The making of a gang member

THE crime rate in Los Angeles and the nation as a whole continues to creep downward, but alarm about gang-related crime is on the rise again: During L.A.’s spring mayoral campaign, accusations flew about which candidate would be “soft” on gangs. In recent months, publications such as Newsweek magazine and the Washington Post have run articles warning of “blood-spattered urban streets” and a “new wave of gang brutality.” In May, a so-called gangbusters bill that would allow prosecutors to transfer 16- and 17-year-old gang members to adult court for a wide range of charges without judicial review and would impose a list of new, harsh mandatory minimum sentences was fast-tracked through the U.S. House. It will likely hit the Senate floor this fall -- if a competing bill cosponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) doesn’t get there first.

Certainly, it’s essential to more effectively address the gang violence that continues to cause unbearable sorrow in communities all over America. Yet good, functional solutions rarely emerge from headline-driven public emotion. It also might help to remember that although there were 463 gang murders last year in Los Angeles County, the number is significantly lower than during the so-called decade of death of the late 1980s to mid-1990s when, in 1992 alone, 803 such killings turned certain streets into free-fire zones.

In the hardest-hit neighborhoods, funerals became so frequent that the local mortician’s face was as weirdly familiar as that of a favorite uncle.

The trauma of those deadly years produced a number of books by academics and journalists trying to understand what caused the violence and what might best be done in terms of public policy to lessen it. But what was always missing from the analytical mix was an insightful narrative written from the inside.

Although no major books have yet come out of East L.A.’s Latino street gangs active during that period, the African American gangs of South L.A. have produced two books of significance. “Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member,” by Sanyika Shakur, a.k.a. Monster Kody Scott, in 1993 and now “Inside the Crips: Life Inside L.A.’s Most Notorious Gang,” by 39-year-old Colton Simpson.

Shakur used prose of diamond-hard precision to blast open the doors to the most brutal aspects of gang life, daring the reader to look inside. Yet the narrative was short on self-reflection, thus reinforcing the very stereotypes it wanted to dispatch. Simpson also documents urban warfare with unflinching intensity, but the reader must provide much of the analysis. Nevertheless, “Inside the Crips” has several important strengths that “Monster” lacks. For one thing, Simpson shows us exactly how and why a bright, personable kid comes to join a gang and why that same kid would choose to stay despite the lethal risks, the constant soul-battering violence and the inevitable incarcerations.

The story begins as Simpson’s father, a pro baseball player for the old Los Angeles Angels, effectively abandons young Colton and his two brothers to their unbalanced mother, a nurse, who beats the boys with a plastic baseball bat and anything else that comes to hand during her frequent drunken rages. When Colton is 8, his mother rousts him and his year-older brother, Damon, out of bed and -- leaving their baby brother behind -- drives the two pajama-clad kids to another part of the city where, incredibly, she leaves them, blindfolded, by the side of the road. The boys are taken in by their kindly maternal grandmother who, while caring, seems able to do little more than pray, plead and ultimately turn a blind eye when her traumatized grandson takes to the street. At age 9, Simpson meets “Smiley,” a muscular and charismatic 14-year-old homeboy who will eventually initiate him into gang life. Simpson’s description of the encounter is so drenched with loneliness and father-longing that it suggests a religious conversion: “... and then he smiles and it’s as if the light, the sun behind him, fills me, fills each and every one of us standing there before him.... ‘Don’t worry. I’ma toughen you up, though. Make you hardcore.’ ” From then on, Smiley becomes the yearned-for big brother-dad figure charged with bringing order and warmth to the younger boy’s chaotic world.

One of the most harrowing scenes takes place a year later, when Simpson officially joins the Rollin’ 30s Harlem Crips. During the day, Simpson is a child, thrilled to have hit a home run in a Little League game. Late that night, however, the skinny boy sneaks out to be “courted in” to the Crip set by Smiley and other teenage gangsters. The initiation consists of a storm of punches and kicks administered by the older kids. But once he has withstood enough bruising to prove himself, the gang members each hug Simpson tenderly. “You in, cuz,” they tell him. “One of us, Li’l Cee.”

Then they all get their guns. It seems that the day before, some “enemy” gang members -- Bloods -- shot at one of the Crips, and retaliation is considered mandatory. Simpson is allowed to go along for the payback and is supplied with a .38 for the occasion. “If Smiley can do it, I can,” he tells himself when they locate their quarry, and Simpson empties his gun with abandon. “It’s easy. Like playing with Damon.” Tragically, he’s a natural. Two of his bullets connect, and the 10-year-old watches with detached awe as blood spreads across two now-quieting teenage bodies..

