Los Angeles All Ganged Up

By Alessandra Stanley

In the inner city of Los Angeles, it's the parents who dream of seeing their kids leave and the children who refuse to abandon the old neighborhood. & Ginetta Robinson wants her 17-year-old son out of his gang and out of the house, even though the place he is likeliest to end up is jail. "I'd rather see him locked up than dead," she says. Ramona Penuelas, a housewife who immigrated to America in search of a better life, plans to take her 14-year- old son back to Mexico once he gets out of juvenile detention. Zuela Menjivar is from El Salvador, and her dreams for a more prosperous life are so earnest that she has a subscription to FORTUNE magazine but no washing machine. She can't keep her 14-year-old away from the gangs. Once she screamed at him, "I'll send you to Salvador, where you can really fight with guns!" Unimpressed, her son shrugged. "Why should I fight someone else's war? I got my own to fight."

South Central Los Angeles looks a lot like the rest of the city -- smog- filtered sunlight, palm trees, pastel-colored stucco apartments. It doesn't look like a ghetto. The gang writing on cement walls, criminal samizdat that cops read for news of a planned attack with the expert alacrity of CIA cryptologists, is fastidiously printed; it bears little resemblance to the loopy graffiti of New York City.

South Central is best understood with eyes closed, because then unnerving sounds eclipse the familiar Los Angeles sights. Police and ambulance sirens, the insistent sputter of hovering police helicopters, blaring car alarms, the rapid pop-pop that no resident mistakes for a car backfiring -- all blend together into an incessant white noise of menace.

More than 500 gangs, with some 80,000 known members, infest Los Angeles County. The best known are the Bloods and the Crips, the two largest, predominantly black gangs, and the most bitter of rivals. Bloods and Crips break down into small neighborhood sets, and it is not uncommon for one Crip group to fight another Crip group up the street, for Blood to fight Blood. There were 462 gang-related murders in 1988, 107 of them in South Central, a 43-sq.-mi. stretch of ghetto with a population of 500,000. Though the murder rate does not approach the carnage of Beirut or El Salvador on a per capita basis, it is higher than that of Belfast or Burma. The U.S. Army has begun sending doctors to train in the emergency room of Martin Luther King Jr. General Hospital in Watts, because there they can get 24-hour-a-day experience treating the kind of gunshot wounds normally seen only in battle.

"Little Ducc" went on his first "mission," a drive-by shooting, as an observer when he was twelve. Freshly inducted into a local Crip gang, he drove in a sedan he describes as a GTA as casually as if he were saying GTO or MG, though it is police parlance for "grand theft auto" -- a stolen car. He is 14 now, in juvenile detention, and mainly remembers the noise. "A lot of yelling, some shooting, and then the police sirens." He never knew what prompted the attack. His "homeboys" had brought him along to test his mettle, and he acquitted himself well.

The next day Ducc was ready to fire on his own. When it got dark, Ducc and a few others headed on foot over railroad tracks and through alleys to the enemy neighborhood. This time Ducc was carrying a deuce-deuce, a .22-cal. pistol. The rival gang was waiting, armed and hidden, but Ducc spied two on the street who weren't even looking at him because, he says, "I'm so small." He fired and hit one of them. "I saw a lot of blood," he remembers. He froze, so shocked he was unable to move. One of his homeboys snatched him up and ran back to their neighborhood. The momentary paralysis was not held against him: it was then that he was awarded the nickname Little Ducc, after an older, respected gang member.

Hate among Los Angeles gang members isn't personal; it's an attitude. Ask Ducc why he shot, and he says, "Cuz he was an enemy." Ask him why he was an enemy, and he shrugs and says, "Cuz." It's part of an outlaw code Ducc lives by but cannot define. Ducc says he never felt any remorse. "I wasn't going to cry about it, because he was an enemy and I wasn't going to feel sorry for him," he says. But didn't he feel anything? "For a while I got drunk, to hide my feelings," he mumbles.

It wasn't long before he began feeling that a .22 was insufficient firepower. "A deuce-deuce doesn't seem like it do anything." He and a friend tried a .357 magnum, aiming it at a dog. They missed the animal, but the kick was so strong, "it threw both of us back against the wall." He settled for a .38.

Ducc was arrested two months earlier on an ADW (assault with a deadly weapon), one of many brushes with the law. His family history is standard for the neighborhood: his mother died when he was five; his father, a first- generation gang member, has spent the past five years in prison; his older brother, 17, is also in the gang. What little care Ducc has received came from his grandmother. Ducc happens to be bright -- smart enough, in fact, to be discovered by the I Have a Dream Foundation, which selects gifted ghetto kids and pays their college tuition if they complete high school. Ducc, however, hasn't gone to class much since the fourth grade.

Ducc's prison diagnostic-evaluation sheet notes that he suffers "low self- esteem." Ducc says that belonging to a gang is about obtaining "respect." Respect and disrespect make up the reigning ethos of the streets. Kids seek respect by joining a gang, then prove themselves by punishing someone outside the gang for an act of disrespect. In Los Angeles you "dis" a rival gang by uttering an irreverent nickname; "cheese toes" is a slang word for Crips and a sure way of provoking a gun battle.

