Cold Killers and Fearful Innocents : Homeboys: Players in a Deadly Drama

It’s happened so many times. One of the homeboys would get back to the neighborhood all bleeding, saying, “Aw, such-and-such, they did such-and-such to me.”

And just because I’m there I’d say: ‘I be back.’ Jump on my bicycle--whoooom--head back to the house, get my gun, come back out to the neighborhood, go to one of the homeboys’ house, put WD-40 oil down the gun, put the bullets in--click, whiiiisssh--turn the revolver, make sure it’s cool. Let’s go. Get in the car, roll where we gotta go, talk about what we gon’ do, park the car, walk about three, four blocks to where they at, shoot ‘em--boom boom boom boom--run back to the car.

David Stewart, a former Main Street Crip,

describing a pay-back shooting.

Where do they come from, these audaciously violent young men? What rules do they play by? What kind of mentality is this?

The chief of police calls them cowards. The district attorney’s gang specialist compares them to Al Capone. The minister who sees them one day in church and the next day in jail calls them “our children.” The psychologist who counsels their parents calls them “Buicks,” victims of deprivation mass-produced by a callous society the way a factory spits out cars. The probation officer who sees them on the street calls them angry harbingers of a new Watts riot.

Gang members are routinely described as cold killers and fearful, street-warped innocents. They are both. Their assaults are routinely described as the calculated byproducts of soured cocaine deals and drunken, spontaneous responses to the faintest insult. They are both. Their organizations are routinely described as large, disciplined rings and small, fragmented knots. They are both.

Gang members are too diverse to be captured by any generality. Their penchant for violence is too varied, their loyalty to their “sets” too unpredictable, their lives too riddled with contradictions and grand myths. Some are there for the thrill of hanging out with the toughest, coolest people on the block. Some are there for protection from the enemies they have made, or plan to make. Many are there to sell drugs, something you cannot do without at least tacit approval of the gang that claims your neighborhood.

The madness percolates most deeply through the city’s black neighborhoods. Here gang members immersed in an inside-out logic that makes killing reasonable collide randomly with one another and with innocents who live in the same milieu.

Start with Doc.

Doc is 16, tall, 6-foot-3, about 200 pounds, with a strong face and the rangy build of an athlete. But the streets--hanging out with Eight-Trey Hoover Crips, partying at the shabby Hoover Plaza apartment complex at 81st and Hoover streets, where his homeboys “kick it”--got to Doc before any coach had a chance. He has spent nearly three years in county juvenile camps for armed robbery and selling drugs. He figures he has lost 16 or 17 pals in gang violence since he started hanging around the Hoovers in the fifth grade. His older brother was a gang member. So were his five older sisters. He has developed a blase, fatalistic way of looking at the world.

Take the time his older brother got shot in a phone booth. It shook Doc. It made him think about trying to find excuses to spend less time around the Eight-Trey Hoovers, one of perhaps a dozen “sets” of Hoover Crips who claim territory along Hoover.

Yeah, he told himself, he’d start to cool it. But first there had to be revenge.

Most of the time you know which set to blame. This time Doc wasn’t sure. His brother was wounded near the boundary line of two other Crips sets, Rolling 60s and Menlo Avenue. But Doc also thought a Bloods gang, the Brims, might have had something to do with it.

Doc got a gun, got in a car and rode into each neighborhood at night.

“Looking for anybody in they gang,” he said matter-of-factly, “anybody in they territory who looked like a gangbanger.”

Whenever he saw one, he’d stop and yell that he was looking for one of their homeboys. You spend enough time in the county camps, you learn at least one name from most of the other sets. All he wanted to do was to draw somebody close enough to his car.

‘Boom! Boom! Boom!

“These other homeboys, they’d see me, come up, say, ‘Who is that?’ I like: Boom! Boom! Boom!: ‘ That’s who I am.’ I didn’t call out my gang’s name or nothing.” He just sped off. He still doesn’t know whether he killed anybody during his spree. He figures he wounded some.

People outside the vortex talk about innocent victims. For most gang members, there is no such thing.

One of the powerful myths that gang members buy into is that they represent and protect their neighborhood. Gang members rarely talk about themselves as belonging to a gang. That is outsider language. Instead, they talk about being from a ‘hood. This is more than semantics. It is one reason why no one in South Los Angeles ever feels completely safe. If your ‘hood rides into my ‘hood and fires on us, goes the unspoken threat between gangs, anybody in your ‘hood could get hurt when we come back. We’ll come looking for gangbangers, but if we don’t see any we might hit anybody--just to let you know we were here.

