GANG PEACE - I first met Cynthia Mendenhall two hours before the funeral of her nephew, Frank Evans Jr. We were seated in the booth of a Denny’s on the edge of Watts, eight miles south of downtown Los Angeles. I expressed my condolences. She received them with a nod. Her sister-in-law, she said, was taking it hard. In fact, she nearly refused to come to the funeral. Even though it had been almost two weeks since Frank was shot, she still couldn’t accept that he was dead.
Mendenhall could. A 51-year-old mother of four, she had lost two sons to gang warfare in Watts, something she knew well. During the 1980s, Mendenhall was a high-ranking member of the PJ Crips, one of the oldest Crips gangs in Watts. We sat down at a booth, and Mendenhall began to talk.
“Frank was a free spirit, an African-American white boy, a hippie,” she said. “He thought he could go anywhere.” Frank, who was nicknamed “Peace,” was wrong about that.
Gangs in Los Angeles don’t fly their colors the way they used to, but the rivalries persist. In the 1980s, members of the two dominant gangs, the Crips and the Bloods, flaunted their affiliation by dressing in blue (Crips) or red (Bloods), even though doing so made them targets.
Today, computer databases, gang injunctions and enhanced criminal sanctions for gang-related crime have driven such obvious, outward expressions of gang affiliation underground. Gang members now wear their colors mainly on YouTube (where they conceal their identities with bandannas) or on special occasions. As a result, a blue or red shirt no longer signifies gang membership in the way that it used to.
At least, it’s not supposed to. But when Evans stepped out of a friend’s house wearing blue in a part of South Los Angeles controlled by the Swan Bloods, a member of the gang pedaling past took offense and opened fire on him.
“Now they just found out they shot the wrong person,” Mendenhall said. “They say, ‘Oh, my God, we did not know who he was.’ ” Meaning: they didn’t know about me. Mendenhall is better known in South Los Angeles as Sista Soulja, a name earned in the 1980s when Watts was practically a war zone. (Mendenhall is not to be confused with Sister Souljah, the rapper Bill Clinton made famous on the 1992 campaign trail.)
The code of the streets is clear: You kill one of mine, I’ll kill one of yours. But things have changed in South LA, somewhat. When Mendenhall’s cellphone rings a half-hour into breakfast, it’s not a PJ Crip calling to plan a counterattack; rather, it’s her favorite police officer, Sgt. Anthony Cato, who grew up near Watts. He’s calling to talk about arrangements for the funeral and the three repasts that will follow it, each of which is occurring in a different part of the city so that mourners from rival gangs won’t have to cross into each other’s territories.
“O.K., O.K., listen to me,” Mendenhall tells him. She then reviews where she wants Cato to deploy his officers — these intersections, this many cars, this close to the church where the service is taking place. She even specifies their gear (“soft tactical,” meaning short-sleeve shirts and a more casual look).
The goal is to provide enough of a law-enforcement presence to prevent a drive-by shooting — funerals make for tempting targets — without angering family members by overwhelming the occasion with police officers. (Read the rest … including how former LAPD Chief Gates’ plan failed … here.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 11 Issue 57
Pub: July 16, 2013