Posted on 12/04/2005 10:23:50 AM PST by NormsRevenge
LOS ANGELES - Entering middle age, Chico Brown lives in the world of children. He greets them at school, settles their fights, listens to their problems, watches them finish their homework, coaches their basketball teams, offers them rides home, reads their letters.
He has four of his own children too, most of them nearly grown. But "they didn't know me," he says - for most of their lives, he was in prison.
Now a gang-intervention specialist, dedicated to keeping kids from following his path, Brown was once a notorious drug dealer, an integral part of an operation that supplied much of Los Angeles with crack. He was a member of the Crips, the band of neighborhood toughs, co-founded by Stanley Tookie Williams, that became a national phenomenon.
Williams is scheduled to be executed Dec. 13; only clemency from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger or a stay of execution from the courts will save his life.
His supporters say he has reformed in the 25 years since he was sentenced to death for the murders of four people - writing children's books, renouncing his gang ties, preaching an end to violence and gangs. To kill him, his supporters say, is a crime; he is capable of great things.
Lost in the extremes of Williams' story are the stories of other men, who grew up in the same place, in the same times, with many of the same deficits and opportunities. Original gangsters like Williams are difficult to find. If they survived, they disappeared into the woodwork of unremarkable lives.
There are old Crips who have reformed, men like Chico Brown. But there are others who never had the opportunity: Raymond Washington, who co-founded the Crips with Williams, was shot and killed in 1979, a murder that remains unsolved.
The old Crips who survived often look back at their youth, and what they did in those days, with chagrin and great regret.
"I never saw families torn apart, parents hooked on crack, crack babies in intensive care, kids growing up without their parents ... ," said Brown, 40. "There is an entire generation of people that don't own houses because they were on crack, or in prison."
The old Crips see gangs that have only grown more menacing since their days, even as rap music has glorified the culture that surrounds them.
In Los Angeles, there were about 750 gang-related murders last year, almost twice the number of murders the year Williams was arrested. The number of gang members nationwide has grown to more than 650,000, the bulk of them in Los Angeles, though Crips and their self-professed offshoots have been implicated in murders from Washington state to Missouri to North Carolina.
But the people who were there at the start also remember the circumstances that led them to join the gang in the first place, and what it was like before crack and guns changed everything.
The Crips began in the early 1970s as a loose association of boys from Compton, neighborhood toughs with a reputation for being good with their hands. The fighting, the posing, the clothes, all seemed like good, clean fun in the day.
"It was the end of the Vietnam War, and there were a lot of young, delinquent youth without any kind of political or religious philosophy," said Wes McBride, a retired Los Angeles gang investigator who policed the early gangs. "The gangs grew out of poverty and despair."
Membership did not require much, just the willingness to fight and the desire to belong.
"Everyone I knew was in a gang, for one minute," said Malcolm Dinwiddie, 50, a real estate consultant who grew up in Compton. "Those guys (the Crips) were just the guys in the neighborhood, guys you talked to standing on the corner. We swam together at the pool. We got our hair braided by the same gal. You had straight-A students who ran with those guys."
"It's a culture, it's ghetto life," said Ronnie M. Gibson, an early Crip. "You assimilate to your environment. It was survival of the fittest. You weren't thinking about going to college. You were thinking about being a pimp or a hustler. It was the day of Shaft and Superfly, and those things had an effect on us."
Like many boys in Compton, Gibson's family was poor and he had a head full of conflicting ideas. His mother, a devout Christian, preached Jesus' love. The Black Panthers around the corner talked about the "blue-eyed devil," and his father left the family and married a white woman. It left Gibson, second oldest of seven children, a ball of anger, betrayal and distrust.
Meanwhile all his boyhood friends at Centennial High School were in a gang, the Crips. They kept pit bulls, smoked dope, pimped, sold drugs. The ones with charisma and the gift of gab became the best drug dealers.
"We were not trying to kill people, but we weren't afraid to do it," said Gibson, 50.
He was in and out of jails, but because he had was good at talking to cops, because he always hid his drugs and guns when they came around, he avoided prison. The police would always ask, "What are you doing hanging with these guys?" He got to wondering what set him apart.
A call to religion, in 1981, finally took him away from the thug life. He went to college, got married to a professor of biblical studies and started a ministry in Riverside.
"It's not fate," Gibson said. "I call it amazing grace."
For others, religion was not key to their reformation.
For Zane Smith, it may have been just a matter of maturity.
About 30 years ago, Smith joined a group of boys that became the Crips, and learned how to concoct and sell a drug called angel dust. It was around then, he said, that he helped recruit Tookie into the group.
Smith was imbued with a sense of racial injustice but had no cause to harness. He was the oldest of six children, born to a Filipino mother and black father, whom he resented for having abandoned the family when he was young.
