Rule of the Jungle : The Operative Principle Is Retaliation as Gang Killings Grip Neighborhood

A hundred mourners gathered at a funeral home on Crenshaw Boulevard on Friday, some of them sobbing openly as a minister prayed to the Lord to “bind the powers of outer darkness so that they may not overtake the city.”

William Adams, the slight-looking youth lying in an open casket, was by then not even the latest casualty in the city’s lengthy procession of gang deaths. Within 24 hours of the Adams death on the evening of Feb. 20, two other men were killed in unrelated gang incidents.

“Just another statistic,” spat a youth at the funeral. “Another of the 100,000 dead.”

The shooting of the 14-year-old boy, who was not a gang member, added to the unease in a neighborhood that already was jittery over random acts of gang violence.

“Bullets ain’t got no names on them,” said Darryl (Tee) Rodgers, a former gang fighter who counsels gang members in the neighborhood. “If they do, they’re probably misspelled.”

The shooting was another episode in the grueling war between Bloods and Crips, the rival federations that dominate gang life in South Los Angeles. And it was followed quickly, police say, by an act of retaliation.

Adams was gunned down in the Jungle, a neighborhood of about 50,000 people, wedged between Baldwin Hills and the Crenshaw area. A gang called the Blackstones, part of the loose Bloods federation, claim the neighborhood as their own.

It’s easy to figure out why people call this square mile of garden apartments and meandering streets the Jungle. Palms and banana trees poke out of open patios, and tufts of greenery sprout in alleyways. Here and there, a flash of aquamarine through an open front gate signals a working swimming pool. Some of the buildings even sport names on their facades--like “The Tahiti” or “The Tiara”--suggesting balmy, tropical luxury.

New Kind of Heat

But residents of the Jungle have been feeling a different kind of heat in recent years--a punishing, urban heat. Youth gangs and drugs swept into the neighborhood in the early 1970s, ending young lives, dealing out devastating injuries and, lately, giving everybody a watch-your-back complex.

Things have gone from bad to worse, some residents say. Adams’ death was preceded by the shooting six days earlier of a resident of Gibraltar Avenue who got into an argument with a drug dealer. Youngsters from the neighborhood are still jittery about the death of a 15-year-old youth, gunned down in December on La Brea Avenue.

“Nowadays around here, it’s turn off the lights, pull the shades and we don’t want to know nothin’,”said one woman who said she had witnessed five shootings on her block in the last year. “It’s sad. Somebody oughta do something.”

Police from the Southwest Division, covering a broad stretch of real estate in the middle of the city, bounded by the Santa Monica and Harbor freeways and Vernon and La Brea avenues, say the Jungle contributes more than its share of crime. Although its just a small corner of the 9-square-mile division, 20 of 87 drug arrests last month in the division were made in the Jungle, and 62 of 365 reports of assault with a deadly weapon came from there. Eight of the division’s 72 homicides occurred in the neighborhood last year, two so far this year.

Operative Principle

Gang violence assumes a relentless force of its own. When attacks occur, retaliation is almost inevitable, said one former gang member. The operative principle among gang members, he said, goes like this: “Either you get yourself labeled a punk or you make the crime statistics go up.”

On the Saturday afternoon when he was killed, Adams was at a party in Jim Gilliam Park, a stretch of grass and picnic tables along the neighborhood’s western edge. The gathering had started as a picnic to celebrate the second birthday of a neighborhood child. But it became more of a grown-up affair toward evening, with amplified tapes filling the air with rap music. Some of the celebrants wore red clothing, indicating their affiliation with the Bloods (Crips wear blue). William Adams, whose home was two miles away in South-Central Los Angeles, was in the neighborhood visiting a cousin, friends said.

At about 7:30, gunshots came from the top of the slope above the picnic. Everybody hit the ground. William stayed down, with a single gunshot wound to the chest.

“I guess there were too many people showing red,” said Adams’ friend Deshawn Tidwell, who was not present at the picnic.

The operative principle quickly took hold, police said. Two days after the shooting at the picnic there was an act of retaliation, according to a spokesman for Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH). The spokesman declined to say what form the revenge took, but detectives from the Southwest Division said someone from a rival gang shot Brian Cole, 26, Monday as he walked with his girlfriend on Jefferson Boulevard near Western Avenue. The gunman, who hid at the side of a building until Cole reached the corner, wounded Cole in the chest with a .45-caliber handgun. Cole was in County-USC Medical Center in stable condition.

Black-and-Whites Roll

Along with all the street action has come, some residents say, brusque, insistent police heat. After incidents of violence, the black-and-whites roll through the streets of the Jungle in waves, stopping young men, making them lie spread-eagled on the ground to be frisked, gang members say.

The police had the heat turned up high last week. “I’m tired of kissin’ the sidewalk,” one gang member on Stevely Avenue said bitterly Monday evening. “Every time something happens, they sweat us like that.”

The young man had just watched two smiling police officers step out of their car, unstrap their holsters and ask for information.

“You still holding?” one of them asked a young man in a wheel chair. Was he carrying drugs or weapons?

“You want to search me?” said the young paraplegic, a victim of a street shooting three years ago.

“Yeah, I want to search you,” said the officer, smiling broadly. “Just move down the sidewalk here.” As the officer meticulously patted the young man down, lifting each paralyzed leg to see if anything was secreted in the seat of the wheelchair, his partner stood warily behind the “home boys.”

