To Live & Die in L.A.

heavy dope from rap's original gangsta

''The most dangerous black man in America is the ghetto hustler. He is internally restrained by nothing. He had no religion, no concept of morality, no civic responsibility, no fear--nothing.''

--Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Gangs Were Born out of chaos--the inner city. When you grow up in South Central and you've never had anything in your life that you control, you seek control. Gangs offer ultimate control to do what you want. Just getting it for a minute is intoxicating. Gang members are out there trying to control their own little world. It's only a tiny place. It may not look like much to you--an alley, a street--but it's like a country to them. It's easy for outsiders to say it's just a block, but many of those kids won't leave that block for years--and in some cases, their entire lives. It's theirs. It becomes their whole world. Everybody wants to have power over their world.

The gang scene in Los Angeles is extremely complicated and deep-rooted. The Hispanic gangs have been banging for more years than any of the black gangs. The black gangs began to form after the Watts riots in 1965.

I first came in contact with gangs in 1974, when I started going to Crenshaw High School. I saw one group of guys hanging out together and I wanted to know what was going on. They were the unit. At that point I unknowingly got connected with the Crips. When you go to school and you start hanging out with friends from one neighborhood, they immediately become your gang. The guys I met had come from Horace Mann Junior High School, and they were part of the first generation of black gangs. Across town was a gang called the Brims, which is now called the Bloods. I then began to learn about the different groups and their idiosyncrasies.

Gang divisions are called sets. A gang member will ask you, ''What set are you from?'' Meaning, Are you a Crip? Are you a Westside Crip? A Rollin' 60s Crip? Eight-Tray Gangsters? Avalon Gardens? Project Watts?

The Crips wear blue, the Brims wear red. The Crips call you cuz. The Brims call you blood. The Crip has his left ear pierced; the Brim, his right.

Gangbanger clothes are based on the cheapest shit in the stores. Bandannas. Shoelaces. The Mexican kids wear pressed T-shirts; they even iron a crease in them. They wear khakis and corduroy house shoes that cost five or ten dollars. They wear Pendleton shirts that last forever. The entire dress code consists of inexpensive items, but they press them and turn their dress into something that's honorable because it's all they have.

In black gangs, anything that wasn't a Crip was a Blood. But the Blood gangs weren't all connected. You had the Bounty Hunters, Pirus, Denver Lanes, Villains, Swans. But they didn't get along, and the lack of unity made them less potent than the Crip gangs.

As the gangs evolved, the Crip gangs became so wild that they started to prey on themselves and divide among their own sets. The Grape Street Crips in Watts would be at war with the Rollin' 60s--the numbers correspond to the street blocks. From slightly west of Crenshaw Boulevard, all the way east to Long Beach Boulevard and back into Watts, was the area for gang activity. So when you hear people talk about the 20s, they're referring to 20th through 29th streets. The 30s go all the way across town, but the actual gang lived right around Western and the South Central police station. The 40s were the hustlers. They were the closest thing to non-gang members of all the blocks. They were out there gambling. They thought they were a little slicker than gang members.

Of ten blocks, one street would be popping and a gang would be named after it. You had Five-Deuce Crips (52nd and Hoover) and Eight-Tray Crips (83rd and Hoover). Before there were Rollin' 60s and 74 Hoover--that's the hot spot for the Crip gang--there was a gang called 7459 Hoover Crips, which meant everything from 74th to 59th streets. And each set would have an east or a west side, like the 74 Hoover Westside and the 74 Hoover Eastside.

All these gangs have their own hand signals. A Hoover Crip throws two of his fingers down and puts another finger across, to look like an H. The Crips hold up a C. A Blood will make his fingers look like a B. The hand signals are intricate. One set can tell another to fuck off by throwing up their signals.

When a gang member gets ready for battle or goes hard-core gangbanging, it's called locing. Going loc. Locing up. All of a sudden the beanies will get down crazy, their pants will sag, their sunglasses will go on. It's the equivalent of Native Americans going on the warpath.

I've been to parties where my homies are chillin', and even though they're in a gang, they're low-key. A fight will break out and immediately my guys go on loc. Their hats flip up and they're ready to pop. They spread the gang energy and start vibing off one another.

