Photo by Craig Carlson

Ben Tufuku. By 1979 there were three black gangs. “Today there are approximately seven black gangs — Lincoln Park, Piru, 5/9 Brims, West Coast, Neighborhood, Syndo, Ghosttown.”

It was a little after noon on a Wednesday in midsummer. Ben Tukufu paced tight circles in front of a blackboard set up in the auditorium of the Neighborhood House Association in Southeast San Diego.

Street Youth Program work crew

Photo by Craig Carlson

A counselor with the City of San Diego Street Youth Program, Tukufu had just left a Street Youth-sponsored crew of fifteen teenage boys cutting brush in nearby Southcrest Park and had come to address police cadets. The cadets had been bused to the Southeast community for a day-long briefing by black leaders.

Ben Tufuku: “San Diego’s black community gets its key from Los Angeles. If we go to L.A. and see a truck painted up five, six different colors, the next thing you know, you see trucks in San Diego bein’ painted multicolor."

Photo by Craig Carlson

Once the approximately fifty men and women settled on their folding chairs, Tukufu introduced himself. Wiry and tense, skinny, a furze of beard and modified Afro outlining his narrow face. Tukufu was wearing jeans, a green polo shirt, and a Raiders cap with the bill tilted up. “I'm a street person,” said Tukufu. “Primarily, my office is the front seat of my ’79 El Camino.” Those running the four-year-old Street Youth Program “are not connected with the police department,” he said.

Muhammad Ali Abbas-Hassan: “Sometimes I break down and cry.”

Photo by Craig Carlson

“Your job is to apprehend. Mine is to prevent.” Immediately Tukufu launched into a history of the Southeast black gang life. Until the late Sixties, there was almost no black gang activity in San Diego, he said. Then in 1969 a member of the Los Angeles Crips moved to San Diego. He organized an offshoot of his Los Angeles gang at Washington High School. By 1972 the group was active in the Southeast area.

Ramon "Chunky" Sanchez, director of Street Youth Program

Photo by Craig Carlson

“San Diego’s black community gets its key from Los Angeles. They set our trends. We’re in the back yards of L.A. We learn from them what’s uppity to do, what kind of groove you should be in. If we go to L.A. and see a truck painted up five, six different colors, the next thing you know, you see trucks in San Diego bein’ painted multicolor. Same thing takes place with gang activities.”

Tufuku and Richard "Liko" Davis. "They really watch out for these kids.’’

Photo by Craig Carlson

At the end of the summer of 1975, said Tukufu, there were still only two black gangs. Central City and the West Coast Crips. By 1979 there were three black gangs, “et cetera, et cetera,” said Tukufu, catching his breath. “Today there are approximately seven black gangs — Lincoln Park, Piru [pronounced Pie-rue], 5/9 Brims, West Coast, Neighborhood, Syndo, Ghosttown.”

“One thing about youngsters, if you explain it and at the same time offer a replacement, they’ll go for it."

Photo by Craig Carlson

As gang membership increased, so did crime. In December of 1981, in response to statistics attributing violent crime to local youth gangs, Mayor Pete Wilson appointed a task force to develop a program that would reduce gang-related crimes. The task force recommended a program whose goal would be to direct gang members and potential gang members into constructive activity and to help them locate employment and job training.

Southeast San Diego

Photo by Craig Carlson

Using police crime statistics, three target areas were selected: South Bay, Logan, and Southeast. Eight “streetwise” individuals were hired: a program director, an assistant director, and six counselors, “among them, myself,” said Tukufu. Because approximately two-thirds of San Diego gangs are Hispanic and one-third are black, four counselors were to be Hispanic and two black.

"They don’t have a cow to kick and a watermelon patch to go steal a watermelon from, so they go write some graffiti on somebody’s wall."

Photo by Craig Carlson

Squinting, studying the rows of faces — white males and a sprinkling of women, Hispanics, and blacks — Tukufu dropped his voice and spoke with a warm confidentiality. “I was a boy much like the boys I work with. In my case, takin’ up the street ways, the drug deal in’, armed robbery, led me to goin’ to the penitentiary. In December, 1970, I was convicted.

From mid-June through mid-August, from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. on weekdays, the program sponsors three crews of fifteen to twenty males, ages fourteen to eighteen.

Photo by Craig Carlson

"I was at Chino, San Quentin, Folsom, and Susanville. I came home,” said Tukufu, lavishing home with a smile, “in February, 1975.” He has not been in trouble since. But he didn’t consider himself qualified for a job as counselor to gang members or potential gang members just because he had been a criminal and served time in the penitentiary. “It isn’t my past that makes me good at what I do; it’s what I have to offer in the present.

