L.A. Gangs: Rock and a Hard Place

April 14, 1985, was a summer-like day in South-Central Los Angeles but husky Alonzo Botswen (a pseudonym to protect confidential legal records) kept wearing the spiffy blue leather jacket that identified him with the Crips gangs. Concealed was the beeper-pager, standard equipment for the drug dealer, making telephone taps all but obsolete; when someone calls a dealer, the beeper sounds, and the dealer goes to a public phone to contact caller. Inside his waistband, Botswen had another item: a 9-millimeter Browning automatic, obtained from a “homeboy,” an acquaintance from the old neighborhood or gang.

A 22-year-old black, Botswen typified the widespread association between broken families, poverty, gangs, drugs and violence. His parents, who had 10 children, were divorced. Like tens of thousands of kids in similar circumstances his introduction to drugs came in grammar school--sniffing glue and drinking alcohol. Semiliterate, he was the classic high school dropout who gravitates to the streets and fathers children he cannot support. By the time he was 20 he had a baby by one girlfriend and a second child on the way by another.

His encounters with the law began when he was nine years old and resulted in a variety of charges ranging from purse snatching and possession of PCP to burglary and armed robbery. Repeatedly placed on probation after a few months in jail, he was able to confuse the legal system by using a variety of aliases; it took officers a number of years to discover that Alonzo Botswen, Swen Alonso and Lon Bots were the same person. (Until the recent computerizing of fingerprints in Los Angeles, it was easy to get away with this kind of deception; even today, the 48-hour time limitation on booking sometimes enables suspects to obtain release before discovery.)

Sentenced to two years in state prison for robbery in June, 1984, Botswen was paroled early in December of the same year although already on probation under one of his aliases. The Los Angeles County probation officer who discovered that fact wrote to a fellow officer: “Despite problems of ‘dual supervision,’ the probationer needs more supervision. With his miserable prior criminal record, he won’t be with you long before he does another serious felony.”

But since each probation officer has a case load of about 500 adults or 350 juveniles, he has only the most perfunctory idea of what his charges are doing. Soon, Botswen was working for a cocaine dealer operating out of a yellow rock house with barred windows on West 79th Street. One day he was given $3,000 worth of cocaine to deliver but instead went into business for himself. This did not sit well with the dealer, who insistently buzzed him on the beeper.

On April 14, Botswen decided to talk things out. The dealer was waiting for him at the rock house, just inside the porch door. A few feet away, cradling a shotgun, was a guard, 17-year-old “Goldfinger.” According to Botswen, the dealer asked him if he had the $3,000. When Botswen said he didn’t, the dealer became belligerent and then said, “Shoot him!”

Goldfinger leveled the shotgun as Botswen pulled the Browning automatic out of his waistband. They fired point-blank at each other. Goldfinger, hit in the abdomen, doubled over, still clutching the shotgun. Botswen, his shoulder shattered, dropped the automatic and took off over the fence. The dealer also fled, leaving Goldfinger dying in front of the house. Witnessing the scene, “Shorty,” a scraggly bearded street person, wrenched the shotgun from the dying Goldfinger’s grasp and scooped up the Browning, which he later sold--one of the ways that guns enter floating urban arsenals.

Botswen survived after being treated at Watts’ Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital, which handles more gunshot wounds than any other hospital in the United States. Although the killing of Goldfinger was deemed self-defense, Botswen was returned to prison as a parole violator.

Though details may vary, the records of case after case reveal a pattern of introduction to violence, death and drugs at an early age. Drugs have been part of the American poverty scene ever since the 19th Century, when opium and morphine were ingredients of patent medicines used to dope up children while their mothers worked in sweatshops. Different drugs--marijuana, LSD, PCP, cocaine--come and go but conditions remain the same.

What has changed in the last half- dozen years is not the arrival of a new drug but a new form of an old one, a drug that, in the terms of pushers and users, was conceived by genius.

