Word: gangly
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...Southern California that was a logical step for the young Cambodians to take. "You land in a gang neighborhood, it might seem natural to form a militia to defend yourself," explains Steve Valdivia, director of Los Angeles County's Community Youth Gang Services Project. Nearly all the state's street gangs started out copying Hispanic "cholo" (lowlife) styles. Scholars trace Hispanic gangs back to the 1920s, when Roman Catholic parishes organized social clubs for children who felt unwelcome at white high school dances. Despite drive-by shootings and drug trafficking, the gangs were tolerated as a "community" issue for half...
Harassed by the East Side Longos, the Cambodians organized gangs with names like Tiny Rascals and Asian Boyz. They helped swell Long Beach's gang membership to more than 10,000. Mad Dog and the others imitated their enemies. They "kicked back" on street corners and marked their turf with graffiti. Between turf shoot-outs, they also began to extort "protection" money from local businessmen. Fearing reprisals, the merchants have rarely complained. Gang detective Norman Sorenson remembers contacting dozens of Cambodian merchants after police found a detailed list of extortion victims in the car of a Tiny Rascals leader. "They...
Many Cambodian gang members became hardened to violence during their escape from the killing fields of Southeast Asia. "I remember walking and walking," recalls Little Devil, 16, describing his family's trek out of Cambodia when he was five. "If we didn't keep up, we'd be lost." Perhaps because of their past globe trotting, Cambodian gang members can be astonishingly mobile. When Long Beach cops saturated the "Anaheim corridor" this summer after a burst of shoot-outs, the Cambodian gangs vanished. "They took off for Stockton and Modesto -- maybe farther," says Mike Nen, an ethnic-Cambodian cop. Adds...
...wise to get airplane tickets too. "The Cambodians know what real war is," says Nen's partner, Patrolman Dan Brooks. "The Hispanics have a street mentality. They shoot on impulse and go home thinking they're safe. But the Cambodians know better." When combat looms, for example, Cambodian gang members sometimes call in reinforcements from hundreds of miles away. Little Devil is an Oriental Lazy Boy from downtown Los Angeles who rode into Long Beach recently with Lazy Boys from Tacoma to help battle the Longos. They left when one of the visiting Lazy Boys was wounded...
State and local officials have been unable to come up with any comprehensive solution to the gang problem. Meanwhile, demography is making radical changes ; in Southern California's gang life. South Central Los Angeles, where the Bloods and Crips began, now has more immigrant Latino youths than African- American kids. Poor black families have moved out, sometimes to the South, to keep their children out of gangs. "In five years," says educator David Flores, a gang expert who runs special school programs, "the Crips and Bloods will cease to be a serious problem there." Perhaps. But Sergeant Wes McBride...