Where Hollywood romanticized gang culture with films like Grease and West Side Story, the realities of gangland were vicious, and usually ended in bloodshed. Forty or so gang sets had split up nearly every inch of Compton’s ten square miles. In the war zone that was mid-1980s South Central, casualties were plentiful, as gang membership between various Crip and Blood sets across the city soared to an estimated fifteen thousand before the decade was over. By 1984 there were about two hundred gangland killings in Los Angeles County—a number that climbed to five hundred by 1988.
Bloody rivalries between gang members didn’t go unnoticed. However, in the eyes of the law, the media, and those who lived in Los Angeles, the gang wars were a crisis relegated to lower-class, primarily black and brown communities—that is, until the slaying of Karen Toshima. The night of January 30, 1988, was one of celebration for Toshima. The twenty-seven-year-old graphic artist from Long Beach nabbed a massive promotion at her Studio City ad agency and planned to have a quiet dinner with a friend to toast the accomplishment. The pair dined in Westwood Village, a handsome, palm tree–lined cavalcade of movie theaters, chic restaurants, and hip boutique shops adjoining the UCLA campus on the affluent Westside of Los Angeles. After dinner Toshima and her companion were walking amid the throngs of Saturday-night strollers when gunfire erupted among rival South LA gang members who’d traveled to the area. A bullet pierced her temple, and she collapsed on the sidewalk near a popular eatery. She died in the hospital the following morning.
The murder of an innocent bystander caught in the crosshairs of gang fire wasn’t an anomaly. Drive-by shootings were typical where Bloods and Crips operated. In some neighborhoods, a Cadillac creeping down the block brought fear to its residents, though not as terrifying as the sight of the barrel of a .30-caliber semiautomatic rifle poking through a passenger-side window and spraying a stream of hot bullets that may or may not have intended targets. “What’s up, cuz?!” or “What hood you from, cuz?!” were questions one hoped never to be asked. Weapons—rifles, tire irons, knives, small-caliber handguns (or “Saturday night specials”)—were wielded with abandon, turning plenty of innocent black and brown lives in South Central into collateral damage. But the idea of a gang-related killing happening outside of the inner city, let alone an affluent neighborhood such as Westwood, jolted naïve Angelenos, for whom gang violence was only a problem in certain neighborhoods. The media covered the story with fervor. Police patrols were tripled, including a spate of antigang programs by police and prosecutors. Thirty officers were assigned to the investigation of the young woman’s murder, and Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley—who made history as the first African American mayor of a major US city with an overwhelmingly white majority population—along with city council, agreed to spend millions for the extra patrols. But the attention given to the Westwood slaying outraged black and brown communities who felt authorities cared more about the one gang-related murder that happened in a posh neighborhood than they did about the thousands of murders across South and East Los Angeles. The optics certainly proved them right.
As gang crime continued to escalate in South Central, the LAPD was also faced with how to confront the invasion of crack cocaine. Before crack found its popularity, spliffs dipped in liquid PCP, known as Sherm sticks or angel dust, provided cheap highs that were popular on the streets. The discovery of crack cocaine, however, would unleash a crippling drug epidemic unlike anything seen before. Crack is cocaine processed into smokeable slivers or crystals through use of baking soda or ammonia. Smoking crack delivered a high far more intense than that of snorting cocaine—and did so without making the user’s nose bleed. But its addictive nature brought a dark cloud to the streets of South Central. The rise of crack brewing alongside the proliferation of gangs made for a perfect storm.
“It just swept through the neighborhood,” said rapper and actor Ice-T, an early pioneer of West Coast Gangsta rap. “[And] came with a tremendous amount of violence—then LA got really, really dangerous.”
DOPEMAN
Eric may have never gotten into the drug game, or out of it, if it weren’t for Horace Butler. Eric was always a hustler, but he started with petty burglaries—not slingin’ dope. Butler, his first cousin once removed, lived close by and would often have Eric tag along with him. Butler showed Eric the ropes, making his then-teenage cousin a “runner”—the person who delivers the product to customers after drug deals were made. Eric greatly admired his cousin, but Butler would soon be met with the very fate so many in the drug game encountered. Late one night, he was driving his truck in Mid-City headed to the I-10 freeway. Butler and an unknown passenger in the car with him crept to a stop at the light. Before the signal changed, shots rang out.
Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop.
Seven bullets ripped through Butler, courtesy of the car’s passenger, who escaped. The car rolled backward before it crashed. Butler’s slaying rattled Eric to his core. It was a wake-up call, and he started to ask himself if it was all worth it. “I’d probably be dead right along with him,” Eric admitted.
Slinging dope certainly came with its bounty of material riches. It was evident throughout South Central, and Eric was no exception. He had the thick gold chains, custom-made leather coats, and a Suzuki Samurai SUV dipped in red candy paint to show how well he had done. But fast money came with its perils. The battle for territory between gang subsets morphed South Central into an urban war zone. Even if you were lucky enough to evade being smoked by an adversary, you were still at risk of being fast-tracked to prison where all too often the occupants were—and continue to be—disproportionally black and brown. And it was a gamble that intensified with the War on Drugs.
