by Ross Kemp
‘Who are you and what are you doing?’ one suddenly blurts. I’m not surprised he wants to know; except for one officer, everyone in the unit is black. As far as I can see I am the only white guy for miles around. More streetwise than the group we caught up with before, these kids are ready with stories. One of the blokes is a walking art gallery: the tattoos on him include the initials LBCG. Ross tells him, ‘Long Beach Crips, right? What’s the G for?’
The kid has a smart answer: ‘Long Beach Community Group.’ Shooting him a ‘Don’t be a wise guy’ look, Ross smiles and shakes his head.
The suspect’s lady friend has 44 tattooed on her forearm. ‘That’s how old my momma was when she died,’ the girl says.
Ross laughs out loud. ‘That’s a good one – I gotta write that one down.’ The second bloke is wearing an inscription he thinks is witty on his upper arm: ‘If it don’t make dollars, it don’t make cents.’ He also has the initials OPAGC. ‘What’s that mean?’ asks Ross.
This one’s a joker too; the answer comes back pat: ‘O’Fallon Park Area Community Group.’
Another unit member leans to inspect the letters and says drily, ‘Or it could say O’Fallon Park Associated Gangster Crips.’ The kid shakes his head; he says the police are confusing him.
When Ross gently points out that sporting Crips colours in this area puts him at clear and present risk of death by shooting, and he might want to think about wearing something a bit more neutral, the suspect blurts, ‘This is my life. I’m in a culture. I don’t shoot people – I’ve been shot three times. My own brother got killed in these streets; my grandmother lives right there, man. Brothers, please don’t get me confused. Because I’m going to stay true to what I believe in. And I believe in it.’
Gang unit policy is to get in the face of the gangsters and make them understand who controls the streets, but is it working? Not if this attitude is anything to go by. When I put this to Sergeant Ross, he didn’t agree: ‘It’s a worthy cause. Whether we get one person or a hundred people out, it’s a worthy cause. This [the gang unit] is something that’s needed in this city and a lot of cities. What’s going on here in St Louis is going on everywhere.’
As well as reading gang signs and trying to make life uncomfortable for gangsters, Ross and his team spend a lot of their time searching for weapons in the stinking, filthy debris of the many abandoned buildings. I really didn’t like going into those rat-infested holes – long-abandoned basements filled with rotting rubbish, crumbling outbuildings and dark, mouldy rooms – but it needs doing. In fact it is a very important part of the unit’s job. Rather than get arrested for possession of an illegal firearm, which can earn you up to ten years in jail, many gang-bangers keep caches of weapons in handy locations all over their home turf. Ross’s partner said, ‘It’s called a community weapon – everybody on the block knows where it is. If they need it, they’ll get it, use it and put it back.’
The most common method of initiating a wannabe member into the Bloods or Crips is to get him to walk into a rival gang’s territory and shoot it up. If he comes back out in one piece, the guy is in. Another initiation ceremony, very like one used by the MS13 and 18 Street gangs in El Salvador, is known as beating in. The gang forms a circle or two lines, and the would-be member gets a kicking in the middle. If he stands up to it well and earns the gang’s respect, then he’s in. Both rites give the gang some idea of whether the new kid has got what it takes, but with this level of violence more and more citizens like Arthella Spence are voting with their feet, negating the influx of immigrants. As people move out of the city, schools close down, forcing children from one neighbourhood to travel to another. This causes more gang warfare because it dumps groups of kids from Bloods-controlled parts of town in among their Crips rivals and vice versa. Disputes that start as childish disagreements in the schoolyard often end up being resolved on the streets. In far too many cases ‘resolved’ means the argument ends up in violence and sometimes death. Up until a few years ago small-scale, essentially unimportant disputes of this kind would have been settled with fists, as they were in my school. Now, many of the schoolkids have guns and are prepared to use them.
