by Jorja Leap
Two days later, I am back at Homeboy, interviewing new trainees.
Throughout all of this, I am being bombarded with questions from a variety of sources——the media, the County of Los Angeles, the Department of Justice—what is the best approach to “the gang problem?”
Is the law enforcement suppression working?
Are the peace treaties holding?
Are the younger gang members more jaded, more sophisticated—less likely to bang on the corner and more likely to use social networks?
Are gangs gone or are they just different?
I don’t know.
What I do know is that there is less violence and more drug abuse. I know that injunctions are keeping gangbangers off the street. But I also know that gangs are still alive. Buddy Howell, the director of the National Gang Center, comes to talk at UCLA, where I have organized a yearlong series of public lectures on gangs. He offers plenty of statistics, all of which show that, locally and nationally, crime is down and gang membership is up.
At Homeboy Industries, Hector Verdugo concedes that what law enforcement is doing has helped—to a point. He makes a swirling motion with his hands.
“What the police have done is this—they have creamed off the top of the problem and taken the worst criminals and put them in prison. They clearly are locking up the leaders, the shooters, the strongest parts of the neighborhood. That’s why we’ve got such a low crime rate. All-time low, that’s what the paper says. The police have the numbers—we gotta believe them. But there are more youngsters coming up and joining the neighborhoods. They’re gonna be the next gangsters. What needs to happen now is the community and the schools need to step in and deal with what’s below, what may rise up.”
I agree with Hector’s prescription. But there are problems. The California prison system is now the largest in the Western world—housing more prisoners than France, Germany, Holland, and Singapore combined. One out of eight prisoners in the United States is incarcerated in California. And the system itself cost the state over $10 billion a year. This investment has bought California the highest rate of recidivism and reincarceration in the United States, along with the bonus of running institutions that foster drug dealing, substance abuse, and institutional gangbanging.
What’s more, I had reason to doubt the numbers Hector invoked. My UCLA colleague who consults with DOJ has told me that many researchers share a firmly held conviction that statistics are not reported accurately, even now.
I suspect that this is true, and not because I know the algorithms. I have continued my practice of spending nights in South Los Angeles, driving around with Kenny Green and Mike Cummings, watching what was going on in the street and reading notifications on Kenny’s city-issued BlackBerry. Weapons are everywhere, and shots are being fired rampantly. There are reports of multiple gunshot wounds and cars speeding away from varied crime scenes. The police never show up. If the LAPD fails to make an appearance, it is as if the event never occurred: it’s never registered as part of the statistical record. The gossip at DOJ was reinforced by the reality of the street. And I had access to much better researchers than DOJ. One of them was Ronald Dawson.
“It was really bad a few months ago,” Ronny insists.
“I heard it was quiet—things were better?”
“They are better now, but I don’t know about what’s gonna happen. It’s gonna be bad this summer. Everyone is just lyin’ low. Everyone is just waitin’ to see, sooner or later somethin’ will get started.”
This doesn’t make me feel any better. This doesn’t make me feel secure for the people in the poorer neighborhoods impacted by violence. There is a small earthquake the next afternoon about an hour after I finish teaching my class. I am sitting in my UCLA office when I feel the tremor. As soon as the building stops shaking, my phone rings. It’s Joanna.
“Did ya feel that?” she asks. I know her seismological curiosity is a front; she wants to talk and I let her.
“Yeah, I did. Are you okay?”
“They’re watching us,” she confides.
I don’t know just who is watching. Is it Florencia? The police?
“They know my grandmother has been in the hospital and everyone is around. You know my grandmother is the one who started all of this. She’s the worst one of anyone in the neighborhood. I hate her. She’s the worst kind, Jorja, she would send her kids out on the street.”
I have never heard Joanna talk like this. I can’t believe she’s saying this on the phone.
“What about Bullet?”
“I picked him up from Kaiser today. He got detoxed. I’m tryin’ to stay positive. He’s gonna go to rehab.” I hear Little Marcos laughing and screaming in the background. I know Joanna is checking in before the weekend. She will be speaking at my summer school class at UCLA next week, after she returns from the domestic-violence training she is attending.
“My grandmother is part of that whole fuckin’ mess. You get a certain type of love in the neighborhood. It is sick love. And I’m never gonna go back to that.”
Something has changed in Joanna. She has thrown her mother out of the house and disowned her grandmother. She is talking about moving far away from Los Angeles.
“I am so done with the neighborhood,” she tells me.
This time I believe her.
I know that neither policymakers nor researchers could have saved Joanna. For ten years I have been on this road, looking for the answers. It has all come down to a Jesuit priest who listens to Amy Winehouse and tells the homie who confessed that he had been arrested for breaking and entering, “You are my son, I love you, but what the fuck were you thinking?”
I have known Greg Boyle since 1990, long before Homeboy Industries ever existed. There was an out-of-control gang problem in East Los Angeles and all he had was a bicycle and hope. While I worked in South Los Angeles, I kept hearing about what he was doing a million miles away in Boyle Heights. There was a gang war and it was being fought on two fronts—the Germany and Japan of the county were East and South LA. Pico-Aliso Village and Nickerson Gardens may well have been located on different continents. The gangs were different, the violence was different, the projects were different. In fact, twenty years later, the landscape remains divided, unrelated. The projects of Pico-Aliso have been razed and rebuilt, while Nickerson Gardens, Jordan Downs, and Imperial Courts stand unchanged from the time I worked there in the 1980s.
