At 38, Ex-Gang Leader Vows to Go Straight : Crime: ‘This is my last chance,’ says Mark McCray, a violent criminal since his teens. Some doubt he can change.

Mark Edward McCray, a child prodigy of drug addiction and crime, later matured into “Casper,” a gang leader and murderer-for-hire who once put a homemade bomb into a box of candy and left it on someone’s doorstep.

Now, at the grand old age of 38, and after a recent stint in state prison for voluntary manslaughter, McCray is struggling to go straight--really straight, he says--for perhaps the first time in his life.

But in a life marked by a deadly combination of white-hot rages fueled by drugs and alcohol, and violent disposition fine-tuned by membership in a drug gang, change has not come easy.

His life, he acknowledges, is an example of what can happen to children seduced by the lure of gangs at a young age, who never quite escape the gang lifestyle.

“This is my last chance,” McCray said during a recent interview. “The next (crime), is my third strike,” and a possible life sentence in prison.

At the moment, his future is in doubt--as it has been since he was a teen-ager.

Last month, he was kicked out of the Claudia Ryan Center, a North Hollywood halfway house, after he got into a fight with another former convict, and other residents accused him of smoking marijuana and trying to purchase a gun.

With nowhere else to go, he moved into the same Van Nuys hotel where he lived before he was sent to prison.

While denying that he was using drugs or had tried to buy a gun, but admitting the fight, McCray said he wants to continue what he had been doing at the Ryan Center--using his life story as a cautionary tale. Although McCray’s juvenile crimes predated the recent epidemic of youth violence, the causes were nearly identical: involvement in gangs, particularly those that revolve around the illicit drug trade.

“If I can save one kid, my life is worth it,” he said. “I have a lot of pay-back to do.”

A recent Centers for Disease Control report and other studies have found kids between 15 and 19 years old are the most likely to be involved in violent crime, but McCray’s path started even younger.

When he was 6, he said, he smoked his first cigarette. At 12, he slammed heroin, and by the next year, he was hooked. After committing burglaries, stealing cars and joining a gang, he said he may have become a killer by age 13, when he stabbed a rival gangster in the neck and left him for dead.

In the ensuing quarter-century, he said, his employment history included stints as a thief, a drug dealer and a contract killer. He even claims to have killed 50 people, but won’t say where or when those deaths allegedly occurred. Though he delivers it matter-of-factly, it’s quite a boast--for instance, the infamous John Wayne Gacy Jr. killed 33.

“I done capped many drug dealers, thugs and garbage,” he said. “At the time, I thought I was doing good, ridding the world of another piece of trash.”

In fact, McCray has only once been convicted of killing, and that charge was eventually reduced to manslaughter. His only other conviction for a violent crime was for making and possessing a bomb.

Detective Rick Swanston, a veteran Los Angeles Police Department homicide investigator, said every once in awhile he has come across people, like McCray, who have claimed to have murdered dozens of people.

“They might have killed one or two people, maybe even three or four, but no way five,” Swanston said. “But they do like to brag about it because it makes them appear tough. You have to look at it with a jaundiced eye as far as I’m concerned.”

But this much is clear about McCray: He has become dangerously inured to violence, first by the streets, then by prison.

“In some ways, I was like kids are today,” he said. “I didn’t care what I did as long as I came out on top.”

Anthony Kimberly, who describes himself as a “former soldier” in McCray’s gang, agreed.

“He is memorable for being one of the most ruthless people I’ve ever known,” said Kimberly, who added that he saw McCray kill several times.

Tale of the Wasp

During an interview, McCray spoke about himself with a detachment usually reserved for discussing strangers.

He rarely smiled or showed any emotion. His jet-black hair is receding, and has gone gray on the sides. Tattoos--including swastikas and two lightning bolts that he says represent prison kills, mark his torso and arms.

When asked about his violent history, he talked about taking drugs, lacking direction, and being just plain mean. He is straightforward, but not brash.

He has never before recounted his life history or thought much about his motivations, he said. Talking now, though, serves as therapy. He recounted the fable of the turtle and the scorpion, though in his version a wasp is the lead character.

“When I was little,” he said. “I heard this story about the wasp who gets a ride across a river from another animal, and then stings it halfway across so they’ll both drown. The animal asks the wasp ‘Why?’ And the wasp goes, ‘It’s in my nature.’ I always remembered that. That’s me, it’s in my nature.”

Whether he can change that nature is a matter of debate.

Claudia Ryan, who has worked with convicts and ex-convicts for 20 years, said if McCray stays off drugs and alcohol, he has a good chance.

Scott Johnson, his parole officer, however, is more circumspect. Even before McCray got kicked out of the center, Johnson gave the former convict poor odds.

“I’d say he has less than an average chance of making it on parole,” Johnson had said. “He has a terrible record. If he wasn’t (at the center), I have no doubt that he’d be back to crime right now. But he’s on parole for three years, so only time will tell.”

McCray’s history with law enforcement traces a tendency toward trouble. In addition to his convictions for manslaughter in 1990 and for making and possessing a bomb in 1988, McCray was also convicted--but did no jail time--for burglary in 1986, and for receiving stolen property in 1976.

In one moment, McCray acknowledges that he is at risk of returning to his old ways, now that he is no longer at the center under the watchful eye of Ryan and fellow ex-inmates.

But in another moment, he insists his old incarnation of Casper is no more. Casper is dead.

The Message

In his talks with juvenile offenders, McCray--who is white but whose gang included members of all races--delivers a message directed particularly at white and Latino gang members. He tries to scare them straight by detailing what will happen if they are ever jailed for committing a drive-by shooting: “You do a drive-by and you hit someone innocent, you get stuck. You kill someone innocent, you get killed.”

