california had a problem with prison gangs and decided the best way to deal with it was by locking up the leaders in a place so impenetrable and isolated they'd be out of contact and out of business but things did not go according to plan this is a story about how a bunch of gangsters went to one of the most maximum security prisons in the country and turned it into their criminal headquarters and here it is pelican bay state prison the super maximum penitentiary in northern california and yet with all the surveillance and isolation gangs still
run thriving criminal enterprises out on the streets from within this fortress lieutenant steve perez a senior official at pelican bay took us on a tour these are the most creative most ingenious man deeply committed to achieving their criminal goals perez took us to a place called the shu the security housing unit a special prison within the prison where gang leaders are housed in nearly solitary confinement they're locked up in their cells 22 and a half hours a day searched regularly for weapons their personal effects x-rayed for contraband they get to exercise for about an hour
a day in a small dreary yard their only companion a surveillance camera and yet lieutenant perez says they managed to outwit the tight security to plot and scheme with one another they will use a drain right here and they can talk through this drain in fact you can talk quite a ways now because they're basically when we designed the the drainage system we connected a number of these individual exercise yards together never thinking that this is how they would begin to communicate and there's little the prison can do about it since with all the rain
in northern california they can't plug the drainage system and now what we do is we pay attention to what they're saying we listen as much as we can lieutenant perez showed us other ways the inmates foiled the security he brought us onto a cell block where we spoke to brian moore of the aryan brotherhood a white supremacist prison gang how long have you been here in this shoe right here since 99. moore who's serving 18 to life for second-degree murder can't see his next door neighbor or anyone else on the block and yet they communicate
by what they call fishing what is fishing you just take up your little string line right here with a little weight on it a string line now you made that yeah i just got a toru sheet he makes the line 40 feet long by tearing up his underwear or his bed sheet and braiding the threads together and he fashions a weight out of soap and you just throw it out the door and somebody else throws their other line out just then a written message came flying down from the upper tier brian demonstrated how he fishes
by flinging a line out hooking it around the other line and reeling it in once brian ties the two lines together the inmates easily send messages back and forth if you know that they're fishing and they're sending messages like this why do you let it go on we don't the officers are required to search so many cells every day the officer will come in if he finds the fish line he will take it at that time the problem is that no sooner than i take it he will go back to his bed sheet and he'll
unravel the string again the threads and start the process all over with inmates that have nothing to lose the authorities are left with nothing but frustration do i leave him out sheets do i take his t-shirts away do i leave him naked in itself how's that gonna sound once they communicate with each other the most effective way they get their messages to their foot soldiers on the outside is through the mail which is one of their rights guaranteed by law this is the guy who is the head of that one organization in southern california trained
prison investigators like devon hawks scrutinize every letter that goes in and out of the shoe an average of two thousand a day one case involved a member of the mexican mafia we reviewed over a thousand letters that he sent out and in those letters we found evidence of over 500 crimes that he committed it involved drug trafficking assaults on people murder that he was directing from inside the prison that he was either directing or that was being reported back to him through the mail how did he get all that stuff out of the prison well
they use code they use codes that have been so hard to decipher they have been sent to fbi cryptologists in washington with nothing but time alone in his cell brian moore spent years learning an ancient norse language that hasn't been used since 600 a.d i've got a key right here for you if you want show me a key see across the top right there got the abcs that's the a b and i can match them up like other inmates he sends out encoded messages embedded in intricate artwork would you mail this picture to i would
mail it to a girlfriend and then a girlfriend would mail it to to a homeboy or somebody else somebody that i wanted to pass the message to and so what happens is that when this goes out if you're not paying attention to what's happening if you're not looking for the indicators of how they communicate a beautiful piece of artwork becomes a message to have someone killed here on an fbi surveillance tape is a group of gang members meeting in a california hotel room to discuss their latest orders from pelican bay [Applause] pelican bay authorities have
had some success getting inmates to flip by offering them a deal in exchange for telling how crimes are being hatched and orchestrated from within the prison they're given privileges and moved into a segregated wing off the shoe how easy was it to get messages in and out these four men took the deal epi cortina brutally beat and murdered a fellow gang member he lived on the shoe for nine years before he renounced his membership in the mexican-american gang nuestra famiglia tell us what kinds of crimes were perpetrated ordered from within the shoe from waestro familia
anywhere from murder to money laundering bank robberies on the car robberies home invasions drug deals prostitution miguel perez gunned down a witness in a murder trial he has told prison officials how his old gang the mexican mafia dispatches orders in the visiting rooms one of the things that we learned was sign language so this way if we see someone assigned to him but that i don't understand that they're watching you they're listening to you you are never not being videotaped observed how did how do you do that i use regular sign language it's easy for
you to go and understand it you pick it up because if you knew it yeah yeah you know but we throw our own stuff in there these men all say they want kids on the street to know that gang life is a sham loyalty honor is not there there ain't no such thing it means something that's fed to you but it's not true can you leave a gang i always thought you can't walk away from it just like that detail right now to answer your question simply yes they want us there they one every one
