by Jorja Leap
Joanna doesn’t openly admit to drug dealing. Hustling is code for all street enterprises: drug dealing, fencing stolen goods, even selling handmade jewelry. But Joanna’s eyes fill with guilty tears. She wants to know how I knew and is surprised when I show her my field notes, where I have graphed my suspicions.
Drugs are the quickest pathway to financial stability. I think Joanna struggles to survive financially and is tempted to hustle. She has told me she doesn’t have money. But at Bullet’s graduation from fire training, she is wearing a beautiful outfit and ballet flats. Her nails are freshly manicured and Marcos wears a new outfit. Joanna films the graduation ceremony with a small, expensive video cam. I think she is dealing.
“Mama, you’re on it,” Joanna observes, the closest she’ll come to admitting my notes are accurate. “That’s what we wind up doin’. Bullet’s gone to rehab and I don’t know what else to do. I’ve got no money. People in the neighborhood—my family—they told me they were gonna help me when Bullet left and then they didn’t do anything. And I can’t make it. I gotta get my hustle on.”
I ask her how much money she makes from dealing, but Joanna remains cagey. “Don’t ask me that. I already feel like shit.”
I wonder just how much this is. Angel Duarte has already bragged that he makes $4,000 a month tax-free from dealing, but I think he is exaggerating. Sudhir Venkatesh, author of Gang Leader for a Day, did the math while studying the Black Kings gang in Chicago’s South Side, finding that the average foot soldier made about $3 a day. While I think the net may be higher in Los Angeles, it is not lost upon me that no one I know is getting rich dealing drugs. They are just getting by. But I don’t ask Joanna. Part of me doesn’t want to know. Instead I tell her that she should go to Homeboy and talk to Greg about money.
“I don’t want to.” She is adamant.
“Why?”
“I’m probably just too proud,” she says. “And I know Father Greg cares about me—the trouble is once we got Bullet into rehab, Homeboy really started havin’ trouble with money. Homeboy doesn’t have money. I don’t have money. We’re all fucked. I just don’t know what to do about money. That’s the truth. So I hustle a little. I gotta get by.”
I’m trying to figure out just how drugs figure in gang life. Joanna insists that drug dealing is how some of the larger neighborhoods—like 18th Street and Florencia—finance operations: it puts their foot soldiers out on the street. Listening to her, I begin to believe that these “soldiers” are the neighborhood sales force. A moment later she adds to this account, saying that the proceeds also enable the neighborhood leaders to buy cars and houses.
“My grandmother owns her own house,” Joanna explains, and I imagine a sweet Mexican woman carefully paying off a small mortgage on a monthly basis over the years. I later learn that her grandmother was a notorious drug dealer who owns three houses “free and clear.” However, when I ask about the mechanics of drug dealing, Joanna shuts down. “I gotta go get Marcos from preschool,” she tells me,then leaves.
Ronny turns out to be a more willing guide to the everyday life of a drug dealer. There was talk that he had been groomed to be a shot caller but lacked both interest and ambition. The neighborhood underachiever, Ronny excelled at street dealing. He still possesses the easy smile and relaxed manner of a natural salesman, sharing the story of his career trajectory and its slippery slope into dealing. Ronny had managed a crack house and a “rollin’” corner where business was good. But after a six-month visit to county jail, he stayed out of the business for a year. He desperately wanted to be legit—but no job materialized.
“I thought I would be okay, but I couldn’t get a job. Then I started sellin’ marijuana—little nickel and dime bags. I was the best weed seller in the world. But y’know, I wasn’t sellin’ much, just a half a pound a day. It was cool. One day, I had like a hundred bucks and I said fuck it, let me buy a quarter pound—no more little bitty two ounces of weed, I’m gonna sell a lot. I kept on sellin’ more and more till I got caught for possession and I went to jail, my first drug case.”
Of course, once free, his employment prospects hadn’t improved.
