Word: gangly
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...Keith Smith, a minister's son in Waukegan, Ill. Smith called it quits last August after eight months of gang banging with a pack called the Latin Lovers. The de-initiation ceremony took place right before midnight in a local park. The ground rules: four against one for three minutes, no weapons. Smith, then 15, collapsed after the first minute. He remained in a coma for 58 days...
...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...
...quickest exit from gang life is via the morgue. The surest route is a one-way ticket out of the old neighborhood. For most young gang members, that leaves no choice at all. "Just to walk away and get out? God, you may get killed," says Daniel Swope, executive director of a community group called BUILD in Chicago. "You make a commitment, and it's lifelong...
Most young gang bangers don't even think about getting out. The money and security are too good and the alternatives too few. The gang is a surrogate family and the only source of approval, however convoluted, that they'll ever know. Pathetically, all the bloodshed is merely a by-product of an utterly misguided and frantic inner-city search for respect. "What other world do these kids know?" asks George Knox, director of the Gang Crime Research Center at Chicago State University...
...safest way out of a gang -- short of fleeing -- is to fade away very carefully. This is more plausible for members 19 and older, who have paid their dues and can now use jobs, wives or children as excuses for not hanging out with the homeboys. But most younger gang members have nowhere to fade away to. Meanwhile, gang bangers are notorious for overreacting at the smallest perceived slight. "You got to earn your respect," says Salvador Nevarez, 23, who joined the Disciples at 13 but married two years ago and now works as a salesman for Montgomery Ward...