of us each and everybody more so now they get to see this interview we're the ones that are speaking now you're automatically marked for dead you're marked for death yes the gangs at pelican bay are organized like the military with strict discipline that includes going to school not in the traditional sense they go to gang school learning for instance how to make weapons from materials the state is required to give them here in this prison video an inmate demonstrates how he constructed a crossbow out of elastic from his underwear writing paper rolled tightly and a
plastic spoon sharpened into a lethal point it's made specifically to be fired through the mesh door pelican bay's jim dejenae showed us a display of prison-made weapons yes since august of 2002 we've confiscated about 1258 weapons well show us some of the more incredible ones because they all look incredible to me inside of a shoe cell they have the metal frame door them embedded metal this here was cut right out of the door and this is a real recent uh discovery the particular inmate that did this he makes one of these about once a month
i hear that some of these guys can actually make handcuff keys oh in the security housing unit all the gang members know how to make handcuff keys this particular handcuff key here look at that this was manufactured from an inhaler just the metal part of an inhaler and they shaped it into a handcuff key and that would unlock the gangs place a huge emphasis on formal education we discipline ourselves to study at least three or four hours a day bob overton who knifed someone to death in a bar has left the aryan brotherhood he says
they make themselves smarter in the service of crime what kind of literature were you reading what kind of books tactical books uh sun tzu's the art of war uh musashi's the book of five rings machiavelli books about power marcus aurelius marcus psychology books psychology books business very it's very your organization did a lot of business yes stephen gruel a former federal prosecutor who investigated eppe's gang says it ran its operations like a fortune 500 company in this surveillance video members of nuestra familia are holding what gruel calls a business meeting here you have the the
regiment leaders coming from san francisco from san jose from salinas from visalia from oakland sitting around for a meeting meeting of the cities one of the one of the members brought this document and so what you have is an agenda and to see some of these words the the the main uh topics were management infrastructure goals and objectives right i mean the fact that that came out of prison and out of the teachings and the work of the western familia is is quite frankly no surprise he came to respect their business savvy which included opening
accounts at legitimate banks you know the proceeds in those accounts are probably from drug dealing or murder for hire or robberies is this a huge enterprise the western familia probably has uh in excess of a thousand or so members and associates so it's it's you know not a small band of individuals it's large in nature they were getting so large they began to expand their field of operations they were starting to move into boise idaho of all places boise idaho we also saw that they had some activities in arizona so what they were slowly trying
to do i think is become a larger criminal organization they certainly had the manpower to do it and this is still all being run outside of this sort of high-intensity prison this lockdown kind of place pelican bay served as the nerve center for all the operations for the nuestra familia so a prison built specifically to put vicious gangs out of business ended up with the worst of the worst all in one place with nothing but time to forge fraternities that were tighter better organized and smarter how do you deal with those people you know how
do you deal with someone who has impunity they're in prison in the worst prison so what do you do with them the government's solution to the problem and gang secrets from an insider who defected in a moment have been investigating one of the most ruthless gangs in the country nuestra familia which means our family in spanish founded by mexican-american convicts in the california prison system in 1965 it consisted of just a few hundred members until the past decade when with its top generals confined to the maximum security wing at pelican bay called the shoe it
swelled into a super gang with more than a thousand made members and associates it was built on the ethic of loyalty discipline and fear and law enforcement was unable to penetrate its solid walls until one of the top carnalies cracked the nuestra familia is considered one of the most sophisticated prison gangs in the united states like so many others robert gratton joined nuestra familia in the 1990s while he was in prison he rose to the rank of captain but eventually defected and told the government the gang's secrets now in hiding he agreed to talk to
us in disguise to join it murder is a prerequisite you have to murder someone to join the gang you have to make a kill or spill the blood of the enemy to be trusted into the gang's clandestine activities did you do that i've stabbed different people gratton spent two years in the shoe going to gang university taking orders from the nuestra familia leaders who they call generals and then he was paroled i was giving given specific orders to organize all the different little cities in northern california which at that time consisted of thousands of young
kids who were straying from the goals of the leader you were called on to whip this thing into shape again so i put together a gangster rap cd to reach the youth and let them know that the nuestra familia was still in charge gratton cd called g-u-n glorified gang life and called for death to the serenos their rivals [Music] it also contained a message from gratton for the youth of northern california the primary purpose and goal of this album is to promote unity amongst each and every one of us did the cd sell i mean
was it in music thousands it was insane it was so popular in northern california that the police chief in watsonville california actually organized a boycott of sam goodies this cd put out by this gang was sold at sam goody's it was sam goody pulled the cd but after it helped generate about eighty thousand dollars in sales twenty five percent of which under gang rules gratton had to kick back to the generals he says he deposited that money in a boise idaho bank account that they controlled what keeps someone in your position who's out taking these
