by Jorja Leap
“They got Little Devon,” Darius reports. “Little Devon is so stupid, he got hisself arrested by a rookie. What a dumbass.”
The arresting officer looks up, walks over to where we are standing, and asks what we are doing. Darius’s assessment is accurate; this is a rookie. I doubt the LAPD officer has even started shaving. He begins to give Darius and Ronny a hard time until he looks at me and pulls up short.
“Ma’am?” He is tentative.
“Yes?” I truly don’t want to say a thing. I don’t want to introduce myself. He is a rookie and this is South LA, but I don’t want to take the one–in-a-million chance that he is going to recognize Mark’s name. I am prepared to remarry my ex-husband on the spot and reclaim my old identity.
“May I ask what you are doing here?”
I want desperately to tell him, No you may not, this is wrong. But I tell him that I am a social worker meeting with my client. That suffices and he moves away. Ronny, meanwhile, starts complaining about the LAPD and their constant “fuckin’ with everyone in the projects.” This is not the friendly, easygoing Ronny—he morphs into angry-black-man mode. Destiny, his girlfriend, has warned me, “You gotta be careful with Ronny. You know he has four personalities at once.” Right now I am getting a look at gangsta Ronny—Saint.
“It’s not fair, it’s not fuckin’ fair,” Ronny says, hitting the side of a building in frustration.
“I know, I know,” I tell him.
“Shit, I gotta go. I gotta go talk to my homies about this.”
Ronny takes off abruptly. I can’t remember where I parked my car. Darius rides back by and I ask him to help me. I don’t want to wander around alone.
“I need to find my car, can you—”
“Yo’ ride is a Prius—yeah, I know where it is.”
I had forgotten about hood intelligence. Darius leads me to the car. I give him five dollars and he rides away happily.
I go home that night, thinking about the LAPD. I don’t say anything to Mark. I really don’t want to deal with his reaction. I have also gone silent because we have been fighting constantly. It’s not about gangs; it’s about counterterrorism. It’s clear that there is an insane amount of money being spent protecting Los Angeles from (drum roll here) terrorist activity. I am finding this all laughable—except for the fact that there has been what the LAPD likes to call mission creep. The war against terrorism has slowly started to include talk of the need to “fight urban terrorism in our communities.” Increasingly Mark has been talking to me in his “official business” tone of voice about terrorism on the streets and in the neighborhoods. It doesn’t help that while I am driving home after Ronny has abandoned me, I hear Mark on the radio discussing how terrorist organizations are raising funds by selling counterfeit purses at swap meets. He is about to be interviewed on PBS’s Frontline by the correspondent Lowell Bergman, my longtime hero. I don’t know whether to feel proud or angry or embarrassed.
“Hi, honey, I’m home from the swap meet,” I snap in lieu of describing my day in Nickerson Gardens. “I think a terrorist just tried to sell me a counterfeit Prada bag.” Mark ignores me as I continue. “But I’m not worried, ’cuz I heard what you said on the radio. I’m so relieved that this is what my tax dollars are being spent on.”
“Y’know, you don’t even know what you are talking about,” Mark begins, with exaggerated patience. He has adopted the tone of a math teacher explaining division to the class idiot. “This is not a small thing. We are talking about millions of dollars being funneled into overseas accounts. This is what is financing terrorism across the globe.”
I really think I am about to lose my mind. “You want to explain to me why it is so important to watch swap meets carefully, while patrols have been cut in East LA and there was a big shootout in Nickerson Gardens two days ago?”
“Here we go,” he mutters. “Poor black woman.”
This phrase had its origins in a major fight that was still a sore spot for Mark and me. A month earlier, I had arrived home drained after spending time with the family of a young homie who had been shot near Athens Park in South Los Angeles. It was unclear whether he was an active member of any neighborhood. All that was certain was that a sixteen-year-old boy would be facing the rest of his life paralyzed from the chest down. I wanted nothing more than to curl up in my husband’s arms and cry. Instead, I was greeted by the sight of Mark hurriedly making arrangements to leave the house.
