Blood Brother

Like many high-school seniors, Damu has his share of problems.

He's in trouble at school. His mood can swing from gregarious to brooding. He's shorter than other kids, but he tries his best on the basketball court. His friends are bad news, but he can't bring himself to ditch them.

All typical problems for a 17-year-old. But there's an additional source of stress in his life. Damu is a Blood, and has been for four years.

Membership in one of the nation's most notorious criminal gangs, he says, can have its benefits: money, girls and a ready cadre of friends. But it's also a life he's starting to see as a dead end with no easy exit.

To protect him from other gang members, WW is not using his real name. Damu, Swahili for blood, is a word the gang's members commonly use to describe each other.

He joined when he was 13—jumped in when four friends beat him up in a ritual initiation that took place in the laundry room in one of their parents' homes.

He knew what was in store.

"It changes your whole fucking life," he says. "You either get killed, or you run for the rest of your life, or you go to jail, or you get a lot of money from it."

Damu is not on the list of about 280 known gang members in Portland. That list, compiled by Portland police, represents only about 10 percent of the estimated 2,000 to 3,000 gang members police suspect live in the Portland metro area.

But Damu's mother, his principal and his school counselor all worry he's deeply entangled in gang life. Deep enough to have "Blood" tattooed on his arm, get kicked out of two schools and bear a scar from a bullet wound in his foot.

He took a substantial risk in speaking openly with WW while Bloods and Crips continue to take shots at each other in an ongoing war of retaliation.

Damu declined to name his friends or any other gang members, in keeping with the gangster creed that absolutely forbids ratting out others. The current round of violence was triggered by a slaying at a funeral in December.

Three young men have been killed and several others injured in gang shootings since the Dec. 12 funeral at North Portland's New Hope Missionary Baptist Church.

Last month, Damu says, he exchanged gunfire with rivals on Southeast 162nd Avenue. He admits he was looking for trouble after his friend, Darius Perry, was killed in a New Year's Eve shootout in Gresham.

As cops and city leaders struggle to quell the conflict, Damu's account of his life provides a rare window into the banality of gang life as much as its brutality.

On top of the usual teenage dramas, he's also pressured to prove himself through violence. Not to do so would cost him the only friends he has.

"Retaliation is a must," he says. "If somebody shoot at you in your hood, you better go get their ass. If you called up, you have to go. You don't have no choice."

Damu carries a .40-caliber handgun when he's selling drugs or cruising the streets at night. But the contrast between Damu the gangbanger and Damu the regular kid was apparent last month.

After school, he was at home in his family's tidy apartment in outer Southeast Portland. He was spending time with his mother and stepfather in the living room—they were sitting on the sofa, he in a plush armchair—watching TV.

He takes the school bus each day and plays guard on an intramural basketball team. He obsesses about girls and has trouble buying booze. His favorite TV show is Family Guy, and he dreams of being a forensic scientist—"like on CSI, " he says.

On Feb. 5, he lost a pack of Newport cigarettes at the David Douglas School District's Fir Ridge alternative school, where he attends class each weekday morning to study for his GED. Tucked inside the pack was a $5 bill he was saving to buy more.

He was broke.

On top of that, the principal sent him home early when he was caught scrawling gang graffiti on a table in the cafeteria.

The graffiti tag was for the Bloods, a black street gang founded in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Portland gang cops say the Bloods took root in Portland in the 1980s and are still one of the most violent black gangs in the city, though they are outnumbered here by the Crips.

Damu is a YG—a young gangsta, or a junior member. To advance he needs to prove himself to the OGs, or original gangstas, by making a name on the social scene, backing his gang when fights break out and responding if he's called on to avenge a wrong. Members who don't follow when it's time to take revenge get tuned up, or beaten into obedience.

Growing up in Northeast Portland's Cully neighborhood, Damu was born into gang life.

His biological father was a member of the Pirus, a group from Compton, Calif., that split from the Crips in the 1970s to found the Bloods. His older cousins also were Bloods known and feared along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Portland's gang mecca in the 1990s.

Mentored by his cousins, Damu grew up fast. With their protection, he says, he was selling rock cocaine on the street to clucks, or crack addicts. Smoking marijuana became his daily ritual, and it still is. At age 12, he lost his virginity to an 18-year-old woman. Both of them were jacked up on powdered cocaine.

