Big Mike hitches up in front of Jordan High School in Watts like a bull snuffling for trouble.
He scans the stoops down Juniper Street. He peers in the windows of passing cars. And he keeps a firm eye on the three chain-link gates of the Jordan Downs housing project down the block.
As a gang interventionist, Michael Cummings trolls the streets here every day making sure students get to and from school safely -- and that gangbangers mind their manners.
Cummings is a tow-truck driver, Pentecostal pastor and former Grape Street Crip. He is as imposing as a defensive tackle and wields absolute respect in the neighborhood where he grew up. Parents adore him. Gangbangers listen to him.
No one messes with Big Mike.
"He can get between people," said Los Angeles Police Sgt. Curtis Woodle. "He's able to actually talk gang members down. . . . And that's critical."
On this morning, five teenage boys cruise out of the project toward the school.
"What's up, soldiers?" Cummings asks.
"Hey, Big Mike," one mutters.
Nothing about their appearance suggests whether they're gang members or not; hip-hop long ago standardized the look in this part of town. But Cummings knows the players.
He smoothly peels one of them away as they pass the school gate.
"Today's the test, right?" he says. "You taking the test?"
His voice rumbles like dredging gravel. The kid hesitates, then says he forgot his uniform.
"Just tell them you're here for tests and you forgot your shirt," Cummings says. His tree-trunk girth closes in on the young man, shunting him through the gate.
The boy looks helplessly at his friends and then slouches inside the old Art Deco building. His homies continue along the sidewalk.
"See, if they send him home" for not having his white shirt, "he's not going home," Cummings says. "He's going with them. They're my troublemakers."
They are members of the Southside Grape Varrio Watts, he says. The boy is not -- at least not yet.
Cummings, 45, can read the subterranean forces in his neighborhood the way a seismologist sees the stress points in shifting earth. For years, the warfare in Watts was mostly triangular, waged by three fiefdoms rooted in the big public housing projects: the Grape Street Crips in Jordan Downs, the Bounty Hunter Bloods in Nickerson Gardens and the P Jay Crips in Imperial Courts.
