Baby Insane and the Buddha

SMURF C WAS MAD-DOGGING the witness, disrespecting him with the sort of stare that might make a person permanently lose his train of thought.

But this witness wouldn’t be dis’d.

Instead, Kevin Glass rocked calmly in the witness chair and told the court how on Dec. 27 of last year he allowed detectives to strap a small recorder to his back and then strolled into San Diego’s most dangerous gang turf, where he purchased two chunks of rock cocaine from Smurf C, also known as John Coleman Clark.

Smurf C’s face tensed. He glowered. One hand was cuffed to his chair, and he leaned forward and leveled his free hand at Glass like a striking cobra.

But Glass--dressed, as always, in blue, hair pulled back in braids--just smiled and explained how Smurf C had signaled that he was offering a bargain by singing him a love song.

“ ‘He’s got a lot of love to give,’ ” Glass crooned in imitation, clearly relishing this new perspective on the justice system--and the world, for that matter.

Just a few weeks earlier, Glass could have walked into any of the Crip-controlled areas of southeastern San Diego and been greeted with high-fives and hugs. He was, after all, a respected homeboy, a Neighborhood Crip with a reputation to match his nickname: Baby Insane. Then last February, an interagency task force descended, arresting 70 Crips in the most successful gang sweep in San Diego’s history. As the hearings and trials continued through the spring and into the summer, Glass’ homeboys faced facts: Baby Insane had broken his Crip bonds and betrayed them.

Each defendant was confronted with tape recordings of his transactions and a street-smart witness willing to point him out across a courtroom. Every one of the gangsters prosecuted in Operation Blue Rag either was convicted or pleaded guilty--Smurf C got the maximum sentence for selling cocaine because of Glass’ testimony last March. By August, San Diego’s most violent gang was, at least for a while, out of business.

Down in the neighborhood, only one question remained, the same question that defense attorneys had used in a futile effort to chip away at the credibility of the prosecution’s key witness: Why had Baby Insane betrayed his homeboys? The cops must have had an awfully hard twist on him, it was suggested, some crime held over his head to coerce his cooperation. Or maybe he sold out for a few pieces of silver.

In case after case, though, Glass rocked gently in the witness chair and shook his head. No, it wasn’t a deal that turned him, he said. And there wasn’t enough money on Earth to make him agree to spend the rest of his life as a walking bull’s-eye.

Sometimes, when defense attorneys pressed, Glass told the court, “I just wanted to do something different, something good instead of gangbanging,” and the defendants leaned back with sickly smiles and shook their heads in disbelief and disgust.

Other times, though, Glass just shrugged and gave a simpler answer: “I met Detective Birse.”

“He met Pat Birse, man,” a prosecutor would later repeat. “He met the Buddha.”

IT IS ANOTHER spring night in “America’s Finest City,” and Detective Pat Birse is on a typical gang-unit hit-and-run blitz through the parts of San Diego that never make the travel brochures. With a dozen other cops, he quietly slips between two decomposing duplexes and moves in on a group of suspected Oriental Boy Warriors as they sit in a semicircle, illuminated by a back-yard campfire. In seconds, the young Asian men are up against a wall, getting frisked. Under a spotlight near the fire, two Chinese fighting fish--one iridescent red, the other blue--do a macabre dance in a glass jar.

One by one, the detectives stop to watch the eerie spectacle in the jar. Some offer encouragement to one combatant or the other in the lopsided battle. Some simply stare, transfixed, as the fish struggle, nipping tiny pieces of flesh off each other.

Then Birse steps into the light of the fire. Decked out, as usual, in brown cords, a black-and-tan letterman’s jacket and cowboy boots, he watches the fight for a moment and then slips his fingers into the jar. Plucking out the losing fish, he drops it into a water-filled bowl and walks away.

Ten minutes later, the unit is hard-charging through the streets again. Spotting a group of suspected drug dealers, Birse whips his blue Chevrolet Astrovan across the avenue and over the curb, pinning a cluster of young black men in his headlights. He jumps out and rushes them, gun drawn.

“Don’t move!” he shouts, displaying all the sensitivity of a feeding piranha. “I said don’t move, (expletive)!”

And there you have it, say people who know Birse--the yin and yang of the Buddha.

Not that Birse’s nickname has anything to do, officially, with Eastern wisdom. An ex-partner, Ernie Trumper, nailed him with the name because of the way the Le Tigre knit shirts Birse favors bulge Buddha-like at the midsection.

