Ghettoside (12 page)

Another witness, Debra Johnson, testified against her attackers in a Nickerson Gardens massacre-style assault that left two people dead. Johnson—asthmatic, on parole, and addicted to drugs—was maimed by gunshots to the mouth and chest and could barely talk. But on the stand, she brimmed with spirit. “That’s just how it was,” she declared, and pointed an accusing finger at the shooters.

Both of these women were from the same neighborhoods as the kilers; they were both poor people indoctrinated in street codes. And both were very brave.

Yet although witness fear and safety was addressed periodically by the press and by policy makers, its centrality to the syndrome of black
murders was massively underrated. In fact, journalistic and academic work related to witnesses tended to focus on their unreliability. The public could not be blamed for believing that these constituted primary problems in the justice system, since so many experts specialized in this issue, and so many grants were awarded for research about them. In Skaggs’s time, there were regular calls to further restrict the use of eyewitness evidence in court—far fewer calls to better protect the mostly poor, frightened, and highly vulnerable people upon whose shoulders the state laid the burden of testifying.

The witness intimidation problem was just one aspect of the larger ghettoside problem: a shadow legal system that competed with formal law.

Each time he delved into a Southeast case, Skaggs had the sense that he was entering an underworld. For all the chaos, this world was organized, rule-bound. Black people in Watts were generally governed by a complex system of etiquette, backed by the threat of violence. This was the shadow that filled the vacuum of legitimate authority. One reason it existed was the neighborhood’s vast underground economy. When your business dealings are illegal, you have no legal recourse. Many poor, “underclass” men of Watts had little to live on except a couple hundred dollars a month in county General Relief. They “cliqued up” for all sorts of illegal enterprises, not just selling drugs and pimping but also fraudulent check schemes, tax cons, unlicensed car repair businesses, or hair braiding. Some bounced from hustle to hustle.
They bartered goods, struck deals, and shared proceeds, all off the books. Violence substituted for contract litigation. Young men in Watts frequently compared their participation in so-called gang culture to the way white-collar businesspeople sue customers, competitors, or suppliers in civil courts. They spoke of policing themselves, adjudicating their own disputes. Other people call police when they need help, explained
an East Coast Crip gang member. “We pick up the phone and call our homeboys.”

Gangs issued informal “passes”—essentially granting waivers that
exempted people from the rules that governed everyone else. A star athlete in a gang neighborhood, for example, might be issued a “pass” that exempted him from participation in gang life. Or passes might be extended to people allowed to conduct illegal businesses in rival territories. “Selling without a pass” was an occasional homicide motive.

Gangs could seem pointlessly self-destructive, but the reason they existed was no mystery. Boys and men always tend to group together for protection. They seek advantage in numbers. Unchecked by a state monopoly on violence, such groupings fight, commit crimes, and ascend to factional dominance as conditions permit. Fundamentally gangs are a consequence of lawlessness, not a cause.

Some version of gangs has characterized lawless settings throughout history. In the nineteenth century, gangs ran the gamut: bandit groups among Russian peasants bearing catchy names like the “Steppe Devils”; Philadelphia volunteer firefighters who warred with each other and committed arson; New York City “voting gangs” who angrily confronted each other, fighting over what Monkkonen called the “nineteenth-century equivalent of cocaine—access to the jobs and graft political powers offered.” In Georgia and Virginia in the early twentieth century, the “gang” mantle belonged to groups of black and white
moonshiners who intimidated people and killed snitches.

The tendency for people to band together when state power is weak is so inevitable it can even seem innate. “The latent causes of faction,” wrote founding father James Madison, are “
sown in the nature of man.” Without law, people use violence collectively to settle scores and right wrongs, and commonly refer to violence as their own law. Wherever law is absent or undeveloped—wherever it is shabby, ineffective, or disputed—some form of self-policing or communal justice usually emerges.

