How Did South Los Beef With Hoovers
IN THE MIDDLE OF L.A.'S GANG WARS
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May 22, 1988
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THE WARM SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA sun has scarcely set on Good Friday when the shooting begins. A dark sedan glides through the dusk on West 46th Street, in the heart of the urban war zone that is south-central Los Angeles.
Suddenly automatic assault rifles and shotguns appear from the car's windows and a burst of gunfire sprays a cluster of young people hanging out near the corner. One round instantly kills Stacey D. Childress, ending his life at age 20. A shotgun blast leaves a 4-year-old boy, certainly too young to know anything about the imperatives of Los Angeles gang wars, critically wounded. Ten more fall wounded onto sidewalks and lawns.
Even as the ambulances pick up the victims, two teams of young men and women in familiar tan jackets are working among the crowds. What gang did the shooting? Did any of the victims belong to a gang? A little later, team members are at the hospital, talking to relatives and friends of the victims. The next afternoon, they are out talking to angry and frightened neighbors on 46th Street. The goal: to prevent the bloody retaliation that is the usual sequel to such ''drive-by'' shootings.
The teams should know; many of them are themselves veterans of L.A. gang warfare, O.G.'s (''original gangsters''), in street parlance. They work for Community Youth Gang Services, an agency funded by the city and county of Los Angeles, whose difficult task is to mediate between rival gangs and discourage young people from joining them. The agency's 54 street workers fan out over the city nightly trying to step between rival gangs. They are fighting guns with words. They negotiate truces for gang funerals, arrange baseball matches between rival gangs, run job fairs and have even produced written treaties between warring gangs. When they can, they impart a message that the life of a street warrior leads nowhere, except to jail and, frequently, a violent death.
Gang warfare and initiation rites, which have taken the lives of numerous gang members as well as innocent bystanders, are a fact of life in Los Angeles, especially in poor black neighborhoods. The killings were little noticed by the city at large until early February when a young woman strolling in the affluent Westwood area - which, with its 10 movie houses, is L.A.'s main entertainment center - was caught in a gunfight between two rival black youths. While deploring the killing, many blacks were bitter that until gang terror had spread to a white neighborhood, scant attention was paid to the carnage.
And even though subsequent national publicity has focused on L.A.'s youth gangs and a new movie, ''Colors,'' provides a graphic simulated version of the real thing, the desperate living conditions that breed gang violence have largely gone unnoted.
At first glance, south-central L.A. does not fit the stereotype of a depressed, predominantly black ghetto. Shaded by tall palms, the bungalow-like homes are fronted by lawns and a profusion of oleander and bougainvillea and hibiscus. But a closer look reveals the grim picture of an occupied zone: heavily barred doors and windows; high chain-link fences; walls covered by graffiti indicating the various gang turfs. Many of the street lamps have been shot out, and when the sun goes down the darkened streets crawl with armed children. Last year, south-central L.A. was the scene of more than half of the 205 gang-related killings in the city.
In the wake of the Good Friday shooting, on Fridays and Saturdays, when there is usually the most gang activity, up to 1,000 police officers converge on the those neighborhoods where youths - carrying beepers and openly dealing in ''rock'' cocaine, or crack -control the streets; where invisible borders divide the neighborhoods, making it dangerous for the residents of one gang area to cross over into another; where wearing the wrong color can incite a beating or worse, and where lives are daily lost in feuds whose origins have long since been forgotten by the teen-age ''bangers.''
The overwhelming police presence has tamped down gang terror in south-central L.A., but senseless killings continue. According to the police, a week or so ago, five gang members allegedly killed two young women, in a case of mistaken identity, to avenge a drug deal gone wrong. Many in the black community are afraid that such violence will return with a vengeance unless the adults themselves seize control of their neighborhoods.
Late last month, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N.A.A.C.P.) and a group of black ministers and politicians staged a mock funeral through the streets to dramatize gang terror. A minister publicly offered ''asylum'' to gang members wanting out. Neighborhood and church organizations are forming.
FIGHTING THE GANG PROBLEM HAS become a crusade for Charles Norman. A 45-year-old black man with graying muttonchop sideburns, Norman is regional director of Community Youth Gang Services in the south-central area. He recalls that during the 1965 Watts riots, his boss gave him time off to protect his family and home, but none of his colleagues offered to go along.
''When it comes right down to it, you have to take care of your own community - that was the message to me,'' he says. He subsequently quit his job as a computer programmer and started a youth job-training program called People Who Care. Last summer, he was appointed regional director of the gang-service agency.
