Officers wait outside a house on N. 28th St. until it is secured during a series of seven raids early Tuesday morning by Milwaukee police and FBI anti-gang task force agents. Credit: Gary Porter

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There were no lights. No sirens.

Officers surrounded a house on N. 28th St. early Tuesday. They tossed a flash-bang through a window, burst through the back door and surprised three people inside. A kenneled dog named Kush, slang for marijuana, watched nearby.

Similar scenes played out in six houses as 200 law enforcement officers — 100 Milwaukee police and 100 FBI agents — descended around the Amani neighborhood on the city's near north side at dawn. Eighteen people had been arrested by late afternoon as the searches continued. A small number of suspects are headed for the federal court system, while most will face state gun and drug charges, officials said.

Officers confiscated guns, crack cocaine, even a military-style ballistic vest. Those arrested are believed to be involved in armed robbery, homicide, and drug and gun offenses that terrorized their neighborhood.

The MPD-FBI Gang Task Force formed in October after an explosion of violence last July through September. It is housed in police District 5, which covers dozens of north side neighborhoods, including Amani, Riverwest and Harambee. Nearly a third of all homicides and nonfatal shootings recorded in the city last year occurred in the district.

Tuesday's operation was the first major roundup for the task force, and came as city leaders expressed alarm over a string of weekend shootings that wounded 14 people, including three children, in various areas of the city. The idea is to get ahead of the curve, to dismantle some of the most violent gangs before the summer gets too far along.

"This is just the beginning," Assistant Chief Kurt Leibold said.

The FBI brought several SWAT teams from Chicago to supplement its Milwaukee staff, while officers from neighboring Milwaukee police districts also took part in the effort.

"It's safer because you plan it and bring in the right resources," Supervisory Special Agent Robert Botsch said. "One of the key pieces is the teamwork between the FBI and MPD. It's seamless when the task force is working together."

Disrupting the violence

Law enforcement officials focused on a street gang called 29 Taliban and its affiliated groups, the 29 Hard-Hitters and 29 Money-Getters. The moniker comes from their geographic base, N. 29th St. between W. Center St. and W. Auer St.

"They most certainly were involved in the shootings last summer and fall," Capt. Thomas Stigler said. "It was so frustrating last summer. It was violence within this group. They were arguing over nonsense."

At the N. 28th St. home, investigators methodically searched the house — "Imagine taking every piece of clothing out of your closet, moving it and checking the pockets," one officer put it — and found crack pipes, pieces of steel wool (used for crack pipe filters), 25 grams of crack with a street value of about $5,000, and drug-packaging materials and the military-grade vest. Police said it looked as if Kush was kept upstairs; a shovel propped up near an open window likely was used to toss waste out the window.

The three residents, police said, were addicts and likely paid in drugs to rent the property and turn a blind eye as others sold drugs out of the house.

Two doors down from the drug house was a well-kept residence with a tidy lawn and flower baskets.

"There's clearly homeowners living here who are keeping up their residences, trying to live a productive life," Stigler said. "If we can disrupt that level of violence in the neighborhood through narcotics and gang investigations, to take those people out of the environment so the good people can live a life of quality, that's our job."

A block or two away, investigators found two guns stashed in a laundry hamper inside a cockroach-infested house. One of eight people inside, who was on federal parole for robbery, was arrested on suspicion of being a felon in possession of a firearm.

Officers did get one surprise at a house in the 4700 block of N. 22nd St.

Task force members threw flash-bangs at the front two windows and found one was made of sturdy plexiglass. The new material had been installed after the windows were shattered by bullets. The house had been shot at three times in the past few weeks, police said.

Once inside, FBI agents wearing two sets of gloves pulled a Ruger P95 out of a laundry basket and carefully placed it in a sterile paper bag to store it for evidence. Intelligence gathered by investigators also indicated the house was used to distribute large quantities of marijuana to lower-level street dealers.

A man and his girlfriend, both convicted felons, were taken into custody. Two women and two young children also were in the house at the time of the search, but were not suspects. Milwaukee police said that child social services would be notified of the situation.

No agents, officers, suspects or residents were injured during Tuesday's raids.

Before Tuesday, the task force had arrested 52 individuals who, among all of them, had nearly 500 prior arrests of which 156 were felony arrests, Botsch said. The task force continues to closely investigate at least two other street gangs in District 5.

"As long as the violence associated with a group continues, we're going to continue to target them," he said. "So even though we arrested these groups today, this case isn't over. We'll continue to target this group and we'll continue to build upon it."

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