Once Upon A Time in Compton

by Brennan, Tim; Ladd, Robert; Files, Lolita

  I’d never seen anything like what was happening at this moment. This kind of warm regard and respect between a former gang member and the men who’d chased and arrested him was something I didn’t hear about, in real life or in the media. I’d seen it in cartoons with Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner as they amiably clocked in and out for the day after another round of chase-vs-outwit, but never imagined it could exist in real life. If I hadn’t experienced it and someone told me about it, I probably would have called that person a liar. At the very least, I’d say hyperbolic.

  ***

  After that Saturday afternoon, I went on to learn of several others in Compton and beyond - citizens, prosecutors, judges, former higher-ups and co-workers - all with the same high regard for Tim and Bobby.

  Per K.D.[2], a native of the city who was once affiliated with the Bounty Hunter Bloods and, at one time, worked for the Compton Police Department: “What I loved about Blondie and Ladd is they weren’t scared of nothing. They were always polite and mannerable [sic], but they weren’t scared to roll up anywhere, no matter where it was.”

  Statements like that were what closed me. I was already highly interested in their story, but the universal respect others had for them turned my interest from high to unavoidable. There was no way I could walk away from this project.

  Their approach to policing and dealing with gangs - one based on actually “serving and protecting” the people of the community and seeing the humanity in others first and foremost - could and should be models for law enforcement agencies across the country.

  Mixed in, was what initially attracted me to this project: their having been involved in some of the most important events in American pop culture and hip-hop history.

  I got a glimpse of what a true rapport between citizens and cops looked like and also discovered two incredible human beings.

  - Lolita Files

  INTRODUCTION

  It was almost befitting, like in a Greek tragedy, that Tim Brennan and Robert Ladd would be the first to arrive on the scene as Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson lay dying, gasping his last breaths on May 29, 1998. Their lives had been intertwined for years by this point - as though fate had fashioned things that way - from the start of Baby Lane’s “career” as a member of the South Side Compton Crips (SSCC) - sometimes just referred to as the South Side Crips through his alleged involvement as the key player in one of the most iconic moments in hip-hop history.

  It was common knowledge, both on the street and through Tim and Bob’s extensive investigations, that Baby Lane was the man who’d murdered legendary hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur. And there he was now, dying at their feet, one of three men who would die that afternoon in a triple murder. Baby Lane’s best friend, Michael Dorrough, also wounded during the shootout, would later be charged, convicted, and imprisoned for all three deaths.

  This was just one of many violent incidents the two men would either be a part of or bear witness to during their time serving on the Compton police force, both as officers on the beat and as homicide detectives running the gang unit. This book is their story as partners for fifteen years working what many considered, in its heyday, some of the meanest streets in the country. They knew the players. The players knew them. They watched those players grow up, join gangs, and saw the impact those gangs had on an otherwise lawful community of good people who were simply trying to make their way toward what they believed to be the American Dream.

  Neither Tim nor Bob were Compton natives, but as a result of their time there, they ended up being experts in dealing with gangs and subsequently traveling around the country to train other law enforcement agencies. Their fight has always been for the community and the people who live in it, who want and deserve what should be basic human rights: peace of mind and the ability to walk out of their doors without the threat of bullets flying and drugs flooding the streets.

  From 1982 to 2000, they knew the world of Compton. They watched the rise of gangsta rap and knew its architects: Eazy-E and the members of N.W.A, Suge Knight, DJ Quik, MC Eiht, and others. They also knew east coast hip-hop artists Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G., aka Biggie Smalls, because both rappers frequented Compton. When Tupac and Biggie were murdered, Tim and Bob were heavily involved in both criminal investigations and wrote search warrants, as well as arrested suspects. They have clear-cut beliefs about who killed both, based on extensive evidence and their own research. The murderers in both cases have seemed clear-cut to them, despite the fact that they’ve been presented as “unsolved” for nearly two decades.

  Tim and Bob witnessed the inner workings of Death Row Records and the actions of its CEO, Suge Knight, along with the behind-the-scenes murders and shootings that were a part of that world. They watched the rise of the Bloods and the Crips, the culture wars, the drug wars, and the staggering negative effects all of it had on the city of Compton.

  Despite their best efforts to fight against what was happening in the streets, they found themselves fighting against an even larger machine -- apathy outside of Compton and corruption within the city which ultimately led to the demise of the Compton Police Department. Compton’s police force had been in existence since 1888, but it was dismantled by corrupt politicians in September 2000 as investigations by the police union began to strike too close to home. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (L.A.S.D.) assumed law enforcement for the city. Compton’s corrupt politicians ultimately went to prison (although, in 2012, former mayor Omar Bradley’s conviction was overturned), but sixteen years later, the city still doesn’t have a police department of its own.