“I never liked that nickname, and I don’t today,” Birse will tell you, in a growl so consistently mellow that it inspires colleagues to offer up parodies: “This is Pat (Buddha) Birse, K-Jazz FM, sending you the best of Count Basie, all night long.”

Patrick Flanagan Birse was born in the San Diego suburb of Pacific Beach in 1947, the first of four children and the only boy. At 17, he joined the Marine Corps and spent from May, 1965, to May, 1966, in Vietnam. Leaving the Marines as a staff sergeant, Birse enrolled in San Diego City College and later earned an administrative justice degree from Chapman College in Orange County.

He joined the San Diego Police Department on July 11, 1969. As he worked his way through the ranks, Birse earned a reputation as a sort of one-man, good-cop-bad-cop combo: someone ghetto kids affectionately call Pat Pat, someone who stopped the escape of alleged child killer James Warren Bland by putting a bullet in his buttocks.

The most impressive thing about Birse, though, is that he is a cop criminals can talk to. He gets them to tell him things they shouldn’t; he gets them to do things that could get them killed.

Birse learned the value of picking the criminal brain early on, by watching other detectives who had the knack. His insight into how bad guys think was sharpened in the mid-’70s during a long undercover assignment. To pass as a fence, he had to dress, act and think like a criminal. Birse played the part well. “I’d be standing in line at a hamburger place, and people would treat me like dirt.” He began to get a glimpse of the world through a criminal’s eyes. That turned out to be the key to interrogation--and more.

When Birse is the one being interrogated, he steers the conversation away from himself. The only approach to investigations is teamwork, he says as he sits at the cluster of gray desks he shares with three detectives in the police department’s gang-unit office.

“You can’t fake sincerity, especially with a street person,” Birse says. Then he nods toward his partner, Gary Jaus, a soft-spoken 34-year-old, who directs a church bell choir when he’s not rousting gangbangers. “That’s why people talk to Gary, open up to him. Jaus studies people. . . . But he never loses respect for someone.”

Finally, of course, Jaus intervenes. “Everything he says, double it for him. I’ve never met anyone who understands the criminal mind as well as Pat.”

Back in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, for example, San Diego’s biker gangs began a shooting war over the booming trade in methamphetamine--the white outlaw entrepreneur’s equivalent of rock cocaine. As part of a team drawn from local, state and federal law-enforcement agencies, Birse assisted in turning several high-ranking members of the secretive biker groups. Major convictions resulted.

Intent on continuing the pressure on gangs, Birse made it his business to keep an eye out for other informants. In 1984, he heard about Charming Charlie, checked his background and brought him in for questioning.

“Charlie was a real gangster. He was in the pen all his life,” Birse says. “His brother was shot to death by the San Jose Police Department. He grew up in an orphanage. You’d look at him and say, ‘This is a tough person.’ ”

But Birse saw something else. “I just had a feeling about him,” Birse says. So he started calling Charlie. Charlie would hang up. Birse would call again.

“With a guy like Charlie, he’s sizing you up,” Birse says. “He’s thinking, ‘Is this person smart? Weak? A tough guy? What does he know?’ ”

The next time Birse and Charlie got together to talk, Birse told him, “You know something? You have a kind heart.”

“He’d say ‘Get away from me, man.’ And I’d say, ‘I need you. I need your help. And I know that underneath, you’re a real good person. You have a good heart.’ ”

Before long, Charlie allowed a recording device to be strapped to his body, and with Birse and his team providing backup, approached well-known bikers, purchasing large quantities of methamphetamine.

When Charlie took the witness stand, ranking members of Hells Angels went to prison. “I wouldn’t have done it with anyone but Pat,” Charlie said recently from an undisclosed location where he lives under a new identity manufactured for him by the federal witness protection program. “One of the reasons I try so hard to do good now, to stay out of trouble, is I want Pat to have a high opinion of me. He really honestly cares about how I do.”

In 1988, Birse was assigned to the robbery detail. In his 20 years with the police department, his work had often taken him into San Diego’s gang territory. He thought he knew the community well. But working daily on the gang crime of choice gave him a new perspective. “I’d never seen such a relatively small group commit so much crime in such a short period,” he says now. “It was incredible how much violent crime the Neighborhood Crips were committing.”

So the Buddha joined a team and started looking around for someone to give him an inside look at how street gangs work. It wasn’t long before he came across the name “Baby Insane.”

