by Ross Kemp
But St Louis is fighting back. Where there are large empty homes for sale at knock-down prices, there will be people anxious to buy them. And not everyone is inclined to join a gang. Over the past decade or so a whole new wave of immigrants has started to repopulate some of the run-down districts that have fuelled gang culture. Including hundreds of Bosnian and Serb refugees from the civil war in former Yugoslavia, the vast majority are hard-working entrepreneurs. There are signs the incomers are starting to turn things around – opening shops and small businesses, populating the schools with new blood, paying their taxes and obeying the law. New corporations are arriving to replace the old, especially in the health and pharmaceutical sectors. Is it time to get out the bunting and celebrate? Not going by the most recent levels of recorded crime. But there is hope that some real change for the better is taking root.
Driving around the worst of the city’s districts, at first glance you think the big, imposing red-brick Addams Family-style houses with their turrets, finials and generous back gardens still play home to 1950s happy families, where Dad goes off to work, Mom does the home baking and the kids do their homework. But get up close and you see that ceilings have fallen in, windows are broken and gardens are a mass of waist-high weeds. Quite often, large trees are growing up through the roofs. They look as if they have been hit by one of the JDAM bombs Boeing manufactures in the city. The crumbling brick shells make it feel as if whole swathes of the city are dying. They are, and the young gang members who haunt them and use them to hide guns and drugs in are dying too.
The particular death we focused on for the programme was the murder of Robert Lee Walker. A good-looking, easy-going seventeen-year-old with striking eyes and a three-month-old son named Elijah by his girlfriend Courtney, Walker was close to graduating from St Louis Learning Center South High School. He wanted to be an architect. On his way home on the bus from school on the afternoon of Friday 5 May 2006 Walker signalled the driver to stop at the corner of Lillian and Emerson, near his home in Walnut Park in the extreme north-west of the city. A friend and his cousin got off the bus with him.
A gang of armed teenagers waited in ambush. Guns blazing, they rushed Walker and his two friends. Trapped against the side of the bus, Walker went down in a hail of bullets. Shot through the body, shoulders and arms, he was probably bleeding to death when a bullet went in through the back of his head and exited between his eyes. Whether or not it was a deliberate execution shot, it guaranteed his death. Walker’s friend and his cousin survived with minor injuries. The driver, who had superficial lacerations from flying glass, raced his bullet-ridden bus to the nearest police station. The boy charged with the murder is just fifteen years old.
Killings like this don’t just end a single life; they shatter whole families, undermine communities and drag all of us back down the ladder a step. When we went to visit Robert Walker’s mother, Arthella Spence, who lived in a run-down, timber-framed house close to where the killing took place, she insisted that her son was not and never had been a gang member. But Sergeant Ross of the gang unit told me he suspects there may have been some involvement. Union Boulevard, two blocks west of the bus stop where Walker was murdered, marks the front line between two warring gangs. The 49 Bad Bloods lay claim to the 4,900 city blocks of Beacon, Alcott and Davison Avenues. The Geraldine Street Crips haunt a typically dilapidated neighbourhood on the other side of the Mark Twain Expressway.
Nobody except the gangs themselves understands exactly what they are fighting about from day to day, but feuds are usually over control of the drugs trade. Whatever the reason, the day before Walker’s murder the escalating violence boiled over when a group of 49 Bad Bloods allegedly shot dead a Geraldine Street Crip nicknamed Four-Foot. Whether the Bloods really did kill Four-Foot is irrelevant to Walker’s fate. The Crips believed the 49 Bads had done it, and macho gang pride – known around here by one of the deadliest words in the English language, respect – dictated that a Blood had to pay in the same coin. When the Crips came looking for payback it seems they found Robert Lee Walker. What’s really hard for an outsider like me to understand is that Walker may well have been killed simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Was Robert Walker a Bloods foot soldier, a fighting member who went out armed and took on Crips like Four-Foot? It doesn’t look like it. The day before his murder Robert had mowed the lawns of the Walnut Park Bible Church he attended every Sunday morning with his mother. He also sang in the church choir. But as far as Sergeant Ross is concerned, none of that cuts much ice: Ross says Walker was known to his gang unit as a 49 Bad fellow-traveller. He may not have pulled any triggers and he may have gone to church with his mom, but he probably hung around the ’hood with the wrong sort of brethren, the sort who dress in red, the universal Bloods gang colour.
