He Walks the Mean Side of the Street to Help a Few

“This is 74 Hoovers’ neighborhood,” Kenneth Wheeler said as he drove his gray compact down Hoover Street across 73rd Street on Los Angeles’ Southside, past the cluttered houses and apartment buildings coated with black spray-painted graffiti.

“The 74 Hoovers go down to 75th Street,” he said. “After they stop, the Eight-Tray Hoovers pick up. Then the 92nd Hoovers pick up, and then the 94th Hoovers--they go all the way down to 107th.”

The maps that guide Wheeler aren’t written down. They transcend police divisions. They transcend logic. They are the boundaries carved out over the years by street gangs. They have been defended and deified at a tremendous cost: Roughly 2,000 people have died in gang-related attacks in Los Angeles County in this decade. Police estimate that fully half of the victims were not gang members. Hundreds were simply in the wrong place when the bullets began to fly.

Estimated 450 Gangs

Wheeler, 28, is a night field supervisor for Community Youth Gang Services, a county program that sends two dozen teams of street workers into gang-plagued neighborhoods in a long-odds propaganda campaign to persuade some of the county’s 50,000 gang members to break off their affiliations with an estimated 450 gangs.

The street workers, many of whom are former gang members or grew up surrounded by gang violence, try to talk kids out of the loose-knit but tantalizing atmosphere of gangs--the hanging out, the parties, the romantic kill-or-be-killed pose of street warrior.

They hand out advice and, less frequently, a job. They cruise the hot spots--the liquor stores, the parks, the alleys--looking for knots of gang members who might be merely drinking and strutting, or getting ready for trouble, or possibly the potential victims of a rival gang’s invasion, a drive-by shooting, the bloody tradition of cruising into enemy territory and randomly firing a gun with little concern about precisely who gets hit.

A Hellish Syndrome

These patterns eat at Wheeler, who grew up in an Eastside housing project, watched a teen-age friend die in a gang attack and now makes $1,600 a month for spending five nights a week in Los Angeles’ most dangerous streets trying to conquer a hellish syndrome with words.

He is a calm man whose voice grows agitated when he begins talking about how the children and young adults of the Southside’s gangs, despite their bravado, have no idea what they are fighting and dying for.

“Take the Rolling 60s Crips and the 83rd Street Crips,” he said. “Those gangs have been fighting for at least 15 years now. The 83rd Street Crips lost at least 12 members by the Rolling 60s in ride-by shootings and stabbings and beatings. Same with the Rolling 60s.

“This started with a female who had a boyfriend who was from the 83rd Street Crips. She also had a boyfriend from the Rolling 60s. One day these two guys met up and there was a confrontation between these guys behind this girl and the guy from the 83rd was stabbed. He went back and got his homeboys and went over and shot up the Rolling 60s, and the Rolling 60s retaliated, shot up the 83rd, killed one of them, and the 83rd retaliated--it’s gone on and on. The female, she was finally killed, too.

“But you ask the Rolling 60s now what they’re fighting the 83rd Street Crips for--that was two generations (of gang members) ago. They don’t know.”

It was a couple of hours before sunset. The sky was brilliant, the first perfect Saturday of summer. The streets were quiet. Wheeler kept driving south on Hoover, scanning. Occasionally, a kid would recognize him or the agency insignia on the side of his car and wave. Or there’d be a gesture, a forefinger and middle finger crossed by the thumb to form an “H,” for Hoover.

Historically, street gangs have claimed identification with the “neighborhood,” not merely with their fellow members. But that tradition is a curse. Whether they affiliate with the gang or not, residents of each neighborhood may be condemned by their address. They face the chilling scenario--played out in many gang-related attacks--of being caught in another neighborhood and confronted with the blunt challenge, “Where you from?”

“You live in 74 Hoover’s territory, you from 74 Hoover,” Wheeler said. “One of these youngsters who don’t have nothing to do with Hoover gangs--he plays basketball, baseball, whatever--say he goes out of this neighborhood and gets approached by rival gang members of Hoover. They ask him, ‘Where you stay at?’ He say, ‘I stay at 7508 Hoover.’ They say, ‘Well you a 74 Hoover.’ They’re not gonna ask him no more. They’re either gonna shoot him, kill him or jump him real bad, and once they jump him he’s got so much hatred for the individuals that did this, he’s gonna come over here to the Hoover gang and say, ‘Hey, guys, I wanna be part of y’all.’

“We can’t go in and demand that youngsters get out of the gangs. We don’t know them and they don’t know us. We don’t know how heavy their involvement is, where they’re coming from. So our first step is get in there and get to know him. And then start working on him.

“We do one-on-ones, we start dealing with them every day. My one-on-one at this time is a kid who’s 14 or 15, his father has no control of him, he’s running around going ‘Main Street! Main Street!’ (a gang affiliation) with a bunch of other little ones. I tell him about a job. He says, ‘If I can’t get a thousand dollars a week, I don’t want it.’ The dude is very hard at this time.”

