It’s Gang Life,But Not As We Know It

Recreational Stage

Forming identity and interest groups (“ganging” in Thrasher’s, 1927, words) is normal adolescent peer behavior. It was unsurprising, therefore, to find that the gangs in my sample were born out of familial connections and friendships formed in local schools, communities, and, in some instances, Mosques and Evangelical and Pentecostal churches, which cater to devout congregations drawn from different ethnic groups. Ethnic minorities and young immigrants occupying an expatriate identity banded together around a commoncultural heritage, shared experiences of cultural estrangement, and in response to repeat, sometimes racist, bullying and victimization at school or on the street. Decker, van Gemert, and Pyrooz (2009) describe similar processes. Xavier says as follows:

The only thing that’s keeping us together in the middle is our situations. That’s what brought us together as a group in the first place is our situations. Either a single parent, no dad or no mum, or nobody just don’t care about you and you’re just out on the street living by yourself and you feel to have some associations to get ahead. So it’s just our situations that brought us together.

With weak family ties in London or, in some cases, no reference group at all because their parents remained abroad, these youngsters formed gangs as a means of social support.

A small number of interviewees prioritized the social support and peer affirmation that gangs offered in the absence of family. Captain even described his gang as a surrogate “family” network:

People out here seems to find more love outside than in their own families… . We were family in a sense of I could sit in their houses, laugh with them, talk to them, they’d drive me around and sometimes they’d even give me pocket money.

Membership within these gangs is not governed by strict rules and rituals but rather occurs as a consequence of shared history. Members enjoy similar interests, life trajectories, and experiences, not least the same spaces (schools and neighborhoods). Gang names, in turn, are often derived from these spaces, regardless of whether they are imposed from within or without. As Bullseye explained, “If you’re from Clapham, you’re a ‘Clap Town Kid’.”

The gang provided activities and a social life. Wolverine outlined the average “day in the life” of a gang member as follows:

You sleep through the morning because you are out late and there’s nothing to get up for. There’s no set time for anything. You wake up, go out, meet your friends in wherever they hanging out, sit on the block. If it’s a weekend you’ll probably hear about a party, a house party or a party in a hall. You call as many people as you can and that’s it, you go.

This social role persists even as gangs evolve, with gangs moving from structured activities back to informal ones. Indeed, regardless of what evolutionary stage the gang is in, the vast majority of gang members’ time is spent sitting around listening to music, “spitting” rap lyrics, hustling girls, drinking alcohol, smoking cannabis, and sharing stories—acts indistinguishable from those untaken by many adolescent peer groups. What is different in the first stage is that delinquency is purely opportunistic and rarely acquisitive. Delinquent “adventures” or “exercises,” such as fighting or acts of petty vandalism, says Gambit, are simply rewarding because they offer reprieve from boredom and release endorphins in the brain.

Criminal Stage

Although gangs begin life as recreational groups, crime and violence can quickly become intrinsic to group identity and practice. Adolescence has long been associated with heightened rates of delinquency. G. S. Hall (1904), who is widely accredited with bringing the term “adolescence” into common parlance, argued “a period of semi-criminality is normal for all healthy [adolescents]” (p. 404). G. S. Hall recognized that culture influences one’s expression and experience of adolescent “storm and stress.” By engaging in criminal acts, my interviewees became people of “respect” in street cultures where respect was everything (Anderson, 1999; Gunter, 2008). Crime was rebellious and exciting. Other youths began to fear them. Girls were suddenly attracted to them. The only problem was that crime also attracted other criminals (both allies and rivals) and law enforcement.

Resulting “in-group” and “out-group” favoritism (Tajfel & Turner, 1986) created a fascinating double standard—gang members viewed the traits of their own gang as virtuous but typically perceived those same traits as vices in rival groups. During my fieldwork, insiders would describe aggressive gangs as assertive, for example, whereas outsiders would describe them as callous. Following Decker (1996), external threat/conflict forced gangs to strengthen their internal structures and become much more violent and cohesive to survive. As Wolverine explained,

We was committing crimes so we sat down together, it was like a meeting, I suppose and we just gave each other names and it started like that. Because it was not like socializing, it was actually going out to commit crime and do stuff. We was premeditating what we was doing before it happened. Planning it up.

Indeed, gangs at this stage often change their names to better reflect their criminal components. Brixton’s “Younger 28s” gang, for example, changed their name to “PDC” (Peel Dem Crew), which has its roots in the Jamaican “peel dem,” meaning to “steal from them,” and better described the extent of their activities (Hill, 2007).

