The Vagos, also known as the Southside Vagos or Los Angeles Vagos, is a Mexican-American street gang that was formed in the 1970s and 1980s in Los Angeles. The gang was the most powerful Mexican gang in the city, rivalling the Los Varrios Aztecas gang of Little Mexico for control of chicano organized crime in the city; while the Vagos had more people that were armed only with pistols, the LVA had less people, but they were heavily-armed. The Vagos gang took advantage of the Grove Street Families' divisions in the early 1990s to take over several turfs in the city, but the GSF expanded to take over all of the Vagos' turf after May 1992.
By 2013, however, the Vagos had been revived due to more divisions in the GSF, and the group became a powerful multinational criminal network, recruiting people from Guatemala and other Central American countries in addition to Mexico. Many of the Vagos' upper leaders were in prison, but they used cell phones to coordinate their operations from behind bars, and the gang became one of the most powerful gangs in the city. Early in 2013, their leader was assassinated after the gang tried to kidnap a member of The Families, and many members of the gang were killed in a grievous massacre. The Vagos took several punches from The Families drug dealer Gerald G and his associates, but it remained one of the most powerful gangs in the city.
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