“You may not have a clear picture of why a youngster gets into a gang,” said Tukufu, his voice spiraling upward once more. He listed reasons — a desire for identity, need for protection, camaraderie. “Ever’body wants to claim something, wants to be a part of something. Gangs offer that. They also offer opportunities for advancement within the neighborhood and recognition.”

A principal project of the Street Youth Program is its summer work crews. From mid-June through mid-August, from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. on weekdays, the program sponsors three crews of fifteen to twenty males, ages fourteen to eighteen. Two crews go into South Bay and Logan Heights. “My group, the Southeast crew, works here. They gather trash, cut brush, and paint over graffiti. ‘If you want to claim a neighborhood,’ I tell ’em, ‘and are willing to gang-bang [fight] over it, then you oughta have pride enough in it to clean it up.’ ” The cadets smiled.

These crews, Tukufu said, serve in part as “a safety net’’ for the fourteen-and fifteen-year-olds. “This year I’ve been geared to that younger age because these guys have the least chance of getting a summer job. That means they have another whole summer during which they have a chance of being incarcerated and being brought into the gang situation.”

Tukufu lowered his voice again. “At fourteen, a youngster starts to have value as a gang member. He has some mobility, some experiences, a certain amount of confidence. Entry-level age for gangs and for jobs is the same.

“In the black community, the primary reason kids participate in gang life is because they lack a better alternative. If a guy gets lucky and knocks himself a job at National Steel, you won’t find that guy claimin’ a corner anymore. When youngsters get into jobs where they see positive things going on, that’s a start. They're going to learn that other stuff anyway. They’re goin’ to get all the teach in’ from professional teachers out there on that stuff.” Tukufu confessed that he did not expect that youngsters with whom his Street Youth Program work crews group worked would entirely cut their connections with gang life and drugs. “But what I hope is, that after they have been with a crew for the summer, or after they’ve had some positive contact with one of our counselors, what they will say is, ‘I want to be able to hang at the park, I want to be around the guys who are sellin’ that base, but I don’t necessarily want to use it.’ It’s that change of attitude to ‘don’t necessarily want to use it’ that makes me feel good.”

Tukufu told the cadets that when they come to Southeast as officers, they must be prepared to treat people the way they would want to be treated. If they were to be able to practice this golden rule in his community, they would have to learn in what ways it differed from theirs. For instance, if they saw folks standing around in a parking lot near a pay phone, it didn’t necessarily mean trouble. “Lots of our folks don’ have no phone. But if you don’t know the community, you wouldn’t think of that,” said Tukufu, glowering, his pace picking up. “An’ if a strange guy in a uniform came runnin’ into your neighborhood when you are just doin’ what you normally do, and ask you, ‘What you doin’?’ and started wantin’ to see ever’body’s ID an’ all? You wouldn’t like it none.” Tukufu, by then pacing back and forth in front of the cadets as a preacher will when he gets hot on a Sunday morning, shook his head in the negative. “You wouldn’t,” he repeated.

“White folks talk about how black folks just rob and steal from each other. Most black folks can’t afford to leave the neighborhood to do their robbin’.” The remark drew a few chuckles, but for the most part the faces looking back at Tukufu had taken on the furrows that faces have when a grim fact has been presented. Among black faces in the group, several had lost all expression, leaving blank gazes that suggested embarrassment.

Tukufu cooled. With mock weariness, he said that he knew the cadets were learning about gangs, gang garb, gang-banging, about Crips and how they all call each other “Cuzz” and wear blue rags, and Pirus, and how Pirus call each other “Blood” and wear red rags. However, he warned, “Everybody with red on in a red neighborhood, or with blue on in a blue-gang neighborhood, is not necessarily a gang member. You gotta understand that these kids come along together age-wise. They use the same language. They get the same likes at the same time. If some youngster starts adornin’ himself in a blue hat or red shoestrings, there may be a wave of blue hats or red strings. That happens. It may not mean anything about gang membership. There may be as many as 30,000 youngsters in the communities that our program serves, but only 1200 to 1500 of them are actual gang members. That's important for you all to know. Important.”

Two days earlier, on a Monday, I had been a ride-along with Muhammad Ali Abbas-Hassan, a community relations officer with the San Diego Police Department. From four in the afternoon until almost midnight,we had driven up and down streets in the Southeast in an unmarked police car. In some blocks, like those on the heights in Valencia Park, homes were neat, yards emerald green and dotted with flowers. Jets of water from twirling sprinklers held rainbow reflections. Hassan said, “You are seeing the La Jolla of the Southeast community.”

