Kody Scott Is Serving Seven Years for Robbery. He is Also The Toast of The Publising World. How Did an Eight-Tray Gangster Crip Named Monster Go From Hoodlum to Literary Hot Property? : Making the Monster Huge

It was October in Germany, and Frankfurt was aflutter.

The literati had gathered for publishing’s preeminent international trade show. In one week, across acres of exhibits and at countless lavish parties, the world’s booksellers would spend millions on current titles while agents, editors and publishers wheeled and dealed in the background, buying, selling and shaping next year’s lists.

At the outset, those with money in their pockets shared a single desire: to snap up authors with proven star quality. Tom Clancy’s new novel was on the foreign-rights block. So were Stephen King’s latest horror story and Madonna’s Mylar-wrapped “Sex.” But in the end, no star in Frankfurt would burn brighter than a complete unknown: one Kody Scott, a.k.a. Monster, a 29-year-old ex-gangster out of South-Central L.A.’s Eight-Tray Gangster Crips.

The buzz had it that Monster was anybody’s urban nightmare. Tattoo-covered, bullet-scarred and doing time for robbery in a maximum-security prison, Scott had grown up within spitting distance of the corner of Florence and Normandie. To earn his nickname, he had beaten and killed. Now, less than six months after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, his story--handwritten with the nub of a prison-issue pencil--was for sale.

On the exhibit floor and between sips of $12 drinks at the Frankfurter Hof hotel’s elegant Lipizzaner bar, tales about Monster were told and retold. Everyone was saying that Scott had a way with words--even people who hadn’t read him. Pirated photocopies of his unfinished manuscript flew from hand to hand. “Getting that close to evil,” said a British publisher, “is very interesting.”

“It was like someone lit a match on a line of gasoline--the fire started,” said Barbara Zitwer, in Frankfurt scouting American books for foreign publishers. She became a booster after hearing just one brutal scene.

Monster Kody “was lying on the ground, bleeding, the blood dripping out of his body, forming a pool. He wanted to die. But then he thought about his daughter, and wanting to see her again,” Zitwer said. “I thought: ‘That’s it! That’s it! It’s fab ulous.’

“It was beautiful,” she sighed.

“Out of millions of books, thousands of people, tons of drinks, huge publishers with blow-ups of Madonna all over the place--out of everything, Monster Kody’s voice from jail had risen above everybody’s. It had become the book of the fair.”

CALL IT BEGINNER’S LUCK. CALL IT GOOD timing. Call it blatant manipulation--or even gang chic. Somehow, says Kody Scott from behind a dirty pane of glass in the visitors’ room at Pelican Bay State Prison, he has become “the hot topic all of a sudden.”

Atlantic Monthly Press, the hip, independent publishing house, is about to release Scott’s memoirs under the title “Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member.” Esquire, the glossy, cologne-soaked magazine, has put Scott’s opening chapter in its April issue. Janklow & Nesbit, the tony New York literary agency, has added Monster Kody to its client list. And Creative Artists Agency, Hollywood’s kingmaking talent firm, is shopping his movie rights around.

Scott is a bona fide hot property, and nearly everyone who knows him is basking in the glow. Even before a single book has been bound, Scott’s editor, Morgan Entrekin, brashly contends that in “Monster” the world will discover a “primary voice of the black experience.” Esquire editor Terry McDonell deems it “extremely arresting,” while Scott’s agent, Lydia Wills, calls it “really real.”

All of these people have a personal stake in the book’s success. In praising it, they are congratulating themselves--for discovering a raw, young talent, for spotting a culturally “important” work, for getting out in front on a pressing urban issue. But not one of them has as much invested in “Monster” as Monster Kody himself.

Inmate D07829’s head is shaved. His powerful chest, arms and neck bear the indelible markings of his gang set. “Eight Tray Gangster,” reads a fanciful tattoo peeking from under the collar of his mustard-yellow prison coveralls. “ETG,” says his left forearm, the letters crude, self-inflicted. He rarely smiles. But there is gentleness in his face, intelligence in his eyes.

From his 8-by-10-foot prison cell in Northern California, far from the cutthroat--and mostly white--world of publishing, Scott has outsmarted many of his self-serving champions. He is the one who started the feeding frenzy for his book, rejecting an initial $25,000 offer and orchestrating a bidding war that eventually netted him more than six times that. For now, at least, Scott has turned his youth, his anger and his race into coveted literary assets.