A gang member reading this will automatically know I was in a Crip set, because a Blood will never use the word loc. When it became public that I was involved in a Crip gang, interviewers asked me which set I was affiliated with. I don't think it's to anybody's advantage for me to represent a set publicly. I don't want to be responsible for somebody targeting that set for any reason. You have to remember, this is no joke on the street. People live and die over their colors.

I also run into problems when I talk to Brims about the gang truce that started in April 1992. They don't necessarily want to listen to me because I'm not in their set. Bangers feel me out first by asking what set I was with. I tell them it's irrelevant because now I'm trying to work for everybody.

''Oh, so you was a Blood?'' they ask.

''Fuck a Blood,'' I'll snap. It's an automatic response because a lot of my friends got killed by Bloods. A lot of my friends. The last time we were on the road, the brother of one of my buddies got killed in gang violence. We had to do everything we could to keep my buddy in, because his brother made a 911 call and named the murderer.

I felt bad for him because I used to be so emotional. I would go on autopilot and no one could talk to me. That's exactly what happens to these kids. They just go crazy--and when you don't retaliate, you just sit around waiting, waiting for justice to be served.

The question is, Will he get justice? Will the killer go to jail? Or will he have to issue his own form of justice?

Try to put yourself in the position of losing your sister or brother. You'd be crazy with revenge, driving around the streets asking people, ''Do you know who killed my brother?'' Once you find out, your response is, ''Fuck them. And their whole set.'' That's how you get a gang situation.

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There are three levels of gang membership: the hard-core, the members and the affiliates. The hard-core gangster is the straight-up warrior. He's always looking for the enemy; he's always in attack mode. He lives the violent side of gang life and that's all he focuses on. He's the equivalent of the Army soldier who enlisted in order to go to war: ''Fuck the GED. I'm here to kill some motherfuckers.'' He's the guy reading Soldier of Fortune and living for the confrontation.

The members are in gangs primarily for the camaraderie. They'll represent their set, but they're not sitting there nutty, just ready to go at it all the time. The members usually run the gangs because they are more levelheaded than the hard-core members. These are the guys who understand that gang membership has its privileges. The Geto Boys have a record out, Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Gangsta. Members have fun with it. They gain brotherhood and confidence that they aren't getting anywhere else.

The affiliates know all the gangbangers and they wear the colors. But they are not out there putting in the drive-bys. Usually, they just live on the same street as a set and they abide by the rules. Sometimes, the affiliate gang members might be calling the shots because they may be a bit more intelligent and less violent than other members. I was an affiliate member, and if one of my homies from Hoover needed advice, we'd hook up and discuss tactical maneuvers. Before you know it, you're setting up a drive-by.

See, when you live on a certain street, you will always be held accountable for your hood if something goes down. In other words, a totally square kid living on 83rd Street knows his street is a Crip street and knows he can't avoid the politics of his hood.

I once went with my daughter to buy some sneakers. I picked out a pair for her, but she pointed to a red pair. ''Let's get these,'' she said. I looked at her and asked, ''Red--what are you talking about?'' She was living near the jungle off King Boulevard and Dorsey High School, and that's a Blood area.

She let me know she's not a gang member but she's part of that environment. She told me, ''I'd just rather blend in than try to fight it.'' If she wants to wear blue and all her girlfriends are wearing red, she's going to create a problem. So why do that?

The first three levels of gangs have to follow the rules completely. One of the main violations is associating with the enemy. It's like the Civil War revisited in South Central. If you have to visit your cousin in another gang's territory on Sunday, expect to hear about it on Monday: ''Yo, cuz, I seen you with them Bloods.'' Kids get sweated for that all the time because of gang spies. If you're seen hanging on enemy turf, it's like an act of treason to your set.

The rules of gang warfare are not much different from those of the military. If a fight breaks out and you run, you can get popped. In the Army you can get sentenced to death. So the kids who are more blatant with their membership--in military-speak, gung-ho--gain the rank. In many ways, gangs are playing the same games America plays against other countries. It's a game of superiority played out on a smaller scale.

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The ultimate rush for any man is power. When you're in a set, you not only gain power, you gain rebellious power. You're not answering to anybody. Once a kid can flick this switch in his head and say, ''I can do what I want to do. There are laws, but I'm gonna handle it my way,'' his ego is boosted. He gains identity. Any time you join a fraternity, you immediately become somebody, even if it's only in your set.

