Jumped In Read online

  I have learned that if I come with an open mind and I am honest—if I explain who I really am—an anthropologist, a UCLA researcher, a crisis interventionist, a sister, a teacher, all of the above—sooner or later everyone in the gang world finds something in me they can relate to. I am a chameleon of the neighborhoods. I will fit in where I need to when I need to.

  It doesn’t always work; there are people who will not speak to me—mainly because I am female or because I am white or because of the combination of the two. “I don’t bang with any woman,” a member of the Bounty Hunter Bloods snarled when I tried to interview him. But he didn’t scare me—he was loaded on heroin and kept going on the nod. There are others around whom I am more careful. T. Rodgers, the self-proclaimed founding father of the Bloods, alternately hugs me and looks as if he is sixty seconds away from killing me. “You don’t call me, ever, you little bitch,” he had complained once with barely contained rage because, in fact, I had failed to return his voice-mail messages. Although I joked around and said, “I’m just no good,” I felt anxious and have worked hard to stay on his good side ever since that brief but threatening confrontation.

  How did I get people to trust me? I have been trained as a clinician and as a researcher. I also relied on any connection that I had—UCLA, the sheriff, the mayor, Father Greg Boyle or Alex Sanchez or Kenny Green—to vouch for my credibility. It was all of those factors but it was something more. And it was something I failed to realize for a long time. I identify with the gang members. I identify with their outsider status, with their self-sabotage, with their rebellion. I even identify with their murderous rage. And I am willing to go almost anywhere at any time to spend time with a gang member who wants to talk with me.

  Of course, there is fallout for all of this. There are people on the streets who do not trust me. Some members of the LAPD welcome my presence; some want me gone. My two brothers repeatedly tell me that they are worried about my safety. These are not my biggest problems. The biggest problem is my husband. Mark.

  Three. Mi Vida Loca

  Why don’t you just face it? Everyone’s relationships are fuckin’ crazy. What are we gonna do? La vida loca.

  —Joanna Carillo

  It was not only the world of gangs I was reentering. I was also in the midst of slowly—and quite unsteadily—reentering the world of marriage. Not an easy task under the best of circumstances.

  And my circumstances were less than “optimal.” They included a previous marriage and several romantic but wildly inappropriate relationships. My first husband was smart and successful. He wore custom-made suits, donated to liberal causes, and for eighteen years provided me with all the comforts money could buy. Unfortunately, he was more intimately involved with his computers than our marriage. He neglected our love life, our sex life, and our social life. In the meantime, I had a personal shopper at Neiman Marcus, a house featured in the New York Times, a closet full of Armani, and a Mercedes in the garage. And I was miserable. I kept going to therapy—trying to figure out what to do. I had two serious love affairs in rapid succession, one of which my husband discovered. When the dust settled and the papers were signed, the marriage was over and I was divorced.

  I wanted to get married again, and I did not want to make the same mistake twice. So I fell in love with someone who was physically gorgeous, sexy, and incredibly attentive. He was the wet dream of middle-aged dating—a widower with a charming eight-year-old daughter. Unfortunately, he wore a uniform, carried a gun, and thought the death penalty was enlightened public policy. Mark Leap was a commander—soon to be a deputy chief—in the Los Angeles Police Department. In all fairness, Mark rarely donned LAPD attire, usually opting for a suit and tie. He cooked elaborate gourmet meals and collected fine wines. His other car was a Mercedes. As a birthday gift to me, he changed his voter registration from “Independent” to “Democrat.”

