Crips, Bloods Look Back--and Ahead--With Anger : Gangs: They say seeds for violence remain. Officials fear talk of more rioting will become self-fulfilling.

Cruising through his South-Central Los Angeles neighborhood of cheesy motels and malt liquor markets, Freddie (FM) Jelks speaks softly and seriously, without a trace of bravado.

“Everything we see is negative, so we act negative,” said the 28-year-old Bloods leader, first pointing to a middle-aged woman high on crack, then to bullet holes in stucco walls. He glared at charred lots that have yet to be rebuilt and, turning down Avalon Boulevard, shook his head at the sight of a fresh homicide scene, the victim still draped in a sheet. “This ain’t nothing nice.”

If there is ever another riot in Los Angeles, Jelks plans on being among those stirring the unrest, though not because he cares so deeply about Rodney G. King or the men accused of beating Reginald O. Denny. It will be because he is poor and desperate, he says, a father of four who has never been employed and who doubts, because he is black and an ex-convict, that he ever will.

“It’s like we’re animals left in a cage and you’re feeding us nothing but poison,” he said. “Hunger is gonna make me eat it.”

As Los Angeles’ two most sensitive criminal cases wind their way through the legal system, speculation has swirled around the destructive potential of the Bloods and Crips. Although the gangs are far less monolithic or organized than most people assume, their capacity for wreaking havoc has filled the streets with rumors, anticipation and dread.

Edgy law enforcement officials, convinced that some opportunistic gang members propelled last year’s uprising, have vowed to put down any disturbance with a swift show of force. A sometimes insensitive press corps has descended on gang neighborhoods, asking over and over again if more rioting will erupt. Even a small cadre of revolutionaries has been circulating flyers in the Watts housing projects, urging Crips and Bloods to join them in armed rebellion.

Whether the threat of bloodshed is real or illusory, it has been taken so seriously and repeated so frequently that those who traverse gang neighborhoods now fear that the expectation of violence could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“It’s almost like you’re practicing for the big football game,” said Fred L. Owens, a veteran California Youth Authority parole agent. “You just don’t know when the kickoff is going to be.”

Nearly a year after emerging from the ashes with red and blue bandannas tied in unity, the city’s black gangs are more defiant, better armed and increasingly bitter that their strained truce--now limited mainly to a handful of Watts gangs--has generated few rewards from Los Angeles’ business and political leaders.

Peacemaking efforts may have helped cut the number of killings last year between Bloods and Crips in South-Central Los Angeles. But the young men who fill their ranks remain frustrated and hardened by the struggle to survive in a culture that--riots or not--continues to be steeped in violence.

With so little to lose, many of them believe that the only power they have is the power to destroy. Yet if it comes to destruction again, most say gangs members will not waste their time burning or looting neighborhood stores. Instead, there is concern that they will take out their anger on those viewed as oppressors.

“Not to incite or frighten anybody . . . but if anything happens, I think it will be more of an urban guerrilla-type of situation, shooting at the police or other symbols of the Establishment,” said Chilton Alphonse, who heads Community Youth Sports and Arts Foundation, a Crenshaw district anti-gang agency. “They feel like they cannot share in the American dream, so they’ve developed an ‘I-don’t-give-a-f---’ attitude.”

The FBI, which has nearly 100 agents in Southern California investigating gang-related crimes, reported a tripling in the number of “takeover” bank robberies last year--a trend they attribute to gangs using terror to steal money, rather than quietly slipping the teller a note.

During last year’s civil unrest, an estimated 4,000 firearms were stolen from gun and pawn shops, according to federal officials, who say only a fraction have been recovered. One pilfered weapon was allegedly used in a January carjacking, which recently led to the indictments of two men with suspected gang ties--the first such charges filed in the area under a new federal carjacking statute.

With the King and Denny beating trials at hand, “everyone’s preparing for a worst-case scenario,” said Charlie J. Parsons, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office. “There’s been a lot of street talk . . . but it’s hard to evaluate how much of that is real.”

Because of the gangs’ deep disaffection and propensity for violence, there is wide-ranging concern that the Crips and Bloods are ripe for exploitation by other groups interested in seeing a confrontation with authorities.

Who those groups are, or what their motives may be, depends on who is pointing the finger. But there is a remarkable similarity in the belief that thousands of alienated young men are being goaded into a war they cannot win.

“I believe there are sophisticated individuals out there who want to see the decline of this country and what better way to do that than . . . have poor and desperate people fight their battles,” said former NFL star Jim Brown, who teaches a course in self-esteem to current and former gang members. “Anyone out there rioting will be victims of people smarter than them.”

A veteran anti-gang detective said: “Somebody is definitely using these guys.”

One organization with a very definite agenda is the Revolutionary Communist Party, which was suspected of stirring some of the unrest in downtown Los Angeles during the riots.

