STREET GANG REALPOLITIK

Black and Latino Gangsters Aren't At War With Each Other. They're
Business Partners.

I TALK TO a lot of gangsters in my line of work. A lot of them are
like child soldiers, both dangerous and pathetic, at once sharpened
and blunted by years of constant predation and grief. Still, I liked
this guy last week. He was watchful and laconic, like a lot of cops I
know. He got jumped into a gang around the time I became a cop, said
he'd done it for the health plan -- figuring it was healthier to get
jumped in than to keep getting jumped on.

I asked him about violence between black gangs like his and Latino
gangs in L.A. He waved the notion away like hanging smoke. "The thing
about it is the Eses outnumber us," the guy told me. "And we're in
business with them."

He might just be whistling past the graveyard, but I don't think so.
The stats are on his side, at least for now.

In Los Angeles, violence remains an overwhelmingly intra-racial
affair. Newton, Southwest, Southeast and 77th Street (where I
investigate homicides) are the city's four most murderous precincts.
All are racially mixed, with Latinos and blacks living cheek-by-jowl
in midcentury shoebox apartments. In these four divisions, The Times
has reported, there were 236 homicides last year -- and just 22 of
those murders crossed racial lines.

To be sure, there have been interracial battles in the past. In the
1990s, the Venice Shoreline Crips went at it with the Culver City
Boys. East Coast Crips once had a beef with Florencia. Varrio 204th
Street have targeted blacks in the Harbor Gateway, and the Avenues
targeted them in Highland Park. Still, these are aberrations. Outside
of prison, even the most ruthless L.A. gangs can be deferential, even
cordial, to their cross-racial counterparts. One reason for this
accord may be that black gangs are outnumbered: Of Los Angeles' 39,000
gang members, roughly 56% are Latino and 40% are black. That might
explain black appeasement, but not Latino tolerance. In my opinion,
the biggest reason for this curious detente is economic. More
specifically, it's drug money.

Both Latino and black gangs in Los Angeles depend on the drug trade
(and rely on each other) for their survival. Firmly embedded in
blighted neighborhoods where the demand for crack is highest, black
gangsters are the Fuller Brush Men of the dope game, hand-to-mouth
salesmen living on wit and hustle. Legendary dope men like "Freeway
Rick" Ross notwithstanding, few black drug dealers make it past the
end of their block. Tales of crack millionaires, like Ronald Reagan's
mythical welfare queens, are largely apocryphal -- the stuff of
hip-hop music and crime novels.

Street dealing is grueling, risky work. The exposure to narco cops,
enterprising stickup crews and gang rivals is high. A black gangster
afoot anywhere in South Central is already a target for arrest,
penetrating injury or worse. For the street dealer, profit margins are
slimmer than one might expect. Crack is so prevalent in places like
South Central that addicts have become aficionados who demand relative
purity. A Crip once told me his South Central customers would turn up
their noses at the stomped-on stuff they sell in San Bernardino.

A gang's overall lethality often seems to be inversely proportional to
its criminal sophistication. After all, random killings are bad for
business. They bring dogged cops sniffing around, asking a lot of questions.

Los Angeles' Latino gangs comprise the rank and file of a hierarchal
structure, governed by the Mexican Mafia, or La Eme. Over the years,
I've learned from gangsters, gang cops, prison officials and federal
officials, that La Eme (which originated as a prison gang) and a host
of Mexican cartels control nearly all of the cocaine, heroin and
marijuana distribution in southern California. The pyramidal
organization collects "taxes" from Latino street gangs, rules on
territorial disputes and metes out punishment. The gangsters I've
known accept this authority, and tithe without question. La Eme, while
historically racist, appears to at least tacitly approve of this
black-brown business arrangement, so long as blacks remain on the
bottom tier.

For now, Latino wholesalers are apparently happy to let Crips and
Bloods take most of the street risk while they enjoy most of the
profits. With their ties to La Eme and the cartels, Latino dealers are
black gangs' only reliable source of wholesale dope. So most black
gangsters are forever relegated to retail -- what choice do they have?
Latinos need only cut off their supply of cocaine to watch them wither
and die.

Latino gangs may yet seek hegemony in Los Angeles, but for now we're
left with an uneasy truce, this illicit symbiosis.

We're not facing some new gang problem in Los Angeles. We're facing
the old one: Black men die at the hands of black men. Brown men die at
the hands of brown men. Gangs hold entire neighborhoods hostage, and
people are afraid to talk to the police.

"Nothing ever changes," that guy last week told me. I hope he's wrong
about that part.