No Way Out

With his crazy stare, massive knuckles and tattooed biceps, Jimmy T. looks like an urban grenade with a faulty pin. The five-alarm face fits nicely with his career as an up-and-coming member of a Chicago gang called the Vice Lords. But when his face relaxes and the baby fat sinks back in place, a different visage emerges. Disarmed of weapons and bravado, Jimmy is a terrified 16-year- old who did something very, very stupid one hot summer night this past June.

“O.K., it was like this,” he says, rubbing those big hands together and rocking slightly in his chair. “They told me, ‘Time to put in some work for your homies. Here’s the gun. There’s the car. Get up and go, boy.’ ” In other words, welcome to the big time, Jimmy. Time to prove your stuff by shooting some rivals. Try not to hit someone’s mama or baby, but mainly just pull the trigger bang bang bang — and don’t lose the damned gun.

Only thing was, Jimmy wanted nothing to do with the big time. Like most kids in his West Side neighborhood, he just sort of fell into gang banging at 14. Then things got crazy, and now he wants out.

A muggy Saturday night shortly after 11. Jimmy is driving around in a stolen 1987 Honda Prelude, a 9-mm TEC-9 under the seat. “I’m thinking, ohhh, man, this sain’t for me. I’m just tired of this gang banging, and I’m, like, real scared.” A semiliterate high school dropout, Jimmy grapples with the ghetto’s version of a mid-life crisis. He drives around for 40 minutes, carefully obeying every traffic signal as he furiously works through his options. Definitely don’t want to be stopped by the police, really don’t want to fire this gun and sure as hell don’t want to disappoint the gang. Absolute ground zero in the mind of a gang banger. “I’m thinking it through, and finally it comes to decision time.” Jimmy wheels the Honda toward a group of faceless teenagers hanging on a corner in rival turf and blasts seven rounds into the crowd, wounding three.

Days later, he tries to explain why he did it. “Damn, man, don’t you know what would happen to me if I just told my gang I want out? That I’m scared?”

You can ask Keith Smith, a minister’s son in Waukegan, Ill. Smith called it quits last August after eight months of gang banging with a pack called the Latin Lovers. The de-initiation ceremony took place right before midnight in a local park. The ground rules: four against one for three minutes, no weapons. Smith, then 15, collapsed after the first minute. He remained in a coma for 58 days.

Or ask Thomas R., an 18-year-old former member of a Crip set in Los Angeles who just said no to his fellow gang members last April. “They did me pretty bad,” he says softly. Bad meaning a broken arm, a broken wrist, two teeth knocked out, lots of cigarette burns on his face and a few dozen bruises, which really isn’t too bad for the Crips. But Thomas cautions, “You bet they ain’t done with me yet.”

The quickest exit from gang life is via the morgue. The surest route is a one-way ticket out of the old neighborhood. For most young gang members, that leaves no choice at all. “Just to walk away and get out? God, you may get killed,” says Daniel Swope, executive director of a community group called BUILD in Chicago. “You make a commitment, and it’s lifelong.”

Most young gang bangers don’t even think about getting out. The money and security are too good and the alternatives too few. The gang is a surrogate family and the only source of approval, however convoluted, that they’ll ever know. Pathetically, all the bloodshed is merely a by-product of an utterly misguided and frantic inner-city search for respect. “What other world do these kids know?” asks George Knox, director of the Gang Crime Research Center at Chicago State University.

But some guys do get wise. Something about all the guns and death and arrests just adds up. “I was scared I’d have to shoot somebody,” says Juan Vanga, 22, who took a three-minute beating from five guys to get out of the Latin Kings in Chicago last year. “Hell, five of my friends are already dead.” Some guys get bored. “I wasn’t scared or anything,” says Eddie Calderon, 16, who quit the Latin Kings last month in a flurry of blows. “I just got sick and tired of holding the guns.”

The safest way out of a gang — short of fleeing — is to fade away very carefully. This is more plausible for members 19 and older, who have paid their dues and can now use jobs, wives or children as excuses for not hanging out with the homeboys. But most younger gang members have nowhere to fade away to. Meanwhile, gang bangers are notorious for overreacting at the smallest perceived slight. “You got to earn your respect,” says Salvador Nevarez, 23, who joined the Disciples at 13 but married two years ago and now works as a salesman for Montgomery Ward in Chicago. “There is no such thing as ever getting out. You just drift away.” Nevarez is well into his ninth life. “I had a lot of shoot-outs, but I never got shot,” he says appreciatively. His advice to the younger guys? “Only way for a young guy to get out is to get killed.”

Even the military, once an honorable way out of the ‘hood, has gradually closed its doors to all but the most qualified applicants, which usually excludes gang members. “There are a hell of a lot of gang members that would like to get out,” says Sergeant Wes McBride of the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department. “But there are not a lot of social programs out there to help them.” For a 14-year-old living in a housing project run by a gang, it doesn’t cut it to plead a hectic schedule when the guys come knocking. “If you’re in the projects, getting out of a gang just isn’t a smart thing to do,” says J.W. Hughes, 22, a former member of a gang called the Black Disciples in Chicago who now counsels gang members. “You have to fear for your life.” BUILD’s Swope warns, “If you don’t show up for meetings, they issue a B.O.S. ((beat on sight)) order.” Or worse.

Those who dare “drop the flag” and resign from the gang face a brutal little ceremony called being “violated” or “jumped out.” The precise ritual varies from gang to gang: sometimes each member of the gang, which may be several dozen strong, gets a free swing at the victim; other times four or five members are assigned to conduct the beating for a set amount of time. Whatever the punishment, the results are strikingly similar. “They give you a head-to-toe, which means you get your ass kicked,” says Frank Perez, program director for the Chicago Commons Association gang project.