He had a lot of anger, above-average athletic skills, a high tolerance for pain, a misguided sense of righteousness and a fascination with gangsters. He loved watching "The Untouchables" on television, rooting for the gangsters. He would not say what kinds of crimes he committed, only that he "was doing big stuff. I wasn't doing petty stuff."
His mother died in 1992, an event that he said moved him to try a more honest way of making a living. He tried producing records, running a trucking business. He moved into his uncle's house in South Central that year, where he still lives.
Now 51, he and his old high school friend and fellow Crip Walter Wheeler - aka Big Squeak - offer to speak with and counsel kids. They call their effort "Children With Wings."
"We're trying to redeem ourselves. We're trying to apologize for our youthful ignorance," Smith said. The gang, said Wheeler, was "something we did when we were children. Men today are following in the footsteps of little boys. That's what we were then."
More than anything, they wish they could erase the effects of what they did.
"Our children's children are suffering from what we started," Smith said. "It really backfired on our culture. I'm ashamed of what it turned into."
Chico Brown also blames himself for so much that has gone bad in the black community. By selling crack, he lived a prince's life. He wore Bijan suits, drank Cristal champagne, drove a Mercedes and sat courtside at Lakers games. It was a life he helped glorify.
These days he wears T-shirts and jeans, drives a white Impala. He often eats whatever happens to be served for lunch at the school cafeteria when he makes his rounds, talking to students and principals, looking for the first sign of any trouble.
The faces that look up to him have hard expressions. He knows some of them want to be what he was, a drug dealer, because that means money and a certain kind of respect. Showing his age, he blames rap videos. But he also he blames himself.
"I didn't see the damage I was causing," he said.
Reading between the lines, I see the message: Free Tookie!!!
Correction - they grew out of despair.
What is this obsession about poor people being violent? I will tell you....
The upper middle class wants to distinguish itself as different and better. Thus, they promote nasty images of rednecks, racists, gangs, and a generally vile underclass.
It's BS. "Poor people" live good, modest, and disciplined lives. Somehow, not aspiring to money and shallow yuppie-dom has become a sign of degeneracy.
Well, now I have told you how that is.
>>It was the day of Shaft and Superfly, and those things had an effect on us.
And people say movies have no effect on kids...
I remember committing several crimes after the movie "Colors" came out.. We wanted to be thugs...
(I was never caught either..)
That message may be there, but I didn't see it. If any of these guys had expressed even the slightest notion of that, I think the reporter would have spun it up pretty good.
Great point well made. "Not aspiring to shallow yuppie-hood".
I certainly hope Mr. Schwarzenager sees that difference.
People are always talking about "root causes". Well, right there you see a root cause.
90% of the time when you talk to thugs you get the same story. Dad is not in the picture.
While they don't help the matter, they are not to blame.
"It gave them high profile, a seat at the politician's table and (I suspect) a bit of disguise to keep up some chosen activities "
In Denver he is called "Rev." Leon Kelly. Honorary bleeding cripple or crippled bleeder, whichever gang.
Let Tookie go in Monterey!
Honestly, I think he's using the influence of movies on him as an excuse. Along with being poor. I once lived in the projects of Oak Park in Sacramento, CA. I didn't become a gang member because of it. Even today, I'm still not rich, but I obey the law.
I've reached the same conclusion.
I was a street cop in the area that the crips got started in when they got started. Between 1971 and 1972 when I was working that area I arrested each and every one of them at some point during that year (there were less than 50 of them then).
Some of the nicest people I ever met were in that neighborhood, so it isn't just "poverty". These animals wanted to be animals, and yes they were killing people right from the start. It wasn't just fists, there were drive bys going on.
Thanks for confirming my memories. I remember hearing of, and seeing these guys in 1973 and thereafter. They weren't just hanging out in their own neighborhood. They were thugs, taking their thuggery, crimes, and threats to cities throughout LA County. This was never "good clean fun" as the article suggests.
That is for sure. I transferred from Lennox up to the desert to Antelope Valley in 1972 and a couple of months later was assigned to day shift. The first car I stopped that morning had "monkey man", one of the crips I delt with at Lennox in the Vermont area. He was as amazed to see me as I was to see him. I told him I'd been assigned to follow him throughout the county so I could shoot him during a robbery. Never saw him in the Antelope Valley again.
>>Honestly, I think he's using the influence of movies on him as an excuse.
I disagree. However, the movies *bring out* and or *re-inforce* the disposition of the person. So, the movies didn't take an angel and in 2 hours turn him into a devil. But they may have took a kid on the brink and released the devil in him....
ROFL! Good move!
Wow! I salute you. At least you tried, and you surely made a good difference to some of them...
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