To sell the book, he has been willing to capitalize on negative and frightening stereotypes: A portrait of Scott, shirtless, scowling and grasping a semi-automatic weapon, will appear on his autobiography’s cover.

“This may hinge on exploitation,” Scott says, speaking softly into the telephone that connects him to his visitor and nodding, behind glass, toward a copy of the cover. “However, it’s exploitation for a purpose.”

If you believe Scott, being “hot” means almost nothing. He wants more than a quick-hit book, more than a onetime payoff. He wants a career, he says, as “a long-term writer.” He wants to “make a significant impact on the community.” And more than anything else, Monster Kody says, he wants a future--one in which he can leave his monstrous image behind.

IN LATE 1991, KODY SCOTT’S STRAIGHT TALK blew William Broyles Jr. away.

A charming Texan with a sterling journalistic resume, Broyles had helped found Texas Monthly magazine, served as editor-in-chief of Newsweek and then become a contributing editor to Esquire. Broyles, a former Marine lieutenant, also had chronicled his Vietnam combat experience in an acclaimed book.

In Scott, Broyles says, he found more than a good story. He found a comrade-in-arms.

“He reminded me a lot of the best Marine Corps soldiers I knew--people of great politeness and humility who at the same time had this air that they could do anything,” Broyles says, remembering the first time he visited Scott at an L.A. County jail. “He wasn’t a tough guy. He didn’t strike me as having to prove anything.”

Instead, says Broyles, he found Scott to be “extraordinary. In other circumstances, he could have been anything, from a general to a university president.”

They swapped stories about how it feels to be shot at and survive. In Vietnam, Broyles told Scott, a soldier wounded three times was sent home. In South-Central, Scott answered, there was no escape: his home was his battleground.

They were meeting on the media rebound. Leon Bing, a fashion model turned writer, had profiled Scott and his younger brother Kershaun in her 1991 book about Los Angeles’ black gangs, “Do or Die.” When Bing heard that Broyles, who had helped create the TV series “China Beach,” was researching a new show about South-Central Los Angeles, she made the introduction.

From his first conversation with Scott, Broyles was fascinated. The TV series fell through, but still, whenever Scott called him collect in Los Angeles, Broyles accepted the charges. Scott told Broyles about the night in 1975 when he became a full-fledged gang member. First, he was “jumped in”--beaten--by three established Eight-Tray Gangsters. Then, he was handed a pump-action shotgun and sent on a murder mission--his first. He was 11 years old.

The gang offered Scott a place to belong. It made him feel powerful and gave him a long-term goal: to rise to the rank of Original Gangster--OG--the pinnacle of gang culture. He devoted his energies to the task. He stole cars and robbed and beat people, once disfiguring a man so brutishly that police said only a “monster” could have done it. Scott wasn’t caught, but at age 13, the name stuck.

At 15, Scott spent nine months in a juvenile camp for carjacking and assault. At 16, he was ambushed by a rival gang and shot six times. At 17, he was convicted of armed robbery and served two years in California Youth Authority. At 21, Scott the OG was convicted of assault with a firearm, sentenced to seven years and sent to Soledad.

It was inevitable, Scott writes: “Prison loomed in my future like wisdom teeth: If you lived long enough, you got them.” Since Soledad, he has seen the inside of many prisons: Folsom, San Quentin, Chino and now Pelican Bay.

Behind bars, Scott hit the books, charting his own eclectic path. He read Sun Tzu’s “Art of War,” learned Swahili and took a new name: Sanyika Shakur. He studied the Geneva Conventions, the U.S. Constitution and Eldridge Cleaver, George Jackson and Malcolm X. As he read, his outlook began to change.

Gang violence had defined his existence. Now he wondered who really profited when young blacks killed each other. He’d spent his life fighting for the honor of 83rd Street, after which the Eight-Trays are named. But he didn’t own so much as a brick on 83rd Street, and no amount of killing was going to change that.

“The more we talked, I really saw him as someone who had a lot of native talent,” Broyles recalls. “I said: ‘Look, you have all these things to say. Why don’t you write a book? I did it. You can, too.’ ”

Scott had doubts. “I had read so many books,” he would say later. “I didn’t want to step outside of the regular boundaries of the literary world and write something totally distasteful.”