''We've got to tell these bangers we are not going to let you kill and intimidate people and walk away from it,'' he says. ''We have to show that we are not afraid of the gangs. We are going to be on the corners where they are. If they are going to shoot us down, let them take their shot. We are not afraid of them.''
The words are as brave as the task is daunting. With about 600 gangs, or ''sets,'' in the area, L.A. County is the gang capital of the nation. Most of the gangs are black or Hispanic, but there are Asian, Samoan and white ones as well. Their names read like something out of ''A Clockwork Orange'': the Five Deuce Hoover Crips, the Black Mafia Crip Dogs, the Avenue Piru Bloods, Los Pocos Locos, Vario Ferocious Crowd.
There are about 70,000 gang members, including the ''wannabes'' and ''gonnabes,'' the prepubescent boys awaiting initiation, which sometimes requires a drive-by murder. During the first four months of this year, there were 109 gang-related killings in the county, many of the victims innocent bystanders.
By far the most violent are the black gangs, whose 25,000 or so members are often armed with automatic weapons. According to the local law-enforcement officials, these gangs have become the main distributors of crack throughout the Western United States. With a few exceptions, they belong to one of two umbrella groups, Crips or Bloods, which are themselves deadly rivals. Crip sets, which often war with each other as well, wear blue; Bloods wear red.
The rivalry is carried to extraordinary lengths. A Blood will not ask for a cigarette because the word begins with a ''C,'' as in Crip; ''bigarette'' is preferred. Crips refer to Bloods as ''slobs.'' Parents carefully dress their children in brown, yellow or other ''neutral'' colors, and avoid buying British Knights brand sneakers because the initials have come to mean ''Blood Killer'' - a sign of disrespect in a Blood 'hood.
Hispanic sets are more old-fashioned, and tend to fight over turf rather than a cut of the cocaine trade. Less violent than their black counterparts, they pose more of a danger to one another than to their neighborhoods.
This is no romantic update of ''West Side Story.'' In Los Angeles, the West Side means white affluence. Just a few miles to the south and east, but a world away, are the black and Hispanic ghettos. Some of the county towns - all heavily black and Hispanic - are among the poorest in the country, with per capita incomes, according to the latest figures, of about $5,500, which is about a third of the state average. The desperate poverty and the newly lucrative trade in crack have combined to give the gangs extraordinary power. Parents sometimes depend on their teen-age sons, who may make several thousand dollars a week, to pay the rent.
KEN WHEELER, A SUPERVISOR WITH THE gang-mediating agency, drives down south-central's Western Avenue with his partner, Jerry Anthony. Both are black, street-smart and have never been gang members. Anthony, 36, is soft-spoken and reserved. A wiry, intense man of 29, Wheeler grew up on the impoverished East Side. He worked as a youth counselor before joining the agency in 1982.
A young black man zooms by in a white Porsche Carrera convertible with a car phone - sure signs of a drug dealer. ''That's 800 rocks,'' Wheeler observes wryly. Across the street another youth parks his red Mercedes-Benz.
The team's mission today is to try to cool the tensions that caused the Good Friday shooting the night before. Rumor has it that the Five Deuce Hoover Crips may have been responsible. (Five Deuce stands for 52d Street, meaning that the gang's turf centers on 52d and Hoover Street.) Wheeler spots a Five Deuce member he knows, Big Bam, a tall young man, who is carrying a portable phone. He has just been released from jail. They exchange pleasantries and Wheeler advises: ''I'm telling you, Five Deuces, be cool.''
Big Bam is cryptic about the gang's putative involvement, implying that the shooting may have been done by younger renegade members. ''If six of your homeboys get killed, there's a lot of pressure,'' he says. ''These damn Crippens. Think they goin' to listen to you? Them niggers not goin' to listen to you.''
When the kids do listen to Wheeler, he brings a sobering message. ''We tell them about the horror of being in a gang, which gang members won't tell them,'' he says. ''About the shootings, the killing . . . so they know there's more to it than just drinking and partying with the homeboys.''
In their off-white compacts with circular insignia, Wheeler and the other gang workers are familiar sights at the gang hot spots, although their reception ranges from warm to frigid. Five nights a week, Tuesday through Saturday, until midnight or 1 A.M., they roam wide areas of Los Angeles looking for trouble. For this hazardous duty, they are paid between $1,350 and $2,000 a month.