We passed other areas, still neat but more modest, blocks in which many of the homes are owned by retired military and people working two jobs. Along other streets, windows were broken out and boarded over, garbage and shattered bottles littered alleys. Hassan had slowed the car and pointed out a telephone pole against which a young black man had recently been shot and killed. We drove through the now-deserted Fedco store’s parking lot and through an apartment complex just behind Fedco. This complex had begun as fairly nice condominiums, said Hassan, and then gone downhill. There were boarded-over windows here, too.

Farther on, we slowed down by a house on which skulls had been painted and the word whore written. Hassan said, “You get an idea of the mentality there. What is outside is what is inside the minds of folks who write that stuff.”

As darkness fell, I saw several windows glowing with lighted kerosene lamps. The electricity, the gas, even the water was turned off, said Hassan, because people could not pay the bills. What I was seeing as we drove, Hassan told me in no uncertain terms, had been born out of a 400-year history of slavery, racism, and discrimination.

Our car was fitted with a police radio. Stabbings, beatings, armed robberies, car thefts, a hit-and-run, descriptions of fights in progress with “guns, knives, and bottles” came up on the radio. Hassan declared it a fairly quiet night. What was not quiet were the young people, particularly the young men. After dark, parking lots outside low-income housing projects were lined with as many as twenty boys at a time, “throwing signs,” or signaling with their hands. Hassan identified these signals as part gang identification and part sign language offering drugs for sale. Anguish contorted Hassan’s features as he spoke of the hopelessness among young black men, more than fifty percent of whom are jobless; of drugs, particularly the recent pandemic sales and use of the purified cocaine crystals called “crack” or “ready rock”; of early deaths by overdose, gang-banging, and neighborhood violence. When he considers the future of young men in his community, Hassan had said, “Sometimes I break down and cry.” There was, however, hope for these young men, if somebody were willing to take a chance on them. He suggested that if I wanted to meet a group that was taking a chance with young people, I should go to the Street Youth Program across the street from his office in the 1100 block of South Forty-third Street.

On Wednesday morning, two days after the ride-along with Hassan. I went to the white house on South Forty-third where the Street Youth Program has its offices. The program secretary said that the house used to be a beauty salon, then a doctor’s office. “It’s one of those buildings that just becomes whatever comes along.” On the wall above the doors that lead into the director’s and counselors' offices, the two-by-three-foot hand-lettered sign reads,

• NO RAGS, NO DRUGS.
• NO WEAPONS
• NO GRAFFITI
• OR HANDSIGNS
• PERMITTED

Ramon “Chunky” Sanchez, Hispanic, is the program’s director. Donald Epps, black, is assistant director. Epps noted that San Diego’s program is unique in that it “mixes black and brown. Normally these programs don’t. We feel we have made a lot of progress in bringing together the two cultures.’’ On the down side, with only six street counselors to work with 1200 to 1500 gang members, said Epps, “there are numerous gangs out there, raising hell, that we don’t have the resources to reach.’’

Currently, said Epps, the program operates with a budget of $300,000. Eighty-eight percent of its funding comes from the city, twelve percent from the state Office of Criminal Justice and Planning. The Regional Youth Employment Program provides wages for fifty to sixty slots for summer jobs and for several year-round jobs for older youngsters who are out of school. Epps calls Tlikufu and the second black counselor, Richard “Liko” Davis, who came to the program a year ago, “guardian angels for these youngsters. They really watch out for these kids.’’

I met Tukufu and Davis. Tukufu invited me to go with him to the Neighborhood House Association on South Forty-first for his presentation. The closed auditorium was hot that Wednesday afternoon, and the air still. Tukufu wound up his presentation, asked for questions. “If we have questions about gangs, can we come see you?” a man asked.

Tukufu scrutinized the young man’s stolid, Scandinavian features. “Sure, you can call and make an appointment and come by. But if you do come by the office, don’ go shakin’ my hand and talkin’ that talk about ‘Brother’ and act like we be knowin’ each other, because we don’t,” said Tukufu, grinning.

Formalities of leave-taking over, we climbed back into the El Camino and headed for Southcrest Park to rejoin the crew. Tukufu slid a cassette into the tape deck. “Patti LaBelle,” he said, “she’s my homegirl. She’s from Philadelphia.” Tukufu said he was born in West Philadelphia in 1949. “When I was a youngster and we’d be in the basement with the red light on, slow dancin'? Her records brought me through those years. Kids don’t like this stuff,” he said, referring to LaBelle’s lush melodies and rich orchestration. “They want that rap — Run-DMC, Whodini, the Fat Boys, the Egyptian Lover.” Tukufu, thirty-seven now, laughed and said, “I’m gettin’ old.”

