Word: ganged
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...save his family from the genocidal Khmer Rouge. Now, as he stalked furiously back and forth across the grimy patio behind a cramped bungalow in the Little Phnom Penh section of Long Beach, he saw a very different threat materializing -- within his own family. His 14-year-old son, gang-named Flipper, and another homeboy, Slicc, 18, were bragging to a stranger about a shoot...
...bizarre and bloody world of Southern California gang life, armed and alienated children are guerrilla warriors. Cambodian gangs battling Hispanic gangs is but the newest infection. Ira Reiner, district attorney for Los Angeles County (pop. 8,776,000), estimates that 130,000 gang members operate in his jurisdiction alone. They range from subteen "peewees" to as many as 13,000 hard-core killers. Last year in the county the gangs accounted for 18,059 violent felonies and 690 deaths. Nearly every ethnic group is represented in the mayhem: the highly publicized black Bloods and Crips; multigenerational Hispanic groups that account...
...traded shots with Slicc was a member of the East Side Longos, a large Mexican-American gang rooted in the Hispanic community that settled along Anaheim Street in Long Beach (pop. 429,000) after World War II. Three decades later, Cambodian immigrants seeking affordable homes arrived. "At school the Mexicans looked down upon us and hurt us," recalls Mad Dog, 29, a "retired" homeboy whose mother was a Phnom Penh university professor. "We saw that American people had groups, white with white, black with black. We decided to become more famous. If they could steal cars and do drive...
...working and under-class urban scene, when fashion penetrates it at all, is gang-inspired fashion: college and professional sports team logos; blue for Crips, red for Bloods. Black and Silver for everyone. Raiders. White Sox. L.A. Kings...
Even the radical, gang-inspired fashion undercurrent of the underclass urban scene (Blue for Crips, red for Bloods, black and silver for everyone--Go Raiders!) percolates up into the middle class. Slumming has always been popular, but even it has been Gapified--reduced to the X hat and the Michael Jordan T-shirt. Gapification is a great neutralizer, stripping violence and excitement from the urban scene...