The police response to gangs such as PDC inadvertently helped to solidify them. For example, one police officer recalled,

We were frequently arresting young boys who claimed to be Muslims to garner preferential treatment in the cells. We called them the “Muslim Boys” because they were quite literally Muslim boys, which obviously stuck because they started calling themselves by the same name.

Some Muslim Boys, a splinter group of PDC, had indeed converted to Islam and, in the post-9/11 and 7/7 era, began posing as Islamists to gain street credibility and trade on false perceptions about links to al-Qaeda.

Following largely unsubstantiated rumors that the Muslim Boys were forcibly converting young men to fundamentalist Islam at gunpoint with help from corrupt Imams, the Mayor of London’s senior advisor on policing described the gang as a criminalized front for terrorist extremists and “as tough to crack as the IRA” (Hill, 2007). Local police similarly overemphasized the threat of the gang to tap into a burgeoning counterterrorism budget and bring state resources to eliminate them. This only enhanced the reputation of the gang, for though the Muslim Boys were certainly responsible for a number of violent crimes, neither they nor PDC, who were incorrectly reported to have more than 2,500 members, presented the size or scale of threat that was suggested (Hill, 2007).

In neighborhoods where conventional protection under the law was perceived as neither available nor applicable, gang members came together to protest repeated searches and militaristic police patrols:

You’re automatically stereotyped. It’s like all Black people are criminals. [The police] got this policy where, more than three [people in a group], you’re considered a gang so you automatically get stopped… . After a time, you feel like, “oh we a gang now? Okay, we’ll show you gang.” (Xavier)

With little or no established collective reputation, gangs thus began to participate in “active street duties,” “posting on the strip” and on the “frontline”:

[The gang] was just a group of friends from the area that just wanted, that went around to different areas causing the hype and then they just called each other a name from what they heard from a film and it’s just started from there, then it just got bigger and bigger and bigger… . We just [started] like doing unnecessary stuff like going to areas and causing problems because we knew we had the older lot had our back so basically we were fearless with anyone. So we used to go out to different areas, gang up, “we’re hard, we’re blah, blah, blah,” robbing people, starting fights, taking peoples’ girls, that stuff. It’s part of the buzz really. (Daredevil)

Such activity not only generated feelings of intense joy, liberation, and power but also redefined existing territorial rivalries along London’s sheer number of schools, postcode areas, and natural geographical boundaries.

Quicksilver explained that gang members actively patrol and police territorial boundaries because the act of someone from a rival gang or postcode “caught slipping” (entering their territory) is seen as an affront to the gang’s power and reputation:

This is my house. These are my endz. Would you let someone break into your house? That’s disrespect. You disrespect my endz, I’ll come down on you hard. This is my house, my rules. Everyone ‘round here knows if you cross this one road, it is death. Your life is on the line.

For gangs to take hold and flourish, they must develop a reputation for violence (Decker, 1996). Violent reputations save on the costs involved with identically reproducing said asset or property (Gambetta, 2009). Gang members rely on the reputation of their gangs for making good on their threats. The violence capital of individual gang members may vary, but if a gang holds a reputation for violence established by years of violence displayed by multiple gang members, then every member of that gang benefits from a reputation acquired by the efforts of others. Others impute a high probability of being violent to a new gang member, not necessarily because he himself has demonstrated violent tendencies but simply because he is a gang member.

Monetary gain from street crime and wanton violence is minimal. Interviewees, such as Flash, argued that the proceeds were barely enough to obtain the necessary accoutrements, such as jewelery and trainers, which kept them ahead of their peers in the competition for social esteem: “You rob a phone it’s cash straight up. But you get five pound here, ten pound there. And what, these shoes [cost] £100, this jacket [cost] £300. That’s a lot of phones.” The risks inherent in such overt criminal displays were further cause for concern:

Back in the day when I first started, that was the thing; you gotta rob someone for a nice phone or like a fiver or, or stuff like that. Now robbing people for that will just get you sent to jail for, for nothing. (Electro)

And yet, street crime was common among my interviewees, and, to gain the reputation sought through its perpetration, it was often violence. My findings thus confirm Pitts’s (2008) assessment that respect and recognition are far greater incentives for the more overt criminal activity of gang members in London than monetary gain.