“You can order something from Emilio’s,” he instructed. “They’ll deliver. Shannon already circled what she wants on the menu.” All I saw was the uniform and all I heard was his officious tone, so I started screaming:
“Where are you going?”
“Will you control yourself?” he whispered. “I don’t want Shannon to hear you yelling.” This was all I needed to hear to raise my voice another decibel level.
“Stop telling me what to do! Stop being so controlling!” Then in a triumph of intellectual reasoning, I added, “You’re acting like an asshole!”
“Calm down.” This was the “license and registration voice” I knew so well. In the past, Mark had told me stories of soccer moms swearing a blue streak when he stopped them for speeding. He would ignore the profanity while adding charges to their citation. As the women screamed he would write, “Driving without a seat belt,” and “Brake light out,” and “License expired”—all visible offenses that would add to the ticket’s grand total. He was maintaining the same pleasant tone with me while I screamed like a banshee.
“Look, I’m not supposed to tell you this,” he began.
Here we go, I thought. I wasn’t fooled. This was the sweetener. All cops used this with wives and family. You were let in on some important, inside information—so inside it was probably just being reported on the local news—to help you understand why your husband, boyfriend, father was running out the door. When Mark and I were newlyweds, the long-suffering wife of the chief of operations advised me, “Honey, get used to being alone. They’re gone all the time.” I had absolutely no intention of accepting this reality.
“Just tell me where you are going,” I repeated, now using a normal tone of voice.
“There’s a guy who killed two cops in Colorado and they think they’ve got him trapped in Long Beach. So the LAPD has set up a command post along with the Long Beach PD to get him. We’ve got thirty men on overtime and I’ve got to get there as soon as possible.” That only enraged me further.
“You don’t have to go to this.”
“No? This is my job.” Mark was just starting to show signs of agitation.
“No it’s not. Your job is to run the counterterrorism bureau and babysit John Miller. Please just tell me how someone who may or may not have killed two cops in Colorado relates to counterterrorism. Please. Tell. Me.”
The mention of John Miller was not good. By tacit agreement, Mark and I stayed away from the subject of the man who was, on paper, Mark’s superior. Early in his tenure, Bill Bratton had brought along Miller—who was his best friend—to head up the counterterrorism bureau, which had been designed and implemented by Mark. Bratton frequently pointed out Miller’s wide-ranging experience, which included a stint working as Barbara Walters’s co-anchor on 20/20. This did not exactly endear him to the troops. But Miller was a good guy who constantly sought Mark’s counsel and acted responsibly, given his limited law enforcement experience. Despite all this, the favoritism evident in his appointment was a particularly vicious thorn in Mark’s side and a topic I generally avoided. But not tonight. Mark looked at me sharply.
“Look, you know, it’s about the murder of a cop. I’ve got to go.”
“You’re all a bunch of maudlin idiots. You’re gonna spend a lot of taxpayer money on overtime hunting this guy down because he killed a cop. Meanwhile, a mother was shot and killed in South Los Angeles last weekend. Was there one hour of overtime spent on her? No. Because it was a poor black woman. You don’t fucking care.”
“Look, I�
��ve gotta go.” He walked over to kiss me good-bye and I ignored him.
After he left, Shannon came down wide-eyed. “You and Daddy were having a fight?” She was half-questioning and half-observing.
“Yes, and I don’t want you to get scared. We were just fighting over the way the LAPD investigates certain cases with lots of energy and ignores other cases—particularly those involving poor people.” The ongoing brainwashing of my only child diverted me from my fury. Mark rarely interfered in the education of Shannon; for that I was grateful. When I had come into her life, she was attending a summer camp run by Calvary, a fundamentalist Christian group. This was a desperate choice, made at the last minute, after Mark was unable to enroll Shannon in a school-sponsored summer camp. I had known Shannon precisely two weeks when she announced, “I have something wonderful to tell you.” I narcissistically waited for the declaration that she would love for me to be her new mommy. Instead I had to check my facial expression when Shannon continued, “I found Jesus.” It took all my self-control not to ask, “Was he lost?” and smile while thinking, I have gotta get to work on this kid.
