erick do you really and seriously think that tookie probably was the baddest gang banger on the planet? yes he was the co-founder of the crips.. yes he was the king/crownprince Cuzz but does that make him the "baddest"? if you really think that then you might be caught in the lack of knowledge about gangs ... theres much worse "bad boys" than tookie and if you think he is "the baddest" then you dont seem to know anything about gangs ... gang life is much more than the stereotyping that clean cuts have about it ... and theres much more to gang members than clean cuts know ...
Mo-DAWG
Here is a good essay:
www.mdcbowen.org/cobb/archives/004918.htmlNovember 23, 2005
Fond Memories of Tookie
I'm being sarcastic. The first thing you have to understand about Tookie Williams is that this is what he looked like. Knowing that this man used to hang out at parks and beat down people for fun, that he used to force people to oil his body, gives you some idea what Tookie was all about. The Tookie I knew hung out at Centinela Park in Inglewood with another huge dude named 'Mouse' doing pullups and otherwise being as badass as humanly possible. Basically, he did whatever he wanted to, and in the end what he wanted to do was be the most intimidating and dangerous man anywhere. He got his wish of course. Who was going to stop him?
I got other Tookie and Mouse stories second-hand from a kid named Timmy Green who was a bodybuilding roughneck too. Back in highschool, Tim Green was about five feet tall and 2 feet thick. He was a devastating football player, a little walking muscle. We all suspected that Timmy was a Crip, but nobody said it straight out, after all ours was an exclusive Jesuit prep school. I heard that Tim is dead, shot by another Crip somewhere. We kinda knew that he had a deathwish. Tim owned a red Honda motorcycle, a CB400 with the swivelly pipes. I rode with him once, and I immediately experienced a kind of terror I've never known before. Tim was absolutely fearless riding on the wrong side of the double yellow line of Crenshaw Blvd at 70 miles per hour. But if you talked about Tookie, Tim showed fear. Admiration to be sure. Tookie went everywhere in LA to prove that he was the was the baddest, and nobody lived to win a challenge, but fear too. Tookie was the man that thugs feared. There could only be one reason for that. He was more than buff, he was deadly.
You could not grow up in the 'hood in Los Angeles during the 70s and not know about Tookie or the Crips. It's probably hard to understand if you didn't grow up in a roughneck neighborhood. But street smarts are just that. You are forced to rely on the human instinct for survival, you navigate the degrees of danger and you grow senses that middleclass live has no use for. Tookie today looks like somebody's grandfather but don't be fooled. Back in the day, there were all kinds of gangs, some no more troublesome than the Jets or the Sharks. Truth be told, Tookie got busted right around the time gangs were going off the chain, and his Crips were the reason. The short version of the story is this, Crips were dangerous and they "Don't die, they multiply". There came a time when they became so pervasive and dangerous that anyone not in a gang was vulnerable - and then beyond that to the point at which gangs that didn't bang hard had to get hard. The Crips in the late 70s were basically escalating street rivalries into open warfare. From fists to knives to guns. The Crips created the Bloods because the Brims and the Pirus had to bang together or hang separately. When I was a kid, there used to be a saying: 'Crips are cool, but Piru rule'. By 1980, nothing was cool.
Me personally, I've battled Crips hand to hand. I've dealt with all kinds of knuckleheads, roughnecks and thugs. But everybody knows their limits. I know I am not to be a warrior and I didn't have to go to jail to learn any of that. I didn't have to wait until somebody wrote a rap song about 'dead homies' to know what that was all about. I grew up in the black neighborhood when basically few people had a choice on where they could get real estate. I know what it's like to walk through the Jungle at night, and I know if the man cursing on the bus is actually going to swing at you. But I only know what it's like to live around people who were basically about 1/3 as dangerous as Tookie Williams.
The scariest part of my neighborhood was West Blvd over near Adams. I could go into it, but it was over there wher I learned the meaning of getting 'curbed'. Now if you're dainty, skip to the next paragraph and agree me because I'm about to describe it. Everybody knows about being 'jumped in' and 'jumped out' of a gang. Basically about 7 of them beat you down until you can't stand up. That's child's play. You basically get curbed if you rat to the cops. What does that mean I asked? Well, you lay down in the street perpendicular to the and facing curb. You open your mouth and bite the concrete corner of the curb and somebody comes up behind you and kicks you in the back of the head. People who did this were afraid of Tookie.
