Bloods Gang

A generation of gangsters--consigned to the sociopathic fringe before the Los Angeles riots--has emerged from the ashes with a visceral new voice demanding a place in the mainstream. Written off as nihilistic and irredeemable, young black gang members have suddenly become prime-time celebrities, articulating the frustration and rage of the disenfranchised with a starkness forged by years of surviving on the streets.

Gang-related homicides in South Los Angeles have dropped markedly--to two last month, compared with 16 in May, 1991--leading police to give new credit to the truce declared between warring black gangs, a high-ranking police official told the Police Commission on Tuesday. "There's no question there has been a real decrease in violence among black gangs," said Deputy Police Chief Matthew J. Hunt, who commands the department's South Bureau. "They have come together," Hunt continued.

If it was a good idea for a warring corner of the Middle East, it just might work for the Bloods and Crips. So figures a group of ex-gang members who are seeking to cement the ongoing truce in South Los Angeles by looking to another seemingly intractable conflict--the 1948 war between Israel and Egypt that briefly ended in 1949 with a United Nations treaty.

The weekly parties that are bringing Bloods and Crips together for nights of beer and brotherhood in South Los Angeles are also opening a new arena of conflict with a Police Department that has little tolerance for the festivities. Both law enforcement and the newly united street gangs, which clashed violently last weekend at the Jordan Downs and Imperial Courts housing projects in Watts, contend that they are the ones struggling to maintain peace while the other is provoking the melees.

In the month since the Los Angeles riots, there have been no revenge killings involving the city's two most notorious street gangs, law enforcement officers in the Los Angeles area said Friday, lending credibility to a truce called by the two gangs in the wake of the riots.

Representatives of black gangs in Watts have denounced illegal acts which have occurred at parties celebrating a gang truce. At a news conference this week, the gang members said former members of the Crips and Bloods--along with a private security force operated by the Nation of Islam--will police the gatherings until an agreement to ease tensions between gang members and police can be reached. The Police Commission is considering a request from the Rev.

Sipping a 40-ounce bottle of Old English 800 at the Nickerson Gardens housing project last week, Dale Marks stood among scores of celebrating Crips and Bloods--once deadly rivals in Los Angeles' street-gang warfare. For the first time in his life, he was partying in the name of peace.

Two severely beaten men were discovered unconscious on a sidewalk early Monday after 150 riot-equipped officers and National Guard members ended a rowdy all-night party of newly united Crips and Bloods in Compton. The injured men, one of them nude and the other partially clothed, apparently had been robbed, said Cmdr. Ramon Allen, in charge of field operations for the Compton Police Department.

Backstage at NBC's studios in Rockefeller Center last week, Li'l Monster and Bone--members of two rival Los Angeles gangs--sat in a dressing room where the stars of "Saturday Night Live" suit up, shut their eyes and let a makeup artist pat their noses with a pink powder puff. Talk-show host Phil Donahue had flown the two men to New York City, housed them in a luxury Park Avenue hotel and delivered them via limousine to NBC, where they were about to be interviewed in front of 13 million viewers.

Some longtime rival gang members in the Bloods and the Crips have reached a purported truce that church and community activists hope will redeem disaffected youths but that police fear signals a possible organized retaliation effort against law enforcement.