by Jim Miller
The thought of having been at the same game while Kelly was pregnant with our son did indeed send a chill down our spines, even though we knew that these six thugs were a minute portion of the more than 56,000 people there that day. Truth be told, there has always been a violent subculture at Raiders games, which, as the assault at the Vikings game shows, is not just an “L.A. gang thing” as many like to characterize it. In fact, some of the most notorious incidents at Raiders games spring not from the bowels of the Crips and Bloods but from regular guys who lose it. Shane Geringer, the nineteen-year-old Los Angeles Raiders fan from suburban Agoura who put a Pittsburgh Steelers fan in the hospital and inspired a stern response from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, didn’t hail from a rough ’hood. Both “the Raiders gang,” who held up banks in the San Gabriel Valley and Gardena, and “the Raider Bandit” from Norwalk, who held up Los Angeles and Orange County banks, were given their nicknames by the FBI and police because of their black clothing, aggressive style, and, in the case of the Norwalk bandit, a Raiders hat. None of them, however, were self-proclaimed “fans.”6
The real Raider Bandit, Claude Dawson Jones, was not from Los Angeles at all, but from Sacramento. Clawson, who had once worked for Bank of America, netted $25,253 in twenty-four bank robberies that took him through the tail end of the 1990 Raiders season and into the beginning of the 1991 season before police arrested him in a motel room that he had converted into a shrine to the Silver and Black. “There was Raider paraphernalia all around. It was safe to say he was an avid fan,” said the FBI spokesman. Before he was caught, Jones had used his plunder to buy Raiders tickets, toast them with rounds for the house at local bars, and go on an expensive road trip to Detroit to see the pride-and-poise boys beat the Lions on Monday Night Football. Jones had tickets to the Raiders AFC Championship game as well as airline fare when he was apprehended. Why did he do it? According to Jones, “All that Raidermania hit me. I’ve got to go see the boys play.” And that’s how it started with Jones (who wore a 49ers cap during the heists); he hit his first bank on the way to see the Raiders play Green Bay in Los Angeles because he was out of gas money. After that, he was on a roll. “Sometimes people like the bad guy,” Jones said in true Raiders spirit. “I was brash, cocky. It’s kind of like, as long as you can get away with it, there are no rules.” Behind the bravado, however, Jones was an unhappy man who drank and drugged too much. He hated his job at the bank, which had asked him to take a 25 percent pay cut, and his later job at the Franchise Tax Board. Worst of all, his wife had become a 49ers fan. So, too, were the majority of the prison guards, who refused to give Jones updates as his beloved Raiders were roundly pummeled by the Bills in the AFC Championship game for which Jones had sacrificed ten years of freedom, as well as his marriage and contact with his two young daughters. The former high school football star and air force veteran wrote Al Davis a letter of apology, but had the consolation of knowing that, as he told reporters, “There are a lot of Raiders fans in jail.”7
Next to the Raiders Bandits, perhaps the most notorious figure in the Raiders hall of shame is Luis Fernando Uribe from Norwalk, who got five years in jail for stabbing a Chargers fan with a pocketknife in 2000. Uribe has been universally held up as the poster boy for Raiders fan thugdom, and his assault on Daniel Napier is usually presented in lurid terms—for example, in this 2003 Seattle Times article:He turned his back, so he never saw it coming. By then, Daniel Napier was lying on the concrete aisle, two Raiders fans pinning him to the ground. One pounding away with his fist, cracking the bones above Napier’s eye. The other pulled out a knife, sliding the blade deep into Napier’s side until a crimson pool formed on the concrete steps at Qualcomm Stadium. As the ambulance sped away, whisking him past the parking lot tailgates and out onto the highway, Napier watched the medics scramble around him and wondered if he was about to die.
