Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/081792/08179931.000

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                                                                                SOCIETY, Page 38

No Way Out


What's more dangerous than staying in a murderous street gang?
Trying to quit.

By JON D. HULL/CHICAGO


    With his crazy stare, massive knuckles and tattooed
biceps, Jimmy T. looks like an urban grenade with a faulty pin.
The five-alarm face fits nicely with his career as an
up-and-coming member of a Chicago gang called the Vice Lords.
But when his face relaxes and the baby fat sinks back in place,
a different visage emerges. Disarmed of weapons and bravado,
Jimmy is a terrified 16-year-old who did something very, very
stupid one hot summer night this past June.

    "O.K., it was like this," he says, rubbing those big hands
together and rocking slightly in his chair. "They told me, `Time
to put in some work for your homies. Here's the gun. There's the
car. Get up and go, boy.' " In other words, welcome to the big
time, Jimmy. Time to prove your stuff by shooting some rivals.
Try not to hit someone's mama or baby, but mainly just pull the
trigger bang bang bang -- and don't lose the damned gun.

    Only thing was, Jimmy wanted nothing to do with the big
time. Like most kids in his West Side neighborhood, he just sort
of fell into gang banging at 14. Then things got crazy, and now
he wants out.

    A muggy Saturday night shortly after 11. Jimmy is driving
around in a stolen 1987 Honda Prelude, a 9-mm TEC-9 under the
seat. "I'm thinking, ohhh, man, this sain't for me. I'm just
tired of this gang banging, and I'm, like, real scared." A
semiliterate high school dropout, Jimmy grapples with the
ghetto's version of a mid-life crisis. He drives around for 40
minutes, carefully obeying every traffic signal as he furiously
works through his options. Definitely don't want to be stopped
by the police, really don't want to fire this gun and sure as
hell don't want to disappoint the gang. Absolute ground zero in
the mind of a gang banger. "I'm thinking it through, and finally
it comes to decision time." Jimmy wheels the Honda toward a
group of faceless teenagers hanging on a corner in rival turf
and blasts seven rounds into the crowd, wounding three.

    Days later, he tries to explain why he did it. "Damn, man,
don't you know what would happen to me if I just told my gang
I want out? That I'm scared?"

    You can ask Keith Smith, a minister's son in Waukegan,
Ill. Smith called it quits last August after eight months of
gang banging with a pack called the Latin Lovers. The
de-initiation ceremony took place right before midnight in a
local park. The ground rules: four against one for three
minutes, no weapons. Smith, then 15, collapsed after the first
minute. He remained in a coma for 58 days.

    Or ask Thomas R., an 18-year-old former member of a Crip
set in Los Angeles who just said no to his fellow gang members
last April. "They did me pretty bad," he says softly. Bad
meaning a broken arm, a broken wrist, two teeth knocked out,
lots of cigarette burns on his face and a few dozen bruises,
which really isn't too bad for the Crips. But Thomas cautions,
"You bet they ain't done with me yet."

    The quickest exit from gang life is via the morgue. The
surest route is a one-way ticket out of the old neighborhood.
For most young gang members, that leaves no choice at all. "Just
to walk away and get out? God, you may get killed," says Daniel
Swope, executive director of a community group called BUILD in
Chicago. "You make a commitment, and it's lifelong."

    Most young gang bangers don't even think about getting
out. The money and security are too good and the alternatives
too few. The gang is a surrogate family and the only source of
approval, however convoluted, that they'll ever know.
Pathetically, all the bloodshed is merely a by-product of an
utterly misguided and frantic inner-city search for respect.
"What other world do these kids know?" asks George Knox,
director of the Gang Crime Research Center at Chicago State
University.

    But some guys do get wise. Something about all the guns
and death and arrests just adds up. "I was scared I'd have to
shoot somebody," says Juan Vanga, 22, who took a three-minute
beating from five guys to get out of the Latin Kings in Chicago
last year. "Hell, five of my friends are already dead." Some
guys get bored. "I wasn't scared or anything," says Eddie
Calderon, 16, who quit the Latin Kings last month in a flurry
of blows. "I just got sick and tired of holding the guns."