“My brother didn’t know who done it to him , so I ain’t gonna care who I done it to,” Doc says, remembering his rage. “I’m just gonna get whoever around at a certain time--the wrong time--that’s who I’m gonna get. If I can get somebody, it be off my back. I feel better about it.”

Haphazard, Chaotic Way

For all the attention being paid to spectacular violence committed over soured drug deals and arguments over drug territory, the largest number of gang killings in South Los Angeles still occur in this haphazard, chaotic way. These endless rounds of retaliation don’t draw much notice because they’re not spectacular, your basic stop-the-car-and-fire-the-revolver incident. There is nothing new about it. It’s happened more than 2,400 times in Los Angeles County during the 1980s, five times every week.

For all the attention being paid to the war between Crips and Bloods, the two loose affiliations that all black gangs claim, a substantial number of gang attacks involve rival sets of Crips who have little loyalty to each other and often engage in festering rivalries.

Crazy? Hell, gang members spit back, life down here is crazy. It’s not just the gang members who settle scores with guns. You see it every day. A grandmother shoots her grandson in the chest as they argue over $40 she wants to borrow. A mother shoots her ex-husband to death in a dispute over visitation rights. A woman shoots her sister’s ex-boyfriend during an argument over a car.

Fuse Is Short

What many gang members don’t understand, since they have seen the world only through the most frenetic end of the prism, is that in their world the distance between increments of violence is very short. It takes frighteningly little time to drive from annoyance to rage to retaliation. The line between self-defense and a preemptive strike is badly blurred, too. That’s because you have to be ready. Anything could happen.

“It’s all depending how your backbone is,” says one gang member. “If you ain’t strong enough to stop ‘em from going in your house, they’re going to go in your house. They ain’t going in my house.”

Inside a wood-frame home with a large porch near the Harbor Freeway, Doc sits on a couch in a darkened living room during an early evening and sifts the circumstances that ensnare him.

One of them is that the set of Crips he has spent his adolescence with is one of the most violent in the city.

In most of Los Angeles, gang members contend that for all the publicity about killings, the gangs themselves are pretty quiet.

“Ain’t nobody banging no more,” they insist.

Peculiar Logic

What that means is that prolonged, organized assaults by one group of gang members on another are far less frequent than than were at the turn of the decade, when turf lines were less hardened and incursions tended to be more explosive. Gang members argue that less organized attacks, in which one or two members shoot somebody because they’re trying to settle their own score, should not be called “gang killings.” It’s just a guy going off and doing his own thing, they say. This distinction is usually lost on outsiders, but it’s an example of the peculiar logic of gang life.

The Eight-Trey Hoovers, by contrast, do bang.

You take a typical gang, Doc is saying, and it’s probably once a month that a few of their members get their heads pumped up by any combination of adrenaline, alcohol and narcotics and ride out to attack any rivals in sight.

Doc’s homeboys “are straight crazy. . . . We be going through others’ hoods every couple days, shooting them up. Don’t care about nothing. All they (the Hoovers) care about is what’s out there at the time. They don’t have nothing to do. They get tired of sitting around drinking and smoking weed, so they just get up, ‘Let’s go roll on somebody. Let’s go jack (rob) him. Let’s go jack her.’ ”

The Hoover sets come from particularly dreary neighborhoods. A few weeks ago a local minister led a delegation of citizens to the corner of Hoover and 94th streets to decry gang violence. A newspaper photographer who pointed a camera at a house to take a picture found a Hoover Crip inside pointing a rifle back at him.

“A lot of the homeboys, the ones who still living in the ‘hood, their mamas are drug addicts,” says Doc, who has moved from his mother’s house to the home of one of his sisters, about 30 blocks north. “They don’t give ‘em no money. Everybody want money; everybody want decent clothes. Lot of Hoovers don’t go to school ‘cause they don’t have no decent clothes. So they just go out and sell dope and rob. That’s the only thing to do. After they do some robbing, they get caught and go to jail. That’s why they never go to school.

‘Doing Nine Years’

“Most of ‘em are institutionalized. They been in jail since they was young; they figure they going back there anyway. One of my homeboys I known since I was banging, he got out after five years. Two, three weeks later he had killed a Mexican man in an alley. He doing nine years right now.”

