The charges against the Brown Pride members are pending in circuit court; an assistant statewide prosecutor is assigned to the case.

Defense attorneys say the charges are overreaching and that the state is unfairly punishing the nine defendants because of their social ties to a group. Some of the defendants deny membership in Brown Pride, calling the group a family, not a gang.

The nine alleged members who were arrested remained jailed, a fact that Steube often says has contributed to a decrease in the number of drive-by shootings around the county.

The charges announced Friday come as authorities across the state are taking tough stances to curb escalating gang-related violence. A statewide grand jury is expected this year to begin investigating gang-related criminal activity across Florida.

“We cannot allow dangerous and destructive gang-related activities to persist in our state,” Attorney General Bill McCollum said in a statement Friday in which he vowed to pursue strong penalties against the gang members.

Steube said the charges against SUR 13 and Brown Pride stem from an ongoing crime-fighting strategy implemented several years ago but not announced to the public until now.

The sheriff said the so-called “Investigative Strike Force” is composed of several local law enforcement agencies and state and federal prosecutors. The group set out to identify crime trends - which included a surge in gang-related violence - and to allocate law enforcement resources accordingly.

A new trend in law enforcement has police surfing MySpace pages on the Internet for evidence in criminal cases. Photos and videos showing four alleged gang members were seized in the ongoing SUR 13 racketeering investigation.

Three of the suspected SUR 13 members - Aurelio Ibarra, Orlando Valenzuela and Johnny Vasquez - are each jailed in Manatee on murder charges.

Valenzuela and Vasquez, both 15, are charged in the shooting death of 9-year-old Stacy Williams III, gunned down in May as he rode a bike in his Bradenton neighborhood. He was the unintended target, killed during a street fight, authorities say.

Sheriff’s detectives say Ibarra, 21, fatally shot a 22-year-old Palmetto man in November 2005 during a robbery. Murder charges against two other men, including Jimmy Lee Sanchez, 21, were dropped.

Sanchez is among the 14 alleged members of SUR 13 charged with racketeering. He and two other men - Andrew Coronado, 19, and Sergio Viera, 16 - were not immediately arrested Friday. Authorities say Coronado is among the gang leaders.

At 14, he was shot and injured, dropped off at Manatee Memorial Hospital by friends wearing blue-and-white bandanas - the colors of SUR 13, according to police reports.

Last year, Coronado was arrested on an aggravated assault charge for reportedly carrying a baseball bat in a fight on a basketball court in Bradenton. The state declined to prosecute the case.

But a gang member’s old crimes are part of the racketeering cases. Previous crimes, authorities claim, show that the gang itself is a criminal enterprise and that its members have a pattern of criminal activity.

Seven of the alleged SUR 13 members were jailed or in prison before authorities set out on their arrest sweep for the others Friday.

Among them was Genaro Agustin, 22. He is serving time in prison for crimes that include possession of a machine gun - a World War II-era weapon that his attorney said was broken.

Authorities identified the other racketeering suspects as: Samuel Conde, 18; Mario Contreras, 15; Jose Garza, 18; Leonidez Gonzalez, 21; Benny Garcia, 20; and Edward Rivera, 15, who once told Bradenton police that he got a gun for protection from rival gangs.

“I just got out of jail,” yelled Laura Garcia, 20, as she sat in a sheriff’s transport van before she was driven to the jail at Port Manatee. Garcia, the only woman in the group arrested on a racketeering charge, said she found it amusing that authorities are treating her, and the others, as “big-time” criminals.