    The safest way out of a gang -- short of fleeing -- is to
fade away very carefully. This is more plausible for members 19
and older, who have paid their dues and can now use jobs, wives
or children as excuses for not hanging out with the homeboys.
But most younger gang members have nowhere to fade away to.
Meanwhile, gang bangers are notorious for overreacting at the
smallest perceived slight. "You got to earn your respect," says
Salvador Nevarez, 23, who joined the Disciples at 13 but
married two years ago and now works as a salesman for Montgomery
Ward in Chicago. "There is no such thing as ever getting out.
You just drift away." Nevarez is well into his ninth life. "I
had a lot of shoot-outs, but I never got shot," he says
appreciatively. His advice to the younger guys? "Only way for
a young guy to get out is to get killed."

    Even the military, once an honorable way out of the 'hood,
has gradually closed its doors to all but the most qualified
applicants, which usually excludes gang members. "There are a
hell of a lot of gang members that would like to get out," says
Sergeant Wes McBride of the Los Angeles County sheriff's
department. "But there are not a lot of social programs out
there to help them." For a 14-year-old living in a housing
project run by a gang, it doesn't cut it to plead a hectic
schedule when the guys come knocking. "If you're in the
projects, getting out of a gang just isn't a smart thing to do,"
says J.W. Hughes, 22, a former member of a gang called the Black
Disciples in Chicago who now counsels gang members. "You have
to fear for your life." BUILD's Swope warns, "If you don't show
up for meetings, they issue a B.O.S. ((beat on sight)) order."
Or worse.

    Those who dare "drop the flag" and resign from the gang
face a brutal little ceremony called being "violated" or
"jumped out." The precise ritual varies from gang to gang:
sometimes each member of the gang, which may be several dozen
strong, gets a free swing at the victim; other times four or
five members are assigned to conduct the beating for a set
amount of time. Whatever the punishment, the results are
strikingly similar. "They give you a head-to-toe, which means
you get your ass kicked," says Frank Perez, program director for
the Chicago Commons Association gang project.

    Eddie Hernandez, 22, formerly of the Disciples on
Chicago's Southwest Side, recalls the first time he ever saw a
guy being jumped out. "They made this guy walk through an alley
filled with gang members," he says. "Aw, man, it was awful. That
guy was unconscious after just a few feet." Hernandez doesn't
shy from violence easily. In his seven-year career, he's been
shot in the stomach, hit in the head with a railroad tie, had
his arm broken in a fight, absorbed countless punches, and been
jailed twice for auto theft -- not to mention all the
unspeakable things he's done to other people. Last May he told
his fellow gang members he had finally had enough. His former
friends promptly jumped and beat him, stabbing him in the hand
during a knife fight. "If they see me by myself, I'll be jumped
again," he says matter-of-factly.

    Perez counsels teenagers to go public with their desire to
quit a gang only as a last resort. "It beats getting killed or
blowing somebody's brains out," he explains. Most antigang
workers are adamantly against such advice under any conditions.
"That would be like telling the kid to go kill himself," says
Swope. Then there are folks like Marianne Diaz-Parton, a
gang-intervention worker for the Community Youth Gang Services
Project in Los Angeles, who actually condone the beatings.

    Diaz-Parton, 33, joined Los Compadres at 13 and served
three years in prison for shooting two rival gang members with
a sawed-off shotgun. Since "retiring," she is frequently asked
by frightened female gang members trying to get out of gangs to
monitor their beatings. "They know I've got juice with the
gangs," she says with considerable pride. She recalls the case
of Priscilla, a 15-year-old who wanted out. Three other girls,
all gang bangers, took Priscilla into a public rest room while
Diaz-Parton waited outside to make sure things didn't get too
out of hand. "They went at her for three minutes. You could hear
it, all right," she says. Fearing legal complications,
Diaz-Parton stopped accepting such invitations three years ago
but argues, "Society looks at being jumped out as something
barbaric. To me it's not out of line. Hey, if you're in a
fraternity, don't they mess with you? Only with gangs they take
it a step further. That way you leave with dignity."