The article goes on to detail how Uribe and his accomplice Dan Garcia called Napier “fat” and “began to curse him” and make “obscene gestures.” For his part, Napier “shouted back,” the article says, and his girlfriend and another woman “blew a kiss at the men.” Since the stabbing, we are told, Napier has suffered from “a scar far deeper than the one above his abdomen” and has undergone extensive counseling and left his La Mesa home. The article then goes on to claim that “the Raiders were the team of L.A.’s gangs,” whose fans are a “lawless,” classless bunch who are “the poster children for thuggery.”8
Many Raiders fans we have spoken with agree with this assessment of the “L.A. gang” influence on the team’s fan base. Chris Eaton, president of the Imperial Valley Raiders Booster Club and a cop himself, told us, “With the tough, aggressive mindset that most L.A. residents have and probably need to exist in that cesspool, Raider fans became angry and lost sight of what they really were. Instead of Raiders fans joining gangs, gangs joined Raiders fans.” Eaton went to cite several examples of “Silver and Black thugs” harassing families and “a hard-core gang member with his teardrop eye tattoo threatening to ‘fuck up’ a thirty-something-year-old housewife who was cheering on the Cardinals” at a game in Phoenix. His theory was that it is “primarily the L.A. or Southern California Raiders fan” that is “giving the Raiders a black eye (no pun intended).” Indeed some of our own Raiders fan friends have the same theory; but is it true?
In the case of Luis Fernando Uribe, I had a chance to investigate the question. Lizet Gonzales, a social worker from Norwalk, grew up down the street from the Uribes and knew Luis well. Would she describe a brutal thug who terrorized the neighborhood and had murder in his heart, as most reports have indicated, or is there more to the story? One evening Lizet, her cousin Hector Martinez, and I sat down at a café in Whittier to talk about Luis. Lizet, a pretty, articulate woman in her mid-twenties, told us about her experience with the Uribes:
I grew up with [the Uribe family]. [Their kids and I] were all in the same class together. Luis joined the army and fought in Vietnam, and was a good husband, too. And he worked at Northrop, so he was a mechanic. He was middle class, you know, a hardworking Hispanic. He was seriously Mexican, not like all the other Hispanics living on the street. So he was born in Mexico and immigrated here when he was young. I called him Dad. He was a very loving guy. He loved his kids. And he loved to party. There was a party at their house every weekend, and during the Raiders season, there would be a Raiders party at their house every single game. There were people over barbequing, the usual. I have a lot of Anglo friends, and it is strange to hear for people who aren’t familiar with the culture that you just get together every weekend and barbeque and party. That was the house. It was never out of control. The police never had to come to any of these parties. There were never any fights. It was totally family. It was totally quiet. It was Raider Nation all the time.
I couldn’t really tell you what the Raiders meant to [Luis]. I think he was just a fan. It is cultural. If you are Hispanic, you’re a Raiders fan, and if you’re not, it’s kind of weird. It’s like you think you’re better than the others. But I am not a Raiders fan. A lot of people say [being a fan] has to do with Commitment to Excellence. It is wanting to be better and, you know, being an immigrant and working hard and working for your family and working to get your family better than you were. All of the Raiders fans that I know are Hispanics. I think a lot of Hispanics, a lot of Latinos are Raiders fans, but a lot of Latinos are hardworking immigrants, and when they really want to identify with the culture, they want to be a Raiders fan so they belong. It’s to be something. You know, what are gangs about? [When you are a Raiders fan] you aren’t doing anything illegal. They just need to belong. It is something to belong to. And when you do identify with the Raiders, people like to party. You become a Raiders fan if you want to party a lot. If Los Angeles had a football team would Raiders fans be for that team? I really don’t think so and I don’t understand why.
Luis was always outside on the block. He looked after the kids. He looked after us. I g
uess I always saw him as a father figure. He united people, introduced people. People would talk to him on the street. When people moved in, he would introduce them to the neighborhood. He was kind of like the Dad that I never had. He was not violent. I never knew him to be violent. I’ve heard the story about what happened at the game. I’m sure there was drinking involved. Well, of course, we didn’t hear his side of the story, but my friend was there. That guy he stabbed was egging him on. He gave them dirty looks and said things. Not about the Raiders, but specifically to him, actually. So he finally got fed up and went up to him. The guy started the fight, and he was really big, and I don’t think that anybody ever mentioned that. If you’ve seen the video, he was a lot bigger than Luis. So he took the knife out of his pocket and stabbed him. That’s what I heard. There was racial stuff being said. And Raiders stuff, but mostly racial stuff. Yeah like, “wetback Raiders,” and stuff like that. People thought they were gangsters, and they weren’t. I guess they appeared to be because they were wearing Raiders clothes. And I guess if you’re wearing Raiders clothes, then you’re associated with being a gangster and that’s accepted. Schools don’t allow Raiders gear. Luis was just a hardworking guy. He didn’t look like a gangster. He looked like a regular guy.