But Broyles kept pestering him. And in March, 1992, Scott tentatively began to write. It wasn’t easy. Prison routine, noise and interruptions all conspired with self-doubt to stop him cold. Then, midway through Chapter Two, Los Angeles exploded, and Scott says he suddenly knew “it was time.”

He threw himself into the writing. “It was incumbent on me to speak out, to say something about the particular tragedy of us killing ourselves at such an alarming rate. And to try to make people over stand,” he says, substituting his own term for the word understand , which he finds too passive.

When the first handwritten pages arrived in the mail, Broyles found them riveting and poignant. “The story itself is chilling: children growing up in violence that’s difficult to imagine,” Broyles says. Moreover, Scott’s “ability to put me in his shoes was just extraordinary. That’s what good writing is. He took me with him.”

Scott described the first time he killed a rival gang member: “I remember raising my weapon and him looking back--for a split second it was as if we communicated on another level and I overstood who he was--then I pulled the trigger and laid him down.”

“Life,” he wrote a few pages later, “. . . seemed to be one big test of show and prove, pick and stick.”

Scott credits Broyles with pulling the story out of him. Events were easy to describe. The hard part was telling how he felt. “I harangued him and hassled him and stayed on his case. We had long talks from the pay phone, with guys in the background saying, ‘Get off the phone, motherfucker!’ ” Broyles says. “I said, ‘Just keep writing.’ ”

Broyles sent supplies: reams of yellow legal paper. And he sent inspiration: essays about writing from the Paris Review, Michael Herr’s “Dispatches” and J. Glenn Gray’s “The Warrior.” Broyles also penned instructive and encouraging letters. “Just know that there are people outside who care about you and are interested in what you have to say, even if it may not always make us comfortable or be what we want to hear,” Broyles wrote.

“I’m not trying to be Norman Mailer to Jack Abbott,” Broyles says now, referring to Utah murderer Jack Henry Abbott, whose correspondence with Mailer was published as a book: “In the Belly of the Beast.” (In 1981, only six weeks after Mailer helped Abbott obtain early release from prison, Abbott killed again.)

“I don’t want to get Scott out of prison. I don’t romanticize him at all,” Broyles says. “But when you see that kind of talent, you want to help.”

He did. In July, Broyles plugged Scott’s unfinished book in an Esquire story on the riots. And when Scott had written about 100 pages, Broyles got them typed and sent them off to his publishing friends in New York City.

One of the recipients, Broyles’ agent, Lynn Nesbit, was slow to spot Scott’s potential. She deemed the writing too “rough” for Janklow & Nesbit Associates to represent, though she asked to see more as it became available. A few blocks west, in the mid-town offices of Esquire, Scott got a much warmer reception.

Editor Terry McDonell liked the sound of Scott’s voice: “Sort of sports commentator meets James Baldwin,” he says. Publishing him seemed like “the smart thing to do.” McDonell, in turn, sent the partial manuscript downtown to his friend Morgan Entrekin, the head of Atlantic Monthly Press.

The wave of adulation was about to crest. What no one expected was how far and how fast Monster Kody would ride it.

Looking back, Broyles can’t help but laugh. “The funny thing is, here’s this guy who I’m encouraging to write in pencil from prison, who I talk to on the pay phone with guys yelling in the background,” he says. “And he ends up making $200,000 or more. It’s great.”

BIRDIE CANADA COULD HAVE PREDICTED that her son Kody would be a killer at the deal table.

Canada says her “little guy,” the fifth of her six children, never cared much about having money. But early on, even before the gang claimed him, he loved the strategic art of making it. Canada, a divorced bartender, sometimes worked three jobs to support her family. But when Kody was 8 or 9 years old, she managed to save enough to buy a bicycle for each child. Next thing she knew, Kody was holding an auction in the garage. To maximize his profits, he was selling the bikes off a piece at a time.

“I’m telling you, he had taken all the bicycles apart!” she recalls, fondness overcoming the anger she felt then. “He had taken masking tape, stuck it on each part and priced them. He had it all hanging up. Oh, it was neat.”

As an Eight-Tray Gangster, Scott would take a lot more from his family--particularly from Canada. Her collection of $2 bills, signed by favorite customers, disappeared one day. So did a Galliano bottle full of quarters. Scott took her television. And her peace of mind.

