Li’l Monster and Bone Offer Nation New Image of Gangs : Fame: The onetime gangbangers seize upon media attention to call for empowerment in the community.

Backstage at NBC’s studios in Rockefeller Center last week, Li’l Monster and Bone--members of two rival Los Angeles gangs--sat in a dressing room where the stars of “Saturday Night Live” suit up, shut their eyes and let a makeup artist pat their noses with a pink powder puff.

Talk-show host Phil Donahue had flown the two men to New York City, housed them in a luxury Park Avenue hotel and delivered them via limousine to NBC, where they were about to be interviewed in front of 13 million viewers. If they were nervous, it did not show.

“You got cappuccino?” Bone, a man in his early 20s, asked a Donahue aide. The answer was no--just regular coffee.

“What? NBC don’t have no cappuccino?” chided Li’l Monster, 26.

Talk about attitude--these guys have got it.

In the wake of the riots, as the news media have scrambled to sum up the troubles of South Los Angeles, Li’l Monster and Bone--both felons--have become instant celebrities. Each characterizes himself as an “inactive” gang member--Bone from Athens Park Bloods, and Li’l Monster from the Eight-Tray Gangster Crips.

In addition to “Donahue,” they’ve appeared twice on ABC’s “Nightline” and National Public Radio, and have been quoted by the country’s most reputable newspapers.

Both were once hard-core gangbangers and have records, notably first-degree murder and attempted murder for Li’l Monster, and assault with a deadly weapon for Bone.

Being articulate gangbangers, even inactive articulate gangbangers, gets them air time. And once they are on, Li’l Monster says with a smirk, “we start dropping political views.”

Intelligent and impeccably accessorized--both wear unscuffed athletic shoes, baseball caps and earrings--they have become America’s most recognized gang members. With every sound bite, they are reshaping the nation’s image of what it means to be “down for the ‘hood.”

Even members of rival gang sets say they have never seen gang members portrayed in such a favorable light.

“We have so much anger in us that when we get on TV, sometimes people express theyself wrong,” said Chop, 27, a Water Gate Crip from Inglewood. Li’l Monster and Bone do not seem to have that problem, he said. “Most people are agreeing with what they’re doing. They mean what they say.”

Mixing class-conscious ideology and tough street banter, the two have endorsed a truce between the Crips and the Bloods, calling for unity to protect against a common foe: the Los Angeles Police Department. When time allows, they go further, urging the black community to demand a role in rebuilding their city and mocking those who would rather rely on politicians.

“We don’t need you right-wing conservatives and we don’t need you liberals,” Li’l Monster said the other day at a news conference near the intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues, where the verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating case prompted violence. “What we need is empowerment in our community and one way or another that’s what we’re gonna get. We’re tired of asking.”

Those views are not necessarily shared by all Crips and Bloods. Though they dress in gang attire--Li’l Monster favors Georgetown University T-shirts trimmed in blue, the Crip color; Bone often wears a St. Louis Cardinals cap lettered in red, the Bloods’ chosen hue--they say they speak as individuals, not as gang leaders. Though still in close contact with their homeboys, both men live outside their home turf and both say they no longer participate in illegal gang activities.

Despite that, some active gang members who have seen them on television call their message of peace persuasive. And lately, there have been moments when Li’l Monster and Bone have appeared to speak for a larger constituency: the angry, urban poor.

“Let me say this,” Li’l Monster told “Nightline” anchor Ted Koppel a few nights after the riots began. “It’s not just the Rodney King verdict that made the crowd move like we did, OK? We’re talking 400 years of oppression, we’re talking Latasha Harlins, we’re talking . . .”

“Ron Settles,” said Bone, naming the Cal State Long Beach football star who was found hanged in a Signal Hill jail cell in 1981.

“Right,” continued Li’l Monster. “We’re talking . . .”

“Oliver R. Beasley,” Bone said, evoking the name of a Nation of Islam member slain in 1990 by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies.

“Exactly. So, I mean, you just can’t suppress 400 years of oppression overnight. We’re mad. We’re upset. We’re frustrated.”