As the first generation of gang members matured out of adolescence, however, “bank balance” and the pursuit of material wealth supersede their desire for “street credit”:

When I first joined we weren’t really on the making money thing, we were just like getting our name around, going around different areas going yeah, we’re [gang name], don’t fuck with us. But then as we got older we just started getting more organized, just working on money, like dealing drugs and stuff, just, we just wanted to make money, that was it. (Scorpion)

Working in syndicate, street robberies became a means not only to enhance individual and collective gang reputations but also to generate a “preliminary accumulation of funds,” which eventually could be invested back into criminal commodities such as drugs and guns (Ruggiero, 2000, p. 51). Enterprise became the new agenda.

Enterprise Stage

London’s gangs first became truly entrepreneurial in the mid-1990s to early 2000s. This timing is significant. Such was an era of easy consumer credit and rising technological materialism, which gave the appearance of wealth among the middle class. London’s bourgeoning financial services industry and declines in the top marginal income tax rate simultaneously drew in foreign billionaires and created a “super rich” class of traders, investment bankers, and hedge fund managers (Standing, 2011). The majority of Londoners, however, lacked the specific human capital necessary to service this new knowledge-based economy. Concurrently, traditional youth labor markets collapsed, university tuition spiked, and youth unemployment soared. Although spending on public services went up, at the same time benefits to the poor were worth less and taxes were less redistributive (Standing, 2011).

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD, 2011), income inequality among working-age people rose faster in Britain than in any other rich nation since the mid-1970s. The share of the top 1% of income earners increased from 7.1% in 1970 to 14.3% in 2005. For my interviewees, such overt differences in life chances translated into perceptions of injustice that in turn affected the decisions they made about their life strategies:

There are two Londons. Our London ain’t The City, Houses of Parliament, all that shit. Our London’s right here, a fucking ghetto council estate. We see those rich people over there and we want what they got. We want our piece. So we’ll shot green (cannabis), steal, rob, fight, till we get it. (Exodus)

Having absorbed the lessons of the acquisitive world, in other words, some youth used gangs to create the life that material deprivation and poor life chances otherwise denied them (S. Hall & Winlow, 2008). As Vertigo mused, “Certain man learn maths through drugs … in school they don’t learn maths but on the road they learn maths. We got 14 year olds like accountants.”

There were other catalysts for the entrepreneurial turn of London’s gangs. George Bernard Shaw once characterized the United Kingdom and United States as “two countries separated by a common language.” By reading media, youths learned to interpret. Satellite television, launched in 1989, and the Internet, ubiquitous by 1996, led to the cultural diffusion of the gang lifestyle (Hagedorn, 2008). New immigrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, and the former Soviet Bloc likewise modeled for young people a diverse gang culture (Decker et al., 2009). Drug networks followed immigrant flows (Ruggiero & South, 1995). Indeed, technology and globalization changed the business model of traditional organized crime in London to incorporate youth (Pitts, 2008). One of my interviewees reflected upon his interactions with adult business criminals as follows:

I wouldn’t say I knew exactly where the stock [of drugs] was coming from. I knew sort of like, some of the people that we had to meet were at the top, like, you have some of the Turkish mafia who you go and get like your heroin from… . They’re grownups. Yeah, they’re serious organized crime. We dealt as well with … the Adams family. Yet again, they’re very, very serious organized crime. You know, they’re the modern day Krays, do you know what I mean? … You got some of the Russian mafia as well like, or you get eastern Europeans now. You meet them down in the docks, you get stuff down there… . They might have containers on the docks, I ask no questions, get told no lies, you know what I mean? You know, when it comes to some of the drugs, like, you go and meet some of these old White dudes in the country that’s grown it and he comes and shows you, “Here’s my, you know, greenhouse full of bloody skunk weed.” (Juggernaut)

Electro also observed how adult business criminals contracted “muscle” from local gangs as additional manpower to murder informants and competitors. He and others were even enlisted to serve as couriers in a simple cocaine market structure that involved direct importation from the Caribbean—“secreting it in body passages” and swallowing it in grape-sized latex rubber packages:

Every time he paid us, he’d only pay us half, though. So we’d get the money for the end the last job and half for the next. The idea was he wanted to keep us on… . There was a job that came up … it was to bring some drugs back, drugs about my person, yeah, so from St. Lucia… . He gave us a proper little shack … a terraced house in the hills … we had a swimming pool, a Jacuzzi… . We had drivers, if we wanted to go anywhere… . We went to the clubs… . There was one strip club we went in called Solid Gold and like the queue in that place was unreal. We just walked straight past them all.