That had all changed. Recently Shannon had arrived home from school and announced that it was important to be honest and say she was an atheist because people who were agnostic were just afraid to tell the truth. She also believed George W. Bush was probably the Antichrist. But right now she was focused on my anger at Mark.
“Do you mean how Daddy doesn’t care about gangs and you do?”
Shannon was well aware of the never-ending argument about how much money was spent on counterterrorism and how little was spent on gangs. While Mark was tasked with spending $50 million in government grants, negotiating how money would be allocated—City Fire, Information Technology, Emergency Response—I was working with community-based organizations that were lucky to get by on $100,000 a year. Greg Boyle did not receive any government funding at Homeboy Industries to support his work on job training, tattoo removal, mental health services, drug counseling, and education. From that night onward, whenever we argued about gangs and counterterrorism, Mark would try to end the conflict by joking, “Poor black woman.”
“Dad doesn’t always understand what people go through—especially people in Watts. They are poor and they commit crimes. That’s wrong, but it doesn’t make them terrorists.”
“When we went to the Watts Towers you told me lots of people there weren’t gang members. Is that what you mean by ‘poor black woman’?”
I was happy to settle for this small victory. Shannon and I moved on to the take-out menu.
A few days after the swap-meet argument, however, Mark and I continue to argue.
“It’s not ‘poor black woman’ and you know it,” I say. “It’s the inequity of the whole situation. You should have been with me two days ago with Ronny. The LAPD is just hassling people in Nickerson Gardens for nothing. And they don’t even understand the gang problem.”
It only increases my fury when Mark responds, “Look, the gang problem has been around for a long time. It’s not gonna get better—and after 9/11 we need people to feel safe.”
“It’s wrong,” I insist. “People are not afraid of terrorists. They’re afraid of getting killed. They’re afraid of Florencia and the Rollin 60s. In the hood, the Twin Towers don’t mean the World Trade Center. They mean the county jail. That’s what’s real—18th Street is real.” But I know we are arguing about money and what Mark had said on the radio and the emphasis on counterterrorism because we really don’t want to talk about the elephant in the room.
Mark is afraid.
And, even though I didn’t want to admit it, so am I.
It had all started about a week earlier, when a gang interventionist named Mario Corona told me, “There’s a rumor on the street your husband is LAPD.”
I never volunteered that I was married to a cop, nor did I hide it. I also knew that street intelligence on outsiders was pretty limited. The neighborhoods knew about one another and who came into their territory, but they knew very little about people in the outside world. I was never involved in any arrest. I kept telling people nothing was going to happen to me.
But Kenny Green had told me the story of Gil Becerra, and it had an impact. Gil Becerra had functioned as a gang interventionist. He had impressive bona fides—he had been in the US military and on the streets. None of this had saved him from what occurred when he got in between two rival gangs, trying to negotiate a truce. He was beaten and left for dead. He sustained multiple broken bones and now had permanent back injuries that made it painful for him to walk or stand up straight. But for me, the critical issue lay in the phrase “gotten between two rival gangs.”
I was convinced that as long as I didn’t plant myself between warring neighborhoods or interfere in gang activity, I would be okay. I also was careful never to go into a violent situation without someone from a neighborhood along for the ride. When Mario told me about the rumor, I told him I was always careful. He listened patiently but warned me again.
“You gotta be careful. If these guys find out that you’re married to someone who is a cop, they’ll kill you.”
Nine. Mario
Everyone belongs to a gang—the LAPD and the Bloods and Crips and even the fuckin’ Boy Scouts, there’s no differences. We all the same.
—Darius
For several weeks Mark and I live in a state of détente. We carefully avoid talking about gangs or counterterrorism. We celebrate Shannon’s twelfth birthday. It rains incessantly, but when the weather clears I announce I am going out to do some interviews. I’ve started to compile a series of gang life histories and I don’t want to lose any of the new connections I’ve made. Mark asks me to reconsider.
“I’m concerned about you going out at night. There’s been a spike in violence,” he begins.
“No. You said you didn’t want to stop me from the work I love.” I knew that whenever people from the neighborhoods had been cooped up because of bad weather, there was invariably a frisson of gang activity when clear skies returned. I just wanted to see what was going on.