Sure enough, at Walker’s funeral a few days later many of the more than 300 mourners turned up wearing red. Mostly teenagers, lots of them left Robert farewell notes like ‘4 Eva Missed’. Friends also tied red teddy bears and red balloons to lamp posts, fences and trees, left Walker, or Li’l Robert as they called him, messages inked on red bandannas and spray-painted red graffiti on neighbouring walls. Some of the graffiti promised bloody revenge on the Crips. Messages like ‘Life Blood Gang’ and ‘R.I.P. Homeboy’ suggest that Walker may have been slightly more than a choirboy; ‘homeboy’ is one of the many slang terms for a gangster.
Whatever the truth, a young boy has been brutally murdered and his family left grieving. The family’s only breadwinner, Arthella Spence works in a St Louis retirement home as a care assistant. When I spoke to her there were no men around – Robert had been the only male, and now even he was gone. Devastated by her son’s death, Spence no longer cooks for her remaining family. With tears streaming down her face, tears that moved me almost as much as they did her family, she said, ‘Robert always loved what I cooked for him, always ate all of it down to the last crumb. Now he’s gone, I don’t got the heart to make no more food.’ She told me how she had written a poem about the murder and sent it to a Web-based company purporting to run a poetry competition. The company emailed her back to say that her poem had won a prize, and in return for the sum of twenty dollars they would send her a certificate to prove it. The certificate hung in pride of place on the living-room wall. ‘You see,’ Spence said proudly, ‘I’m a poet.’
Every day, unable to go near the spot where her son was murdered, she makes a long detour that puts two extra miles on her walk to work. Afraid the same fate might befall her remaining children, Arthella has decided to move away from Walnut Park to a house in a less gang-infested district of St Louis owned by her brother. The memories are too bad to live with – but her flight means another empty house will join the rest that are crumbling away. Courtney, Robert’s sixteen-year-old girlfriend, is also quitting the district, determined to make a better, safer life.
Listening to Spence’s story I realized that it is almost impossible for kids like Robert to escape the gangs. Gang culture is like an invisible fog that gets everywhere and affects everything, even down to what you can and can’t wear. It’s like living under an evil spell. Where I grew up, most people supported West Ham. If you happened to support another football team, you didn’t wear its colours except on match day – it just wasn’t worth the aggravation. Common sense, you might say, but even these days on Britain’s streets it’s hard to imagine someone getting shot – murdered – by a Chelsea fan for wearing the Arsenal strip in public. In St Louis, as in south LA, the colour on your back can be a matter of life or death. Most people wear the neighbourhood gang colour just to be on the safe side. The irony is that by doing so, they have, in a sense, given in. They have accepted the gang as a fact of life and are being controlled by its values.
Once I started noticing the colour codes that mark out the city’s ever-shifting gang boundaries, it was hard to stop. The only alternative to wearing the right colour in a gang-dominated area is to wear something neutral like be
ige. Many people don the dinge despite the major loss of fashion points (obviously) and any street cred. Given that some Crips-affiliated gangs sometimes wear blue and white for a bit of sartorial variety, even white is risky. Yellow is out too, as some Crips go for the occasional bit of blue and gold. As usual when I am fronting these programmes I wore my continuity black T-shirts, but as a white man in an almost totally black area I already stuck out like a big sore thumb.
The mayor’s office invited me to go out with the St Louis police’s dedicated gang unit on patrol. They are doing what they can to stop the killing, end the drugs trade and get the gangs off the street, but with mixed success. Persistently high levels of unemployment still afflict the north St Louis population. The explosive mix of joblessness, fear and the need to belong guarantees a steady stream of recruits to the gangs. Often from homes where one parent is on crack and the other has long since disappeared, too many young kids seek the protection they hope they will get from being part of a pack. When your family is hungry or you feel at risk it can be hard not to make the wrong choice.