During the 1960s, recreational use of marijuana, cocaine, LSD, and heroin were symbols of rebellion and antiestablishment views that were spreading rapidly in the United States and throughout the Western world. Nothing captured the spirit more than rock music, with musicians glamorizing the recreational drug use they exploited for artistic inspiration. It was a sign of the times, as rock lent a voice to the social upheaval and political dissent that resonated with America’s youth. The rock-and-roll lifestyle grew synonymous with drugs, and its stars were celebrated for hard living and partying. The Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison were just as famous for embracing hard drugs as they were for their music—although Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison would all succumb to drugs at the age of twenty-seven. Even the Beatles, a band marketed as clean-cut and straight-laced, experimented. Bob Dylan is credited with introducing the Fab Four to cannabis during his 1964 tour of England, an experimentation that trickled into their work, making it more mellow and contemplative. The band would prove instrumental in shifting attitudes toward marijuana, since “whatever the Beatles did was acceptable, especially for young people.” The Beatles even experimented with LSD, with Paul McCartney boasting it opened his eyes and made him “a better, more honest, more tolerant member of society.”
Laws against drugs have been in existence in the US since San Francisco’s antiopium law of 1875, with drug prohibition policies continuing in some fashion for the next century. The criminalization of psychoactive substances escalated once President Nixon decided to treat drug use and dependency as a crime issue rather than a heath one. “America’s public enemy number one, in the United States, is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive,” he famously declared in the summer of 1971. And Nixon, the country learned, meant business. The Drug Enforcement Administration was established to replace the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and Nixon doubled down on his efforts to eviscerate drug abuse, which he called one of the most vicious and corrosive forces attacking the foundations of American society, a major cause of crime and “a merciless destroyer” of human lives. Yet Nixon’s aggressive crackdown had more disturbing, ulterior motives: It was a way to target blacks and the antiwar left.
“We kn
ew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” one of Richard Nixon’s top advisers confessed years after Nixon left office. “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Nixon’s War on Drugs ushered in the era of mass incarceration. Before then, the US prison population had largely been flat. In 1970 there were 357,292 inmates in custody, a number that spiked by more than 200,000 people by the close of the decade, as law and order swept the nation in a failed bid to cease drug use or the global drug trade.
When President Reagan entered the White House he turned Nixon’s rhetorical War on Drugs into a literal one in 1982. At the same time, high-grade Columbian cocaine was responsible for making Miami a massive drug capital and was being brought into South Central through a Bay Area drug ring that peddled cocaine to the Crips and Bloods. And it was that pipeline to Columbia’s cartels that afforded gang members in South Central the wherewithal to purchase military-grade automatic weapons.
What dealers in South Central weren’t aware of, however, was how the spread of crack through their sales helped finance a Central American war. “Freeway” Rick Ross would purchase product from Nicaraguan supplier Oscar Danilo Blandón Reyes, who in turn channeled the profits to a guerrilla army named the Fuerza Democrática Nicaragüense (Nicaraguan Democratic Force) or FDN, the largest of several anticommunist groves called the Contras. Blandón received protection from the CIA, as the rebel Contras worked to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government while receiving support from the Reagan administration through secret weapons sales to Iran, in what became known as the Iran-Contra Scandal. Blandón would be arrested, and he worked with the US government, resulting in the prosecution of Ross, who served thirteen years in jail.
The Iran-Contra Scandal has long been viewed as proof that the government was complicit in the crippling crack epidemic that tore through South Central. The government did acknowledge in 1986 that the money helped fund the Contra rebels, but maintained the smuggling of drugs was not authorized by the US government or resistance leaders.
Amid the Iran-Contra Scandal, Reagan passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 through Congress. Reagan’s omnibus drug bill appropriated $1.7 billion to fight the drug crisis, earmarking $97 million to build new prisons and allocating $200 million for drug education and $241 million for treatment. The bill also included strict mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines for drug offenses. Possession of at least one kilogram of heroin or five kilograms of cocaine was now punishable by at least ten years in prison, while selling five grams of crack carried a mandatory five-year prison term. Imposing the same penalties for the possession of an amount of crack cocaine as for one hundred times the same amount of powder cocaine placed a wide disparity between how minorities and whites were punished for the same exact drug. Under Reagan’s war, drug dealers and their clients were villainized. They were viewed as America’s most-wanted criminals, with drugs blamed as the sole reason as to why areas such as South Central were struggling.
For young men like Eric, dealing often felt like the only viable way to make a living in South Central. Risks came with the job, but what were the employment options in the area at that time? He may have stumbled upon dealing by circumstance, but it’s understandable the appeal to someone like Eric. He was a high school dropout that didn’t want to answer to anybody but himself. It made him the perfect street hustler, but Eric was faced with a sobering choice after losing his beloved cousin: How much longer do you spend your days watching your back?