KEVIN GLASS WAS BORN in South-Central Los Angeles in May, 1966, less than a year after the Watts riots. He never knew his father. His mother died when he was 7. Glass thinks it was tuberculosis, he will tell you, his voice, usually cocksure, suddenly unconvincing and constricted.

Glass’ uncle, just a week out of prison on a marijuana conviction, drove to Los Angeles and took the boy to live with him in a modest east San Diego neighborhood, where Glass spent languid afternoons in a scrubby canyon nearby, plopping rocks into an irrigation runoff pond and scooping up wriggling black tadpoles. My “polliwog days,” he says wistfully.

It was indeed a time of metamorphosis.

For at least three generations, Latino gangs have staked out turf in San Diego. In the early 1970s, convicted criminals from Los Angeles’ black street gangs began showing up in San Diego; by some accounts, they were ordered there by Los Angeles authorities. Los Angeles’ gang culture reproduced itself almost immediately. Southeastern San Diego was divided between sets of Crips and sets of Bloods, also called Pirus. The Crips wore blue, the Bloods wore red, and, just as in Los Angeles, each gang harbored a homicidal hostility toward the other.

Glass wound up living in Neighborhood Crip turf. He was small for his age. His new friends started calling him Half Pint; the girls called him Little Pup. Neither name offered much of a psychological deterrent to the predators in the neighborhood.

The way Glass tells it, when he was 8, he saw a more impressive name on the graffiti-splattered walls. In a sort of idle tribute, he began spray-painting Insane around town. One afternoon, while he held the paint can, the old gangster himself came by.

“So you want to be Insane?” the O.G. asked. Suddenly, the homeboys hanging out with him--Tray Dog, Crip Dog, Thai Stick, Salt Rock--were wrestling Glass down while the others kicked and punched him, jumping him into the gang. “Nothing fierce or nothing,” he says. “Nothing major.”

Convinced that Glass was a fighter, Insane took the boy by the arm and gave him a new nickname: Baby Insane. While Glass snuffled back a bloody nose, the O.G. completed the initiation: “Uphold this name,” he told Glass. “Never do anything to betray Crip. Always protect your own. Never let anyone disrespect you. And always hold down the set--the people in the neighborhood that are your homeboys are like your brothers.”

“I took it serious. You had to take it seriously,” Glass says. “He was Big Insane. I was Baby Insane. From then on, it was, like, runnin’ wild. I just adapted to the name.”

Baby Insane and his buddies got their first taste of derring-do by swiping fruit from neighbors’ trees. Soon they moved on to stealing pop bottles from garages and cleaning out back-yard freezers. By his ninth birthday, Glass was smoking marijuana regularly and had tried PCP. Stealing cars came next, then home burglaries. Gradually, almost inexorably, Glass and his homies began riding the statistical undertow that says black men are 10 times more likely than white men to die at the hands of another and puts one in four black men behind bars or on probation or parole at any given time.

From the time he was jumped into the gang, Glass made up for his small stature with a hair-trigger willingness to fight and keep fighting with lunatic abandon. The crease on his head is the work of a drive-by shooter. His elbow shows evidence of another bullet wound. He earned the scars on his back one night when a rival Crip set crashed a party he and some homeboys were attending and opened fire with shotguns.

Glass tells the stories of these battles complete with the sound effects kids make when they’re playing cops and robbers: “ Peeow, peeow, peeow. “ His thinking on why he committed drive-by shootings has the same sense of unreality. “We didn’t like Pirus, and we wanted to go kill some,” he laughs. “We just didn’t like ‘em. We didn’t want ‘em around.”

Ask Glass if he ever shot anyone, and he gives a shrug. “I’m sure I did,” he says. “But I didn’t stick around to see if they got up or if they were dead.”

As the exploits grew more dangerous, the gang bond tightened.

“If you go in to rob a store or something,” Glass says, “and you’ve got someone watching your back with guns, if he ain’t your friend, he might let someone come up to your back and cap you. Since I was the bagman, I trusted these people with my life because I didn’t have no gun.”

One night when Glass opted not to go along, the owner of Winchell’s jewelry store put up a fight. “My homeboy said, ‘Shoot him.’ ” Another homeboy did. Five times. “You can imagine the bond they’ve got between them,” Glass says.

A handful of Neighborhood Crips started calling themselves the Mad Drivers and describing their crimes as do-or-die missions. By the time he was 13, Glass was doing a lot of them.