In the ghetto, even the names of gangsters have power. If I say I hang with Tony Bogart, everybody in the hood knows who he is. He's the guy who initiated the gang truce. He's as big a gangster as anyone. Why does P.J. Watts have juice? Because he's been shot a bunch of times and the kids know he's not afraid of anyone. The buzz around town will be like, ''Oh, you know him? You know Raider from Santana block?''

Who are these guys? They are not professional athletes or pop stars. But they are big shots to ghetto kids because they got their names from being tough. They didn't have money, so they used the one commodity they did have--strength.

Gang culture is ghetto male love pushed to its limit. Gang members wear their colors in defiance of everything--the cops, other sets, even the school system. When they wear their colors while strolling through rival turf, it's called bailing, and to anybody on the outside, they're insane. Why would you walk down the street like a big target? Because in an aggressive environment, it's your way of saying, ''I'm not afraid of anybody.''

Gangs offer kids security in a fucked-up environment. It's not the killing that initially draws a kid into gangs. It's the brotherlike bond, because you're telling the kid, ''Yo, I love you, and nothing's ever gonna happen to you. And if anything happens to you, those motherfuckers are going to be dead.''

You don't tell your girlfriend that. You don't tell your mother. You hold true on that promise. When you see these drive-bys and kids are hitting five or six people on the street, they are retaliating for the murder of one of their boys. I've seen crying men enter cars, and when the car door slams shut, they go out and murder.

If they hit their target, most of them will walk. They know that if you kill another black man in Los Angeles, the odds are that you won't be going to jail. Your case isn't an LAPD priority. It's the old ghetto saying: ''A nigger kills a white man, that's murder one. A white man kills a nigger, that's self-defense. A nigger kills a nigger, that's just another dead nigger.''

If your case does make it to court, the witnesses they'll use against you are usually from another gang. These kids want to see Eddie Crook go to jail. And once your attorney proves this, you're not going to jail. You're not going to get popped for it. That's what was so ironic about the Rodney King trials. The witnesses for the defense were police, and that should have been a conflict right there. They are in the same gang. Of course some of them will lie to save their buddies.

Most of the gang killers are still out there on the street. I meet kids every day who are introduced to me as ''the shooter.'' ''This is the shooter,'' they'll say. ''This is our killer.'' It means this kid has killed and will kill again. It's not only what he does, it's what he's known for. Sometimes, they won't be much older than 15 or 16.

Gangs have been able to get away with so much killing, it just continues. The capability for violence in these kids is unimaginable. Last year five of my buddies died. I don't even go to funerals anymore. There are so many people dying out there, it's crazy. Sometimes I sit with my friends and think, There will never be another time on earth when we'll all be together again. Many of my original crew are dead. You get hard after a while. People on the outside say, ''These kids are so stone-faced. They don't show any remorse or emotion.'' It's because they're conditioned to deal with death like soldiers in a war. You just don't know what it's like unless you've been around it.

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In L.A., gangbanging is done under the supervision of the police. The cops watch the gangs' activity; they don't get in it, but they allow it to go down. They don't care about people hurting one another. The gangs are not out to attack the police. No mafia messes with the police because then the cops will come down on them.

The gang mentality is, ''This is my city, this is my hood, this is my world. Fuck the police. They are here to do what they got to do and I'm here to do what I got to do.'' Gangs have total disrespect for the law.

Poverty totally instills a fuck-it attitude. What am I going to lose? they think. It ain't like gangbangers are coming out of nice houses in Brentwood and going out and taking a risk. They are coming out of the projects. Their homes might be as big as the average living room. My buddy will tell you, ''Man, I got a wife, four kids and two pit bulls in a single apartment. So don't come tell me what to do. I'm just trying to live. I'm coming out here on the streets, and whatever I got to do, I got to do.''

Stories fly around town about cops provoking gang members to fight by going from set to set and spreading rumors about who murdered who. Many cops find this shit funny. If you're a real policeman, you don't want to see anybody get hurt. But put yourself in the mindset of the cop who gets up in the morning saying, ''All these fucking niggers, savages down there. I'm gonna go down and put some of them in jail and beat some of them up.'' That cop is causing as much trouble as the gangs, because he's stirring them up.