IF IT AIN’T RUFF
The media made sure Americans were tuned into the War on Drugs. Footage of drug raids became increasingly prevalent on the nightly news, and focused almost exclusively on urban streets. In fact, a survey of network news during the first five years of the 1980s showed the number of cocaine-related stories jumped from ten a year to an astounding 140. Research from the University of Michigan discovered that from 1985 onward, the number of whites shown using cocaine dropped by 60 percent—and the number of blacks rose by the same amount. Blacks and Hispanics most certainly didn’t represent the majority of drug users, but cops weren’t breaking down doors in Manhattan or Beverly Hills. The image of guys peddling vials of white crystal to crackheads or tattoo-covered thugs playing dominoes or sipping forties would have played much better to the fear of the drug than a white businessman loosening his tie at the end of a long day in the office and snorting a few lines from inside a luxury condo.
Los Angeles police responded with brute force. LAPD chief Daryl F. Gates, who went as far as condemning drug use as treason and believed even casual drug users ought to be “taken out and shot,” ramped up efforts to rid the streets of drug users and their suppliers. Gates’s sight was focused intently on black neighborhoods in South Central. Stop-and-frisk became routine, especially for young black men who gave the slightest whiff of involvement in gangs. Red or blue attire automatically made you a suspect. Hand signs were monitored, as was the way men stood while they were in public.
The LAPD’s Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (or CRASH) unit began conducting sweeps, which led to thousands of presumed gang members being arrested, mug-shotted, fingerprinted, and held until someone came to bail them out. “We’d take them to jail for anything and everything we can,” one officer said. Most often the men targeted were unaffiliated, and consequently damaged by the reality of a police record. Just being stopped by a cop could make all the difference to one’s livelihood. Members of the task force compiled a “field identification card” on suspected gang members, even when they had no cause to arrest or cite them, and CRASH officers sometimes carried a throwaway gun or drugs to plant on suspects.
Gates’s bid to control “the rotten little cowards” who belonged to gangs and terrorized South Los Angeles with drugs and guns led to nightly sweeps where hundreds of officers would canvas nearly sixty square miles of South Central looking for any- and everyone with gang ties. Gates approved overtime for one thousand officers to descend on neighborhoods as part of this mission. LAPD’s literal war introduced the use of the battering ram, an armored vehicle weighing six tons and equipped with a fourteen-foot steel arm able to pierce through fortified and barred doors of suspected “rock houses” in a matter of seconds. The ram would burst through the door or smash through a window and a charge was thrown to stun those inside, as officers descended on surprised criminals. The battering ram brought a physical representation of the destruction authorities were fighting against. “It had such a psychological impact on all of us. Your house may have not got run over by the battering ram, but you know it’s out there,” Ice Cube said of growing up around the frequent sounds of smashed doors and windows. “That had an effect on everybody. It was like killing a fly with a sledgehammer. It showed how heavy-handed the LAPD were on us.” On more than one occasion, an innocent resident saw their walls crumble. The battering ram added to the resentment against police brewing in black neighborhoods. It was enough to inspire Compton rapper Toddy Tee to record “Batterram,” one of the earlier hit rap songs to come out of the West Coast:
Yeah rockman, you’ll see it soon
And you won’t hear a snatch, you’ll hear a boom
You can’t stop it, baby
The Batterram
The most famous of these so-called “Operation Hammer” stings happened on April 6, 1989, when Gates—at the time eyeing an entry into politics and set on a run for governor—showed former first lady Nancy Reagan how the battering ram worked. Reagan, who famously coined the phrase “Just Say No,” gladly accepted the offer as she was looking for a way to maintain her visibility as an antinarcotics crusader now that she was out of the White House. A nasty heatwave pushed temperatures in South Central
above 100 degrees the day she was set to observe the battering ram in action. As SWAT officers stormed a suspected “rock house” at Fifty-First Street and Main Street, Reagan and Gates sat in an air-conditioned luxury motor home with “The Establishment” emblazoned on the front, snacking on fruit salad. Reagan wore a blue LAPD windbreaker with “Police” lettered on the back and “Nancy” across the front. A throng of reporters and photographers, all tipped off hours in advance, had assembled. According to the Los Angeles Times, while SWAT officers roughly frisked and cuffed the fourteen men and women captured inside the small, heavily fortified stucco bungalow, Reagan was seen freshening her makeup for the waiting cameras. “These people in here are beyond the point of teaching and rehabilitating,” Reagan sighed heavily while detailing the “very depressing” house she had walked through. In all, about a gram of crack was retrieved.
Years before the former first lady’s overhyped media stunt, her husband’s aggressive War on Drugs might have discouraged Eric from continuing to deal. Jail or getting shot and killed were all-but-guaranteed outcomes of dealing, and so he began to question whether or not it was the life for him. Eric also had kids to think about. A ladies’ man, he already had a handful of children with just as many women by the time he was twenty-two. “He was family oriented, always been,” his daughter Erica Wright recalled. “Always had time for us, period.” Eric knew the drug game had its limits. The money was great and lots could be made, as crack addiction pilfered its victims for every nickel and dime they had. Eric had a nice safety net, saving about $250,000 from dealing—and he soon decided he wanted out. “I seen that it wasn’t really worth it, it wasn’t worth my life,” he said. “I figured I could do something right for a change instead of something wrong.”
Parental Discretion Is Advised Page 3