Warning, this podcast contains explicit language and details acts of violence.

Listener discretion is advised.

A skull, a smoking gun, and red eyes.

Those are images people usually associate with something bad, something evil.

But for some inside the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department,

that imagery is seen as a sign of loyalty to a lethal brotherhood, a unifier.

In 2007, Deputy Curtis Sykes joined the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department gang enforcement task force, or Get, at the Palmdale Station.

The Get team is part of Operation Safe Streets,

the department's gang bureau, which is, ironically, a place where lots of deputy gang members

end up working. Sykes was recommended to the unit by Deputy Douglas Parkhurst. Sykes and

Parkhurst worked together before at the North County Correctional Facility.

The duo became partners on Palmdale's Get Team. Court documents describe the two as, quote,

like brothers. They, quote, developed a strong bond based upon mutual respect and trust that they

still share to this day. In 2009, Sykes moved to the Compton Get unit and worked with Deputy Steve Vargas.

The two also got close and decided to get matching tattoos.

They worked with a Pico Rivera tattoo artist and came up with a design,

the skull with glowing red eyes holding a smoking

revolver. There's a bandana wrapped around the top of the skull with the letters OSS for Operation Safe Streets.

Behind the skull are two playing cards, an ace and an eight of spades, also known as a dead man's hand.

Each tattoo is numbered and placed on the lower leg. This was the birth of the jump-out boys.

And this is a tradition of violence,

a history of deputy gangs inside the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

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