Sometime during the early 1980s rock cocaine was formulated for the first time in South-Central Los Angeles; two or three years passed before it appeared under a different name, crack, on the East Coast. A crystallized mixture of cocaine, lactose and water, it needs no elaborate equipment nor particular intelligence to concoct. Unlike cocaine in powder form, it is easy to handle and comes in fairly standardized quantity and quality; a “rock” is one gram, current street price $80 to $100. A “quarter rock,” probably the amount sold most often, is a quarter-gram, for $20 to $25.

While cocaine powder is sniffed, rock is lit and inhaled. The vapor reaches the brain more quickly and completely, to produce an immediate, intense high. A dealer can buy small quantities of cocaine, “rock it up” with the other ingredients, and make a substantial profit. Even as the convenience and effect of the drug is enhanced, the number of middlemen and pushers is multiplied. The profit margin in one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of cocaine, from wholesale price to retail as rock, ranges from $100,000 to $200,000.

Detection and prosecution is difficult. If there is danger of discovery, a rock can be crumbled into dust or swallowed without harmful effect. Cocaine produces no tell-tale odor or the behavioral changes of marijuana, PCP or alcohol; a person in the next office can light up, go on a 10-minute high and nobody will know. Cocaine is addictive; a user may develop psychological dependency after a single experience.

On the streets, rock houses, vulnerable to police raids, have been largely replaced by fleet-footed peddlers, often operating in teams of three. To the untrained eye, the loiterers at a corner mean nothing, but experienced narcotics investigators immediately recognize the pattern. A car approaches and slows down. One of the young loiterers saunters up for a brief conversation. Another youth disappears, goes to the stash, and returns with a rock. Money changes hands imperceptibly and is taken by a third youth. The operation creates great difficulty for narcotics detectives, both in trying to make a case and in apprehending anyone with enough cocaine to charge him with possession for sale rather than for personal use. Since gang members dominate many streets in the black community, they have long been a significant factor in neighborhood crime. Gangs naturally now ply the retail rock trade. One member of the Rolling 30s Crip gang, named Wayout, became notorious for acquiring a 1984 BMW, a Corvette, a 1986 Mercedes and a 1986 Rolls Royce--along with a Dun and Bradstreet credit rating. But the run-of-the-mill pusher faces stiff competition and hustles to put a few hundred dollars in his pocket.

What is striking about the drug traffic is the way it has become part of the everyday, pedestrian scene. On a street dominated by the graffiti of the Bloodstone Villains, kids are playing while a convertible stops to make a buy. Boys shinny up a telephone pole’s guy wires. An ice cream vendor jingles down the street. A 13-year-old cruises by on a bicycle--but he is a lookout. Another car stops to make a buy. Ten minutes pass. The pushers get restless. A pair of them hold a footrace to the corner.

“There’s enough rock out there to pave the streets,” says Bob Schirn, who heads the major narcotics unit in the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office. Some police divisions have 20 and more “hot spots.” An intensive weekend sweep may result in more than 1,100 arrests. In Los Angeles County, narcotics violations by gang members quintupled during the last five years even though other gang crimes declined. In 1982 Los Angeles police seized 359 pounds of cocaine; in 1986, 13,184 pounds. During the same period, the wholesale price dropped from $50,000 per kilogram to about $15,000, evidence that no matter how much is seized, a greater amount pours in.

The risks are relatively light: until recently, the maximum prison sentence for cocaine sale in California was five years; today it is 10. Bail is easy to make--only $100 cash for possession of narcotics, $500 for sale--but even so, the county jail has too little capacity. The community cry to get tough on drugs becomes an ironic echo given the lack of facilities and huge costs of incarceration. In cases not involving violence, authorities often find ways to release inmates.

Colombia, once a prime source of marijuana, is now the principal source of cocaine; it is grown there and is transshipped there from other Andean countries. Colombia is less than 1,000 air miles from Miami; light planes can make the hop from any of many remote mountain air fields to Florida without refueling.