One night, a few Mad Drivers decided they needed some money for the weekend. Glass, Cedrick (Crip Dog) Pratt and another homie easily stole a Lincoln Continental from a bar called the Round Table. About 8 p.m., they pulled their blue handkerchiefs--the sacred symbol of Crips--over their faces, brandished a shotgun and robbed a gas station in San Diego. They robbed a man at gunpoint as he came out of a restaurant. They held up a doughnut shop.

With one person jabbing the shotgun in victims’ faces and the others collecting the cash, they robbed a man in the parking lot of a K mart and several people in the parking lot of a Sears. At an “old people’s club” in Chula Vista, Glass says, they made a man spread-eagle on the pavement and stole his money.

“Can’t you leave an old man $10 to catch a cab?” the victim pleaded.

“No!” Crip Dog shouted. Then he tossed him a dollar bill. “Take the bus.”

Intoxicated with their success, they continued rampaging through San Diego and the surrounding towns. Figuring that the Continental was getting hot, they pulled up next to a red Pontiac Firebird at an intersection. Crip Dog stuck the shotgun through the window. “Freeze! Get out! Leave your keys and run!”

Their next stop was a Kinney Shoes store. All three went in and ordered the clerks and patrons to lie on the floor. Glass cut the phone line; then they emptied the register and took off.

With 23 armed robberies under his belt, Glass figured it was time to go home. His homies said they’d give him a ride. They drove up San Diego’s Main Street, smack into a cluster of patrol cars.

“The chase was on,” Glass says, calling out the names of streets they shot up and down. With the squad cars wailing behind them and a helicopter chattering overhead, Crip Dog turned off the road and into a cemetery, stuttering over grave markers toward an exit blocked by a single-crossbar gate.

“You’re not going to make it!” Glass shouted.

“Duck!” Crip Dog yelled.

The gate peeled off the car’s top like a key taking the lid off a sardine can. The Mad Drivers were tossing their loot into the street when the topless Firebird hit a telephone pole. “I jumped out and ran up an alley and was trying to get into this girl’s house,” Glass says. “Then I heard click , click , click. “ Glass turned to face a battery of shotguns.

“The cops had those metal flashlights. They beat me up pretty good,” he says. “I was spittin’ blood in the back of the police car.”

Glass spent 2 1/2 years at California Youth Authority on the charges stemming from the Mad Driver spree. While there, he took advantage of the corrections department’s education program. He learned to arc weld.

Within a year of his release, he put his new skill to work. He and some Neighborhood Crip buddies, who now called themselves the Uzi gang, cut through the metal door of a Leo’s Stereo store. Glass was inside when two police cars, responding to the silent alarm, pulled up.

Eighteen years old at the time, Glass got another 2 1/2 years at CYA, including a 90-day evaluation at Chino Institute for Men, a medium-security adult prison. In CYA, Baby Insane did OK for himself, building respect by fighting every Blood who even thought of dis’ing him. But Chino, with its gun towers and barbed wire and the distinctive sound of double gates slamming shut, was another world.

Glass knew that if he didn’t like Chino, he’d be even less thrilled with his next likely stop on the criminal migration: Folsom or the new Richard J. Donovan prison near the Mexican border. “It was all older people in those places. I’d have to prove myself all over again,” he said.

Between his first and second convictions, Glass had returned to high school just long enough to father two daughters by two different girls. Sometimes Glass thought about whether his children would blame him for the circumstances of their lives: poor, unmarried mothers; an imprisoned father; a neighborhood where selling crack added up to a Horatio Alger opportunity.

As far as Glass knew, there were only two ways of life: the street life he was born into and the straight life that surrounded him but remained absolutely out-of-bounds. Although he never much understood that other life, it intrigued him. So one night, he wrote a letter to the San Diego district attorney, telling him Baby Insane might be willing to offer some information. He never heard back.

Released on parole in 1987, Glass got a work-furlough job at a hazardous-waste disposal firm at the 32nd Street Shipyard. Although Glass waffles here, police suggest that he also moonlighted in other equally dangerous, though less legal, pursuits.

Less than a year into his parole, while Glass was down in the cavernous tanks of a big ship, decked out in a yellow jumpsuit, breathing bottled air and sucking up poison with a high-pressure hose, corrections-department officers visited his uncle’s home. They left word for Glass to report to his parole officer.

The officer questioned him for about an hour, intimating that authorities had parole violations on him, including a dirty drug test. Then the office door opened and an intense man with a pot belly walked in and began pacing the room.

Glass assumes a “Dragnet” voice when he recalls the meeting: “It was a sunny day in June. . . . Little did I know that Pat Birse was waiting to pounce.”

