Inside LAs most vile gang accused of branding women and kidnapping 14-year-old girls for sex

Los Angeles pimps used “horrific” acts of cruelty to keep a vicelike grip on a sleazy stretch of south LA road where perverts can buy sex with children, and women turn tricks for as little as $40, cops and prosecutors said.Vile flesh peddlers maintain a thriving sex business on LA’s Figueroa Corridor by branding prostitutes, recruiting girls from foster homes, forcing them to get abortions, and even biting and punching them with Rolex watches, authorities said.The sickening sex trade secrets of the infamous Hoover Criminals gang’s brutal prostitution ring were revealed in a massive takedown of the Hoovers that saw the arrest of at least ten prostitution kingpins operating the in Figueroa, an area known to locals as “the Blade.”“This is how they accomplish the sex trafficking in Figueroa,” explained LA’s top prosecutor Bill Essayli after Wednesday’s takedown, dubbed Operation Broken Blade.“They do it first through coercion, and then through violence.”“It’s horrific,” he added.The Hoover Criminals, which originated in the late 1960s and early ’70s, are one of the largest and most powerful street gangs in Los Angeles.

After breaking away from the Crips, the gang flourished in the ’80s during the crack epidemic and expanded into several various criminal enterprises, including narcotics and prostitution.They are infamous for operating under an “everybody killer” (EBK) mentality, which means they brawl with both the Bloods and the Crips.The Hoovers operate a massive sex ring around infamous Corridor, authorities said, controlling women and young girls they force to walk sidewalks and attract johns, and then turn them in to seedy motels, where sex is sold for a cut to the front desk.LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell said the Hoover gang recruits victims who “have no one left to protect them,” and they do it to girls who are as young as possible.“They lure young children with promises of money, expensive clothes, affection, and a place to...