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Gang Mom
The Evil Mother Whose Gang Secretly Preyed on a City
By Fred Rosen OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1998 Fred Rosen
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2267-5
CHAPTER 1
SEPTEMBER 24, 1994
It was the first day of burning season and fires blazed all around Eugene, Oregon.
Jim Michaud stood at the front door of his rustic home on the outskirts of the city. As he sipped a martini, he thought back to the many burning seasons of his youth, when his father would set the barrels up outside their home, fill them with anything that needed burning, and set them on fire. Their neighbors would be doing the same thing, so a ring of controlled fire would encircle their neighborhood.
Burning season was the beginning of fall, a time to burn your detritus. Michaud liked to think that it was also an opportunity to burn from memory any sins committed against others, an opportunity to create a slate that was clean and purified by fire.
Some might consider such existential thoughts to be unusual for a country boy like Michaud. A true Westerner, he had grown up in the backwoods of Oregon where he hunted and fished, first as a child, then as an adolescent and now as a forty-one-year-old adult. Yet he was anything but a backwoodsman.
That martini in his hand, for instance. Most guys he knew at work preferred a beer. His taste, though, ran to something a little more refined. He took a sip of the drink, made with Bombay gin and dry Martini & Rossi vermouth, then looked out at the fires again.
This time, the fires made him think about a pig roast he and Paula had thrown when they'd moved in last year. They had invited all their friends over, used a backhoe to dig a pit and filled it with white-hot charcoal and then added the pièce de résistance, a full-size pig. The poor sucker was covered with earth and left to roast its guts out until later in the day when it was dug up and dug into. But again, Michaud was a man of contrasts. Pig roasts might be fun once every ten years, but he liked to cook more sophisticated dishes like beef bourguignon, adding the spices carefully on the "island" that stood in the kitchen of his home.
He looked down at his watch and pressed the dial that made it light up in that bright turquoise color that was all the rage now. It said 11:17. Time for bed. He liked to get into work early, before anyone else arrived.
Turning, he walked through french doors into the kitchen, then through the living room with its projection TV. Except for the modern appliances like the TV, the house might as well have been in Montana, decorated as it was with wooden beams and wooden flooring, Plains Indian blankets and Plains Indian art.
Michaud walked into the second bedroom on the left, furnished with a queen-size bed and two dressers. The room looked lived-in, with things out of place, sort of comfortable and confused at the same time.
Draped over a chair beside his bed was a cross-hatched shoulder holster. It was a lateral draw, so the butt of his .45mm Sig Sauer automatic faced out, affording a quick, easy draw. On the front straps were a shiny lawman's star and a beeper.
He slipped into bed beside his sleeping fiancée Paula and heard the steady sing-song of her breath, in and out, in and out. He paused for a moment, contemplating her beautiful form beneath the sheets, and then put his hand on her, slowly caressing. Soon, she turned toward him and they intertwined.
Too many times, Michaud had been in the middle of making love when murder intervened. He hoped this would not be one of them.
The teenagers, who had gathered late at night in a park in the city, could see the flames from scattered fires. As they smelled the odor of leaves and other things burning, Wayde Hudson pressed the release on the stopwatch and shouted, "Go!"
Lisa Fentress jumped into a circle of white middleclass teenagers who had gathered in a deserted lot on the outskirts of Eugene. As the circle closed in on Lisa, she was pounded on all sides by fists and feet. Hudson kept looking at his stopwatch. His gang leader had told him that Lisa should go first, and that a proper jumping in, or gang-initiation ceremony, lasted a precise time, specifically seventy-four seconds. When seventy-four seconds were up, he shouted, "Stop!"
The gang members, Joe, Jim, Angel, Larry, Wayde, Linda, Jack, Cameron, Jasmine, Lennie, and Robert, all drew back. Lisa lay bruised and bloody, a cut across her bottom lip, her eyes already swelling shut.
"Welcome to the Seventy-four Hoover Crips," Hudson shouted triumphantly. He handed her a blue rag, actually a bandanna. Whenever she wore it, it would signify her gang membership because blue was the "official" gang color. "Lisa, you're now a full-fledged member of the gang," Hudson shouted. With that, the videotape recorder that had been brought to record the event was turned off.
The gang leader had told Wayde Hudson that there was a difference between mixing in and jumping in as a means of entry into a gang.
"Jumping in means that the gang beats you up until they consider you to be sufficiently beaten to be a member of the gang. Mixing in means taking the fall for somebody who is a gang member. If you take the rap for them and they avoid being prosecuted for something they've done, then you're mixed in."
Few if any of the 74 Hoover Crips had had prior gang experience, and therefore never questioned their gang leader's definitions. Had they, they would have discovered that there was actually no difference between mixing in and jumping in, that they were in fact the same thing.