Viewed through the lens of the evening news, such ghastly incidents suggest bands of junior psychopaths who should be locked up for as long as possible. But Simpson’s narrative lays down enough emotional bread crumbs to make the route from Little League to body bags depressingly easy to map. The morning after the shootings, the boy is shattered by what has occurred, and one hopes for a wise adult to pull him back from further ruination. None appears. In his mind, a Rubicon has been crossed. “I can’t take back what I’ve done,” Simpson writes. “It’s not forgivable.” Neither will he confess his terrible feelings of guilt to anyone. “To do so will shame me.” The feeling of guilt passes, he writes with disconcerting plainness. “It’s like being a virgin.”

Years of easy death and serial incarceration follow, as Simpson makes us watch “my grandma’s church-going grandson” becoming subsumed by the rising ghetto superstar Li’l Cee Loc (Loc for “Loco”). It is an unsettling portrait, akin to watching a man who is drowning at sea bob occasionally to the surface before finally going under.

The most unexpectedly compelling and original sections of the book concern Simpson’s time in various California prisons. In the last decade, the various uber gang structures inside the state’s correctional institutions -- the eme (Mexican Mafia), Nuestra Familia, CCO (Consolidated Crip Organization) and the AB (Aryan Brotherhood) -- have strengthened until they are essentially captive criminal nations.

Simpson gives us fresh, detailed snapshots of this highly disciplined supergang existence, where survival involves keeping abreast of group politics so intricate they resemble high-court intrigue, and shot-callers attempt to imbue the organization with higher meaning by cobbling together a history cum mythology that includes a pantheon of heroes, special days and an elaborate secret language that is rewritten the minute it can be understood by rival groups or the guards.

Because California’s enormous prison system barely avoided federal receivership last year (it’s healthcare system was taken over by the government this summer for “incompetence and outright depravity,” in the words of a U.S. District Court judge), it is instructive to read Simpson’s portrayal of life “inside,” where there is a dearth of even cosmetic attempts at prisoner rehabilitation. Instead, the system appears to cultivate the basest themes in everyone’s nature as prison modules are repeatedly on lockdown and correctional officers treat prisoners with a dehumanized viciousness, more likely to create viciousness, in turn, than cure it.

Simpson details instances of guards deliberately promoting dissension between ethnic groups, setting up gladiator fights among rivals and, in one horrific case, sadistically refusing Simpson’s cellmate his daily asthma inhaler until the man lies on his cell floor strangling and subsequently dies (episodes made more credible by the fact that similar incidents have been well-documented in such prisons as Corcoran and Pelican Bay).

In light of California’s prisoner recidivism rates, which are among the the highest in the nation, Simpson’s accounts of his assorted releases and re-incarcerations are also valuable to evaluate. Although he begins parole with the best of intentions, prison has given him zero preparation for life on the outside, and few employers seem eager to hire a felon -- a situation exacerbated by the fact that he’s shot at within 30 minutes of his homecoming in 1985. When Simpson is arrested six months later, he sounds almost relieved. “Jail’s my second home.... “ he writes. “Actually the handcuffs don’t bother me.... Extending my arms early in the morning has become second nature.”

It’s only after a 12 1/2 -year stint in lockup that Simpson finally marshals the maturity to leave gang life behind -- yet it’s done despite a correctional system that is theoretically designed to better him. The change includes a string of dark nights of the soul in which Simpson comes to terms with the beginnings of self-responsibility fueled by a lacerating sense of remorse. Yet he credits the bulk of his transformation to an unlikely series of mentors whom he met while he was incarcerated: a prison lieutenant who treated him “like a human being,” Black Panther lifer Ruchell Magee and famously wrongly convicted inmate Geronimo Pratt. “The institution simply taught me carnage,” Simpson writes, “and reinforced the violence taught by [stepfather] Pete, by Smiley, by the Bloods. Instead I learned what I needed from the rare man able to rise above the hellhole circumstances.”

Or, to put it another way, although the child Colton had no good dad to rescue him, perhaps the adult Colton Simpson was finally able to fashion the right composite of fathers to rescue himself.

Now, however, comes another twist, post-publication: Since his parole in 1998, other than a two-year period in jail fighting an attempted murder charge, Simpson appears to have tried to lead a clean life, working mostly for old friend rapper-actor Ice-T. Soon, however, Simpson will begin trial on charges stemming from the 2003 robbery of a Robinsons-May jewelry department in Temecula. If convicted, he faces a possible life sentence under California’s three strikes law. Simpson has pleaded not guilty. This month, Riverside County Superior Court Judge Mark A. Cope ruled that portions of “Inside the Crips” that depict robberies committed by the author more than 20 years ago would be admitted into trial as evidence against him. *