He was also schooled in the rules that govern gang life: Total loyalty is demanded. There's no dipping into the gang's supply of cash—the get-on money. And youngsters often bear the risks of running drugs and carrying weapons.

Women are sex objects who are relied on to open their homes and provide cash handouts to men. They also can join a gang if they're jumped in or sexed in by sleeping with the gang's male members.

"You get more pussy," Damu says. "Most bitches like gang members. For what reason, I don't know."

In summer 2003, a cousin bought Damu a bus ticket from downtown Portland to Los Angeles. Damu lied to his mother, saying he was staying with a friend in Portland, and went to L.A. for two weeks.

There he met up with his older cousin, who was a member of the Denver Lane Bloods. The neighborhood where he lived was a battleground, with the Raymond Avenue Crips—longtime enemies of the Denver Lane Bloods—vying for control.

One evening Damu and an 18-year-old Blood were on their way to a store to stock up on the night's supply of booze, beer and cigars. A car drove past and a passenger opened fire.

Damu watched as a bullet ripped into the right side of his friend's head. He died at the scene, splattering 12-year-old Damu with blood. He stared at the wound for a moment.

"It fucking looked like spaghetti and shit—like if spaghetti had a lot of sauce in it and you chopped it up real small, except it was chunky," he says. "I'll never forget that shit."

Damu ran and a bullet ripped through his red Converse All-Stars into his right heel, where a puckered round scar still remains.

Some kids would have suffered emotional trauma. Damu says he locked the memory away and moved forward with plans to join a gang.

He lived on Northeast 60th Avenue, but he had his choice of any hood—the word to describe subsets of the Crips and Bloods.

Damu chose the Lincoln Park Bloods, a hood based in Southeast San Diego, where he has never been. Prominent members include the rapper Mitchy Slick.

He says the choice was arbitrary.

"I was a Blood from the start, I just wasn't in no hood yet," he says. "I already knew some people from [the Lincolns], I got drunk a little bit, and I thought, 'What's up, man?' It didn't happen right away. I had to kick it with them for a little bit."

After he was jumped in, Damu had the word "Blood" tattooed down the inside of his right forearm, its curly stylized letters clearly legible in black ink.

The tattoo marks him as a member for life—a low-key reminder that often lies hidden under long sleeves. He sometimes shows off the fact he's a Blood by wearing red. But just as often he can blend into a crowd.

With inchlong kinky hair teased out into tiny poofs, wearing oversized parkas and baggy pants, Damu's style mimics that of many other young black men.

His school counselor, La-Shawanta Spears, says the one characteristic that sets him apart—his height, at about 5 feet 6 inches—may give him a "little-man complex." Perhaps as a result of his short stature, she says, he's quick to anger and to assert his authority.

In interviews his voice is barely audible. He rarely makes eye contact. When his temper flares, he lashes out and calls his listener a "fool," or he broods in silence.

"He's a hard kid to get to know. He puts up a pretty good wall," says Ron Knight, director of the Fir Ridge alternative school Damu attends.

When he opens up, he shows flashes of self-awareness that are disarming coming from a teenager. After spending an afternoon boasting about gangster life, in a thoughtful moment he admits it's a dead end.

"Banging don't give you shit. It just takes your life away," he says. "It's stupid. [But] once you realize it's stupid, you did everything and you in it. You can't help it."

Damu worries he couldn't get out of the Bloods even if he wanted to escape.

"Once a Blood, always a Blood," he says.

Knight agrees it will be hard for Damu to undo years of gang affiliation.

School records confirm he was expelled from Benson High School his freshman year and from Albina Youth Opportunity School last year. Damu says he was expelled from Benson for bringing a handgun to school and was kicked out of Albina for fighting with a Crip.

"That's been his lifestyle for a long, long time," Knight says. "I would think it would be difficult for him to [quit]. He would lose all of his identity and the people he hangs out with in the evenings—what he does at night, what he talks about, the music he listens to, what art he does. That would all need to be supplanted with something else."

Damu says for now, that's not a change he's willing to make.