The biggest current teenage flashpoint in the city is a local school on Cass Avenue, an example of ill-advised – or wildly optimistic – planning if ever there was one. The new air-conditioned school was supported by lots of local businesses and private institutions, hoping that its $47.3 million-worth of shining new architecture would be the catalyst for change the area so needs. It is a beautiful building, with media centre, swimming pool and competition-standard gyms. But this school lies bang in the middle of territory claimed both by the JVL (Jefferson Van der Loo) Bloods and their deadly rivals, the 26-MAD Crips.
Since it opened in 2002 the area around the school has seen regular violent battles between the two main gangs. According to the gang unit, even during vacation time, when it is closed, kids from warring gangs hang around outside the school looking for trouble. When Ross and his colleagues stop to warn them they are likely to end up in the city morgue, most just shrug their shoulders. ‘At that age,’ he says, ‘they believe they are invincible. But a bullet doesn’t care how old or young you are.’
As we drove around I kept seeing groups of younger children performing all kinds of amazing gymnastics: back flips and front flips and vaults on mattresses dragged out of empty houses and laid on the grass by the side of the road. There is so little else for them to do and so much obvious athletic talent going to waste. But unless things change a lot of them will inevitably drift into the gangs.
One organization trying to help the city’s youth get out of the gangs and stop them joining in the first place is the Brothers of Islam. Led by a large charismatic man named Kabir Mohammed, the Brothers of Islam hold gang avoidance workshops once a week in a local school. Kabir means big in Arabic, and Mohammed is big, both physically and as a personality. An ex-member who lost a brother to gang violence, he is not one to mince words when it comes to telling it like it is about the realities of gang life. Faced with fifty or so kids either already in gangs or at risk of getting sucked in, what Kabir tells them is all the more powerful for being based on his own experience. When someone in the audience objects that the way he is speaking to them shows disrespect, Kabir loses it: ‘Fuck you! I’m trying to save your lives, man! I got people out there want to kill me for what I do. And damn, we got society feeding you with all this so fucked-up music, all these fucked-up videos. So no – I ain’t changing shit. This is how it’s going to be; this is how we get down. Straight, right to the fucking point. Now, goddamnit, you can accept the truth and live, or you can reject it and fucking die.’
As he tells it, the white people who control the music and video industry manipulate many black musicians into broadcasting messages of violence, misogyny and general hatred, not to mention the use and sale of drugs. Encouraging black-on-black gang violence in this way is, he insists, ‘the white man’s way of keeping the black man down’. The words seem to strike home. Listening and watching, even I am a bit scared. Kabir’s shouted delivery is brutal, but it needs to be. Looking at the hardened faces of the kids, I don’t think a softly-softly, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we talked through our problems’ approach is going to cut much ice.
Kabir doesn’t try to pretend there is any easy way out of the car crash waiting to happen that is life for so many young north St Louis kids. Given the difficulty of reaching them and how little respect they have for authority, the fact that he gets any of them to come and hear him speak at all is little short of a miracle. Some come because other gang-bangers have told them about the Brothers of Islam, and this alone is a sign he is reaching them. But Kabir also goes out on the streets in person, finds these kids and encourages them to come along.
He moves on to take a swipe at the way he believes some big-name US companies are ready to exploit gang culture for profit. ‘Is the chairman of Nike a black man? Of course not – he’s a white man.’ He
also points out that some businesses are making money on the back of gang culture. St Louis sports shops, he tells me, divide their merchandise according to gang colours: Bloods red on one side, Crips blue and white on the other. I went to see for myself. Many of them do.
All really young, the boys sit there on the hard wood chairs, and they listen and watch Big Mohammed do his stuff. I could tell he scared them just a little. But two things about the meeting worried me: when I looked around the room, most of the kids were still wearing red or blue, and when I visited the toilet, there on the walls was more gang graffiti. One scrawl, written in pencil above the sink taps had an arrow pointing at the soap and read, ‘Crips don’t use this.’ The insult may be childish, but it tells you everything about the mindset.
Kabir asks a fifteen-year-old in the group why young people his age ‘get involved in gangs even knowing it can cost you your life’. He gets an equally direct response. ‘People join gangs so they get to feel like they belong to something. If your family messed up and stuff, your momma on crack and stuff, it makes you feel like you belong to someone, like you want to be somewhere.’ Hard to argue with that one.