Despite increasing confiscations, the volume continues to swell. An estimated 90% of the people involved in the wholesale trade are Colombians. Networks involving all classes, including some long-time residents of the United States, have created a spider web of smuggling across the Caribbean.

A typical wholesale organization was the one headed by Gairo Santa Mario, reputedly the owner of a multimillion-dollar ranch in Colombia plus vast holdings in Miami. Among the 21 persons arrested when Los Angeles police seized 619 pounds of Santa Mario’s cocaine were a Miami flight dispatcher, an architect, a bacteriologist, a clothing salesman, a carpet cleaner, a mechanic, an appliance repairman, a welder and a doorman, plus students and laborers, nearly all of Colombian birth or extraction. Santa Mario flew the cocaine from Colombia to Mexico and from there it was transported through Arizona to California via trailer truck.

The wholesaler uses middlemen, who may be small businessmen or other respected members of the middle class; they are an elusive target for the police. In the Santa Mario case, an auto repair business in Compton and an electrical shop in Huntington Park were owned by three of the arrestees.

Generally, Colombian wholesalers rent homes in middle-class areas as bases of operation and “stash houses,” where they store the cocaine. Beepers are used for communication. Vehicles are usually rented for transportation. Contacts meet in restaurant or market parking lots. There, buyer and seller exchange vehicles. The seller drives back, via a circuitous route to make certain he is not being tailed, to the stash house, where he loads up in the garage. He then meets the buyer, who meanwhile has placed money in the seller’s car, at another location. Cars are switched again. No transaction is conducted in the open. In almost all instances big drug busts depend on an informer, followed by days and weeks of police surveillance.

Usually the wholesaler, responsible to a Colombian umbrella organization, keeps meticulous records. Stash houses may hold hundreds of thousands of dollars. Despite those vast sums, Colombians are almost invariably unarmed, risking being ripped off rather than face more serious weapons’ charges if arrested. Although the police played up the seizure of nine handguns, a rifle and a shotgun in the Santa Mario case, these were in fact the private collection of one of the lesser figures and not integral to the case. So far the violence associated with the drug trade in Colombia and Miami has manifested itself minimally at the wholesale level in Los Angeles.

The perspective of the Colombians was expressed by a well-educated cattle rancher and fish merchant, Oscar Carbajal, arrested in another multimillion-dollar wholesale case. Carbajal, arguing along the lines of “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” regarded his activities as anything but criminal.

“Isn’t perhaps alcohol equally or more dangerous . . . ?” Carbajal wrote the judge sitting in the case on Dec. 3, 1986. “On the other hand, your honor, if we speak of tobacco--how many people in the world would die of cancer and other complications caused by consumption of tobacco and, nevertheless, no one is charged with the responsibility for those deaths or, better yet, we might speak of the addiction to tranquilizers sold in pharmacies . . . .

“We should also speak of weapons that can so easily be purchased in this country . . . .

“I make all of these observations . . . with the intent of showing that alcohol isn’t dangerous, tobacco isn’t dangerous, pharmaceutical drugs aren’t dangerous, firearms aren’t dangerous and cocaine isn’t dangerous . . . . They are only dangerous when man . . . of his own volition misuses them . . . . “

This is, of course, specious: “Why is my poison worse than your poison?” But it should not be easily dismissed. All mind- and behavior-altering substances are damaging, and if we permit some, we should not be surprised when laws against others are disobeyed.

What we are faced with is a substance that has millions of users. A substantial portion of them, infinitely more than were ever addicted to heroin, are psychologically hooked, but rationalize that they can handle their addiction. Whether user or dealer, they argue like Carbajal that their behavior is not anti-social. For dropouts and gang members, the cocaine trade has become a road to material wealth otherwise unattainable. If we are to convince them that they are wrong, we must offer realistic alternatives--ways to attain the opportunities that middle-class Americans take for granted. “Just say no” won’t work on the streets, not when it goes against the grain of everyday experience.