Posted on 02/16/2005 3:52:28 PM PST by Dan from Michigan
The lure of gangs sucks in middle-class suburban teens
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
JOE SNAPPER
THE SAGINAW NEWS
One man stood to the side holding a stopwatch.
Six others clenched their fists. A seventh, a Freeland High School student named Ricky, held his breath.
The "jump-in" could begin.
The rules for Mafia Clan induction were simple: Sixty seconds of abuse, avoid the head and groin, and if the blows knocked Ricky down, go ahead and kick.
"I was smart enough to go in a corner so they could only get about half of me," says Ricky, who is in his 20s and asked The Saginaw News to withhold his identity for fear of gang retribution.
"It seemed longer than a minute," he recalls of that winter's day in a tattered West Genesee house heated by an open oven door. "With six people, it's 12 fists."
When the beating ended, Ricky tasted his blood but also his mettle: Now he could wear the purple, white and black bandana in his left back pocket. And wear it he did -- home, out, to school.
Those were the days before gang awareness caught up with urban sprawl.
Ricky's descent into the pleasures and pains of gang membership reads like every other gang member's nightmare-plagued adolescence -- with one exception.
He skipped the nightmare. As he puts it: "I had it made."
'Lock 'em up'
Longtime gang law enforcement officers say the middle and upper-class teens sucked into gang life are not a negligible presence. Although he declined to quantify them, Mike Van Horn, a member of the city's Gang Task Force from 1994 to 2003, called it a "significant percentage."
The lure of gangs is a complex appeal, police and anti-gang mentors say. While many urban children are effectively forced into gang membership for protection, Van Horn says, others have to work to get in.
Much of the problem is popular exposure, which is blind to socio-economics, he says. Just as for the inner-city poor from single-parent homes, the "rich kids" from stable suburban families also give in.
Stoked by media portraits of modern outlaw living as glamorous and easy, the gangster image glistens. Many police officers -- and hardened drug dealers -- deplore it.
Van Horn, now a state police detective sergeant at the West Branch Post, says he "has no respect" for any criminal gangsters, but won't even muster pity for those such as Ricky.
"Lock 'em up," he says.
Ray, a 16-year-old Saginaw drug dealer and gang leader whom The Saginaw News featured in a Sunday article, says he can't stand rappers he once adored. He now blames them for poisoning young minds like his.
"I really despise this," he says. "I hate the context of the music. They make it seem like selling dope is cool. But if they really did it, they would be coming out with another message. People that really do that don't like theyself."
Snapping stereotypes
In high school, Ricky drove a late-model car, dressed well, received a regular allowance and reaped every benefit of a stable Tittabawassee Township home life with loving parents.
The marijuana he sold in Freeland never earned him much, he says. It was a luxury, nothing worth risking real danger, he says.
But he moved with thugs, from both the Mafia Clan and Mafia Kings. They fought, stole and sometimes killed -- but never with Ricky around, he says. His only risk came when, on occasion, they piled into his car with pistols.
Then, one March day in 1994, Ricky was getting ready to attend a party on Collingwood near Morris. He can't remember why, but he decided not to go.
At the party hours later, Mafia Kings member Marcos J. Urivez shot 16-year-old Terry Short in the forehead. Urivez is serving 10 to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to second-degree murder, records show.
Ricky sums up his two years inside the gang as "lucky."
"As far as what I did," he says, "I pretty much partied with them, got drunk all the time."
He also snapped a stereotype. While many gang disciples joined as sibling legacies or neighborhood insiders, Ricky sought a peer group Freeland High School didn't offer.
"I liked hanging out with Mexicans," he says.
Hispanic gang revival?
While never taking part in violence, Ricky moved in two of Saginaw's predominantly Hispanic gangs -- Mafia Kings and Mafia Clan -- implicated in multiple homicides and known as the chief rival of the equally bloody Folks gang.
In the mid-1990s, those Hispanic gangs were at their most active, but Steven T. Flattery, the FBI special agent running the city's anti-gang efforts, says they now are largely dormant.
Folks members, a strain of the Chicago Disciples Nation, once ruled Saginaw's South Side, now the province of the Sunny Side Boys, a black gang. A mural at Nestel Food Store, 2715 S. Washington, the turf's northern boundary, was erected during the Folks' reign.
In the bottom right corner of the mural, a man in a black bandana sits with a pistol to his side. Above him a street sign reads "Sunny Side."
But the Hispanic gangs aren't gone. Fresh graffiti sprang up just last month at the Genesee Meat Market, 1115 W. Genesee. The red spray paint shows "Mafia Clan" and anti-Folks slogans.
Another 30-year-old former Mafia Clan member, who asked The Saginaw News to shield his identity out of fear, said his old gang has sprung back up on the West Side, in the area between Pleasant and Weiss. The former gangster, who now works with troubled children, added that a 15-year-old Folks gang member told him Arthur Hill High School, where he is a freshman, is "a big gang school." Other educators and crime prevention workers confirmed the Folks presence at the school.
Mafia Clan and Folks are far from gone, the 30-year-old and others told The Saginaw News. But they are waiting for new leaders to emerge, he and others fear.
"They still beef," the former Mafia Clan member says.
OK - BRING BACK THE DRAFT. Boot camp under a few good Marines will straighten out this adolescence.
Think of it as Evolution In Action.
So9
Having lived in Flint in the early 70s (before GM went down the tubes) I can only imagine what it is like now.
And am in no hurry to see it for myself.......
On a hot day, when a dog takes a dump, grass, pebbles and grass sticks to the underside the warm sh!t. Anyone having anything at all to do with a gang is lower than even that.
Tell us more of these advanced mathematical theories, Einstein.
Bring back Wyatt Earp..anyone wearing gang insignia etc will be shot on sight.
The only way to get the mafia or any gang is to push hard. If you let them rest and plan then they win. If you keep up constant harassment then you get them to mess up and they get caught. It's a game of attrition. You get them and you throw them in jail. Get them all off the street and they die out.
The gov't only got Capone because we never let up. Same thing for the thug on the street corner. You have to force him into being louder and more wild in his discretion.
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