AHC Get an all out war between the Crips and Bloods

How do you get an all-out war, not just skirmishes, but an all-out gang war across America, between the Crips, and Bloods?
 
What do you mean by all out? There are a huge number of bloods and crips, who often have beef with not only (say you were a blood) Crips and Latin Kings, they also often have beef with other bloods. Sets can be at war all the time. What do you mean by war? Im just confused as to the intent of this thread.
 
Most sets of Crips and Bloods have little to do with each other, aside from having adopted common gang imagery. They also regularly fight each other. It's hard to get much more of a "gang war" than OTL.
 
It's very tricky for a simple enough reason: the Crips and Bloods aren't overarching organizations like the Five Families/Patriarcas/DeCavalcantes, Winter Hill Gang, or the modern Mafia incarnations in Italy. They're loosely affiliated organizations made up of local "cliques" or "sets" that cooperate somewhat when it benefits them but are mostly autonomous. Most modern gangs are structured this way: MS-13, Calle 18, and most others that could be named work similarly. Efforts to unite these cliques into a real structure have to date been unsuccessful. The most organized ones left are probably the Latin Kings, and even they aren't truly analogous to what groups like the Italian Mafia used to be. The RICO Act and decades of all-out war by the FBI (along with, in the case of the Mob, some spectacularly bad leaders of whom John Gotti was the main one and gentrification/integration of Italian Americans) and every other federal law enforcement agency have been very successful at stamping out the centralized model of organized crime.

If you want an all-out war, you'd need to find a way to unite them into real organizations first. That's very tricky, but it might be possible. You'd need a few charismatic and capable leaders and some sort of force or reason to bring them together. There is actually a somewhat interesting possibility: the FBI in conjunction with those leaders makes it happen. This would be modeled on what they did in Boston in terms of literally creating Whitey Bulger and the Winter Hill Gang to fight the Patriarcas, who they in turn successfully marginalized to become the main organized crime unit in New England (and brought the FBI along for the ride). Here's my idea. For whatever reason (maybe a super anti-drug politician comes to power and starts the Mexican or Colombian Drug Wars early), the Latin American cartels go completely insane and start a massive war on level with what we saw in Mexico in the late 2000s that spills over heavily into the United States. Narcoterrorism is a big feature, and after a series of spectacular gangland slayings cum terrorist attacks, eliminating them becomes the U.S. government's number one priority. At this point, some corrupt FBI agents similar to H. Paul Rico/John Connelly/John Morris and the dozens of others in the FBI who created the Winter Hill Gang decide that maybe turning the relatively more docile, seemingly less threatening black street gangs into a national organization to counter the infinitely more savage (supposedly) Latino gangs would be in the net interest of U.S. public safety. It's the same argument that was used in the Boston FBI, with Winter Hill/the Irish Mob being the blacks and the Mafia being the Latinos. Working with capable leaders of either the Crips and the Bloods, they turn them successfully into a national organization and turn a blind eye to their activities. The other side, seeing this happening and now having a real reason to unite (or be marginalized, with the incumbent possibility of being violently dispatched), does it similarly in an organic way, but with more hiccups. Namely, recalcitrant local set leaders are assassinated. They expand their power steadily with the FBI institutionally turning a blind eye and forces in it actively helping one side, whose leaders are top echelon informants and use the relationship like Whitey Bulger did to dispatch rivals who become problematic.

Eventually, inevitably, after a couple decades of full court press the Latino cartels are defeated like the Medellin were. Within half a decade of this point, people start noticing what a menace the super Crips and Bloods now are. Eventually, through a whistleblower, leak, indictment, or lawsuit, it becomes public knowledge that the leaders of the side the FBI actively aided are working with them and profited from the relationship to do in their rivals. This causes an uproar in the criminal underworld. Many of the other side's soldiers are now in jail due to informing and they are furious. They go to war. Yay.

That's my best effort.
 
If Central American has a more severe problem with state breakdown and both gangs build a power-base there, this could allow both gangs a base of operations. Full-scale conflict on US only seems likely if a severe economic downturn occurs, or a major war is going and most military, national guard units are overstretched and deployed overseas.
 
If Central American has a more severe problem with state breakdown and both gangs build a power-base there, this could allow both gangs a base of operations. Full-scale conflict on US only seems likely if a severe economic downturn occurs, or a major war is going and most military, national guard units are overstretched and deployed overseas.

The Crips/Bloods aren't Latino gangs, they're African-American ones. They don't have a presence in Latin America, though there are some in Canada and, weirdly, some Crips in the Netherlands.
 