The gangs act as defiantly as possible toward police. A gang member will see a cop and throw his set up to him. It's called ''giving it up'' or ''hitting 'em up.'' Like Ice Cube says on his Predator album, ''See One-Time, hit 'em up.'' He's illustrating the defiance gang members feel toward One-Time (the cops who roll through the neighborhoods). Most gang members aren't afraid of getting thrown in jail. What do they have to lose?

To most of them, jail is no different from home. They ain't going to do nothing but kick it with the homies in jail. Everybody's there. If you're young, you say to yourself, ''I can do two standing on my head.''

Gang mentality is pounded into your head in prison. When you go to prison in any section of California, you get thrown into a car. A car is the group you hang with when you're in the joint. A ride. These are the guys you'll be rolling with in a prison riot. The first thing you'll be asked after being in prison for a while is, ''What car you in?'' In jail there are Muslim cars (415 up north, 213 in L.A.), a Black Guerrilla Family, a Crip car, a Blood car. These cars are your gang and your form of protection while you're serving time.

Like in any gang situation, even if you don't side with any of them, that becomes a car--the people who ain't with anything. An inmate will ask, ''You ain't with the Aryan Nation? You ain't with the Arabs?'' If the answer is no, you become linked with all the other prisoners in an independent car.

If a convict goes to prison for ten years and lands in a Crip car, he's waking up every day putting on his bandanna, walking the walk. And it's no joke when a guy who outranks you in your car comes up to you and tells you that you have to stick some guy. You gotta do it.

There is drama in jail. By the time you come home, you're really banging. When the police take a gangster off the street and put him in jail, his criminal side is totally reemphasized. You'll see the gang tattoos. You'll see the change in his eyes.

My hope is that the gang truce can reach into the prisons, because the prisons really run the streets. In the joint you get favors by seeing what you can do for somebody on the outside. If I were in jail with you and you wanted something done by me, or if I wanted something done by you, I'd say, ''Don't worry, I can reach your people and handle it.'' A lot of the guys who are getting killed on the streets are being reached by people in the joint. The joint contains the most hard-core gangsters.

All these shots are being called by people in the joint, and if they decide the war is over in there, then it will be over outside, too. You can't stop on the outside without the commitment of guys in the joint. They're going to be saying, ''Yo, when I get out, blam.'' A truce has to happen in both places simultaneously.

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One of my buddies once told me, ''Man, everybody wants to be special.'' If you can't be special by being the smartest person in school, you're going to try to be special by being really different or really tough. The guys in Boo-Ya Tribe wear big braids and clip a blue barrette to the end of their hair. What they're saying is, ''I'm going to look crazy. And if you don't know better, you might say something to me about it.'' It gives them distinction.

I went to Mann's Chinese Theater in Hollywood one time with 50 of my gang-banging buddies. Fifty dudes with sunglasses and baseball hats. You should have seen how the streets cleared as people got out of the way. These are kids who would never have had that kind of power without being in a gang.

If they only threw fists when a confrontation came up, there wouldn't be a problem. But somewhere along the line, somebody got killed. Once death came into the equation, it became a dark, evil, scary thing.

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Frederick Douglass wrote more than 140 years ago, ''Everyone in the South wants the privilege of whipping someone else.'' He believed that slaves, by having to submit to the power of their masters, became aggressive toward one another and would whip one another more cruelly than their masters had. Frustration builds into aggressive behavior and causes people to lash out and hurt somebody. Anybody who suffers pain is searching to reach out. If you grow up in an aggressive environment, your threshold for pain grows higher and you'll do one of two things: become extremely gentle or become extremely violent.

I'm more or less a gentle person, but I can get extremely violent in stressful situations. Because I have a gangbanging past, people always want to test me. That's a dangerous thing, trying to push the ghetto button. People can end up dead in those situations. With gangs, you're dealing with killers or with people who have the potential to kill. Why fuck with this guy? Why would you want to see if he's real? Because of his upbringing, the ghetto black man has this built-in mechanism he's trying to control. You shouldn't push him toward the edge. Sometimes you're dealing with people who are so frustrated, they are on the brink of insanity.

The way to deal with these guys, particularly when they're attempting to break out of the gangster mind-set, isn't by threatening them. In Orange County, California, politicians are threatening to crack down hard on gangs. They actually believe if they bully these kids, they will be scared out of gang membership.