As we drove, Tukufu pointed out neighborhood landmarks: a house where until several weeks ago a drug dealer had done business, a corner grocery where kids hung out and drugs were sold, a popular liquor store where a drive-by killing had taken place, low-income apartment complexes. Some yards were green; their grass was glossy. Others were bare dirt. “You don’t buy grass seed,” said Tukufu, “when you need the money for groceries.”

Painted on walls that wc passed were names such as Little Sneak Around, Little Boss Man, Big Al, Nasty Red, Mad Mike, In-sane, Mad Blue, Capone. In what was clearly a rhetorical query, Tukufu asked, “Can you imagine a guy namin’ himself Little Sneak Around? I can understand ’em wantin’ to change their names, but I think it ought to be done in a different environment.” (In 1969 Tukufu, who at that time went by the name he was born with, Benjamin Carleton Crawley, became a member of the San Diego organization connected with Ron Karenga's cultural nationalist group, US. He then took the name “Tukufu,” which means “Exalted One” in Swahili.)

Earlier that day, at the office and while Tukufu talked to the cadets, I realized that Tukufu had his own way of getting to things, that he talked on side paths, by indirection. But he always got there. “In mid-June,” began his explanation of the names I had read, “the work crew has an orientation session v and devised rules. ‘Drinkin’ and drugs,’ I tell the crew, ‘You can’t get so drunk the day before that you can’t come to work the next day.’ Then I say, ‘Okay, what about fightin And they say, ‘Yeah, there better be no fightin’.’ I say, ‘We better not call each other outta our names. That might start somethin’.’ If I let them call each other by their street names, then I allow for the propensity for somebody to get into the gang jargon and disrespect somebody.

“Because I don’t allow it. I’m doin’ two things. Number one, we’re here to get that gang thing out of your life. Number two, Bennie is a good name. If we’re goin’ to get an alternative, we’re goin’ do better than B. Hog. We're goin’ to get somethin’ with some grip to it. We not gonna leave Bennie and go grab Trey Deuce. We’re not gonna go get Capone, ’cause he’s a white boy, been dead a long time, and lived a wicked life.

“One thing about youngsters, if you explain it and at the same time offer a replacement, they’ll go for it. I haven’t seen nothin’ these youngsters have, nothin’ that they treasure or grip so tight, they won’t give it up, if you have somethin’ else to offer them. What happens is that when people come and ask ’em to give up stuff, they come with empty hands.”

On our way to the park, Tukufu was stopped twice by people passing by in cars. Another thing I had learned earlier that day was that when I went from Place A to Place B with Tukufu, I could expect that people would honk, pull over, and stop to say hello. During half of these stops, Tukufu would mention a job opening about which he’d heard. Or he would ask what was happening with a youngster he had not seen around recently. Once Tukufu’s impromptu meetings were concluded, he would drop right back into the conversation at the point at which we had left off.

“These kids,” he said, as we drove into the Southcrest parking lot, “aren’t that different than anybody else’s kids. They don’t have a cow to kick and a watermelon patch to go steal a watermelon from, so they go write some graffiti on somebody’s wall. I used to think that only blacks did this. Hell, white boys do this, too.”

As we got out of the car, Tukufu told me that if I would sit down at the table, after a while the youngsters, with his prompting, would begin to talk fairly normally among themselves. By listening, he suggested,.! would discover a great deal about the nature of their lives.

It was almost two in the afternoon. At a picnic table under the shade of a tree, the crew had spread out lunches of meat and cheese sandwiches, oranges, carrot sticks, pint cartons of milk. (The lunches are provided through the program.) The boys spoke in the coded language and present-tense verbs, the radical elisions and suppressions of the r-sound (as in “fo’ ” for “four”) that has come to be called “Black English.” Their style was narrative; almost any statement contained the potential for a story with a story’s beginning, middle, and end. Several of the boys, like Tukufu, told these stories through a cast of varied voices, at times taking the part of as many as four or five characters and managing to keep each voice distinct. As they talked, a vast, complex history of the Southeast community as seen through the eyes of these young men unrolled: there was the story of somebody’s big brother who perhaps was pimping; there was someone’s uncle who went to the pen with somebody’s else’s cousin; there was a guy’s older brother who just got home from the pen; there was a cousin who was “cornin’ up,” doing well on the street and driving a new Mercedes. There was boasting talk of weaponry: Uzis, Magnums, .44s, .38s. There were things that had happened recently: apartment break-ins, stabbings, shootings, a wreck in a stolen car, deals that went down, deals that went bad. There was gossip about peers: who had “hooked” (left one gang for another), who was using the pipe (freebasing “crack” or “ready rock”), who was smoking Sherm (PCP-laced cigarettes), whose “baby mama” just had a baby. They addressed one another jocularly as “nigger.”

