• 9 months ago
Tyrone White was a member of the 65 Menlo Gangster faction of the Crips gang in South Central Los Angeles during the late '80s and '90s, witnessing police brutality and the LA riots.

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Transcript
00:00 My name is Tyrone White. I'm a former 6'5" middle-old Crip.
00:04 Some of my rivalries were the blood gangs and the Crip gangs.
00:07 We're involved in drive-by shootings as well as drug dealing.
00:10 And this is how crime works.
00:12 Yeah, of course I've participated in drive-bys.
00:19 I've been a victim of drive-bys plenty of times.
00:23 When you go out against war with one another, there's no winners.
00:27 Now, you can look at it and say, "Okay, I shot more of their homies than they shot of mine,"
00:32 or, "I killed more of their homies than they killed of mine."
00:35 But both sides are taking losses.
00:37 So if you both are taking the loss of life, there's no winners.
00:41 When I was coming up, the guns that were used in gang bangings were
00:52 the 99mm, the 45s, Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun pump, AK-47s, Tec-9s.
01:01 The first gun that I ever got placed in my hand, given to me as a gift from one of my homeboys, was a .25.
01:08 A chrome .25, a little small .25 with the pearl handle.
01:12 Shot like, had like seven shots, six shots in it or something like that.
01:16 And as you got older and you learn more about guns and elevate yourself, of course you get bigger guns.
01:21 Guns are sold on the street like dope is sold on the street.
01:23 You can even buy guns from enemy gangs.
01:26 Because right now it's a business. It's about making this money.
01:28 They come from everywhere. Now, where they get them from could be from the police force.
01:32 It could be from the military.
01:34 You can never be caught what we call lacking or slipping.
01:37 You got to always be ready. You got to have enough firepower.
01:40 You are ready for war at all times.
01:49 From the early 80s all the way up through the mid-90s, those were the years of heightened gang activities.
01:56 So drive-by shootings were nothing.
02:00 You could literally turn your news on every day during those years and see a drive-by shooting.
02:07 Yeah, I mean every day.
02:09 We had a drive-by shooting to where, that I participated in.
02:13 I walked in the house and I remember seeing it on the news.
02:16 I must have been about 15 at that time.
02:19 I remember my mom was on the phone and she was like,
02:22 "I'm so tired of these kids shooting one another and killing one another."
02:27 And I remember thinking to myself, like, "Man, she has no idea that I was just in this situation."
02:37 She never found out about it, but I just remembered the way that I felt
02:42 listening to her on the phone telling her friend, like, "Man, these kids need to stop this and this is crazy."
02:49 And there's another situation to where we were getting ready to go out on what they call Sunday Funday
02:56 when all the lowriders, all the motorcycle clubs, all the car clubs, all the gang members,
03:01 that's like the one day to where all the gang members, enemies, everybody can congregate in one area on Crenshaw Boulevard.
03:14 I remember we seen a car pull up to the corner.
03:18 And usually when you see cars pull up in the corner with no lights or anything like that,
03:23 you know that's a sign of something that's going to happen.
03:27 And all you see was guns come out the window and everybody just got to shooting, shooting at everybody.
03:32 And we all just scattered like ants, just everybody screaming, hollering, running, scattering,
03:38 because no one had guns actually on their person at the time.
03:43 One of my big homeboys, he was very known.
03:48 He had got hit in the face because they shot with a 12 gauge and they had buck shots,
03:52 but it didn't kill him because they weren't shot at close range.
03:55 Luckily, nobody got killed.
03:57 The Crips were founded in the 60s and by Raymond Washington.
04:08 He formed the East Side Crips, which is on the east side of L.A.
04:12 Tiki Williams formed the West Side Crips.
04:14 And through those two different foundations, different sets start to evolve, different areas.
04:23 You know, the Hoover's, the East Coast, the Road in the 60s, the Menlo's, all these different sets.
04:30 The object and the goal was to keep this side of L.A. safe.
04:35 But, you know, as usual, things escalated, things multiplied, and violence became, no sh*t happened.
04:43 When Raymond Washington got killed, that's what caused the division.
04:48 That's what caused, that's when Cripping became divided between the east and the west,
04:54 and different things started happening in different subsets, and it just became like a disease.
05:00 You know, one Crip set betrayed this Crip set, and it just caused a never-ending feud.
