FORMER LEADER IS NOW SPILLING GANG'S SECRETS

Pancho Real's Chilling, Detailed Testimony Chronicles His Rise From
Reluctant Killer to Shot Caller

Pancho Real was at Our Lady Queen of Angels Church with his wife and
daughter one Sunday in October 2006 when his cellphone rang.

He was summoned to a park near his home on Drew Street, a drug and
gang haven in Northeast Los Angeles, to kill a man he didn't know.
The Mexican Mafia wanted a paroled Avenues gang member named Frank
"Kiko" Cordova dead.

Real left church with his family and called another gang member,
Carlos Renteria.

At the park that afternoon, they figured out who Cordova was but saw
he was among children.

Outside the park, Real said, he told the mafia's representatives ,
who conferred with others by phone. They told Real to shoot Cordova anyway.

Real and Renteria returned and saw Cordova walking away from the kids.

"We said, 'There he goes. Let's roll,' " Real testified.

Real said he fired in the air to scare onlookers as Renteria walked
across the park and shot the parolee. (Renteria was charged last
summer with Cordova's murder.)

Back on Drew Street minutes later, Real changed his sweat shirt, met
his wife and daughter at his stepfather's and went about his Sunday.

That scene, described step by emotionless step, captured the life of
opposing impulses of Francisco "Pancho" Real, former leader of the
Drew Street clique of the Avenues gang and a member of a notorious
crime family.

He ordered up extortions and robberies and taxed drug dealers, but
said he didn't use drugs, attended church every Sunday and attempted,
as an attorney skeptically put it in cross-examination, to be a
"kinder and gentler shot-caller."

In testimony over two weeks in Los Angeles County Superior Court,
Real, 28, offered a firsthand account of life in one of Southern
California's most notorious Latino gangs. The Avenues gang has roamed
Northeast L.A. since the 1950s. Its Drew Street clique, of newer
vintage, dates to the 1990s.

A short man in a white jumpsuit, shackled and with slicked-back hair
falling to his shoulders, Real spoke slowly, leaning into a
microphone on the witness stand next to Judge Lance Ito.

He was ostensibly there to testify, immune from prosecution, in a
preliminary hearing for three alleged Drew Streeters charged in the
shooting death of a member of a rival gang on Feb. 21, 2008.

Minutes after that attack, a fourth suspect in the shooting -- Real's
half brother Daniel "Clever" Leon -- was killed in a shootout on Drew
Street with Los Angeles police gang detectives, allegedly after
firing at them with an assault rifle.

Leon's death was ruled a justifiable homicide. At the time, by all
accounts, Pancho Real ran Drew Street. He knelt by his brother's
body, then challenged officers to kill him as well. Four months
later, he was arrested and charged with racketeering. Now he is an
informant and is being treated for cancer. So Ito allowed prosecutors
and defense attorneys wide latitude in questioning him.

"In the event this witness is not available in the future, this is
your opportunity," Ito said at the hearing, which concluded two weeks ago.

Real testified for days. Kids on Drew Street, he said, were raised as
drug dealers amid a swirl of half brothers, baby mamas, aunts, second
cousins and stepfathers. They hid guns, drugs and money in a maze of
apartments while spotters alerted Real to every police car; a
neighborhood auto shop worked on most of their shot-up cars, he said.

The whims of incarcerated prison-gang members, expressed in
rectum-smuggled notes, translated into Drew Street killings or
beatings. Gang members knew one another by nicknames that seemed to
reflect a cross between "A Clockwork Orange" and the Seven Dwarfs:
Droopy, Nasty, Tricky, Flappy, Creeper, Menace, Pest.

Not everything Real said could be confirmed. But as his testimony
stretched on, law enforcement representatives slowly filled Ito's
gallery: four homicide detectives; two uniformed officers; six, then
eight sheriff's deputies.

From the stand, Real clinically issued shards of chilling detail:

Daniel Leon had laser eye surgery to make himself a better street
marksman. The gang had a hard-core crew -- known as the A Team or the
Killer Squad, including Leon -- that would go on "missions" against
rival gangs. A Mexican Mafia prison gang member, held in maximum
security, had a "secretary" handling his affairs on Drew Street.

Real admitted having smuggled immigrants and selling drugs for years.
But he painted himself a reluctant shot-caller -- unwilling even to
become a Drew Street member when beaten into the gang in 2004.

He was anointed the street's shot-caller in the fall of 2007 by
representatives of the Mexican Mafia, who asked him to take the job
after another leader was arrested.

He said his main responsibility was collecting "taxes" for the
Mexican Mafia from about 40 drug dealers in the 12-square-block
neighborhood surrounding Drew Street -- a total of $150,000 to
$200,000 in his nine months as gang leader. He said he gave the money
to mafia associates every Thursday.

He never carried a gun, even in rival gang territory, because any
gang member "would be crazy" to shoot a mafia tax collector, he said.

Real also named attorneys who, he alleged, provided him with
addresses of witnesses so that he and others could threaten them.
Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district
attorney's office, declined to comment.

A network of families related by birth and marriage cemented the
gang. They hail from Tlalchapa, Guerrero, a town in a violent region
several hours west of Mexico City.

Real's mother, Maria Leon, an illegal immigrant from Tlalchapa, had
14 children on Drew Street, including 10 sons, with four men, he
said. She had sold drugs there since the late 1980s, Real said, as
did his uncles, aunts, cousins and stepfathers. He and his brothers
each joined the gang as they entered their teens.

Real tried to break from his family and go straight, even receiving
First Communion alone at 17, he said. But, "every time I try to get
out, they pull me back in."

On April 30, 2008, while several members of his family were in jail,
Real said, he went to the FBI -- finding the number by calling 411.
He said agents interviewed him but never got back to him. Two months
later, his name led a 158-page federal indictment of more than 70
Drew Streeters.

In custody, Real began cooperating with investigators. In return, his
mother told him she hated him, his sisters and uncles stopped taking
his collect calls, his brothers were asked to kill him.

"I never thought my family would turn like that on me," he said.

The Real-Leon family saga seems done. Their house, once guarded by
laser trip wires and cameras, is gone, the property a vacant lot.
Real's brothers and mother have pleaded guilty to drug conspiracy or
immigration charges.

Crime is down on Drew Street. Trees are no longer spray-painted with
graffiti. At Drew and Estara Avenue, an optimistic homeowner is
offering a house for sale -- unthinkable two years ago.

After years amid Drew Street tumult, Francisco Real must be housed in
solitary confinement at the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in
downtown Los Angeles. He can't go outside to exercise or go to
church, and gang members in nearby modules rain down insults well
into the night.

"I don't have a friend," he testified.

He stared at the ceiling and fought emotion describing how his
younger brother and sister were beaten and had to be relocated.

Yet, when defense attorney Jim Hallett asked if he regretted
cooperating, Real shook his head.

He should, he said, have done it "a long time ago."