“If you weren’t here,” said one youth to a reporter after the officers had left, “they would’ve had us all on the ground.”

“They would’ve knocked my chair over,” said the wheelchair-bound youth.

Police Strategy

The police are unabashed about their treatment of gang members after a shooting. “The strategy,” said Officer Russell Poole of the CRASH unit, South Bureau, “is to go into the area, and anybody wearing red in a certain age group gets stopped. The officers aren’t really rousting them but trying to identify them. A lot of people fear for their lives over there.”

One of those is Michael Campbell. On Feb. 15, he got into a dispute with drug dealers behind his Gibraltar Avenue apartment. “They were using my car as a stash location,” Campbell said last week, sitting in his living room, nursing an abdominal wound after four days in the hospital. Campbell was shot by a man who argued with him about the use of the car, which was parked next to an alleyway often used by drug dealers as a marketplace.

“They can do what they want as long as they keep out of my 4-by-8 area,” Campbell said. “They were infringing on my territory.”

Since the shooting, drug dealers have conveyed the message to him through acquaintances that he and his wife and four children should move out of the neighborhood. “The message was that there wouldn’t be enough left of me to scoop up with a spoon,” said Campbell, a tall beefy former truck driver.

The police contend that gang members and drug dealers in the black neighborhoods near the center of the city are one and the same. “The gangs control narcotics in South-Central L.A., no question,” said Poole. “They’re not stupid. They know what they’re doing--making a lot of money.”

Plenty of Exits

The long alleys behind the Jungle’s apartment buildings, with corner-to-corner views and dozens of exits between the buildings, make it easy for street-level drug dealers, police say. “They can do business in the alleyways, and if a police car comes in, they just blend right into the neighborhood,” said Detective John Bunch of the Southwest Division.

But members of the Blackstones deny that they are heavily engaged in drug trafficking. Some even operate on the principle, “If you’re high, walk on by,” insisted Tee Rodgers, a graduate of street violence whom the Blackstones respect as an O.G., or “original gangster.”

Some Blackstones freely acknowledge that they sell cocaine. A common description of the three gang pastimes is, “Hangin’, bangin’ and slangin’.” They are, in other words, spending time on the streets, fighting other gangs and selling (or “slinging”) narcotics.

But none of them is getting rich from it, they insist. “The police say it’s us (controlling the drug business), but it’s the Jamaicans,” said one Blackstone. “They’re the ones driving the fancy cars and dealing the big deals. My friends? They’re driving around in buckets.”

Poole said police acknowledged that Jamaican drug dealers are operating in the Jungle. “But the Jamaicans and the gang members sometimes work together,” he said.

Differing Views

Jungle dwellers are of two minds about the aura of criminality in their neighborhood. On the one hand, they want authorities to do something. Something extreme.

But on the other hand, they don’t like seeing the Jungle portrayed as a place without redeeming values. “It’s not just crime and drugs around here,” says one O.G. heatedly.

“A lot of young guys don’t know what they’re getting into until they get into it,” says Helen Patterson, the mother of a gang member. “By then, they’re trying to get out.”

Patterson’s cluttered apartment in the Jungle--the “Kool-Aid house,” she calls it--is a haven for gang members. “I’d rather see the kids here than on the street,” she said. “I don’t like seeing them walk home late at night. Too many things happen in the Jungle.”

Teen-agers are perched on Patterson’s living room furniture, desultorily watching a Sylvester Stallone movie on television. Her teen-age daughter works on another young woman’s hair, weaving dozens of thin braids into the strands, and a baby sleeps on the sectional couch.

Signs of Harassment

For Patterson, a big woman with tightly marcelled hair, the problem is as much police “harassment” as it is gang violence. “Whenever somebody gets killed in the Jungle, they say it’s the gangs,” she said. “Whatever happens, they harass these boys.”

Jungle teen-agers need normal pastimes, said Patterson. “But if you have a party, the police show up with their guns,” she said. “Everybody has to come out and kiss the ground.”

In William Adams’ neighborhood, two miles away on Halldale Avenue, they’re trying to reconcile innocent teen-age pursuits with gang violence, too. The dead youth was, by most accounts, a fun-loving youth, small for his age, with reddish hair and a contagious laugh, a member of the swimming team at the Harvard Recreation Center on 62nd Street. “People can’t believe it was William,” said his friend, Deshawn Tidwell. “They say, ‘Little William? Little bitty William? I can’t believe it.’ ”

He was not a gang member, friends and family insist. “I’m not going to let them put that on him,” Elizabeth Brown, the boy’s grandmother, said with asperity.

But even before his death, Adams had been touched by gang violence. In December, someone in a passing car shot him in the leg, sending him to the hospital for a week.

Two days before Adams’ funeral, his grandmother was so distraught that she found it difficult to stay seated during an interview in her apartment. “They went to Westwood and stopped this violence,” Brown said angrily as she paced the floor of her living room. “Why not over here? Because we’re black?”

On the sidewalks of the Jungle, where the tensions are high, there are no ready answers, says Tee Rodgers, who still has the gang member’s habit of unceasing watchfulness. “It just goes on and on,” he says, his eyes sweeping the block like a radar beacon, studying cars turning the far corner or pedestrians shambling down the sidewalk in the dark. “The main thing is that, hey, all of us ain’t animals out here.”