court. One such example is a 1979 murder case, which we talk about in one of the chapters, where a known gang member was convicted of shooting a deputy to death. While this controversy takes its course, what we expose next is what happened in the not-too-distant past. Sometimes we actually learn from previous experiences, though sometimes we don’t, and history unfortunately repeats itself. Our hope is that readers of this book judge for themselves.

1 Eric Leonard, Appeals Court orders LA County DA to enforce three strikes, special circumstances. Investigations, Updated June 2, 2022.

Chapter 1

Early 1978

This story begins at a meeting for the filing of a North Whittier gang case. With his investigative report of multiple suspects in hand, Detective Charlie Araujo presented evidence of his case to Deputy District Attorney (DDA) Jimmie Jacobs. The suspects were in custody with a seventy-two-hour arraignment hold, which meant that filing DDA Jacobs had to review and decide the merits of the case within this quick timeframe. Since the case involved a gang fight where no one was killed, with less than cooperative victims and witnesses, he decided the case would be filed as a conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor, thereby elevating the charge to a felony. The underlying misdemeanor was fighting in public, a 415, also known as Disturbing the Peace.

Jimmie put on the preliminary hearing and arraignment. He and Charlie decided to follow it through to Superior Court as a team because of the complexity of the case. It seemed, as is the case in many gang-related cases, the victims were reluctant to testify. In this instance, a deputy present helped to identify the carrier of the weapons in question. One of the arresting units identified suspects who had thrown a bat and handgun into the bushes. As a result, they could use that in court by having those deputies also testify to what and who they saw, thereby tying the crime to their suspects.

Though a 415 is a minor misdemeanor, Jimmie leveraged the case to a 182, a 12020a, 12090, 12031a, and 496 of the penal code. Under these sections, the suspects were charged with: Conspiracy, Possession of a Deadly Weapon, Removal of a Firearm Number, Possession of a Loaded Firearm, and Receiving Stolen Property. In essence, he took a Toyota and made it a Mercedes! Signed by a judge, this became the first of many cases that the pair would work on together.

According to Araujo, things were disjointed in the courts. As a result, many violent gang cases were falling through the cracks. He felt they had to do something to make an impact on the violent street gang activity he was witnessing daily. It was taking a toll on the hardworking people in the San Gabriel Valley community.

Vertical prosecution wasn’t new to the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office, but was usually reserved for specialized units such as major narcotics, fraud, and complicated murder cases. On television, there’s always plenty of time to prepare. Not so. Even in most homicide cases, only one DDA got assigned to the case. Of the eleven murder cases that Jacobs tried, many with multiple defendants, not once did a second DDA assist him in court to present the trial.

The East Valley Gang Task Force was formed at a time when trial courts existed at three levels: Superior, Municipal, and Justice. Everyday felonies, during this period, were handled by the investigating officer, in this case Charlie, who would go to a filing DDA at the courthouse and present his case. The filing DDA’s sole job was to review cases, and he almost never went to court. The filing DDA would either file charges, reject the filing pending further investigation, or reject the case outright with no suggestion on how to remedy the insufficiencies. As only one filling DDA per Municipal Court existed, he often assisted the Deputy DDA in charge of the local office.

More often than not, cases slipped through the cracks at this level because of victim/witness non-cooperation and because any further investigation could be very time-consuming and often would not reveal anything to reverse the rejection. Most gang cases were not overly complicated, but without witnesses in court, the prosecution of the case could not proceed.

If the case did get filed, the defendant would appear in court for arraignment, have an attorney appointed if he did not have one, have a date set for a preliminary hearing (prelim), and make a bail motion if in custody. At the formal arraignment, the public reading to the defendant of the complaint informed him of the charges against him. Most often, the municipal court judge did this. Depending on the way the judges designed the case flow, the DDA in arraignment court may or may not be the same as the DDA that had conducted the preliminary hearing.

At the preliminary hearing, the DDA would present sufficient evidence to convince the court that a felony had been committed with probable cause to believe that the defendant before him was the one who committed it. Grand juries are not used in Los Angeles County, except in a small number of cases, because of the huge caseload. At the time of the East Valley Gang Task Force, Los Angeles County filed nearly 100,000 felony cases per year. Most felony cases got held to answer. This means they would be reviewed in Municipal Court, a much lesser number ended in dispositions, and an even smaller number get dismissed, usually because victims and witnesses do not appear to testify.

If the defendant is held to answer at the prelim, he would be ordered to appear in Superior Court on a certain date to be arraigned before a Superior Court judge on the crimes the Municipal Court judge found to be true upon information and belief. The document used in the Superior Court arraignment is called an information. The arraignment proceeds in much the same manner as in Municipal Court, except for the fact that the judge usually orders the DDA to inform the defendant of the charges against him. The defendant gives a plea, usually not guilty, and the case is set for pretrial and trial.

The DDA at the arraignment may or may not be the DDA that handled the pretrial and the trial. Under this system, a DDA might be sitting in his office reading appellate reports, interviewing witnesses for an upcoming trial, or doing other legal things, and receive a phone call from the calendar DDA telling him that he has just sent a case up to a trial court. In addition, jury selection would begin in fifteen minutes without any real opportunity for the trial DDA to prepare until lunchtime. This system could be brutal on the trial DDA, but effective. Many referred to this method of trial presentation as flying by the seat of your pants.

Thus, the notion of a vertical gang prosecution and the East Valley Gang Task Force began to accommodate this process!

Chapter 2

Exciting Times in Working Gangs

Charlie’s experience as a Los Angeles County deputy sheriff working gangs began in the early 1970s. He and his partner, Deputy Gordy Johnson, was the first station-level gang unit assigned to Industry Station under the direction of Sergeant Jimmy Johnson. Thus, we begin this segment of a stellar