Crips Gang

Even as gentrification swept Venice in the last decade and the district's once notorious gang activity dropped, the Venice Shoreline Crips kept a stubborn hold over the Oakwood Recreation Center, authorities say. According to authorities, the gang exerted a brazen influence over the facility, turning outsiders away and using it as an outpost for drug sales -- particularly within the last several years. On some occasions, the basketball court saw more drug deals than free throws, they said.

On the way home from school Thursday, 13-year-old Magda Gomez and his friends walked past the South Los Angeles intersection where five youths and three adults were shot the day before. One of the boys pointed out the splatter of dried blood that stained the sidewalk next to the bus stop at Central and Vernon avenues. "Check it out," he said. Gomez and his friends turned briefly to look and then kept walking. "I saw the injured people," Gomez said of Wednesday's shooting.

A group of black community activists, including a former Eight-Tray Crips gang member, called Sunday for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to add more preventive approaches to his proposed strategy to fight gang crime. At a news conference held at a South Los Angeles street corner where a youth was recently gunned down, Earl Ofari Hutchinson, president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable, and former Crips member Melvin Farmer said Schwarzenegger's plan was "doomed to failure."

In its stepped-up campaign to curb gang activity, the Los Angeles city attorney's office Wednesday announced that it had filed a lawsuit against the owner of a small Venice apartment building that is allegedly a home base for drug dealing and other illegal activity by the Shoreline Crips. The civil lawsuit, which was filed in July, seeks the closure for one year of the three-unit property in the 600 block of San Juan Avenue in the Oakwood neighborhood, officials said.

A onetime Crips member, who bragged in his memoir that he could clear out a jewelry store in 30 seconds, heard his own words used against him Thursday in his first day of trial on robbery charges in Murrieta. Colton Simpson, 41, told readers he had abandoned his violent lifestyle as a Rollin' Thirties Harlem Crip and wanted to help turn youngsters away from gang violence.

A Riverside County jury Monday found former Crips gang member Colton Simpson, who wrote a tell-all book about his life on the streets of Los Angeles, guilty of robbing a jewelry store, a decision that could send him to prison for life. The jury convicted Simpson of planning the March 2003 heist at the then-Robinsons-May Co. in Temecula, driving the getaway car and leading police on a high-speed freeway chase.

A Riverside County jury Monday found former Crips gang member Colton Simpson, who wrote a tell-all book about his life on the streets of Los Angeles, guilty of robbing a jewelry store, which could send him to prison for life. The jury convicted Simpson of planning the March 17, 2003, heist at the then Robinsons-May Co. in Temecula, driving the getaway car and leading police on a high-speed freeway chase.

Colton Simpson's autobiography impressed literary critics last fall with its raw account of the L.A. gang underworld and his war stories of life as a thief, thug and triggerman in the bloody battle between the Crips and Bloods. The book, "Inside the Crips: Life Inside L.A.'s Most Notorious Gang," was publicized as a tale of the former Crip's redemption, one meant to divert youngsters from street crime and jewelry heists.

A federal appeals court said Wednesday that Stanley "Tookie" Williams, a founder of the Crips street gang who has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, can be executed for killing four people in 1981. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to grant Williams another hearing based on his claim that he was a victim of racially biased jury selection in his 1981 trial. The prosecutor in that case struck all three blacks who might have served on the jury. Unless the U.S.

The problem isn't new, but gang violence seems to be on everybody's agenda at the moment. The House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a bill that would, if enacted by the Senate and signed by the president, allow some kinds of gang crimes to be tried in federal court. It would also lengthen sentences and create a RICO-like statute to give law enforcers an additional tool with which to attack the problem.