05:06 Bloods used to be the main rivals of the Crips, but now there are just as many Crips are against one another.
05:13 Then there are Bloods.
05:14 A lot of Crips and Bloods have become allies because they share the same common Crip enemy.
05:20 For example, the A-Trade Gangster Crips, they have a peace treaty going on with the Englewood family Bloods,
05:29 and that's because their borderline is connected right next to one another.
05:36 So, since our neighborhoods are so close to one another, you got to come to my neighborhood to get home,
05:43 I got to come to your neighborhood to get home.
05:45 Let's make this a Blood-free zone.
05:47 Not saying that we're homeboys, or we're just a close hood, but let's keep the peace between this dynamic, between this area.
05:56 The beef between the 6'5" Menlo Crips and the Hoover Crips, it goes way back.
06:01 We actually all grew up together and went to school together.
06:05 We became one of the biggest enemies to the Hoovers because our sets are so close to one another.
06:11 To get to the Hoover hood, you got to come through our hood.
06:14 You know what I'm saying?
06:15 And for us to get to other parts of the city, we got to go through the Hoover hood.
06:19 I was born and raised in South Central L.A. all my life.
06:28 I had a stepfather in my life that taught me how to be a man and different things,
06:32 but for the most part, I was raised by a strong single mother.
06:36 Usually in the black neighborhoods, when kids that come from single parent homes like that,
06:40 they usually get caught up in these streets because your mom is out working, trying to make a living for you,
06:45 provide for you, while she's at work, you're out there running the streets, doing s*** that you know you're not supposed to be doing.
06:51 And that's pretty much how I started it.
06:55 I was about 10 when I first started hanging around them.
06:58 I knew them very well.
07:00 It comes down to, "Hey, you know, you've been hanging around us a lot.
07:04 You've been chilling a lot. You're from the hood.
07:07 Let's make it official."
07:09 You know, and making it official means getting jumped in or doing something to be a member of the gang.
07:16 It can be anything from you fighting one person, sometimes four or five persons.
07:21 It's to see how you handle yourself.
07:23 It's to see what type of skills you have.
07:26 If you get into one of these type situations, you know, can you stand your ground and hold your own,
07:31 whether you get beat up or not, you have to know how to fight back.
07:34 You've got to be a monster to be a member of any gang, but particularly the Crips, you better be a monster.
07:41 [chainsaw]
07:47 The word Crip was really originally meant community resistance and progress.
07:52 It was a way to bring the community, to uplift the community, to protect the community.
07:57 Of course, they took on a moniker and the appearance of a gang because, according to the dictionary,
08:04 a group of five or more people was considered a gang.
08:07 To be a Crip, you have to carry yourself a certain way. You have to walk a certain way.
08:11 But for me, the allure was I loved the color blue, and they wore blue rags.
08:17 They wore blue jeans. They wore blue belts. They wore blue Chuck Taylors.
08:21 The dress code for me back when I was an active Crip in the '90s, in the early '80s, it was definitely 501 Levi jeans, creased.
08:31 I would go buy a can of starch and literally spend about an hour ironing my pants,
08:37 layering the starch to the point to where before I even put my pants on, I could stand them up.
08:42 Crips wore K-Swiss because it was an acronym. It was actually a disrespectful term towards the Bloods.
08:50 It was called K-Swiss still for kill slobs when I see some.
08:55 Slobs is a disrespectful term towards the Bloods.
08:58 If you wasn't a Crip, you couldn't Crip walk. If you wasn't a Crip, you didn't know how to Crip walk.
09:03 And so to learn how to Crip walk and to actually perfect something like that was like a badge of honor.
09:09 It's a cool thing. When you look at it, the feet movement, the way they dance, the way they do it,
09:14 the way they incorporate certain moves, along with the hand signs and the hand signals,
09:19 words that you Crips use, which was part of the lingo, was of course cuz.
09:24 Everything we say would start with a C. If you had to say burger, you say kerger.
09:30 You know, if you say b***h, you say s***.
09:33 It's just different things that you could replace the B with a C, you would do it.
09:40 And that was the same thing with the Bloods. Anything with a C, they wanted to eliminate it.
09:44 And it may sound strange to people, but, "Oh, that's stupid. Y'all sound stupid."
09:48 That was our language. That was the way that we talked. We understood it.