Electro never made it past Customs and Immigration at Heathrow airport. He served 8 years in prison for trafficking two kilos of cocaine. For him and others, however, imprisonment merely facilitated social interaction with other career criminals. The boundaries between gangs and organized crime became increasingly blurred.

As gangs evolve, they display less personal orientation and more goal orientation—specifically a commitment to financial goals with crime as the means not the end. Iceman posited: “We’ve got a common goal which is like you try and grow the reputation and you try and make money … economics is a very, very important part of it.” Rejecting the notion of gangs as purely recreational groups, fellow gang member Xavier quipped: “If you want to hang out and play Playstation, join a youth club”. Indeed, nearly 80% of my gang member interviewees explicitly characterized their gangs as remunerative drugs “businesses.” For example,

It’s organized crime. We had an aim, an aim being money, yeah, an aim being to generate capital for the big man… . We are in competition as a business with other businesses, that is, other gangs, other businesses for products, for opening hours, for size, for price, you understand? We are the competition, for security, for all of those things. Why do you think that young people be [ambivalent] about getting [legitimate] employment? They find the ideas difficult to grasp because in the business they’re involved in they get a credit line, a company phone, company car, bodyguards, you know, and these are all metaphorical statements. (Electro)

The drugs business within gangs very much resembles the multilevel marketing structure of direct-selling companies such as Amway and Avon (see Densley, 2012). Gangs essentially stop recruiting their peers and begin recruiting subordinates, resulting in the incorporation of approximately three levels of power and decision-making authority: (a) a higher level, or “inner circle”; (b) a middle level of decision makers, or elders, that develop gang organization by generating sales and building an active customer base; and (c) a lower level of youngers who are directed by their elders and thus accountable, punishable, or capable of being rewarded by them. As these names imply, some degree of organizational evolution is age graded (see Densley, 2012).

Elders purchase drugs on demand from their inner circle, either working alone or pooling their resources to make larger initial buys. As Wolverine explained, the inner circle “make their living selling guns or selling big pieces … of drugs … on credit with strings attached.” Elders, in turn, proactively build and mentor their own “downline” (in direct-selling parlance) of distributors (youngers), who in time build their own distinct customer bases, thereby expanding the overall gang organization.

Elders supply their youngers through a series of “blind drops” in which drug quotas are wrapped in plastic bags and strategically placed in advance into loose masonry, overflow pipes, toilet tanks, receptacle chambers, car wheel arches, and in other places:

[The elders] just drop off what they need to drop off and then they’re off to whatever they’re doing. Everything is hand delivered. They use pay as you go phones with no contract. They don’t use text messages. They don’t come on the street with the lower ground dealers. (Psylocke)

Elders rarely handle the contraband in which they deal. Directions are later sent via Blackberry’s encrypted instant-message service or, in the case of one gang, instructions recorded on MP3 players. Economic transactions are arranged in person or by telephone, but mobile handsets are routinely changed to combat police surveillance (a trick some interviewees said they learned by watching the hit television series, The Wire). Messages are also often coded. Firearms may be endowed with female names, such as “Loretta” the Beretta handgun or “Tanisha” the TEC-9 submachine pistol, for instance, so that when gang members speak of “going out” or “looking after” a particular weapon it sounds to outsiders as though they are either embarking on a romantic date or caring for a sick relative.

Most youngers are employed by their elders to work what was known colloquially as the “drugs line,” although some are sent out “on assignment” to explore “new markets” in areas where they are unknown to police; notably commuter cities with vibrant nighttime economies (Nightcrawler). The “line” refers to the client list, which is unique to each individual gang member. Complete lists of trusted users are stored on mobile phone SIM cards akin to the Rolodexes of business executives. This explains in part why gang members often maintain multiple telephone numbers: one for family and friends, one for other gang members, and one for clients.

