Voices from the Hood

It's hard sometimes to comprehend that the netherworld of South Central Los Angeles is not lawless, no matter how many visions of blood-soaked streets and body bags show up on the evening news. Think of it instead as a place with different laws, where a cross look is punishable by death and a toddler may be shot in its mother's arms for wearing shoelaces that are the wrong color. But South Central was a city on fire long before the first building burned in April. To those who live in South Central--actually a combination of cities and communities, including Watts, Compton and South Los Angeles--this is the world of the Bloods and the Crips, the nation's two most notorious street gangs. The gangs started back in the late Sixties when a local resident, Raymond Washington, organized a bunch of kids at Watts's Fremont High School into what later became known as the Crips. As the Crips began to bully other kids, some began to organize. One such group, on Piru Street in Compton, adopted red railroad bandannas and became the Bloods. (The Crips use blue railroad scarves to hide their faces on missions.)

In the early Seventies the Crips split into different factions. Soon there was open warfare among several Crip sets--smaller gangs under the Crip umbrella--as well as between the Crips and the Bloods. These struggles have left South Central with thousands dead and the haunting image of innocent children killed in drive-by shootings. It is not unusual for relatives living just a few miles apart to go years without seeing one another, afraid of making the dangerous journey through hostile gang jurisdictions.

Yet South Central can also be a place of love and kindness: a community where simple trust is highly regarded and disloyalty is harshly punished, where known killers drive elderly ladies to get groceries and where the same young man who teaches kids how to shoot an AK47 on the street might show them the way to shoot a jump shot in the park.

These conflicting passions came to a head in late April 1992, at the intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues, just hours after four white Los Angeles police officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King. (The officers are being retried on federal charges.) Although the fires burned from Long Beach to Hollywood, South Central was the hardest hit. Out of the ashes, however, emerged word of a truce among gang members. The unity movement was at work even before the riots--and so far the truce has remained intact. Not a single black-on-black gang killing has since taken place in Los Angeles.

To better understand the more than 20-year lethal feud between the Bloods and the Crips, as well as the subsequent truce, Playboy asked Léon Bing (author of Do or Die, the definitive book on L.A. gangs) and journalist Greg Spring to visit South Central and talk with those who know the place best.

Bone and Li'l Monster personify the new peace. Interviewed together for this article, they are "OGs" (original gangsters--a term of great respect) and appear remarkably similar: Both are 27 years old, well-spoken and thoughtful, yet both have a glint of rage in their eyes. Although no longer active gang members, both admit that, given certain circumstances, they would consider a limited comeback. The only obvious difference between the two is the color of their baseball caps, and, of course, their gang affiliation. Bone is an Athens Park Blood, and Li'l Monster is an Eight-Tray Gangster Crip.

Monster Kody, like his younger brother, Li'l Monster, also an OG Eight-Tray Gangster Crip, was interviewed in California State Prison at Corcoran, where he is serving seven years for beating a crack dealer who would not leave his neighborhood. Previously, Kody had served seven years for shooting a rival gang member. A self-professed revolutionary, Kody has spent 12 of his 28 years behind bars.

Jim Galipeau, a deputy probation officer in Los Angeles County for more than 20 years, most of them with the Metropolitan Specialized Gang Unit, has been working with the Bloods and the Crips almost since their inception. With his shaved head and broad shoulders, he creates an imposing figure on the streets of South Central, where he keeps tabs on the 50 or so young men and women on his caseload. Galipeau has gained a reputation for fairness and loyalty on the streets.

The talk began with the images that so startled a nation.

Kody: I've known Rodney Kings all my life. I've seen Rodney Kings in the African community from the time I can remember. This is a blanket type of thing in the African community--whippings--and it's a throwback to slavery. If you run or put up any resistance, or if they just feel like it that particular day, you're gonna get whipped.

Galipeau: Basically, the King incident is part of the system. The police are no more violent than the people they're out there with. The cops are really ignorant of and insensitive to the social conditions the people are in. The people are insensitive to and ignorant of what the police have to go through. So you have armed camps on both sides.

