At 12 he was inducted into the National Honor Society. At 15 he was inducted into a Newburgh-based “hood” of the Bloods street gang and at 18 he was serving time in a maximum-security prison.
Now, a few weeks shy of his 21st birthday, “Bill,” as we’ll call him, has successfully regained a foothold on the straight and narrow path, and is working at a fast-food restaurant in Dutchess County. He sat with us recently on the front stoop of a neat little house on a quiet street in Kingston where he lives with relatives, reflecting on the gang culture he’s left behind but still sees flourishing on city streets.
“It seemed like I wasn’t going to get nowhere,” said Bill, explaining his earlier transition from honor student and athlete to gang member. “I got depressed. I’d look on the streets and see people making money, people smiling, people having fun, and here I’m trying to do the right thing and not having any fun. It was easier to live a street life than to make a good life.”
The recruitment process, Bill said, started slowly, with invitations to hang out, introductions to new friends and gradual instruction in Blood ideology and history.
“Its propaganda,” said Bill. “They don’t call it a gang; they call it a family, a nation, a brotherhood, a cause.”
That “nation” began in Los Angeles in the ’70s and jumped to the East Coast in 1993 when Leonard “Deadeye” McKenzie and Omar “OG Mack” Portee organized a Bloods set at New York City’s Rikers Island detention center to challenge Latino gangs who dominated the jail. By the time Bill became involved, the East Coast Bloods phenomenon had metastasized into a dizzying array of sets and subsets: United Blood Nation, Miller Family, Stone and Brim, Nine-trey. All share a Blood philosophy built on “fighting oppression” and a complex system of hand signs, codes and symbols.
According to Bill, the ideology held true, to a point. Unlike Mafia families, which are hierarchical, organized, criminal enterprises, Bill said his Bloods set was a looser affiliation, not all of whose members were criminals. Some members sold drugs and committed robberies while others worked steady jobs and threw backyard barbeques.
“It just depends on what kind of individual you are,” said Bill, who nevertheless admitted that some members of his set committed crimes ranging from organized drug-dealing to senseless drunken assaults.
Despite having rejected gang life, Bill still sees positive elements in the Bloods culture that attracts young people. Members with no home always have a couch to sleep on; they can move through the toughest neighborhoods unmolested and they can always count on support – physical, financial or moral. But the camaraderie comes at a price; a lesson Bill learned on the streets and which was reinforced in prison.
“It’s like they always have this card in their back pocket they can pull out on you and say ‘OK, now we need you to do such and such for us,’” said Bill.
Turf wars
“Such and such” for Bill involved fighting rival gang members and defending turf, a skill he says made him “notorious” and a valued member of his set. A few weeks before he was due to graduate high school, he set out armed with a knife to avenge the beating of a fellow Blood. The result was a four-year sentence in state prison for felony assault.
After he was rejected from a boot-camp-style “shock incarceration” program because of his violent history, Bill moved to a medium-security prison where he was quickly – but subtly – sized up by gang members.
“They don’t come up to you; they send someone else, some uncommitted guy to ask you ‘Is you bangin?’ They ask where you’re from, all that. So (gang members) have your whole gang history, they have everything they need to manipulate you and you don’t even know who they are.”
Just like on the streets, Bill’s recruitment into a prison-based Bloods set began with introductions, schooling on jailhouse survival, food and favors. He learned how inmates record contacts made in prison and other important information in the margin of a Bible or Koran, since holy books are never taken away by prison officials. He also learned how gang members can issue orders from prison using coded letters known as “kites.”
“Nothing in this world is free,” said Bill of his time as a fresh recruit to a prison gang. “You know that as soon as someone comes in they don’t like or someone violates, you’re the one who’s going to have to go to the box (solitary confinement). But dudes just accept their fate. You do it so you can go to sleep at night and know no one’s going to come and mess with you.”
Six months in ‘the box’
Bill’s turn came shortly after he arrived when another gang member got into a fight over a bet involving 20 pushups. As a new member, Bill was detailed to settle the score. He carried out his orders in what he just refers to as “an altercation” with the offending inmate.
The fight earned him six months in “the box,” a special housing unit where he was locked in a solitary cell for 23 hours a day, given two showers a week and a once-daily exercise period in a small cage outside his cell. The attack also led to his reclassification by the prison system and transfer to Elmira, a grim maximum-security prison near the Canadian border.
“It was the best and the worst in there,” said Bill. “That’s where you got the kingpins, the rapists, the murderers, the real gangsters. That’s where people get hurt; people die up there.”
Determined to stay out of trouble, Bill said he banked on the respect earned by his stint in the box to get by, despite the threat of an attack by gang members upset over his refusal to “put in work.”
After two-and-a-half years in Elmira, Bill was released in November 2006, still too young to drink, but already carrying a reputation that left him essentially barred from returning to Orange County. Now living with relatives, Bill spends 50 or more hours a week working at a restaurant where he’s worked his way up from cook to assistant manager.
“It’s good because the hours I work are the hours when trouble starts,” said Bill. “Problems that start in the afternoon climax at night; I’m working all afternoon. I don’t come home ’til 11 p.m., so I’m not going out anywhere.”
But, even as he tries to leave his past behind, Bill said he sees reminders of gang life everyday. Chart-topping hip-hop songs, he says, are full of coded language easily understandable to Bloods gang members. While getting acquainted with his new home in Kingston, Bill immediately picked up on the city’s gang geography: Bloods on the west side of Broadway, Crips to the east.
Bill says he sympathizes with the young gang members he sees on the streets, especially the ones he calls “kids making man decisions” who struggle with poverty and lack of parental involvement. But, when asked if he thought he could use his hard-earned prison experience to dissuade others from the gang life, he sounded pessimistic.
“If they’ll listen, I’ll talk, but I don’t think they’ll get the message because it’s not real to them,” he said. “Like with me, I knew what I was doing was wrong, I knew what could happen but it wasn’t real until I went through it. It’s like someone shows you an apple; OK you know it’s an apple, but if you’ve never tasted an apple, what do you really know?”