CHAPTER
3
Suburban
Gangs-The Affluent
Rebels
REAL
TALES FROM THE
DARKSIDE
Excerpted from SUBURBAN
Gangs-The AFFLUENT REBELS by Dan
Korem (Richardson, Texas:
International Focus Press, 1995) ISBN
0-9639103-1-0
HEARTLAND
GANG
The kid could have been
anybody, but not long ago he felt
like nobody—an outsider. He
sounded like a lot of kids growing up
in America’s heartland. Where he
lived was not quite Norman
Rockwell’s idealized, American
town, but it certainly wasn’t
the urban, nightmarish underbelly
often flashed across America’s
television screens during evening
news broadcasts. But if you listened
closely, you heard a dead edge to his
voice: "In my home I was a
nobody. I hated it. When I was young,
I was fat until the seventh grade,
and kids bothered me because of my
attention deficit disorder. I got in
all kinds of fights with kids who
were making fun of me."
Residents of
Minneapolis-St. Paul, the Twin
Cities, use words like
"nice" and
"clean" when they
affectionately refer to their city.
Yet in this benign, seemingly
innocent place, the nobody’s
path crossed the path of a nice,
law-abiding, law-enforcing man. Jerry
Haaf was a nice guy, who worked the
streets. People didn’t think
that gangs would invade a smaller,
more isolated metropolitan area like
theirs. Big cities like Chicago,
Dallas, Los Angeles, New York City,
and Miami—yes! Minneapolis/St.
Paul? No. Inner-city gang violence
was commonplace in other places,
but not in the Twin Cities, home of
the 1991 World Series champs.
On September 24, 1992,
officer Haaf met a nobody hell-bent
on becoming a somebody—or at
least he met the nobody’s
bullets. He was gunned down—shot
in the back—while in a pizza
shop in a run-down section of south
Minneapolis.
The same night, another
nobody was arrested. Andy Joseph
Kriz, formerly of New Brighton, a
suburb filled with
$100,000–$250,000 homes, was
taken into custody. As far as the
police were concerned, he was
somebody—somebody dangerous. He
was the leader of the DFL (Down For
Life) gang. He was ostensibly
arrested for an unrelated shooting of
several members of the Latin King
gang in north Minneapolis. These
shootings awakened people. They
started talking about gangs, even in
the suburbs.
Andy Kriz’s
parents divorced when he was young.
Both remarried, but Andy never got
along with his step-father; and he
never saw his real father on a
regular basis until he was
eighteen—the same year he
started serving time at St. Cloud
Penitentiary, a massive
one-hundred-year-old, granite prison.
Inmates called it the Greystone
College—Gladiator School . . . a
place you have to prove yourself.
Andy: "Gangs
were something I could relate to for
once. When I was living in New
Brighton, all these other kids had
two parents . . . they cared what
happened and could buy their kids
stuff. I couldn’t relate to any
of them. I wanted power over the pain
inside of me."
In 1986, when twelve
years old, he was with his father for
the first time since he was three.
The same year Andy started hanging
out with the G.D.—Gangster
Disciples, which were under the
umbrella of the Folks nation of
gangs—he would visit his father
in a deteriorating neighborhood in
north Minneapolis. He was also
fascinated by the Vice Lords, the
same gang that later shot and killed
Officer Haaf.
Andy: "I was
fascinated how nobody bothered them.
They stuck together like a group
[unlike his parents]. They were like
a family. But that’s only a part
of it. They had money. But it’s
an excuse. Your excuse is that you
are hungry. But your greed grows,
because greed always grows.
"Gangs are so
pretty at first, so shiny. But it
just turns into hell. I remember how
much fun I used to have gang-banging.
You didn’t live by any rules,
whatsoever . . . but then it got bad.
It wasn’t fun anymore."
Andy was put in rehab for drug use
when he was fourteen. The following
year he joined the Gangster
Disciples. "The initiation
lasted six minutes. Six guys beat you
and you couldn’t fall or say
anything ."
Dealing drugs, breaking
in and stealing from New Brighton
homes, and ripping off were a part of
the routine. By the time he was
seventeen, Andy left the Disciples
and formed his own gang, Down For
Life—DFL. He recruited three
youths he met in drug rehab and one
from the neighborhood where his
father lived. It was a racially mixed
gang—white, Hispanic, and a
Native American Indian. Each came
from broken homes where the mother
headed the household.
Andy: "Our sign
was a four-pointed crown. Each point
stood for pride, power, protection,
and partnership. Joining our gang was
a lifetime commitment."