Kody: The police actually function as gangs unto themselves in our community, riding down the street, looking at people. If you look back in a challenging manner, then you are dissin', and they will whip you. I've been in situations like that. It's a fear tactic.

Li'l Monster: When I went into my backyard [after the verdict was announced], I saw five pigs chasing one of my little homies--one of my little fifteen-year-old homies. They tackled him. One put his foot on his neck. Then they handcuffed him and threw him over the gate. By the time we saw this, we were already upset about the Rodney King verdict, and I think that escalated a lot of tension right there. A lot of people in the community started coming out of their houses, and a lot of homies started pulling up. A lot of pigs started pulling up. It escalated to a shouting match. The people who were voicing their opinion the loudest were the ones that they grabbed first. It was plain and simple that they were arresting these guys for no reason. It escalated to a point where sticks and bottles and rocks were being thrown. The LAPD went into a retreat mode. When they retreated, I think that gave the people a false sense of victory, to the point where we backed them up, at which point the next motorist was just as good as a pig.

Galipeau: The night the riots started, I pulled into the parking lot at Florence and Normandie and saw a couple of guys I recognized. They asked me if I had heard about the Rodney King verdict, and I said, "Yeah, ain't that a bitch." They said, "Well, we're going to be partying tonight." I said, "Man, you guys better be cool because 77th [police division] is gonna be coming down and kicking ass and taking names, so be careful." And they said, "Well, we're cool." Fifteen minutes later, I was listening to news radio, when all of a sudden I started hearing that there were problems at that intersection. And really, at the time I was there, there were no problems. One police unit with two cops in it could have cleared that up.

Kody: In respect to the rebellion in Los Angeles--and that's what it was, a rebellion--most of us, gang members and civilians alike, knew that such an outcome was imminent. We didn't, however, know when it would take place or what would actually trigger it. Nor could any of us have envisioned its depth and latitude. Although such an "end" was spoke of, thought of and wished for in our minds, none of us were actually prepared for this. It was totally spontaneous.

Li'l Monster: It was a rebellion. A rebellion is when you have a class of people stuck in a situation where they're not accepted by society. They're living below the poverty line, or somewhere near the poverty line, and they get mad about it. They rebel against the system. We rebelled against the verdict that was handed down in Simi Valley. They call it looting. I call it being able to get something that you couldn't normally afford. It's like when one Hispanic lady said that this was the first time in her life that she had been able to put shoes on all six of her kids' feet. It crossed all racial lines. It was a class struggle.

Galipeau: Initially what I was watching for was gang involvement, but I didn't see very much of that. The police had intercepted a communication in the early part of the riots that said the Crips and the Bloods were uniting under a white banner to take on the LAPD and the sheriffs. So I was watching to see if there really were white hats, headbands and arm bands showing up on the streets. I was driving up and down all the riot streets, and a few started to show up, so I stopped some of those guys and talked to them. They were talking about, "We're Bloods and Crips united." "Off the pigs." Blah blah blah. All that kind of shit. I went down to the projects and confronted some of the high-standing gang members, and they said, "That's bullshit. There ain't nobody wearing white. If they are, they're busters [cowards]." And it made sense. When I looked at the guys I did see wearing white, they weren't guys I recognized as gang members. They were guys who figured they were covering their bets, in case the Bloods (continued on page 171)The Hood(continued from page 100) and the Crips really weren't united.

Li'l Monster: We're not ready for that confrontation [with the police]. That's just the bottom line. The problem is, they don't respect us as gang members or as people. So, what we want to do with the pigs is to keep them out of our community. We want to police our own community, that's all.

For me to sit here and say that all black businesses were being burned by accident is not the fact. People in the community know who does the law. People know who's not a part of the community, and that's why these stores were burned.

Galipeau: They burned one black-owned fast-food chain that they felt ripped off the neighborhood and treated them bad. They left Korean stores standing that treated them good.