[Luis’s family] feels they used him as an example. They’re not angry about it because they know that what he did was wrong, which is a surprise to me, but they are really good about it. They’re not at all resentful for the fact that he’s [in jail] because they feel he did something wrong, but they are resentful of the way he got treated. He had no hope. He never had a chance of being put on probation. I would not make excuses for them, either, because I don’t think it’s right that they went down [to San Diego] in the first place. They know how they are and they continue to do it. That’s your hard-core Raiders fans, but it’s not right. They are going down there to get trouble, but they keep going. I’m not saying that it’s right for the San Diego fans to overreact, but it’s not right for them to go down looking for trouble, either. They love to go. My friends still go to the San Diego game.
Luis has three sons, two daughters, and a wife that he totally left behind. He was the breadwinner and they were living comfortably. I’m not saying that they were well off at all, but now they are seriously struggling, and [his wife] is trying to keep her head up with all her kids. My friend Anthony (he’s the oldest) finds himself being the man of the house. Now he is finding himself having to work to help his mom. He’s very responsible now. (He’s still a Raiders fan.) I guess, in a sense, this has been a good experience for him, but I’m sure he’s having a really hard time. The little girl, Luis’s daughter, she’s the youngest one, and she really misses her dad. She’s very bright, but she goes to see him and says, “Yes, my daddy’s at work and I want to see him.” And I find a little bit of the Raiders in her. She’s nine now, and she does have a little resentment of the Raiders because she misses her dad. They all miss their dad.
So if Luis was not a hard-core gang member, but rather a mechanic, and if the Raiders Bandit and the thugs who assaulted the couple after the Vikings game were neither gang members nor dreaded Los Angeles fans, what gives? While it is clear that gang members may have attended Raiders games, their numbers would not be large enough to create the mythic portrait of the Raiders fan/thug. In fact, as we have already noted, other sports fans, like those in Philadelphia, Detroit, New York, New England, and even some small college towns, have filled jails in the bowels of stadiums, brawled, fought police, stolen other fans’ wheelchairs, thrown bottles and chunks of ice at coaches, referees, and each other, and prompted the fear of opposing fans. Still, without denying some of the grim realities behind the negative image of Raiders fans, they inspire a particular dread that frequently verges on hysteria. The Los Angeles gangster myth is central here because the Raiders fans gained this reputation at the peak of the gang hysteria of the late eighties and early nineties, years when inner-city Los Angeles came to represent all that troubled the suburban mind and inflamed the media’s imagination. As Mike Davis has noted in his seminal book on Los Angeles, City of Quartz:Like the Tramp scares in the nineteenth century, or the Red scares in the twentieth, the contemporary Gang scare has become an imaginary class relationship, a terrain of pseudo-knowledge and fantasy projection. But as long as the actual violence was more or less contained to the ghetto, the gang wars were voyeuristic titillation to white suburbanites devouring lurid imagery in their newspapers or on television.9
What happened in the case of Raiders fans is that the presence of a small number of gang members at games has inflamed this fantasy and every incidence of violence is held up as evidence of the accuracy of the “pseudo-knowledge” that sees a gang member behind every Raiders jersey, when, in fact, it may actually be “regular guys” crossing the line rather than the dreaded criminals from South Central Los Angeles. The fact that “normal” folks might lose it and commit violent acts just does not fit into the dominant narrative about American society. Our experience at more than a decade of Raiders games in San Diego is that the gang fantasy is based on the presence of a tiny group of fans who are then overdetermined to represent half the stadium. This exaggerated fear, in turn, becomes a source of conflict as suburban San Diegans see “inner-city” hooligans everywhere, and the average Raiders fan is made to feel like one of America’s Most Wanted.