"I'd be bored," he says. "I'm stuck in between. I don't know if I should or I shouldn't. But it's not like I can get out anyway, so there's no point. So you just stay in."

Damu's is a world with its own code of conduct every bit as demanding as those that rule professional warriors or Intel executives.

And just as off-duty soldiers and CEOs enjoy mundane pursuits, Damu and his friends can appear like any other group of teenagers when they get together after school.

"We just chill, get on the computer, smoke, eat and drink," he says. "That's fucking it. Just like everybody else."

Several evenings each week he hangs with fellow Bloods, or at times with Latino members of the Sureños, a national Hispanic gang originally based in Southern California.

The Sureños are a heavy presence in outer East Portland, where Damu moved with his mom and stepdad last summer. Before that move he lived his entire life in Northeast Portland, where increasing numbers of black residents have been pushed out by gentrification.

In winter weather, Damu and other gangsters mostly gather in apartments, look at car magazines, send text messages and talk on the phone, surf MySpace and smoke pot.

It's the same ritual performed by many high-school students everywhere. Except that in Damu's case, all the accoutrements are gang-related—parts of a ready-made identity he's adopted wholesale as his own.

The gang dictates what he wears—red jackets to represent the Bloods, with bright-green T-shirts underneath to represent Lincoln Park. His shoes and bandanas come in red or green.

His favorite sports teams are the Boston Red Sox and the Boston Celtics, but he has no affinity with Beantown. The Red Sox wear red and have a B for Boston (or Blood) on their caps, and the Celtics' colors include bright green.

His tunes come from Bloods-affiliated rappers like Messy Marv, the Game and Tupac Shakur (who was not a Blood but once famously assaulted some Crips). He drinks trendy booze: Olde English malt liquor, Hennessy cognac and Christian Brothers brandy. He rolls his blunts with grape-flavored Swisher Sweet cigarillos.

About once a week, when they need money, he and his gangsters cruise the main eastside arteries of Southeast 82nd and 122nd avenues, making contact with buyers by phone, meeting them in public or at home, and selling them small amounts of marijuana and cocaine. They carry guns, concealed by hooded sweatshirts or oversized jerseys.

That fits the FBI's description of typical crimes committed by the Crips and Bloods. In a report released this month, the agency says the gangs' main source of income is street-level distribution of cocaine and marijuana.

The image of a gang as a highly structured criminal enterprise dealing in mass shipments of drugs and weapons doesn't always fit, especially for black gangs in Portland, says Sean Riddell, a Multnomah County deputy district attorney who prosecutes gang cases.

Black gangs in Portland are not highly organized, Riddell says. He's never seen them engage in large-scale profit-sharing from drug deals. Most of the violence, he says, is motivated by revenge rather than defending criminal turf.

"Sometimes it's about a girl, sometimes it's about somebody pulling someone's punk card," Riddell says. "You shot up my momma's house, now I'm gonna shoot up your momma's house."

Gangs in Portland also lack a strict hierarchy, says Michael Johnson, a former member of the Columbia Villa Crips who now does gang outreach. There are no true leaders, and no organized meetings of gang masterminds.

"What you have are shot-callers," he says. "People who can motivate."

Another quirk in Portland is the lack of gang territory. In other cities, gangs rule whole quadrants. But the breakup of historically black neighborhoods by gentrification has left few gangs able to claim contiguous territory here.

After the 1990s, members of neighborhood gangs like the Unthank Park Hustlers and Columbia Villa Crips were displaced and intermixed with other gangs, Johnson says. Many moved out to "The Numbers," as some call outer East Portland, where Damu lives.

That breaking up of old neighborhoods, combined with the small size of Portland's black community, means no gang has a lock on any part of town. Members of different gangs mix in the same apartment building or even in the same family.

So gang members have to be on constant alert to know who they're dealing with.

Growing up, Damu learned to watch for signals only gangsters notice. Some wear Crips blue or Bloods red. Hand signs are thrown to identify or intimidate. Nicknames are important, with kids borrowing elders' names to show they enjoy that elder's protection.

Baseball caps are crucial: Rolling 60s wear Seattle Mariners, Bloods wear Phillies and Hoovers wear Astros. Dropped words reveal friends or enemies: Crips call each other cuz, while Bloods more often say dawg.