Kody: What took place in South Central, beginning on April 29, was a necessary cleaning-out process. I don't condone the beating of innocent civilians. I do, however, support my people's effort to strike at those who systematically rape our communities of vital finances needed for our own urban development.

Li'l Monster: The gang peace had been going on for several weeks before the rebellion took place because of the work that [former football great] Jim Brown and his Amer-I-Can group did with members of certain sets throughout the city. By April 29, Brown had already laid some groundwork, to the point where certain areas were putting down their weapons. Once this happened, we realized that we had a common goal: If I'm a Crip and you're a Blood, and we meet at the front of a Circuit City, we both know that we want to get in and get out of this Circuit City as soon as possible. We saw a common goal. And then when the National Guard came, we saw a common enemy.

I hope that people realize the magnitude of the war that has gone on between the Crips and the Bloods. It lasted nine years longer than the Vietnam conflict. It's lasted longer than any war America has ever been in. The body count is uncountable. Missing in action, wounded--unthinkable to even count.

Galipeau: I have been a probation officer for twenty-seven years. I do not remember another three-month period when there has not been a black gang shooting or killing. This is why I'm so optimistic. This peace had nothing to do with organized society. It was not really facilitated or assisted by the police, the probation department or any organized group. It was a grass roots movement that started in the projects of Watts by older guys--when I say older, I mean in their late thirties, early forties--who grew up in the projects before there were Crips and Bloods. These guys played little-league baseball and Pop Warner football together. They went to grade school, junior high and maybe even high school together before there were Crips and Bloods.

Bone: We hate that word gang. We'd rather be considered a community inside of a community, you know? But the word gang puts a stigma on our love. And it's all about love.

Galipeau: I do things for them because they do things for my kids. When I ask them to do something for one of my kids, they do it in a minute. When they ask me for something, I'm there in a minute. These people are proud and honorable. Their code of conduct may not meet with the approval of society, but it is just as strict.

Kody: It's like being in a family, like being in a house--a secure house. A place where you get the praise and love of people who are appreciative of you and your achievements--albeit they may be criminal. But these people are appreciative of you.

Li'l Monster: I was thirteen when I became active. But it's not something that you just do. It's not like you say, "Well, today I'm gonna be active." I mean, growing up--and I'm quite sure it was like this for a lot of people--you go through phases. With each phase you push yourself to the limit. You may start by robbing somebody, right? OK, so you've gotten over the robbery phase. And then it may come down to your actually having to correct somebody. So there's another challenge. Boom, you knock that down. And once you knock that down, it's like riding a bicycle.

Kody: I was ambitious as a kid. Outgoing, energetic, intelligent. I was my mother's favorite. I always wanted to be the achiever, so I struggled harder in certain areas than my siblings. I was combative and violent.

My older brothers are not involved in gangs. They're a different generation, different age group.

Do you know the chronological makeup of gangs? In reference to age, we live in dog years, meaning that the life expectancy of a gang member is eighteen years. Being that I'm twenty-eight now, I'm basically a fossil in the gang arena.

Galipeau: The real genesis of the street gangs was black gangs that were really more social groups than they were gangs. These kinds of gangs were territorial. The big difference was, when these guys got into conflicts, it was on a one-on-one basis. And it was fists. Sometimes there might have been a chain or a switchblade or some other weapon, but by and large it was what they called "goin' from the shoulders."

For these guys it was an adolescent phenomenon. The guys would come up, the gang would be part of their adolescent development and then they would get married, have kids and get jobs. It was just a passing thing.

Bone: The first time I ever got into a real confrontation--gunplay, I should say--I was about fourteen. It was still about me, my brother, my neighbor across the street and the homie on my street. Then I came to find out that this was a common battle for everybody. This was a whole neighborhood thing. Then I said, "Oh, OK. Now I get it."

