More than 100 arrested in gang sweep

Over an 18-month period, Operation Garlic Press targeted gang members in Alameda, Santa Clara, San Benito, Monterey and Santa Cruz counties. Agents went undercover tracking guns, drugs and stolen goods.

A gang sweep dubbed Operation Garlic Press this week struck another blow at an intricate crime network that stretches along Interstate 5 and small-town back roads from the Mexican border to the Bay Area.

At a Friday news conference in the farming community of Gilroy, known for its annual garlic festival, Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris announced that agents had made more than 100 arrests after an 18-month operation.

This sweep — which covered Alameda, Santa Clara, San Benito, Monterey and Santa Cruz counties — comes on the heels of a Central Valley sweep in June in which authorities said they arrested high-ranking gang leaders living in tiny farm towns, directing a web of human, gun and drug trafficking.

The Nuestra Familia prison gang, with direct links to Mexican drug cartels, directs most of the Norteno street gangs. The gangs had set up shop in towns such as Dos Palos and Los Banos after being largely driven out of Salinas in earlier sweeps.

"What is clear is they're moving straight up and down California, crossing jurisdictions," Harris said. "We'll cross jurisdictions too. We're going to take them out wherever they are."

Harris said her priority is backing up local law enforcement agencies.

"We have small cities with big problems," she said.

Michelle Gregory, a spokeswoman with the California Department of Justice, said there had been an increase in violence in the five-county area targeted in this week's sweep.

"The Central Valley sweep was targeting hierarchy," she said. "This was more — I don't want to say bottom of the barrel — but this was local crime reaching a point where the local agencies said, 'We need help.' And that's also why we're here."

Agents went undercover and spent 18 months tracking drugs, guns and stolen goods.

Gilroy Mayor Al Pinheiro said he hoped people didn't get the idea that Gilroy was overrun with gang members.

"A small amount of the people arrested actually lived in Gilroy," he said. "But that's partly the point. These people move around. We have to team up and work together to stop them."

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Los Angeles Times Шестакова

Marine in prison for killing Iraqi allowed to be with wife during labor

October 14, 2011 | 6:36 pm

A Marine from Camp Pendleton serving a prison sentence in the killing of an unarmed Iraqi has been granted emergency leave from the brig so he can be with his wife as she delivers the couple's second child, a boy.

Lt. Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, granted the leave to Lawrence Hutchins, now being held at the brig at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station, according to the North County Times.

Hutchins will be brought under guard to the hospital at Camp Pendleton so he can be with his wife, Reyna. She is set to have labor induced Monday, the newspaper said.

Reyna Hutchins became pregnant when her husband was free on appeal. The couple has a 6-year-old daughter.

In August, an assistant secretary of the Navy rejected a parole recommendation for Hutchins. The Navy Clemency and Parole Board had recommended that Hutchins be paroled, but Assistant Secretary Juan Garcia said parole would be "premature."

Hutchins, then a sergeant and squad leader, was the leader of a plot to kill an unarmed Iraqi suspected of cooperating with insurgents who were attacking Marines with roadside bombs in the Hamdania area in 2006. He was convicted at a court-martial in 2007.

Sentenced to 11 years in prison, Hutchins had served four years -- one in the brig at Camp Pendleton and three at the prison at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas -- before an appeals court in 2010 ruled in his favor.

Hutchins, 26, was free for nine months before the Navy assistant secretary rejected a parole recommendation and ordered him returned to prison.

Hutchins was among seven Marines and a Navy corpsman convicted in the 2006 plot to kidnap and kill an Iraqi. None of the others served more than 18 months.

In an earlier decision, Waldhauser, who led Marines in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, rejected Hutchins' bid for clemency.

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by Rosanna Xia, Los Angeles Times

October 10, 2011

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