    Fat chance. Even those who endure a beating are not spared
future harassment. And getting out means losing the protection
of your gang while retaining all your old enemies, who don't
stop to ask questions. Those who do manage to escape their gang
while remaining in the neighborhood are often sucked back in by
a confluence of raw fear and sheer necessity. "The pressure is
just too damn strong," concedes Commander Robert Dart, who
heads the Chicago police department's gang unit. "You can't be
an island out there."

    Many anxious inner-city parents send their children to
live with relatives out of state. Unfortunately, many of these
kids simply start new gangs, rather than new lives, in
Grandma's neighborhood. "They've just transported the cancer,"
says Sergeant McBride, who has a large map on his office wall
covered with red and blue flags showing how the Los Angeles
Crips and Bloods have metastasized across the country.

    Police in Wichita (pop. 300,000) arrested their first
transplanted L.A. gang members in 1989. Now Sedgwick County,
which includes Wichita, is riddled with 68 dif ferent gang sets
boasting 1,400 members. Last August, Regnaldo Cruz, 15, was
taken to a park, forced to his knees and fatally shot in the
head and chest with a .410-gauge shotgun. Though the suspect
remains at large, police believe Cruz was executed for trying
to get out of a gang called the Vato Loco Boyz. Says Kent
Bauman, an officer with the city's gang-intelligence unit:
"People who aren't familiar with gangs think that these kids
should just say no. But in the gang world, saying no can get you
killed."

    Local residents seized on a creative response early one
morning last May, when members of Pastor Chuck Chipman's
congregation descended on a gang-infested neighborhood to rescue
a 12-year-old boy being forced to work as a drug courier for a
gang that was threatening him and his family. Before gang
members could react, the entire family of four and all its
belongings were whisked away to a safe house.

    That evacuation prompted a local group called Project
Freedom to construct a network dubbed the underground railroad
to funnel gang members and their families to safety in cases
where all else fails. Six former gang members and two families
have been shuttled to safety through a patchwork of churches
both in and out of the state. The relocations are coordinated
with the Wichita police, who check for outstanding warrants.
Project Freedom pays for the initial move, while local
congregations agree to assume housing costs and arrange for jobs
and education for as long as two years. "It's a stopgap
measure," concedes executive director James Copple, who tours
the city's rougher neighborhoods on weekend nights wearing a
bulletproof vest. "If we have to relocate them, then in some
ways we've already lost the battle."

    An underground railroad may be impractical, but so are
most of the other options available to a young gang banger who
wants out. At least Project Freedom is saving lives. Frances
Sandoval, founder of Mothers Against Gangs in Chicago, gets
tearful phone calls from parents with kids too scared to leave
a gang but terrified of staying in. "Unfortunately, there is
very little I can offer them," she says. "In most cases it's
hopeless unless they can literally pack up and leave. And we're
talking about moving to another state."

    Surprisingly, even many loyal gang members admit that
their ranks would be thinned if quitting wasn't so dangerous.
"People want to get out of gangs, but they're afraid of getting
whooped," says Enirque Quiroz, 20, a hard-core member of the
Latin Kings in Chicago. Quiroz, a lumbering fellow who has been
shot at 12 times, jailed five times, sliced in the elbow and the
chin and had his hands broken with a bat, is exactly the kind
of guy who makes getting out so problematic. Although he
acknowledges some qualms about cracking the heads of close
friends who want out of the gang, he has a simple technique for
dealing with his conscience. "I've never done it sober," he
admits sheepishly. "Only time I do it is when I'm high or drunk
and you know you just get going with the guys and get yourself
really worked up."

    Then it's all flying fists and boots and maybe even a
knife or chain until the rage is exhausted and a body drops to
the ground -- just another punk expelled from the pack.