Galipeau: All of a sudden the Sixties came, particularly the mid-Sixties, with Black Power. Blacks became more militant. You had the Black Panther party with Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton and those other guys coming out of Oakland. They were talking about pride in race, talking about armed resistance, walking around Oakland and, to some extent, Los Angeles wearing guns--which was legal in those days. Then you got some of the groups who became way more political and racist, and who identified with the Muslims, Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad. And Martin Luther King was on the scene during that time, talking about Gandhi-type things. So the kids were torn in a lot of different ways.

Kody: I go to the shooting range because bullets are too expensive, and I don't like to miss. That's why I go to the range, because I don't want to shoot innocent people. And, you know, I've pushed a few innocent people out and had it in my thoughts, and I'm sorry for it. I don't like to shoot innocent people. I like to get a soldier, because that soldier is trying to get me.

Bone: The last time I was shot, I was shot in June, July, something like that, this past summer. Careless. That's how I got shot, being careless. Running my mouth. Talking. Being careless.

I had been coaching a kids' baseball game, but it was over with, and it was in a high-risk area. You know, I always watched for 'em coming down the street. I never thought that they would creep up on foot. Yeah, they saw me and creeped up. As soon as I got shot, the first thing that came into my mind was, Damn, I slipped.

Kody: My name is Monster, therefore I had to live up to the personification of that name. A monster is someone who does atrocities, who is atrocious, who carries on in an inhumane manner. So I would do things that people wouldn't normally do. I would go on missions considered suicidal, and live to come back. What I mean by that is, entering a totally armed camp of another gang, a street where these people are heavily armed, where no one does drive-bys, no one does walk-ups. I would go to put down these people militarily. I'd use whatever was at my disposal at that particular time, which was often a large-caliber gun. But I would survive. And as I continued to do military maneuvers and get away, my reputation grew.

Bone: Bloods are considered a minority, and Crips are the majority. This is in the correctional facilities, on the streets--anywhere. We're outnumbered by more than half. But what we lack in numbers we make up in heart.

Kody: Someone may disrespect your particular set, your little chapter. Or someone may step on your shoe. What we take as serious, the outside world takes as trivial. But to us, stepping on a shoe can quite easily get someone killed. In fact, it has, and will probably continue to.

Crips are my worst enemies [even though I'm a Crip]. The Compton Crips' worst enemies are the Bloods. But where I live there are relatively few Bloods, and my worst enemies are the Crips. I've been shot six times by Crips. I've lost eighteen homeboys to Crips. We've killed many Crips.

We have not always killed one another. The contemporary problems can be traced back to colonialism. Don't get me wrong, there have been tribal wars in the African tradition. Always. Like in every other person's tradition, every other person's heritage. No one has ever gotten along with everybody all the time. To study gangs is basically to study the history of a people.

Bone: You have petty differences, and they escalate. The petty differences were before our time. Our enemies were chosen for us.

Kody: One of the biggest wars inside the Crips today goes back to when a woman, or a young girl, had a leather coat taken by a guy from my neighborhood. It erupted into a full-scale war, with people getting dropped. And today, twenty-five or thirty deaths can be attributed to that one coat being taken.

Galipeau: Maybe one percent or less are vicious killers. I work with them and I have seen them. They like to hurt people. Ninety-nine percent of the hard-core gangbangers I deal with, when I get them one-on-one or two-on-two, we can talk, and they wouldn't hurt one another because they aren't intrinsically evil. They are not intrinsically hateful. They are not intrinsically vicious. They do it because that's what is expected of them out on the streets.

Ninety-nine percent of these guys could not come up to another person and beat him to death with their hands. One percent or less could. Leave those people to me and the cops, the penitentiaries and the gas chambers. The rest of them we can deal with.

Li'l Monster: These are people who have been created by America, to the point where they now feel so much rage, so much hatred. But at the same time, this rage and hatred is misdirected.

Kody: But when we fight one another, it's this black-on-black crime that looks so bad. Well, of course it's bad, but people magnify our problems so that they won't think about the larger issue. If I think my only problem is another African person, I'm never going to think about the larger problem--us as African people in this country. Narcotics, lack of education, inadequate health care and inadequate housing all contribute to the demise of a people. Genocide.

