Word: gangly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Angeles Olympics, took the helm of Rebuild L.A., the city's formal rebuilding effort. Angelenos also warmly greeted new police chief Willie Williams, who arrived from Philadelphia in July after the forced resignation of the combative Daryl Gates. The era of good feeling even produced a truce between street gangs and a summer-long drop in black-gang-related homicides...
...higher-energy field (Is there any other kind?). Things go haywire. He menaces his old buddies, threatens to reduce the entire city to rubble and generally set the earth spinning sideways on its axis. Only one person can stop him: his best pal and main rival in the motorcycle gang. The guy with the coolest bike...
...tough, disturbing account of teenage gang life...
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...
...eventually forced him to choose between doing heavy prison time and turning informer. A shrewd detective named Patrick Birse -- called Buddha because he looked like one -- persuaded him to turn. The author's tough, believable account of their edgily trustful relationship offers no solutions at all to the gang problem facing most of the nation's cities. But it does suggest why a restless man might become a detective, and why a bright, rootless boy might take shelter with a tribe of homicidal children...