“When I got out of jail, my brother had his own drug spot rollin’ and my cousin had his. My brother said, ‘I don’t wanna getcha right back into selling drugs.’ But I wanted to hang with my cousin—he had women around—so I started sellin’ dope ten days after I got out. My cousin got me a job doin’ inventory. I still was sellin’ drugs but I was goin’ to work too, plus I had me my first little car. I would go to work in the daytime and sell drugs at night. My life was balanced. But then things changed. I started sellin’ crack cocaine—the money was faster. I quit my job. Weed had been fun and it involved women. Crack cocaine was male-dominated and it was for reals, not fun. I was workin’ for somebody who was a really good person. . . .”
Is he serious? I think, hoping my expression doesn’t give me away.
“The individual who ran the business took care of me—I was able to do what I wanted to—I was hands-on and independent.”
I struggle to understand how Ronny, who reads the Bible on a daily basis, could tell me a crack distributor was a good person. Over a decade ago, crack cocaine had laid siege to and basically decimated the African American population in Los Angeles and San Francisco. At one point, half the families in South LA were reportedly “in the system” as clients of child welfare, courtesy crack cocaine. Even today, many feel the black community has never quite recovered—including the African American men who drew extensive drug sentences. I can’t stop myself from reminding Ronny of this.
“I know what crack did to people—to my family. But I would sell drugs to my family. If they needed money—I would give it to them. If they had no money, I would give drugs to them.”
I stop myself before I tell Ronny what else I think. He watched his mother destroy her life on crack cocaine, but that is not part of this narrative. Instead, we talk about the money drugs brought. They also brought other changes.
“Sellin’ drugs required things. It required guns, it required more attention to the streets, so basically it was time consuming with both my actions and my mind—I had to be worried about it all the time. But it brought me status too. I started to get a little more rank in my neighborhood. You could fight all you want, you could be brave all you want. If you don’t got no money or no gun in the projects, you don’t got no rank.” This was the curriculum vitae of a successful gangbanger: drugs, money, guns.
Still, Ronny was not a major drug distributor. He could not shed any real light on who controlled drug distribution and how this played out in the neighborhoods. The truth about the relationship between gangs and drugs was a dicey thing. There was a mythology that gangs controlled drug sales, operating through an entrepreneurial, highly structured bureaucracy more intricate than the IRS. This all played into the drama of conspiracy and gang corporate structure that had people in the suburbs quaking in fear and law enforcement assembling task forces to “take back the streets.” Newspaper headlines and TV docudramas fed the narrative of the lethal, drug-dealing gang “organization.” Two decades of research, however, had begun to offer another perspective. While some studies continued discussing “corporate” gangs, other research showed that drug dealing formed only a small piece of neighborhood existence. Several studies revealed that the smallest, most numerous gangs were preoccupied with loyalty and territory, not product. Instead of violent, organized groups, the neighborhoods were barely capable of what Greg Boyle often referred to as “disorganized crime.” As early as 1996, on the tail end of the “decade of death,” the National Youth Gang Survey questioned three thousand law enforcement departments nationwide and found that the vast majority believed that gangs were incapable of either managing or controlling drug distribution.
This was what I was seeing in Los Angeles. There was no real connection between drugs and the neighborhoods. In fact, it was more the exception than the rule that the folk I knew pooled thei
r earnings for the gang. Instead, the more enterprising homies told me that they saved their money for their baby mamas or their families. The vast majority of gang members or people trying to leave the neighborhood, like Joanna, sold drugs to “get by.” Despite what she told me about financing foot soldiers, her current efforts were fairly typical and less exciting—they had nothing to do with Florencia-13. Drug dealing occurred on impulse and was part of a grab bag of criminal activities like theft, burglary, check fraud; anything and everything was on the table in the struggle to make a living.
Meanwhile, the mythology of the corporate gang was kept alive by law enforcement, which force-fed the public misleading statistics. What bothered me was the distortion by numbers: when an individual who belonged to a neighborhood committed a crime for their own reasons, the police immediately labeled the crime “gang-related.” This led to higher statistics about gang-related crime and little understanding of what was really going on in the streets. It wasn’t about the neighborhood, it was about poverty.
