The United States Senate is administering CPR to the illegal immigration amnesty bill. One of the catastrophic provisions of the bill permits ‘gang’ members, here illegally, to become citizens if they just ‘renounce’ their gang membership on their applications.
Right….Well, perhaps they haven’t heard, but resigning from an L.A. street gang is not the same as resigning from the Owl Club.
The Owl Club, in case you haven’t heard, was a gang to which the esteemed blimp from Massachusetts, Edward Moore Kennedy [D-Goodyear] belonged for decades.
Its dues were one hundred dollars a year and its major criminal activity was preventing women from joining. It was due to this criminal activity that Kennedy had to resign from the gang in shame this past year.
But resigning from the Owl Club is nothing like quitting the street gangs of L. A.
Uh – uh….If anything, for those accustomed to a moral society - it’s more like trying to quit the Catholic Priesthood without having been de-frocked. As far as the church is concerned: once a priest, always a priest. Of course, there the resemblance between the Holy See and the L. A. hoodlums ceases, but you get the idea. Once you’ve been ‘ordained’ as a gang member, your membership is ‘irrevocable.’
Some of those gangs have a pretty straightforward policy: You leave when you are dead, and not one second earlier.
I happened to get an education about seven years ago regarding one particular L. A. street gang whose members were comprised of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans.
I was working as a teamster on a movie being filmed in San Diego. The crew members all had 24 hour a day access to a ‘walk-in’ food service vehicle that was basically a cafeteria mounted on a six wheel truck.
It was easy for passers-by to slip in and take a sandwich, drink or snack since there were a couple of hundred extras as well as crew members working on the film.
On one particular afternoon I was waiting in line in the food truck. Ahead of me in line stood a very muscular and tall black fellow. He and his girlfriend were trying to choose from the snack bin.
I do not know what the black fellow said out loud, but a security guard for the movie company overheard him. The guard then told the man and his girlfriend to get out of the truck and leave the set – that it was not open to the public.
The black fellow immediately threatened the guard. He said something along the lines of, “Hey man, mind your own business or I’ll give you a beatin.’”
The security guard, a middle-aged fellow of average height and possessed of a somewhat stocky and overweight build, turned down the collar of his jacket. “Hey!” he called out to the man, “You wanna step outside? I’ll f--- you up real good.”
With that one gesture by the guard – that of the down-turned collar - the black man suddenly started apologizing and practically humiliated himself with his suddenly humble and submissive attitude.
He took his girlfriend’s arm, quickly turned and started out of the truck. As the pair squeezed between the on-lookers, the man kept calling out to the guard over his shoulder such phrases as, “Hey man, I’m sorry – like, no offense – O.K.? I didn’t know man, O.K.? We’re leaving……Come on, babe, let’s go, hurry it up…”
I was amazed. I had no idea what had just occurred. I walked up to the guard and asked him what that ‘show’ had been all about. The conversation went like this:
“What’s with that guy?” I asked. “What just happened?”
“Oh, nothin’ much, man,” said the guard, “I just overheard the dude talkin’ to his lady. I realized he wasn’t part of the film crew, so I told him to leave.”
“Yeah, I know,” said I, “but at first he wasn’t going to go. He started cussing you out…But then you did something with your coat collar - something that scared him…I mean – that guy was suddenly petrified of you. It was obvious he couldn’t get out of here quickly enough.”
Again, he turned down his jacket collar, just as he had done when talking with the black man. “I just showed him this, and he knew he should leave.”
I looked at his neck – but --stupid me. I still didn’t get it.
I just saw a bunch of tattoos. I had no idea what the hell this guard was talking about. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I’m from Massachusetts. I guess I don’t know what it is you’re trying to show me.”
The guard laughed. Then very quietly he said in my ear, “He saw my tattoos and realized I’m an ‘S.A.,’ so he knew he better leave or I’d hurt him real bad.”
[For purposes of this column, I am writing the letters ‘S.A.’ to express what the guard said. The way it is pronounced, the term sounds like the word “essay.” I’ve never heard a good definition of it. However, my guess is that the term comes from the abbreviation for Hitler’s original gang of street thug storm troopers which terrorized the Jews of Germany in the 30’s. They were known as the “S.A.”]
Anyway, at that point I decided not to push my luck. “Oh,” said I, as though I understood what he meant. “So that’s why he left?”
“Yeah…he knew better than to stick around.”
I was still amazed. No matter what the tattoo showed, the black man had looked like he definitely had the physical strength – and the youthfulness coupled with toughness and attitude - to stuff this middle-aged guard into a trash barrel.
Later I asked one of my fellow teamsters what an “S.A.” was.
He explained that it meant that the guard was a member of a street gang in L. A. I recounted to him what I had earlier observed.
“Oh yeah,” said the teamster, “the black guy was smart to leave. Those Mexican guys, they’ll kill y’uh, man. They are really, really tough. The black guys, especially if they’re alone, won’t screw with the Mexican gang members. They’re pretty much afraid of them. The black gangs will fight among themselves, but they leave the Mexican guys alone.”
