A Wrong Turn on the Road From ‘Hood to Hollywood

A year ago, state prison inmate “Monster” Kody Scott, famed for his exploits as a savage Los Angeles street gang member, was on the verge of hitting the big time.

Scott’s handwritten memoir of life in the notorious Eight-Tray Gangster Crips had become a searing bestseller, then a successful paperback with more than 100,000 copies in 10 languages. Renouncing his gang ties and claiming to be a convert to political activism, he would soon be out of Pelican Bay prison in Northern California to taste his fame.

Paroled in September after serving four years for robbery, Scott walked away from his 8-by-10-foot cell with a movie deal in which he would also serve as a consultant on the screenplay.

But something went wrong in the 32-year-old ex-gang member’s storybook transition from the ‘hood to Hollywood.

In early March, when parole agents burst into his Moreno Valley home looking for narcotics and seeking to test him for drug use, Scott fled. He is still on the lam, and virtually assured of being sent back to prison for up to a year when he is caught.

Such a reversal of fortune would destroy most literary and movie plans, especially one based on the theme of redemption. Not this one.

Even on the run, Scott has granted interviews, including one in person, and has continued to reach out to those in his new life. He stays in touch with his literary agent. He calls the director of his film-to-be almost daily. He telephoned one close friend to sing her a birthday greeting.

Scott’s story is that of a man whose keen awareness of his reality is so far more powerful than his ability to change it.

“I just ain’t ready to go back in. It’s hard for me,” Scott said last month in an interview to be published in the June edition of Rap Pages, a Los Angeles-based music magazine.

In a conversation with a reporter who met him in Ontario, Scott declined to say why he violated his parole. He merely explained the dilemma he feels about turning himself in: “I always ran from the police, I never ran to ‘em.”

Meanwhile, state officials say Scott’s parole officer has yet to receive a call from him, and Scott’s friends are bewildered by his behavior and worried about how this chapter of his life will end.

“Living on the outside can be an extraordinary shock to the system,” said Leon Bing, the author of “Do Or Die,” a book on Los Angeles street gangs who was on the receiving end of the birthday phone call. “Living on the outside involves choices, living on the inside involves taking orders. When he walked out of prison, responsibility descended on his shoulders.”

It was within the confines of the prison walls that Scott discovered and sharpened his writing skills--a way to survive the long hours of isolation and a way of understanding his violent past.

At the age of 11, his initiation into gang life was to shoot rival Blood gang members. Two years later, he robbed and beat a man so badly that police told bystanders that whoever was responsible must have been a “monster.” The name stuck. At 16 he was shot six times in a gang ambush. Life in the gangs, as he described it, was like playing “God, having the power of life and death in my hands.”

Prison was inevitable. Convicted of armed robbery, assault and possession of an AK-47, he served time in some of the state’s toughest institutions, ending up in isolation in the high-security facility at Pelican Bay.

In prison, Scott wrote, he also began to reject the perverted pleasure he took in inflicting pain, disfiguring rivals as a brutal reminder of his power. He renounced gang life and changed his name to Sanyika Shakur, a reflection in Swahili of his commitment to black unity.

“Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member,” its cover featuring a picture of Scott wielding a semiautomatic, was met with mixed reviews. A New York Times critic compared it to Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s confessional 1968 autobiography, “Soul on Ice.”

Scott’s book hit the street when the world was clamoring for firsthand accounts of gang life in Los Angeles following the riots that erupted after the Rodney G. King verdicts.

Reporters from around the world were requesting interviews of the imprisoned author. Correspondents from “60 Minutes” came to Pelican Bay for a segment. There was anticipation that Scott’s journey out from under the gangs would serve as a lesson for others.

The six-figure advance he got from his publisher, Atlantic Monthly Press, gave him financial security to buy a home for himself and his wife, Tamu, and guarantee comfort when he was released from prison.

“I would have thought he would have had a good chance to make it,” said Morgan Entrekin, his editor at Atlantic.

Despite his freedom, Scott told a reporter, he was frustrated by the conditions of his parole, which restricted him to Moreno Valley and prevented him from accepting a number of speaking engagements throughout the country.

“I transformed my criminal mentality into a revolutionary one, wrote a book, cooperated with the government for the first time by paying taxes and when I got out this time they treat me like Hannibal Lecter,” he said.

“I see the [parole officer] twice a week, I test [for drugs] once a week, I can’t leave the area without a pass and I see a psychiatrist once a week. They make me jump through hoops when I actually did something successful and legal with my life.”

The parole agents who knocked on Scott’s door in early March suspected that he was involved in drugs because he had been stopped by police not far from his home in late February and found to have about a gram of marijuana in his car.

However, state Department of Corrections spokeswoman Lynda Ward said Scott’s weekly drug tests were all negative, and that no drugs were found in his house.

Scott and his wife have three children, believed to be staying with her. Tamu Naima Shakur, who has known her husband since he was 15, described him as a peaceful person who “wished he didn’t have to be this hard-nosed person that everybody looked up for him to be.”

“Where we grew up, you fell victim unless you became aggressive,” she said.

By fleeing, Scott became one of 13,800 parolees and released prisoners at large in the state--about one-sixth of the total of 93,000. Many of these cases last only a day or two, officials said.

A warrant for Scott’s arrest has been sent to law enforcement agencies nationwide.

His New York book agent, Lydia Wills, got a call shortly after he went on the run.

“When I talked to him, he said he was going to give himself up,” she said. “I encouraged him to do that. I thought he was [already] back in prison.”

Director Antoine Fuqua, who said he has been hired by Propaganda Films to making the movie of Scott’s life, said he talks with him daily about the progress of the project.

“He seems clear-headed, intelligent and well-spoken,” said Fuqua, who directed the music video “Gangster’s Paradise,” which helped fuel interest in the movie “Dangerous Minds.” “We are still going through rewrites but it is going to be a very powerful movie.”

On the cover of his book, Scott was a shirtless, ominously muscular man, testament to years of jailhouse weightlifting. These days, he has a leaner look.

He said he resents parole officials for knocking down his door, and claimed that they attacked him when he refused to let them take him into custody--an allegation state officials deny.

“I won’t let them bully me because I’m a parolee,” Scott said. “If they come and pounce on me, I’ll fight back. . . . I want to live like the next person, but I’ll be damned if I’ll live it on my knees.”