Greg and I got to know each other as “training consultants” for the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services’ six-week “Child Welfare Academy.” The program was designed to introduce newly hired workers to the “problems of Los Angeles,” in hopes they would know what to do once they found themselves dealing with parents who abused their children while they gangbanged and fought and smoked PCP. The consultants were on a fool’s errand—we all knew it—but we functioned with an “as if” sort of mentality. “As if” anything we were teaching these young social workers was going to help.
I spoke from nine to twelve about attachment, separation, and loss; Greg spoke from one to four about gangs. He came early, accompanied by several homies, and at the lunch break sold sweatshirts and T-shirts emblazoned with the logo JOBS NOT JAILS. I knew Greg had started a program and that he had recently been the subject of a magazine piece in the LA Times by Celeste Fremon. He was young, earnest, and rode around the projects on a beach cruiser, trying to convince gang members not to shoot each other. He negotiated peace treaties and organized the local mothers in peace marches. If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because he was doing what LA gang interventionists would claim was innovative—a decade before they ever got started. Bo Taylor and Mike Cummings and Felipe Mendez were still shooting people when Greg was riding around on his bike, imploring homies to put their gauge away.
At the DCFS training, we would hang out during the lunch breaks while the homies sold T-shirts, gossiping about politics and the LAPD. The training eventually ended, but over the
years, I kept up with what Greg was doing through friends and at trainings, and every once in a while we would be thrown together on the dais—with Greg talking about the homies, and I once again intoning about attachment. His story was changing. There was more talk of putting gang members to work, and in 1997 he opened a bakery and a graffiti-cleaning service and a drop-in center for homies in East LA. I don’t know when I was made aware of Homeboy Industries, but it became part of my life in ways I could not have predicted.
Greg had opened his first storefront agency at 1848 First Street. While I was involved in my first, then second, serious love affair, both taking place in a rented loft on the other side of the Los Angeles River, I would sometimes walk down to Homeboy and stop in just to say hello to Greg. This was before the loft district in LA was fashionable and before First Street was safe. To say I didn’t know what I was doing would be an understatement. Greg was always in the middle of a crisis—someone was arrested, someone had been shot and was in the hospital, someone had died and a car wash was being planned to pay for funeral expenses. There was a kind of energy in the room that I loved, but I was too busy directing traffic in my own life to get involved.
In 2001 he moved into a larger space, still on First Street, where I would visit much more frequently. In 2002 my loft was long gone and I was negotiating the commute from Westlake Village, balancing life on the home front with interviewing homies on the streets. Greg and I began what felt like a never-ending conversation—I wanted to evaluate Homeboy, and he looked upon my idea with a strange combination of warmth and what he later called “a hairy eyeball.” There were more panels, more questions, and more “gang conferences” discussing the benefits of street-violence interruption versus long-term intervention.
From my experience with prevention and street intervention and research on violence and family dynamics, I knew the community-based approach that Homeboy and places like it offer represents the best of all the “answers.” Gang members need to experience something other than the neighborhood. They need a family, they need a community, and they need to understand the story of their lives. Homeboy, of course, provides that family, that community.
I had come to know the meaning of love and family and it had changed my life. Despite mistrust and my need to run wild, a cop and a child had finally provided me with the security I craved, even though I had tried very hard not to admit it. My life had changed forever because of Mark and Shannon. The young men and women I knew needed that same kind of family—with all the craziness and control and security it involved.
Change is never easy—as Homeboy Industries discovered. By 2007, after outgrowing its storefront, the organization moved into a new, beautiful building in Chinatown—reaching far beyond East LA. This somehow seemed appropriate—the gang members Greg Boyle had served were gone, relocated. Greg and I talk about this on a summer day in 2010, while he is seeing a constant stream of people.
“We need to have a central location, because the gang members are coming from everywhere. They’re no longer coming just from the projects. And they never really did.”
An older black man, Eddie, who has joined us in Greg’s office, says, “I used to be from East Coast Crips, but now I’m in recovery. I live in a sober living facility.”
Greg nods encouragingly.
“I am looking for work,” the man bravely states.
Greg immediately responds. “I remember you.” Eddie is relieved and starts laughing. “You were around when I first got here in ’84,” Greg says. “And ’86 is when we first started having wars with the East Coast Crips. That’s when Eddie here—his girlfriend was killed. That was Mike Garrett’s niece.” Mike Garrett was a USC football star, winner of the Heisman Trophy. “No one was immune in those days.” Greg is in a mood to reminisce. “It’s changed so much now.”
Of course it has. Gang members no longer depend on knives; they wield AK-47s. The neighborhoods communicate on social networks. With hip-hop music and baggy pants, gangbanging has gone mainstream. Yet the problem remains the same: gangs continue to attract youngsters and ruin lives, and exiting feels impossible.
