The latest homicide figures in Los Angeles have set off a shriek-a-thon that is weird and seems to me fed by 24-hour-news culture, which is dangerous because it is utterly devoid of context. I believe in police accountability, smart deployment […]
Gangs
Twitter is abuzz with word from South Central Los Angeles that either 1) a gang, angered at the shooting of a member is planning on killing a hundred people in a hundred days or 2) that two gangs have a […]
An opinion piece of mine is out in the LA Times — this one about the radical changes at Southern California parks. Parks, by and large, are now free of gang presence. They are, generally speaking, places where families can […]
Today I drove through the Drew Street neighborhood and found an L.A. miracle. Fabrizio Uzan had purchased a triplex out of foreclosure. When I met him, he was redoing the downstairs unit with new refrigerator and stove, new toilet and […]
I’m very proud of my cover story in the January’s edition of Pacific Standard Magazine about the decline of gang violence and gang presence in Southern California. I’ve been watching this phenomenon quietly unfold for several years. It amounts to […]
No corner of the city appears better protected than 41st and Broadway in South Central LA. There are five virgin murals on three buildings at one corner, and another two on a mini-market a block away. “We’ve put up flowers […]
Today’s RICO indictment of the El Monte Flores gang offers another glimpse of the Southern California gang underworld and how it’s changed. EMF ran taxation of not just drug dealers but also of fake-document vendors on behalf of the Mexican […]
Gonzalo Inzunza Inzunza, the alleged chief of hitmen for Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, himself the alleged co-leader of the Sinaloa Drug Cartel, has been killed in Puerto Penasco, Sonora. Inzunza, 42, was from Culiacan, Sinaloa and better known by his […]
Two Latino gang members from Compton pleaded guilty (Thursday, Oct. 16, 2013) to federal hate crimes in attacks on black youths in a case that showed how much the town had changed. Jeffrey Aguilar and Efren Marquez, Jr., admitted to […]
On the night of July 9, 2000 on the West Side of the city of San Bernardino, several armed gang members went into the driveway of a duplex and opened fire. Four people were killed that night. They included two […]
An indictment announced today offers a scary, fascinating look into a new alliance between a California prison gang, including a current hunger strike leader, and a Mexican drug cartel. Florencia 13 — from the Florence-Firestone district of LA — and […]
The hunger strikes in California prisons lately are motivated as much by prison gang maneuvering as by concern over human-rights violations. That’s the opinion of one veteran gang member I spoke with recently. Emanating from Pelican Bay State Prison, the […]
Tonight at 10pm (9 pmCentral), A&E/Biography is showing a documentary on the Leon-Real family and the Drew Street gang, part of its (perhaps hyperbolically named) series on gangs: Gangsters: America’s Most Evil. Anyway, I helped make this doc, interviewing with […]
TELL YOUR TRUE TALE: One Day in Compton
July 22, 2013
In Culture
Gangs
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Tell Your True Tale
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Hey all, I’ve just posted another story on my storytelling page, Tell Your True Tale. Johnathan Quevedo tells the story of how Los Angeles was the lifesaver he turned to as he fled his mother’s manic depression. Until, that is, […]
A group of inmates in California’s maximum security lockups — Pelican Bay, Corcoran and Tehachapi — are calling for an end to the racial warring that has been part of prison life in the state since … probably since I […]
At long last, a story I worked on months ago, has run. It’s about Wan Joon Kim, a vendor at an indoor swap meet in Compton, who became an impresario of gangsta rap, a music he didn’t particularly care for […]
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