For all the impassiveness with which Doc discusses this, he’s still trying to distance himself from the Hoovers without feeling as though he’s betraying a way of life. He’d like to graduate from Manual Arts High next year and then study carpentry. As far as he knows, the only other members of his set who have graduated are his brother, who is no longer a gang member and is attending Trade Tech, and another friend doing time in Folsom.

Despite having moved out of the Eight-Trey Hoovers’ ‘hood, he periodically goes back to Hoover and 81st, and when he does, if there’s a robbery or a drive-by going down, “I just want to get into it. I feel left out of something. You don’t have to go. You can be smart and stay. But most of the time I just go.”

He strides through Manual Arts High School with his pants sagging low on his waist, one of the most forthright fashion statements a gang member can make. Donald Bakeer, an English teacher who has befriended him, knows better than to push Doc too hard. The identification with being a gang member is deeper than most people understand. It was Doc’s brother who used to sing: “Ain’t just saggin’, I’m blue-raggin’ (blue is the Crips’ color), don’t you wanna look like me?”

‘It’s Their Daddy’

“It’s all they have,” says Bakeer, who has written a self-published historical novel about the Crips and believes black gangs are a powerful family substitute for boys from poor, fatherless homes. “It’s their daddy, and if you dis’ (disrespect) their daddy, they may go off and you may never get them back.”

What makes the gangs of Los Angeles so unpredictable is that many of the young men who join or simply hang around the periphery do not see themselves as cut-and-dry murderers who wake up wanting to squeeze the trigger. Rather, like Doc, they tend to be so inured to violence that they think of themselves as nothing more than streetwise survivalists.

The trouble is, it takes very little--maybe a short evening of gulping 40-ounce bottles of “Eight Ball,” Old English 800 malt liquor, a favorite gang pastime--to move from survivalist to aggressor.

Ask Kimberly and Tina, two 17-year-old cousins who were sitting around talking with five gang members in a motel room on Imperial Highway last January. Tina made the mistake of saying something negative about the gang that one of the men belonged to. He exploded.

“He said he should kill her, or he was going to, for disrespecting his ‘hood,” Kimberly testified in court recently. The gang members almost did. They gang-raped the girls and then shot them repeatedly with Uzis when the girls tried to flee, she said.

This kind of hair-trigger life is not what Li’l Jake envisions for himself. But Li’l Jake, who lives in Watts, surrounded by even grimier poverty than the neighborhoods along Hoover, knows he could go either way.

He was scarcely into his teens when he asked to be initiated into Grape Street, probably the biggest Crips set in Watts and the acknowledged rulers of the huge, tattered Jordan Downs housing project. As a symbol of its independence, Grape Street disdains Crip blue for its own color, purple.

Li’l Jake, 16, grew up in a relatively quiet part of Watts, but as he was entering his teens, he moved and Cripdom surrounded him. Then a Blood killed his brother’s 19-year-old uncle at Will Rogers Park in Watts, and Li’l Jake got mad. He told the older guys he wanted in. To prove himself, as an initiation, he fought five Grape Street members, one after the other.

Now he walks the tightrope. He still goes to school at Jordan High, but he hangs out with guys who don’t. He watches the older guys who populate 103rd Street as it runs down the middle of Grape Street’s territory, guys with no future except selling the rock, guys whose one-dimensional hardness is emphasized by gold chains shimmering against their rippling white T-shirts.

He wonders whether he’ll wind up like that.

‘I Got a Chance’

“Sometimes I think that’ll probably be me,” says the boy, a slender 10th-grader who wears his hair in a jehri curl and has a pleasant, youthful face set off with hardened eyes. “I know I’m hanging out with the wrong people. Then again, if I stay on the right track, go to school, do my work, play football, then I got a chance.”

A chance to be a pro football player. That’s his goal, despite the fact he’s no taller than 5-foot-9. He played wide receiver on the B team last fall.

If he can’t play ball? “I’ll to try to get a job or something.”

His mother died four or five years ago after she went into a coma. He’s not sure what caused it. He lives with his two aunts, their three children and his three brothers in a three-bedroom apartment in the Imperial Courts housing project. The aunts work. One of Li’l Jake’s brothers comes home after school and looks after the smaller children. Li’l Jake keeps an eye on them after he gets home. “When my auntie comes, I leave.”

Quit Drug Trade

Like most gang members he’s tried his hand at selling rock cocaine. He stood out on the street, conducted transactions, then went into a house, got the dope from “the head man” and brought it back to the buyer. He was not a big-timer. He grossed maybe $300 a day, kept half of it. But after a year he quit. He almost got arrested, and he was afraid of being shot.