Listening to the boys, I felt that even though I was fifteen minutes from downtown, I was in a foreign country. Much of what the boys said I could not understand. Their apparently easy use of what I heard as racial epithet, “nigger,” shocked me. Its use seemed evidence to me these boys were filled with self-hate. As we got back into the El Camino to go to the office, I told Tukufu what I had been thinking.

He nodded and began to talk. “I put youngsters on job sites, two weeks later I see one of them on the street. I say ‘What’s happenin’?’ He’ll say, ‘Baby girl was trippin” and by that mean that his boss, a woman, don’ like blacks. Or he’ll jus’ shrug ’n’ say, ‘I got fired.’ When I delve into what happened, in jobs and school suspensions, I often discover a misunderstanding, a discrepancy, based on language. The youngster’s boss or teacher will have asked him for an explanation of something he has done and then not understood his answer.

“Their English sometimes gets them diagnosed as developmentally disabled. If you took me and dumped me in China, I’m sure I’d be developmentally disabled,” he said. He added that social service professionals who work with these boys often have great difficulty. “A lot of that clinical talk, ‘Well, Johnny, your apprehension of things is faulty,’ that don’t go over with these youngsters.”

About “nigger,” Tukufu said, “There was a time when I would have thought it more damaging to me to call a brother ‘nigger’ than to go on heroin. The word felt like a sharp stab to me.” But the use of “nigger” had changed over time, he explained. “At first it was what white folks said when they were talkin’ bad about black folks. Then it became a word black folks would use about their own people, if that person were doing something untasteful. Along the way, a generation younger than mine, it became another learnt behavior, a reflex, a word folks were sayin’ without thinking about it. That’s who these youngsters learned it from.” Young people, Tukufu continued, do not know the word’s history. “They’ve been left with this word jes’ hangin’ around.

“They have a limited vocabulary in terms of talking about their emotions. Referring to each other that way has become a label of distinction, a way of expressing intimacy and friendship. If they don’t know a guy well, they may call him ‘dude.’ But if they’re in the same set an’ they’re friends, they’ll say, nigger.

Tukufu indicated that he didn’t like the term and didn’t use it. But he was not sure that because youngsters called each other “nigger” I could assume they had absorbed into themselves the hatred inherent in the word when white racists used it. When black people have dealt with the larger culture, which for the most part has meant dealing with white people and white people’s institutions, they have needed to try not to get the message confused with the “message deliverer,” said Tukufu, grinning. As example, he offered this, “We don’t want youngsters to have no respect for law and order because they run into a bad policeman, or because they hear about a judge involved in prostitution. When they call each other ‘nigger,’ they may not mean by it what white folks meant.”

The boys I had met, said Tukufu, ranged in age from fourteen to seventeen. Most were fourteen and fifteen. These younger guys, he added, are “more receptive. They haven’t had a chance to be so hardened.” Several of the seventeen-year-olds were on their second season with the crew. “They are more outgoing this year, not as intimidated when it comes to talking to somebody.” Smiling, Tukufu added, “Now, that’s rewarding. Several of these youngsters are very gifted. I don’t want to see them give up on the establishment and do somethin’ like become a pimp.”

Tukufu uses the crew experience to introduce the boys “to the importance of a work world and a work ethic.” But in doing so, he said, “I am realistic. I take rules from a world the youngsters don't respect and make sense out those rules for them by relating to the world they do respect. For instance, one rule is that anybody messin’ with somebody’s else's lunch is gonna be docked. So about the lunches, I tell ’em, ‘It’s jus’ like you do with the dope man. If it was the dope man bringin’ dope instead of the van driver bringin’ the lunches, you wouldn’t run up to the car and grab. Lunches gotta be like that.’

“I try never to lie to ’em and say a guy don’t look good drivin’ down the street in that new pretty car. Because I know that in their eyes, you drive up in somethin’ like a big pretty Cadillac, it looks like you livin' full speed. But I want them to see that you have to crawl before you walk.

