Word: crips
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Kevin became Baby Insane, and a Crip. As such, his totem color was blue, and his mortal enemies, who wore red, were Bloods, and in particular a nearby Bloods subset called the Skyline Pirus. (Black Crips and Bloods gangs, now nationwide, got their start in Los Angeles in the early '70s.) The bonding ritual was a subadolescent mumbo jumbo of slogans and hand signs, like those used by adult fraternal groups. Car theft, drug selling and smash-and-grab robbery (smash a storefront with a car, wait for the glass to settle, and grab the goods) were agreeable moneymakers...
...inner city someone is doing crack and someone else is preaching a sermon about it. A Crip member warns a Blood wannabe not to clown him and then sells some coke to the fat white guy in the BMW form the suburbs...
...Thomas R., an 18-year-old former member of a Crip set in Los Angeles who just said no to his fellow gang members last April. "They did me pretty bad," he says softly. Bad meaning a broken arm, a broken wrist, two teeth knocked out, lots of cigarette burns on his face and a few dozen bruises, which really isn't too bad for the Crips. But Thomas cautions, "You bet they ain't done with...
...kids as young as ten or eleven readily join. They are called "wanna-bes" and are looked on even by the cops as apprentices in the trade. Yet it doesn't take much for a wanna-be to earn full stripes. According to Henry, 13, a Grape Street Crip, the only difference between "little gangsters" and "big gangsters" is firepower: little gangsters use .22s or .25s; big gangsters, .38s or Uzis...
Henry has a much stronger sense of being a Grape Street Crip than a Mexican American or an Angeleno. Ask him about his family, and he'll talk about his "homies." He knows the odds against surviving gang life. "I might get killed one day," he says. "My uncle did." His uncle, a Florencia gang member, was shot in the back with a .45 when Henry was ten. His uncle was Florencia because he lived in that neighborhood, but that was long ago, and Henry has always been Grape Street. "I don't like Florencia, I never did." One reason...