The idea of using former bangers to mediate between gangs began in Philadelphia with the Crisis Intervention Network; similar efforts have been mounted in Chicago, Miami and Atlanta. The seven-year-old L.A. agency, which is independent of any law-enforcement group, has an annual budget of $2 million. Its executive director is Steven D. Valdivia, 39, who has worked with gangs in the tough, largely Mexican-American barrio on the East Side.
The agency's workers are usually hired at the recommendation of community leaders, neighborhood centers, the district attorney's office or politicians. They are trained mostly by its veterans, with probation officers, youth authorities and the district attorney's office providing advice. When making gang contacts, they are taught to recognize those amenable to intervention -for example, younger people who may not be fully committed to gang life, or those who have been victims of shootings or knifings, or had close relatives and friends killed.
But the most difficult part of the job is knowing when nothing can be done, when the knives and guns flash and the radio crackles with ''1031,'' the code for a shooting. Although gang workers purposely maintain a distance from the police to preserve credibility with the gangs, ''when there is no way of talking it out,'' says Valdivia, ''they must know when to call Code Blue [ the cops ] to save lives.''
There is debate about the wisdom of using former gang members. They win a measure of praise from Lieut. Bob Ruchhoft, a gang specialist with the L.A. Police Department. ''They do a lot of good,'' he says. ''There's a real need on the streets for the kind of intervention they provide. You cannot hire people born and raised in the middle class to go into these neighborhoods.'' He says there have been only a few minor confrontations between the police and gang workers.
Nate Holden, however, the black city councilman who represents central L.A., doubts former convicts can be trusted to work with gangs. (Several years ago, some of the agency workers were arrested on drug and other offenses, but there have been no incidents since.) ''How are you going to put some former gang members out there to solve a problem the police cannot?'' he asks. ''All I know is we have more gangs, more violence and we are spending more money.''
CLEARLY THE GANG-service agency has more success with Hispanic gangs than with black ones. Just west of south-central, on the fringes of L.A. International Airport, the neighborhood becomes mostly Mexican-American. Hispanic gangs - Lennox 13, South Los, Los Compadres -reign here.
It is terrain that 28-year-old Marianne Diaz knows like the back of her tattooed fingers. She originally joined Los Compadres, she says, ''out of my need to control something,'' as well as for the ''family atmosphere.'' But her involvement led to a three-year prison term for attempted murder of a man in a rival gang who had offended her.
In jail she found no help from her gang, and Ken Bell, a county deputy sheriff who knew her from her street days, helped her see the dead end into which she was heading. ''I just grew up,'' she says. Now the stocky, assertive woman is a gang worker, ''trying to do the same thing he did for me.'' Her mission, she says, is to let bangers know ''they are making enemies of the community, that they will be treated like street terrorists by the police.''
This Saturday night she is checking out her target area with her partner, Vincent Parton. Parton is a hip 21-year-old who was never a gang member but who knew them well when he was part of a neighborhood break-dancing club.
The two drive down an alley littered with old tires and discarded furniture where, with the help of sympathetic South Los gang members, they have been conducting an anti-graffiti campaign. Several walls have been painted clean; on one, a neighborhood artist has painted a mural of the Virgin Mary. No new graffiti have appeared, and no one, they say, deals drugs before the mural.
''When we work with Hispanic gangs,'' says Ms. Diaz, ''we get a lot of mileage out of their religious upbringing, their ancestry, their roots.''
The team's first order of business is defusing a potential conflict that arose the night before. Some youths stole a set of tools from a car belonging to some nearby gang members, who are threatening mayhem if the tools are not returned. So this evening Ms. Diaz and Parton are scouring the neighborhood in their Dodge Colt, looking for clues.
They check a liquor store. Parton wheels the car up a driveway. A youth furtively comes out the back door, runs into the garage and hands him a white plastic bag full of tools. The team drives off to find the aggrieved party, and Parton hands the tools over to an intimidating-looking man with tattoos on his thick neck who is just out of prison for ''shanking [ knifing ] a dude,'' in Ms. Diaz's words.
''Here're your tools - so leave the kids alone there now, O.K.?'' Parton says. Comes the reply, ''Yeah, O.K. Thanks.'' The pair then drives back to the youngsters who took the tools and assures them and their grateful parents that the issue is settled.
A small victory. A moment later, the car radio crackles with a report of a gang confrontation nearby. The pair screeches off to the Taco Bell restaurant at the corner of Hawthorne and Lennox Boulevards, where a banger in a black sweatshirt and carrying a stick is watching warily.
