At Tom's liquor store, one of the first businesses looted in the Los Angeles riots, the Asian-American owner keeps a watchful eye on the angry and jobless men loitering outside. The same surly crowd frightens Goldie Bell, 65, a beautician who is black and lives nearby. The vagrants' noisy carousing causes Bell sleepless nights, and every morning she must run a gauntlet past them to get to her car. "I'm just afraid all the time," she says.
What Bell and the rest of Los Angeles fear most is how these idle and restless men will react if the verdicts in two...
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