When I got out of Folsom prison in 1988, I came home and somebody handed me a Kalashnikov AK47--7.62 x 39. It had Distributed by China on the side. So my questions were to the homeboys: "How did you get to China and get this gun? Who got the helicopter? Who got the plane?"

These are not sold down on the street. Where are these guns coming from? Who is bringing these guns in? Who is bringing in kilos of cocaine--more cocaine than we've ever seen? I've seen money stacked from that side of the wall to where I'm standing right here, three feet off the ground! Who puts these things in our community? That's my question.

Galipeau: This, to me, was the downfall of the Crips and the Bloods. It came around the time cocaine hydrochloride--crack and rock cocaine--came into the equation. Then it became about money. It wasn't about heart, it wasn't about territory, it was about money.

Kody: You have youngsters with AK47s, high-velocity weapons, who are shooting into houses, not knowing they're shooting ten houses behind that house because of the velocity of the weapon.

Galipeau: When I started to work with gangs--when the Crips and the Bloods began--you would seldom hear of a gang member rolling over on another gang member. They would rather go to jail. Nowadays, I see them rolling over on their mamas. They will tell on anybody in the gang. They will tell on family members. They will do anything to get back onto the streets and get to their money or their drugs or their girls.

In relation to the lack of real loyalty to the gang, there is the worldwide-known phenomenon of the Los Angeles drive-by. The drive-by is the coward's way of becoming a gang member. The old gang members used to go from the shoulders. They would fight.

Kody: One of my homeboys was killed when we were both sixteen. His mother came to us and said, "I want to see newspapers. I want to hear bodies drop. I want these people who killed my son. And you don't come back here, you never face me again, until you bring me a newspaper." And she continued to give us bullets and ammunition until we brought back newspapers. To see her and sit with her, to feel her anguish, sent me on outrageous missions. I used to feel emotionally responsible because some of the people who were killed were my friends, my clique. So I was obliged to drop bodies in response to that. It used to tear me up--initially. Now it's to the point where, "Oh, such-and-such is dead. Oh, he got killed." I'm not emotionally attached to it anymore. It's just a way of life now.

Li'l Monster: We're not savages. We're not beasts. We think very clearly. We're made out to be these uncaring human beings who, when one of ours gets hit, don't care about it. We have a total disregard for human life. There's that reaction of revenge, that reaction of hatred and sorrow and sadness. There's that feeling that you've lost someone close. We go through those same emotions. It's just that we act on them, because the police aren't gonna act on them for us.

Bone: People look at us in fear. They fear us because "Oh, you've taken life." But when their government does it, they bust out their flags. They bust out their yellow ribbons.

The United States killed how many thousands of innocent people [in Desert Storm]? Why do people put us in a category of being subhuman, as if we don't have regard for human life? And they live theirs as patriotic, as the right thing to do.

Kody: Gangs are nomadic. The police will catch us on one street, so we will go to another street. The only reason we're still around is that we're disorganized, because there's no central body they can strike at and say, "Now we've got the leadership. Now this will die." Kill the head, the body will die. As soon as we organize ourselves, we will be struck down, like any other organization that the government deems a threat.

Galipeau: Basically the role of drugs in the gangs is to finance guns and to finance loyalty. It's revenue-enhancing, but it is not funding.

Few gang members make any money from drugs. Out of the thousands of gang members who have been on my caseload, I can count fewer than ten who could support themselves, an old lady, a kid, a six-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment and a four-or five-hundred-dollar-a-month car payment with their illegal activities.

The top dogs get all the money. I'm fond of the saying from my liberal Berkeley days that, in the United States, ten percent of the people control ninety percent of the wealth. In the gangs, it's worse than that.