"You have to always know who's around you," Damu says. "If you don't, you dead."

Driving around his old neighborhood in Northeast Portland, Damu shows the psychological effects of four years in gang life. The cost of being a gangbanger is paranoia.

He stares out a side window, his eyes tracking and evaluating each pedestrian and passing car, looking for Crips who may recognize him.

If he runs into the wrong people, violence could erupt. He's got off—fired shots—about 10 times in Portland, he claims.

As in most gang-related shootings, he quickly flees the scene without surveying the damage. He's never received word that the people he's shot at have died.

"I shot at people, but I ain't killed nobody," he says.

He points to a house at Northeast 42nd Avenue and Alberta Street he says was shot up while he and his cousin were smoking weed inside a few years back. Police reports confirm the house was hit by a bullet during a 2004 shootout. No one inside was injured.

Just one block away from that house, a 15-year-old Grant High School student was shot in the chest Feb. 8 near Northeast Sumner Street. He was hospitalized in critical condition but is now recovering.

It was the latest casualty in a gang war that has brought 17 shootings since Darshawn Cross, a 31-year-old Unthank Park Hustler, was gunned down at the Dec. 12 funeral in North Portland. Police say the shooter was Latwan Brown, a Kerby Blocc Crip.

On New Year's Eve, the war claimed the life of Damu's friend Darius Perry, another Unthank Park Hustler. Investigators say he was killed by Willy Butler, Brown's half-brother. Butler was shot dead moments later. Ramond Lawrence, a member of the Hoover Criminals 74, is charged with his murder.

Damu says he knew Perry from Damu's days at Albina Youth Alternative School, where he hung out with Unthank Park Hustlers. Damu says he taught Perry to snort cocaine, and the two had a close bond.

"I really can't explain it," he says. "We was cool 'cause we had the same thing on our mind and shit. Getting money from bitches and shooting people."

Damu went patrolling outer East Portland for revenge in the days after Perry was killed and exchanged gunfire twice. He's laid low since then, but he predicts worse gang violence will come this summer, when gang activity traditionally heats up.

The recent shootings are just a rehearsal, he says, with youngsters taking advantage of the reprisals to boost their credentials. "Little dudes trying to get their stripes for the hood and shit," Damu calls it.

Damu, meanwhile, is seeking to build his own prestige in the Bloods.

He hopes to travel to San Diego in September, where he'll get jumped-in again by the Lincoln Park OGs. He'll meet more members of the hood and gain status to graduate into a higher echelon after he takes another beating. He says the pain is worth it.

The rewards for increased rank are more money, more respect and more women. But it also will bring more danger when he's known and connected to more people, increasing the chance he'll be targeted for reprisals.

But if he wants to go deeper into the gang, it means meeting the original Lincolns. He's on his way to becoming an OG, but he needs to know more people in the hood.

"I'm already fucking in this," he says. "There's no turning back."

Portland And Gresham Gang Related Shootings Since Dec. 12, 2008

met Damu after officials from the David Douglas School District asked Damu's family if they were willing to let him be interviewed. Aspects of his story—including his longtime gang affiliation, history of violence, and the fact he ran away to Los Angeles—were corroborated by his parents. School records, police reports and observations of his tattoo and scar confirmed other details. His accounts of gang life in general agree with information from law-enforcement officials, outreach workers and a former gang member. But many of the details in this story are based on his own account and could not be verified.

The FBI estimates the Bloods have as many as 30,000 members in 123 cities engaged in drug trafficking, assault, extortion and murder.

Nationally, murders of black teenagers jumped 39 percent from 2000-2001 to 2006-2007, according to a recent study by Boston's Northeastern University. Overall homicides rose just 7.4 percent in the same period.

Of the 27 homicides in Portland last year, two were gang-related—a rate of 7.4 percent. That does not include two gang-related homicides in Gresham on New Year's Eve.

The first black street gangs in Los Angeles were formed in the 1940s to defend residents from attacks by a white gang. When whites left the inner city, they turned to victimizing other blacks. (Source: Territoriality Among African-American Street Gangs in Los Angeles by Alex Alonso.)

WWeek 2015