Wheeler estimates that he’s convinced between 60 and 80 youngsters to stop hanging out with street gangs, but he admits that he and other street workers struggle with older gang members. The ones they usually target, through street work and programs that Youth Gang Services offers to elementary and junior high schools, are the “wanna-be’s.” Wheeler calls them the “gonna-be’s.”

“If you don’t get that 14-year-old who’s trying to act tough,” he said, “if you don’t get him out of the gang he’s gonna be one of the key guys in five years.

“You explain to him about somebody you were working with that said all the same tough things he’s saying, but is in the cemetery now, or the penitentiary--and that he’s been in the penitentiary and has had his manhood taken away from him. See, a lot of gang members get raped inside the institution, but when they get back on the street they keep it a secret. You let some of the young kids know about this.”

‘One-on-Ones’

A car flagged Wheeler down. He made a U-turn and caught it. It was a young man wearing a new Lakers T-shirt. The cars pulled over and the men exchanged good-natured greetings.

“He was one of my one-on-ones,” Wheeler said as he drove off. “He would have been in a gang forever, or he’d been dead. With each kid you work differently. With him, it was a matter of saying there’s another world out there than this stuff. Making your money honestly, you’ll have money in a long span of time. Like, when he first filed for his income tax, he found out he’d get a refund. He said, ‘Hey, I wish the government would take more of my money (in withholding) so I get more back at the end of the year.’ ”

For the last month Wheeler has been sharing his knowledge of Southside streets with an audience beyond his wildest dreams. Radio and television stations, several would-be movie producers and even a major talent agency have attempted to pluck him from anonymity since Newsweek magazine named him as one of 50 everyday American heroes in a special section that chose one person from each state.

It was a fluke. Newsweek had been preparing a story on gangs earlier this year and Wheeler happened to be the staff member that his boss, Steve Valdevia, assigned to take a Newsweek reporter on two weeks of ride-alongs. That eventually led to Wheeler’s name being submitted to the magazine’s editors.

Fame Means Support

For the 6-year-old gang agency, which has walked a tightrope by trying to simultaneously command the respect of the criminal justice system and the gangs, Wheeler’s fame has meant helpful support. The program, which is still regarded skeptically by some politicians and lawmen, has struggled to maintain its $2 million in annual funding from the county Board of Supervisors and the Los Angeles City Council.

For Wheeler, the experience of becoming a media-certified gang expert has been wearing, even though his credentials are solid. He avoided gang membership as a boy, he said, and began working as an Eastside Teen Post counselor of hard-core youths at 18. In 1982, he joined Youth Gang Services (and later married the woman who was his first street team partner). He is wary of the new-found attention but eager to educate a public that he considers imprisoned by stereotypes.

“The movies that have been made about gangs--’Warriors,’ ‘Bad Boys’--it wasn’t there in none of them,” he said. “They should make one that the young kids who’re being pressured by gang members to be in gangs can relate to, that the parents who are having trouble because their kid is in a gang and won’t go to school can relate to, that the parents who lost kids through gang violence can relate to. That the parents who got kids in jail behind gang-related shootings can relate to. So innocent victims who survive can start understanding why they were shot.”

These whys are murky. When the annual countywide total of gang-related murders fell from 351 to 212 between 1980 and 1984, police suggested that tougher prison sentences for Eastside gang leaders had weakened many gangs. When the annual total pushed back up to 271 in 1985 and 328 last year, it was attributed in large part to turf wars between Southside gangs who had moved into dealing drugs, particularly crack, the cheap form of cocaine.

More Killings This Year

This year, gang-related killings are running 11% above last year’s total in the city of Los Angeles and 70% higher in areas patrolled by the county Sheriff’s Department. Some experts say as much as half of Southside gang killings are drug-related. Yet sheriff’s and LAPD gang experts have linked less than 20% of the murders there directly to drugs.

East Los Angeles, an unincorporated section about three miles east of downtown that was for decades the most violent street gang turf in the county, experienced only four gang-related deaths last year, benefiting from years of intense community work and a curious change in fashion, in which many youngsters abandoned traditional street gang membership for so-called “stoner” gangs that are tied more to heavy-metal music than “gang-banging.”

Death Spiral

That left the Southside to plunge further into the death spiral.

As of last week, there had been 25 gang-related deaths this year in the Lennox and Lynwood areas patrolled by the Sheriff’s Department, compared to only eight during the same period in 1986. In the LAPD’s Southeast Division, which stretches as far as Watts, gang-related murders were only up slightly during the first six months of the year, from 21 to 25, but gang-related attempted murders rose from 19 to 31 and gang-related felony assaults more than doubled, from 99 to 201--more than one a day.

Of the 97 gang-related murders that occurred in the city during the first half of the year, 58 of them took place in three of the LAPD’s South Los Angeles divisions--Southeast, Newton and 77th. Gang-related crimes in those divisions are up 35%.

Only 36 of the 97 gang-related murders have been classified as “gang-versus-gang” incidents. Many of the others involved tragedies such as the 10-year-old boy killed near a Pacoima Park last week, or a 9-year-old boy killed in a Southside park last month.

