PORTRAIT OF A GANG LEADER

His small, round badge of courage is on his back: the puckered scar left by a bullet wound. He is proud of the scar, and prouder still that he can shrug it off as an accepted part of his lifestyle. "Almost everybody's been shot," smiles the 19-year-old black youth known as "Bartender," a leader of one of the street gangs that flourish in the Los Angeles area.

Bartender is known as Lyle Joseph Thomas on police records and his dossier is full. He has been arrested eleven times on charges that include assault on a police officer, simple assault, strong-armed robbery and possession of a carbine. But, thanks to the vagaries of juvenile justice, he has never served time in jail.

With both of his parents working, Bartender grew up on his own in suburban Compton, gradually drifting into trouble. "They hate me," he says of his mother and father, who had just kicked him out of the house when TIME Correspondent Joseph N. Boyce came past to talk. "They take turns getting on my ass."

A high school graduate, Bartender is intelligent and knows it ("I used to see the brothers writing graffiti on the walls--spelling names wrong. I decided I wanted to help them"). He makes $121 a week as a porter at Kaiser Foundation Hospital, but his real life belongs to the Piru, the street gang of about 150 members who hang around Compton's Leuders Park taking drugs, playing basketball and planning robberies and burglaries. "I do my share," acknowledges Bartender, explaining: "People be broke." But mainly the Piru plots, attacks and defends itself against its hated enemies, the local chapter of the Crips, which is perhaps the most vicious and largest street gang in the area. (The Crips got its name when its leader was shot in the leg and thereafter strutted around his turf with a cane.)

The rivalry between the two gangs started with fistfights four years ago in the high school cafeteria. Then someone brought his mother's gun to school, and the killing started. Now the battles are called "gang-bangs," and they are often settled by blasts from sawed-off shotguns and .38s. Police estimate that about ten members of the Piru and the Crips have been killed to date. "People get high and just don't care sometimes," Bartender explains. "Somebody says go do something, and everybody is game for it because they don't want to look like they're scared. At the beginning, when you first start banging, you're scared. But after a while, you can't be. Like myself--I got a lot of people looking for me, and if I clinched up, I wouldn't last at all." -

Bartender's courage often came from marijuana, cocaine, acid, "whites" (amphetamines) and "reds" (Seconal). They are still easy to get and so are guns. "You can get any kind of a 'roscoe'--twelve-gauge shotguns, four-ten shotguns, 9-mm. pistols, 38s, .357-cal. Magnums. I remember one person outside the gang even had a flamethrower."

Asked what he thinks of the juvenile justice system, Bartender laughs and responds, "I wish I were still a juvenile." Now that he is 19 and for the first time answerable for his crimes as an adult, Bartender sometimes talks about quitting the Piru. "This year I have a job. Next year I'll have a car and a pad." But in the next breath, he talks of his loyalty to the gang, the fact that if he were to quit, "there's more chance of those left getting downed [killed] quick. Besides, I live in Crip neighborhood--I'd still get messed with when I got to my pad. The only way to stop is to get out of Compton, and that's something that's not easy to do."

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