By the summer of 1991,
over twenty-five youths had been
recruited. Andy could buy anything he
wanted, eat out at restaurants, and
regularly carried at least $500 in
his pocket. Then the Latin Kings
tried to invade his New Brighton
turf. He moved again from New
Brighton to the north end of
Minneapolis, but DLF’s turf was
still New Brighton.
"I was walking
up Tenth Avenue to Broadway going to
Burger King. I had been drinking. A
car stopped and four Latin Kings
jumped out. We fought and they
stabbed me in my arm, chest, and the
back of my head. It took me a couple
of months to figure out that the
house was at 18th and Taylor. So we
drove by the house once and the
second time we circled by, they all
came out on the street. That’s
when I started shooting."
Andy pumped three rounds
into the crowd from his 12-gauge
shotgun. Three people received only
minor wounds, but a fourth Latin King
was sprayed in the face and chest. He
later recovered.
"We then took
off, rented the movie Lawnmower Man
and watched it at the apartment of
one of our girlfriends."
A short while later, the
Minneapolis PD descended on the
apartment, arresting everyone. Andy
denied the shooting, but was
convicted of the shooting and
robbery. He was sentenced to six
years.
Lt. Bob Jacobson, one of
the officers who worked Andy’s
case and a youth gang specialist,
said, "Andy’s really a good
kid. I think he’s got better
than a 50/50 chance of making it when
he gets out." He based his
assessment on talks he had had with
Andy since the time he was fifteen.
He observed that
virtually every youth involved in
gang activity came from a broken
home. When asked what he thought
would be the most effective deterrent
to gang activity, he said: "Stabilizing
the home. If that doesn’t work,
go to prison. It’s about the
only thing that will scare
them."
Andy agreed. He said,
"Nothing would
have worked for me to stop.
There’s nothing you could really
do. I have a sister, right now, who
joined the Latin Kings. I’ve
tried talking her out it. But
she’s just like I was."
Since he started serving his sentence
in January of 1992, he has burned the
bridges with his gang, earned his
GED, and is now on the honor unit.
Special privileges include: being out
of his cell twelve hours a day,
better food, and a separate store and
weight room. He adds,
"I’d rather
be the geekiest person on the streets
than the coolest sucker in prison.
You can stay out of trouble when you
don’t feel you have to get
respect—being a man shooting
someone. My emotional mentality is
only now just starting to grow
because of what I did."
Andy wanted power over
his pain from a lack of respect, but
his prison case-worker, Doug Randall,
says that the change in Andy seems
genuine. Andy will have that to prove
to himself when, at the age of
twenty-two, he is released in 1996.
NO TEARS
FOR THE SPIDER MAN
Warm, summer nights in
the Dallas suburb of Plano, Texas,
are meant for dreaming, especially if
you’re a fourteen-year-old girl,
riding in a shiny, bright red,
mint-condition ‘64 Mustang. She
should have been able to lay back and
swoon as the wind rushed through her
long hair, but this girl wasn’t
dreaming , swooning or smiling. She
was riding through a gathering gloom,
a passenger of someone who could have
been the Spider Man. Like the lyrics
of Lullaby, a song she and her
friends heard many times, the refrain
snaked through her brain—
On Candy
Stripe Legs the Spider Man Comes
softly through the shadow of the
evening sun. Steering past the
windows as the blissfully dead,
Looking for the victims shivering
in bed.
Searching out
fear in the gathering gloom, And
suddenly a movement in the corner
of the room. And there’s
nothing I can do when I realize
with fright, That the Spider Man
is having me for dinner tonight.
Quietly he
laughs and shaking his head
creeps closer now And closer to
the foot of the bed. And softer
than shadow and quicker than
flies, His arms are all around me
and his tongue in my eyes.
Be still, be
calm, be quiet now my precious
boy Don’t struggle like that
or I will only love you more. For
it’s much too late to get
away or turn on a light, For the
Spider Man is having you for
dinner tonight.
And I feel
like I’ve been eaten By a
thousand million shivering furry
holes, And I know that in the
morning I will wake up in a
shivering cold. And the Spider
Man is always hungry.
Amy was feeling it was
much too late—too late to get
away or turn on a light, and she was
shivering. Her terrible, untold
secret made her feel even more
terrible. She would remember her
daddy’s midnight visits just
before falling asleep. He would touch
her like the Spider Man, tongue in
her eyes, alien, quicker than flies.
He would trespass as a dark stranger,
not as her daddy or deacon of the
church, but as something worse—a
dark, silent invader. And she wanted
him to stop, to please stop, to
disappear. But like the Spider Man,
he never did. He was always hungry a
nd he was always there.
One day I asked an abused
youth drawn to these lyrics, "What do you think
the song’s about?"