Kody: People amass huge amounts of wealth from the distribution of narcotics. We used to break into houses to get guns. Now Colombians and Cubans are dropping off cases of weapons--and I'm not talking about shotguns: H&K .308s, AK47s, AKSs, AK74s. Top-notch assault weapons. In hospitals, they're employing combat doctors from wars just to deal with the people who are the victims of these weapons. So the drug trade has been devastating to the community in two ways: the death toll and the addicts who sell their worldly possessions.

Li'l Monster: It's easier for someone to get an ounce of cocaine and sell it than it is for him to get a job. You tell that man it's wrong, but that's how he's feeding his family, because he can't get hired.

Kody: The drug trade, although lucrative, is on its way out. Legitimate business is on its way in. Music production. People are starting to take all this drug money and put it into rappers. You'd be surprised how many rappers are drug-backed.

Galipeau: I have seen a twenty-thousand-dollar Trans Ams given to a sixteen-year-old kid who didn't have a driver's license. The cars are bought with cash. The dope man who has a kid pushing a hundred-grand worth of dope every month gives the kid a car. The kid has not been going to school, so he has no possibility of getting a driver's license, because he has to take driver's ed. He goes out and drives the damn car--picks up his girl, has dope in it, guns in it. Pretty soon, the cops pull him over, he runs away. Well, there's the car. Who's it registered to? Nobody. A fake name. The car gets towed back to the dealer. The kid has had a month, max, maybe a month and a half, with his car, and that's it. To gangsters, dope money is play money.

The guys who are the real dope dealers got tight with the gang and let the gang distribute their dope. They don't give a fuck about that gang. They're the ones who have houses in Beverly Hills and Encino. They're not homeboys. They don't even want to come down to the ghetto.

Kody: Drugs were put into our community deliberately to push down the resistance of a people desperately trying to exert themselves to be free. There's no doubt about that. The gang members got hold of them simply as a survival tactic. They knew they weren't going to be employed by AT&T or IBM, because they didn't go to school to get the proper education. Education is not available in the community.

Li'l Monster: We network with one another. We help one another. There have been times when a homeboy didn't have a place to stay. He'd spend the night with me. The next night he might stay with another homeboy. "Don't tell me you don't have a way to school, because you can call me and I'll take you." "Don't tell me you don't have a way to this job interview, because I'm gonna take you."

Bone: We have a place where we house seven or eight homeless youngsters whose parents have moved out of town to get away from the bullshit.

We pay rent on this house and we have people in and out of it. Some people stay two weeks and get their shit together. Some stay two months.

There is someone older to oversee the youngsters most of the time. And the kids usually go to school.

Kody: The schools act as babysitter, recruitment area and drug distribution area. But they're not learning centers, for sure. Knowing George Washington and Abraham Lincoln isn't going to help you survive in South Central. People are wise to that. The schools could be mowed down in South Central today and nobody would miss them, because the kids would still congregate in the parking lot where the school used to be.

Galipeau: Most guys on my caseload started at eleven or twelve years old. It's a full-time avocation. You have to be beating up people, you have to be planning shit, you have to try to get off in the drive-by. You cannot go to school and do this.

By the time they're seventeen years old, they've done their drive-bys, they may or may not have killed people, but they've certainly hurt people. They've had whatever involvement with dealing they're gonna have. They have three or four babies spread out all over the ghetto. Grown men step off the sidewalk when they walk down the streets of their neighborhood because they're afraid of them. But it gets old. It's like anything else: Once you get to the top of what you're doing, you start looking for something else. It's not stimulating. And they see they don't have a future.

They have no chance of getting a high school diploma because they have no credits. They don't have any of the classwork to prepare them to take the Ged. They have no skills other than kicking the shit out of grown men.

Bone: I don't feel connected to America, because I know America isn't connected to me. My type of people are the mass of people in the streets, and America is forcing us farther and farther out of the picture, or trying to. I feel alienated. I don't fit the plan of America or of the presidency.

Galipeau: I cannot sell them on going three years to night school to get a diploma and then two years to trade tech to get a plumbing certificate, when they won't get a job because of their record. What I can offer them is the Los Angeles Times' Reading Lab, where they can reach high school reading level in two months. The Times' Reading Lab has the technology to do that.