Drug sales are fundamentally an individual or small-group activity, not coordinated by the collective gang. The gang instead provides the reputational and criminogenic resources to sustain the enterprise. Elders earn income both from the retail mark-up on any drugs they sell personally and the sales volume they and their downline generate. Youngers, in turn, receive a small wage or cut of the profits. Income variation between elders and youngers thus appears “highly skewed,” perhaps even similar in proportion to the wage disparity found in legal franchises and the gang famously documented by Levitt and Venkatesh (2000, p. 786). For example,

[As an elder] you can more sit back and make money. You’ve got everyone else running about for you. And even if you’re not doing something you’re taking a cut out of something else, you know what I mean? You go out there and earn money trying to stay as much below the radar as possible. You’re literally putting bits on people to say, “Ok, well, I need you to go out and, you know, you’ve built up a line.” You know, you’ve got cats phoning that line, “all right, here’s the line, you go out, you sell the drugs. I’ll give you the drugs, just go out and sell it. Yeah? This is what you’re getting for a week,” yeah? So they’ve got a weekly wage, which might be something like £500, but they’re making five, six grand … for you… . Yeah, they’re getting, like, a 10% cut out of it. You know, or there’s a percentage that they get out of what’s made. Peanuts compared to what, you know, your taking home for yourself… . Those are the kids you like because they’re entrepreneurs. Sometimes they don’t even know that they’re working for me or working for me second or third hand. All you’re doing is literally, now and again you come, you meet them, you drop the bits on them and you’re in, you’re out. The best way to put it to you is like the director or CEO of a company. Or like a General in the Army. He doesn’t need to be out there on the front line but he still has the troops doing the work. (Juggernaut)

Elders also typically deal within lower risk private networks. Buyers and sellers know each other and routinely cooperate in arranging illegal transactions that occur inside private (e.g., hotel rooms, homes, cars) or semiprivate (e.g., bars, nightclubs, stores, motorway service stations) spaces. Gang youngers, by contrast, often work within higher risk public networks, which involve making sales to buyers in public settings such as streets and parks or in hallways and common areas of buildings. Before the police shut them down in 2008, for instance, members of the Acolytes sold drugs out of an unmanned launderette, concealing small quantities of product in their laundry and behind tumble driers and change machines.

My interviewees typically overestimated the scale of their drug dealing operations, as the following analogy demonstrates:

We’re entrepreneurs, we work hard for it bruv. Youngers be making a grand a week shotting. Do you even earn a grand a week? Getting them out of the game is like telling someone working at Merrill Lynch to quit and go work at Sainsbury’s [grocery store]. (Thunderbird)

Success in the drugs business depends on acquiring the funds to make bigger drug purchases:

The more you buy the less the mark-up and that comes down more with time when your supplier trusts you. It still comes down to money. Money is power. If you can dead the connect (buy the entire drugs supply), then people start to have to come to you. You become the man. (Havoc)

Things are rarely so uniform, however, not least because gang members may consume drug supplies before they are sold or accept other forms of payment (e.g., consumer goods, firearms, sex). People who walk around with large quantities of product with them also become priority robbery targets. To avoid a reputation as someone always in possession, but also to remind others of their role in a bigger organization, gang members will instead tell new and unfamiliar customers that they first need to go visit a “friend” to fulfill their order.

Gang members were eager to pull thick rolls of banknotes out of their trouser pockets to illustrate a typical “night’s work,” but amounts quoted often refer to revenue rather than income. They also struggled to transform cash into wealth. Only inner circle gang members had the human and social capital to launder profits through casinos, pawnbrokers, money couriers, small bank deposits, and remittances transferred using money service businesses such as Western Union. One interviewee resorted to depositing cash into the bank account of a wealthy private school girl he had known since primary school. In one high profile case, TerrorZone gang members used ticket machines at train stations to launder dye-stained banknotes obtained through cash-in-transit robberies. They purchased cheap fares, paid with high denomination stolen cash, and pocketed the “clean change.” (Daily Mail Reporter, 2010). In another example, gang members bought their own music on iTunes and Amazon websites using stolen credit cards in order to profit from the royalties (Smith, 2009).

Governance Stage

Gangs in the enterprise stage are comprised of individuals for whom involvement in crime is for personal gain. By some margins, therefore, such gangs would already constitute organized crime (see Marshall et al., 2005). Some gangs, however, evolve to an even higher state of being and thus meet more robust standards of definition. Not only are they suppliers of illegal goods and services, for example, but they also aspire to be the sole suppliers in a given domain (Varese, 2010).

Members of the Avengers gang, for instance, distribute drugs in and around the brick-built quad-shaped flats of a labyrinthine social housing estate, which is comprised of nearly 900 apartments. Gang members have ripped out security cameras, smashed lights, and tampered with electromagnetic locks and intercom systems on communal doors to help conceal and expedite their nocturnal deals in the alcoves and stairwells. They have also modified attic and floor spaces, electrical boxes, emergency access ladders, and service cupboards in communal areas to hide sealed plastic bags that contain drugs, knives, and other contraband, and to make these items difficult to attribute to any one specific gang member. The Avengers not only enjoy a “monopoly” in the distribution of drugs and firearms in the area but also are engaged in a violent campaign to reduce competition and govern neighboring markets. They even extort small business owners who operate on their turf (a barber, café owner, and newsagent).