The gang Lisa had joined was a bunch of punk-ass white kids, high school dropouts who thought that, because they banded together and took the name of a black street gang that controlled part of southeast Los Angeles, they were cool.
These were kids who, while they may not have grown up with silver spoons in their mouths, knew nothing of poverty, nothing of discrimination because of skin color and, most importantly, nothing of manipulation by a gang leader. They were not cynical, tired beyond their years from exposure to constant street violence, the type of kids who knew a con man when they saw one. They were kids, with time on their hands, looking for the thrill that violence affords, something exciting enough to get their blood going when they weren't stoned or drunk.
Like most middle-class kids who join gangs, Lisa felt alienated from her peers. As long as she remembered, she had always hated kids. They were always so mean to me growing up, she thought. And when I got older, all the girls wanted to do was talk about their boyfriends.
As for her home life, it was nothing if not strained. She felt impotent at home, at the mercy of her parents' whims, never free to assert herself, to be her own woman. The gang gave her the one thing she lacked. Power. People knew who she was. They wouldn't mess with her because she was a member of the 74 Hoover Crips. It was kind of like she, Wayde, Larry and all the rest had formed their own family.
What a wonderful feeling, that sense of belonging, of being part of something greater than yourself! Lisa Fentress cherished that feeling more than anything. It was a feeling unlike any other, a feeling so heady, so strong, so intoxicating that in order not to lose it, she was willing to chuck the belief system she had grown up with, that some things were wrong and some things were right absolutely. She decided that, for her gang, she would dwell in the gray area, neither wrong nor right, just what was right for the gang regardless of the consequences. That was why she readily agreed to become a button woman.
She was given the job of pressing a button on a guy. Put another way, Lisa's job was to finger a guy to be murdered. And since it was being done to maintain gang unity and loyalty, there was nothing wrong with that.
Was there?
CHAPTER 2
OCTOBER 3, 1994
Had it not been for Meriwether Lewis, the Eugene chapter of the 74 Hoover Crips would not have had a turf to begin with. It was Lewis who, in 1806, explored the Willamette River Valley during his fabled expedition to find the Northwest Passage. In the process, he made peace with the Indians who inhabited the valley.
Not much changed in the years immediately after he left to return to Virginia, but the mere fact that he and his partner William Clark and their Corps of Discovery had penetrated the area opened it up to white trappers and hunters, who would go on to make fortunes off the abundant wildlife that inhabited the area, and would inexorably affect the history of the United States.
The valley was so fertile that almost two centuries later, there were sections that were almost as pristine as in Lewis and Clark's day. But there were also the trappings of modern civilization, most notably the University of Oregon that made its home in this major northwest city, where Indians walk the streets harmoniously with cowboys, and gun shops coexist with head shops. It's the Old West and the 1960s all rolled into one.
Nestled snugly in Oregon's Willamette River Valley, Eugene is a tight-knit, secure community. But it has one major source of vulnerability to the corruption of the outside world.
The town sits on the Interstate 5 corridor, a major thoroughfare to Portland in the north, and California to the south. Because of its proximity to these population centers, Eugene is susceptible to urban problems. Like gangs.
Lisa Fentress admired the au courant gang look — baggy clothing in dull colors. But the school she attended felt just the opposite. The administration believed that wearing gang clothing incited gang-type violence. The school passed an ordinance banning students from dressing as "gangsters." In protest, Lisa led a walkout among students, who, like her, believed in freedom of clothing. Not to be outdone, the school punished her by forcing her to attend a gang-prevention seminar at the Downtown Athletic Club run by the community's dynamic anti-gang activist, Mary Thompson.
Mary Thompson had exploded on the Eugene scene like a comet in the night sky. She had lived in anonymity for years, she said, but when organized gangs first came to Eugene in 1991, she decided to take action.
Her son Beau had been seduced by the power of gangs. A small, tousle-haired kid, he looked innocent enough to be in one of those milk ads. But Beau was hardly an innocent. Barely thirteen years old, he helped form the 74 Hoover Crips, taking the gang name "Bishop," and subsequently served time in the MacLaren Juvenile Facility for gang-related crimes.
Instead of fretting like most would, Mary Thompson became an anti-gang activist. Her message was simple: "If it could happen to my family, it could happen to yours."
She began conducting anti-gang seminars at high schools and youth centers, where she spoke passionately to teenagers of the good life her son Beau gave up, of her pain in watching him go down the wrong road. She showed students her photo albums filled with heartwarming shots of Beau proudly wearing his Cub Scout uniform, fishing with his father, and opening presents on Christmas Day like any normal American kid. But he wasn't any normal American kid, Mary said, not since he got involved with gangs.