"It’s about
nightmares," she said.
"But who’s the
Spider Man?"
"The Spider
Man’s the nightmare."
"I know, but
doesn’t it sound like
incest."
After a long, frightful
pause, she added, "Yeah."
Amy’s parents
finally divorced when she was in the
sixth grade, but that didn’t
stop her nightmares. Nothing did. She
desperately wanted them to disappear,
and she didn’t care what it
would take or what she might need to
do to rid them.
Jonathan was a recruiter
for The Satanic Cult, a local gang of
drug sellers. He too was fourteen
years old, and he didn’t know
why Amy was withdrawn and
frightening, but he knew one thing:
Amy matched Terry’s
instructions: "Just find a girl
at your school who looks shy and
scared—who’d do anything to
have a friend. Then ask her the four
questions about drugs." Terry
always used these four questions to
recruit new sellers, who were then
told to sell only to
"long-hairs"—those
with hair past their shoulders.
Jonathan saw Amy sitting
alone at lunch. He recognized the
opportunity, sidled alongside her,
and softly asked, "What’s
your name?"
"Amy."
"Wanna do
drugs?"
"I don’t know.
Maybe."
"What kind of drugs
do you like?"
"I don’t
know," she answered, almost
whispering.
"How about some
coke?"
"I don’t
know." Jonathan told Amy about
his friend, Terry—the guy with
the red Mustang, who had real powers.
Amy’s eyes widened.
"Terry’s got power over
everything. Just name it! And he can
teach you to have it."
"What kind of
power?"
"Satan’s
power."
"What can it
do?"
"Anything."
"What do I have to
do?"
"Just try some coke a few times
and sell a little to your friends."
Amy had never used or dealt drugs,
but now she was thinking about her
nightmares, her demons, the Spider
Man. Maybe this power would work. So,
she bought a few "nickel"
bags (a five-dollar bag of cocaine
packaged in cellophane). A few days
later she was introduced to Terry,
who picked her up after school. Amy
climbed into the front seat of the
red Mustang. Then Terry blindfolded
her and told her to keep her head
down in her lap so she couldn’t
see anything. He didn’t want her
to know his destination—his
apartment in Garland, a middle- to
lower-middle-income suburb. Amy knew
she ended up in Garland—only
fifteen minutes away from
Plano—because she lifted her
head a couple of times and peeked
under her blindfold.
Terry, a
nineteen-year-old dropout, was five
years older than Amy and in her
nightmarish world, he had an edge.
His red hair hung down the middle of
his back and he had flashing, knowing
blue eyes, an upside-down cross
tattooed on his stomach and a
swastika tattooed on his right thigh.
He was a racist and later battered
Amy for trying to recruit a black
girl into the cult. After grilling
Amy, he asked her to submit to him
sexually, testing her loyalty to the
group. She agreed. Perhaps this
was the way to transmit to me some of
his power, she thought. They had
sex in his small, sparsely furnished
apartment. Amy was the second
partner. "He always had two
girls," she said. When they
finished, Amy was blindfolded again
and they drove to an isolated field
in Plano. He forced her to kneel and
when the blindfold was removed, she
saw a crudely painted, red pentagram.
It was several feet across and seemed
to surround her. There was also a
small, makeshift altar where a
sacrifice would take place. This was
the site of her secret induction, and
she felt well-prepared. Her father
taught her how to keep secrets and
she kept them well.
At least a dozen young
teens sat in a circle around the
pentagram. (Terry liked young gang
members because they were easy to
control.) Because of their position
in the gang’s hierarchy, each
one knew their role in Amy’s
"orientation."
The structure of The
Satanic Cult from the top down was:
Master, Slave, Orientor, Recruiter.
Terry, who was only five-foot-one,
was the Master. He liked to recruit
kids from rich neighborhoods because
their friends had enough money to buy
drugs. The Slaves took orders from
Terry and acted as runners. The
Orientor, Jonathan, was in charge of
induction rituals. Recruiters, like
Amy, were at the bottom in the chain
of command. They were lowly proles
who sold drugs and recruited other
kids to sell.
Kids recruited into the
gang had to fit a specific profile.
First, each recruit had to be new to
the community. Students were sought
who didn’t have ties to anyone
else in their school; that way the
cult-like gang became their immediate
circle of friends. Terry preferred
fearful, reclusive, emotionally
damaged kids. Plano, population
150,000, was a good
"technoburb" to hit. There
were lots of kids from broken homes
with "new money." Plenty of
homes where kids came home to an
unsupervised nest. (Although often
touted as a premiere suburb in which
to live, the seeds of discontent in
some homes were observed as early as
1983 and 1984, when eight youths
committed suicide, garnering national
attention.)
