Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

by Johann Hari

To protect this way of life, you have to be terrifying. As we learned under Rothstein, you can’t go to the police to protect your property or your trade. You have to defend it yourself, with guns and testosterone. If you ever crack and show some flicker of compassion, he tells me years later, “everybody’s going to fucking rob you . . . They’ll just move in on your turf, take over your block, do whatever they want to you. You have to be fucked up to survive in this fucked-up paradigm . . . You got to be violent to not have violence done to you . . . You set examples. You make examples out of people. Some of them are completely justified and called for. A lot of them are not.” So the crew shot at trees, shot in the air, killed animals. Sometimes Chino would shoot in the direction of people—rival crews he needed to scare shitless. He will tell me that his bullets never hit them. He will also tell me there are things he can never tell anyone. Sometimes the gun jammed and everyone else was too frightened to unjam it. Not Chino. “I would cock that bitch back,” he says, “let that bullet come out, put it back in the clip and put the clip back in.” Two of their rival gangs were called the Autobots and the Decepticons, after the Transformer toys that were popular at the time, and that they still played with. These child soldiers lived in a mental landscape they constructed from scraps of TV cartoons, hip-hop, and a policy decision that handed them a crucial place on the delivery lin...