Instead of the scenes depicted in the photographs, in her mind's eye she saw Beau selling guns at a local ice cream shop, serving time in prison, and threatening cops with a revolver. She saw a boy who, ever since he became "Bishop," had a gaze as hard as glacial ice and a heart frozen with hate for authority.
As her stature in the community increased, so did her influence. She formed a close relationship with the police department. Law enforcement looked to Mary as the one person who could break the spell that gangs cast over the city's youth. She formed a close working relationship with Ric Raynor, a detective in the anti-gang unit. Eventually, the department appointed her to the newly formed Gang Prevention Task Force.
Like the best evangelists, Mary could spellbind a crowd with the emotion behind her words, her commitment to keeping Eugene gang-free, her zeal in allowing the city's children to keep their childhood pristine. And Mary vowed publicly to continue to pursue her cause, to break the hold of gangs in Eugene, to stop kids from joining them, as long as one breath remained in her body.
As Lisa listened to Mary tell her story, she felt very moved and attended a subsequent meeting of the Gang Prevention Task Force that Mary was a part of. It was there that she met Aaron Iturra.
"Hi, is Aaron there?" said Lisa into the phone. She was in the privacy of her room at home and took a quick toke of the joint in her free hand.
"Uh, he's busy right now, but if you want —"
"No, it's okay. Never mind," Lisa interrupted, and hung up. Taking another toke, she made her second call.
"He's home," she said. "I just talked to his sister."
"Good. Now call James."
The third call was to James "Jim" Elstad.
"It's a 'go,'" she said.
The wind came whistling in through the window of the back bedroom, where Janyce Iturra lay sleeping. Despite the weather, Janyce always slept with her windows open. She liked the feeling of fresh air around her. She worked hard during the day, as a receiving clerk at Fred Myers, a large department store. And since she usually went to work at four or five, she was in bed by nine.
When the phone rang at ten, it woke her up. She heard her daughter Maya go out to get Aaron because the phone call was for him. After he came back in, she heard him say:
"Well, who is it, Maya?"
"I don't know," Maya answered. "It was just a girl. She hung up."
Janyce drifted back to sleep.
Minutes later, seventeen-year-old "Crazy" Joe Brown stood in front of the Iturra home. The house was a panhandle, situated in back of another, the two connected by a narrow alley. The beauty of it was, you couldn't see the panhandle house from the street. This type of dwelling was common in Eugene.
Brown was a short kid who, at five-foot-six, weighed all of 140 pounds soaking wet. Dressed in black shirt and pants, with jet-black hair, scraggly mustache and goatee, he cased the joint. Quickly, he realized he had come too early. The house was lit up. People inside were still awake. He left and returned around midnight.
This time, the house was dark. He tapped the glass of the living-room window several times just to be sure. When no one answered, he walked back to the far end of the alley where Jim Elstad crouched in the darkness.
"Iturra's asleep," he whispered, the cool night air making his breath come out in a white plume.
Elstad nodded and followed Brown back to the house. Both boys were dressed in the gang colors: blue bandannas over their faces and heads, blue bandannas covering their hands. Their gang leader had told Elstad and Brown that the open display of their gang colors was a symbol that someone was going to get killed. This was ritualized behavior. Dressing in this manner signified this as a Crip event, a Crip killing. Their gang leader had assured them that their "brother" Crips in Portland and Los Angeles would soon know about their work.
They lifted the door of the garage, and found themselves standing before a bedroom that had been partitioned off by sheet rock in the rear. Brown pushed at the door of the makeshift room.
Clothes, beer bottles, soda cans and empty pizza boxes were strewn all over the floor. On a small dresser made of cheap pressed wood were various types of shaving lotion and high school loose-leaf binders filled to bursting. There was also an old console color TV set.
Two of the walls were decorated with posters celebrating Motley Crue, Menace II Society and Budweiser beer. There were pictures of two attractive young women dressed in low-cut outfits revealing their cleavage. The two other walls of the bedroom were covered in graffiti.
And there on the bed was the target, Aaron Iturra, sleeping arm in arm with his girlfriend Carrie Barkley.
Brown shook Aaron's bare back. The teenager continued to slumber, but then Brown saw Iturra move his head a little bit, and start to get up. By then, Jim Elstad was at the door, holding a .45 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver in his right hand. Steadying it with his left, Elstad raised the weapon.
Brown reached down to the girl's purse, which sat on the floor amid the litter of the beer bottles and pizza cartons. He reached in and took out a pack of cigarettes, which he pocketed, then stood up and to the side.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Gang Mom by Fred Rosen. Copyright © 1998 Fred Rosen. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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