They don't have a clue that by the time a kid joins a gang, he's already lost all fear of what could happen to him. Nothing could be scarier than Johnny's home life and upbringing. The killing fields have destroyed his spirit and the lives of his friends. If politicians were smart, they'd explore the issues that make a kid want to join up in the first place. Why does this kid want to tag the wall? It's so typical for the government to say, ''Let's go after the kid instead of figuring out the reason he's so full of hate. Let's attack Ice-T because he wrote Cop Killer. We don't want to explore the reason he might have written it. That's too horrible. That's too complicated.''

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Because the causes are never explored, the battles will continue. And with the injection of drugs into the gang world, you have the perfect breeding ground for organized crime.

People outside the gang arena will always have a difficult time understanding why these kids sell drugs. They ask, ''How could they hurt their own people?'' To understand, I always used this scenario: Take four people, put them in a prison cell and say to one of them, ''Come to work for me. First off, none of y'all are ever getting out. You're destined to die in this prison cell. But if you poison the other three, I'll let you out. They are going to die anyway. But you can live if you kill them.''

How many people could stay there for the rest of their lives? How many would take the chance to get out? These kids are saying, ''I ain't got no way out. It's not that I want to hurt anybody, but this is my chance. The chance of escaping outweighs the harm I'm doing to others.''

When you deal dope, people come to you and beg for it. You don't see it as hurting anyone. You're quick to say: ''If I don't give it to them, somebody else will. They want the dope. I'm fulfilling a need. They're feeling good. Well, it's their own fault, you know. I got to do this. For the first time, my little sister got new sneakers. My mama's car note is paid. I'm able to achieve something. I have things now. I ain't never had anything before.''

Dealers are intoxicated with what they earn and can't stop. People don't go into selling drugs to hurt people. If that were the case, they would lace the drugs with cyanide. They aren't trying to kill anyone. They're trying an occupation that gives them a chance to live better. Before the introduction of crack, you had units of kids fighting over a street, not money. All of a sudden, these kids have cash flow and they're creating their own organizations. Right now, crack cocaine is the number-one employer of minorities in America. That's capitalism.

Crack and cash flow have added yet another angle to the complex problem of gangs. Now the gangs are spread out all over the U.S. You wonder where they came from.

Gangs took the game on the road. The crack or dope sold in Los Angeles is four times as expensive out of state. Los Angeles is the number-one headquarters for cocaine in the U.S. The dope capital is no longer Miami. It stopped coming in through Florida. Now it's coming up through Mexico and Arizona to L.A. The gangbangers get it and they're already organized. Everybody has a cousin in St. Louis or Cleveland and they can get their homies involved in the drug trade.

A gang member flies out to see his relative, and since he has this strong identity, the kid out of state will listen. Gangsters are given respect. Compared with these kids in Mississippi, they have it going on. A kid in Mississippi has never seen anything like it. He's dirt-ass poor, saying, ''Hey, I want to be in this. I like this.''

The L.A. connection will tell him, ''I'm from the Rollin' 60s and I have this product for you. If you have any problems or any drama out here, I'll have motherfuckers flown in from L.A. You see how we're kicking up dust in Los Angeles?'' And in no time, they'll turn out about ten dudes in Mississippi. They'll dress 'em up, teach them the ropes, and now Mississippi has a gang with real members.

Then, like in organized crime, they decide they want to take over an area and they need somebody to handle it. So they fly in another kid from Los Angeles, he does the job and he's out of there. Straight hit. How do you bust him? This kid's not from Mississippi. Nobody knows anything. He doesn't even know anything about who he's doing. And it's on.

The gangs grew out of control in L.A., so they were able to spread throughout the country. We're looking at the breeding grounds for a black mafia. The irony is that it's the same way many immigrants to America used crime to try to get ahead.

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With the gang truce, gangs in L.A. are in their final bonding stages. Prior to the truce, the gangs had bonded into small units. If they remain separate, the war will definitely continue. By bonding together, they can step back and realize, ''Yo, we all have the same enemy. Let's stop killing one another.'' Then they'd be a devastatingly powerful--and dangerous--unit of black men.