09:52 And that's all that matters. And if you disrespect us and tell us it sounds stupid, you might get your ass whooped.
09:58 Of course, they throw up the C. You know, the C is just, you just take your hand, you make a C with your hand.
10:04 And now you're set. Your actual neighborhood, your Crip neighborhood, like the 60s, they have their signs.
10:12 The Hoovers, they have their signs. The Menlos, they have their signs.
10:17 You're going to throw up that sign to represent, to let people know that you're actually from that set.
10:23 You're from that neighborhood. We threw up the M. It was just an M.
10:27 You just take your hands across. This is just how Ice Cube throw up the W.
10:32 When he's in concert and taking pictures, Snoop Dogg throws up the W.
10:36 Just turn it upside down and you throw up the M.
10:39 Gang graffiti is a big part of Crips. People that are coming in there, they know when they see that on the wall.
10:46 The Rolla 60 Crips or the Menlo Crips or the 55 Crips, they know we're entering this gang.
10:53 This is their neighborhood. The gang structure is not so much organized like the mafia with underbosses and bosses and stuff like that.
11:07 We didn't give titles like that. But people automatically knew who the OGs were, who the double OGs were,
11:13 who the big homies was and who was ranked over who.
11:17 The double OG is usually one of the big homies that has put in more work than you can imagine.
11:24 He's done it all. Killed, robbed, made money, been to jail. You name it, he's done it.
11:32 Usually 50s, 60s, you know, higher age, they were around in the 70s, in the 80s when gang banger really just exploded.
11:41 They were at the top of their game. An OG really falls not too much different from a double OG,
11:47 except that he may be a little younger, may have done a little less of the crimes.
11:53 You have some of the OGs that have turned their lives around and they just want to live life, have a family, have wife and kids.
12:01 And they're getting money. They're making money the legal way.
12:04 So what makes them an OG is the fact that they're talking to the little homies, to the young homies,
12:09 showing them and explaining to them how they were able to do this.
12:13 Street Soldier is exactly what that sounds like.
12:16 A street soldier is going to go out there and put in that work for the OG, for the double OG, for the little homies or just for the set period.
12:24 A street soldier has no limits. He's going to go out there and do what he has to do no matter what.
12:30 The little homies are using, of course, what they sound like. The little homies that's looking up to the big homies.
12:35 They're going to imitate, they're going to copy everything that the big homies do.
12:39 And if the big homies is constantly going to jail, robbing people, shooting people, killing people, the little homies are going to file a suit at some point.
12:47 My main thing was always to look out for my big homie, whoever called me their big homie,
12:51 and make sure that he was taken care of and vice versa because he does the same for me.
12:57 He don't have to, but he does.
13:00 [Motorcycle engine]
13:05 I started out selling weed in middle school and then moved to crack, cocaine and robbing. I did robberies.
13:13 That was my way mostly of making money and keeping money in my pocket.
13:18 The big homies had the big dope and they'll issue it out to the younger homies.
13:24 They'll issue it down to the guys to the next level. And it was a way for everybody from the big homie, OG homies, all the way down to the homies in junior high school to make money.
13:35 The homies in junior high school, they may be out there selling crack on the corners, $5 rocks, $10 rocks, $20 rocks.
13:43 The big homies, they moving big weight, you know, ounces, quarter pounds, pounds, stuff like that.
13:51 The drugs came from a lot of times from drug cartels and as well as the government, believe it or not.
14:00 I mean, there's a story about Free Ray Rick, one of the biggest black dope dealers in the history of Los Angeles.
14:06 And he was set up, he was caught up in that IRA and contra stuff with Ronald Reagan and come to find out that the DEA was supplying him with dope.
14:15 The same dope that they gave him 30 years for in prison.
14:19 So, you know, it's like that's how that's just how it worked.
14:22 They put they put it in our neighborhoods to bring us down, to keep us down.
14:27 Always a goal of Crips to make a substantial amount of money and to open up your own business, whether it be a smoke shop or liquor store or a fool's place or whatever.
14:39 That was the goal to find a way to take that money and make it somewhat as legal as you can.
14:53 The L.A. riots happened in '92.
14:56 I was 18 years old at that time.
14:58 The L.A. riots was a result of the Rodney King verdict.
15:01 Those four officers that were clearly guilty as hell on video beating Rodney King half to death when they were found innocent.