For the Avengers, and other gangs at this stage, violence is more instrumental than expressive:

This ain’t no thing where we stand here like we own this piece of concrete and kill you just because you live five minutes this way or that. But if you come violate what we’ve created … what we doing here … the thing we got going on here, then there’s trouble. (Vertigo)

We don’t just go around shooting people. This is about money. It’s all about money. (Hulk)

Violence is used both to protect drug markets when they are threatened and prevent others from setting up in competition with established drug dealers. Electro, for example, described one gang’s response to someone trying to cheat him and go at it alone:

He took the money that I was supposed to have been owedand rather than give it to my sister to help her pay the rent and whatever else, he tried to set himself up with a cocaine dealer. But, of course, the people that run the area didn’t like the idea that this little kid was going to try and, and also he had no-one to have his back, now, did he? So apparently he got beaten up quite savagely and they took the drugs back and the cash anyway. What an idiot.

Suffice it to say, while individuals can and do enter the drugs market, it is much less risky to do so as part of a gang.

Another feature of this stage is gangs moving into legitimate business. Ex-gang leader Elijah Kerr, for example, argues that PDC is no longer a gang but a “street movement” titled “Poverty Driven Children,” which encapsulates an underground record label (PDC Entertainments), a clothing line (Public Demand Cartel), a barbershop (Pristine Designer Cuts), a youth engagement project (Code 7), and investments in the local nighttime economy (see http://pdcent.com/profile/). One can only speculate how a group that is “poverty driven” can so afford to pay for their business premises and to produce and promote their work; suffice it to say that revenue generated from record sales and live performances in this age of digital media cannot cover it alone. Indeed, Kerr alludes to “taxing” drug dealers on the Angell Town estate where PDC operates (Hill, 2007), thus, implicating himself in the business of organized crime.

Another sign of governance is when the benefits gangs bestow extend beyond the immediate membership of the gang. Some gangs in London, for instance, protect community residents from violence and exploitation, provide them with financial sustenance, organize recreational activities, and otherwise “serve” the community, much like certain larger US gangs (Sánchez-Jankowski, 1991; Sobel & Osoba, 2009; Venkatesh, 1997). Gangs are not conventionally restrained from taking action, which is advantageous not only in illegal markets but also in community settings that may not have reliable access to official or bureaucratic state means of action (as a result of history, money, and social standing). As Vertigo explained, gangs can dispense “quick justice” upon those that unduly prey upon “innocent people.”

I have written elsewhere (Densley, 2012) how gangs develop rudimentary structures, systems for issuing orders, rules that govern member interaction, and continuity over time, to ensure their effectiveness as suppliers of goods and services. To regulate the distribution of goods and services, however, gangs must also invest in the “resources” of violence, territory, secrecy, and intelligence. The latter two deserve additional explanation.

Gangs require an informational advantage to stay one step ahead of rivals and the law. I recall once standing on the corner talking with a group of gang members when one of them received a telephone call from a “lookout” positioned at the window of an adjacent building: He had watched our entire conversation and demanded to know who I was and what I was doing there. Gang members likewise listen on police scanners and conduct research on the Internet regarding basic police surveillance techniques, the function of different police units, and the meaning of police shoulder boards and identification numbers. On one occasion, Colossus showed me a record of officer shift patterns and the make, model, and registration number of supposedly “unmarked” police cars. He described updating these data as part of his “job.”

A gang’s capacity for information gathering is part of its reputation. A gang’s reputation, in turn, is intricately tied to its control and influence within the local and larger community. During my fieldwork, I learned about gangs paying local residents to act as “sentinels” and gangs corrupting police and local authority employees so that they turn a blind eye to certain activities and provide early warning of new suppression efforts. In some communities, “clean skins” above suspicion provided personal alibis, safe houses, and stash houses for gang members. In others, gang members had befriended nightclub door staff through local gyms and sports clubs to obtain valuable information and ensure clemency during personal security checks. The Marauders even provided nightclub security in return for carte blanche to deal drugs on the premises. Bottom line: Gangs were beginning to encroach upon and govern all aspects of life in the neighborhood.