The corporate-gang myth also obscured the truth about drug distribution. For that kind of information, I needed to talk to someone who knew the logistics of drug dealing in LA without being in the business. I begin to consider whom to interview and I feel like I am on a fool’s errand. When I share my questions with journalist Celeste Fremon, she urges me to talk to Felipe Mendez. “He is incredible and he knows the business. Y’know, he’s out of the life,” she remarks. “Felipe has changed so much. And he was a serious character. He was a real shot caller.”
Felipe and I had grown close since I had completed the evaluation of a Los Angeles School District gang-prevention program at Hollenbeck and Markham middle schools. It was an intense project that had consumed huge amounts of my time and had broken my heart. So many of these young kids were going to be lost to gangs, and there was little this program could do about it. As the gang interventionist assigned to the program, Felipe served as a combination key leader and mentor to many of these fledgling gangbangers looking for a role model. He was also one of the most intelligent homies I had ever encountered. Medium height and very slim, with hair he wore in a ponytail, Felipe exuded a quiet strength that both men and women found irresistible. He was a natural leader in any endeavor, legitimate or illegitimate. He was the one who knew the rules—to stay quiet and watch your business no matter where you were. He had risen through the neighborhood ranks rapidly, trusted and well respected. And yet, Felipe had turned his back on everything and exited. He stood out, a living rebuke to the idea that you could never leave the gang.
I knew there were scars. Felipe possessed rage and regret, guilt and anxiety and God only knows what else. But along with this backpack full of demons, Felipe was brilliant. Listening to him, I morph into an MBA student in a course taught by a master professor.
“Tell me about your work.” I could be straightforward with Felipe. He’d always respond.
“When I was eleven years old, I realized that I wanted things. When you’re little you get told—you can’t have this, you can’t have that. But I wanted things. And I started then, at that age, going to get them. First I got them the easy way. And the easy way was illegal.”
This is an understatement. By the time he was twenty years old, Felipe was sitting in Avenal State Prison for possession of a controlled substance with intent to sell. He had fathered four children and had overseen a drug-distribution network before he was even legally eligible to drink. Once he was released, he distanced himself from the neighborhood. “I got serious about making money, and when you get serious, you can’t gangbang anymore,” Felipe explained. Here he was—the walking, talking counterargument to the mantra that gangs were corporate organizations devoted to drug dealing and revenue.
Felipe tried to go legit—saving his money and eventually opening a restaurant. He was Stringer Bell—the intelligent, ambitious drug-syndicate operative in the HBO series The Wire. I was not surprised when Felipe told me how much he loved The Wire. He talked about his methodology.
“We would buy fax machines,” he explained. “Then we would completely hollow them out—just take out all the guts. We would stuff the drugs into the fax machine and then ship it UPS and Federal Express to houses or offices to where someone took delivery.” I marvel at the innovation. But I also wonder why someone as smart as Felipe would join a neighborhood.
“I grew up around it—my mom was in it and my dad was in it, my grandfather was in it, and you kind of feel destined to it. I got jumped in to it when I was thirteen years old. This is a tradition among Latino gangs in the projects—you went through the ritual of getting involved in gangs.”
“If you felt destined, how did you get out?”
“I got out when I was about twenty-five. It’s kind of hard to say exactly when I got out, but there was a point when I stopped. It’s like you say, ‘I definitely do not gangbang.’ You start to grow out of it. For me, drug dealing kind of pulled me out of it. I had to get serious. Now, there’s different . . . what’s the word?”
“Perspectives,” I fill in. Felipe has always asked for help with his vocabulary.
“Perspectives. I think an outsider would see slanging—drug dealing—as gangbanging. But I’m not worried about gangbanging, I’m worried about money. And I started to reflect about growing up, my family life compared to the family life on TV, those thoughts of my family line, your grandparents, my parent, myself—how did I end up this way and how can I stop the cycle?”