Police, prosecutors, and politicians in L.A. blamed gangs for the homicide problem. They portrayed gangs as formidable nations of organized crime or as an exotic new social disease. But among street officers in South Bureau, doubts sometimes surfaced, a sense that much of what
was breathlessly termed “gang culture” was pretty ordinary group behavior. Officers couldn’t help noticing certain inconsistencies, like the way so much gang crime seemed to involve just four or five guys “cliquing up,” in the spirit of a high school locker room, or the way
so few gang homicides stemmed from drug deals—and so many from infighting. Some gang members showed signs of being unwilling draftees, and many monikers sounded less like noms de guerre than like playground taunts—“Cheeseburger,” “Wheezy,” “Klayhead,” “Beer Can.” Petty arguments, insults, and women seemed to drive a lot of gang violence. One gang war in Southeast stemmed from the sale of a used car. Gang members in Watts bragged of making large sums. But in the morgue, the rolled wads of dollar bills found inside shoes contradicted them: these were poor people. The black market is a desperate place.

The size of the stakes did not limit the reach of the shadow system, however. Seemingly minor transgressions could bring severe reprisals. Skaggs marveled that one of the highest offenses in the underground was the simple act of “lying on” people, in the sense of spreading malicious gossip about them. But the prohibition that affected him most was the one banning snitching—that is, cooperating with police. This was not simply a criminal ethos. Snitching was sometimes seen as borderline racial betrayal, a concession to a law enforcement system that had not served blacks especially well. People in Watts would argue that street justice was ethically superior. They would pressure homicide witnesses to keep quiet so the victim’s family would have a chance to strike back.

The snitching taboo was surprisingly nuanced. It was more like a standard of selective cooperation. Gang members sometimes turned in their own for the killing of children, for example. This followed from the correct assumption that such “innocent victim” cases would
bring out the heat
—that is, provoke an aggressive police response. But moral repugnance also played a role. Gang members who snitched in such cases sometimes did so because they considered the mistake “out of bounds,” or beyond the pale. “They have their own idea of what’s justifiable,” Skaggs said.

Other killers were protected by a broad consensus, extending beyond gang members. Murders of gang assailants inside enemy territory were
notoriously difficult to solve for this reason; the invader was seen to have had it coming. Detectives were also less likely to win cooperation in cases in which the victims were obnoxious or strangers. Skaggs described one case involving a victim who had been an annoyance to his neighbors: “Everyone in Nickerson says, ‘That’s no problem if he got killed! Why are you guys even bothering?’ ” he said.

Nearly every official who dealt closely with crime in Watts felt the same way. “
They have their own businesses … their own law!” prosecutor Joe Porras said of the participants in the gang cases he tried in Compton Courthouse. “It’s a parallel world, and you are trying to bring your law into it.” Cops and prosecutors felt like door-to-door salesmen, trying to peddle a legal system no one wanted anything to do with. Prosecutor Grace Rai marveled at how much work it was just to get people to participate in proceedings at Compton Courthouse. To witnesses, jurors, and victims, “you can’t just say, ‘This is a violation of the law,’ ” Rai said. First, “you have to get them
behind
the law.”

Testifying in Compton Courthouse in late 2009, one young black man explained why he had not reported a killing he had been present at. “The place I live at—
there’s
rules and regulations
behind living there,” he said. He lived in the territory of the Bounty Hunter gang. Pressed for details, he did not say whose rules they were, or how he had come to learn them—simply that they existed for him unquestionably, enforced by an implied threat that surrounded him, as ever-present as the roar of traffic from the elevated freeways. An attorney asked what would happen if he violated these mysterious “rules and regulations.” The young man answered with an impatient shrug: “Killed, shot—anything,” he said.

Back in the 1930s, the anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker wrote of the proscriptions of Jim Crow in exactly such terms. Powdermaker noted a conversation with a black woman about her fear of socializing with a white man: “When asked what she is afraid of, she laughs and says: ‘Don’t you know it is against the law?’ Further questions make it clear that she knows of no specific law … but
the law to her is a vague and sinister force, transcending any body of definite rules.”