A carload of youths in a maroon Capri from Tepa, a nearby rival gang, has tried to jump a member of the Lennox gang. The warm night air is suddenly charged as carloads of Lennox gang members gather in the parking lot of a Top Valu supermarket. Ms. Diaz and Parton, both of whom grew up in the neighborhood, know the kids well. They ask them to calm down, to ''kick back'' and wait.
The team drives down to where the Tepas are gathering. Sticks and bats can be seen in the darkness. A boy comes to the car to talk.
Parton: Hey, you guys, Lennox is going to be rollin' by here. . . .
Ms. Diaz: You with your back to the street, homeboy. They goin' to be lookin' for this car, some burgundy car.
Boy: If they want to find me, they know where I'm at.
Ms. Diaz: I'm tellin' you to be afraid of them. There are some girls here. You better tell them to move down the street. . . . We are goin' back over there to try to keep them there. Don't get lazy or drunk and not know what you're doin'. I know you don't think it's serious, but if one of your friends gets killed tonight, you will. Boy: It's serious, I know. Ms. Diaz: We're goin' to keep them in their 'hood, you just stay in yours for a while. Boy: All right. The team spends the next hour shuttling between the two gangs, and ultimately the tensions evaporate. By this time, about two dozen of the Lennox homeboys have gathered in a cul-de-sac that is their bastion.
For all the harm gangs do, they nonetheless serve a certain social function, providing a sense of both belonging and protection for their members. ''This is our own little family,'' says Sneaky, 19, a short, rather charming youth, neatly dressed in a white sport shirt under a black pullover. He is a high-school dropout who has served time for assault and battery. ''I love these guys with all my heart. If one of the homeboys gets hurt, we have to protect who we love.''
Ms. Diaz and Parton appear to be trusted by the Lennox youths. ''If I shot somebody, I can tell them, and they would not tell,'' says Oscar, 16, still dressed in the white shirt and tie from the supermarket job that Ms. Diaz helped him get. Although this statement reflects Oscar's faith in the gang workers, it lies at the heart of their toughest dilemma: they must constantly grapple with their legal responsibility to report a crime and their need occasionally to look the other way in order to maintain their credibility with the gangs.
The team has used the trust it has built to steer some of the bangers into jobs and drug-rehabilitation programs. Sneaky, for one, says he has had enough of the gang life and is looking for work. Oscar wants to be a policeman.
GIVEN THE TEAMS' FORMIDABLE task, whatever successes come their way are savored. Freddie Brooks, a powerful-looking man with a goatee, and a former banger, recalls attending a rap-music concert where a youth was wearing a red jacket - in Crip territory. ''We got word they were going to get him before the show was over.'' He took the boy home quickly. Probably the gang-service workers' greatest success was the peace treaty at Roy Campanella Park two years ago. The county park in Compton, a predominantly black town adjacent to south-central L.A., was the object of a bitter feud between two gangs, the Terrace Town Hustlers, who lived in the apartment project by that name, and the Roy Campanella Park Boys, who lived in the homes on the other side of the park. There had been several shootings, stabbings and beatings, and one death, based in part on the fact that the Hustlers' families were renters and the Boys' were owners.
Wheeler led four weeks of stormy negotiations, and finally a formal peace treaty was signed by representatives of the gangs, their parents, the park police and the Parks and Recreation Department. The treaty held, but the Hustlers became angry at perceived slights by the park workers and last year firebombed the buildings. Now the park is closed, its swimming pool locked as the hot summer months approach.
Such short-lived successes aside, the workers know they face almost insurmountable odds against desperate poverty. ''Everybody wants to drive a Benz, to wear gold,'' says Mike Redmond, a tall muscular man of 31 who was himself a founder of the Compton Crips 14 years ago. ''If they are selling drugs, they are bringing gold to their mothers. So she's fascinated, not knowing the consequences for herself and her sons. You can make $2,000 a hit. But that's no money, considering what you are risking to get this money.''
Even so, a new generation is growing into this ethic of quick riches and quick death.
Not far from the Campanella Park is the Ujima public housing project. Ujima is a picture of desolation, its three-story apartments surrounded by scruffy unkempt lawns. This is a Blood 'hood. Youngsters in red shorts, red caps, red pants run the project, many supporting their drug-addicted parents. A youth lounges on the grass; tucked into his bright red pants is a beeper. It is only five miles from Ujima to the sumptuous estates of Beverly Hills, home of movie stars.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/22/magazine/in-the-middle-of-la-s-gang-wars.html
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