LAPD officer’s killing brings attention to one of L.A.’s largest gangs

 Seven decades ago, Latino youths in South Los Angeles banded together to form a gang. They called themselves Florencia, after the east-west thoroughfare that ran through the heart of their territory. Years of violent conflict over that territory with other gangs lent Florencia an identity and reason for being. Over the years, demographic and social shifts have weakened many street gangs and caused some to die out altogether. Florencia did the opposite, law enforcement officials say, absorbing smaller gangs and expanding their extortion and drug dealing rackets on the orders of its leaders, who are incarcerated many hundreds of miles away. The gang is now at the center of the killing earlier this month of an off-duty Los Angeles police officer. Officer Fernando Arroyos, 27, was shot to death the night of Jan. 10 near the intersection of 87th and Beach streets. Police say he was with his girlfriend, looking at a house that he was thinking of buying, when two men robbed him at gunpoint of his wallet and jewelry. Arroyos and his assailants exchanged gunfire. The officer collapsed in an alley, mortally wounded.

Luis De La Rosa Rios, Jesse Contreras, Ernesto Cisneros and Haylee Grisham have been charged in federal court with Arroyos’ killing. The three men are members of Florencia-13, according to the FBI. Grisham, the girlfriend of Rios, is described as a gang associate. None could be reached for comment, and they have yet to enter pleas.

The particular charge that prosecutors have brought against the four — violent crime in aid of racketeering — means they must make the case that the defendants robbed and murdered Arroyos to maintain or increase their standing within Florencia-13. 

Juries have found in a number of recent trials that Florencia-13 amounts to a racketeering enterprise, but in those cases, prosecutors had evidence — recorded calls, intercepted letters and jailhouse notes — that its leaders had directed the drug deals, shakedowns and murders that formed a pattern of racketeering activity.

According to an FBI agent’s affidavit, one of the defendants has admitted that they were driving around, looking for someone to rob, when Rios spotted Arroyos and remarked, “He has a nice chain, let’s get it.”

The historic core of Florencia’s territory is bounded by Slauson Avenue to the north, 101st Street to the south, Central Avenue to the west and State Street to the east, Lt. Hector Velasquez of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department testified in 2016. In time it absorbed smaller gangs, many of which became cliques, or subsets, of Florencia-13. The gang now has at least two dozen cliques across South Los Angeles, Huntington Park, South Gate and Maywood. 

Its ranks are knitted together by blood. It’s common, authorities say, for members of the gang to have followed an uncle, a father or a grandfather into it.