But Governor Wilson just closed down four of six of these Impact programs. San Diego has closed. Compton--my God, of all places, they closed down Compton! It's disgusting because the combination of eight weeks to read and six weeks to get a Ged and a job--they can see that. You're talking four months. These guys can see four months down the road, but you can't talk to an OG about three years down the road because he knows there's a high probability he's going to be dead or in the pen.

Kody: Until the gang members, the OGs, the youngsters, the community, the church, the workers, the students--until we say, "That's it, no more," it won't stop. We have to create an alternative ourselves to this madness. The alternative must come from the people.

But there are people who are in the community working to bring about this particular perspective. You see it in every facet of society now, in the way people dress. People are starting to wear haircuts that reflect their African culture. Rap music. Other political leaders. Things like Rodney King heighten the consciousness of the people who are still oppressed.

Gang activity in America is only a small problem in terms of the way people are dying. Gang members are not responsible for the largest number of deaths in the African community. Don't you know we have a high infant-mortality rate? We have people who are on narcotics. We have a high level of hypertension. Those things are causing a tremendous amount of deaths in our community.

Galipeau: If we're going to solve the gang problem, the country will have to resolve itself like we did when Kennedy got pissed off because Khrushchev put up Sputnik first. When I was growing up, our society said that nobody is going to beat the Americans to the moon. And our whole social fabric, our intelligence, our brilliance, our education, our science--everything honed in on putting an asshole on the moon to hit a golf ball. We spent billions of dollars.

Kody: I'm never going to be unarmed. Because power goes out of the barrel of a gun. They've got guns, so I'm gonna have a gun. If it were up to me to stop this today, I would do it. But it's larger than the individual.

Gang activity will stop when an alternative is reached where a youth can say, "I can still keep my gun and be a part of this." They're never going to be unarmed, because they see what's going on in Palestine. They see what's going on in South Africa, where youth are throwing rocks and bottles at tanks because they were unarmed years previously. The African community is never going to be unarmed again, because we know that being unarmed means certain death. See, gangs are like every other thing in society, they're evolutionary. In the Nineties the new thrust of gang crimes will be extortion. Just as the Mafia started with the Black Hand, with small extortionists, and evolved into a multinational corporation today, so will gangs.

Commercial extortions. Merchants in our community, for example, who are not of our nationality. Who have recently been killing African people. Koreans. These people will either be systematically driven out of the community, or they will be extorted at the expense of staying in the community. If they want to take our money, they must have money to put back into the community.

Bone: You have a Korean on every corner now. It didn't used to be like that. You might have had one on a corner. We had black stores, man, I'm tellin' you, about eight years ago. They've got Koreans selling chitlins now. Goddamn!

Li'l Monster: They just sap our community, drain the life out of our community. And they won't put a dime of it back in. Then they kill our kids, like Latasha Harlins [a black teenager shot during an altercation with a Korean shopkeeper]. No, that's not an isolated incident. There's a Korean-owned market right up here. Earlier this year I would go in there in the morning and get me a cup of coffee before I started on my way. One morning I walked in there and the store was completely rearranged so you couldn't just step straight into the store, you had to go through a little maze to get in. I asked the owner why he did that. He said, "Because kids come in and steal candy on their way to school." He said, "I called the police and they won't do nothing, but they told me I can shoot them." This is what a Korean merchant in a black community told me that the police told him.

Kody: Drugs started the expansion, and now gang members are, in a sense, just like the American government. They're looking for new land to conquer. They're expansionists. They're imperialists. Don't you know whole states are allocated to a specific set now? I can't go to Louisiana because it's controlled by another set. So my set goes to Baltimore. That's just a small look into the future of what we'll be about, because we will really start to control commerce.

Galipeau: One thing I am most fearful of is something that's starting over in Inglewood, Hawthorne, Torrance, Gardena--middle-class areas where you have down gang members [dedicated gang members] who shoot out of cars. The problem is going to be between browns and blacks, and it's gonna start in middle-class communities with kids who don't understand what they're doing.

