Gangs Read online

  Gangs

  Gangs

  ROSS KEMP

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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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

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright

  reserved above, no part of this publication may be

  reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,

  or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,

  photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior

  written permission of both the copyright owner and

  the above publisher of this book

  EISBN: 978–0–141–90175–6

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 Rio de Janeiro

  2 New Zealand

  3 El Salvador

  4 St Louis

  5 Cape Town

  6 Moscow

  7 Jamaica

  Conclusion

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  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. That’s when I have to remind myself that it was my idea to be there in the first place! And if we didn’t 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 hasn’t 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 America’s 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. We’re 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 wasn’t a healthy location. In fact it was so toxic he told me he had been shot twenty-seven times. At first I didn’t 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 don’t believe me? Most people don’t 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. He’d 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, he’d 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. ‘It’s 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 didn’t 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 didn’t have an open-top Mercedes or loads of bling, and he didn’t 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 I’m 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. I’ve 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 H
ound Dog’s buddies, TK, got shot in the back by two rival gang members. He couldn’t 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.

  Not a good way to live or die. Nothing glorious about it.

  We had to leave in a rush when it looked as if there might be shooting – apparently the local Crips were jealous of the attention. Back in my hotel room, I tried emptying the minibar to calm my nerves. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I thought it over. There must be lots of Hound Dogs out there with stories to tell – stories that were fascinating but which, if Hound Dog and his mates were anything to go by, demolished the myth you see in movies and music videos, the myth that gangs are sexy, glamorous and cool. The idea that firearms are somehow fun and using them makes you a big man. Was the ‘gangsta cool’ image we see so much of just so much hype? What about a series that lifted the stone and set out to find the truth? I called Jackie Lawrence, then a factual programmes commissioning editor at Sky Television: ‘If I can find more people like Hound Dog out there on the streets, there’s a series to be made.’ Without a moment’s hesitation, Jackie gave me the green light.

  My brother Darren is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and my wife is a journalist. I have many reporter friends in the field, but I am not a journalist. I’m an actor, and I don’t go at stories in the same way. Actors are generally interested in the way people behave. I don’t have an agenda, an angle, or anything like that.

  My father was in the Metropolitan Police. When he was a Detective Inspector and I was around nine years old, I opened his briefcase, something I was forbidden to do. Inside I found a set of crime photographs showing the dead body of a white male dumped in scrubland. The sun had cooked parts of his skin black. The police initially thought the victim had been run over. It turned out that the killers had kicked and stamped on his chest so hard they had collapsed his ribcage. The corpse was drilled and mined by maggots.

  I felt sick at what I saw but, at the same time, fascinated. My dad came home, found out what I had done, and I got the biggest telling off I’ve ever had. Then he sat down and explained to me what had happened to the victim. I was intrigued. With tours on the Sweeney (Flying Squad) and with the Regional Crime Squad he spent a lot of time around human suffering and violence. This is one of the very rare occasions he talked about his work and it was rarely discussed again. But, like my father, I am interested in finding out about what motivates people to cause each other harm.

  There have been countless times over the last five years when I have longed to be back in the safe fictional world of Albert Square or the battles of Ultimate Force in the comfort of Pinewood Studios. I’ve spent considerable time in some of the worst prisons on the planet and countless hours with murderers, rapists and assassins. At times, undoubtedly, I have been deeply affected by what I have witnessed. At others, I have found myself sharing a beer and a joke with a multiple murderer. I would say now that this book leaves more questions than answers. Gangs are not a new phenomenon, however, their membership is on the increase globally.

  I have been privileged to travel the world over the years and discover countries and cultures that I wasn’t aware existed. I hope by reading this book you too will be able to gain an insight into some of the most dangerous and, I think, most interesting people on the planet.

  1. Rio de Janeiro

  Rio de Janeiro is a city at war with itself – it’s just that no one has declared it openly yet. When we got to the airport on the first leg of my journey to investigate some of the world’s most dangerous gangs, Ivan, one of the city’s hard-bitten taxi drivers, drove me in through the northern suburbs to my hotel on Copacabana Beach. The potholed four-lane motorway snaked in past a motley collection of half-finished offices and grimy apartment blocks, functioning and abandoned factories, warehouses and parking lots, and there, glowering from the steep, loaf-shaped hillsides that rose all around us, were Rio’s 800-plus favelas, or shanty towns.

  Up there was where the gangs lived. Up there was where I needed to go.

  Like avalanches of crime and resentment waiting to sweep down and engulf the city, Rio’s favelas are home to some of the world’s poorest people and some of its most violent gangs. With worrying frequency, the gangsters do come to town – mugging, looting, burning and killing.

  As we bowled past long stretches that looked as if someone had forgotten to finish them, Ivan asked what I was doing in Rio. When I explained I was there to do a programme for Sky Television on the city’s gangs, he burst out laughing. ‘What’s so funny?’ I asked.