And now, suddenly, they are famous. Strangers, white and black, shake their hands in restaurants, in shopping malls, on the street. Their phones ring off the hook. Arsenio Hall called Bone the other night. So, Bone says, did Jesse Jackson. Football Hall of Famer Jim Brown, whose Amer-I-Can program for ex-convicts and gang members has attracted its share of media attention, jokes that lately he is having trouble competing.

“I can’t get on Larry King without these guys,” he said last week as he, too, waited to be interviewed on “Donahue.” But Brown says he is glad to have them by his side.

“People don’t pay attention to intelligence unless it’s framed in terms of Harvard or Yale. But when it comes to life, having the courage of their convictions and truly making change. . . .” Brown paused, casting a fond look toward the two young men. “These will make change.”

Some worry that Li’l Monster and Bone have gotten caught up in the media hype, trumpeting an irreverent bravado that could aggravate tensions between black neighborhoods and police. Li’l Monster calls the Los Angeles Police Department “the pigs.” LAPD officials refuse to comment on him and Bone at all, saying that to recognize individual gangs or gang members gives them a false sense of celebrity.

Still, many agree that the two young men have the power to do a world of good.

“They ain’t about getting together and shooting it out with LAPD. These guys don’t want to die. They want to see their neighborhoods come back up,” said Jim Galipeau, a Los Angeles County probation officer who works in the gang unit in South Los Angeles and who also appeared on “Nightline.” Among gang members, he said, “they’re both high status, loved and respected. People look up to them--even the young ones who won’t listen. . . . Nobody can do what they can do.”

Li’l Monster and Bone met a few years ago through writer and former model Leon Bing, who was writing a book about Los Angeles street gangs. Each had already earned the title Original Gangster, or “O.G.,” by proving their loyalty--through violence or otherwise--to their gang sets. They were established gangbangers, men of frightening reputation, and they were supposed to be enemies.

But through Bing, Li’l Monster and Bone forged an unlikely alliance. When Bing’s book, “Do or Die,” was published last year, the two men accompanied her on a book tour, flying to interviews in Seattle and San Francisco. Built on common experience, their friendship has endured.

Li’l Monster, whose real name is Kershaun Scott, grew up at 69th Street and Denker Avenue--just four blocks from Florence and Normandie. The youngest of six children, he says he always loved to read, stealing library books to feed his curiosity. His next-oldest brother, whose gang name is Monster Kody, used to try to tease him into working out with weights.

“I work out,” Li’l Monster would tell him, tapping a finger at his temple.

Their mother, a bartender, was not wild about her two youngest children being Eight-Tray Gangsters. (That is how they spell it: Li’l Monster even has it tattooed on his arm that way, and called it a “major dis”--disrespectful--that The Times had spelled it “8-Trey.” The LAPD identifies them as 8-Treys, trey from playing card slang for three.)

But Li’l Monster says he never considered not being part of the gang. There was a camaraderie in the gang, he says, a feeling of power that made living in constant danger seem worth it.

Then, on New Year’s Eve 1980, three rival gang members ambushed Monster Kody, wounding him critically. The next day, Li’l Monster--then 15--took revenge, opening fire on a group of people on the other gang’s turf. He was convicted of one count of first-degree murder and four counts of attempted murder and served more than five years in prison.

Since his release, Li’l Monster has spent time in Las Vegas, working as a salesman and studying computer programming. Now, he and his wife, Jennifer, a cosmetologist, live in Hawthorne with their 2-year-old son, Kershaun II.

Li’l Monster says he hopes his namesake will never be a member of a gang. Still, he continues to spend about a quarter of his time with his homeboys in the old neighborhood. While in New York, he learned that three reputed Eight-Tray gangsters and one alleged gang associate had been arrested in the beating of Reginald O. Denny, the white trucker who was yanked from his cab on the first day of rioting.

Li’l Monster condemned the beating, but said even if gangbangers are convicted, “I would never turn against my own.”

Bone grew up south of Watts, in the neighborhood the Athens Park Bloods call home. Raised by his grandparents, a nurse and a Douglas aircraft foreman, he was kicked out of public schools for gang activity. A graduate of Verbum Dei High School, a Catholic school, he says he has studied telecommunications at Riverside College and Cal State Long Beach.