Bone: We always have small race wars. You always hear about small race riots at different high schools and stuff like that. It's like that in South Central because ten years ago the black high schools were black high schools. But now it's half Latino and half black. So with the Mexicans going to school side by side with blacks, there's a lot of tension. Where the problem comes in is with holidays, like Black History Month. The Latinos say, "Fuck Black History Month. We don't give a fuck." They're walking out on the black history celebrations. So the blacks get mad. Then they come with Cinco de Mayo. And the blacks say, "Fuck Cinco de Mayo. We don't care nothing about the fifth of May." And then they walk out on their celebration, laugh at their culture. So it's building right there.

Galipeau: Law enforcement is not capable in Los Angeles County or anywhere else of taking care of brown-black warfare. When they get it on, nobody will be safe. Every freeway is going to be a drive-by land. Everybody who ain't your color, who doesn't look just like you, is a target--that's white, that's brown, that's Korean, that's black. Anybody who doesn't look like you gets blasted on these freeways. We're going to have to have federal troops--not National Guards, not Army reserves--federal troops coming in putting us under martial law.

Li'l Monster: You know what? I'm going to tell you the truth. I worry more about dying at the hands of some white racist pig than I do of another gang member. Plain and simple.

Galipeau: We're now in an era where there is no one in South Central who hasn't had a loved one killed or seriously hurt [by gang warfare]. It's come to that. Everybody has had a mother, father, brother, sister, auntie, uncle, nephew, niece--somebody who has been killed or seriously injured. If you drive around South Central, you'll see ramps going up the steps to people's houses. They aren't there because this is an old person's community. They're for young people who need the ramps because they're paraplegics as a result of gunshot wounds. Everybody wanted peace, but they didn't want to admit it and sound like a buster or something.

One of the parties I was most gratified by was at Lueders Park in Compton. This is a Blood stronghold. I saw Crips I hadn't seen in fifteen years. They had big tough guys who were running it, keeping people in control--keep your bottle in a bag, keep it down so the neighbors don't get upset. There were probably five or six hundred people there. I was there from two in the afternoon until eight at night, watching these guys drinking that awful Old English and Cisco's steady. There was not one fight. Now, I was in the Army during Vietnam and I was never in a beer hall with fifty guys when there wasn't a fight within an hour. There was not a fight in six hours with all these high-status Crips and Bloods. Dancing with each other's girls. I mean, it brought tears to my eyes.

Bone: You know what one of my biggest fears is? Not being in my kids' life at all times. Just not being there. I'm sure that's anybody's biggest fear if they think about it. If you have kids, that's supposed to be your number-one shot.

Kody: I have two sons and a daughter. That's my most fearful thing, not being able to support them or teach them the pitfalls of society. I wasn't taught, and so I've fallen.

It wouldn't surprise me if either of my sons joins a gang because I've seen it in the past, but I doubt that would happen. If it did, it would be on me as a parent for not teaching them the right and the wrong ways of growing up. It would be my responsibility, and I would feel bad. Of course I wouldn't want them to be in a gang, because that would mean their lives would be shortened. If they joined a gang, that would mean that my family wasn't giving them the attention and the love they needed, and therefore they've had to seek that somewhere else.

Li'l Monster: I have no regrets in my life, but that doesn't mean I want somebody to live the same life I've lived. So, quite naturally, I'm going to steer the person in another direction than what I went on my own. One of my worst fears is going out of this world without having made a difference. My idea of making a difference is getting to brothers and sisters when they're young and when they've started in a life of crime and telling them that they have other avenues and other channels they can take to turn that negative influence into something positive.

Bone: Yeah, I've been lucky. But it still could happen any day. I could get washed up tomorrow, you know, if I made the decision to do something or get caught doing something. It still holds today. So it's not like I won the battle, you know, because I'm still down in South Central every day resisting and stuff. Anything could happen.