It’s hard to reconcile the thirty-two-year-old man in front of me with the thirteen-year-old boy who was jumped into VNE. But the neighborhood fit his identity perfectly. Varrio Nuevo Estrada, also known as VNE, is one of the oldest and largest Hispanic gangs in Los Angeles, its members identify as Southsiders, or Sureños. Founded in the early 1940s, VNE traces its roots to the Estrada Courts project—a Los Angeles City housing development in Boyle Heights. Within Estrada Courts, VNE developed a fiercely violent reputation, which ultimately resulted in a gang injunction being granted, ordering VNE members to cease associating. This did not stop the neighborhood’s spread to include multiple cliques in the Antelope Valley of northern Los Angeles County and the Inland Empire. The neighborhood was both feared and revered. Felipe was proud to belong.
The gang provided stability for Felipe, who spent most of his early years in “the system,” parented by Children’s Protective Services. His father died while incarcerated when Felipe was four years old. His mother suffered with severe mental illness. Their apartment in the projects featured a revolving door of police officers, boyfriends, drug dealers, social workers—all who stayed long enough to indulge, arrest, or remove Felipe and his younger sister, Lilita, from the household. When I asked Felipe what had kept him sane through all of those years, he did not hesitate before replying, “Lily.”
“I had my sister,” he continued. “When we were in some foster home we would push our beds together and go to sleep with our pinky fingers touching. Nothing else, just our little fingers. And I could get to sleep. Y’know, this makes all the difference in the world, to have someone I can fully trust, whether I’m right or wrong.
“Look at us now,” Felipe laughs. “We’re still living together.”
Felipe has a daughter and Lilita has two sons. Both of them are no longer with their partners. Instead, the brother and sister rent a house in Lincoln Heights. Of course, domestic life is somewhat less than idyllic. Lily suffers from depression. The local schools are overcrowded and underperforming. One of Lily’s sons is failing sixth grade. Their landlady is intrusive, “checking” on them all hours of the day and night. There are family arguments. But Felipe tries to mediate. Constantly.
“I imagine this is how you were in the neighborhood,” I tell Felipe.
“I was kind of a negotiator.”
“If you were born in Brentwood, you would have been an attorney.”
“Nah,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say. “What do you think lawyers do? They ne
gotiate. They mediate.”
“Yeah, that’s what I used to do in the varrio when some of the veteranos would try to scare the youngsters—y’know, intimidate them. I reminded them, ‘You can’t do this. You gotta remember where you came from.’ I guess that’s why I ended up being an interventionist. You work with the varrio, you talk with them.”
Later, when I relate this to Mark, he is not surprised. “There’s your story,” he remarked, something he has taken to saying whenever I talk about Felipe. “He is the success case of the neighborhood. Felipe has the story you want to tell.” I marveled at Mark’s endorsement and then it struck me—they were alike—each of them quietly magnetic and occasionally tyrannical. And both of them were highly intelligent. I gradually began spending more time with Felipe.
A few weeks later I discover that although Felipe has left the neighborhood, he maintains ties to the place where he more or less grew up. Along with Ramona Gardens, Estrada Courts is the only old-school project still standing in East Los Angeles. Just like the projects in South LA—Imperial Courts and Jordan Downs—Estrada Courts was constructed between 1942 and 1943. It owed its construction to the boom in wartime industry work and the eventual return of war veterans to East LA. Spread out over thirty acres, Estrada Courts is composed of just over four hundred one- and two-bedroom units. It borders the San Bernardino Freeway and is dotted with colorful murals, some of which were featured in the music videos of Tupac Shakur and, more recently, the Black Eyed Peas.
I first visited Estrada Courts when I was in college, on a politically correct date with someone who took me to see the murals and eat Mexican food. I still remember the mural painted by Danny Martinez, In Memory of a Homeboy, and feel strangely nostalgic when Felipe talks to me about the VNE homie memorialized in the artwork. But when I recall the “charm” of the projects to Felipe, he laughs. “I can tell you what it was really like then.” We are talking about this while we spend the afternoon walking through Estrada Courts. The silence is almost eerie.