  I never imagined I would date a member of the LAPD. They were Rodney King and Rampart—police brutality and the abrogation of civil rights—all rolled into one. I criticized the LAPD in forums on “The Future of Los Angeles” and marched in protest against them. In short, I had spent most of my anti-authority life acting out against law enforcement. My bias was so strong that when UCLA offered me the plum assignment of helping design and teach a series of classes on “Leadership for the 21st Century” to the command staff of the LAPD, I balked. Then I remembered the post-divorce credit card debt I was rapidly accumulating and backpedaled, agreeing to work on the project for one year. It turned out to be a great success, and I actually developed friendships with several of the captains, commanders, and deputy chiefs, including Mark. After one class, he invited me to visit him at Parker Center, LAPD headquarters. A few weeks later we met for lunch. Back at UCLA, one of my closest friends and colleagues, Shelly Brooks, asked, “So, how was lunch with the LAPD?”

  “He’s the one,” I told her.

  “What?”

  “I’m gonna marry him.”

  “You’re gonna marry him? Just how much did you have to drink at lunch?” Shelly burst out laughing.

  “He’s not like a cop. I’ve never met anyone like him. Believe me.” Shelly just shook her head. “You’re crazy. Here we go again. This will be over in a month.”

  “No, this is it. He’s different.”

  A year and a half later, we were married.

  I wanted to believe it would be different. I wanted to believe he was different. But despite everything Mark told me when we were dating—that he was not a typical cop, that he did not own a speed boat, that he did not read, eat, or breathe law enforcement. Despite every bottle in his fifteen-hundred-bottle wine cellar—despite all of this, I soon came to realize, I had married the LAPD. And try as I might, I couldn’t fit in.

  I was the LAPD’s worst nightmare. I had experimented with Marxism and controlled substances. I was a card-carrying member of the ACLU. And I believed that those three little words, “rule of law,” made up one of the most dangerous phrases in the English language. I was not good “cop wife” material. But—in a thoroughly misguided way—I believed love would conquer all. Instead, no sooner was the ring on my finger than the fight was on. My identity was at stake, and defending it felt like a full-time job. If I managed to forget the cold, hard reality of what my husband did for a living, the truth would march up and bite me in the ass.

  Before we married, I was no stranger to war and violence. Alternately terrified and fascinated, I voluntarily worked in both Bosnia and Kosovo. In Pristina, I was attached to a UN mission that continued to function throughout bombardment. The next stop after that was New York City in the aftermath of 9/11 to work at Ground Zero, feeding and counseling the workers who were clearing the rubble and dealing with loss on a daily basis. Now I was running around some of the most dangerous streets in Los Angeles. Before we were married, Mark had insisted that he didn’t want me to change. Ever.

  But this was all forgotten once we returned from our honeymoon and settled into domestic bliss. If there was a major gang bust involving the FBI, or the Counterterrorism kindergarten color wheel of elevated threat suddenly turned, I would be treated to a display of male macho that would send me running to check the expiration date on my NOW card. No gangbangers for me. I was to stay at home and watch the little girl who was now “our” daughter, Shannon, while Mark drove off into the big world.

  Along with maintaining a division of labor straight out of Leave It to Beaver, it also gradually became clear that Mark and I approached life very differently. The operating principal of my existence continued to be organized chaos. I would be working on a research grant, going to court to help some baby mama trying to get her children back from DCFS (the Department of Children and Family Services), and due at a meeting of the Watts Gang Task Force in South LA—all in the same day. And I was never happier than when I was juggling three catastrophes at the same time. Not my darling husband. There might be cancer, tragedy, infidelity, illness—or all of the seven deadly sins
simultaneously being committed—but he always possessed a plan. The two most frequent phrases I would hear in the early days of our marriage were “I love you” and “Here’s what we’re going to do.”

  The problem is, I was beginning to experience my life as filled with plans, plans, and more plans—there was lots of control but very little drama. By the time I met Mark, I had grown accustomed to having a breakdown if someone frowned at me. I dwelled in the land of emotional extremes; if I was happy, I was delirious, and if I was angry, I was furious. Mark’s idea of an emotional outburst was admitting, “I’m a little frustrated.” The gap between my Mediterranean hysteria and his WASP stoicism widened by the day. But wait, there was more.