Second, prospective
recruits had to be blue-eyed with
blonde, red, or black hair. Brown
hair was forbidden. Amy had blonde
hair and blue eyes; this satisfied
Terry’s tastes. And she was
perfectly predisposed to be seduced
by his empowerment scam. He knew they
wouldn’t receive powers, but
they didn’t. No matter, just as
long as they sold drugs and he cashed
in.
At the site there was the
board and cinder-block altar, adorned
with candles and a metal chalice.
After ranting about how he was Satan,
Terry savagely killed a cat, spilling
its blood in the chalice. Amy drank
some of the fresh blood and took
drugs. While under the influence, she
heard them chant in low voices,
"We have the power to do
anything," as they pledged
allegiance to Satan.
Other induction rituals
were held at a Motel 6 in Denton on a
Saturday—the sixth day
of the week, and in a room with a
number (like 126). This formed the
number, 666—the mark six
in the room of the Antichrist. During
the next several months, the drugs
and the gang made Amy feel important
and affiliated with something that
held the promise of power; however,
none of it stopped or diminished her
demonized nightmares. She still woke
up, shivering cold. Terry
couldn’t kill the Spider Man.
Terry’s promise of power was a
sham. When Amy entered a local drug
treatment center, she asked her
counselor to talk with someone about
the terrors she experienced in the
gang. But she was afraid of reprisals
and harm from Terry when he realized
that she entered rehab and was
getting out of the gang.
In 1989, over a dozen
such small, independent gangs had
arisen in schools around the central
and east Texas area with the
name—The Satanic Cult. These
drug-selling gangs helped set off a
false panic that adult be
used as sacrifices. Two weeks after
we talked about her gang, Amy groups
were after kids to moved to Alaska to
live with a relative—far away
from Terry’s turf.
BURLY BOY IN JACKBOOTS
The boy-man was burly.
His shaved head gave him the right,
savage look; and he dressed in black.
Macho boots, jeans, T-shirt, and
heavy belt. His jacket of course was
black leather. There were silver tips
on his boots. He was dressed to
march, swagger, menace, and to
destroy. This was the uniform of the
tribe, the skin-head colors.
"What the f--- are
you looking at?" he bellowed,
standing erect, throwing his chair
aside. The nattily dressed man looked
askance, then moved away as quickly
as possible to the remotest section
of the atrium. Grabbing a fistful of
fries, the boy-man flung them in the
direction of the man’s retreat.
Blaring, pulsating MTV
music and video images filled the
Burger King. Housed in a posh
business complex, youths regularly
dropped in for fast-food fixes.
Management strategically constructed
a separate, quiet atrium dining area
away from the cash register lines. It
was designed to attract a more
genteel crowd—business and
family types. It had the right
look—subdued chrome, glass, and
greenery providing an upscale
environment to mollify the stress of
everyday life.
The boy-man is Erik. He
dressed to intimidate visually and
attract attention. He used this as a
device to lash out. Two months
earlier, a bigger fellow with his own
lashing out to vent, didn’t like
Erik’s image and style. Without
warning, he bashed against
Erik’s shaved skull, knocking
him to the floor. It was a bad scene.
"He didn’t know
that I had any strength left,"
Erik later bragged. "After a
couple of minutes, I reached into my
pocket, grabbed my brass knuckles and
destroyed him. He never got
up."
Although Erik didn’t
maim or kill his attacker, he claimed
to be a killer. No one knew if his
stark and horrendous claim were true.
It sounded authentic and everyone
stayed away and gave him the benefit
of the doubt.
This burly, six-foot
two-inch figure seemed even more
threatening in the sedate atrium. He
should have been in the other room
with the kids, but he chose the
atrium to spew hate, shout
vulgarities at men as they passed,
and cheaply whistle at women.
Eighteen-year-old Erik and his
shorter partner were dyed-in-the-wool
skinheads.
"When he was a
younger boy, Erik’s parents
divorced and his father, a teacher,
moved to Sweden. Erik wanted to be a
pediatrician, but failed to enter the
medical university. He was angry . .
. He was angry about his absent,
abandoning father.
He was angry that he
couldn’t cultivate and keep
friends; and he was angry that some
Arab youths raped his girlfriend.
This was a defining moment for Erik.
The rest of his cumulative, simmering
hate became sharply focused and he
could express it with laser-like
intensity as a hate-mongering,
menacing, hell-on-wheels skinhead. .
"I ordered my
friends to kill him. They didn’t
do it, but he never came around
again." Neither did his
girlfriend, who was terrified of his
rages.