Now I was fascinated. I wondered what a ‘street gang’ member was doing working for a security guard firm and what he was doing on the set. Remarkably, I got a rather full answer over the next few nights.
That evening, the same guard, whom I’ll call Miguel [definitely not his real name] was working a double shift. As part of my teamster duties, I was living on the set in a small trailer. Thus, he and I were there together.
Since it was a particularly cold evening, I asked Miguel if he wanted to sit in the trailer for a while and get warm by the propane heater. He was quite glad to accept my invitation.
Over the next three nights, from midnight until about four each morning, Miguel and I talked the nights away. He was a seemingly pleasant fellow and very soft-spoken.
We chatted amiably for hours. He told me of his girlfriend, who was toying with him and had just about dumped him. He told me about the new girl he had just met whom he wanted to ask out on a date. He also told me about a softball team on which he had played in the army.
And he told me about the number of people he had observed being shot, knifed, beaten, or robbed, depending on the circumstances.
In the same very soft voice, this man described all sorts of horrific crimes he had ‘observed.’ He discussed the gang structures in L. A. and the divisions of gangs between the northern and southern parts of California. He was careful not to say exactly what role he had played in the crimes he had happened to witness. But the implication was very, very clear: he had been heavily involved in the execution of these various crimes.
Miguel had also served in the United State Army as a young man. Even in the army, he told me, the gang divisions had reared their heads. He told me of fights that had occurred off-base between varying factions of gangs, including some stationed in Alaska.
As stated, some of the stories were horrific. Some were morbidly funny, and some were outright funny and rose to the level of practical jokes. Were they to be believed?
Or, were these tall tales like those of police ‘bloodbaths’ described by L.A.P.D. Detective Mark Furhman about ten years before the infamous O. J. Simpson trial?
I say that Miguel’s stories were true. Why? Well, it’s necessary to distinguish Furhman’s tales and tales told by folks like Furhman, from the stories told by Miguel during those evenings he and I spent together.
Furhman’s tall tales were brought out during his cross-examination by F. Lee Bailey. It was this cross-examination, more than anything else I can think of in our culture, that has resulted in newspapers and media resorting to the phrase “the ‘n’-word.”
[Incidentally – I personally find the phrase silly. When dealing with anti-semites, we do not refer to the ‘k-word’ for kike, nor when referring to disparagement of the Irish do we refer to the ‘H-word’ for Harp, etc. Whenever I write this column, I will state the word to which I’m referring – other than outright profanities – in full. I see no point in creating an alphabet soup of code words for racial, religious or ethnic words. We are – I hope, all grown-ups here.]
It turned out that Furhman had used the word ‘nigger’ repeatedly when talking with a woman who was purportedly writing a movie script about cops and criminals.
Furhman had sought to impress her. He told her story after story about cops beating up, as he said, ‘niggers,’ and leaving rooms with walls covered with blood from the victims of the police.
In fact, the stories Furhman told her were all urban legends that the cops told about themselves. Cops who told these stories were basically portraying themselves as the type of rogue cop one sees portrayed today on television by actors such as Michael Chiklis in “The Shield” television series.
But Furhman’s stories were told in a style of braggadocio. He was not apologizing for these [fictional] violent acts. He was using them to impress the young scriptwriter with how ‘tough’ he and his colleagues supposedly were.
But what about my gang member, Miguel? What distinguishes his wild stories from those of Mark Furhman?
Well, after three nights of these stories, I finally asked Miguel how he had gotten to be a security guard if he was actively involved with a street gang.
He explained that he was no longer in the gang.
How, I asked, did that work? Did one resign? Did you get kicked out? How did one end one gang’s membership since he obviously still had the tattoos that had put such fear in the black man days earlier.
Again, in that soft-spoken voice, he began to describe more of his history with the gang and spoke of a turning point that he had reached.
The story was this: He had joined the street gang when he was about sixteen years of age. For several years he had done the bidding of the gang leaders. Some of that bidding involved pretty violent and vicious stuff. Still other acts of violence he had done for the ‘fun’ of it.
Seemingly without doubt, these stories were the tales of a man who had no conscience. In other words – the stories were those of a sociopath.
In my lifetime, in the practice of law, I have had occasion to meet three people who turned out to be criminals who were sociopaths. However, with each of these three men, I had sensed from the first moments I had met them, that they were missing a piece of the ‘human pie.’ There was something not ‘there.’
I do not know how to describe it, but I knew that they, for lack of a better word, each had no ‘soul.’ In each instance, it was only later that I found out that each of these three men were, indeed, criminal sociopaths.
But I had not sensed that moral vacuum in Miguel. It was one of the reasons I had talked with him for so many hours. I did not sense that total lack of conscience in the man. And, this was in spite of the horrible stories he had recounted, some of which included vague descriptions of his direct and enthusiastic involvement.
He then described what one might call a ‘moment of moral clarity.’ Without going further into the details of Miguel’s life, suffice it to say that something terrible had occurred in his family’s life when he was about thirty-five years of age. By then he had been a gang member for almost twenty years.
This incident of ‘moral clarity’ had awakened his conscience. In one fell hit, the horror and repugnance of his actions and the life he had led had come crashing down on him.