  In yet another way, Mark was pure LAPD. Although he spent most of his waking hours working “to protect and serve” Los Angeles, he—along with most of his colleagues—believed that Los Angeles was not a good place to live. The inconsistency of this failed to strike any of them—or me. I was madly in love, and so I moved into Mark’s house. I quickly abandoned bohemian Rustic Canyon, rented out the funky cottage I owned, and suddenly discovered myself living smack-dab in the middle of Stepford.

  Mark, like most of his blue brethren, lived behind gates in a planned community. This one, thankfully, was not in Santa Clarita or the Simi Valley. Instead, every morning I was waking up in an area described as “the city in the country,” Westlake Village. This was neither the city nor the country—it was the petrified forest.

  Of course, our neighborhood had a name—every neighborhood had a name—no doubt dreamed up by an Anglophile on crack. Kensington Park consisted of a series of pristine, neatly manicured townhouses. If you came home drunk, you would definitely not know which house was yours. And there was a chance you might not care.

  Upon retirement, there would surely be more of this. I grew anxious that a time-share in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, loomed large in my future. But Mark reassured me he did not want to move to Idaho or own a time-share. This was a relief. But remember, this was the LAPD. There was a plan. Mark wanted to spend one year onboard a small sailboat, navigating the seven seas. There was just one problem: I did not swim.

  None of this was good. My idea of a relaxing evening was to sit on my patio and smoke pot. Mark’s recreational activities focused on working out at the gym. The fact that we got together was probably due to a combination of sexual attraction, intellectual openness, and—how do I say this?—true love. The fact that we stayed together was nothing short of a miracle. We began shopping for a new house, preferably not behind gates, in Westlake. I tried to restrict my activity in the streets. Just when I thought things were settling down, however, the real trouble began.

  Mark and I were out for a walk, talking about—what else?—the LAPD. Chief Bill Bratton, newly arrived and claiming his own territory, was bent on reshuffling the entire command staff. Mark carefully explained he would be working longer hours, probably six days a week, along with call-outs in the middle of the night. There would be trips to Washington, DC, law enforcement conventions, and top-secret counter-terrorism meetings that he would be required to attend. He wrapped up this itinerary by announcing, “I will be depending on you to take care of Shannon. And you should probably sell your house in Rustic Canyon.”

  It was one of those rare times in my life when shock rendered me inarticulate. He was marching off to fight crime and leaving me with the child. This did not square with my self-image. I never had been the one to keep the home fires burning. In all my relationships up to this point, I had always been the girl who left, packing my bag to fly off somewhere full of danger, poverty, disaster—or all three. But now I was supposed to stay home in the suburbs and mind Shannon? While I struggled to recover the ability to create sentence structure, Mark took my silence for agreement and moved on to outline the summer vacation he had planned, sharing a houseboat at Lake Powell with two other LAPD families. “Remember, honey,” he said, smiling, “it’s not going to be work all the time.” I suspect he thought this glorious possibility would render maternal responsibilities well worth the effort: Surrender your life. In return you will experience amazing sex and an annual tour of America’s National Parks. For a woman who loved to brag that her passport required extra pages, this was beginning to sound like the seventh circle of hell.

  I was not sure how this was going to work out. I tried to put blue heaven out of my mind. I began to spend more time in the streets. This was a bad idea at a bad time. Crime in general and gang crime in particular was starting to climb. We would have to make other arrangements for Shannon. What those were, I wasn’t quite sure. There was only one thing that was certain. I wasn’t about to stay put in Westlake Village.

  Four. Living with the LAPD

  It is the mission of the Los Angeles Police Department to safeguard the lives and property of the people we serve, to reduce the incidence and fear of crime, and to enhance public safety while working with the diverse communities to improve their quality of life. Our mandate is to do so with honor and integrity, while at all times conducting ourselves with the highest ethical standards to maintain public confidence.