What is also frequently at play in the stands in San Diego is the crossing of borders of class and race. Because the Raiders still have a far more urban, blue-collar, and multi-ethnic fan base than most other teams, the annual Raiders invasion of San Diego seems like a black and brown invasion to many Anglo fans, or an unwelcome infusion of “street” for mild-mannered suburban Chargers fans of all races. The result is an annual festival of hysteria and ugliness that is far less one-sided than the media portrays. Like the gang panic, the Raiders fan panic is a yearly display of largely white suburban anxiety writ large. The annual Raiders–Chargers game is then both a literal and symbolic battle between the imagined communities of America’s Finest City (San Diego with its bland suburban hegemony) and Raider Nation (Oakland and L.A. with all their rough urban flair). In the national imagination, Raider Nation is the loathed “other,” the “bad side of town,” and it just doesn’t matter if reality is a bit more complex.
Even the Raiders themselves have gotten into the “blame Los Angeles” game, with Al Davis saying after the team moved back to Oakland, “One of the [other team] owners said to me, ‘I’m scared to get off the bus.’ Howie [Long, a Raiders star] would always make a big issue out of it, how he wouldn’t bring his wife and kids to the game. And other guys would say, ‘I’m not bringing my wife.’” Raiders star Tim Brown also pointed to Los Angeles as the source of all the trouble at Raiders games as he commented on the controversy of the Raiders’ yearly visit to San Diego: “I tell people—especially the guys who weren’t in L.A.—when we go to San Diego, this is basically how the fans were in L.A., all the fights and all the turmoil that’s up in the stands. That’s basically how it was in every L.A. game we had.”
Interestingly, however, a 1993 study showed that there were fewer crimes around the Los Angeles Coliseum during Raiders games than there were at Lakers or Kings games and the crimes that did occur there were largely nonviolent crimes. The point here is not to deny that there were and are a good number of fights at games or to excuse the violence, but to point out that something about Raiders fan violence captures the imagination more than other fan violence, and that Los Angeles Raiders fans, even more than Oakland fans, are the favorite boogiemen.10
I explored this topic with Mychal Odom, an African American graduate student at the University of San Diego who is completing a master’s thesis on urban history, and who is also a former college player and a huge Raiders fan from L.A. He argued that this image has to do with the way people have come to see the urban working class:The people in the eighties that are Raiders fans are the children of working-class people, but there
are no more jobs and gangs have come in and crack cocaine, and all this stuff that essentially changes the community, which essentially changed the image of Raiders fans. The image of a hard worker is a lot different than the image of an unemployed person, an unemployed criminal. Where I’m from in Long Beach we had shipyards. The shipyards finally left in the mid nineties, but they had been sliding for quite some time and so had the aerospace industry. At the same time aerospace is losing jobs and factories are closing. Gangs are on the rise. And NWA [the rap group Niggers With Attitude] comes out and popularizes this picture of street gangs who were wearing Raiders clothes. I think that’s when the two images [Raiders fan and gang member] collided. So what people are really talking about when they talk about Raiders fans is a change in urban America.
Mike Davis supports Mychal’s observation by noting that, during the eighties, “Most tragically the unionized branch-plant economy toward which working-class blacks (and Chicanos) had looked for decent jobs collapsed.” Thus, the Coliseum neighborhood and other troubled parts of urban Los Angeles in the heart of the media capital of America became a nationally broadcast ad for urban blight in movies and the media at large. The contrast between Oakland and Los Angeles, then, is not a contrast between cities (Oakland’s flatlands suffered problems similar to those of inner-city L.A. during the period that the Raiders were in Southern California) but a contrast between an idealized memory of a noble, hardworking (and whiter) working class in 1970s and before and the criminalized and demonized blacker and browner working class of Los Angeles in the eighties and nineties. Thus observers can nostalgically valorize the mythic Raiders fans of old while heaping scorn on the debased lumpenproletarians who have tainted the image of the lovable rebels of the golden era.11