The alternate ghettoside “law” in Watts was exactly like this—a
vague and sinister force transcending any body of definite rules. The shadow system had long ago evolved to the point that a mere hard look or the sucking of a tooth conveyed its lethal force without further elaboration. People knew the “rules and regulations” and obeyed them.

At the same time, some Watts residents appeared to long for freedom from the oppressive menace of informal law. Many older gang members appeared miserable and talked constantly of “getting out.” In the privacy of the interrogation room, many proved willing to turn on fellow gang members, telling detectives that they secretly disliked them. Residents would still holler “One time!” at the cops. The term derived from the memory of police touring black neighborhoods once a day, making no real effort to address crime. “One time” was a stock anticop insult, just like “po-po” and “blue-eyed devil.” Yet it contained a plaintive note—a paradoxical suggestion that more times might be better.

And once in a while, street hustlers would make it clear that they would rather have formal justice if given the choice: they’d call 911. When the puzzled officers arrived, the hustlers would ask them to referee disputes: “My dope got ripped off! I want you to book him for robbery!”

Skaggs learned to think of his job as persuasion: selling formal law to people who distrusted it and who were answering to another authority—shadow law. The pitch had to be convincing and relentless. Ghettoside detective work was “ninety percent talking to people. Maybe a hundred percent,” Skaggs said.

The challenge left no room for self-doubt, no room to equivocate. Skaggs was made for it. He went back again and again to the same streets, the same houses, knocking over and over, rousting witnesses at dawn or late at night. He learned certain patterns of life in Watts—where junkies loiter, which couch a drug dealer might call home.

Skaggs’s manner of knocking was loud, persistent, and seemed to brook no opposition. He banged on windows using his department-issue flashlight, since most homes in Southeast had those steel security doors and it was hard to knock on their metal screens. If no one came,
he banged some more. He moved to the next window and the next, banging and banging, as if he had all the time in the world. He might return several times that day. Sometimes people talked to him just to get him to go away.

“In the room” (which, in Southeast, literally meant a room, since there was no interrogation booth), Skaggs enveloped people with his conviction. Everything would be better once the truth came out—this was his axiom. His approach was neither coarse nor hostile. He simply bore down, relentless and businesslike. He talked of putting things right, of releasing burdens. He presented justice as psychological relief, even to suspects. He believed it was.

These were the skills that mattered because there were few mysteries among Southeast cases. The homicides were essentially public events—showy demonstrations of power meant to control and intimidate people. They took place on public streets, in daylight, often in front of lots of people.

Killers often bragged. Some were so brazen they posted public signs taking credit. Gloating graffiti was a common homicide clue.
DLB fallen star hahaha!!!
read one such public announcement in Watts. It had been spray-painted in an alley hours after a youth nicknamed Star was shot to death. (DLB stood for Denver Lane Bloods, who in this case were allied with the suspects from a neighboring gang.)

Families of the dead often heard rumors of who did it. Once in a while, a family member would report to police that the killers had attended the funeral, or paid them a menacing visit. An uncle in Southeast Division reported hearing the name of his nephew’s killer from friends. But he was hoping police would discover the killer’s identity without involving him. One mother in the Southwest Division reported that the killers of her son knocked on her door. They taunted her about her loss. If she told police, they would kill her too, they said.

“Everybody knows” was a phrase that cropped up a lot. Names buzzed on what Southeast detectives called the Ghetto Information Network—the GIN. But even when murders took place amid crowds of
people, detectives were left with no witnesses. A score of people would see a murder; not one of them would testify.

To counter this, La Barbera taught his detectives to think of themselves as Madison Avenue impresarios. Their job wasn’t deducing—it was sales. They had to “sell ice cubes to an Eskimo!” he would say. The elegant business attire was part of this ethos. “People say, oh, you think you’re perfect,” La Barbera said. “Well, yeah! We’d better be.” He kept a whiteboard near his desk to track cases and leave messages. The salesman’s credo, “ABC—Always Be Closing,” was written at the top.