She had tried to keep her children safe. When gangs began gaining ground on 69th Street, where Canada owned a three-bedroom home, Scott’s older brother Kerwin told his mom he wanted to be a Crip. She threatened to make him one--by breaking both his legs. He abandoned the idea. But not Kody. No matter what she said, she couldn’t reach him.

In protest, Canada hung up on people who called for Monster Kody. “There ain’t no Monster living here,” she would say. When the police came looking for her son, she’d tell them: “You have the wrong house. There’s no monster that lives here. Kody Scott lives here.”

By that time, however, Birdie Canada had two monsters living under her roof; her youngest, Kershaun, had followed Kody into the gang. They shared a bedroom, then a lifestyle and a moniker. Kershaun become Li’l Monster. (Later, they would also share the mainstream spotlight. After the riots, the media, using Bing’s book as a resource list, made Kershaun into a much-quoted, much-filmed gang spokesperson.)

For all the heartache Kody brought into her life, Canada still thinks of her “little guy” with pride. She remembers the bicycle sale, for instance, as mischievous but smart. “I used to hold him and hug him and say: ‘Kody, you are a very special little guy. You were put here to do something, and you have to do that,’ ” she recalls. “He said, ‘Bird, what do you think it is?’ And I said: ‘You’ll recognize it when it comes to you. And you’ll be able to deal with it.’ ”

Two decades later, when Morgan Entrekin came to Scott--reportedly with $25,000 in hand--Birdie Canada was proved right. It was the first offer Scott received for his book, and he knew it wasn’t enough. Real writers made more--Leon Bing, for instance. Scott knew that she had gotten a $75,000 advance for her gang book, and if she could get that much, he should, too. It was a matter of respect.

Scott didn’t know much about publishing, but he could work the angles. He told Entrekin he wanted more money. Then he did something much more shrewd. He contacted a screenwriter and author named Thomas Lee Wright.

Wright had written the screenplay for “New Jack City,” and in 1991 Universal Studios hired him to try to turn Bing’s “Do or Die” into a movie. When that fell through, Wright embarked on a separate project with Scott’s brother Kershaun--a documentary about Kershaun’s life called “Eight-Tray Gangster: The Making of a Crip.” Wright, who had co-authored a book about screenwriting, had his own connections in the publishing world. And Scott wanted to use them.

“Kody said, ‘I really want to write a book. Will you look at it?’ ” Wright recalls. “And I called Avon.”

Mark Gompertz, Wright’s editor at Avon Books in New York, said Scott’s story sounded interesting. A few weeks later, in July, 1992, Gompertz found himself face to face with Kershaun. In Manhattan to raise money for their documentary, Kershaun and Wright had stopped by. Looking back, Gompertz suspects that Scott sent his little brother to size him up.

“It must’ve gone all right,” Gompertz says, “because in August, I got four or five chapters. And it was amazing stuff.”

Gompertz moved quickly. Scott set the price--$75,000--and days later, Wright told him the good news: The deal was going down. “It was like a birth,” Scott says. “It was like a slave being recognized as a human for the first time. It was like giving me the first job I’d ever had.”

Janklow & Nesbit, meanwhile, was beginning to come around. Lynn Nesbit had passed Scott’s manuscript along to Lydia Wills. At 29, Lydia, daughter of historian Garry Wills, was an up-and-coming agent in the firm, struggling to make a name for herself. To her, Scott and his book were an easy call.

Five stories above Madison Avenue, the well-tailored Wills looks out the window of her comfortable office, remembering what it was like to see Scott’s words for the first time. “I read the first three pages and I was blown away. I couldn’t believe how incredibly moving it was--and how well-written,” she gushes. Besides, she says, it was clearly the right book at the right time. Wills set out to snag Scott.

By then, Scott had Avon’s contracts in his prison cell. Still, when Broyles passed along the agent’s number, he gave her a call. “Wills said $75,000 is peanuts,” he recalls. But he resisted her advances. “I was saying, ‘Well, I don’t want to split the money with an agent.’ ”

Wills kept at Scott, sending him letters, enclosing a photo of herself and her home telephone number. She mailed him books by authors her firm represents: Camille Paglia’s “Sex, Art, & American Culture,” Richard Price’s “Clockers” and her father’s “Lead Time.” When they talked about the representation contract, Wills told Scott: “Look, I told my father to sign it. I wouldn’t do my father wrong.”