“Friends getting killed,” he says softly. “Buying it. Taking it. Buying up cars, shooting. They use kids 12, 13 years old. Little girls nowadays sell it. It’s a trip.”

Gang members listen to public service announcements about “saying no” to gangs and they sneer. People don’t understand, they say. Theoretically it’s a wonderful idea, but “even if you don’t bang (attack rival gang members), you still go into another ‘hood and they still gonna ask you where you from,” Li’l Jake says. “Somebody might find you for some reason. They don’t care. Nowadays, people is crazy. It hurts sometimes to see.”

Crazy. Last summer he went over to his girlfriend’s place with some friends when he found that some Hoovers, from a set around Hoover and 112th Street, were there. Hell, they should have known better. Hoovers just can’t walk into Grape’s ‘hood.

“The Hoovers come out,” Li’l Jake remembers, “so I told ‘em, this is Grape. So they pulled out a .22 and fired. We dug who shot the gun, we left, I told my homeboy, he gave me a gun, I went back and I shot at them. I think I hit one.”

He knows this is a ridiculous way to live.

‘Coming Back for Him’

“But you know,” he adds with more resignation than bravado, echoing the words of so many gang members, “a person think he can shoot me, but if I don’t die, I’m coming back for him.”

George is the same age as Li’l Jake and dresses the same simple way: white T-shirt, dark corduroys, white sneakers. But sit across from him and you feel little of the pathetic world-weariness that washes off Li’l Jake’s words.

Part of the reason is that George (not his real name) is sitting on a nest egg of $50,000, a settlement from a traffic accident, that he’ll collect at 18. He talks about using the money to buy a carwash on Crenshaw Boulevard, which is shorthand for the drug business. According to police, drug dealers often use carwashes and auto body shops as bases of operation.

But there’s more to George’s outlook than that. George is from the West Side of South Los Angeles--in gang parlance, anything west of Broadway--and the difference between the two sides is night and day. The East Side of South L.A. is where you find the housing projects and the dented ’79 Chevys. The West Side is where gang members who have the “snaps”--money--show off their “fresh” cars, the ‘Benzes and the glittery sports trucks. Drug money and drug power are contemptuously on display. And even when they’re not, the fact is that families on the West Side generally have more money than families on the East Side.

Money as Friend

“My family, they got the money. They give me anything I want,” boasts George, a student at Crenshaw High who lives with his mother. “My mama, she tells me I ain’t got no friends, that my friends are in my pocket--whoever give me money is my friend.”

For George, being a gang member--a Rolling 60s Crip--is a ticket to good times. To the younger guys at school, the ones who throw 60s hand signs and yell out the name but aren’t really in the set--the claimers, the wannabes--George is a hero. A real gang member. Has been since sixth grade. He grew up in the 60s’ neighborhood, at 60th Street and 8th Avenue, a collection of fading stucco homes, dried-out lawns and graffiti-strewn walls. He didn’t need to be initiated. He’d grown up around the older guys.

On the East Side, they talk about being a Crip to survive. On the West Side, to George at least, what it’s about is belonging, heading with the fellows to the skating rink, to the rap concert, or getting together in Hyde Park, which is impractical now that the police are conducting sweeps.

“It’s about having fun , just being with ‘em,” says George. “The guys are cool. You gotta know ‘em. If you don’t know ‘em, you think they crazy. For me, it’s not about doing anything for money. If I was doing it for the money, I’d be out of town right now,” joining older gang members selling drugs in other cities, he says. “I’d come back in two weeks with snaps.”

Assured of Infamy

The Rolling 60s assured themselves of infamy four summers ago when three of their members, in what prosecutors said was a contract job, drove to a home on West 59th Street and killed the mother of former football star Kermit Alexander and three other family members. Only later did the gang members learn they had hit the wrong house.

Law enforcement officers estimate there are 500 to 700 members of the 60s. George figures he knows maybe 300, and that’s another part of the lure: Everywhere you go, you see a homeboy.

George is one of his set’s younger members. His nickname--again, he asked for an alias--is Baby Train. That means he’s the third oldest member of the Rolling 60s to use that name. Above him is 19-year-old Li’l Train, and above him is Train, who’s 25, and is considered an OG--Original Gangster--because he has held that nickname the longest.

“It ain’t like they your brother,” George says, of Train and Li’l Train, “but it’s like you’re real close.”

