THE BOYS OF SUMMER
Miami Herald, The (FL)
Summer had built to a point. The gangs had ripened and swelled in the heat, the clots of kids growing larger in the Grove and on the beach and at the Hot Wheels rink in South Dade. Violence spawned violence, retaliation begat retaliation. Round and round.
September 18, 1988
Author: JOEL ACHENBACH Herald Staff Writer
The big fight, the one that will long summon war stories both factual and embellished, came on the 19th of August. Some gang members from New York had come to Miami to hang out with the Latin Kings, and a rumble seemed appropriate for out-of-town guests. By midnight everyone was heading to the Grove.
The Kings set up camp at Fuller and Grand, in the heart of the tourist district. Their rivals, the International Posse, clustered a block away, across from the McFarlane Road entrance to Senor Frog's.
Counting allies and wannabes, there were about 30 kids on a side. Bunched together, the kids cast the unmistakable profile of a gang, but individually they could filter semi-anonymously through the Friday night horde of tourists and yuppies and clean-scrubbed teen-agers, their gang affiliation reduced to symbols, codes -- a Gucci hat on backward, a stopwatch around the neck, a quick flitting hand sign. Vocabulary gave the final clue: We used to be down with them -- we used to be friends; that scene is green -- it's boring; he's got locity or he's a crucial dude -- he's cool, funky.
The Kings and the Internationals keep a distance at first. There were a few perimeter skirmishes, warm-ups, like stretching exercises before aerobics. The gangs began to consolidate about 12:45 a.m. Slowly, almost ritualistically, they made their moves. They circled the triangular heart of the Grove, watching one another. This would be the big night, everyone could feel it. A dozen police officers -- a gang in themselves -- threatened to arrest anyone who didn't keep walking. The kids feared the cops. It wasn't just the threat of jail that the gangs were worried about. It was the threat of getting roughed up. Cops were head-knockers. The trick would be to achieve the fight and then sprint away before the cops arrived.
The police were absent on Main Highway, and that's where the gangs drifted. They faced off underneath Fuddrucker's.
"Are we down or what?" said a tall skinny boy from the Internationals. He repeated, "Are we down or what?"
Two Kings stepped forward and raised their fists.
The International Posse and the Latin Kings belong to different "nations" of gangs. Internationals are Folk. Kings are People. The terms were imported to Miami by gang members from Chicago, along with the name Latin Kings. The Folk and the People have no inherent characteristics. It has nothing to do with age or ethnicity or even neighborhood. No one could explain why Internationals were Folk -- except that they were allied ("down") with such gangs as the Latin Force and the Young Latin Organization, and they were Folk. Why were they Folk? Maybe because they'd had so many fights with the Kings, and the Kings claimed to be People. Why do Kings say they are People? Maybe they know up in Chicago.
If nothing else, the war between the Folk and People nations provided a nice structure for an otherwise long, hot, dull summer. The world is simpler when it can be divided in two, good guys and bad guys. Like America and Russia. Like Crips and Bloods in Los Angeles. Like in the movies.
Most of the kids in the gangs are 15, 16, 17, those years of superheated hormones and social alienation, years in which boys must suddenly prove they're men. They come from one-parent families, usually living with a mother who works and is gone much of the day. Sometimes the parents just don't care, or think delusionally that their son is really a sweet boy going through a phase. What they don't realize is that he sees himself as part of the warrior class. He may talk in a straight voice about how he intends to kill someone -- not because he wants to, but because he has to, to preserve justice. The toughest kids, the leaders, are the ones who can talk about this stuff with conviction. In their young lives these kids have already seen thousands of murders on TV, so they know the attitudes and language of homicide and mayhem.
There had been talk that Willie, a gang member in Homestead, would become the "godfather" of the Folk nation. No one knew for sure what a godfather would do. But a lot of kids thought that Willie would make a great leader, that he understood the meaning of loyalty, wouldn't run from a fight, knew how to stay mad. And he was 18 -- a wise man, an elder.
But Willie wasn't sure he wanted to be godfather. Maybe just "president." Godfather was too much responsibility. And he also had been catching heat from the cops. He didn't want to get thrown in jail, didn't want to embarrass his family. Like a lot of gang members, he says privately -- away from his friends -- that he's trapped.