In the afternoons you hear the intermittent crackle of fireworks as jobless men sit around in their backyards, drinking the locally brewed Budweiser and Michelob beer and throwing firecrackers at the passing traffic – and now I was around, at me. At first I thought they were just being childish but the facts are more sinister. The background din means that when a real shooting takes place, the explosions delay and sometimes confuse the police. Was that gunfire or just a bunch of good old boys having their usual fun?
One of the very few alternatives to the gangs for young men from deprived areas is the military. Aware of the number of young men desperate for work, US Marines in immaculate uniforms stalk the city’s shopping malls, ushering likely candidates into the signing booths. Some of them end up in Iraq. As a result, competing Bloods and Crips gang graffiti is now turning up on the walls of Baghdad and Fallujah.
Before joining the gang unit on patrol on our third day of filming, I had to change from my usual sandals into trainers in case we ended up in a chase. The only trainers I could get hold of at short notice were bright red. My choice of footwear did not go down at all well. The police and the rest of the crew looked at me askance. Bloods feet. I was in breach of the unwritten colour code.
Travelling slowly and softly in two or more ‘low riders’ – large unmarked cars – the St Louis PD gang unit operates a lot like the cavalry scouts in the Western movies I watched as a kid. They go looking for signs – only instead of scouring the country for hoofprints they study the buildings and the lamp posts, reading the totems, the graffiti and the tattooed skin of the gangsters themselves for information. What’s happening in the neighbourhood? What’s the current state of play between the local gangs?
The graffiti the unit showed me looked meaningless at first but a day or two in the expert company of Sergeant Ross and his colleagues taught me how to read it. Every scrawl has its own meaning – a cross through ‘44 Kitchen Crips’, for example, tells you a Bloods sub-gang is having a problem with the 44s. Called ‘X-ing up’ or ‘X-ing out’ the opposition, this kind of tagging means serious trouble. Sometimes an individual opposition gang member is marked with a cross by name. This kind of message boarding gives Ross and the team some idea of where they can next expect trouble and might even mean they get there in time to stop it. Pointing at a new message on a monolithic red-brick wall, Sergeant Ross said, ‘This is like reading a newspaper. When we take a look at this, we know the Kitchen Crips are having a problem with the Bloods.’
‘Some people get confused because they think the Crips are going to get along with the other Crips. That’s not true,’ adds one of Ross’s colleagues. ‘We’re not like Los Angeles or Chicago. We’re different – it’s less neighbourhood here. It’s more cross-street. Whenever you see one little gang, their enemies are always nearby. They get into a problem in school or somewhere else and they bring it home here.’ Some people say the Bloods and the Crips started life in south Los Angeles, moving east to St Louis along the interstates in the mid-1980s when the LAPD’s none-too-gentle crackdown on their activities forced LA gang-bangers to seek their fortunes elsewhere. But whole sectors of Los Angeles are solidly under the influence of either Bloods or the Crips, whereas here in St Louis a lot of sub-gangs will occupy and work a single street.
This aspect of St Louis gang life reminded me strongly of the way the MS13 gang and its lethal rival 18 Street operate in San Salvador. The gangs are often very small: they occupy very small patches of land and live within shouting distance of their enemies. The proximity of the St Louis neighbourhood gangs guarantees constant tension and violence, just as it does in San Salvador. Operating under the umbrella of the wider gang, sub-gangs, or sets as they sometimes call themselves, adopt all manner of weird and wonderful names: 6 Deuce, Gangster Disciples, JVL Bloods, 44 Kitchen Crips (nothing to do with an interest in cooking and everything to do with the intersection of 44 Street and Kitchen), the Rolling 60s and so on.
I suppose there’s always the possibility that, like the tornadoes this city sometimes suffers, the gangs might blow themselves out, but that doesn’t look very likely. Official statistics show that more gang-bangers are killed by their supposed allies than by their enemies. Crips kill Crips and Bloods kill Bloods in numbers even greater than they do one another, reinforcing the cycle of violence.
To say the St Louis gangs are permanently at war with one another isn’t entirely true. The Crips and the Bloods do sometimes declare a truce. That’s when they want to get on with business: drug dealing, burglary, pimping prostitutes, extortion and carjacking.