For all his love of belonging, George willingly accepts the need to pay the price, to “be down” for his set. It means, simply put, that if he’s around when a bunch of guys decide to avenge a real or imagined offense committed by another gang, he’ll go along. In practice, there are ways of sliding out, but if you do so too often, you become known as a “buster.”

Powerful Allegiance

As in war, fidelity to the set and hatred of all its enemies have become deeply ingrained. A cop who knows George threw a hypothetical question at him one day. He asked him what he’d do if he was at a skating rink and saw a girl he knew being hassled by a member of the Eight-Trey Gangsters. The two Crips gangs have killed off each other’s members for years, ever since a fight over a girl who was dating members of each set.

“We woulda got him before he got that far,” George said confidently.

“Let’s say he got that far,” the cop said.

“Aw, we gonna smoke him anyway, ‘cause we don’t get along with him.”

But isn’t that absurd, shooting someone you don’t even know?

“He claiming that set. They don’t care about us . So just get even. That’s the way it’s always going to be.”

Doesn’t George ever think of the senselessness of it?

‘Think of the Funeral’

“I think of it,” he says calmly, but then, as if he has just caught himself sliding into a dangerous mind-set, his voice heats up. “But if I see one of ‘em, I just think of the funeral I went to where I saw one of my homies, and I be like, I get mad. I just go off. I see my homie in his casket.”

There are ways out of this, of course. One is to move to another neighborhood. That at least would decrease the odds of being shot by familiar rivals. But George, who proclaims “I’ll always be a 60 in my heart,” is not about to do that. He thinks, like many gang members, that he can have it both ways. One foot in the future, one foot in his set. Besides, he says, “I’m not the kind of person to walk around letting everybody know who I am. I’ve got feelings for people. I’m not like those guys who don’t got no feeling for people.”

Wait a minute. What about the Eight-Trey Gangster you just hypothetically killed?

George’s mood darkens.

‘I Got Feelings’

“I don’t care about him! They can do anything to him. They can torture him.”

Would you ? he is asked.

“I got feelings, but I’d still do it. I don’t care. I remember my homeboy, my mind is going off.”

OK, he is asked, let’s say it’s two years from now and the same Eight-Trey Gangster drives into your Crenshaw Boulevard carwash. Are you going to blast him?

George thinks for a second.

“Nah. I dunno. He got a fresh car, I’ll have my homies jack (rob) him.”

Listening, one is disarmed by the possibility that a lot of this talk about killing abstract enemies is just that, kid stuff, that it wears off with age. Sometimes it does. Too often it does not.

Ask Dwayne Jordan.

Dwayne was the same age as George, with the same kind of mind-set: He was cool, he was tough, he was a street warrior who hid his fears of being shot with stoic, time-tested sayings like, “Hey, man, whatever happens is gonna happen.” He went to school only because it was a good place to find girls and other gang members. Privately, he was not planning on doing anything stupid enough to wind up in jail.

Dwayne’s neighborhood was Eleven-Deuce Hoover.

‘Second Family’

“It was a second family in a sense. My mother was working a lot. I was always with ‘em, basically spend more time with them than at home.”

He began carrying a gun in the seventh grade after he was jumped by another gang. He kept it in an ankle holster. Such are the problems of being a Hoover. Enemies were everywhere. Raymond Avenue Crips on this side, N-Hoods, a Blood set, on another. You couldn’t go anywhere without going in a group. His brother was an N-Hood, but that’s just the way it is in some homes. Black gangs have little of the inviolate tradition of Los Angeles’ much older Latino gangs.

Shootings abounded. “For the most part it was pay-backs, but a lot of it was we’d just be bored at night and one of the homeboys says, ‘Man, let’s go hoo-bang on the N-Hoods,’ so we’d go over there and shoot up the N-Hoods, shoot up the Raymonds. You wouldn’t always kill somebody. It would just be shooting to let ‘em know Hoovers know where you hang out, can kill you anytime.”

The thing was, you didn’t feel like a potential murderer. Like another gang member puts it, you get so used to shooting at your enemies, it’s like playing Laser Tag.

“At certain times people did get hit, but people didn’t die every time. Some of the guys I’d be with, they’d feel like, ‘I’m gonna kill one of ‘em.’ Some of us, it didn’t really matter. We were just there for the ride, hanging out with the rest of the homeboys, followers, so to speak.

Everybody’s Shooting

“It was usually shooting at people in a crowd. Everybody just be shooting. You couldn’t tell if you was the one that shot that guy. There would always be that thought in your mind--did I kill that guy or did Li’l Bob kill that guy?--but you would never know. You’d be with five, six, 10 other guys, drive by, jump out the car, start shooting.”

Dwayne never felt like killing anybody. Except for the time he did.

He was on his way to Washington High School when five guys from N-Hood jumped him. He knew it went with the territory. He’d been stupid enough to walk by himself across Normandie. They didn’t beat him up badly. But they got him mad.

“I talked to a homeboy during school. After school I was home, lifting weights in back yard, when a couple of homeboys came by to say they’d spotted some of those Bloods. They told me they had a gun and the whole deal. I was a little hesitant, but then it was like they were gonna call me scared. I went. I was the oldest one of that bunch in age, but streetwise I wasn’t the oldest one.

“We went over there and me and my friend Eric, who had the gun, started arguing about who was going to do the shooting. I told them, ‘Let me do the shooting.’

“We was on foot. They was in a big field. I lived on Mariposa. All I had to do was walk to the corner, go through an alley and I saw ‘em in a big field, playing music, dancing around, 10, 15 of them.”

He didn’t know if any of these were the gang members who had actually jumped him. But he knew they lived in the apartments adjacent to the field, and that was enough. He raised Eric’s .32-caliber revolver and fired one shot. Then he and Eric split.

‘Shot in the Head’

“Later, one of the homegirls told me a guy had been shot in the head. I didn’t think he would live. Three, four days afterward he died.

“That’s when I decided to cool this gang stuff. Although I’d been shooting at people, I never knew I killed anyone if I did. This time I knew. It was my bullet that did it. It didn’t seem impossible before. There was always that chance. But there was always that uncertainty.”

It took a month or two for the police to catch up to him. One of his homeboys confessed. Dwayne spent the next five years in a California Youth Authority facility.

“For me, the main turnaround was being incarcerated. I had thrown away all of my teen years. Sitting up in that jail gave me a lot of time to think. Just like that was Dwayne Allison I killed, it could have been Dwayne Allison killing Dwayne Jordan. That wasn’t what I wanted out of life. “

Today, 23-year-old Jordan works as a truck driver for $1,300 a month. Not much, but it’s better than the $500-a-month job he started with when he came out of CYA. He lives with his wife of nine months in a garage apartment, watches his friends sell cocaine and shakes his head.

“Some of them,” he says, “they make my paycheck in a day, and I have more than they have. I don’t know what they be doing with their money.”

Lucky in a Way

In a way, Jordan is lucky. He could have gone to state prison. He could have come out hardened and cynical, convinced that the deck was stacked and that crime was just a word. He could have wound up like Eugene Hooper.

Hooper (not his real name) is 27, a convicted thief who makes a living by doing auto detail work out of his car, dealing cocaine and hustling dice. He lives with his girlfriend and their 6-year-old son. He grew up as a member of the Harlem 30s Crips, near Exposition Park, had his share of wild, violent times during the turf wars of the late 1970s and then, as he hit his late teens, realized he had to come to terms with the real world. He started robbing jewelry stores.

“I was trying to beat the white man’s system,” he says, sitting in the bleachers of Denker Recreation Center on 35th Street, dressed in a white jogging suit and wearing a beeper on his hip. “I was trying to get the white man to lose some money--that’s all they did, tried to make us lose. I was thinking, they leave all the jewelry out at night, why not get some? I made my money, and then again I did my time, too. But then again, when I get out I don’t need to be labeled. They label you.

“If you mess up early, you never get back. I done tried. I was on parole two years ago. I tried to get a job for a whole year while I was on parole. I lied on my application sometimes. They call back and then deny me. Then when I put it down they say your record show you were a professional burglar.

‘Couldn’t Accept That’

“And then I went to the point as far as trying to be a janitor, at my age,” he says disgustedly. “I went to work, and for a whole two weeks they never took me off the toilets. They made me work toilets for two weeks, and I called up one morning and said find me some work where they ain’t no toilets. When I went to work that night, they had me in some toilets. See, ‘cause what they want me to be is what they want me to do. They don’t want to see me go up, do nothing else. I couldn’t accept that, and they weren’t paying me more than $4 an hour. When I could come out on the streets and sell a rock 10 dollars every 10 minutes? What would you prefer?

“Everybody’s trying to survive in this world. The white folks is bringing us the dope. . . . Hell, the white man is making all the money. We getting the crumbs, the bottom barrel. They just issuing us our little crap. They made all their millions at the top.

“We just innocent bystanders stucked up in a mad-ass world. That’s all it is. We just trapped in a world that we gotta survive until we die.”

This is the adult voice that some of the children of South Los Angeles hear. The black middle-class--the lawyers and the doctors and the civil servants and the entrepreneurs, the role models of opportunity and working within the system who lived there when segregation forced them to stay--have largely moved to nicer neighborhoods. “And if they come back to see the cousins or the aunts,” grumbles one disgruntled youth worker, “they in and out in 15 minutes.”

Devoid of Hope

Hooper fills this void. It’s not that he’s recruiting anyone to his philosophy. It’s that he’s devoid of hope. It’s not that he’s exhorting anyone to gangbang--he’s long been out of that. It’s that he’s an active voice for the hopelessness that makes the gang seem like a redemptive presence.

His bitterness is typical of older gang members.

“If a guy from the moon asked me about Cripping,” said Chic, a slender, muscular, unemployed man of 22 with chiseled facial features who hangs out in an apartment courtyard on 69th and Main streets with other members of the 69th Street East Coast Crips, “I’d tell him it’s a confused, disorganized, depressed kind of thing.”

The young ones never think about this. It’s too distant. The social pull is so strong. To belong . To be known. To be somebody.

“I wasn’t a problem child. I still did the things my mother told me. I just got to the point where I wanted to be with everybody,” remembers David Stewart, 20, who was a Main Street Crip from the age of 11 until he began to ease himself out of it two years ago.

“I used to be into drawing, sports, used to join the teams. It just wasn’t fast enough for me. I needed something more. Just going to school and playing basketball, I needed something more exerting.

Having It All

“I didn’t want to sit in the house by myself and be neglected, not one of the fellas. So I just got out and wanted to dress down (flaunting gang colors) and be down with everybody, stand out and get drunk and have it all, ‘cause when you a gang member you just have everything you want. When you a gang member, you have all the ladies. Ladies come around, be like: (He imitates a girl’s voice) ‘Where you from?’ ‘Main Street.’ ‘Oh, you from Main Street? ‘

“All gang members come out for is: They want ladies, they get easy money any kind of way. Guns, power, the excitement of the whole thing. Respect. You can walk up the street and people pass by in the car and say, ‘Hey man, what’s up? That’s my homeboy.’

“Just having that respect. Having certain people scared of you. They see you coming, and (he gasps in mock horror) you 20 pounds lighter than him, he’s a big guy and he’s scared: ‘Oh, that’s such and such. He’s bad. You don’t want to touch him.’ You have whole school grounds scattering because you from the same set.

“It was like that movie ‘Scarface’ (about Al Capone). Everybody say, ‘I’m gonna be like him, make all this money, be 17 in a Mercedes.’ All you imagine is all this money, you doing this, you got all this. It blows your head up. That’s all you think about.

‘Momma Knows ‘

“Most of the time your momma knows what’s going on, but Momma’s not going to be the one to tell the kid to stop it,” said Stewart, who had his own apartment when he was selling cocaine but today, after serving nine months in jail, has moved back with his mother.

“Moms are too gentle. When I started gangbanging, my mother tried to get me to stop. I wouldn’t; she saw that’s what I wanted. If I did something I shouldn’t, she was there to help me. She wouldn’t, if I killed somebody, get rid of the gun. She wasn’t that deep into it. But if I do something like: ‘Hey, Momma, we just do such and such,’ she sit me down, talk to me.

“I would tell my mother everything I did. That’s the kind of relationship I had with her: ‘Oh, Momma, we just broke into this house, and if the police come here, just tell ‘em you haven’t seen me since you don’t know when.’ I’d get out of the house. She would say, ‘Hey, well if that’s what you want to do with your life, hey, you do that with your life, but I see a better way. If you don’t see it, you will in the future.’

“That’s what happened. If she’d told me, ‘You got to stay in the house,’ that’s gonna make me start arguing with her. And then she’d have been telling me, ‘You can’t do this and that in my house,’ and I’ll be: ‘Forget it, I’ll stay with one of my homeboys.’ But she didn’t want that.”

Fatherless Homes

The mothers are largely alone in carrying this load. In many sections of South Los Angeles, the majority of homes with children have no father, the majority of births are out of wedlock and up to 90% of the mothers with children are on welfare.

Charles Baylor, a sweet-faced, 14-year-old boy, has both parents at home. He’s lucky enough to have lived outside Los Angeles long enough to know what life beyond the vortex is like. His father moved the family to Alaska two years ago to take a job as a court administrator. Last year he moved back to a modest apartment in Inglewood, where Charles rediscovered gangs.