Violence Accepted

The numbers are numbing, and the awareness that the violence can flash without warning is accepted laconically by many. On this evening, Wheeler pulled into an apartment building driveway, spotting a teen-ager and an attractive young woman. He remembered the woman because he had been on patrol the evening her brother was shot to death. He had a summer job application for the boy. Youth Gang Services and a private group, People Who Care, will put 205 gang members to work for 12 weeks doing county maintenance chores.

The woman leaned into the passenger seat window.

“How do the juveniles look?” she asked, as if asking a weatherman about threatening clouds.

“They’re quiet,” Wheeler said.

“It ain’t too bad?”

“No, they had a rough night last night.”

“My mother lives on 61st and Crenshaw, police had 40, 50 of ‘em jacked up.”

“A couple of ‘em got shot on Hoover last night,” Wheeler said.

“Some 60s?” the woman asked.

“No.”

“Cause I know the last person who was affiliated with the 60s who got killed. He was with East Coast but he moved over into the 60s, and they got along with him but something happened at the skating rink and he got killed.”

“Last incident I had with the 60s there was two shootings,” Wheeler said, mentioning two victims by their gang nicknames.

“They got shot?” the woman asked.

“Yeah.”

“They didn’t die, did they?”

“No.”

Angling for Jobs

Wheeler said goodby and met up with another car, driven by Ed Turley, a regional director of the gang agency. They picked up two ex-gang members in their late 20s who were angling for jobs as street workers and would ride through the shift tonight on something of a tryout.

An hour later the two cars were heading west on Imperial Highway toward Western Avenue when Wheeler saw crowds of people drifting out of Los Angeles Southwest College. “Looks like something is happening,” he said. The cars stopped at a nearby gas station. The men got out.

Nothing seemed to be happening, just hundreds of people walking from a free campus music concert across Western to a shopping center parking lot. But in the crowd Wheeler saw a youngster come by waving a blue rag, saying, “It’s time to Crip.” The Crips are one of two major black gangs in Los Angeles. They identify themselves with the color blue. Scores of neighborhood gangs add the word Crips to their name. Others affiliate with the Bloods. Their color is red. Los Angeles County’s Central Jail has special cellblocks to segregate leaders of both gangs. Several other teen-agers who walked by proclaimed jocularly, “30s! 30s!” Another gang.

The reporter who was accompanying Wheeler remarked how placid things looked.

Fights Erupted

About 30 seconds later a man started to beat up another man with a metal folding chair he’d brought to the concert.

People began to scream and yell. The fight spread into the middle of Western, tying up jammed Saturday evening traffic. Half a dozen men seemed to be involved. Dozens of bystanders gradually followed them across the street into the shopping center parking lot. Knots of potential combatants wound up milling around a liquor store in a corner of the center. More fights seemed imminent.

Wheeler, his colleague Turley and the two ex-gang members did what they could, attempting to separate the man with the chair--who said someone had tried to grab his wife--from the others. Then they tried to insert themselves between the hotter-headed boys and young men, several of whom were talking tough. They cajoled, reasoned and used an occasional shoulder hug. It took half an hour before everyone had cleared away.

‘Itching for Trouble’

“That was the 69th East Coast Crips,” Wheeler said later. “They were itching for trouble. . . . We were very lucky there wasn’t a killing. One of those guys took a gun out of his car and put it in his pocket.”

Moments like this are the essence of street work. Patrolling hot spots, getting out to talk, trying to intervene before something explodes, operating on the belief that, as Wheeler said, “once people get the feeling that somebody’s out there trying to stop this stuff, and don’t want to see it going on, the friction kinda dies down.”

It was dark. He headed north on Western and was flagged down by another teen-age gang member he knew. Like a number Wheeler would visit this night, the kid wanted an application for summer work. “Get me a job!” he said. “I’m tired of Crippin’!”

Wheeler told him the application had to be returned by Monday.

“One o’clock Monday,” the boy said firmly. “You think I’m playin’ but I’m gonna come.”

A Bad Corner

He headed west, to 63rd Street and 10th Avenue, near Inglewood. A bad corner. The street lights were dim and dogs barked angrily and the sound of every passing car carried the possibility of a drive-by shooting. A crowd of teen-agers clustered on 10th, drinking. There were guns. Wheeler parked around the corner and walked part way toward them. A boy he described as a “colonel” in this gang drifted up. They talked. “He’ll calm ‘em down,” Wheeler said.

Wheeler was not going to walk into the middle of the gang. The last time he’d done that, he’d been clipped across the chin by a bullet when a rival gang drove by and fired into the pack.

“We’ll come back here later,” he said.

Around the corner, on 63rd, a couple of other gang members were talking. One of them heard Wheeler say something about not wanting to talk directly on the corner. Too much exposure.

“Yeah,” one of the gang members said to no one in particular, “this is a war zone.” He said it with exaggerated seriousness, to show he feared nothing, but in a couple of minutes he, too, had left.