He had had a moment of ‘empathy’ that led to this ‘clarity.’
‘Empathy’ is a quality that sociopaths are incapable of having. Miguel was not, in fact, a sociopath. Rather, Miguel had been a giant, walking-talking case of arrested moral development.
He was not a fully formed man with a full moral conscience when he joined the gang at age sixteen. As a young child he had admired the gang members. He had begun to develop a warped sense of loyalties and of morality. By the time he joined the gang, he had a totally twisted and misguided sense of what was right and wrong.
“Loyalty” was good.
Being ‘loyal’ to the gang was good.
The gang was his surrogate ‘family’ and the older members ‘surrogate fathers.’ Being in a surrogate family with surrogate fathers was a ‘good’ thing to the teen-aged Miguel.
Through it all, he had been able to ignore the havoc his acts and those of his fellow gang members had wreaked on the lives of their victims.
But, as I say, when he hit the age of thirty-five, something had happened within his own biological family. It had devastated him. This event had sledgehammered his psyche and what spark was left within him of a moral being.
It had taken but a moment for the door of ‘empathy’ to open in his very cold soul. But, when it did, repeated tidal waves of guilt and remorse had practically drowned him.
He had suffered a complete nervous breakdown.
With his hands trembling and his body shaking – his mind in a virtual catatonic state – he had been committed to a mental institution. It had taken him over a year to recover sufficiently to function outside the hospital.
After the year of hospitalization and with continued counseling, he had come to the conclusion that he could not continue in the ‘gang’ life. He could no longer behave as a sociopath – for – indeed, he was not a sociopath.
But he also knew the potential consequences of quitting the gang.
There was a penalty for leaving: it is known in the justice system as ‘the death penalty.’
Yup! Miguel would be murdered if he tried to quit the gang. His family, as well, might suffer consequences.
But, Miguel could not live with himself and remain in the gang. So, he decided to do the unthinkable: he would ask the local ‘board of directors’ of the gang if he could leave.
Everyone in the gang and among his family and friends had known about the nervous breakdown and what had happened to Miguel. After all, he had been in the ‘nuthouse’ for over a year.
When he made his request, he was told to come to a meeting. As he said, when he walked into that room the evening of the meeting, he did not know if he would ever leave alive. But he felt he had no choice. His mother and family were still in L. A. and his mother was an invalid. He could not leave her.
If he stayed in L.A. and tried to quit the gang he might be killed. But if he left L.A., his mother would certainly die without him there to provide home care. So – he faced a Hobbesian choice and decided to do so ‘head-on.’
The board had first met in ‘executive session’ without him present. They then heard his personal plea to be released.
They had told him that, due to his many years of loyal service on behalf of the gang [it sounds sort of like a speech at a retirement party for an insurance salesman, mais non?] that he would be allowed to leave the membership and to live in peace.
He was also assured that his family members would not be hurt or murdered. [Nice of those fellahs, ‘eh?]
So, about five years before I met Miguel, he had gotten his freedom. But the tattoos that had identified him as a gang member covered his body from his lower neck to his waist. There were a few small ones on the back of his neck and a couple of very small ones on his face.
But it was the ones on his neck that clearly identified him as belonging [or in his case, having belonged] to a certain gang. And it was those tattoos that had so frightened the black man in the cafeteria trailer earlier in the week.
As shown on that day in the trailer, Miguel had found that sometimes the old tattoos had come in handy during his security job. Sometimes when he encountered a street ‘tough’ who was not impressed by an overweight, 40-something ‘security guard’ who was armed with nothing more than a metal badge, it just took a flick of his collar to get the fellow’s respect, fear and immediate obedience.
So, that, my friends, is the story of Miguel, the L. A. gang member.
Senator Edward Kennedy may have had to resign the Owl Club in shame. They may have cursed his name for violating whatever sacred trust this little band of men had established.
But one can be sure that the Owl Club did not tell the good Senator that – due to his years of faithful service – they had decided not to murder him or his family members as a penalty for quitting the club.
Our distinguished Senators on both sides of the aisle are living in a total fantasy if they think that illegal immigrants who belong to the street gangs such as those found in L. A. are going to be able to quit the gangs even if they sincerely desire to do so.
Under this current proposed immigration bill, we will be granting citizenship to gang members, most of whom, unlike Miguel, have had no moment of moral clarity. These young men and women think nothing of driving by a group of people and opening fire in hopes that they might hit one of the people in the group – while taking down another six or seven who were unlucky enough to be in the way.
No, my friends, the folks known as S.A.’s live a world away from the Owl Club and the Whiffenpoofs and the super secret bunch at Yale known as ‘Skull and Bones.’
These clubs are groups comprised of the social and educational elite of this country. They play cards. They play golf. They have secret handshakes.
They are not, however, anything like the street gangs of L.A. and of other urban sites in California.
Those gangs are nothing short of a modern-day version of Chicago’s depression era mob known as “Murder Incorporated.”
If this immigration bill passes, these sociopaths-in-training or in-fact will not just own shares in Murder, Inc., will also become citizen shareholders in the United States of America.
This cannot and must not be allowed to happen.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment