by Jorja Leap
The call invariably comes on a Friday night or over a weekend or right before vacation. The call never comes during business hours. This time was no different. The voice mail was time-stamped 3:00 a.m. and the message came from Bobby Arias. “Call me,” he said tersely. “It’s about Mario.”
There was a whole world contained in those five words and it was not good. It was either going to be guns or drugs. There was little else to fuck things up in the neighborhoods. Someone was shot, someone OD’d, or someone had been caught dealing. I called Bobby back and when I heard the tightness in his voice I waited for death.
“I want you to hear this before it hits the news,” Bobby warned.
“Oh God.” I braced myself.
“Mario’s been arrested.”
This was when all the fragments of Mario’s life pulled together. He was arrested on suspicion of possessing a pound of methamphetamine—obviously not for use but for profit. The meth was found taped to his chest, underneath his clothes. The surrounding information was even more disturbing. None of this had happened in the darkness of night. Instead, Mario was arrested on a sunny afternoon, a little before three. Joe Curreri was the LAPD captain who announced the bust, adding that Mario had long been under suspicion.
I thought back to my interview with Joe Curreri over a year before. After calling Bobby, I turned to Mark, who was watching the replay of the arrest announcement on the local morning news. The last frames showed Mario leaving the police station, having posted bail.
“I guess your friend Joe Curreri is happy,” I said ruefully.
“Come on, sweetheart,” Mark cajoled me. “Did you look at the charge? Suspicion of transportation of narcotics. For God’s sake, that’s not a small thing. He’s a drug dealer. He ruins people’s lives. I felt it—there was something about him.”
I thought about this. Mark knew a lot more than I did. He had been assigned to narcotics for several years and successfully worked undercover—posing as a drug dealer. I laughed when he told me this, until he showed me his mug shots from his “arrest”—his all-American looks transformed with hair grown to his shoulders and a Fu Manchu mustache and beard.
“I guess I’m just worried. And I don’t want this to bounce back on all the good people who work so hard,” I admitted. I was listening carefully to the news report. I knew there was no one who would help Mario or Blinky or Bobby. Ron Bergmann had retired a few months before, leaving CIS without its greatest defender.
“Listen to Curreri. He has already tried Mario and convicted him. He appears to have forgotten about—what’s that pesky little thing the LAPD loves so much—the Bill of Rights?”
Mark shrugged and listened as the report continued that Mario had been under surveillance for more than six months.
On Monday, there was more news involving Michel Moore, the new deputy chief of Valley Bureau. Moore was not a favorite around our house. With Bergmann gone, the LAPD rumor mill had predicted that Mark would finally, deservedly be promoted to deputy chief, taking over command of the Valley. Instead, the position had gone to this rather brash commander while Mark languished in the counterterrorism bureau, watching over John Miller. Moore had been on the job a few months when Mario was arrested. After he bailed out, an informant had revealed that Mario had allegedly been part of a transglobal drug-distribution network. Evidently, the rumored ties to the Mexican Mafia did not prevent Moore from calling Blinky and asking him to convince Mario to turn himself in to the LAPD. Blinky put a call in to Mario, who resisted, complained, and then acquiesced. Blinky drove him over to Valley Station to be booked on new, even more serious, charges. He remained in custody, bail pending.
And there I was looking like an idiot—the role model I had introduced my daughter to, in jail. Mark had figured it out. And once I thought about it, I knew Mario was guilty. While I recognized that Mario was smart, I had forgotten that the neighborhoods recognized talent.
Mario was gifted—and people responded to that. Whether it was the barrio or USC or gang intervention, Mario had the golden touch. And when he talked about changing his life, you wanted to believe. But in rewinding the story and listening to his words, it is unclear just exactly when Mario started to change or why. Mario insisted, “I had adults who helped me, especially teachers.” In the human-interest story that was his life, there was always a former professor willing to comment about his brightness, that “something special,” the spark in him. But how on earth did he get better? I was a good teacher and earned wonderful evaluations, but I knew a few hours in a classroom and the ministrations of a caring instructor were never enough to change someone’s life. There had to be something more.
And now the authenticity of Mario’s change was murky. It was all lost in the confusion of his arrest and the news of his possible deportation. No one wanted to touch him with a ten-foot pole. Once in custody, the police had tossed his house and found a 9 mm handgun, not registered. This was added to the case against him. In court, Mario entered a plea of no contest to two major charges: transportation of a controlled substance and being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm. He was sentenced to nearly three years—thirty-two months—in prison; his deportation remained open to negotiation.
All of this left me shaken—and angry. It now seemed like a miracle of good timing that I had agreed to work as the gang policy advisor for the mayor of Los Angeles. I had been recruited by Maurice Suh, the brilliant and enterprising attorney who was deputy mayor of public safety. Maurice was so enterprising that while I was moving into City Hall and taking the photo for my official ID, he announced he was resigning his position and going back to private practice. “I’ve got school tuition for three kids,” he told me. It was a late night and his City Hall office was crammed with packing boxes. “Watch out,” he told me. “Everyone here is venal, corrupt and venal.”
Just where do you think you are, Sparky? I remember thinking as I listened to Maurice. He was working for a politician—Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa—who was being described as a potential vice presidential running mate if Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination for president. He abandoned me with one final admonition: “Watch your back. They’ll throw you to the wolves first.”
Thank you very much, Maurice. Still, maybe I was better off working with policymakers. Maybe I could help people more by working to change laws and create programs. Maybe it was time to stop running the streets. And then came my first assignment: figure out how the mayor could distance himself, as far as possible, from Mario Corona. Join the club, I thought to myself. There was a photograph of Mayor Villaraigosa with a group of gang interventionists, including Mario, on the mayor’s website. I suggested that it be removed, as soon as possible. USC had set the bar pretty high; the university had erased all traces of Mario from its website two hours after the press release concerning his arrest. Still, dealing with the Mayor’s Office was nothing compared to what I had to face at home. Mark was smug, but I tried to ignore that. How was I going to tell Shannon?
At dinner we began our nightly sharing. When I first came on the scene, upset at the non-existent level of conversation in the Leap household, I demanded that everyone bring a share to dinner at night—something interesting, something new, something they learned. It could not be a work report or a test score. That night my share was Mario.
“I have something to tell you that is very sad and frustrating,” I began.
Mark kept eating while Shannon looked curious.
“The LAPD stopped Mario and they found him with drugs. He wasn’t using. He had a lot of methamphetamine—”
“Crystal meth,” Mark helpfully supplied. I glared at him.
“He had a lot of meth on him. He was getting ready to sell it.”
The room was silent.
“My Mario?” Shannon asked, already knowing the answer. She was trying not to cry.
“Yes, sweetheart.”
“What’s gonna happen to him?”
“Well, he’s going to prison. And
they are trying to figure out whether or not to send him back to Mexico.”
I had already offered Shannon a sort of verbal primer on immigration when I explained that Mario was here on a visa, that he was legal but not a citizen.
“Do you think he did it?”
I knew in my bones he had done it. That was the answer to the house and the car and the $100,000 student-loans payoff. But I was not going to be responsible for fostering my daughter’s cynicism. The world would take care of that.
“I don’t know, sweetheart. It doesn’t look good. But this is America and—George Bush notwithstanding—you are innocent until proven guilty.”
Mark rolled his eyes.
And then Shannon asked, “Can I write him?”
Ten. Fear Rules over Love
My hood is my family and my family is my hood.
—Ronny Dawson
Events with Mario leave me shaken. A week later, Ronny calls and apologizes for abandoning me that day that now feels like it took place a million years ago. The afternoon he left to find his homies, he was picked up in an LAPD gang sweep and spent a week in county jail. He asks me if we can get together. I may be working for the mayor, but I am still moonlighting in the neighborhoods. I meet him the next night.
“When did you get started with the neighborhood?” I ask.
“In middle school,” he begins. “I wandered into doin’ stuff.” Ronny is calm and thoughtful.
“I guess it was the stuff I did after school that got me in trouble—like fights, bein’ the lookout, informin’ people where the police were at, and so I was put up into the Bounty Hunter Bloods. And y’know it was easy, ’cuz no one at home was payin’ attention. It was nothin’ but dysfunction and I saw a lot of violence. So I got violent.” The words skate over a frozen pond of trauma. When Ronny was nine years old, a shooter from the Crips killed his favorite cousin, Anthony.
“He was special, my cousin. He wasn’t in the neighborhood. He was goin’ on to college. But he was part of my family. So they killed him. This is when I started learnin’ about the rivalry between the Bloods and Crips. I guess that was when I first really felt pain in my life—Anthony was only sixteen when he was gunned down. Then three years later my granny died—so from nine to thirteen—those years was really rough for me. And my daddy wasn’t around.”
“But who were your role models? Who helped you learn to be a man?”
“I admired people, growin’ up, and some of them were dope dealers. Some of them were killers and gangsters, but they all had this aura, this persona about them, and I would think, Damn, I wanna be like that when I grow up. But I never wanted to be a shot caller, I didn’t wanna kill anyone, that was not one of my goals, I just wanted to be respected and liked by the girls.”
After his granny died, his older sister assumed custody of Ronny, but she was no match for the teenage boy. Ronny’s first arrest had already occurred when he was ten years old, and he was constantly in trouble from that point on. He makes no excuses.
“I was responsible for my troubles. My sister was young. She trusted me to be at home and take care of her kids and my sisters by myself. I learned to always look out for them.
“While I was with the kids, my older cousins would come by and sell drugs out of her place. I helped them. That jumpstarted me—when I was fourteen, I started sellin’ drugs myself. I already had a good reputation in the neighborhood and I was up for helpin’ out the homies. Gettin’ money was the icing on the cake. I still participated in violent stuff. From fourteen to eighteen, I was gettin’ shot at a lot—I got wounded, really bad, for the first time when I was sixteen when I came home from my basketball game and cut through the wrong neighborhood.” At fourteen Ronny went to probation camp for the first time.
“When I went to camp I saw my enemies. A lot of the dudes were big, grown men laughin’ and tellin’ me, ‘We’re not gonna fuck you up, little nigga. We’re gonna give you a pass.’” But his next trip to camp, at fifteen, marked a change.
“The emotional standpoint hit me harder. Now I was thinkin’ about what I was doin’, what kind of role model I was—I was thinkin’ about my little cousins and nephews—how do I look to them? I knew I had to get out and make somethin’ of myself.”
“Were you changing?” I ask.
“No, I was maturin’.” It’s a sophisticated nuance, and I wonder how far Ronny would have gone if he had been emotionally supported and educated. As if reading my mind, Ronny continues.
“After I got out, I started goin’ to school. I got off probation for the first time—it took me a minute to get off of probation because I used to always go to court alone. My parents were about the last people I would call. I was alone.” I know what Ronny means by “a minute”—it’s the hood paradox. A minute means a long time, something that feels like forever.
His resolve dwindles. Eventually, Ronny drops out of school and returns to drug dealing, working for his cousin who operates the Fifth Avenue of crack. When another gang member tries to muscle in on his profitable corner, Ronny’s cousin shoots and kills him. The Bloods retaliate and kill one of Ronny’s nephews. This is all part of a series of ongoing feuds and shifting alliances, the Bloods constantly fighting between themselves. This is never all-out war. There are fewer Bloods than Crips and their numbers must be preserved. Still, the drug economy causes frequent conflict between Blood sets.
“This is how a huge beef began between my family and my neighborhood. It’s still goin’ on,” Ronny tells me.
I struggle to figure out the difference between Ronny’s family hood and his neighborhood. The Bloods have always been a very loose network of independent groupings—called “hoods,” never “gangs.” The hood controls a discrete geographic area, with sets claiming even more specific streets and city blocks. These streets or projects give the sets their names—Ronny was from the Bounty Hunter Bloods—a set that claimed the Nickerson Gardens housing project as their territory. The Bounty Hunter Bloods gang is composed of several different sets—including Ronny’s family, the Hillbilly Gangsters.
“My family was poor and people would make fun of us—my mama was a crackhead and we had accents, so people would call us hillbillies. We started sellin’ dope and makin’ money so we called ourselves the Beverly Hillbillies. Then my cousin put the G at the end of it and we became the Hillbilly Gangsters. We started all havin’ babies and that would make people cousins. We were popular ’til the drug murders occurred. People said we planned it, makin’ up rumors—callin’ us the hillbilly snitches. There was this other circle of people who were strong, they had fear in the projects, no respect. My family was respected and loved. But fear rules over love—even though love is strong. The neighborhood put a green light on my family, the Hillbilly Gangsters.”
The green light is the point of no return. A neighborhood receives a green light when it has broken a code of gang life. Kenny Green once tried explaining this to me. He started laughing when I asked how a green light was recorded, explaining that nothing is written down; gang members learn the rules verbally and through relationships. There is a code of silence—that encompasses loyalty and respect toward all things hood.
“Let’s say your neighborhood is shooting and they kill a child. Then they get the green light. You can’t kill a little child or a baby. Or if someone in your neighborhood gets caught snitching, then your neighborhood gets a green light.” Kenny is going through all of this in painstaking detail. He is a scholar of the hood.
It is always open season on any neighborhood that has been green-lighted. The other gangs can shoot to kill with impunity. Here in the Wild West, no breach of the code goes unnoticed. Outsiders are constantly watched. While I am with Ronny, my cell phone rings. It’s Big Mike, who tells me that I’ve been spotted in the projects.
“You know they watch when anyone new shows up,” Big Mike cautions. “Be careful, Little Mama.” I feel safe but I try not to think too hard about the surveillance under way in the projects at this mom
ent. Ronny is showing me where his homies have carved their initials into the cement of Nickerson Gardens, with the Cs in their names carefully crossed out. This is because any reference to Crips, however oblique, must be undone as part of the Bloods’ practice of “affirmation by negation.” The Bounty Hunter Bloods avoid certain words—they won’t say “cuz” or “cousin” because it sounds like “Crip.” Instead people are referred to as “relatives.” Back in the day, homies tell me, the Bloods liked to wear Calvin Klein jeans: the words symbolized “Crip Killer.”
“The whole time the situation with the green light was in the air,” Ronny recalls, “I wanted to go on missions, but I was torn. It wasn’t like I hated my whole neighborhood—I really loved some of the people in it. But my family kept sayin’, ‘Fuck everybody.’
“So I decided to leave the family and go to my hood, by myself. This was when I really fell in love with my neighborhood—they embraced me. You’re my nigga, you’re my friend—and they gave me guns to protect myself.”
From what I can decipher, Ronny left his own family set, identifying with and representing the Bounty Hunter hood. This change is further complicated when he is arrested, no longer a boy. He is a man, charged with possession of a firearm.
“I was eighteen and it was my first time going into the Men’s Central County Jail. I felt weird, I felt lost. I had heard all of these rumors about county jail. I made it through processin’ but believe me, it’s not a walk in the park—you got your gang activity right there in the jail—you got your Sureños so you got racial tension and gang tension and a lot of the dudes in my hood were aware of my family members and the people in the projects and I was scared—these dudes were a threat to my life. ”
At this moment, Nickerson Gardens is no longer part of Ronny’s reality. Instead, he is my walking, talking guide to the California penal system.
“The prison structure is better for keepin’ things cool between the races and the gangs. In county jail there’s no structure, it’s a lotta dudes that wanna make a name for themselves. And there’s trouble because of the age difference—in county jail there’s more people between eighteen and twenty-four, while in prison there’s men in their twenties and thirties and forties. This makes it a lot smoother, they dominate. CJ operates the way younger men operate. I remember I was nervous, walkin’ down the hall to my cell. Everyone’s bangin’ on their cells, sayin’, ‘Where you from?’ I had to answer really strong. You can’t say nothin’, and you can’t be soft. I hadda say it loud, ‘Bounty Hunter Bloods.’