Although the small group of radicals has been largely unsuccessful in attempts to capitalize on anti-police sentiment, it is believed that they have rallied more support of late--particularly in the Nickerson Gardens housing project, where police killed three young men in a firefight on the first night of rioting.

Nearby graffiti, oddly out of place amid the scrawl of gang and tagger logos, urge support for the Shining Path, Peru’s Maoist revolutionaries. In flyers circulated at the Watts projects, the group’s message is more carefully tailored: “No more racist pig brutality!” reads one. “Lock up the cops! Free the LA4+! Revolution is the Solution!”

Tyrone (Ty-Stick) Baker, a former Blood from Nickerson who helped forge the truce, takes little of it seriously.

“It’s always the same two guys--a white dude and a black dude--smoking weed with the homies, pumping that b.s.,” he said. “Nobody pays attention to them.”

But one Watts resident, who claims to have attended several communist party meetings and reported on them to authorities, insists that the militant group has made inroads in persuading gang members to engage in armed resistance.

“I would never in a million years have thought this would happen,” said the man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Basically, this would be urban warfare. They want to kill cops.”

Law enforcement officials, still smarting from criticism that their response last spring was slow and mismanaged, have vowed that history will not be repeated. It also irks them that their perennial enemy--hard-core street gangs--became media darlings with talk of brotherhood and peace. “They never declared a truce on you and me,” grumbled one cop.

Despite a move toward community-based policing, law enforcement has made repeated shows of force in the last year, with helmet-clad officers breaking up melees at concerts, homicide scenes and at a protest at Florence and Normandie avenues. Often they are met with rocks and bottles, although three times in the last month gunfire has claimed the life of a Southern California police officer.

“I think some segments are more openly defiant of the police,” said Capt. Bruce Hagerty, commanding officer of the patrol division at the LAPD’s Southeast station. “And they’re very comfortable in expressing their defiance.”

Yet the get-tough stance of police also has heightened tensions with gangs. After officers cracked down on some of last summer’s truce parties in Watts, gang members accused them of trying to sabotage their peace efforts. Many still believe that police are working to undermine attempts at unity.

Jim Galipeau, a deputy probation officer who has spent three decades supervising South-Central gangs, worries that a tense police force could spark an uprising should its response to any incident be perceived as heavy-handed. The Watts riots of 1965, after all, started with a drunk driving arrest.

“I don’t think there will be an organized gang attack on police--not many gang members are that suicidal,” Galipeau said. “But if something happens and the cops move in, they will defend their neighborhoods. In that case, there will be a battle, and a lot of people will die.”

Given this scenario, news crews--local and from outside the country--have besieged communities hungry for positive coverage. In many cases, it has seemed that the only question posed by reporters is whether there will more rioting. And if so, when.

“Let’s exercise some care about repetition,” said the Rev. Cecil L. (Chip) Murray, pastor of First African Methodist Episcopal Church. “We can often beg the question by asking it in isolated places over and over again. The answer is predictable.”

An extreme and roundly criticized example of the media’s manipulation of gang members appeared last month on the front page of USA Today. The story, which stated that Los Angeles gangs are “itching” to riot, featured a photo of five angry-looking black men sporting a rifle, handguns and a bullet bandoleer.

What the story failed to mention is that the subjects of the photo had agreed to pose with the weapons before surrendering them to a program that would reward the men with jobs. The reporter was suspended and fined.

“They exploited them brothers and put their lives in danger,” said Tony Bogard, an ex-Crip and truce leader from the Imperial Courts housing project in Watts, where the five young men live. “That’s the press, period. They don’t want to see peace. They just want murder, murder, murder.”

To be sure, some current and former gang members, especially the handful who have most benefited from post-riot rebuilding ventures, are working to defuse rather than escalate a delicate situation.

A few have been hired as community workers through Mayor Tom Bradley’s Neighbor to Neighbor program. Others have helped organize a series of “Stop the Violence, Increase the Peace” rap concerts benefiting anti-gang agencies. Brown will ask each ex-gang leader in his Amer-I-Can course to be responsible for several younger gang members should violence erupt.

But whether the reaction to the verdicts is peaceful or not, a more fundamental reality remains unchanged: Conditions in the city’s most troubled neighborhoods continue to fester, pushing people to the brink everyday.

“It’s not like we’re gonna get mad when the verdicts come back; we’re already mad,” said Jelks, now sitting on the front porch of his mother’s tidy bungalow on 88th Street--a Bloods neighborhood surrounded by four Crips sets.

Jelks says he has applied for jobs at electronics stores, a home improvement store and at corner liquor markets. But even with his high school diploma, he has come to realize that there are few employers interested in hiring someone living so close to the edge.

“Why I gotta live in combat?” he asked. “Why I gotta do the things society says is illegal? When am I gonna be granted with the glories of life?”