15:10 That just sparked something in the community.
15:13 I didn't ever think I would see nothing like that.
15:16 The ground zero of the riots happened five blocks from my house.
15:21 I was sitting at home watching the news.
15:23 I seen the news.
15:24 So we jump in the car, we drive up to the riots.
15:28 By this time, you got hundreds and hundreds of people starting to migrate to Florence and Normandy.
15:34 So at this point, it just kicked off.
15:36 Every spirit of wildfire, every car that came through the intersection that had a white person in it was getting attacked.
15:43 I saw news reporters getting beat up.
15:45 I saw cameramen getting beat up, getting the cameras taken from them.
15:48 And at that time, it really didn't matter what gang you were from because now it's a black against white thing now.
15:57 So it didn't matter if you was a blood or a crip or whatever you was.
16:02 Even though it was such a messed up day, it's such a f***** up day, it was also a day to kind of rejoice because that was the first time in a long time that you saw common enemies,
16:13 Crips and Bloods and Mexican gangs come together against this one common enemy, the LAPD.
16:20 And so after a days of rioting, some of the community leaders like Jim Brown, the football player,
16:28 a couple of popular gang leaders from different gangs, from different areas, different sets,
16:33 had a meeting and decided that this was the perfect opportunity to try to bring a peace treaty, a truce between the gangs.
16:41 Even though it was something bad that caused us to get to that level, it still was an opportunity for us to bring things together.
16:48 The peace treaty lasted officially maybe a good couple of weeks and it kind of continued to dissolve as weeks and months went on to the point to where it exists no more.
17:04 But for that little short time, it was great to have it.
17:09 [Motorcycle engine]
17:15 When Gangsta Rap came out, it introduced a lot of Crippin', a lot of Crips.
17:22 And when N.W.A. came out, which is the group that started Gangsta Rap, Eazy-E, Rest In Peace, Eazy-E was known to be a Crip.
17:32 And from him, you had other pioneer rappers that were from Crip neighborhoods.
17:38 You had Snoop Dogg, you had Duv C, all these popular gang rappers that was in the neighborhoods representing their hoods that were blowing up on the mainstream.
17:50 And so now you got people sitting at home watching MTV, 106 and Park, they're watching all these video shows and they got these gang members doing rap videos.
18:01 With the blue rags and the six-foes and the low riders and wearing all the gang attire and the gang uniform, but they're actually artists making money on TV and now it's being broadcast all over the world.
18:16 My side from the UK and the Netherlands, I've heard about Crips in China, I heard there's some Crips in Africa, which I've actually seen online, social media, people in Africa Crippin' and just loving this West Coast culture.
18:31 And I think all these countries adapted on to these United States values and these United States ways just because of how it was glorified.
18:43 Not really understanding the meaning of it.
18:47 Know that people lost their lives and people are killing.
18:50 This is not something to play with.
18:59 In 1994, I went to Oklahoma.
19:02 I got a football scholarship to go to Oklahoma to play football.
19:06 That's pretty much really what saved me from being killed or anything else bad happening to me on these L.A. streets.
19:12 Played football there for two years at a historically black college.
19:15 In 1996, '97, I moved to Oklahoma City and I started working at the juvenile detention center.
19:22 They needed a gang advisor, a gang trainer.
19:25 So, of course, I was qualified for that. Just volunteering my time.
19:29 Talking to the kids and educating them on gangs and telling them no, because I had no idea Oklahoma had a gang problem.
19:36 So I went and I sat down with the chief of police to see exactly where did he want me to go with this.
19:41 I did two years in the school system.
19:43 They came to me and asked me, did I want to be interested in transferring to the streets?
19:48 Basically running traffic, pulling people over, writing tickets, blah, blah, blah.
19:52 I'm like, yeah, let me do that. I'll do that. See what that's like.
19:57 I actually want to see how they dealt with drug dealers, with me being on the other side of the law.
20:04 And all the complaints that I had as a criminal, all the police brutality, all the mistreatment from the police,
20:14 I got to witness that firsthand working with them.
20:17 And a lot of times I would have to intervene on like, hold on, like, you know, it was a couple of times where they had to have that conversation with me.
20:27 Look, either you with us or you with them. So even in the training and police academy, I dealt with racism.
20:33 I dealt with discrimination because a lot of those officers felt like this dude is a criminal.