  —LAPD Mission Statement

  Fuck the cops.

  —Khalid Washington

  My first year of domestic “adjustment” is under way—with mixed results. To justify the time I am spending away from home, I throw myself into multiple gang-related projects. These include a needs assessment for the Los Angeles Unified School District to figure out how to prevent gang violence from spreading throughout its 730 schools. I quickly decide that the best experts to consult for this project are the gang members who once attended these same schools.

  Mark is apprehensive about my research plan; his fear is being fed by the latest crime statistics and his years in the LAPD. His response is to attempt to command and control . . . me. I am trying to stay one step ahead of him so I can interview as many homies and homegirls as I can (while he’s not looking). From late 2003 and into 2004 in the city of Los Angeles, there is an average of two gang-related homicides a day. Peter Jennings and ABC News arrive to tape a special on LAPD’s Southeast Division one evening while I am hanging out with Bo Taylor, a gang interventionist, and talking with three gang members about middle-school gang recruitment. All five of us notice the camera crew.

  “The blood is gonna flow if that foo’ stays here with a camera,” one homie predicts, and Bo quietly tells the camera crew to move on. It’s a good recommendation. Southeast Division has ten square miles, 140,000 people, five housing projects, and the most gang-infested middle and high schools in the city of Los Angeles. The area averages somewhere between seventy and eighty murders a year. When I report all this to him the next morning, Mark does not blow up. Instead, he offers me what I start to think of as alternative employment.

  “It’s time for you to understand this all from the cops’ perspective,” he tells me. “What if I can get you complete access to the LAPD Gang Unit? Will you stop running around on your own?”

  I readily agree, knowing I will never have to make good on this promise. I laugh, thinking, In your dreams.

  I should have known better. It’s a complicated task, but Mark finds a way to cross it off his to-do list. He pulls a few strings so I can “conduct research on the department’s response to gangs.” The good news is that I have access to the LAPD that no other “non-sworn” person is ever going to have. The bad news is that I now have a bodyguard, Deputy Chief Mike Hillmann.

  It’s a gray fall morning when I first meet Mike Hillmann. He is wearing a long-sleeved LAPD dress uniform and jackboots. Hillmann is more enthused about the practice bomb blast he witnessed the day before at Edwards Air Force Base than the LAPD Anti-Gang Initiative. This is fine with me, as I am trying very hard to avoid any discussion of my research. More to the point, I don’t want to have to talk about what I’ve seen various gang members doing that may fall slightly outside the law. It’s nothing major, nothing violent, but it is also nothing that is legal.
Instead, I ask Hillmann his plans for dealing with “the gang problem.”

  “Let me tell you,” he says, and then points to a full-color photo on his wall offering a view over the shoulder of a pilot in the cockpit of what looks to be a fighter jet.

  “That’s me,” he says, and I find myself wondering if he is actually flying the plane. But I stifle my confusion and Hillmann continues.

  “I’m always the observer. Even at the LAPD. They tell me what to do about gangs. And then I go out and do it. I drop those bombs. Someone has got to lock up those knuckleheads once and for all.”

  So this is the newly enlightened LAPD policy? And this is the guy Mark has selected to show me the law enforcement side of the story? Good luck.

  It turns out to be exactly the right choice. Bill Bratton has leapfrogged Hillmann up two promotional levels from captain to deputy chief, and ordered him to solve the gang “crisis,” a chronic problem that Bratton has redefined. Despite the big promotion, Hillmann is not easily domesticated. While I never find out just exactly who was pictured in the fighter-jet cockpit, it quickly becomes obvious that Hillmann feels much more at home inside a helicopter—where he immediately takes me—than behind his desk at LAPD headquarters. His conversation is riddled with malapropisms that would make Yogi Berra blush. “Jorja is one of those sociologicals,” he explains to the helicopter pilot flying us to South Los Angeles. “And we need our aca-dames. They can really help us.”