Kemp - Gangs

ROSS KEMP

MICHAEL JOSEPH

an imprint of

PENGUIN BOOKS

MICHAEL JOSEPH

Published by the Penguin Group
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Published in 2007
1

Copyright Ross Kemp, 2007

Photography courtesy of Ross Kemp and British Sky Broadcasting Limited

The moral right of the author has been asserted

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EISBN: 9780141901756

The AK-47 was fully loaded, safety catch off and was so close to my face that I could taste the metal. The fact that this weapon was in the control of a teenager who was off his face on coke was clearly of some concern to me. But the really frightening part was looking into his vacant eyes as he fingered the trigger in his world the price of life is worthless. It is at moments like this that I often wonder how I have got myself and the crew into this kind of situation. Thats when I have to remind myself that it was my idea to be there in the first place! And if we didnt take control of the situation very quickly my epitaph would be, Bloody idiot!

Three years earlier I was standing on an LA sidewalk talking to a gangster who had been shot more than two dozen times (as you do) when the questions came to me: Why hasnt anyone made a television series about gangs?, Why do people join them?, What makes a gangster tick? and Why do they do what they do and how do they do it? I wondered if gang membership was really on the increase and, if so, why was it happening? With gang violence a growing problem in my own city, London, I wanted to find out.

Like many things in life, the Gangs series came about by accident. In 2005, Sky Television asked me to step in as a presenter on Lethal Attraction, a programme about Americas deadly love affair with firearms. While filming in Compton, a gang-infested suburb of Los Angeles, I met a leader of the Bloods gang called Hound Dog. Little did I know this was to have a profound effect on the next five years of my life.

Hound Dog operated in the Rolling Twenties, between 21st Street and 29th Street, where a lot of gang action goes down. Were talking war a war of attrition for turf, supremacy, money and kudos waged on a daily basis between the two main gangs, the Bloods and the Crips. A war that started in 1969 and has been going on ever since.

Well built and physically fit, Hound Dog had a small teardrop tattooed under his right eye, dreadlocks with red plastic bobbles on the ends of the plaits and an easy-going, open manner. He was highly intelligent and charismatic. He talked about life and death in a plain, matter of fact way. He was engaging and articulate, and we both knew that if fortune had dealt him different cards and he had been born two miles up the road he might have gone to college. As it was, Hound Dog lived in a Bloods enclave totally surrounded by Crips. This wasnt a healthy location. In fact it was so toxic he told me he had been shot twenty-seven times. At first I didnt believe him. How could any human being take that many bullets and survive? It had to be some kind of world record. Either that or a miracle. Seeing my reaction he said, You dont believe me? Most people dont believe me. He pulled up his shirt, lowered his jeans and counted off the wounds one by one. It was true: his body was starred, notched and riveted with entry and exit wounds. The man was a walking testament to modern medical science and the most incredible luck. He said, Put your fingers in these, man, trying to get me to feel the depth of his wounds.

Hound Dog had spent so much time in ER he knew more about anatomy especially his own than most medical students. Hed taken nine rounds in the chest and three to the ribs. He knew exactly how to treat a wound, what type of bullet inflicted what damage, and how likely the body was to survive a certain gunshot in a given spot. As he lay unconscious on the ground in the course of one shooting, one of his attackers had run up, put the muzzle of a 9-millimetre pistol up under his chin and pulled the trigger. It was meant to make sure he died. Instead, the round went up into his mouth, blew off the tip of his tongue, ripped out the left side of his nose, re-entered at the top of the left eye socket, skimmed across his forehead and then stuck fast. It had to be cut out. He lifted up the red and white rag Bloods bandanna he wore to show me the neat scar where the bullet had been removed. By any spin of the dice Hound Dog should have been dead. Instead, hed had his chest split and cranked wide and his spleen removed along with lots of lead.

The shooting had begun as soon as he joined the gang. The young Hound Dog had been leaning in through a window selling marijuana. What will you take? he had asked his customers. Your life, they said, and shot him six times in the groin as he reared back. One bullet hit a testicle. Hey, but look, Hound Dog told me with a grin. Its all right I still got two kids!

Hound Dog was a scary guy. But scary or not, fully fledged Bloods gang member Hound Dog lived in a 24/7 world of fear. He didnt have a nice house in Beverly Hills; he had a very small house in one of the worst parts of south LA with a blocked toilet and small, airless rooms. He didnt have an open-top Mercedes or loads of bling, and he didnt have a pneumatic young blonde hanging round the place in designer lingerie. He had a large wife with a baby on each hip, and every time a car slowed down outside he reached for the MAC-10 sub-machine gun he kept ready or one of his many other automatic weapons, or the .38 Smith & Wesson revolver he had in case the automatic weapons jammed. Standing in the front room of his house he said, If a car slows down, you gotta get down cos Im gonna start shooting.

Hound Dog kept a lot of domestic bleach in the house to remove his DNA from the firearms after use. He knew how to strip and clean his arsenal blindfold. Ive worked with the British army a bit and it was like talking to a soldier in his case, a south LA street soldier. Violence was his stock-in-trade. He lived on the front line of a routine relentless war.

In case you think I am exaggerating, while we were filming, one of Hound Dogs buddies, TK, got shot in the back by two rival gang members. He couldnt afford medical care, so the hospital did what it could and then asked him to leave. Another gang member, Rat, let TK stay at his parents place, but after one night they grew understandably nervous and asked their badly wounded house guest to leave. When I interviewed TK we both knew he was dying. Forty-eight hours later he died alone on the street.