L.A. Gangs Are Back

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Nobody got shot that night, so a little later the gangsters sit on the porch of a house on Fedora, drinking beer, smoking weed, listening to Eminem and swapping stories of jail, women, guns. Little Boy is bragging that he has scored a huge settlement for a false-arrest report filed by Perez, the central figure in the Rampart CRASH scandal. They laugh about that. Little Boy will blow the money in a year, they think. Already he has bought an SUV and a wide-screen TV on credit.

Since the police offensive on crack in the '90s, the Playboys deal mostly in marijuana, which doesn't have crack's high profit margin or lethal side effects. Drug fashion has moved on, and the days have passed when multiple dealers hung out on side streets in the Playboys' territory selling to crazed addicts. Black gangs are still heavily involved in drugs, but Latinos, who make up 60% of L.A.'s 100,000 gangsters, are far less so.

The Playboys' principal rivals are the 18th Street gang and Mara Salvatrucha. Each continually invades its rivals' territories, which are often only a few city blocks away, spraying their graffiti on walls, sometimes doing drive-bys. Each attack prompts retaliation, as violence feeds on violence. Inevitably, innocent bystanders like Elizabeth Tomas get hurt.

No wonder the rise in Los Angeles gang violence is starting to attract attention from gang-suppression units in other parts of the country. "As goes L.A., so goes the rest of the country," says Ron Stallworth, a former gang-intelligence coordinator for the state of Utah. "Whatever is fueling the rise in killings there will soon infect the rest of us."

The infection process is already under way. To avoid the mandatory 25-years- to-life sentence under California's three-strikes-and-you're-out law, gang members with two convictions have been moving out of state. "We are arresting people in Spokane and finding they are gangsters from L.A. who have also been arrested in Oregon and Seattle," says Sergeant Michael Yates of the Spokane, Wash., police department.

But with crime rates down in many jurisdictions and city budgets under pressure, some antigang forces are being reassigned--and the gangs are quick to take note. El Paso, Texas, a city that saw 300 drive-by shootings in 1993, had reduced that number to 14 (just one of them fatal) by last year. Early this year, during the city's mayoral campaign, the candidates debated disbanding the five antigang units and reassigning the 30 officers to regular patrol duty. Within a few months, there were two fresh gang murders, a spray of new gang graffiti on city walls, and a new sense of entitlement among some gangsters. "When we went to arrest the gang members, they said we had no right to be there because we had been disbanded," says Mary Lou Carrillo, a gang-intelligence officer with the El Paso police department.