  This is the story of Tim and Bob’s time in Compton, not of the city as it exists now. Today’s Compton seems to be on a promising climb with strong mayoral leadership, the support of hip-hop artists such as Kendrick Lamar shining a renewed light on the city, and generous efforts such as music mogul Dr. Dre donating all the royalties from his 2015 Compton album to build a performing arts and entertainment facility for kids.[3]

  The era spoken of in these pages was a different time altogether, one closer in spirit to Sergio Leone’s epic saga, Once Upon A Time In America, which depicted the rise and fall of gangs in the twenties and thirties. In the eighties and nineties, there was a similar rise and fall, as blood, bullets, violence, and death played out before the world, with the driving soundtrack of gangsta rap and hip-hop chronicling it all.

  Tim and Bob with a cache of weapons seized from the streets.

  This was Tim and Bob’s Compton, and would always be the Compton of their hearts. It was a community of people they knew, respected, and did their best to serve. It was a war zone then, actual warfare happening in the streets, every day and every night. That warfare gradually stretched across the country as gang activity proliferated from city to city, town to town, the tentacles of the Bloods and Crips extending further and further.

  That era would never be forgotten, especially by those who lived it. Good, bad, and bloody - this was a time whose impact was so far-reaching, it didn’t just shape Tim and Bob’s lives and those around them. It arguably touched the entire world.

  PART I:

  THE 80’S

  “STRAIGHT INTO COMPTON”

  1

  THE CPT

  By the early eighties, when Tim and Bob joined the police force, the city of Compton was mostly Black and Latino. Located in South Central Los Angeles on the southern border of Watts, it hadn’t always been that way.

  Prior to the forties and fifties, Compton had been predominantly white, having been settled in 1867 by a group of thirty families from Northern California, headed by a man named Griffith Dickenson Compton. The area in which they chose to set down roots was known as Rancho San Pedro, a land grant of some seventy-five thousand acres that had been deeded to former Spanish soldier Juan Jose Dominguez by the king of Spain.[4] The land Compton and his group purchased was first named Gibsonville, then Comptonville, then finally Compton. It was a harsh, stark, cold, and rainy place for th
e settlers. Not long after, they faced a flood that almost wiped them out. More than a few of the settlers found these conditions overwhelming and wanted to leave for someplace better, but they stayed and found a way to make it their home.[5] Compton was officially incorporated in 1888.

  It was called the “Hub City” because it was smack in the middle of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which made it the geographical center of Los Angeles County. By the eighties, it was also referred to, both on the streets and in the music, as “The CPT.”

  The police department was formed the same year the city was incorporated. For nearly the first half of the twentieth century, Compton remained a white, suburban middle-class community.[6]

  Blacks and Latinos gradually began arriving near mid-century, but whites were still the dominant demographic. During World War II, an influx of Blacks arrived in Los Angeles for employment opportunities that weren’t available in the Jim Crow South. The booming war industry meant jobs. Blacks found work making weapons in aerospace factories, and at shipyards, and had the chance to forge a better way for their families.

  Finding good housing, however, proved to be a challenge. Many white communities in the Los Angeles area balked at the idea of Blacks living among them. Some enacted covenants and restrictions designed to keep them out. In addition to having a racially-restrictive covenant regarding the sale of property to Blacks, the city of Compton took things further by revoking the real estate licenses of those who sold to Blacks.[7]

  Compton was also a “sundown town,” an all-white community where Blacks had to be out by sunset or find themselves subject to the possibility of violence.[8]

  A notorious white gang called the Spook Hunters - “spook” being a pejorative for Blacks - formed with the express purpose of keeping Blacks from coming into white areas. Blacks were routinely attacked and beaten in an attempt to deter any desire to be in a white-dominated community. Some of the earliest Black and Latino gangs in the forties formed to protect themselves and their neighborhoods from the Spook Hunters.

  Per historian Josh Sides in a 2011 piece by KCET on the once fiercely-defended whiteness of Compton in the late forties and early fifties:

  “There were very few neighborhoods in Los Angeles or Southern California generally in which there was not a restrictive web of covenants established. So in that regard Compton is unexceptional, but the virulence and the violence in which the Comptonites protected the whiteness of their neighborhood was much more acute than you would have found in the city of Los Angeles for example.”[9]

  That violence played out in ways that courted being deadly. When some Blacks were still able to move into homes in Compton in the fifties, angry white residents didn’t hold back. One white man was badly beaten because he sold to Blacks. Several Black-owned homes were bombed.[10] At one point, when it seemed the influx of Blacks would keep rising and they would start applying for jobs in law enforcement, Compton’s city council considered dismantling the police department and having the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (L.A.S.D.) assume policing for the city.[11] (This consideration, ironically, would eventually be realized nearly fifty years later by Black city officials for reasons entirely different than the motivations of the white city officials in the fifties.)

  Compton wouldn’t have its first Black police officer until 1958, when Arthur Taylor joined the force.

  Racially restrictive covenants were eventually struck down by the courts. Blacks, Latinos, and others were able to move into Compton and, while the city was still mostly white, for a time in the fifties and sixties there appeared to be a comfortable coexistence among the residents.

  Then the Watts Riots happened in August of 1965. Six days of chaos. Fires, protests, bloodshed, mass arrests. Property damage in the tens of millions. The National Guard was called in. Thirty-four people lost their lives.

  White residents lived mostly east of Alameda. Blacks lived mostly to the west. During the riots, white residents took to Alameda with rifles to defend their homes.