“Likewise, I don’t say about that dope, ‘You ain’t gonna get no good feelin’ hittin’ that dope.’ That’s why people use it. They don’t use it because it makes them feel miserable. An’ by the time they do get to where the dope's makin’ ’em feel bad, they've had that history of good feelin’. They may say to themselves, ‘Here's twenty minutes of bein’ really spaced and twinky. I’ll go for an hour of bein' depressed, because it can’t be too much different from what I’m feel in’ most of the time.’ “Last year we had this kid on the crew, I was here one Saturday morning, and he rode up on his bicycle, huffin’. He said, ‘Well, 'Kufu, where’s the crew at?’ I said, ‘Man, today is Saturday,’ and he gave me the most astonishing look. There is a kid’s life that is so shattered with confusion that he can’t keep track of the weekend. These youngsters lead such a loose and flimsy life during the week, there’s no great significance between the weekdays and weekend. You see what I mean?’’

Tukufu described himself as strict with the crews. “If a guy is late, he gets his pay docked. I want them to see that there are consequences for breaking rules. Most of these youngsters don’t live in a setting where they have to follow rules. But when guys are late, I also always make sure that I leave them some time before their next pay period to make that time up. Because I want them to see that they can do things to change their situation.

“I never stop learnin’ about workin’ with these guys, and one thing I’ve learned is that you can’t be completely harsh. When you come down hard, you also have to know when to back off. You have to figure when to cut ’em some slack.”

I was not clear, I said, how Liko and Tukufu made contact with the boys with whom they worked. “A lot of it is neighborhood network,” said Tukufu, “and being around has a lot to do with it. For almost ten years, I’ve been with the Pop Warner program [a youth football program], and before this I was a youth diversion counselor with the Neighborhood House Association. Youngsters will see us working with older guys in the neighborhood. It looks attractive. They don’t see that they’ll have to work, or that we’re kinda tough, or have a lot of rules. They tell themselves, ‘When my turn comes, when I turn fourteen, I am going to go see Tukufu and hook me up with some kinda work. If my homie can handle it, I can, too.’ ”

By then we were sitting in Tukufu’s El Camino in the parking lot behind the Street Youth Program office. I asked Tukufu if he ever had difficulty taking a work crew composed of gang members into a neighborhood “claimed” by another gang. “Sometimes,” he answered, “when we are working in other gangs’ areas. But the town is small enough, you know who’s feudin’ with who. You know what gangs is not hittin’ it off. I won’t never take these guys to the Neighborhood. I know that the Neighborhood [a Piru gang], and 5/9, for instance, have a longstanding battle. It’s going to be a while before enough new blood comes that they’re goin’ to forget what the beef's about.”

I asked Tukufu if he had ever had to stop a gang fight. Yes, he had. And he had some theories about how a potential fight was best headed off. “You have to get at these things quickly. The longer you wait, the more people get involved. The more people involved, the harder it is to stop. You get some guy claimin’, ‘Homeboy, he come through our neighborhood the other day, he did so and so.’ The sensible question is, ‘Why didn’t you do somethin’ about it then? Why you wantin’ to do somethin’ now, when you got forty guys with you?’ Well, I’m an old gang-banger, and I know how it goes. I know how you pick your time for jumpin’ on a guy, especially if you are kinda short on guts and boxing ability.”

Last summer, Tukufu said, one of the members of his work crew had violated another gang’s territory. A gang member from the affronted gang came to the Street Youth offices with some of his sidekicks. “He was complainin’ to me about this guy on our crew. We were right out here in the parking lot, me and a bunch of guys from two different sets.” Tukufu, grinning and shaking his head, pointed out to the bare dirt by the dumpsters where the confrontation had taken place. “I said, ‘Look, come here man, now y’all got a problem.’ The guy who came to complain, he turned to me and said, ‘Man, I wanna throw hands.’

“Now, I knew right off that he didn’t wanna throw hands. But now he was bein’ prodded. Nobody was say in’ nothin’, but it was all in that eye communication. Guys standin’ there watch in’. So this guy, who came complainin’, he said again, ‘Yeah, I wanna throw hands.’

“I said, ‘Well, y’all go ahead, right here in the parking lot.’ There they go, hittin’ like girls. I let 'em go for jus’ a few minutes, enough to kick up some dust, work up a little sweat. Then I said, ‘Okay, men, that’s it. Get up. Break this up. You’ve had an opportunity. That’s settled. We don’t want that cornin’ up no more. You done got it off. You done bust him up one side of the eye. You done got your lick in. So this is over.’

