Black-Hispanic gang rivalries send summer chill through LA area

LOS ANGELES - Alejandro "Bird" Martinez was joyriding in a stolen van full of fellow gangbangers when the crew came upon a black man parking his car - and decided to kill him.

Martinez and two others hopped out and riddled Kenneth Kurry Wilson and his Cadillac with bullets from a .357 revolver, a 9 mm semiautomatic and a 12-gauge shotgun.

Four members of the Avenues, a Hispanic gang entrenched in one Los Angeles neighborhood, were convicted of federal hate crimes usually tagged on white supremacists. Prosecutors argued the gang was trying to drive blacks out.

The slaying was seven years ago, but the verdict this month was one in a series of reminders this summer that racially motivated black and Hispanic gang violence remains a Los Angeles reality.

While some police, academics and even gang members insist racism isn't a factor in the violence, a pair of headline-grabbing killings - of a Hispanic teen by a black assailant who witnesses said yelled a gang name as he fled and a drive-by shooting by a pair of black gunmen that left three Hispanics dead - suggest otherwise.

"If it's not race motivated, if it's not gang motivated, then what the hell is the motivation?" asked South Los Angeles activist Taylor Mayfield after the June 30 drive-by.

After 20 gang shootings in Compton left four dead over one July weekend, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca cited tensions between black and Hispanic gangs as he redeployed deputies to the area. The federal prosecutor who oversaw the Avenues case announced plans to prosecute other gangs involved in race-based violence.

The June 30 slayings prompted black and Hispanic leaders to hold an emergency discussion of how to prevent a bloody back and forth.

"Please talk to your gang members and ask them to bring a truce," South Los Angeles activist Eddie Jones appealed to black and Hispanic gang leaders. "Stop the shooting and the senseless killing."

There have been few studies of Los Angeles' black-Hispanic gang violence. One was completed by University of California, Irvine, professor George Tita, who reviewed the nearly 500 homicides committed between 1999-2004 in a violent South Los Angeles policing district and found almost all cases were black-on-black or Hispanic-on-Hispanic.

"The rare events are more newsworthy," he said of gang killings between Hispanics and blacks.

Police Chief William Bratton has said there was no evidence the June 30 killings were race- or even gang-related - a position that had some questioning what it would take for the department to acknowledge tension between black and Hispanic gangs.

"Look at the history of this town. It went up in flames," said Assistant City Attorney Martin Vranicar Jr., who supervises his office's gang cases and who was referring to the 1992 race riots that followed a white jury's verdict acquitting four white officers of the most serious charges in the beating of black motorist Rodney King.

Complicating the current equation are gang members returning from prison, where joining a race-based gang is a mode of survival. A war between Hispanic and black prison gangs set off a series of prison riots across California this year that left two dead and more than 100 injured.

"The whole racial thing leaks out into the real world," said Joseph Holguin, 28, who grew up in an East Los Angeles public housing complex as a member of the Primera Flats gang.

Los Angeles gang feuds were historically black-on-black - as embodied in the war between the Crips and the Bloods. That changed in the 1990s, when Hispanic immigrants moved to Compton and South Los Angeles homes that middle-class blacks were leaving.

The area was 80 percent black and 20 percent Hispanic in 1980, according to an analysis by University of California, Santa Cruz, professor Manuel Pastor. By 2000, Hispanic residents represented 60 percent of the neighborhood, blacks 40 percent.

Resentments simmered between black holdouts, who felt besieged by the newcomers, and recently arrived Hispanics.

"They would try to jump me for not being black," said Mario Bonilla, a 22-year-old Mexican immigrant who spent much of his South Los Angeles childhood looking over his shoulder. "They resent us."

A convulsion of violence in 1993 and 1994 was the last mass outbreak of black-Hispanic gang warfare. Two Hispanic gangs shelved a long-standing rivalry to fight the black Shoreline Crips, who had cornered drug sales in the beach community of Venice. The turf war left 11 dead in six months.

For Skipp Townsend, that was a lesson in how black-Hispanic conflict could erupt at any time.

Even as the violence cooled in Venice, it flared in the South Los Angeles neighborhood where Townsend, now 42, was a member of a black gang. A war that began more than 10 years ago with a fight between a Blood and a member of the mostly Hispanic 18th Street Gang continues today.

"I had no idea that a year and a half later I would lose so many loved ones," he said.

The Avenues case offers another vivid example.

An informant told the FBI that in 1998 the gang received an order from the Mexican Mafia prison gang to kill all blacks on sight in their predominantly Hispanic Highland Park neighborhood. Leading up to Wilson's murder, members of the Avenues terrorized other blacks, shooting a 15-year-old boy on a bicycle, pistol-whipping a jogger and drawing outlines of human bodies in a black family's driveway. In 2000, members of the Avenues attacked another black man waiting for a bus in Highland Park as they called him racist slurs. Shortly after Chris Bowser reported the crime to police he was shot three times in the head and died in the street.

For the most part, however, it is a mistake to describe battles between black and Hispanic gangs as purely a matter of racism, said Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest who has worked for more than 20 years rehabilitating gang members in East Los Angeles. Instead, he described the friction as a struggle between gangs suddenly occupying the same neighborhood.

"It's no more about race than rape is about sex," he said.

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