“You Don’t Want to Know What We Do After Dark”
On the streets of southwest Houston, violent gangs are out of control, dealing drugs, robbing businesses, and protecting their turf at all costs. For one longtime member, each day comes down to two simple questions: Will I have to kill? Will I be killed?
Luther Randerson says: To be sure, the border fence is an eyesore; but an anti-personnel mine strip along the border, while probably being effective, would endanger our wild life. Does Mr Lewis have a better way to keep the illegal bastards out? Luther Randerson, Midland, Tx (March 21st, 2011 at 5:15pm)
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“You still don’t get it, do you?” he asks. “These gangbangers play for keeps. I’ve talked to hundreds of them, and I ask every one of them, ‘Why is it so important to live this kind of life? Why is it so important to shoot someone because he came to your street and waved a ninety-nine-cent bandanna at you that’s a different color from the bandanna you own?’ And they just look at me—I swear to you—like I’m the one who’s the fool for even asking the question.”
Tran takes me in his squad car back to Dashwood, the street where I had done my faux drive-by with Alex. Two teenagers are standing on a corner, both showing black. Tran gets out of the car and says, “Hey, guys.” They shrug and don’t move. They tell Tran their names—Miguel and Jose (like all the other juveniles in this story, their names have been changed)—and then Tran informs them that I’m a reporter and want to do an interview. To my astonishment, they both shake my hand and politely say hello.
They are good-looking kids, thin as reeds, with short dark hair and unblemished faces. At my request, they show me their black rosaries and their long black cloth belts. When I ask to see their tattoos, they pull off their T-shirts. Miguel has “SWC” (the initials for the Southwest Cholos) across his stomach, and Jose has the word “Cholos” stamped on the bicep of his right arm. They both have la vida loca tattoos on the tops of their hands.
“What happens, say, if an MSer comes through here and throws down?” Tran asks the Cholos.
“If some punk-ass puto wants to disrespect us, then we do what we have to do,” Miguel says.
“And that means?” I ask.
He doesn’t seem remotely bothered that a police officer is standing beside me. Miguel looks me in the eye and says, “Shoot them, stab them, f— them up. Whatever.”
A couple of days later, police officers Mario Válles, David de Torres, and Johnathan Fraley, who are also assigned to chase down southwest Houston gangbangers, take me to an apartment complex about a mile from Dashwood, where some members of Somos Pocos Pero Locos (Spanish for “We’re Few But We’re Crazy”) are hanging. I meet a short, squat seventeen-year-old boy who tells me that his gang nickname is Señor Tórtolo (Mr. Turtle), and when I ask him about colors, he says, “If someone comes through here showing another rag, shouting, ‘F— SPPL,’ then it is our duty to retaliate. We were raised here. We are going to keep the hood ours.”
Fifteen minutes later, I’m talking to a couple of La Primera gang members at an apartment complex on Bissonet Drive. “We had some Cholos come over here and shout, ‘F— Bissonet! It’s all about Bellaire!’” one of them says, referring to Bellaire Avenue, which is another gathering spot for Cholos. “We know who they are. We know what to do.”
Gang violence, of course, has plagued American cities for decades. A report released in October by the Police Executive Research Forum largely blamed gangs for what it described as “dramatic” increases in violent crime this year in the nation’s biggest cities, including Houston. According to police reports, in the first seven months of 2006 the city’s gangs committed at least 298 assaults, 271 drug-related crimes, 130 robberies, and 32 murders—statistics that one police official says are “drastically low” because of a state law that strictly limits the ability of officers to identify a suspect or a victim in a police report as a gang member. “If we added up all the crimes that we suspect were committed by gang members, those numbers would double,” he says.
Regardless of the numbers, it is clear that gangs are just as responsible for Houston’s soaring crime rates—the city is on its way to recording four hundred murders in 2006, its highest number in more than a decade—as the Katrina evacuees who have received so much media attention. The gang shootings have been so frequent that some residents of the apartment complexes have hidden with their children in hallways so they won’t be hit by stray bullets. In one gruesome slaying, a young woman was shot in the face by a gang member because she had called the police to report a gang shooting. (Just before pulling the trigger, the gang member allegedly said to her, “I’m sorry, but I have to merk you”—“merk” being gang slang for “murder.”) In another, a young man who reportedly belonged to La Primera was shot as he was entering a store a few blocks from his high school. His killers, who were reportedly members of La Tercera Crips, drove away, only to return a few minutes later to shoot him again while he lay unconscious in the parking lot, just to make sure he was dead.
And in broad daylight in early June, at least twenty gangbangers, many of whom lived in the apartments of southwest Houston, clashed at a public park. They went after one another with baseball bats, golf clubs, tire irons, and machetes. According to police, a fifteen-year-old boy who ran with Mara Salvatrucha was stabbed to death by a sixteen-year-old girl who ran with a gang called Crazy Crew. Afterward, she went to eat chips and salsa at a nearby restaurant, refusing to show any remorse, not even when officers showed up to arrest her.
Since the spring of 2005, the police department has expanded its gang unit, established a “gang murder squad” in the homicide division, and budgeted approximately $10.5 million in overtime pay to send more officers into what are described as high-crime hot spots, most of them plagued by gangs. In August of this year, police chief Harold Hurtt announced the formation of the Violent Gang Initiative, a task force composed of members of the department’s own specialized “gang unit” as well as agents from the FBI; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; the Drug Enforcement Administration; Immigrations and Customs Enforcement; and the Department of Public Safety. Hurtt declared that the task force would “target the most violent gangs in Houston” and “disrupt and dismantle the gangs themselves.”
But so far, the task force has not come close to dismantling a single gang. And nowhere is that more glaringly evident than in the former Swinglesville—an area that some police officers are now calling Gang Land.
“No one seems to have any idea what is happening down here,” says Amanda Escobedo, a 65-year-old community advocate in southwest Houston who has spent nearly twenty years holding workshops and speaking at schools, trying to persuade kids to stay out of gangs. “The nice Houston people who live in the nice Houston neighborhoods and who come shop at the nice Galleria don’t have any idea—or don’t care—that the apartments that they all used to live in have now become a war zone. And it is a war zone, make no mistake about it. Every week, I hear about a stabbing or a shooting or a drive-by that doesn’t make the newspapers. It never, ever stops.”
It is indeed difficult for an outsider to imagine that this area is a war zone. (To get to Gang Land, all you have to do, if you’re at the Galleria, is drive for about half a mile down Loop 610, turn south onto Texas Highway 59, then take one of the next few exits—Fountainview, Bellaire, Hillcroft, or Fondren.) On the main boulevards, the exteriors of many of the apartment complexes are kept in good condition. The hedges by the managers’ offices are trimmed, and the bulbs in the streetlights by the front gates are quickly replaced whenever they get shot out. The apartments’ owners regularly paint over any gang graffiti that might be visible from these streets.
But when you turn onto the side streets, you begin to sense where you really are. Graffiti is spray-painted on the back walls of the apartment complexes, on the walls of convenience stores and taquerías—even on stop signs and the trunks of some of the crape myrtles themselves. The graffiti is like modern-day hieroglyphics, a highly stylized series of letters and numbers. On various walls I saw the initials for numerous gangs—“SWC,” “MS-13,” “SPPL,” “LP.” On one, an “SWC” had been marked out with a large black X, and “MS-13” had been written directly above it. I also saw the spray-painted phrase “187 to MS” (“187” refers to the section of the California penal code that deals with homicide). That phrase had been marked over and replaced with “MS-13 Controla!”
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