But he was learning quickly. “Lydia said, ‘We’ll get you more money,’ ” he recalls. More important, he says, she described how they would work together to shape his future. Scott was sold. It was, he says now, “a career decision.”

In a flash, Wills spread the word: Kody Scott was hers. With just days to go before Frankfurt, she called Gompertz to make things perfectly clear. Any deals would have to go through her. Avon could no longer lay claim to Scott’s book.

The Frankfurt Book Fair was frantic. The grapevine buzzed with talk of “Monster”--but until day five no one owned it. Avon Books and Atlantic Monthly Press were both bidding, but with Janklow & Nesbit behind him, Scott was now commanding a much higher price. For a while, the two publishers joined forces to try to buy the hardcover and softcover rights as a package. At one point, Gompertz says, he and Entrekin, Atlantic Monthly Press’ president as well as its chief editor, offered $150,000. Wills pooh-poohed it.

“She said: ‘Oh, no. We’ve been thinking this is worth $300,000.’ I said: ‘Hey, why not half a million? Or a million?’ ” says Gompertz, who eventually decided to watch from the sidelines. “It had taken on a circus atmosphere. The feeling that it would have been an exciting thing to publish this book was completely lost. It felt dirty.”

Now, Entrekin won’t say what he paid for hardcover rights. He will only admit that it is significantly more than the $25,000 to $100,000 that is typical for Atlantic Monthly Press. Variety put the figure as high as $250,000, and Scott says he will net $150,000 up front, with future earnings contingent on sales. (Because laws preventing criminals from profiting from their stories have been overturned, he should have no trouble actually banking the money.)

The “Monster” deal was a high-stakes gamble for Entrekin, but he knew his odds were good. When it comes to peddling the printed word, “Morgan is the king,” says Barbara Zitwer, who is now an agent in New York. In Frankfurt, she says, he was in top form, toasting and schmoozing until all hours, only to emerge, fresh as a daisy, to deal over breakfast. Just one hour after Entrekin finalized the U.S. “Monster” deal, he’d made back much of the money he would advance to Scott.

Pan/Picador scored first, plunking down $50,000 for the right to introduce Monster Kody to British readers. Publishing director Ian S. Chapman admits he signed up before reading a single word. “I bought the book,” he says, “on Morgan Entrekin’s hype.” The Germans came next, happily paying $50,000 for what the publisher called the “inside story in America today.” By the end of the fair, the foreign deals were piled up like so many bodies. Italy. Holland. Spain. Sweden. Finland.

Today, the memory of Frankfurt still prompts Entrekin to sigh with delight. “It was wild,” he says, grinning. “You couldn’t have planned it if you tried.”

Wright isn’t so sure. Serendipity certainly helped. So did Entrekin’s reputation and contacts. But looking back, Wright believes that at its heart, the deal was the work of another even-more-cunning designer. “Kody,” he said admiringly, “played all of us like a violin.”

“Isn’t it naive to think that someone who has risen to that level on the street would not be able to translate that to the business world?” asked McDonell, Esquire’s editor. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all our agents were as good as he is at the deal table?”

RICK PRACHER IS SURE OF it: Monster Kody will sell himself.

In a photo-strewn 11th-floor office off New York City’s Union Square, Pracher, the art director of Atlantic Monthly Press, is flipping through images of Scott, talking about how he and Morgan Entrekin wanted “Monster” to look just right.

They’d seen the cover of Leon Bing’s “Do or Die,” which featured a color photo of Scott, toting a gun. Taken in 1990, when Scott was paroled briefly from prison, the portrait was nothing if not threatening. Pracher called to get a look at the outtakes.

Now, Pracher shuffles through the photos in front of him. “I was disappointed at first,” he says, pointing out a few of the shots. “Kody looked posed, nervous.” Then, Pracher says, “we saw this.” The photo in his hand has Scott facing the camera head-on, the left side of his muscular body bathed in shadow. He holds the semi-automatic at waist level. Dark sunglasses hide his eyes from view.

“There’s a slight head tilt, which gives him a fuck-you attitude,” says Pracher. “I found it much more menacing.” Though the picture was in color, he converted it to black and white. “We wanted that rough-hewn edge--raw, more gritty.”