The guy sitting next to him pipes up, ‘I was born on the East Side.’
‘Gangster Disciples?’ Kabir asks.
The kid nods. ‘My uncle got killed over there, in his apartment.’
‘Was he a gang member?’
‘Yeah. He was going downstairs. Dudes came, and they shot him on the ground. I was in my room and they were shooting at my window. A bullet came in through my window. That’s when I saw him on the ground. Blood was all on the ground. They told me to go back in my room.’
‘How old were you then?’
‘I was seven.’
I asked the first kid, ‘What age were you when you first knew there were drugs in your neighbourhood?’
He said, ‘My grandmother told me this story about when I was little and I used to come over her house. It was December, and the cold was real bad and there was snow on the ground in the street. And I fell in the snow and I picked it up and I said, ‘I’m going to eat this stuff.” And when she saw me wanting to eat snow, that’s when my grandmother realized my momma was on crack.’
You can see why Kabir struggles to make the kids understand that the gangs are the problem, not the solution to their smashed-up lives.
Do I think Kabir Mohammed is doing a great job? Without question. Do I think he has an uphill struggle? All the way. Will he ever make a significant lasting difference to the gang-ridden streets of north St Louis? Even with the help of Islam and its powerful message of living a drug- and alcohol-free life, I’m not convinced. But if he saves even one kid from the gangs, as Sergeant Ross says, Kabir Mohammed’s almighty effort has to be worth it.
I’d been in the city of St Louis for a week and felt as if I hadn’t met any of the ‘real’ gangsters who wreak havoc in their communities, the kind who kill the Robert Walkers of this world and bequeath their families decades of grief. And then I met one.
Jason Hampton was not only a gangster but one of the biggest men I have ever met. At about six feet six inches and 280 pounds, twenty-six-year-old Hampton would not have looked out of place playing for the St Louis Rams. A former JVL Blood, I got to know him through the local parole board. Hampton’s parole officer, Carol, looked all of fifteen years old. In fact, she’s in her twenties and carries a Glock 9mm. Jason, out after several years behind bars for drugs trafficking and illegal possession of a firearm, I am not sure whether Carol’s sidearm encouraged Jason to stick to the terms of his parole, but it definitely sets her apart from her British counterparts.
A long-term Blood, Jason saw the light when a rival gang member crept up on him, clapped a pistol to the back of his head and pulled the trigger. The round failed to explode, perhaps because the cordite inside was past its sell-by date, but for Jason his escape was a life-changing incident. As he told me, ‘This stuff ain’t no game. If someone come up and puts a gun to your head and pulls the trigger and that gun don’t go off, that’s a sign. You know what I’m saying? A sign you gotta wake up, brother.’
He took me on a guided tour of the mean scabby streets he had grown up on and fought over before his arrest and imprisonment. Stopping in front of a dilapidated clapboard house, Jason pointed to the bullet holes that peppered its facçade. Then, turning to look across the street, he said, ‘This here is Bloods turf; right over there is the Crips. Come night time, they get in the mood, they come right on over, shoot first and ask later.’ The opposition didn’t need to drive by – they could just walk across the street and start blazing away. He said it was mostly about drugs. All types dropped by to score. ‘Folks was coming from everywhere. We have people coming from St Charles, we had guys coming from Springfield, truck drivers stopping, picking up hookers, the hookers bringing them over here. My first day at high school, I had $800 in my pocket.’
When I started secondary school at the age of eleven I was lucky if I had a couple of quid. I stared at Hampton to see if he was telling the truth. ‘Eight hundred dollars?’
‘Eight hundred dollars. Jewellery on, everything. It was just how you get money, and that’s what we was doing, we was just getting money.’
He talked me through some of the gang graffiti sprayed on the pavement. ‘Velar, that’s the homeboy who got killed in a high-speed chase with the police. BIP stands for Blood in Peace. 31 Tray ACE. Thirty-one is the block right here.’ He pointed at the area behind him.