“Now that was an experiment on my part. I didn't know that this would work. There was the potential that it wouldn’t. If it didn't, in the night those kids might get a car and come back and do a drive-by thing. But it worked. I bluff a lot of them. I do whatever I think will work at that time.”

I asked if he were ever afraid of them. “Naw,” he answered, looking thoughtful. “Even them that have some sass, that get kinda chesty, they don’t have enough fight in them to do somethin’ to me. In a group, they might could do somethin’. But those that have that kind of cowboy mentality, well, they know I can get one shot off before they get to me.”

Back inside the office, I had an appointment to talk with Richard “Liko” Davis. Davis, said Tukufu, had been his cellie at Chino. “A cellie is someone you shared a cell with in the institution. It’s one thing to go to the pen together, but it’s another to be in a cell together, because once you’re in that cell, you let a lot of emotions go.”

In contrast to Tukufu, Davis is low-key. Stocky, compact, neatly dressed and almost dapper, thirty-seven-year-old Davis displays an obdurate, oxlike patience and a smile that starts slowly and then hangs on through a conversation. Born and reared in San Diego County by hard-working parents, his father a janitor and his mother a schoolteacher, a self-described middle-class kid who drifted into trouble, Davis spoke of himself as “having been drawn into crime by the lure of easy money, excitement, and danger.”

The first ten years of his life, Davis lived in La Jolla. After his mother’s death, when Davis was ten, his family moved to the Southeast community. Davis grew up during what he called “the tumultuous Sixties.... To me, twenty years ago. La Jolla seemed quiet and sedate, while the Southeast rolled with excitement. There were house parties every night, and the time folks went to bed in La Jolla was the time folks got up in the Southeast.”

Davis became a gang member, a Vice Lord, at fourteen. He got into drugs. “Sniffin’ airplane glue, then from glue to pills to LSD,” he said. He fought. “I got shot four times, stabbed twice, got a plate in the back of my head from where I got hit with a baseball bat, got a scar across my nose from a switchblade.”

He was lucky, he said, because although he got into drug-dealing — heroin, cocaine, PCP, marijuana — he quickly got into and out of heavy drug use. “Drugs were like drinking, for me,” he said. “I couldn’t handle either. I’d get so sad, and I’d just start cryin’, when I was drunk or high, thinkin’ about my mother. Guys would say to me, ‘Liko, you’re no fun.’

“I liked living on the edge, and before I knew it, I had caught myself up in a spider web of something that was a nightmare: trial, conviction, almost nine years in prison.”

He wasn’t con-wise when he got to the penitentiary in 1968, Davis said. “They gave me those aptitude tests, for placement. I said, “Boy, I’m gonna do real well, so maybe I can get a good job or maybe they’ll send me to a prison without all the violence.’ When I got to San Quentin, Big Red Nelson was the warden. He was a big Oklahoma redneck, red as a beet, red as meat, fire-engine red hair, six feet and six inches and weighing 225, not an ounce of fat on him, lean, mean. He acted just like he was a prisoner, as opposed to a warden. We met. He was lookin’ at my test scores. He said, ‘You know there’s two things I hate. One’s dogs that chase cars and the other is educated niggers.’ Then he said, ‘What do you want to do, ’cause you gonna be here a long time.’ I said, ‘Well, warden, I’d like to be an electrician.’ He laughed, said, ‘We’re gonna make you a cook.’ All the blacks worked in the kitchens, Chicanos worked in the laundry, whites had the clerical positions. So, I cooked, ‘culinary,’ they called it.”

Before he got to prison, said Davis, “I was living in a dream world. I was on a head-on collision with death, and I needed to slow down and take a look at my life. Prison arrested that. It stopped me. Prison gave me a chance to look at myself, to do some introspection. Prison was a nightmare but it was also the best thing that ever happened to me in my life.”

In prison Davis finished high school, and after he got out, he began attending college; he is now a few units short of a B.A. from National University. Before he came to the Street Youth Program, Davis, whose area of expertise is drug-abuse prevention, worked with Crash, Inc., a San Diego outpatient and inpatient substance-abuse treatment facility. Here at the Street Youth Program, he counsels youngsters with drug problems. He makes many contacts for the program by offering drug education presentations at schools and churches in the program target areas. Davis has served as consultant and speaker for the Bank of America, General Dynamics, and Rohr. It was during his incarceration that Davis became aware of his talent for public speaking. He laughed, ruefully. “Most of the guys in prison couldn’t read and write. I’d read to them. I’d put all this drama into the story, these gestures. Guys, big guys, thugs, would follow me around, like little kids. They’d say, ‘Hey, Liko, read this! Read this!’ ”

Davis said that the average age at which kids now begin to use drugs in the Southeast is twelve and a half, and that age is going down. The use of PCP “is especially prevalent in black communities. It is cheap and readily available, easier to get than a six-pack of beer, because with the latter, a kid at least has to find an adult to buy it for him.”