orders from the guys in i mean why not set up your own organization why not why don't you become the more powerful one the same way that the nuestra familia has no problems um killing the enemy it would also kill any member who turned coward traitor or deserter if you try to get out in any way they're going to kill you and if they can't get you they will go after your family gratton says he was having misgivings about the gang when he was arrested for drug possession and faced another long stint on the shoe
i had already wanted to walk away from the gang on my own this just kind of sealed the deal robert gratton was probably one of the most significant if not the most significant cooperator in this case stephen grull was the lead prosecutor in operation black widow the largest and most expensive investigation of a prison gang in u.s history we already knew who they were we knew who were the leaders we knew who were the shot callers you knew that the leaders were in prison you knew that we did we found that out and and that's
the irony of this we had to deal with a situation where the leaders were already behind bars he says the big break came when gratton handed over the latest secret codes used by nuestra familia they were written in ultra miniature script on tiny pieces of paper called wheelas that were smuggled out of pelican bay here's one he actually provided to us in its original form it says the following will be code words for drugs we're going to call cocaine soda and tennis shoes are going to mean handgun high tops are going to mean a rifle
boots if you see boots in some sort of letter it's going to mean an uzi so this teeny teeny writing this is the way they would pass the new code right because they kept changing it wheelers were regularly smuggled in and out of the most secure prison in all of california in things like this thanksgiving day card looks innocuous kind of nice you know if you were a prison guard would you you know think much of it no it's just another card you know no big deal well we found this and then we slowly started
to peel some parts of it back and what we found were three wheelers robert gratton says that when he sent messages into the prison he used a variety of techniques to fool the guards including writing in urine it's undetectable to the naked eye if i had urine in a in a cup i could write a message on a piece of paper which wouldn't be detected until it was heated you've done it yes perhaps the gang's most brazen way of communicating was through fake legal documents looks like something you would think is you know some sort
of court documents got the caption etc but if you start getting down to the second page well within the body building up of this organization on the outside will be done in these three steps bam who on earth wouldn't think that was a legal document and then you're not supposed to scrutinize that in the same way as you do letters they send in and out yeah this is you know a clear example of abuse of a privilege so they can get their orders and functions out on the street once the codes were understood and the
messages intercepted operation black widow turned up 10 hit lists the cops had to call 300 people to tell them there were death threats against them gruel says they prevented scores of homicides that were already in operation for example we uncovered that there was a plot to uh murder two district attorneys you know in california and as a consequence we were able to you know identify those involved in that plot and arrest them and and convict them in all operation black widow resulted in 150 arrests but now what to do clearly locking them up together at
pelican bay didn't work so now what the government wants to do is disperse the leaders around the country in various maximum security prisons in the federal system we're going to move them to indiana in florence colorado in marion illinois and each prison will have one of these captains or one of these generals yes one of these lifers but couldn't they start a whole new organization in whatever prison they're in i don't think that's going to happen and the reason why is this there are two essentially identifying characteristics of being a member of the western familia
one mexican-american the other is that you're from northern california so if you take a general and put him in marion you know illinois or in you know minnesota or some other institution in arkansas he's going to be a nobody it's too late they've already re-established new lines of communication new contacts you're telling us that even if from today these generals are broken up and one is in connecticut and one's in pennsylvania they're still going to be able to run this criminal organization in northern california not only are they going to run it it's going to
expand they're going to be able to recruit and they're going to prosper i know what gratton is talking about and you know uh we'll have to see you know i don't have a crystal ball to kind of tell you to tell you with certainty what's going to happen but you know i thought it was worse to do nothing you had to do something with this situation you couldn't let these guys you know go on with impunity but back at pelican bay lieutenant steve perez and the prison senior gang investigator devon hawks say the leaders of
nuestra familia aware they may soon be split up are already plotting they're not ignorant men they have a plan a definite plan like any business organization that is successful and they stay with that plan that plan was spelled out in a coded letter intercepted from the shoe this is the actual letter and as you can see we've highlighted where the code is before every comma is the word and what was the message well the message is that the noystar familia is reorganizing new captains and generals have already taken over on the shoe and as this
deciphered message shows the generals heading off to places like indiana and minnesota are going with a stated mission says these carnalists that's what they call an nf member are mandated to organize our organization in the feds and place regiments in other states other than california they will do so under the authority of this new general as i understand what devin is telling us this letter that you intercepted is is mandating that these people who are being sent away from here around the country are to set up the same kind of internal prison gang system so
you're trying to break up here exactly and it's a mandate these men will go out into the federal system and continue to branch out to create new gangs and continue their gang activity california governor arnold schwarzenegger will decide later this year whether to go ahead with that plan to scatter the gang leaders throughout the federal prison system if he rejects that idea they will remain at pelican bay serving out their life sentences 60 minutes we're always on cbsnews.com sponsored in part by lamisil tablets ask your doctor if lamisil tablets are right for you