Gangs have existed in Los Angeles since the turn of the century, but they have been turned into small armies by drugs and money and the violence that goes with them. Combat has changed from bare knuckles and knives to random shots at an enemy who is tracked from a distance, is usually faceless and is therefore all the easier to gun down without remorse. Not all gang members deal drugs, just as not all drug dealers belong to gangs, but the flow of drug money has infiltrated every crevice, creating a hyperinflation of shooting.

Few gang members use crack, the community's best-selling drug. Kids don't need to see TV public-service ads of a man frying an egg to know what crack does to the mind. They see it all the time on the streets and in their homes. "It makes people go out of their heads," says Edgar, 15. "My friends would stop me if I ever tried it." His mouth pursed with disgust, J.J., 15, says, "It makes people skinny and ugly." In South Central the only thing worse than a "basehead" is a "strawberry," a woman addict who trades sex for crack. J.J.'s mother is a basehead, and probably also a strawberry, but he won't discuss her. He'll fight anyone who does.

Most gang members are in their late teens and early 20s, but kids as young as ten or eleven readily join. They are called "wanna-bes" and are looked on even by the cops as apprentices in the trade. Yet it doesn't take much for a wanna-be to earn full stripes. According to Henry, 13, a Grape Street Crip, the only difference between "little gangsters" and "big gangsters" is firepower: little gangsters use .22s or .25s; big gangsters, .38s or Uzis.

Henry has a much stronger sense of being a Grape Street Crip than a Mexican American or an Angeleno. Ask him about his family, and he'll talk about his "homies." He knows the odds against surviving gang life. "I might get killed one day," he says. "My uncle did." His uncle, a Florencia gang member, was shot in the back with a .45 when Henry was ten. His uncle was Florencia because he lived in that neighborhood, but that was long ago, and Henry has always been Grape Street. "I don't like Florencia, I never did." One reason is that he had to stop playing football in a nearby park because Florencia claimed the territory. That happened when he was nine, before he became a Grape Street Crip, but gang members prize their memories almost as much as their weapons.

Henry doesn't sell drugs or commit robberies. "I just like gang banging," he says, meaning hanging out with his friends. He witnessed the mortal consequences of gang banging when he was eleven: a 16-year-old homeboy was shot twice in the head by some guys from "Colonia Watts." Henry was hanging out on the next street, heard the shots and ran over to find the boy sprawled on the street, his blood seeping onto the concrete. "I was mad, everybody was." Henry didn't get a chance to vent his anger until much later, for a different shooting by a different gang. After Florencia gang members shot a Grape Street member in the leg, the Grape Street gang had a meeting, and Henry and two other friends volunteered for the mission. "I wanted to do it," he says.

They walked 20 blocks, entered the Florencia neighborhood through back alleys and just started firing. "I shot three times, and the second shot hit one of them," Henry recalls. "The others jumped behind a car, but this guy fell down. I could see the blood, and I could hear him calling out." Henry remembers his heart racing as he headed home, where "I just calmed down." Of the shooting, he can only say, "It felt weird, I dunno, just weird."

He was carrying the .25 when the cops arrested him on the street the following day. He wasn't wearing colors; few members do so anymore, since gang emblems are as open an invitation to arrest as carrying a semiautomatic rifle. But just the fact that he was dressed in low-slung black trousers, Nikes and a Pendleton shirt gave him away.

Inside prison, Henry met one of his nemeses, a 15-year-old Florencia member named Saoul whom he had once shot at in a park. Saoul approached him. "Say, ain't you from Grape Street? Didn't you shoot at me?" he asked. After a moment of silent appraisal, Henry says, "we both just started laughing." They talked. "He's a nice guy, you know, normal," Henry says. "We won't fight each other anymore, but I'll fight his friends."

Henry, good-humored and alert, is not so very different from Akbar, the smart-alecky mujahedin boy who in the battle zone of Afghanistan grew closer to his comrades than to his father. In Henry's insular world, his homies are his only family. It is his enemies who keep changing. Despite designer sneakers and all the food he needs, Henry is far poorer than Akbar. He has no cause, no purpose to his fighting, no dream of redemption in another life.

Cops, gang members, shopkeepers and social workers in South Central Los Angeles all describe their community as a "war zone." But from afar, their battle wounds seem self-inflicted. In Third World war zones, combatants have no real alternative to war. For the child soldier in Burma or Afghanistan, there are no Big Brothers or child psychologists laboring to keep them out of harm's way. American inner-city kids, like those of Belfast, do have alternatives to gang shootings and street riots. Those opportunities may seem faint, but society does provide American and Northern Irish children with a semblance of choice.

Ehtablay, the Karen rebel, and Ducc, the Los Angeles gang member, have nothing in common except their age, and the intoxication and empowerment that came when they first fired a gun. Young boys, be they in Burma or Afghanistan or Northern Ireland or Los Angeles, are drawn to the violence; even the fear, when it distills into adrenaline, carries illicit pleasure. What sets Los Angeles apart from Afghanistan, Burma and Northern Ireland is that gang warfare, with its spoils of drug money, gratifies greed. Money in South Central is the gang warrior's jihad -- a fitting retribution for a materialistic society.

All comparisons end in paradox. The Burmese, the least sophisticated warriors, enmeshed in the longest, most brutal war, yearn for soothing discipline and community structure, while inner-city youth of Los Angeles, at the center of the most advanced society on earth, respond to adversity and deprivation by regressing to a primitive parody of tribes.