But if the problem remains the same, so does the answer. Long-term intervention: job training and comprehensive services including therapy, anger management, and education. Mike Cummings and Felipe Mendez have both told me, “We need to do it all.” While street intervention is sexy and delivers immediate results, comprehensive programs offer the best hope for long-term change. It is the most effective counter to the idea that you can never leave the gang.
It’s not a straight line to redemption. A few months later, on a fall afternoon, five gangbangers from 18th Street walk into the Homeboy lobby, very deep. A group is “deep” when it comes in a pack demonstrating strength in numbers, the gangbanger show of force. Greg immediately calls them into his office.
“I feel disrespected when people come in deep,” he begins sternly. No one is being called “my son.”
“I know so many guys from your neighborhood, from before you were born. They would never do what you did! When you come in deep, it’s so disrespectful. It’s disrespectful to me and disrespectful to Homeboy. People look up and think there is something going on.” The group listens solemnly. They are all of a piece, shaved heads, enormous tattoos, T-shirts, and medallions. It’s quite a sight. And yet Greg points out the reality.
“You come in deep from weakness, not strength.” The menace begins to disintegrate. Something emanates from their eyes and it is not rage. They are serving depression here, straight up. One of them—Angel—keeps craning to see what I am writing on my laptop.
“Don’t pay attention to him,” another homie advises. “Angel’s special-ed.” The group laughs, but Angel says, shakily, “There’s a lot of us who’re special-ed.”
The young men—they are all hovering around the age of eighteen—are fairly engaged, except one who tilts back in his chair, mad-dogging Greg. He looks angry. Greg bears down and stares at him. The homie blinks.
“Why are you here? Are you looking for work?” They all nod. “Let’s go see a job developer then.” They have temporarily morphed into a quiet and respectful group who follow Greg, obedient ducklings. Nevertheless, I decide not to plan any future meetings with them in the community.
When Greg returns he is greeted by a huge homie, Cisco, who enters the office holding his baby son.
“This is my pride and joy,” he explains as he hands the infant over to Greg for a blessing. When Greg finishes, Cisco looks down at the floor in embarrassment.
“What else do you need, my son?” Greg smiles.
“I kinda need a job, G.”
“Don’t worry. Let me give you a date for drug testing—that’s the first step.”
“Thanks, G—but there’s something else. . . .” The homie is hesitating, still embarrassed.
“What is it, my son-for-life?”
“In 2002, you loaned me twenty-five dollars. I would like to pay you back now. I am ready to pay you back today.”
Greg refuses the offer and tells him, “You’ve just made my day.”
It is not always this easy. Later that day Destiny calls to tell me that Ronny has been locked up. She doesn’t know what’s going on and asks if I can go with her to county jail to find out. In the next week, Maniac texts that he is going out of town. I get him on his cell phone and he is brief. “I need a change of scenery for a while, Jorja. I’ll call you when I’m back.”
Kevin Williams still has no job, but he and Elena have welcomed a baby daughter, Susana, into the world. Hector Verdugo, who has completed graduate-level leadership training at UCLA, has been named associate executive director at Homeboy and is focused on ensuring its financial security. “We can never lay off our staff again. Ever,” he insists. Bullet continues to struggle with his meth addiction, while Joanna and her four children have moved to Arizona, where she works as a domestic-violence counselor. Agustin Lizama has bought his first home, while Louis and Judy Perez have had thei
r first baby, a son. Carlos Sanchez, Joanna’s cousin, was arrested once again, convicted of assault, and is now serving time in state prison. Milagro Diaz completed drug rehab, was clean for eleven months, then relapsed again. Mike Cummings continues to work in Jordan Downs and together we co-lead the Project Fatherhood men’s group every Wednesday night. Kenny Green serves as the lead organizer for the annual violence-prevention conference of the California Wellness Foundation and a supervising gang interventionist. Felipe Mendez continues to work in East Los Angeles as a gang interventionist, recently acting as part of a team that provided community support for the City of Los Angeles Summer Night Lights Program. Carol Biondi has been named president of the board of Homeboy Industries and continues to advocate for youth and carefully monitor the Los Angeles County Department of Probation. Alex Sanchez remains out on bail awaiting trial on RICO charges and working to ensure the stability of Homies Unidos; he and his wife are expecting a baby son. Mark helps Greg whenever a homie is locked up, running interference at the LAPD. My cousin Nick is using again and has dropped out of sight. And Shannon is in her first semester at Pitzer College.
At Homeboy Industries, a forty-nine-year-old lifetime gangbanger whose skin and tattoos have begun to sag walks into Greg’s office and announces, “I don’t have an identity, I don’t even have an ID card. I need help.” He is followed by a sixteen-year-old member of Tortilla Flats—David Escobar—who has been in four probation camps since he was eleven years old.
“Can you hang here, son?” Greg Boyle asks.
“Everyone in Compton is my enemy,” David answers.
“Yeah, but here everyone is your friend, no one is your enemy, and that includes people from all the neighborhoods in Compton.”
“You mean—I would work here with enemies?”
“No hanging, no banging, no slanging. And you get a job here and services—you get a life. Can you hang here, son?”