"Once you get in, you can't get out," he said. "It's your life. . . . I can't get out. The only thing I can do is stay in, be calm and keep going higher and higher."
In recent months gangs have become a common subject at county commission meetings and on the evening news, yet there remains some doubt among the public, the press and the politicians as to whether gangs really exist. It seems a ludicrous question to those who work on the countywide Gang Task Force and to the merchants in the Grove and elsewhere who have had to deal with the gangs. What fuels the confusion is that crimes that are supposedly gang-related tend to be the handiwork of one or two individuals who just happen to be in a gang.
Gangs are a hot topic in the Miami media, in part because the word is a useful code for a vast, mysterious phenomenon. To modify the description of a crime with the phrase "gang-related" is to simplify a particularly disturbing kind of violence, categorize it -- to at once make it more sensible and more frightening. A kid gets shot and the first question is, "Was this a gang shooting?" If so, it's news; if not, well, maybe.
The lines are not so easily drawn. Darren Bibbs, 19, a former star athlete at Coral Gables High, was slain early this summer in a gunfight between two "groups" of black youths from Coconut Grove and South Miami. The "groups" denied that they were gangs.
"It ain't no gang, it's just a bunch of kids," said Mark Thomas, 18, of Coconut Grove. (Asked if he has a gun, Thomas said, "Yeah, I got a gun, because I have to protect myself.")
A member of the South Miami squad said, "We're a 'gang' cause we hang out together" -- meaning, apparently, as opposed to being an official gang with a higher, more exalted purpose.
These guys hang out together, use and sell drugs together and fight together. They also defend one another, which is probably the fundamental purpose of a gang -- to be a protection ring. The Skinheads of North Dade and Hollywood -- neo-fascist white kids with shaved heads, tattoos and a partiality for slam- dancing -- do not consider themselves a gang, but they behave as such if provoked. The symbolic aspects of gangdom -- the hand signs, the scary nicknames, the uniform clothing, the initiation rites (running a gauntlet or burning flesh with a cigarette) -- seem most popular with Latins. But even the Latin gangs are atomistic, nonhierarchical.
Still, recent fears about the rise of gangs are statistically justified. In the past three years there has been a doubling of gang members in Dade County, to upward of 3,000, according to conservative estimates by gang experts. Simultaneously, the gangs have consolidated, small gangs being swallowed up by larger ones.
Are they a public menace? To the parents of a slain or maimed child, yes. But gangs are probably only a symptom of a larger plague of teen-age disillusion, machismo, joblessness and truancy. If there were no gangs, if they could be abolished by law or hounded out of existence, there would remain the huge corps of troubled kids, wild kids, ignored and uneducated and unappreciated kids -- kids with nothing to do and a whole summer to kill.
One of the Kings, a small boy, took a fist in the face and collapsed. The whole place erupted. The violence was so quick and savage it was hard to tell what was happening. Four brutes pinned someone against a storefront and beat him relentlessly. Beer bottles sailed and burst on the pavement. Patrons of Steve's Ice Cream Parlor were shrieking as they watched a muscular kid stand in the middle of Main Highway and smash a chair on another boy's head. Another youth clasped a gun to his thigh and shouted that he was going to shoot someone. Tables and chairs flew like bowling pins in front of TCBY Yogurt. So many bodies were sprinting everywhere that one would have thought Godzilla had just appeared at the end of the street.
It was over as soon as the blue lights appeared -- it seemed like 10 minutes but might have been only a couple. The kids ran. The police tackled as many as they could. Half a dozen went to jail.
There was no more fighting on this night. The gangs went home, to their moms. But this surely would not be the end. The Internationals would demand revenge.
So would the Kings.
There could be no resolution to this conflict, no winners, because the violence had no meaning in the first place, no purpose save its own intoxicating performance. The kids knew the gang war was fundamentally stupid and foolish, that it was just a make-believe war, but they are of an age in which stupidity and foolishness are lesser sins than cowardice and disloyalty, an age in which make-believe is still a familiar and entertaining game, however dangerous.
Edition: FINAL
Section: TROPIC
Page: 8 Copyright (c) 1988 The Miami Herald