They used PCP in the Southeast community when he was a youngster, said Davis, but the route of administration has changed. “Like, when I was coming up, we took PCP, but it was orally ingested in a pill form. Today, kids smoke PCP. When I was coming up, you injected cocaine or sniffed it. Today people smoke it, freebase it.”

I asked Davis if he was shocked at the recent death of Len Bias, the Maryland basketball star, a death that was attributed to ingestion of cocaine. “No,” he said, “I’m not shocked. Simply because I know how cocaine makes you feel. Cocaine is one of those drugs that makes you feel euphoric, hyper-alert. hyper-aware, filled with initiative, drive, enthusiasm. All those American things, it makes you feel them. That’s how people get into it. I don’t care how successful you are or how big a failure you are. Cocaine gives you attributes we all admire and would like to have naturally. The thing about it is, though, ‘What comes up, must go down.’ ” Drug dealers, said Davis, in a voice that took on chill, make uniquely bad role models for youngsters. “Adolescents, particularly in poor communities, tend to measure success by what a man drives and how he dresses. Kids see dealers dressing in tailor-made suits and driving brand-new cars. Guess what they are influenced to do? Then they look at a poor social worker who drives a used car and buys his clothes off the rack.”

I asked Davis to tell me something about the boys with whom the group worked, both those who come in during the winter for job and personal counseling and those on summer crews. Most, he said, come from families whose incomes fall below- the poverty level. Few fathers live in the household. Some boys are fathers themselves. Typically they lead very isolated lives. Many rarely, if ever, leave the area bounded on the south by National Avenue, to the north by Highway 94, to the east by a jagged line that runs along Meadowbrook and Sixty-ninth and Imperial, to the west along Twenty-fifth and Market. Some have never been to the beach, to a Chargers or Padres game, to Sea World. I had supposed that they watched a lot of television. “No,” said Davis, “they just sleep. And then when night comes and they can’t sleep anymore, they prowl the neighborhood.

“When you live in a place where about all you can do is shoot some baskets and drink some beer upside a bathroom wall, how much drinkin' beer and shootin’ baskets can you do before you say, ‘I’m just gonna go back to the pad and kick it’?”

The majority read with great difficulty. (“A lot of them attend Lincoln High School, and they can’t even spell Lincoln,” Donald Epps had said.) Some cannot read at all. “It’s really sad, because they’re intelligent and perceptive. But they an victims of poor teachers who aren’t sensitive to minorities and parents who are ignorant.” Many can barely speak standard English, “and English, for them,” said Davis, “is not a second language!

“They have experienced so much failure that when you ask them what kind of work they’re look in' for, they’ll say, ‘Can you get me a janitor’s job? Can I pull weeds somewhere?’ ”

Davis told me about Bobbie (which is not his real name). “Fifteen years old. His family is on welfare. This crew job was his first job. His check didn’t come to us on time. A week and a half passed. Every day, he asked about his check.” Late one afternoon, the Regional Youth Employment Program office called. The check had arrived. Davis said he would pick it up and take it to Bobbie right away. “I drove to Bobbie's house, knocked on the door. The inquisition began. ‘Who are you? What do you want?’ They’re lookin’ out for welfare workers and police. Maybe they want time so that people who aren't supposed to be livin’ there can hide or run out the back door. Finally, when they were satisfied as to who I was, they let me in. I asked, ‘Where’s Bobbie?’ and his mother said, ‘He’s up in the bed.’

“When he came in, his eyes were all red, and naturally, I am always suspicious about drugs or drink, so I said, ‘What you been doin’?’ He was real defensive. He said, ‘I been asleep, honest.’ I said, T got your check.' He smiled. He jumped up and he hugged my neck. He said ‘Oh, Liko, I'm so happy.’ His mother was standin’ there, and she told me, with tears in her eyes, ‘That’s the first check that ever come into this house that wasn't welfare.’

“When I got into my car, I broke down on the steering wheel and cried. And I prayed, ‘Lord, just give me the strength to go on with this. Because it isn’t easy work.’ ”

This is part one of a two-part story. Next week: funerals, the other side of the law, and the boys speak.