Kevin Reed, an attorney with the National Assn. In one case pending in federal court, attorneys want two deputies who allegedly shot a man to death to show whether their ankles bear the Vikings insignia. Some of the lawyers now suing the Sheriff’s Department on behalf of clients who say they were beaten, shot or harassed have demanded that deputies accused of misconduct roll down their socks and reveal if they have one of the distinguishing tattoos. The county paid $9 million in fines and training costs to settle the lawsuits in 1996. Membership swelled in the 1980s at overwhelmingly white sheriff’s stations that were islands in black and Latino immigrant communities.Ī federal judge hearing class-action litigation against the department described the most well-known of the groups, the Lynwood Vikings, as a “neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang” and found that deputies had engaged in racially motivated hostility. Senior officers say they began with the creation of the Little Devils at the East Los Angeles station in 1971. The groups-with macho monikers like the Pirates, Vikings, Rattlesnakes and Cavemen-have long been a subculture in the country’s largest Sheriff’s Department and, in some cases, an inside track to acceptance in the ranks. Then a street cop at the Lennox station, this deputy has risen to a key position in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department-along with other members of his “club.” The somber image of Death’s hooded skull and scythe tattooed onto the inside of the deputy’s left ankle in 1989 initiated him into a select fraternity called the Grim Reapers.
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