The Crips/Bloods aren't Latino gangs, they're African-American ones. They don't have a presence in Latin America, though there are some in Canada and, weirdly, some Crips in the Netherlands.
The Netherland presence seems kind of random. Even if the Bloods and Crips don't recruit from the local population in Central America, I thought a failed state(s) in the region would be necessary for either group to have a significant base of operations. They wouldn't have to govern the territory, but at least preserve a base of operations there analogous to Al Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan during the '90s. Any failed state could work in theory, but central america would be the closest region to the Blood and Crop "businesses" in the US.
 
The Netherland presence seems kind of random. Even if the Bloods and Crips don't recruit from the local population in Central America, I thought a failed state(s) in the region would be necessary for either group to have a significant base of operations. They wouldn't have to govern the territory, but at least preserve a base of operations there analogous to Al Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan during the '90s. Any failed state could work in theory, but central america would be the closest region to the Blood and Crop "businesses" in the US.

That isn't really how it works. U.S. organized crime doesn't set up bases in foreign countries (they would stand out too much and the local groups/honchos wouldn't want them on their turf), at least unless the government explicitly invites them in like Cuba under Batista. I'm not aware of any case in which what you outlined has happened. Also, organized crimes (at least the American kind) doesn't really 'train' their people in the sense al-Qaeda does. It doesn't make any sense for them to establish foreign camps like that.

The Crips and the Bloods are really based around their own segregated neighborhoods and that's largely where they're going to rule. Even if cooperated nationwide, that's where their power base is going to stay.
 
The Netherland presence seems kind of random. Even if the Bloods and Crips don't recruit from the local population in Central America, I thought a failed state(s) in the region would be necessary for either group to have a significant base of operations. They wouldn't have to govern the territory, but at least preserve a base of operations there analogous to Al Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan during the '90s. Any failed state could work in theory, but central america would be the closest region to the Blood and Crop "businesses" in the US.

Not really that random, when they're just locals imitating notorious American gangs, which certainly gets them a lot more attention. Locals in poverty-stricken, wartorn nations like El Salvador don't need to imitate American gangs. Even if they did, the "Salvadoran Crips" or "Honduran Bloods" would be very, very different than any other group of Crips or Bloods, in terms of almost everything aside from their imagery.

I definitely don't see the American Bloods or Crips going to Central America. There's no reason to spend money on trips to Central America, unless it's for "business". And since this "business" is the territory of local gangs and cartels, all of whom have far more experience in the area, they'd be very lucky to leave the region alive. It's not the sort of operation you'd see from the Crips or Bloods. Even a more "organised" gang like the Gangster Disciples wouldn't go for something like that. It's too big of an operation to carry out with far too many risks and not enough reward.

A bunch of African Americans showing up in Central America inserting themselves into local crime is very suspicious. The United States finds out sooner or later, and anyone who tries to re-enter the United States finds themselves arrested. There would probably be extra Coast Guard presence in the area since it's pretty obvious drug trafficking is involved.
 
That isn't really how it works. U.S. organized crime doesn't set up bases in foreign countries (they would stand out too much and the local groups/honchos wouldn't want them on their turf), at least unless the government explicitly invites them in like Cuba under Batista. I'm not aware of any case in which what you outlined has happened. Also, organized crimes (at least the American kind) doesn't really 'train' their people in the sense al-Qaeda does. It doesn't make any sense for them to establish foreign camps like that.

The Crips and the Bloods are really based around their own segregated neighborhoods and that's largely where they're going to rule. Even if cooperated nationwide, that's where their power base is going to stay.
Yeah, gangs don't "rent out" space the way a terrorist group would from a willing client state. That seemed like a more feasible way for the two groups to stockpile weapons for a full-out war. If an American gang started stockpiling tanks and RPGs in safe-houses on US soil, the FBI would notice very quickly.
 
Yeah, gangs don't "rent out" space the way a terrorist group would from a willing client state. That seemed like a more feasible way for the two groups to stockpile weapons for a full-out war. If an American gang started stockpiling tanks and RPGs in safe-houses on US soil, the FBI would notice very quickly.

Right, cartels work with local clients who function as distributors. The alliance between U.S. gangs and the Medellin Cartel and the relationship between MS-13 and the actual Mexican drug cartels for whom they distribute drugs today is a good example. They work together, but neither would trod on the other's territory.
 
Slightly off-topic: does anyone here have any good material (books etc) on how the FBI was successful in doing away with (most) centralized crime structures?
 
I read a book once that details a future where the CIA hear Gary Webb has evidence about their drug operations, kill him and destroy his evidence before he can go public. This leads to plenty of repercussions but, one of them was the CIA infiltrating and eventually controlling the Crips and Bloods. They bring both groups up to national level syndicates that fund most of their black ops in other countries.

It's all fairly plausible until the plucky hero comes along and exposes everything.
 
After the groups across America ended up uniting as two cohesive groups, there would be so much crossover that the actual war would be between the Blips and the Cruds.
 
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