baldo wrote: ↑Tue Apr 07, 2020 2:54 am
UTC wrote: ↑Sun Apr 05, 2020 11:59 pm
They do have a very rigorous and formal code of behavior. they do have a weird collection of leaders at times though. I have the charter around that a police chief gave me a long time ago. The LK leader in CT for a long time was a female medical doctor (not the Queens, which is a sub-chapter).
Did I read this right? An female MD was the head of the LK in CT? How the hell did that work out? What would an MD be doing with a street gang? Thanks.
ew Haven – From her desk in her small, sunlit apartment, Beatrice Codianni broke a national news story this summer about the women’s federal prison in Danbury.
Codianni’s story, posted on her national criminal justice website, Reentry Central, revealed that the women’s facility was being turned over to house male prisoners, and that the Bureau of Prisons planned to move the women inmates across the country, far from their families.
The story was picked up by the national media and created a firestorm, with senators pushing to stop or at least suspend the plan.
Codianni, a matronly woman, isn’t an editor or a lawyer. But she does know a lot about prisons. She was incarcerated for 15 years at the federal prison in Danbury because of her involvement as a leader of the notorious Latin Kings gang that terrorized New Haven with drug dealing and shootings in the 1990s.
At 65, she has found her calling writing news stories about criminal justice reforms and the barriers facing ex-offenders, quietly shedding light on what happens beyond the barbed wire.
It is hard to square her gang-leader reputation with the Codianni of today. She comes across as warm, friendly, an earth mother-type, with her wire-rimmed glasses, a pronounced limp and a rescue dog named Rocky.
Not that she ever really looked like a tattooed gangbanger. Codianni joined the Latin Kings when she was in her 40s. A white mother of three in a gang of mostly young Latino men, she had a den-mother quality to her.
In many ways, the plot line of her life sounds like an HBO series.
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Becoming a Latin King
Codianni said she never planned to join the Latin Kings. In fact, she said she was appalled when she got a phone call from her son in prison who told her he had joined the gang in prison.
All she knew about the Latin Kings at the time were the news stories about shootings between rival gangs plaguing Meriden.
“He said, ‘You don’t understand’,” she said. “ ‘They support you. It’s more of a community thing.’ “
He told her that the gang’s support had helped him get over the death of his father.
She began to see the Latin Kings more as a support group, pointing out that the group originally started as a civil rights organization for Latinos.
This appealed to Codianni, who had been a political activist since the ‘60s, when she protested the Vietnam War, supported the Black Panthers and worked for the women’s liberation movement.
She said that she had wanted to help reform the young gang members, and help them earn their GEDs and get jobs so they wouldn’t rely on drug-dealing to make money.
“I’m not Mother Teresa. I was just trying to help,” she said. “I came from a poor neighborhood, so I always felt like I had a lot of empathy.”
So she wrote to the gang’s vice president, Pedro Millan, and told him that he should take a leadership role, stop the violence and change the gang’s direction.
“I offered to be a community liaison, but he said, ‘No you’d get more respect and they’d have to listen to you if you joined. You could come in as my assistant,’ ” she said.
She became a member of the gang’s board of directors and was named director of programs and charter goals. In her new role, she courted the media as a self-appointed spokeswoman for the gang and reached out to the New Haven community.
She visited the police chief and asked him to get his officers to stop roughing up gang members. She asked the schools superintendent to be more lenient with gang members who were chronically late for school, explaining that they came from dysfunctional families.
“My job was to try to get things better for the young kids,” she said. “I went knocking on doors to, like, McDonald’s, for example, in Fair Haven,” she said, referring to one of New Haven’s poorer neighborhoods. “I said, ‘Can you hire some of these kids so they don’t feel like they have to deal drugs?’ The guy was open to that, which was amazing,” she said.
Getting sucked in
But as time went on, she became more entrenched in the gang. Her position gave her authority and she was seen as the eyes and ears of Nelson Millet, the imprisoned leader of the Latin Kings who directed much of the gang’s activity from his California prison cell.
Her friend, Patricia Buck Wolf, urged her to get out.
“When it got bad, I told her ‘Look, you’re an old lady now, and these are a bunch of young toughs, and I don’t think you know what is going on’,” said Buck Wolf, who has known Codianni since their days as activists in the 1970s.
Buck Wolf, who later became an attorney, warned friend that if federal authorities cracked down on the Latin Kings and their drug dealing, the consequences would be awful.
In 1994, Codianni was rounded up along with 32 other Latin Kings in a statewide police sweep. She was charged with conspiracy to murder for ordering a drive-by shooting and knowingly taking money from known drug dealers to pay her exorbitant phone bills.