Since aggressive gang graffiti only serves to ratchet up gang-on-gang violence, when the police have finished deciphering the latest graffiti the authorities send in teams to clean it off. A day or two later the messages promising revenge are usually back. When these threats go up, the gangs mean it: in 2005 the St Louis police recorded eighteen homicides and 280 aggravated assaults in Walnut Park alone, most of them gang-related, making it the city’s most dangerous and violent district. One reason for the violence in Walnut Park, I learned, is the close proximity of Interstate 70, which means that users can drive in, score their drugs and be back on the freeway and gone in what for them is a reassuringly short period of time. The huge amounts of money to be made from drugs fuel the relentless war for control of turf, especially lucrative bits like Walnut Park.
Drugs are everywhere in the gang-infested pockets of St Louis – it’s impossible to miss the signs of dealing in progress as you drive around. Responding to a call from an unmarked gang unit car ahead, we catch up to find Sergeant Ross’s colleagues frisking four black male suspects for drugs and weapons. The baggy blue jeans and white T-shirts say Crips loud and clear. Baseball caps on backwards, the four stand with their hands flat on the boot of their car while the police go through their pockets. Most unit cars carry a laptop in the boot with a wireless connection to police headquarters, meaning officers can take digital photographs of a new suspect and enter these together with names, parents’ names, home and mobile telephone numbers and addresses on the unit’s extensive database. Then they beam the whole lot to HQ for criminal record checks. They also check the kids for gang tattoos and take snaps of these. In the war against the gangs, information is power.
The area is badly deprived, a ghetto of run-down homes protected by makeshift chicken-wire and chain-link fences, a few people hanging out on their porches watching what’s going on. All this name-taking and checking takes a long time. It is a serious annoyance to the kids – not to mention some of the neighbours, who gradually form a small and not very friendly-looking knot across the street. As time goes by and the locals edge closer, I start to feel uncomfortable. Do these kids really deserve all this police attention? They look like the sort of harmless teenagers you might find anywhere. Am I party to the St Louis gang unit flexing its muscles for effect? The suspects certainly seem to think so; it takes all of Ser
geant Ross’s patience to extract basic information from them; at first they won’t even give their names. But just as one suspect is busy protesting there is no arrest warrant out in his name, the routine check comes back: in actual fact two of the four are wanted on outstanding warrants. Ross’s men snap on the handcuffs, put the pair in the back of a prowler and take them into custody. The unit count this as a win, if only in that there are two fewer wanted men out on the streets.
The arrested men will get a surprise when they reach police headquarters: to go with the graphic photographs of gang-on-gang violence that cover the walls of the interrogation suite, the team have stuck up a plain white poster. In the middle of this poster there are two black dots: one is the size of a penny, the other as big as a basketball. Underneath the smaller dot are the words ‘Your ass before prison’. Underneath the golf ball-sized dot: ‘Your ass when you are in prison’.
Towards the end of my first day on patrol with the gang unit I spot a second bunch of kids out of the corner of my eye. ‘What’s that?’ I ask Ross. The second the kids see the marked patrol car, they start running. Picking up the radio mike Ross shouts right in my ear, ‘We’ve got runners!’ He hits the gas, and we are in hot pursuit. The kids are all dressed in blue and white, or blue and gold.
Red trainers pounding in time with my heart, I’m out of the car on the sergeant’s heels. The rest of the unit make a fast loop round to the other side of the block to cut off the suspects. Ross and I race through a maze of project housing and low-rise apartments. The scrubby open spaces between are intercut by slatted wooden fences and small alleys, rat runs that might have been made for escape. We are on the tail of about thirteen kids, but they split up and scatter in different directions. We catch up with five, three blokes and two girls all aged between eighteen and twenty. Ross escorts them back to the car, sits them down on the grass verge and the gang team set to work again checking IDs and records. As this is going on Ross tells the grumbling kids, ‘We will humiliate and embarrass you every way we can until you give up or go away.’ I can tell by the way they are eyeing me the kids think I am with the unit.