20:39 This dude is from the streets. How in the hell is are you guys going to let him work with us? Blah, blah, blah.
20:45 That's even that's why even after I became a police officer and I moved back to California,
20:50 I still ended up hooking back up with my old homies and old gang members.
20:56 And I end up going to jail even after being a police officer. I went to jail.
21:00 My experience with the LAPD, they still haven't found a way to deal with communities and cultures that they don't know anything about.
21:10 It's the same tactics. No dirty cops, bogus charges, planting drugs, mistreatment because of who you are, what you represent.
21:21 It's the same thing. It hasn't stopped.
21:23 The one way the police can bridge the gap with the community is to continue to work with those that want to work with them.
21:30 Big U.A. example from rolling 60s, guys that like that, that are gang activists that are trying to do things to stop the gang violence and help kids in the community.
21:39 And bring some positive positivity in the community.
21:43 The main thing is to save lives. And after you save lives, you want to create opportunities.
21:47 I went to jail in Oklahoma for robbery.
21:56 Since at that time when I was out there, it was for a robbery that I did when I was living in Oklahoma.
22:03 When I came back to California in 2006, I went to jail again in 2009 for another robbery.
22:12 And they ended up finding out about another robbery that I did and they combined the cases.
22:18 I ended up taking a three-year deal.
22:20 When I first got arrested, they took me down to the main LAPD headquarters, what they call the Parker Center.
22:27 They transfer you the next day to the county facility.
22:30 So I left the Parker Center that morning. They put me on a jail bus, took me to the county jail, which is known as the Twin Towers.
22:37 You usually go into the tank. The tank is basically a holding area where a whole bunch of other gang members are at.
22:44 And I'm talking about mixed in, Crips, Bloods, Mexicans, everybody.
22:50 And that's just a, that's like a box of dynamite waiting to explode.
22:55 And sometimes you get put in those situations and the officers just leave you and they don't care.
23:02 They don't, whatever happens in there, it happens.
23:05 And you're going to always find somebody in there that's going to challenge you, especially if you're from a rival gang.
23:12 You listen for the lingo. You listen to what they're saying.
23:15 Or you might see people that you haven't seen since elementary and you lost contact with and you wonder where they were at.
23:21 Well, this is where they at.
23:23 And so you find out that they from a Crips set. And so you guys, you guys just connect on one.
23:29 Now, if it becomes a racial thing, Bloods and Crips, you know, they find a way to unite against whoever, whatever race they have to go against.
23:38 You know, it could be some violence erupt in between the transportation into the different dorms or the different units.
23:44 But for the most part in the county jail, Crips is with Crips, Bloods with Bloods, or sometimes you get the general population where it's a mixed dorm.
23:54 Now, don't get me wrong. If I went in there as a Menlo Crip or as a 60 Crip or 60 going there and they run into some Hoovers, it's bad blood automatically.
24:04 No matter if we're Crips or we're Crips, we're in the same unit, it don't matter. We need to settle this beef.
24:09 So you I might walk in here and a Hoover Crip might say, hey, hey, are you from Menlo? I need that faith.
24:16 I need that faith. So that lets you know that at some point you and this guy have to fight because you are both of your sets don't get along.
24:25 Inside or outside of prison with Crips, there's no difference.
24:29 The way you carry yourself on the streets is the same way that you expected to carry yourself into prison,
24:34 except at a higher level. Because it's a little more dangerous in prison than it is on the streets.
24:40 The thing that made me change my life was my kids.
24:50 When I took the scholarship to the school, I was in the process of changing my life.
24:54 I just didn't know it. But that was my start of changing my life.
24:58 And when I start working with gangs and talking to the kids in the schools and at the juvenile jails,
25:04 and I see how I was getting through to them and how much they respected me from what I was telling them and trying to teach them.
25:11 It just made me want to change. It made me want to continue to do positive things.
25:16 And that's what I've been doing ever since. I met somebody one day and they told me I had this look.
25:22 They said, "You should get into acting. You should think about acting." So I started doing acting little gigs, doing extra roles.
25:29 And so I've done several projects and been a part of several TV series and dramas and different things that have gotten my foot into the door of acting.
25:39 So there's definitely some positivity that could happen from my past that was negative.
25:46 [projector whirring]
25:56 [silence]
26:01 [silence]
26:04 [silence]
26:07 [silence]

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