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! | { { meee ber ! MARR ICHAKDS =i ‘turf’ in L.A., Grape Street Watts Gang members last Decem graffiti marking gang expert with the Los Angeles Police ; Department, Deputy Chief Glenn Levant. | : Says most sets are as casually organized as | a pickup basketball game. Bloods wear red and Crips wear blue; traditionally, each | ; gang member wears or carries a bandanna ! this “rag”) to show his colors. (Many gangs also use “signs.” which are hand gestures these gangs make a point of staging their ‘ assassinations in broad daylight whenever possible. “You don't kill no mothe: from across the street.” one young hit man explained toundercover agents. "You walk up to him, you kill him in his head.” Gang culture—the mock-feudal tradi- tion of inner-city kids banding to; fc her for comfort, support and mutual protection — has a long and, some would say, romantic history in America. Think of “West Side i Story." It is still true that many gangs are little more than collections of neighbor- hood youths with a penchant for macho posturing, petty crime and street brawls over girls or turf. Recruitment begins ear- ly, in the grade-school years: gang veterans call their young acolytes “peewees” or “wannabees” (want-to-be’s), Though old hands say the custom is dying out, initia- tion bya Los Angeles gang is supposed to be abrutal ritual known as being “courted in” or “jumped in.” To be jumped in is to re- | ceive a beating administered by three or | four gang members: the candidate is ex. | pected to show his fighting spirit. If he passes the test, the peewee then becomes a | “banger” or “gang banger” and is entitled to share in the gang’s fortunes or, more commonly, misfortunes (George Will’s col- umn, page 76) Colors and signs: The two most notorious L.A. gang Bloods and the Crips are not really I. Instead, the names denote lege: confederations among hundreds of ‘sets.” | Dressed for batt! Washington, D.C,, cop MARTY KATZ—OUTLISE ry bgroups, o S formed along neighborhood lines, and only a more than 100 bang. | ers; 20 to 30 members is commonplace and inter- | aders One | Li | Gan | gral j Hawk 1987 BSVG c 187.” To translate, | cally, rollers | Hamric like a letter of the deaf alphabet, for ide tification when the members are not wear- ing their colors.) But local variations on the theme are endless, and Crip gangs are almost as likely to fight each other as they are to fight the Bloods The days when rival gangs fought each other only over turf and colors are fading fast. In Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and dozens of other cities, gang conflicts have becomea form ofurban-guerrilla war. | fare over drug trafficking. Informers. welshers and competitors are ruthlessly punished: many have been assassinated. turf, which is still demarcated with now involves more Cis sales territory One Big Big Hawk is a gang member's street name. BSVG stands for Blood Stone Villains Gang, a Bloods set. The lower-case ¢, which is deliberately x’d out, indicates th writer kills Crips, and the num fers to the section of the California cr nal code for murder. ‘Rollers and 0.6.’s’: The variety of drugs sold by big-city gangs (page 27) includes heroin, marijuana. PCP, hallucinogens and designer drugs like fentany asynthet- ic heroin that is even more potent than the real thing and just as addictive. But crack cocaine is the rage—and the scourge—of the ghetto. Crack isa drug peddler’s dream: it is cheap. easily concealed and provides a short-duration high that invariably leav the user craving more. It was probably in- evitable that street gangs, observing crack’s arrival in their neighborhoods over the past several years, would be drawn into trafficking themselves. South-central Los Angeles today. like Miami and New York, is flooded with crack. It is sold on street corners by peewees and in rock houses op- erated by bangers. Somewhere behind the than bragging righ Some gang graffiti are coded threa in south-central L.A. reads as follow. ; Scenes, much of the ghetto cocaine trade is | controlled by what Los Angeles calls “rollers” and “O.G?s"—~old gangsters. a term that usually refers to gang veterans, many of them still in their 20s. who have been to prison. Rollers, short for “high rollers,” aregang members who have made it big in the drug trade, whether or not they are actually at the top of the distribution pyramid. Typi are in their teens or 20s. They tend to wear gold jewelry and drive flashy s: Datsun spor pes, five-titer Mus- tangs, BMW's and Mercedes-Benzes are among the most popular models. Roger + a communit: orks in Miami mbers a gang member who moved to Daytona Beach, Fla., to peddle crack. “When he left [Miami], he was on a bicycle,” Hamrick vs. “When he came back, he wore more gold than Mr. T. and he was sitting in a white Mercedes. Hi 23 ARCH 28, 1988