No father. No girl. No
future. Erik was a boy-man in pain,
and he was poised to smash it into
smithereens with his fists.
Dave watched Erik and saw
flickers of the pain that nourished
the hate. Possessing acute insight
into counter-culture types, Dave
heard in a university lecture earlier
that year that it was the pain of
broken homes that drives most
skinheads. The two skinheads trained
their attention on him, mumbling
derogatory remarks, laughing at Dave,
the all-American guy and his bright
red, white and blue shirt. Dave
informally greeted Erik: "Hey,
how ya’ doing?" The skin
and his partner were stunned, then
surprisingly they returned the
greeting.
"Mind if I join
you?" Dave asked casually. They
waved him on. Dave asked Erik where
he came from and initiated some
nonthreatening, small talk. Another
adult passed and made the mistake of
staring. Furious, Erik threw his
chair aside, screaming, "What
are you looking at? Am I a show? Quit
looking at me!" He grabbed his
nunchaku, a martial arts weapon, and
flashed them in the face of the man
who only wanted to eat lunch in a
quiet place. Then in an instant, he
composed himself, sat down, and
resumed our conversation.
"Do you enjoy being
a skinhead?" Dave asked with brotherly directness.
"No. I don’t
know if any of my (skinhead) friends
love me or not. I don’t
have any friends outside of
skins."
"Skinheads are
basically known because of their
hate. Would you agree with
that?"
"Yea."
"Who do you hate? Do
you hate foreigners? Do you hate me?"
"No. I don’t
hate you."
"Do you hate
Jews?"
"Yea, but I
don’t hate them as much as I
hate Arabs. I hate Arabs. And I hate
Chinese. And I hate Blacks. I guess I
don’t really hate Jews."
"Why hate Arabs?"
"Because an Arab
raped my girlfriend."
As they continued to
talk, Erik periodically shouted
obscenities at those around him. Dave
chastised him. "I was amazed
that Erik received me as a big
brother," Dave later recalled.
"When I directed my attention to
him as a person, rather than a
strange object, he responded.
" Dave pressed him
about his father.
As tears welled up, Erika
said, "Last week my father
embraced me. He was concerned about
me being a skinhead. What will happen
to me. He is concerned that I
didn’t get accepted into the
university." "Erik,
it’s so foolish to hate."
"I know. . . .
It’s eating me alive." Dave
had heard of skinheads in America,
England, and Germany, but never
expected to encounter a skinhead in
Burger King in downtown Budapest,
Hungary, in October of 1992. He had
heard there was a profile of a youth
who engages in skinhead activity, but
never expected one to show teary-eyed
emotion so quickly and openly.
Erik and his friend,
Gyula (pronounced du’la) were
born in Budapest, the Paris of the
East. They were like many of their
counterparts in other, affluent
communities. Their expressions of
hate were not learned at home. And
like many skins in America, Erik,
when pressed, admitted that he really
didn’t hate minorities which he
impulsively had said earlier.
These stories, taken
together, represent what is occurring
in affluent communities in America
and Europe. The kinds of gangs youths
are joining are diverse, and which
one is more popular at any given time
can depend upon something as simple
as which type of inspiring music is
in vogue. Collectively, these stories
illustrate what is going on in the
minds of affluent gang youths and
depict the three types of gangs—delinquent,
ideological, and occultic—that
are and have been present since the
early 1980s. Andy Kriz, inspired by
inner-city counterparts, formed his
own delinquent gang. Regarding the
emergence of affluent gangs, his case
is not typical one in that he was
directly inspired by inner-city
gangs. He stated, though, that he
probably would have formed a gang
when he was enough even if he had
never spent time around the Gangster
Disciples, witnessed by the fact that
he opted to form his own independent
gang.
Most affluent gangs, like
the occultic gang that
snared Amy, have their own
independent inspiration points, far
way from urban areas. They don’t
form as a result of a spill-over from
inner-city areas. Erik, the Hungarian
youth who came from a well-to-do
family, wasn’t influenced by
gangs from lower income areas. He
derived his inspiration from the
youth subculture—expressions of
fashion and music—and formed the
third type of gang addressed in this
text, the ideological gang.
Until you have
interviewed a number of these youths,
it is difficult to imagine that
there’s a common, predictable
profile of a youth who engages
in these gangs, but there is. There
are also predictable reasons why they
will disengage. Before we examine
these facets, let’s take a brief
look a t the history of gangs in
America.
The Art of
Profiling
Reading People Right the First Time.
Reading people is a natural
reaction. Now learn how to profile
people like a trained
professional—with comprehensive
and systematic accuracy that extends
beyond just reading body language.
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