Street gang realpolitik

I TALK TO a lot of gangsters in my line of work. A lot of them are like child soldiers, both dangerous and pathetic, at once sharpened and blunted by years of constant predation and grief. Still, I liked this guy last week. He was watchful and laconic, like a lot of cops I know. He got jumped into a gang around the time I became a cop, said he'd done it for the health plan -- figuring it was healthier to get jumped in than to keep getting jumped on.

I asked him about violence between black gangs like his and Latino gangs in L.A. He waved the notion away like hanging smoke. "The thing about it is the \o7Eses\f7 outnumber us," the guy told me. "And we're in business with them."

He might just be whistling past the graveyard, but I don't think so. The stats are on his side, at least for now.

In Los Angeles, violence remains an overwhelmingly intra-racial affair. Newton, Southwest, Southeast and 77th Street (where I investigate homicides) are the city's four most murderous precincts. All are racially mixed, with Latinos and blacks living cheek-by-jowl in midcentury shoebox apartments. In these four divisions, The Times has reported, there were 236 homicides last year -- and just 22 of those murders crossed racial lines.

To be sure, there have been interracial battles in the past. In the 1990s, the Venice Shoreline Crips went at it with the Culver City Boys. East Coast Crips once had a beef with Florencia. Varrio 204th Street have targeted blacks in the Harbor Gateway, and the Avenues targeted them in Highland Park. Still, these are aberrations. Outside of prison, even the most ruthless L.A. gangs can be deferential, even cordial, to their cross-racial counterparts. One reason for this accord may be that black gangs are outnumbered: Of Los Angeles' 39,000 gang members, roughly 56% are Latino and 40% are black. That might explain black appeasement, but not Latino tolerance. In my opinion, the biggest reason for this curious detente is economic. More specifically, it's drug money.

Both Latino and black gangs in Los Angeles depend on the drug trade (and rely on each other) for their survival. Firmly embedded in blighted neighborhoods where the demand for crack is highest, black gangsters are the Fuller Brush Men of the dope game, hand-to-mouth salesmen living on wit and hustle. Legendary dope men like "Freeway Rick" Ross notwithstanding, few black drug dealers make it past the end of their block. Tales of crack millionaires, like Ronald Reagan's mythical welfare queens, are largely apocryphal -- the stuff of hip-hop music and crime novels.