In the daytime Jason said the streets were usually quiet; the gang-bangers were sleeping. It was night when most of the dealing and the killing and the robbing took place. He stopped at an intersection and nodded at the street opposite. Even in broad daylight he did not dare drive down it. When I asked him why, he shrugged. ‘I can’t go there. If I do, they’ll kill me.’ This was a grown man, one of the biggest I had ever met, a larger-than-life character like someone out of a Raymond Chandler novel. And yet he was afraid to leave his own neighbourhood. He said he never stopped at traffic lights, he rolled through them at a slow, steady speed ready to step on the gas if killers came running up to shoot him where he sat. It’s a favourite St Louis gang execution method.
As we drove, I thought that although Jason was out on parole, where it counted he was still in prison: confined to his own little patch in fear of his life. In the land of the free, Jason Hampton had no freedom. As he said himself, this is no way for a grown-up to live. ‘There’s no life in these gangs, so you just got to leave it alone. Sometimes you just got to look at yourself and ask: Is this what you want? Is this how you’re going to settle for your kids as they get older? I’m tired of seeing my partners, my friends and my associates all going to jail. Either there or dead – it hurts. It’s just time to wise up, man, leave this gang stuff alone.’ Amen to that. I left Jason Hampton on the porch at his home, trying to wade back to dry land from the gang swamp. All we can do is wish him luck.
Hampton had taken me closer to the front line, but he was a reformed gangster. It didn’t seem right to leave St Louis without meeting some active, hard-core gang members if I could. It was a big if. Making contact with seriously bad guys isn’t just difficult, it’s like herding cats. The way it worked? Our local fixer knew someone who knew someone else who had agreed to talk. After four hours waiting in a hot stuffy car in a wind-blown parking lot being taken for undercover cops by local dealers, I decided it wasn’t going to happen. I’d had enough; we’d have to give it a miss and go home. But then, as we started to pull out of the parking lot, the phone call came through.
Waiting for gangsters in the heat for hours on end is bad for the nerves, but fear lends its own edge, one I found quite useful as we followed our contact out to meet the leading Blood who had agreed to an interview. We eventually pulled up outside a tumbledown house at the end of an unpaved track in a low-rent district. Here, the few homes looked long-abandoned. Bits of junk loomed up out of the darkness as I approached the house. I had no idea wh
ere we were but I knew one thing for sure: I did not like the look of this place one little bit. I liked it even less when I tripped on a low mound of earth and fell. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had fallen over the grave of a dog. I ignored the loud knocking sound coming from the inside of my ribcage and pushed in through the open front door. Nobody else knew we were here; we were totally in their hands.
Inside, the house was poorly lit. There was no one there. At first I thought we’d been set up. Then two older men appeared. They looked exhausted and emaciated, like classic crack addicts. They told me the big man would be coming later. One produced a thin piece of brass piping about the length of a biro. One end of it was sealed with plumber’s tape. He took a bag out and stuck a rock of crack into the open end of the tube, pushed it down with a metal nail, flicked a cigarette lighter and heated the pipe. As I waited in the gloom, the acrid smell of burning crack filled the room. The other guy was smoking a More brand cigarette, except it seemed to be having a much bigger effect on him than usual.
These guys told me the Bloods paid them in drugs to work on houses being done up as part of a city-wide regeneration project. It was one way they had of laundering money. Even better, this type of project sometimes attracted municipal funding, increasing the profits. Looking at the standard of their work and the amount of narcotics they were getting through, I won’t be asking this pair to come round and retile my bathroom.
A young bloke with a white T-shirt over his face suddenly walked in. The way he had it arranged made him look like a Tuareg tribesman. Even though he was obviously very young, the older guys clearly respected him, stepping back out of his way. The kid beckoned me out. I followed him through a dank room, empty except for a couple of plastic garden chairs along a corridor, and out into a second, larger room at the back of the house. The smell of dog excrement grew stronger and stronger, and then a loud chorus of barking broke out in the night. There were pit bulls out in the backyard locked up in metal cages. ‘Turn off the camera light,’ the kid told us; he was worried it might attract the police or rival gangsters.