When newly-promoted Lieutenant Ralph Mott of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department was assigned to gang control in East Los Angeles, he knew little about the barrio or the extent of the violence there. Although he had heard of the seventeen warring youth gangs, he was unprepared for fourteen-year-old hitmen, for the savage brutality of boys still in their teens. Now with gang activity increasing, he plunged into the fight to control the armed robberies, the gang rapings, the shotgun attacks on houses, and the constant warfare between hostile gangs that raged on every street and hillside. Most of the people in the Mexican-American community were law-abiding, yet Mott soon learned that fear of gang vengeance kept them silent when they had witnessed a crime.