WHEN PAT BIRSE JOINED the robbery detail in 1988, San Diego’s supermarkets were under siege. Detectives labeled the robbers the Git Down gang. The pattern seldom varied: Several young black men, armed with handguns and sawed-off shotguns, their faces concealed by blue bandannas, entered a Vons, an Alpha Beta or an Osco Drug Store and ordered everyone to lie on the floor. They demanded that the store manager open the safe while the cashiers emptied the registers. After filling a blue duffel bag with cash and money orders, they walked calmly out of the store, climbed into a car they had stolen earlier and sped away.

The detectives working on the case, including Jaus, Jerry Wiggins and now Birse, had information that Neighborhood Crips were involved.

Poring over computerized police records, piecing together who was in custody and who was out, Birse came across the name Kevin Glass, a.k.a. Baby Insane. In parole files, he unearthed Glass’ letter to the district attorney. Baby Insane, he discovered, was an O.G. respected by his homies. The Crips were the only real family Glass had, and tests indicated that despite a life of dumb decisions, Glass had a very high IQ.

Birse arranged for the invitation Glass had received from his parole officer. As Jaus and Wiggins recall the scene when Birse and Glass met, it was like a courting ritual, the street-smart criminal and the veteran cop circling each other, sizing each other up. By all accounts, Birse got the upper hand.

“He scammed me,” Glass says now with admiration. Birse told him he was under arrest for a dirty test.

“They just wanted to stop the robberies. He’d done his homework real well. I guess he figured I was ripe for picking.”

Holding the threat of a parole violation over his head, the officers asked him who was behind the supermarket robberies. Glass listened closely. The detectives knew more about him and his gang than Glass thought possible. And they actually treated him with respect. Glass decided that, just this once, he’d talk.

Working with the information Glass provided, the detectives compiled enough evidence to send the Git Down gangsters to prison. Birse thanked the informant, praised him for helping the community and said, “If you want to keep in touch, please do.”

“It took me about a week to think about it, to figure out, do I want to do this? Do I want to betray Crip?” Glass remembers. “I’ve been shot. I’ve seen friends die. I’ve had friends die next to me. I’ve been to the hospital and cried. I’ve been to many, many funerals. There is a certain inner bond between me and Crip that I love.”

On the other hand: “I’d never known a police officer before, friendly-wise,” Glass says. And Birse treated him like a friend. “It wasn’t like he’d come to me and say, ‘Go do this, go do that.’ He’d ask, politely, ‘Kev, do you happen to know anything about this?’ ”

Glass decided he would keep in touch with the Buddha. Young gangsters were eager to get the advice of Baby Insane on crimes they planned and to brag to him about the crimes they’d just committed. When a Crip called M-Loc killed a man, Glass phoned Birse and told him where to look for evidence. When a new Git Down gang crossed the county line and went on a rampage through San Clemente, Mission Viejo and El Toro, Glass filled in Birse and Jaus on his conversations with the culprits.

But nowhere in any of the official reports on these crimes is there mention of an informant. The trust between Glass and Birse and the robbery detail grew. Meeting at coffee shops or riding together in unmarked cars, they talked for hours about their lives, about the ways their professions intersected. “I viewed him as a consultant,” Birse says of Glass, who took great pride in showing the team every corner of the neighborhood, telling them the street names of all the homeboys, telling them where to find stolen cars, explaining how easy it was to steal shotguns from police cruisers.

For his part, the Buddha became a sort of mentor for Glass. He brought him to his new, pink-stucco Spanish-style home in a manicured suburb of San Diego and introduced him to his wife and two daughters. When Birse’s wife, Marilyn, finally met the legendary gangster, she shook her head: “But you’re only a baby.” One of Birse’s teen-age daughters, a surfer, worried about him. “You’re not letting my dad put you in danger, are you?” she asked.

Danger was a matter of perspective. All of the original Mad Drivers and Uzi gang were in prison, Glass knew--at least the lucky ones. Crip Dog Pratt, the balls-out graveyard driver from the robbery spree, had gone out one evening in 1987 to rob a Domino’s Pizza in National City. The manager shut the door and called for help. A blast from a police shotgun caught Crip Dog square in the head as he left the store.

“I knew that if I stayed in the gang and I stayed loyal to them, one of three things was going to happen,” Glass says. “Either I was going to die, I was going to go to prison for the rest of my life, or I’d become a hard-core criminal. Robbing banks was the next step.”

