Bloods, Crips React in Tempered Tones : Neighborhoods: Guilty verdicts, massive show of law enforcement muscle temper reaction. But one gang veteran says: ‘The fire’s still burning.’

Freddie (FM) Jelks had been predicting trouble.

A month ago, the 28-year-old gang veteran from a Bloods neighborhood on 89th Street talked in near-apocalyptic tones about the rage that could be unleashed by verdicts in the Rodney G. King civil rights case.

“It’s gonna be a shooting war,” he told The Times. “People are just looking for an excuse to explode.”

But on the day of reckoning, Jelks was not packing a pistol, or mixing a Molotov cocktail, or scheming to gut a liquor store. “Just coolin’ out,” he said, as he and two friends sat in his green Impala on Saturday, watching the setting sun cast a tranquil shimmer across a lake in Willowbrook Park.

“Conversatin’, contemplatin’, communicatin’.”

For weeks preceding the verdicts, a maelstrom of speculation had swirled around the destructive capacity of the Crips and Bloods, triggering wave after wave of rumor and anxiety.

Police, community activists, news crews and revolutionary groups had all turned their attention to the gang members of South-Central Los Angeles--those most likely to emerge as protagonists, they all figured, if violence were to erupt.

Instead, the city’s black gangs greeted the two guilty verdicts with peaceful, albeit bittersweet, satisfaction.

The convictions, gang members said, succeeded in pacifying the anger of residents in poor, minority neighborhoods. But to the Crips and Bloods, it is impossible to separate the 1991 beating from all the inequities and injustices--real or perceived--that they blame for denying them their share of the American Dream.

“The fire’s still burning,” said Jelks, an unemployed father of four, his wiry frame outlined by a white nylon jogging suit. “They got it down to simmering a little bit. But they ain’t fooling nobody.”

The day of peace was encouraged by a massive show of law enforcement muscle, as thousands of shotgun-toting officers took to the streets. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), in an open letter to the community, warned anyone who might consider stirring unrest that they would be giving police the legal right to kill them.

“You have got to live --not die!” she urged. “Life is too precious.”

That message rang true for most Bloods and Crips, who had begun to believe that conspiratorial forces were trying to goad them into a futile street fight as an excuse to attack African-American men.

In the end, gang members were not willing to sacrifice themselves--especially not in the name of King, whom they generally view not as an ally but as a sellout whose plea for peace last year displayed too much willingness to capitulate to the system.

“Was they asking to get along with you when they was beating your ass?” one gang member in Watts jeered Saturday, recalling King’s famous statement, “Can we all get along?”

Earlier in the week, Herbert Taylor, 31, had sucked on a filterless cigarette in the Imperial Courts housing project and explained why he believed there would be no riot.

A veteran of the project’s PJ Watts Crips gang, Taylor recently lost his $290-a-week job as a driver for a drug treatment program because he failed his drug test.

He has been to prison for a robbery that he insists he did not commit and says he has been harassed by the police for no other reason than that he fits their image of a criminal.

Although he could think of many excuses to explode in anger, Taylor had no desire to be part of a violent battle that he could not possibly win. A riot in this climate would be a suicide mission, he said, a deadly trap set by people far more powerful than him.

“Things were messed up long before I was born,” he said, as his homies played dominoes nearby and Ice Cube blared from a stereo, singing that it was a good day because he did not have to use his AK. “I look at it like: Hey, I just gotta live.”

It is a life that for most gang members still offers little hope. Except for a handful of gang leaders who have become celebrities or sold the rights to their life stories, the promise of last spring’s truce has all but fizzled.

A year ago, Bloods and Crips emerged from the ashes with their red and blue bandannas tied in unity. The summer months were marked by jubilant peace gatherings at the housing projects in Watts, where once-mortal enemies spoke of brotherhood, and relatives separated by imaginary boundaries were able to embrace.

The rest of Los Angeles was not so forgiving. Although a few peacemakers were rewarded for their efforts with government grants for grass-roots organizing, most had hoped that in exchange for laying down their guns, they would get jobs, day-care centers and recreation programs from the city’s business and political Establishment.

When that did not happen, the truce, which had rippled across much of South-Central, began to crumble, and is now limited mainly to the gangs at the four Watts projects.

“We need jobs,” said Cynthia Mendenhall, 31, an ex-gang member known as “Sister,” who serves as president of the resident advisory council at Imperial Courts. “We need somebody to come down and embrace us.”

And so today, while much of the city looks at the King verdicts as the final episode in one of the most turbulent chapters in its history, the Crips and Bloods are not sharing in the healing.

“There’s no victory in this for the African-American people,” said Mujahid Abdul-Karim, a Muslim minister who helped organize the truce and spent Saturday talking to the gang members.

He was sitting down to a plate of soul food at the new Denny’s in Watts--the first large, family-style restaurant to move into the community since the 1965 uprising.

“We’re still enslaved,” he said. “The police are going to continue harassing, disrespecting, maiming and murdering people of African descent.”