I cannot wait until the founder of the Crips dies at the hands of the California justice system. This convict has actually convinced people that if you write some children's books, that you can redeem yourself for a quadruple murder conviction. That doesn't say much for the state of conviction these days. So long as he fries, I can handle it.
It's not surprising that the Coalition of the Damned is up in arms about this clemency drama, and quite frankly I'm not surprised that Jamie Foxx and others have a screw loose in this matter. Clearly, they don't know what Crips are all about. I discussed this sorry SOB here and over at africanamerican.org a month or so ago, and it's amazing the amount of BS excuses go into trying to make the case for clemency. Take this one for example:
Never mind the fact that Blacks make up the majority of the prison population because White cops are 6 times more likely to arrest a Black or Latino than a White offender. And never mind the fact that the police purposely go looking for Black criminal offenders while ignoring White criminal offenders.
Never mind the fact that the police don't do stings on White gangs because they know if it got on the news, it would tarnish the false image that "White people don't do crime". Never mind all of that, that is not important.
What is important is that Blacks are criminal animals, and that's all there is to it.
Nevermind? How about nevermind the Crips. So let's inteject a little sanity. And I'm going to break a rule here and bring back a whole lot more from a site than I usually do because I want people to get a handle on what gang violence is like in LA County. As you read this try to remember that this is just about one particularly notorius set out of hundreds of streetgangs.
Rollin' 60s N-Hood Crip Seattle Mariners
Seattle Mariners Cap
Sub Sets: All 60s are NHCs, but there are the Avenues and the Overhills that are west of West Blvd. Allie(s): Their allies include Neighborhood Crip sets such as 67 NHC, 55 NHC, and 46 NHC.
Brief History:Their main rival would be the Eight Tray Gangster Crips to the east. This would be the most intense rivalry between any two gangs in all of Los Angeles County. This rivalry goes back to 1979 and was the beginning to Crip infighting. This rivalry is discussed in Monster Kody's book Autobiography of an LA Gang Member and Donald Bakeer's book, Crips. It would be great to see a truce between these 2 sets, because so many other rivalries would come up under it and many lives would possibly be saved. Thus far nearly 400 members of both sets have died in the last 20 years and that does not include the bystanders caught in the cross fire. Also keep in mind that many of the decedents expired as a result of non-gang related circumstances such as car accident, suicide, natural causes and conflicts outside gang membership.
Comments:The Rollin 60s made news headlines when Tiequan Andrew Cox (b. 1966), who had purchased fake cocaine, sought revenge against the dealer when he mistaken a neighbor's house as the drug dealers. He was convicted in 1986 for committing a quadruple murder that occurred in 1984. The victims were the wrong targets and were related to former NFL Rams wide receiver Kermit Alexander. Cox, while on death row stabbed Stanley "Tookie" Williams in 1988. This act is depicted in the 2004 film Redemption starring Jamie Foxx but many suggested that the incident didn't play out as it did on the silver screen.
In 2003 City Attorney filed a gang injunction against the Rollin 60s Crips and they had specified 31 men that were members of the 60s, but some have suggested that the 60s were being unfairly targeted and some mentioned that the injunction included individuals that had not had police contact in several years. Below are some published articles about the injunctions.
Their main Blood rival would be the Van Ness Gangsters (VNG) to the north. Since the 60s attend Crenshaw High School, north of Slauson, they often clash with the VNGs and becasue the VNGs are a smaller gang with less membership, the Rollin 60s have been able to dominate the school population even though the high school is outside their turf.
The Rollin 60s also started a conflict with the School Yard Crips during the 1980s. This is an unusual conflict because gangs often rival with neighboring or adjacent gangs. But the Rollin 60s would show their dominance by hanging out at the World-on-Wheels skating ring on Venice in the neighborhood of the School Yard Crips uncontested many times. Although there were several shootings committed by the School Yard Crips, the Rollin 60s, for the most part maintained their dominance for several years there.
Other rivals would include all Hoovers, especially the 83 Hoover and 74 Hoover and all Gangster Crips that are hooked up with the ETGs, such as the 53 Avalon Gangster Crips and 43 Gangster Crips. The 60s and all the "Owes" were allied during the 1980s but that is not the case today.
Tookie deserves to die. Plain and simple. If he's such a saint, let's hurry him on his way to his everlasting reward.
