TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/061890/0618007.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 12.4 KB | 250 lines

                N    ╩                                                            WORLD, Page 50

COVER STORIES

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.