Bone, who manages a rap group called OFTB (Operation From the Bottom), keeps most details of his life private. Though his face is familiar to millions of television viewers, he prefers not to reveal his real name or his age. He lives in Lakewood, he says, and is the father of two small daughters. When asked about his criminal record, he lists one conviction--for assault with a deadly weapon.

What Bone likes to talk about are the men who made a difference in his life, men such as H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver and George Jackson, whose writings he says taught him about the world. Li’l Monster, too, has a list of favorite authors ranging from Malcolm X to Mike Davis. Last week, he was reading Studs Terkel’s “Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession.”

With influences such as those, it should come as no surprise when their talk turns to racism and Reaganomics, reinvestment and revolution. Sometimes the self-described “community activists” sound like a lexicon of radical chic, leaning heavily on terms like “class struggle” and “mass propaganda.” Other times, they bolster each other’s arguments with quotes from the U. S. Constitution or the Geneva Conventions.

“Whenever we get together,” Bone said recently, “we kind of click.”

That is part of the reason K & S Speakers, a Boston-based speakers bureau, is promoting the duo on the college lecture circuit. Li’l Monster has made paid appearances at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Claremont-McKenna College and UC Riverside, according to Ellie Deegan, a vice president at the company.

But this fall, Deegan expects to book both Li’l Monster and Bone, along with an LAPD gang expert, in a program she has titled, “To Live and Die in L. A.” According to a promotional flyer, the program will address the causes of the recent riots from the vantage points of “the three most powerful gangs in L.A. (the Crips, the Bloods and the Cops.)”

“We’re not interested--and neither are the parties who are participating--in getting rich off people’s trouble. We’re interested in getting people involved in the solution,” said Deegan, who described the lectures as being “very moderately priced.”

“We’re keeping the costs as low as we can,” she said. “But at the same time, they have families. They need to put food on their tables.”

In America, Li’l Monster is fond of saying, economics is the bottom line. That goes for gang members, just like anyone else.

“The majority of gang members in L.A.--if they had a job they would not be in the streets like they are,” he said. “Do you think if I was living in Brentwood or Bel-Air I’d be gangbanging? I would still be faced with racism, but I wouldn’t be living below the poverty line.”

So he does not apologize for the fact that he has made some money off his gang affiliation--and that he hopes to make some more.

“Personally, I’m feeling a little broke. A lot of these shows aren’t giving me a dime,” he said last week. After “Donahue,” he said, he is planning to spend less time on non-paying speaking engagements. “I’m not out for publicity. I’m here to make a point. But it’s time for me to start worrying about me, first. I’ve got to feed my kid.”

But these things have a way of taking on momentum. Li’l Monster and Bone say they have talked with Koppel, whom they call “Ted,” about appearing for a third time on “Nightline,” which does not pay its guests. They have also discussed the possibility of speaking at an ABC affiliates meeting next month. They will do anything, it seems, for Ted.

“Ted is cold. He don’t get ruffled,” Li’l Monster said admiringly.

“He’s smooth,” agreed Bone.

And the feeling is, apparently, mutual. After spending an afternoon with Bone, Li’l Monster and several of their gang colleagues, Koppel said on television that he was “only slightly embarrassed to say that I liked them very much and was extremely impressed with a great deal of what they had to say.”

But it does not always go so well. Last week, after taping “Donahue,” Li’l Monster and Bone sat in their dressing room and analyzed what they agreed was a poor performance.

“That was the worst one yet. He threw us off our format,” Bone said, referring to one of Donahue’s six guests who had challenged their claim that the Los Angeles riots were rooted in revolutionary struggle.

Li’l Monster agreed--there were too many guests, he said. “All you could do was get a jab in. You couldn’t really knock anyone on their back with a solid right.”

When Donahue stuck his head in to say thank you and goodby, they told him of their frustrations.

“In six months, bring us back,” Li’l Monster said. “Is that a date?”

“Hit and run media,” Donahue said, heading for the door. “You know how it is.”

“Is that a date? “ Li’l Monster asked again.

Donahue laughed. “OK, OK. That’s a date.”