Just down the hall, Entrekin sits behind a large desk littered with paper. He makes no apology for choosing such a scary cover. He signed off on it, he says, not for its aggressive attitude--he prefers to call Scott’s expression “confident”--but because he just liked this photo best. He says he chose it “instinctively.”

The book’s title was also his decision. “Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop” was what Scott had picked--a Crip slogan that is tattooed on his chest. But Entrekin wanted more “poetry” and “loaded meaning.” His idea set the tone for the book jacket: Spelled out in big, glossy black letters superimposed over Scott’s body, the word MONSTER looks like the bars of a stylized cage.

It’s in your face, Entrekin grants, but he rejects the idea that it might also be offensive. “Kody has behaved in ways that are monstrous. That’s how he got the name,” Entrekin says. In the book’s pages, readers will see there is “much more to it.”

“What I have to do to package a book,” he explains, “is sometimes oversimplify a little bit. I do the same with P. J. O’Rourke or Cynthia Heimel.” Hanging on his hall, a huge poster for Heimel’s most recent book proves the point. “If You Can’t Live Without Me,” it says, “Why Aren’t You Dead Yet?”

Lots of people say Morgan Entrekin is a brilliant publisher. Lots more say his small publishing house--which just merged with another independent, Grove Press--is struggling to survive.

As compared to large houses that publish hundreds of books each season, Atlantic Monthly Press puts out 15 to 20 books a year--a highbrow mix of investigative journalism, literary nonfiction and what Entrekin calls “fiction with a cutting edge.” Backed by a handful of investors, Entrekin has no corporate coffers, and every new Atlantic Monthly Press book must perform.

“This business is not easy to make money in. So you try not to lose money,” is the way Entrekin explains the economics. “Monster” is exactly the kind of book he looks for: thought-provoking, controversial--and marketable.

Once he acquired Scott’s partially completed manuscript, Entrekin set about delivering on its promise. First, he decided to grab readers by publishing the book to coincide with the L.A. riots’ first anniversary. And determined not to let the Frankfurt fire go out, Entrekin pushed the book in his spring/summer, 1993, catalogue, which formally announces books to reviewers and booksellers. “ ‘Monster,’ ” he wrote, “is the most remarkable and important book of the black experience since Eldridge Cleaver’s ‘Soul on Ice’ and George Jackson’s ‘Soledad Brother.’ ”

When pressed, Entrekin will admit to hyperbole--perhaps, he says, he should have said the black inner-city experience. But still, he says, “There’s just no question that this towers above most of the dreck that’s passed off as cultural discourse. You can say, ‘Well, there’s all this hype.’ But the fact is, at least it’s not hype about some hokey diet book. This is real work. This is a worthy book.”

As an editor, Entrekin can sometimes take months to hone a first draft into a final book. With “Monster,” he has been forced into a “crash, crash, rush” approach. His desire to get the book on the streets around the riot anniversary is part of the problem. The rest comes from dealing with a jailhouse writer. Scott has been stripped of his telephone privileges in Pelican Bay and placed under restrictive security because of his alleged affiliation with the Black Guerilla Family prison gang--a charge Scott denies. All editing must be done by mail, or in person, in the prison visiting area.

All this gives Mark Gompertz, over at Avon, a bit of sour-grapes comfort. Nothing against Entrekin, he says with a tight smile, but he thinks Scott’s manuscript needs careful editing, and he would have taken his time. “We wanted it to be a classic, a book that would last, a book that would sell for years and get into college courses,” Gompertz says pointedly.

Entrekin admits that if he had it to do over again he would leave himself a little more time. But he expresses no doubts about the book’s quality. Better less editing, he says, than too much. “I don’t want a sort of educated-white-upper-middle-class New York publisher’s voice,” he says, “What I want is his voice.”

And he concedes that he won’t make the April 29 date he listed in the catalogue. The final chapters of Scott’s manuscript, which arrived in early March, contain an abstract ideological analysis of African-Americans (whom Scott calls “New Afrikans”) and their place in society. It’s a shift in tone that seems “like grafting an apple onto an orange,” says Entrekin, and Scott is in the process of reworking it.

Judy Hottensen, Atlantic Monthly Press’ publicity director, offers another reason why Entrekin has conceded the riot-anniversary date. It seems that Steve Kroft, of CBS’ “60 Minutes” is considering interviewing Scott in prison. But because the rules limit Scott to one visit with a journalist every three months, CBS can’t even get started until May.

