Life And Death With the Gangs

By Jon D. Hull/Los Angeles

Michael Hagan's idea of a good time is to guzzle a few bottles of Olde English "800" Malt Liquor and smoke PCP with his fellow gang members in the slums of south central Los Angeles. There is no telling what might happen.

During one Monday-evening binge, Hagan, 23, and his "home boys" decided to have some sport with a rival gang. Flushed with bravado, five of them piled into a blue Buick and sped toward enemy turf. There they spotted four teenagers, two of them girls, standing at a corner in front of a cinder-block wall covered with gang graffiti. Hagan grabbed a semiautomatic rifle and, with a fellow home boy known as "Baby Monster," strolled to the corner.

When the teenagers saw the rifle, three of them ran. But Kellie Mosier, 17, a lissome, bright-eyed high school junior who worked in an ice-cream store, never got a chance. As she turned to flee, Hagan began squeezing the trigger, methodically emptying all 15 rounds from the fully loaded clip. Just for kicks. Mosier was hit six times in the back.

This summer Hagan was convicted of first-degree murder for the 1986 slaying. His sentencing is set for September. He pleaded not guilty, claiming that the fateful day was blurred by drugs. Witnesses testified otherwise. Like so many other killers churned out each year by the ghetto, Hagan does not really care what happened. He does not care about Kellie Mosier or her family or her dreams of being a model or the fact that she never belonged to any gang. "I done did something, and I'm known," he boasts, smiling broadly as he lounges behind the bars of the Los Angeles County jail. "I consider myself public enemy No. 1."

If many American ghettos now resemble Beirut, urban terrorists like Hagan are largely responsible, acting as roving gangs peddling drugs and violence and terror. Despite the fratricide among gangs, most of their victims are innocent bystanders. Says Lieut. Bob Ruchhoft of the Los Angeles police department's gang detail: "Life is cheap as hell in some of these communities."

Los Angeles is home to more than 200 gangs with some 12,000 members, an increase of about 25% from 1980. There were 187 gang-related homicides in 1986, a 24% increase over 1985. So far, this year looks even worse. Drive-by shootings are more common than smog alerts, and the burgeoning trade in crack cocaine has turned gangs from stray hoods into multimillion-dollar enterprises equipped with Uzis and AK-47 assault rifles.

) Gangs are prospering because crime pays in the ghetto. Many gangs have made the deadly transition from switchblade bravado to organized crime, serving as highly efficient distributors for Colombian cocaine dealers. Stiff competition has prompted bloody firefights in broad daylight over market share, while the influx of drug money provides topflight weapons, fancy cars and high-tech surveillance equipment. Once an adolescent phase, gang membership is now a full-time job, enticing many members to stay well into their 20s and 30s.

Hungry for customers, a growing number of gangs are going national, with black gangs like Los Angeles' Crips and Chicago's Disciples establishing franchises in cities from Seattle to Shreveport, La. "They're all over," says Detective Robert Jackson of the Los Angeles police department gang detail. "We've got a glut of coke here in Los Angeles, and the price is down. They can make three times as much money in Phoenix or Denver." Phoenix has suffered seven gang-related murders this year. In Denver the first Crips were detected in 1984; last March police there busted a crack house run by another Los Angeles ghetto gang, the Mafia Bloods.

In Los Angeles most black gangs call themselves either Crips, who wear blue, or Bloods, who favor red. Crips fight Crips and Crips fight Bloods; there is no central command over the hundreds of separate gangs. At stake are fiercely coveted turf and customers. "We're talking about unfeeling, murderous villains," says Sergeant Wes McBride of the Los Angeles sheriff's gang squad.

At 5 ft. 6 in. and 140 lbs., Hagan is all muscle and fight. His gang moniker, tattooed across both forearms, is "Wishbone." But "Powder Keg" might have been more appropriate. "If I'm loaded and get mad, anything can happen," he warns. He reckons that about ten of his friends have died violently over the years but still finds the dangers of the streets "exciting." Just another rush in a big man's game of cowboys and Indians. Even the prospect of a lifetime behind bars does not crack the cold composure. "To me, life is not much better on the streets than in jail," he says. "I can live here, no problem." He's not afraid of dying; he's not afraid of jail. Society has nothing to scare Hagan into line.

