Word: gangly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Keystone Kops. At one point, lawyers carrying a Johnson offer became stuck in Manhattan traffic moments before the bid was due. In desperation, they leaped from their cab and raced the remaining two blocks on foot, arriving breathless and embarrassingly late. Said a disgusted RJR director: "This is the gang that couldn't shoot straight...
...four, lay dead, cut down by automatic gunfire in Garden Grove, Calif. But what infuriated Ralph Rodriguez, a cousin of the dead child's, was that not one witness was willing to tell police what everyone knew: the slaughter was a revenge killing by the 5th Street gang from nearby Santa Ana, where Rodriguez lives. "I started screaming, and I made people talk to the police," he recalls. "I knew everybody they named as the shooters. I knew all their families." Rodriguez, 32, helped investigators gather testimony and even permitted police to question his eleven-year...
...Southern California's sad subculture of gang violence, such stand-up citizenry is rare. "This was a big break for law enforcement," explains Orange County Deputy District Attorney Tom Avdeef. "The gangs rule the neighborhoods like terrorists." Rodriguez would learn just how in the weeks that followed...
After police raided the gang's headquarters, seizing weapons and arresting four 5th Streeters, the nightmare began. A Molotov cocktail cracked Rodriguez's bedroom window; gang members marauded nightly through the * neighborhood; a suspect's father and his cronies camped out on Rodriguez's doorstep, screaming death threats. Squad cars always seemed to arrive after the tormentors had left. Rodriguez moved his children to the bedroom floor and pushed furniture against the windows. To protect his living room, he parked the family truck in the front yard and took up sentry duty by the front door...
...afternoon in early November after cruising gang members twice tried to run down his son, the beleaguered auto mechanic finally lost his cool. Rodriguez fired a semiautomatic pistol into the air from his backyard to signal that he'd been pushed far enough. Neighbors called the police, who this time arrived within minutes and arrested Rodriguez. "I begged them not to take me and leave my family without protection," he remembers bitterly. But Ralph Rodriguez went to jail...