  He gestured at the rubbish-strewn ground either side of the shimmering asphalt. ‘See this autoroute we are on? We call it the Gaza Strip. On one side you got the Comando Vermelho gang. CV are the strongest gang in Rio; they run most of the favelas. On the other side, you got the Amigos dos Amigos – the Friends of Friends. When night comes, the gangs start shooting at each other – sometimes even during the day. You don’t want to drive down here after dark, my friend, or you get your head blown off.’

  Before we got any further, we hit a police roadblock. This wasn’t anything like a UK police checkpoint – sinister in black, these policemen bristled with weapons: M16s, shotguns and semi-automatic pistols. Seeing a gringo in the back of the cab, they waved us through; as far as they were concerned, I was just another tourist on my way to the fleshpots. ‘What are they looking for?’ I asked Ivan.

  ‘Gang members,’ he said and drove through the barrier. ‘Drugs. Money. Kidnap victims. Stolen goods. You name it.’ Swerving to avoid a pothole, Ivan took a hand off the steering wheel and gestured lazily. ‘Look at the walls.’ I looked, wondering if he was trying to wind me up. He wasn’t – most of the high concrete walls, peeling paint, were pockmarked with bullet strikes. Sometimes you could see quite plainly the work of heavy-calibre weapons.

  ‘OK, mate,’ I said. ‘That’s very reassuring.’

  As we drove on, Ivan told me there are many of these Gaza Strips in Rio de Janeiro, front lines between the city’s warring gangs locked in a deadly struggle for control of the drugs trade. Another of the crossfire cross-routes is known locally as the Lebanon. The fighting that goes on around it is as bad as the bloody civil strife that ravaged Beirut in the 1980s.

  As we turned onto the six-lane motorway that separates Rio de Janeiro’s long curving beachfronts from the city behind, the whole picture changed: this was the Rio of the guidebooks, the downtown area fronting some of the world’s most famous beaches – Ipanema, Copacabana and Leblon – backed by soaring hotels, tall, swaggering apartment blocks and what looked like glitzy shopping malls. At face value, it was easy to see how Rio had come by its reputation as one of the world’s sexiest and most glamorous cities. Set in a spectacular curving bay, the city enjoys one of the world’s most wonderful locations. There was the soaring Sugar Loaf Mountain in the distance; the scenery and the weather were beautiful; and even though the sun had dropped below the horizon, there were lots of not bad-looking people wearing not very much clothing.

  Checking into our hotel, I was greeted with the news that Jason Evans, our assistant producer for the shoot, had already been mugged by four kids. I was beginning to think leaving my Rolex Submariner watch at home might have been a smart move. Peter Wery, our Brazilian cameraman, had lived in the Netherlands for many years and was ex-Dutch special forces. Cool in a tight spot, he had been in a few of them. Jason had been preparing the ground. He was already on very good terms with the local street robbers, but clearly not all of them. There was also Tim Pritchard, the director, who specializes in South American stories and handily speaks Brazilian Portuguese.

  We had found ourselves some local fixers, who would hopefully know how to handle the gangs. Born and brought up in Rio,
Fernando Continentino, our short, smiling, blue-eyed local translator/fixer who always had a Marlboro Red on the go, was one of my main contact points with the gangs. Our soundman, Heron de Alencar, was also Brazilian – very bright and never stuck for a word. He got by on charm when all else failed. I made a mental note to be respectful: whatever I might find here, Fernando and Heron probably wouldn’t appreciate my coming down too hard on the city.

  Once installed in the hotel, we went out to find some dinner. It was late by now, but the beachfront was buzzing. No one looked as if the idea of sleeping troubled them much, and judging by the street urchins racing around in little packs – the kind Jason had warned us about – when they did sleep they kept one eye open to make sure no one ripped them off. The more time I spent wandering around, the less I felt Rio lived up to its glamorous reputation. It looks good from a distance, but even one block back from the glittering strip goes rapidly downhill. There are bright flashing lights everywhere you look, more fast-food joints than you can shake a stick at and lots of very young girls walking arm in arm with equal numbers of very old American tourists. Shops sell fake designer clothing and tawdry souvenirs; dodgy saunas advertise rent boys. In fact, if I had closed one eye and ignored the Americans I could have been in Soho in London, only it was a whole lot hotter and the women were wearing even less.

  But the place was extremely alive – everyone animated, everyone busy. Even getting on for midnight, there were kids queuing on the beach to play keepy uppy football on the volleyball courts – you have to stop the ball touching the ground, using only your feet and head. No wonder the Brazilians are so good at the ‘beautiful game’. The world’s most flamboyant carnival wasn’t actually on when we were there, but with the thumping music, the racket from the street and the general level of hustle and bustle it felt as if one was about to start up at any moment.