Eddie Hernandez, 22, formerly of the Disciples on Chicago’s Southwest Side, recalls the first time he ever saw a guy being jumped out. “They made this guy walk through an alley filled with gang members,” he says. “Aw, man, it was awful. That guy was unconscious after just a few feet.” Hernandez doesn’t shy from violence easily. In his seven-year career, he’s been shot in the stomach, hit in the head with a railroad tie, had his arm broken in a fight, absorbed countless punches, and been jailed twice for auto theft — not to mention all the unspeakable things he’s done to other people. Last May he told his fellow gang members he had finally had enough. His former friends promptly jumped and beat him, stabbing him in the hand during a knife fight. “If they see me by myself, I’ll be jumped again,” he says matter-of-factly.

Perez counsels teenagers to go public with their desire to quit a gang only as a last resort. “It beats getting killed or blowing somebody’s brains out,” he explains. Most antigang workers are adamantly against such advice under any conditions. “That would be like telling the kid to go kill himself,” says Swope. Then there are folks like Marianne Diaz-Parton, a gang- intervention worker for the Community Youth Gang Services Project in Los Angeles, who actually condone the beatings.

Diaz-Parton, 33, joined Los Compadres at 13 and served three years in prison for shooting two rival gang members with a sawed-off shotgun. Since “retiring,” she is frequently asked by frightened female gang members trying to get out of gangs to monitor their beatings. “They know I’ve got juice with the gangs,” she says with considerable pride. She recalls the case of Priscilla, a 15-year-old who wanted out. Three other girls, all gang bangers, took Priscilla into a public rest room while Diaz-Parton waited outside to make sure things didn’t get too out of hand. “They went at her for three minutes. You could hear it, all right,” she says. Fearing legal complications, Diaz-Parton stopped accepting such invitations three years ago but argues, “Society looks at being jumped out as something barbaric. To me it’s not out of line. Hey, if you’re in a fraternity, don’t they mess with you? Only with gangs they take it a step further. That way you leave with dignity.”

Fat chance. Even those who endure a beating are not spared future harassment. And getting out means losing the protection of your gang while retaining all your old enemies, who don’t stop to ask questions. Those who do manage to escape their gang while remaining in the neighborhood are often sucked back in by a confluence of raw fear and sheer necessity. “The pressure is just too damn strong,” concedes Commander Robert Dart, who heads the Chicago police department’s gang unit. “You can’t be an island out there.”

Many anxious inner-city parents send their children to live with relatives out of state. Unfortunately, many of these kids simply start new gangs, rather than new lives, in Grandma’s neighborhood. “They’ve just transported the cancer,” says Sergeant McBride, who has a large map on his office wall covered with red and blue flags showing how the Los Angeles Crips and Bloods have metastasized across the country.

Police in Wichita (pop. 300,000) arrested their first transplanted L.A. gang members in 1989. Now Sedgwick County, which includes Wichita, is riddled with 68 different gang sets boasting 1,400 members. Last August, Regnaldo Cruz, 15, was taken to a park, forced to his knees and fatally shot in the head and chest with a .410-gauge shotgun. Though the suspect remains at large, police believe Cruz was executed for trying to get out of a gang called the Vato Loco Boyz. Says Kent Bauman, an officer with the city’s gang-intelligence unit: “People who aren’t familiar with gangs think that these kids should just say no. But in the gang world, saying no can get you killed.”

Local residents seized on a creative response early one morning last May, when members of Pastor Chuck Chipman’s congregation descended on a gang- infested neighborhood to rescue a 12-year-old boy being forced to work as a drug courier for a gang that was threatening him and his family. Before gang members could react, the entire family of four and all its belongings were whisked away to a safe house.

That evacuation prompted a local group called Project Freedom to construct a network dubbed the underground railroad to funnel gang members and their families to safety in cases where all else fails. Six former gang members and two families have been shuttled to safety through a patchwork of churches both in and out of the state. The relocations are coordinated with the Wichita police, who check for outstanding warrants. Project Freedom pays for the initial move, while local congregations agree to assume housing costs and arrange for jobs and education for as long as two years. “It’s a stopgap measure,” concedes executive director James Copple, who tours the city’s rougher neighborhoods on weekend nights wearing a bulletproof vest. “If we have to relocate them, then in some ways we’ve already lost the battle.”

An underground railroad may be impractical, but so are most of the other options available to a young gang banger who wants out. At least Project Freedom is saving lives. Frances Sandoval, founder of Mothers Against Gangs in Chicago, gets tearful phone calls from parents with kids too scared to leave a gang but terrified of staying in. “Unfortunately, there is very little I can offer them,” she says. “In most cases it’s hopeless unless they can literally pack up and leave. And we’re talking about moving to another state.”

Surprisingly, even many loyal gang members admit that their ranks would be thinned if quitting wasn’t so dangerous. “People want to get out of gangs, but they’re afraid of getting whooped,” says Enirque Quiroz, 20, a hard-core member of the Latin Kings in Chicago. Quiroz, a lumbering fellow who has been shot at 12 times, jailed five times, sliced in the elbow and the chin and had his hands broken with a bat, is exactly the kind of guy who makes getting out so problematic. Although he acknowledges some qualms about cracking the heads of close friends who want out of the gang, he has a simple technique for dealing with his conscience. “I’ve never done it sober,” he admits sheepishly. “Only time I do it is when I’m high or drunk and you know you just get going with the guys and get yourself really worked up.”

Then it’s all flying fists and boots and maybe even a knife or chain until the rage is exhausted and a body drops to the ground — just another punk expelled from the pack.