Still, there was no way to simply chuck the old life and walk away. “I was used to that adrenaline of doing robberies, doing drive-bys, hanging out with all the girls and selling dope.” Playing cop, he discovered, was a little like a methadone program.

In return for his help, the detectives gave Glass cash from the detail’s informant fund--$50 here, $100 there--and occasionally cash from their own pockets as well. Then Glass came through with some information that proved particularly lucrative.

Throughout the late ‘80s, the trials of Sagon Penn embroiled San Diego in racial turmoil. Two juries had acquitted Penn of murdering a police officer, deciding that the attack was self-defense against a cop’s brutality. Sagon’s father, Thomas Penn, was among those who had charged that the case was a reflection of deep-seated racism in the San Diego Police Department.

At Birse’s suggestion, Glass went to the Drug Enforcement Administration with the information that Thomas Penn was dealing large quantities of cocaine. When the elder Penn was convicted, the DEA treated Glass generously.

Glass used part of his $4,000 DEA “reward” to buy a ’73 Cutlass Supreme. He spent $400 on a pair of Cazal sunglasses and another $400 on a headstone for his mother’s grave.

As before, Glass’ role in the case remained off the record. But it would only be a matter of time, Birse told him, until some young Crip noticed that hanging out with Baby Insane was as good as drawing a “Go to Jail” card.

Birse told Glass about Charlie and the federal witness protection program and about how a grateful Establishment had set the former Hells Angel up with a whole new identity. He warned him that acceptance into the program wasn’t a sure thing, but to Glass, the possibility looked like a secret passageway from the street life to the straight life.

Would Glass be willing to wear a tape recorder, buy crack from his homeboys and then square off against them in court? Birse asked.

Glass saw his bond with the Crips snap; his addiction to the street life would be cured cold-turkey by vengeful homeboys eager to gun him down.

“I said yes,” Glass would later testify, gently rocking in the witness chair. “And since then, we’ve been rocking and rolling.”

IN MARCH OF LAST YEAR,spurred by the stepped-up war on drugs, the San Diego district attorney’s office, working with the police department and a hodgepodge of state and federal agencies, conceived Operation Blue Rag. The idea was to put away violent gangbangers by hitting their most common criminal sideline: selling crack. The targets would be the three most dangerous gang sets in San Diego: the Neighborhood Crips, the Linda Vista Crips and the West Coast Crips.

In November, Birse transferred from the robbery detail to the gang unit and joined the Blue Rag team: at this point, Wiggins; Garland Peed, the deputy district attorney in charge of the case, and Glass. “As far as we were concerned, he was an equal member of the team,” Birse says of Glass.

On Dec. 6, the team made its first buy. Birse carefully strapped a sophisticated Swiss Nagra recorder, about the size of a Walkman, to Glass’ back, running two microphones up to his chest. The team briefed him on the night’s assignment in the back of Birse’s Astrovan. The focal point was 30th and Imperial, a graffiti-scarred area of small businesses and burned-out shops in the heart of West Coast Crips turf.

As Glass picked his way through the crowd on the corner, he spotted an alleged O.G. named Marcus Dawayne White--Casanova to his friends. Glass had already told Birse that he thought Casanova was dangerous. Birse checked it out and agreed.

The Nagra recorder picked up the sounds of the street and the $40 transaction:

“Yeah, loc, are you serving, cuz?” Glass asked in street slang. “Proper 40, cuz.”

“Forty, 40, 40,” Casanova said.

“Cuz, you know me, don’t you? You know, I’m Baby Insane.”

“Exact,” Casanova said.

“Say, who you, cuz?” Glass asked.

“Casanova.”

“Cas, oh yeah, cuz!”

With two rocks in his hand, Glass walked off. Back in the van, the Blue Rag team was ecstatic. “Man, if we can buy from him, we can buy from anyone!” Peed said.

For the next two months, the team worked almost every night, sometimes sending Glass off to make two or three purchases. “It was almost like a job, you know,” Glass said. The taped accounts of the operation are systematic: “The date is Jan. 2, 1990,” Birse says in one, his mellifluous monotone making the narration sound like a radio drama. “The time is 20:34 hours, 8:34 p.m. We’re at a secure location. A parking lot near the SDPD facility. . . . I just searched the confidential source’s person. He’s wearing a Dallas Cowboys sweat shirt, stone-washed jeans, white socks, brown shoes. He’s wearing a black-and-blue Puma jogging-suit top. I placed an on-body recording-device tape recorder on his person. I searched all of his pockets. . . .”