Charles is not a gang member. Most young black men are not. According to law enforcement agencies, there are about 25,000 Crips and Blood gang members or “associates” in Los Angeles County--an estimate based on arrests and field interrogations of persons stopped but not arrested. That represents about 25% of the county’s estimated 100,000 black men between the ages of 15 and 24.

Still, Charles must play the game, despite his innocence.

On the Border

The Baylor family lives a few blocks southwest of Crenshaw where the Los Angeles municipal border turns into Inglewood and the Los Angeles street gangs’ borders turn from Rolling 60s to Six-Four Brims, a Bloods gang.

Charles, a good son and a dutiful student, is frightened of pressures around him. But he doesn’t want to be messed with. So he feigns a certain toughness. He pulls his pants down so they sag at the waist. And he initiates fights between classes at Paul Revere Junior High in Pacific Palisades, where he is bused to school. His friends do the same.

He wrote an essay about it for his English class:

On the outside of me, I want to be like everybody else. I try to be a gangbanger and act hard, as we say. I have a certain name people call me and I just try to mix in with the crowd and sag, talk slang talk and fight a lot because I mess with people. It’s just like a sickness. You get ready to go through the same thing every day. It’s just a trip.

On the inside, I am the sweetest kid you could know. I know you probably don’t believe it, but when school is over, I am very scared of the same thing I be doing. I pull up my pants, turn my hat ( baseball cap ) to the front and go on about my business. When I get in the house, I am a whole different person. I help my mother out when she needs me. I help my brother out from time to time and when I get to school it gets crazy. My mother keeps telling me you’re going to need an education to make it. And I try to keep it in my head, but it slips right out. That’s why someday I can do good and other days I act like a you-know-what.

Charles has nightmares about his family’s modest apartment being shot up because gang members are pursuing him.

David Stewart, an intense, quick-witted young man who has gone back to school to complete his high school education, has lived that nightmare and awakened with an uncommon resolve.

Two things changed him. The first occurred two years ago when he was pushing his newborn daughter in a stroller to buy some diapers. He was walking through Rolling 60s territory when he was confronted by a 60 who put a gun to his head and complained about the color of the stroller. It was burgundy. Too close to red, the Bloods’ color.

Later, Stewart went to jail for selling cocaine to an undercover officer. It made him do some more thinking.

He Doesn’t Go Back

“The only thing you think is, I could have done better than this. I got out seeing that gangbanging wasn’t benefiting nobody. Long as I was gangbanging, I was Homeboy This, Homeboy That, but when I didn’t graduate high school, none of them was out there to help me. Now I don’t have my diploma, or this and that, I can’t look at them and say, ‘Can you help me do this? Can you help me take care of my family?’

“When you’re really into it, and one of the guys goes down, the homeboys are usually there at the funeral. But in this day and age, with dope like this, they figure you die, I can’t come to your funeral cause I got a big deal to take care of. It’s like you don’t really matter. I figure I don’t need it. I went to jail for selling dope, but the man I was selling dope for didn’t take care of my mother, didn’t take care of my child.”

Stewart did what most gang members never do. He cut off all his associations. He does not go back to Main and 94th streets, his old ‘hood.

“You can stop doing anything you want,” he says.

“In my mind it’s nonsense. It’s nonsense, black people killing off each other like that. It’s not what’s happening. I think it (should) make some people feel kind of funny to just kill another brother.”

That was what one of Donald Bakeer’s creative writing students at Manual Arts High, Miles Allen, was getting at a couple of months ago when he turned in a poem. It went like this:

Cooling out with the boys in the ‘hood.

Everything is OK and going good.

But nobody no how up to no good.

Big weed-smoking and 8-Ball drinking. Everybody was high as a kite.

Budd (marijuana) smoked up, beer all gone, fall to the ground, nobody is paying attention, nobody looking around.

Duck! Duck!

Boom! Boom!

‘Aw, Cuz, aw, Cuz, they are blasting.’

Silence went through the ‘hood. That is all it was.

Bakeer liked it. Miles (not his real name) was talking about trying to distance himself from the gang members he hung around with. About a week later, he was walking to a liquor store with a Crip friend when a Blood drove past and threw his gang’s sign. In defiance, the Crip threw his gang’s sign. The Crip went into the liquor store. Miles waited outside. The Blood made another pass in his car and stopped. He stepped out, walked up to Miles and shot him half a dozen times, killing him.

Silence went through the ‘hood.