“You leave me when you go to work, now it’s my turn,” I say on my way out to meet up with Mario Corona, the gang member turned social worker who was part of the staff at the San Fernando Valley grassroots agency Communities in Schools.
CIS operated out of a small building with cinder block walls that looked like it would not survive the next major earthquake. Located in Pacoima, it was a DMZ right in the middle of a hotbed of drug dealing and gang activity, staffed with outreach workers who possessed long histories in the neighborhoods and devoted themselves to gang prevention and intervention. It was headed up by Don Quixote reincarnated as a kickboxer, Blinky Rodriguez, and a social worker turned Sancho Panza, Bobby Arias. Together they traveled from City Hall to school sites, preaching the gospel of leaving the gang. Blinky, in particular, could walk the talk. He had one son locked up in Corcoran State Prison and another son dead, victim of a drive-by shooting.
“I’ve paid dearly—with my life—for the gang problem,” Blinky would insist. “I remember going with my wife to see my son, lying on a slab in the morgue. And I can’t even talk to my other son, he’s in solitary confinement.”
That Blinky had experienced a Job-like set of sorrows, no one could dispute. However, there were rumors about Blinky—that he was connected, that he was part of the Mexican Mafia, that he collected taxes—a street-level form of extortion. “If those rumors are true,” he sighed, “then why am I always so fucking poor?”
Still, despite all the second-guessing, I felt grateful to Blinky and Bobby because they had brought me to the party. Early in 2002 I had conducted an evaluation of the CIS intervention program, and while there was room for improvement, the outcomes were positive—the areas where they worked showed reduced rates of crime. After the evaluation, we continued our relationship: they included me at meetings and connected me with gangbangers all over the San Fernando Valley.
Blinky had credibility with the neighborhoods in and around Pacoima. In the aftermath of his son’s death, he sat down with representatives of roughly seventy-five gangs in the San Fernando Valley and brokered a gang “truce.” One of the moving forces behind the negotiation was a shot caller representing the Pacoima Criminals, Mario Corona. The truce was credited with reducing gang homicides in the Valley. More importantly, Blinky had acquired a powerful new ally—Deputy Chief Ron Bergmann of the LAPD.
The agency that was Bergmann’s favorite “crime-fighting tool” operated in a constant state of chaos. There was after-school tutoring and case management. Then there were the former gangbangers and veteranos, who worked to stop retaliation and gang violence. These street interventionists planned funerals for gang victims and joined forces with the mothers of children who had been killed in drive-by shootings, chanting, “No more bullets flying! No more babies dying!” After a homicide, Blinky would counsel grieving family members not to retaliate while arranging for a burial plot to be donated. This occurred at a high pitch, in crisis mode, all at once. And then there was Mario.
Mario Corona stood out in the fray. He was tall, soft-spoken, and possessed an almost Castilian courtliness. Blinky suggested we work together. I showed up at CIS braced to meet a rough-and-ready gang member and instead, in walked Sir Galahad. He was my tour guide through the barrios of the San Fernando Valley, a place I knew nothing about. South and East Los Angeles were notorious for gang activity. But there was a whole other world of violence in the San Fernando Valley that buzzed on pretty much below the radar.
Mario spent several days driving with me through “the Valley.” Here, the gang problem wasn’t located in the projects as it had been in South and East LA. Instead, there were huge apartment complexes, low rent and government subsidized, that housed different neighborhoods, serving as a staging area for criminal activity. Mario took me to talk to the homies kicking it at Parthenia Park, alerting me to the fact that there were sixty-eight apartment complexes bordering the park, many of them sheltering gang families and the homies who drifted from unit to unit. I quickly learned that every neighborhood provided housing for its homies; gang members didn’t end up in homeless shelters. Instead, if they were careful to maintain ties, they could always ask for help from their homies, in exchange for work. This quid pro quo ensured that there would always be lifeblood serving the neighborhoods. I learned this not from the leadership of gangs, but from hanging around with the foot soldiers—the individuals on the lower rungs of the totem pole, angling to get ahead.