Korean Grocers’ Gathering With Gang Members Hit

Korean-American community leaders, in a sometimes acrimonious meeting Thursday, strongly criticized the heads of a Korean grocers group for meeting with purported gang members to hammer out a proposed rapprochement.

Some participants suggested that the tone of Thursday’s meeting makes it unlikely that the grocers will agree to specific proposals from the gang members in follow-up talks today..

About 25 members of a coalition of Korean-American community groups, meeting in the Oriental Mission Church in Koreatown, blasted the local and national presidents of the Korean-American Grocers Assn. for meeting earlier this week with a handful of gang members led by a minister whose credentials they questioned.

Jung Sun Suh, a merchant whose import-export business burned down during the riots, angrily denounced the gang talks. With a flushed face and strained voice, he called on the grocers group to help out Korean-American victims of the riots--not gang members.

He said Korean-American merchants would be willing to hire African-Americans in local neighborhoods if the city were willing to subsidize the merchants. Otherwise, he said, the community should marshal its resources to aid victims.

While acknowledging a need to build bridges with the black community, the Korean-Americans Thursday repeatedly questioned the grocers’ wisdom in meeting with the gang members.

They were openly skeptical of the legitimacy of these particular gang members and their leader, James H. Stern, who was convicted in 1988 on fraud charges. And they argued that the grocers should not represent themselves as speaking for all Korean-Americans.

Several members of the coalition, formed in the aftermath of the riots, called for the resignation of Yang Kim, the president of the national grocers group. Kim, however, declined to step down.

Instead, he said he would proceed with a previously planned meeting with the gang members today, but would do so only informally and without media present.

Thursday’s meeting, which was conducted in Korean, hinted at divisions within the Korean-American community as it struggles to rebuild after the riots and to defuse tensions with African-American neighbors.

At the same time, that community is also attempting to develop a cohesive voice with which to address the American mainstream, some Korean-Americans say.

After a closed-door meeting with the grocers Monday, Stern unveiled a host of proposals for the Korean-Americans. They included giving management jobs to gang members, moving a branch of a Korean-American-owned bank to South Los Angeles and forging joint business ventures between blacks and Koreans.

Critics of the talks have likened the gang members’ proposals to extortion or a protection racket.

At Thursday’s meeting, several participants also attacked the mainstream media for focusing too much on animosity between blacks and Korean-Americans and blowing the significance of the gang talks out of proportion.

For his part, Kim said he and David Kim, president of the Southern California grocers group, had agreed only to meet and talk with the gang members on Monday, and had been ambushed by media when they arrived. He acknowledged that it had been a mistake to proceed with the talks with the media spotlight focused on the two groups.