This is a situation the LAPD does not want to see happen. They do not dig this gang truce. They want to keep them separate. Once 20,000 guys who used to fight one another in groups of five or 500 sit down together, it's a new kind of phenomenon. Think about the force of these kids. If you ask, ''How many people here have done a drive-by?'' and 2000 hands go up, you've got some shit on your hands. You've got some hardcore soldiers. And if they decide the cops are the enemy, then the LAPD is in trouble. The cops have every reason to want these kids to remain separate. It's better for the cops if they keep killing one another.

I'm not worried about the gangs banding together. Once they reevaluate their lives, they'll want to move in more mellow directions. When I was out there hustling and looking at everybody crazy, I believed that was what I would always do. Once I was able to change and once I had hope for a different future, I didn't have those feelings. I didn't want to hurt anybody. I had no pressing reason to go out and do low. But when you're down in that hole, you feel like that's how you got to be all day, every day.

You have to be brought out of the gang attitude slowly. Lots of brothers can't do it. The DJ. I work with, Aladdin, grew up in Compton. Even after we started working together, he used to go back to Compton every night and hang out with his homies. I used to tell him, ''Yo, Aladdin, you look like a gangbanger.'' It was cool he was going out there to hang with his buddies, but I knew that if they committed a crime or hurt somebody, Aladdin would be nailed because he was making records. The cops could get with him. You have to remember, the brothers he's rolling with have the ability to disappear--they're unknown. That's why gang members have nicknames. The worst thing you can do is call a gangbanger by his last name. They purposely keep themselves incognito.

Aladdin knew what was going on, but he'd tell me, ''I come over here and kick it with you and it's cool, but I got to go back to Compton, man. When I go back to Compton, just because I know you, everybody thinks I'm a little bit better. So I might have to stand out on the corner with my boys for an hour or so--and I might not even want to--just to prove I'm still down.''

I told him to start protecting himself. They might have tried to make him do low just out of jealousy, because they knew he had a chance out. His true homies would be happy for him, but those other guys might have challenged him by daring him to go out and commit a crime with them. They might have tried to test his loyalty. Aladdin needed to step off and tell them he's not down with that. He'd found his way out and he was getting paid. If they couldn't understand that, then fuck 'em.

Eventually he had to get an apartment and move out. But he didn't just move, he took his real friends with him. They still come over and hang out. Even when you're in the neighborhood, it might seem like you have a lot of friends, but you actually have only a couple of true friends.

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I don't see the elimination of gangs. I would like to see the elimination of gang violence, though. Currently, I'm putting time and energy into Hands Across Watts, the organization in L.A. that's trying to see the gang truce through. Many of my friends still live in South Central or Compton, so every other phone call I get is word from the street. I'm what you call a shot-caller, so I probably know more about what's going on in the hood than the people who live there. I'm paying for funerals and counseling kids to quit killing over colors and streets. I'm their homeboy who made it, and I'm trying to set an example that there are alternatives to violence. I hope that peace can be instituted.

People have to understand that gang warfare is not something that should be treated like a minor problem. It's going to take a big truce. It will take negotiations and money. It will require a lot of effort to end it.

Thousands of people have died on each side of this bloody battlefield. It's not something you can just tell people to stop. When you talk to these kids, they are like veterans of war. They are used to death. They are used to despair.

On my record Colors, I rap:

''My color's death

Though we all want peace

But this war won't end

Till all wars cease.''

This gang war is just like any other war. If you think it can be easily stopped, let's go to Northern Ireland and tell them to stop. Let's go to Bosnia and tell them to quit. Don't call it anything less than what it is. Once we accept that, we can begin to deal with it. As long as the media define these kids as dumb gang members, they are undermining their efforts and not seeing what these kids are going through.

We can say how stupid it is, how ignorant it is. But understand that you can say that about any war. Regard it as such.

Whenever the U.S. goes to war, there is a reason for it and there is money for it. But in reality, I can sometimes see more sense in the war in these streets than in some of the wars overseas. American soldiers are usually fighting something we don't even understand. They are fighting for a belief system, while these kids are out fighting somebody who hurt their family. They're on some real shit. Until you've been up and around 250-pound dudes crying while loading guns, you don't know what it's about. You don't know this is real. Why did it happen? I don't know. But the problem is--the reality is--somebody's dead and somebody wants revenge.