“All these things are influencing me,” Entrekin says over the phone. He sounds a little down. Not only would he like the “60 Minutes” coverage to be timed to coincide with the book’s release, but he had also been hoping to wheel a satellite dish up to Pelican Bay once the book is in stores. The idea was to make Scott accessible to journalists all over the world, in a media blitz. Prison rules, he now realizes, will make that “an impossibility.”

Still, Entrekin is trying to come as close to the riot anniversary as he can. In mid-March, he made a fast trip to Pelican Bay. He came away from his first extensive editing session with Scott “exhilarated by how good this book is going to be.” Now, a late May release seems workable. “I just want to get the best book possible,” he says. “The book will have to speak for itself.”

KODY SCOTT NOW SPENDS 22 1/2 hours a day locked in a jail cell the size of a bathroom. Barring any future infractions, corrections officials say, he will remain there until September, 1995. It’s not exactly a literary life.

“I walk in tight circles, talk at length to myself and write a lot, which is my only solace,” Scott wrote in a recent letter to his brother Kershaun. “The isolation, the quietness, the utter despair is far more violent than any other violence I’ve ever known. . . . In all honesty, bro, I don’t believe I’ll make it out of here.”

But at other times, Scott says life in prison is oddly reassuring. This month, when Esquire gives readers their first taste of Scott’s words, he says he will welcome the protection of the reinforced walls.

“I think the main question I’m going to get is about remorse: Do I feel guilty?” he says. “I think I feel about as guilty as a Viet Cong shooting a Marine. I feel remorse that it was my people. But other than that, no. I don’t feel guilty for the individual people I pushed out.”

He left a lot out of the autobiography. It’s “not one-tenth of my life,” he says, a strategy undertaken “to keep me off Death Row.” Even so, he is bracing for how he fears the black community may react.

“The bad response would be that I’m exploiting the community--that I’m throwing it out there and getting glory off death. That would be bad,” he says, adding: “I’m glad I’m here. Because I’m not ready for that yet. When I step out, I want to be ready.”

He’s right to be wary. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, whose district includes South-Central Los Angeles, has read a short excerpt of “Monster.” She calls the writing “profound” and says she looks forward to reading the completed book. But she says the jacket design reminds her of a recent front-page photograph in USA Today. The photo of five heavily armed Los Angeles gang members, which accompanied an article warning of more civil unrest, was later revealed to have been staged.

“I don’t like that kind of marketing,” Waters says. “I think it frightens people and polarizes people.”

Some gang members--including Scott’s old rivals--are endorsing the book, even before reading it.

“He’s straightening some stuff out that needs to be straightened out,” says G-Liz, 20, an Athens Park Blood. “He’s saying stuff nobody wants to hear. He ain’t supporting just where his gang is from. It’s about helping blacks out.”

Snoop, 34, an OG from the Rollin’ 60s Crips, says he wishes his former enemy well. “I’m proud of him,” Snoop says, “cause he’s made it through.”

But the real test, Scott knows, is still to come. Already, he and Broyles are talking about what he should tackle next. Broyles says Scott has joked that, once he gets out of prison, he will have to build himself an 8-by-10-foot cell in order to concentrate. Broyles says he thinks Scott “has a great prison book in him.”

Scott, meanwhile, wants to try his hand at novels. He’d like to explore the whole of South-Central, he says--not just Eight-Tray Gangster territory. He wants to tell stories that no one has told before, to show “how graphic it can be down there.”

Those who know him predict that Scott will succeed as an author, artistically and commercially. By contemplating his past, Entrekin says, Scott has begun to move beyond “Monster.”

“There is a kind of rebirth, or transcendence, that comes through the act of writing,” he says, allowing that Scott may well outgrow him and Atlantic Monthly Press. “He’s going to write some great books, if this first one is any indication. He won’t be the first writer I’ve discovered that’s gone on to bigger advances at larger houses.”

Scott, too, claims that writing has changed him.

“Getting this out has been like an exorcism to me--pushing it off my chest, saying things I’ve always wanted to say,” he says.

He looks through the glass in the Pelican Bay visitors’ room and into the sunglass-covered eyes of the man on the “Monster” cover.

“I’m through with being a criminal. I’m not a criminal no more,” he says softly. “It feels good to make an honest living.”