Twice, on the operation’s off nights, Glass succumbed to temptation and smoked crack. Twice, Birse locked him up. “It’s like taking an alcoholic and asking them to go into bars every night,” Birse says. “Somewhere down the road they’re going to take a drink.”

Birse’s biggest concern was that Glass would get made while he was wearing the Nagra. For Glass, it all came naturally. Birse and Wiggins often would cruise nervously past a buy scene just to keep Glass covered. On more than one of the tapes, Glass spots the van and shouts out the Crip code for police: “One time!”

Occasionally, homegirls would step up to him on the street and hug him. He’d push them off, muttering, “Get away, baby, you wanta mess up my clothes?”

Only one incident really shook Glass. It occurred during the sort of sidewalk shakedown he’d been subjected to since elementary school. Glass and some homeboys were hanging out by an apartment building when the police department’s Special Enforcement Unit came screeching up. Set up to combat gang violence, the unit uses no-nonsense tactics similar to those of the Los Angeles Police Department. When San Diego’s gangsters see the unit coming, they shout, “Daryl Gates!”

That afternoon, one homeboy smarted off, and a unit officer began “dishragging him--shaking him like a dishrag, like a rag doll,” Glass says. Meanwhile, another officer frisked Glass and found the beeper Glass carried to stay in touch with the Blue Rag team. The beeper went off.

When the officer recognized the number appearing on the digital readout as a police phone, she demanded: “Why are they calling you?”

“Don’t you know?” Glass answered, trying to be cool.

She called over her partner. “Look at this number,” she whispered.

“She was making a big deal of it. She started getting really snotty. I thought I was burned,” Glass says. Finally the officer backed off.

To squash any suspicion, about a week later Birse rousted Glass while he was with gang members. Glass cast him a friendly glance. Birse was all over him. “What are you smiling at?” he snarled in his best bad-cop voice. “You know you’re hanging around with a robber? A thug?” he asked Glass’ companions.

By mid-February, the Blue Rag team gathered to check their progress in their unofficial headquarters, a district attorney’s office on the fifth floor of the county courthouse. On one wall was a poster from the film “Colors” that proclaimed, “In America’s cities, people die for wearing the wrong colors.” A computer-generated banner read: “Crush the Crips. Bleed the Bloods.”

Glass had made purchases from almost every West Coast Crip as well as a number of Neighborhood and Linda Vista Crips. It was time for the final phase of Operation Blue Rag to begin. For three days and nights in late February, a team of state, federal and local law-enforcement officials quietly swept through the streets of southeastern San Diego, arresting 70 gang members on charges of selling crack or for parole violations.

The Blue Rag team flew Glass and his girlfriend to another city to await the hearings and trials. In May, the couple had a daughter. Glass was in the delivery room, doing Lamaze. The only people who sent gifts and congratulations were law-enforcement officers. “Jaus is like a big brother to me; Wiggins is the uncle,” Glass said. Of Birse, he adds, “If I’d ever known my real father, if I’d had a choice, I’d have pictured him just like Pat.”

Adds Glass’ girlfriend: “Kevin is the son Pat never had.”

The couple named the Buddha as their daughter’s godfather.

ON MARCH 15, TWO DAYSbefore preliminary hearings began on the Operation Blue Rag cases, armed witness-protection guards escorted Glass back to San Diego. That night, the Blue Rag team reconvened in a secured hotel room and began preparing for the rush of hearings and trials in state court.

When the hearings began, Glass was shuttled back and forth between San Diego and his temporary home. If accepted into the witness-protection program, Glass would get a new name, a fabricated background and a new start. As Birse had warned him, though, there was no guarantee that the program would let him in. So for most of the spring and summer, Glass lived in limbo, trying to understand who he was, who he had been, who he might become. “If I were on the streets, I’d be expected to uphold the Baby Insane name,” he said one afternoon between hearings. “Now, in my life, I’m supposed to be a different person, but sometimes I have trouble.”

When he rode the bus in his new neighborhood, young gang members approached him, sizing him up, asking, “Say, Blood, what’s happening, Blood?”

“They keep saying ‘Blood, Blood, Blood.’ It’s like I’m having a flashback,” Glass said. “Sometimes I’ll just snap. I’ll say, ‘I ain’t no Blood. Stop calling me Blood!’ And they’ll say, ‘What are you? You a Crip?’ And I’ll say, ‘No, but you’d best stop calling me Blood.’ ”

“Eventually, it’s going to wear off,” Glass said confidently, tapping together his high top sneakers with the blue laces.

