Gang Counselors Find Williams Was Mostly Forgotten

Eight hours after gang leader Stanley Tookie Williams was executed, Rock Johnson walked the streets and parks of Compton, as he does almost every day, trying to persuade budding gangsters to turn away from crime. Only twice did anyone mention Williams, the co-founder of the Crips street gang.

For all the international attention paid to the execution of Williams -- whose failed bid for clemency hinged on his appeal to young, prospective gang members -- counselors making their rounds Tuesday found his presumed audience unmoved by the death of the most famous inmate on death row.

“Tookie was locked up for 26 years. The hard-core gangbangers, they’re 18, 19 years old. All they know is the name, the image on TV,” said Chico Brown, an ex-convict and former gang member who works to defuse gang tensions. “His death is nothing to the guys on the street.

“Crips and Bloods die every day.... They’ve got people from their neighborhood who died just yesterday. They’re more attached to them than they are to Tookie.”

Tuesday’s reaction was a far cry from rumors of violence, and evidence that whatever power and notoriety Williams achieved on the streets faded during the nearly three decades he spent in prison.

“He had a reputation for being a tough guy,” said Wes McBride, president of the California Gang Investigators Assn. “But after he went down for the murders, he was quickly forgotten.”

During his youth, Williams was known on the streets as a thug and bully. A bodybuilder with an imposing physique, he was sentenced to death in 1981 for killing four people in robberies committed while he was high on PCP.

In prison, a long stint in solitary confinement led him on a path of self-improvement, and he became an anti-gang crusader who wrote a series of children’s books warning youngsters away from violence. The books, aimed at second- and third-graders, are used in schools in Los Angeles and across the country. But until Williams was lionized in a popular movie, “Redemption,” starring Jamie Foxx, he was virtually unknown outside his Compton neighborhood and a small circle of veteran gang members and law enforcement officers.

Now, gang counselors fear his execution may have made him a martyr. Their job is to make him an object lesson, not a hero.

Harold Hartfield -- an ex-convict and former Crip who now works with the Amer-I-Can anti-gang program -- has a stock and simple answer when children ask who Tookie Williams was: “He’s a convicted gang member who was sent to death row and executed.” Nothing there to emulate.

“If anything, I think Tookie’s death will be a deterrent,” said Robert McNeill III, an anti-gang counselor at Horace Mann Middle School in South Los Angeles. McNeill works with the L.A. Bridges Program, which tries to steer at-risk youths away from violence.

“We talked about it a lot this week,” McNeill said. “The kids’ attitude was mostly ‘You do the crime, you do the time.’ They’re not feeling sorry for Tookie. What they’re mostly worried about is retaliation,” by gangbangers trying to avenge Williams’ death by shooting up their neighborhood.

In fact, it is the gang counselors of Williams’ generation -- many of them ex-convicts -- who seem hardest hit by Williams’ death. They too have reversed their course, and now wonder if the execution signals that society places little value on redemption.

“I’ve been through what he did, having to prove myself over and over again,” Brown said. “It seems you’re always judged by the worst thing you’ve done. Even when you change, people say: ‘You’re just trying to get out of jail’ or ‘You just want to get off parole.’ You change, but you can’t get people to recognize it.”

Gang workers hope the celebrities who championed Williams will channel their efforts to save other young men from his fate. “If you believed in this man, how about helping organizations doing the hard work in the trenches every day,” said Johnson, of Amer-I-Can. “Just the other day, a 17-year-old got killed [in a gang shooting]. Where was everybody at?”