  Segregated communities, economic frustration, and racial injustice were deemed underlying causes of what exploded on the streets those six violent days. It was a watershed moment, one that set off several domino effects in its wake. One of those effects was that a gradual, then radical, shift in several primarily white communities began to occur like a changing of the guard. An influx of Blacks and Latinos looking for suburban life as an escape for what was happening in the inner city coincided with an exodus of white families who didn’t want to live alongside, and have their children go to school with, people they viewed as volatile and dangerous. People whose presence would have a negative effect on property values.

  Those fleeing whites struck out for what they considered “safer” suburbs: El Segundo, Torrance, Carson, Gardena, and other cities in Los Angeles’ South Bay, located in the southwest part of the county. Some headed for the San Fernando Valley. Others resettled in Orange County and as far away as the Inland Empire, in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

  In the fifties, Latino gangs in Compton had already begun to claim turf on the west side of town. That activity increased in the sixties as more Latino families moved in.

  When the sixties came to a close, the Black Panthers began to dominate the streets with a message of Black pride that was a strong furtherance of what was happening in the Civil Rights Movement. They wore black leather jackets, gloves, hats - an image that emphasized a sense of structure, uniformity, and strength in numbers and culture. By the early seventies, they had been all but decimated by the F.B.I. and law enforcement.

  A new generation of neighborhood gangs emerged trying to fill the void left by the Black Panthers, carrying over some of their principles including developing a strong political voice. They wanted a show of strength against police brutality. With many, that show of strength would evolve into a show of force and intimidation stacked on the back of the desire to make money.

  Crip with a bandana on his face and cane.

  Enter The Crips.

  In what many oft-quoted accounts say was the year 1969 (although one of the two founders himself stated it as being 1971[12]), two Black teens from different groups in South Central - one on the east side, one on the west - decided to join forces to create a more powerful group; one that was a series of connected “sets” (smaller neighborhood-based groups) that could fight off gangs bordering their areas and provide a form of protection from the violence in the streets. That group, “The Crips” - formed by Raymond Washington and Stanley “Tookie" Williams III - would eventually come to be one of the largest, most notorious gangs in the country, despite Tookie Williams’ original stance when forming the group of being very anti-gang.[13] Members wore the color blue, carried blue handkerchiefs they called “Crip rags,” and referred to each other as “Cuz” (sometimes written as “Cuzz”).

  There were several stories of how the name “Crip” came about. Some OG[14] Crips Tim and Bob interacted with believed it was in reference to the way some members who had been shot would walk with a limp like a cripple - a “crip,” for short. CRIP was, in fact, an acronym for “Community Resource for Independent People.”[15] The organization was modeled after the tenets of the Black Panthers, but eventually abandoned them for a different kind of unity in the streets.

  Many of the early Crips Tim and Bob dealt with carried a cane with a Crip rag tied to it just for show. The gang’s name and reputation grew through claiming territories they mapped out by tagging walls and property with graffiti.

  Members had nicknames often based on family nicknames or inspired by their physical appearance. “Rock,” “Dog,” and “Killer” were not uncommon. The best nicknames were those that made a member sound tough, dangerous. No one wanted someone named “Killer” to roll up on him.

  The Crips sold narcotics. Marijuana, heroin, cocaine, PCP, and a rock version of cocaine that emerged in popularity in the eighties called “crack.” They engaged in robberies, burglaries, auto thefts, assaults, and mu
rder to further their empire. Crip sets established rivalries with neighborhoods populated by other gangs, battling it out for control of their turf and money-making enterprises (e.g., narcotics sales).

  The Crips branched out to other areas where they easily recruited disenfranchised youth with the idea that belonging to a gang could provide protection, respect in the streets, and easy money, stacks of it, from drug sales and other crimes. To many kids from low-income homes, unstable families, and for those awkward outsiders who often found themselves victims of beatdowns by bullies, the allure of gang life proved irresistible. The more malleable and disenfranchised the kid, the better.

  South Side Crip gang list.

  Young people who felt alienated, put-upon, and misunderstood were easily shaped. Those who’d never had any money could, after just a short time, buy fresh gear, nice kicks, video games, new bikes, even cars, expensive ones, and houses of their own, depending on how high they rose up the criminal food chain. They could impress and get certain girls, something that proved, for many, an even stronger draw to the game. Gangs provided a sense of belonging, a brotherhood. Members had each others’ backs. They were the epitome of “ride or die,” literally, long before the phrase became popular as a synonym for the utmost type of relationship loyalty.

  The Crips established themselves on the southwest side of Compton around the Grandee Apartments on Grandee Avenue, referring to themselves as Westside Crips or Grandee Crips. Area gang members would later be called the Neighborhood Blocc Crips, and later, based on their reputation, the Nutty Blocc Crips.

  By the early seventies, several Crip sets had begun claiming neighborhoods in Compton. In 1972, Sylvester “Puddin’” Scott, Vincent Owens, and several other teens from Piru Street formed a gang of their own as protection against the Crips. Originally called “The Piru Street Boys,” their group was the start of what would become the Bloods.