Death in the 'Hood

By John Skow

TITLE: BABY INSANE AND THE BUDDHA

AUTHOR: BOB SIPCHEN

PUBLISHER: DOUBLEDAY; 370 PAGES; $20

THE BOTTOM LINE: Children gun one another down for fancied slights to a gang's code of honor.

SUBTRACT DRUGS FROM THE bloody San Diego gang scene that reporter Bob Sipchen describes -- go ahead, wave a wand -- and the festering urban mess still would stink of hopelessness. Sipchen, who writes for the Los Angeles Times, uses an African proverb for an epigraph: "It takes a whole village to raise a child." If there is no village of strong adults, only warring teenage street gangs controlling a few blocks of city turf, then the gangs may do the child rearing. Kevin Glass was 10, a clever, skinny black kid already moving from mischief to larceny, when he began to ape the swagger of a 15-year-old member of the Neighborhood Crips gang, whose street name was Insane. Among older kids, Kevin had noticed already, it was the "gangstas" who always had money, guns, girls, the wary enmity of cops and the fearful respect of "chumps," or civilian noncombatants.

Kevin became Baby Insane, and a Crip. As such, his totem color was blue, and his mortal enemies, who wore red, were Bloods, and in particular a nearby Bloods subset called the Skyline Pirus. (Black Crips and Bloods gangs, now nationwide, got their start in Los Angeles in the early '70s.) The bonding ritual was a subadolescent mumbo jumbo of slogans and hand signs, like those used by adult fraternal groups. Car theft, drug selling and smash-and-grab robbery (smash a storefront with a car, wait for the glass to settle, and grab the goods) were agreeable moneymakers, but what gave the Crips their legends and their heroes were drive-by shootings in Bloods territory, to avenge real or fancied dissing -- slights to the gang's code of honor.

Baby Insane earned his name. He dodged automatic weapons fire successfully, against considerable odds, but his repeated collisions with the law eventually forced him to choose between doing heavy prison time and turning informer. A shrewd detective named Patrick Birse -- called Buddha because he looked like one -- persuaded him to turn. The author's tough, believable account of their edgily trustful relationship offers no solutions at all to the gang problem facing most of the nation's cities. But it does suggest why a restless man might become a detective, and why a bright, rootless boy might take shelter with a tribe of homicidal children.