Word: gangly
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...mother in the squalor of south central Los Angeles. His father left the family when Hagan was only ten. It did not take Hagan long to learn who had the girls, the cars, the clothes and the prestige. When he was 13, he was jumped by a dozen local gang members, who beat him savagely. He fought back like a wild animal, and his courage earned him the status of a home boy, the generic street name for a fellow gang member. He had been accepted...
...gang is your family," he explains. "If you're my home boy, I fight for you, no matter what the odds. If you're the enemy, it's do or die." Young punks with real guns playing capture the flag for keeps. Hagan is a member of the Eight-Tray Gangster Crips, a pack of predators named after their turf along 83rd Street. They identify themselves with hand signals and mark their territory with hieroglyphic graffiti that translate into a simple warning: TRESPASSERS MAY BE SHOT...
Within a year after joining the gang, Hagan was drinking, fighting and smoking PCP with the best of the home boys. Eager to please the older gang members, he became the fearless errand boy, quickly learning to rob and steal and priding himself on his growing reputation as a "crazy." He says: "I was like a hardhead. The more my parents told me to stay away from gangs, the more I wanted to hang with them." He has his own ideas about parenthood: "If I had a son, I would give him a choice: either he can go to school...
Shuffled among five different high schools because of his gang activity, Hagan was arrested as a juvenile in 1979 for robbery and served five months. In 1981 he mugged an off-duty policeman and served four years. He finally managed to graduate in 1982 while behind bars. "When I was younger, it was fun," he says of his criminal career. "Like Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel. I didn't think I was going to get into the radical stuff." But the radical stuff became addictive...
...clerk at a computer software company and stormed the streets in search of the killer, barging into local dope houses with a fury born of grief. Then came a letter from a sympathetic inmate in the county jail who provided the names and addresses of the gang members involved. Irene waited three days before passing the tip on to police. She explains, "I wanted to kill him myself...