That message--passed on, McCray said, from the head of the Aryan Brotherhood--follows a similar decree made by the Mexican Mafia, the dominant Latino prison gang.

McCray’s own gang involvement transcended race. Moving from state to state, he was not particular about whether it was a white or Latino gang. His presence, as a white man, was not surprising, experts say.

Gang murders claim members of all races, the Centers for Disease Control gang study says. In fact, FBI statistics indicate that from 1982 to 1992 the rate of violent crimes rose twice as fast among young whites as among young African Americans.

“It’s a national problem with the same trends for whites and blacks,” said Dr. Mark Rosenberg, a CDC director.

During one of McCray’s recent talks, he warned about 70 wards at a juvenile detention center against heading down the rough path while young.

It is difficult to gauge how seriously young people take him during the Ryan Center talks. Although he is tall and muscular, McCray does not look particularly mean. He is stiff, somewhat mechanical, and talks to them in a measured, conversational tone.

The teen-agers sit quietly and ask no questions. Most are young enough to be his children.

As one of his fellow ex-inmates noted, “these kids don’t listen to their fathers, either, but that doesn’t mean you stop trying.”

Early Years

From an early age, McCray said, he seemed destined for a bad end.

The 13th of 14 children, he grew up poor in Orange County, his family moving from place to place in search of work and a better life.

The only memory he has of his father, a jet mechanic, was seeing him dead, lying in a coffin after an engine crushed his chest.

While he struggles to remember the names and ages of all his siblings, McCray does recall his older brothers telling him that their duty was to make him tough.

“They taught me how to fight, how to steal,” he remembered. “They said they wanted to make me the toughest mother alive. . . . What they did was make me a stone-cold killer.”

When he began drifting into gangs when he was 11, his mother moved with him from Orange County to Fresno. But, already enthralled with gang life, he joined a predominantly Latino gang there, which in the pre-gun era of the late-1960s fought their battles with meat hooks and ski poles.

By then, his elderly mother was senile. She died a few years ago, during McCray’s second stint in prison.

“She was a sweet lady,” he said. “I never saw her angry. She disciplined us, but she let us know she loved us.”

But while he was on the street, he learned to love violence. It intoxicated him. At 13 he stabbed another boy in a gang dispute. “I don’t know if he died. I never saw him at school after that. I didn’t see him anywhere.”

Afterward, he remembers sniffing gasoline with friends until dawn. “I felt powerful,” he said. “I had no remorse. Kids are cold-blooded.”

Later, he moved on to heroin, then kicked the habit. Still, he dropped out of high school. He continued his nomadic lifestyle, finding a new gang to join everywhere he moved--from California, to Washington state and Oregon, and back to California.

And as he got older, McCray said, he grew more violent. By the time he arrived in Van Nuys in the 1970s, he had taken to wearing gloves that concealed a .22-caliber pistol at the ready in his right hand, and a knife in the left.

Gang-fashion, the gloves had had their fingers snipped off. That way, McCray explained, the knife or gun could be slipped forward, ready to use in an instant.

Finally Caught

Somewhere along the way, McCray picked up the nickname Casper, after the “friendly ghost” of cartoon fame. The name was derived from his method of attack: walking up to his targets, putting them at ease and then striking.

Eventually, he got caught. McCray said the owner of a plumbing business offered him $3,000 in 1987 to kill a business partner who was scheduled to testify against the man in a murder trial.

McCray agreed, and decided to use a bomb. He found out the name of the business partner’s girlfriend, waited until Valentine’s Day, and placed the bomb on the man’s front doorstep inside a box of candy. He wrote the girlfriend’s name on the top, he said, as if it was a gift.

But when the businessman who had hired McCray for the murder failed to deliver the final payment, McCray said he retrieved the bomb, and instead put it in a cupboard in the businessman’s home.

Eventually, the bomb was detonated by the LAPD bomb squad, police said, and both McCray and the businessman went to jail.

McCray served half of a four-year sentence for manufacture and possession of a destructive device before being released. Eight months later, however, McCray struck again.

It was vintage Casper. After a rival gangster had stabbed him during a failed robbery attempt near the corner of Van Nuys and Victory boulevards, McCray watched as the man went into an abandoned building.

Before following the man inside, McCray bought a 40-ounce bottle of beer at a nearby liquor store as a peace offering. After the two traded sips for awhile, the man relaxed, McCray said. Seconds later, McCray stuck his knife first into the man’s heart, then his throat.

McCray’s attorney would later argue that although his client did indeed kill the man, it was only after the man stabbed McCray first. A judge accepted McCray’s guilty plea to one charge of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced him to four years in prison. He was released last August.

Today, he will say again and again, he is trying to go straight. What finally woke him up, McCray said, was not prison, but a restraining order against him signed by five of his brothers before he was released.

This recollection brings the only moment, during several hours of talking about a life of crime, that McCray is visibly shaken.

“It didn’t dawn on me that my family was scared of me,” he said, his eyes welling with tears, his voice breaking slightly. “It was the first time I cried since I was knee-high to a grasshopper.”

McCray said he hasn’t seen his family yet. He isn’t ready. Neither are they. “They’re so scared of me now, they’d probably call every police department in the country if I tried to visit them.”

In the meantime, he said he is on a mission--to save himself, and anyone else who will listen.

“I am apologizing now,” he said, his eyes still watery. “No one has the right to take a life, I know that now. . . . Things have got to change.”