The oldest of three children, Hagan grew up with his mother in the squalor of south central Los Angeles. His father left the family when Hagan was only ten. It did not take Hagan long to learn who had the girls, the cars, the clothes and the prestige. When he was 13, he was jumped by a dozen local gang members, who beat him savagely. He fought back like a wild animal, and his courage earned him the status of a home boy, the generic street name for a fellow gang member. He had been accepted.

"The gang is your family," he explains. "If you're my home boy, I fight for you, no matter what the odds. If you're the enemy, it's do or die." Young punks with real guns playing capture the flag for keeps. Hagan is a member of the Eight-Tray Gangster Crips, a pack of predators named after their turf along 83rd Street. They identify themselves with hand signals and mark their territory with hieroglyphic graffiti that translate into a simple warning: TRESPASSERS MAY BE SHOT.

Within a year after joining the gang, Hagan was drinking, fighting and smoking PCP with the best of the home boys. Eager to please the older gang members, he became the fearless errand boy, quickly learning to rob and steal and priding himself on his growing reputation as a "crazy." He says: "I was like a hardhead. The more my parents told me to stay away from gangs, the more I wanted to hang with them." He has his own ideas about parenthood: "If I had a son, I would give him a choice: either he can go to school and be a goody-goody or hit the streets."

Shuffled among five different high schools because of his gang activity, Hagan was arrested as a juvenile in 1979 for robbery and served five months. In 1981 he mugged an off-duty policeman and served four years. He finally managed to graduate in 1982 while behind bars. "When I was younger, it was fun," he says of his criminal career. "Like Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel. I didn't think I was going to get into the radical stuff." But the radical stuff became addictive.

Raised amid violence, Hagan responded with greater violence. Walk around like a hand grenade with the pin pulled, and people will make room. A soldier since age 13, he is adept at using battlefield logic to justify the daily carnage. "If you're in a war, you just accept that the only thing you can do is stay alive," he says. He impatiently explains the necessity of stealing from the enemy: "It's like I'm coming up in the world, you know. I'm trying to make it, and I need your wallet. That's how I see it." He bluntly cautions his victims not to resist: "If you pull out a gun on us, we're not going to leave you walking. You're trying to retaliate, and that means you just don't % care about us." Cocking his head back, he adds menacingly, "Think about it: Do you want your wife and kids to find you six feet under because of your wallet?"

Still, even that twisted logic does not explain his cold-blooded murder of Kellie Mosier. A junior in high school, she was working at her first job, behind the counter of an ice-cream parlor. While Hagan was being initiated into gangs at the age of 13, she was still playing with dolls. Resisting pressure at school to join the gangs, she selected friends who shared dreams beyond the streets, and they stuck together for protection. Poised and attractive, she dreamed of being a fashion model.

Kellie was gunned down just five blocks from the neatly manicured, stucco home in south central where she lived with her mother Irene, 36, and her grandparents. Now all that remains of her is the silver-framed picture on the mantel and the bedroom her mother will not touch. Kellie was an only child. "We were best friends," says Irene, sitting in her daughter's room beneath the pictures of cover girls still taped to the wall.

After Kellie was killed, Irene quit her job as a clerk at a computer software company and stormed the streets in search of the killer, barging into local dope houses with a fury born of grief. Then came a letter from a sympathetic inmate in the county jail who provided the names and addresses of the gang members involved. Irene waited three days before passing the tip on to police. She explains, "I wanted to kill him myself."

During the trial, Irene endured Hagan's remorseless composure and watched in disgust as he reveled in the pride of gang life. Sometimes, when she sits alone in her daughter's room, she cannot help wondering where a young boy learns to pull the trigger without blinking, why manhood in the ghetto is such a dangerous thing. "I knew these gang members when they were just babies," she says sadly. "Now look at them. They've turned into killers."

Across town in the Los Angeles County jail, Hagan is chuckling. He cannot believe someone would ask him how gang members learn to shoot. "It's just like in the movies," he explains, demonstrating different firing positions. "You just shoot until you hit something."

That's what Hagan did. Six out of 15 into the back of a girl he had never met.