While federal cases trailed into August, the last state case was heard in mid-June, when Marcus Dawayne White, a.k.a. Casanova, took the stand. Through his attorney, Casanova denied that he had sold Glass crack.

But Glass and Birse packed a one-two punch. Glass, still looking every bit the gangster, gazed right at the jury and patiently defined the street slang of drug dealers; Birse described in his soothing Buddha voice the systematic way the Blue Rag team had pieced together its evidence. And when John Davidson, a deputy district attorney, slipped the cassette of the transaction into his boom box, Casanova’s own mother could not testify that the voice was not her son’s.

The jury found Casanova guilty. When the last federal case ended in mid-August, everyone against whom Glass testified had been convicted.

Out in the streets of southeastern San Diego, though, the verdict was split. Some argued that Blue Rag was all huggermuggering and hoopla; that the gangsters would soon be paroled and return to the impoverished life from which they’d come. But most in the community openly applauded Glass and the statistics to which he contributed. As of July, gang-related killings were down 50% from the previous year.

If opinions on Glass’ actions were mixed, though, the sentence on the streets--pronounced by friends and enemies alike--was unanimous: “He’s dead meat.”

“He put away some people that would have died for him,” said a West Coast homegirl who calls herself Dimples. “He betrayed his homeboys.”

“Baby Insane--that’s not a name you think is going to be a snitch,” muttered another young Crip. Then someone chimed in with a nearly universal Crip appraisal: “He just let his own self down. Ruined his life. The police, they through with him now, they ain’t going to pay for his funeral arrangements.”

Glass’ uncle, after kicking his own drug problem, dedicated his life to counseling inmates on the dangers of dope. He has not talked to his nephew since Glass began working as an informant. But he heard about Operation Blue Rag, and he’s angry. He believes Glass was manipulated into making a possibly fatal decision.

“This isn’t tiddlywinks, man,” he snapped. Some of the Crips Glass put away would kill him without blinking. “They’re without remorse. . . .”

The whole thing, he said, is another sad twist in a life that got off to a bad start. Hearing that Glass attributed his mother’s death to tuberculosis, the uncle heaved a sigh. “She was murdered, man. A man raped her and beat her. Down in Watts. Kevin was there. He witnessed it.”

Now, he said, he just hopes Glass can stay alive.

Even law-enforcement officers and district attorneys who are now rooting for Glass, who consider him their friend or brother, admit in candid moments that they have doubts. The sad pattern, they say, is that kids who grew up on the streets usually return to the streets.

Birse, though, refuses to entertain thoughts of failure. The big success of Operation Blue Rag, he says, is not that it took 70 dangerous Crips off the street for a while, but that it gave one young Crip the chance to break away from the tragic statistics and get a shot at a different life.

“That’s as important to me as arresting people. Kevin shows that people can change,” Birse says. “I say these things and people look at me, like, What are you talking about? But it’s the truth.”

ON THE EVENING OF AUG. 6,with all but one trial behind him, Glass got the call to start packing. The next morning, a federal marshal drove him, his girlfriend and their baby to the airport. They disappeared. No phone calls, no change-of-address forms, no goodbys permitted. But then, the Blue Rag team had been saying goodby for months.

On one sunny afternoon during the preliminary hearings, for instance, Glass, Jaus and Birse climbed into the Astrovan and drove to San Diego International Airport. Checking their weapons with airport security, the detectives walked Glass to the gate. As they waited for the passengers to board, Birse threw an arm over Glass’ shoulder and offered advice; Jaus brought him a soda. Then Birse drove along the shore, past the sailboats and fancy restaurants and down to where the murals of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and other black oracles of hope battle with gang graffiti for people’s attention.

Stopping at 30th and Imperial, Birse called a burned-out former gangster over to the van. “How are things?” he asked.

“See for yourself,” the man said. “It’s a ghost town.”

A few blocks down the road, a boy of 7 or 8 waved Birse over. Birse knew the boy’s family. He’d watched the child grow up.

“Hey, Pat,” the boy said. “Give me 10 bucks--I want to see a movie.”

“I don’t have 10 dollars,” Birse said. He dug into his pocket and handed the boy the six dollars he did have.

The boy grinned. “Thanks,” he said.

Then Birse fixed him with a gaze that said “Don’t dis me.” “By the way,” he growled, “how come you’re wearing all that blue?”