The homeboys call him Frog. But as he swaggers through the Rancho San Pedro Housing Project in East Los Angeles, Frog is a cocky prince of the barrio. His mane of lustrous jeri curls, his freckled nose and innocent brown eyes belie his prodigious street smarts. Frog is happy to tell you that he rakes in $200 a week selling crack, known as rock in Los Angeles. He proudly advertises his fledgling membership in an ultra-violent street gang, the Crips. And he brags that he has used his drug money to rent a Nissan Z on weekends. He has not yet learned how to use a stick shift, however, and at 4 ft. 10 in., he sometimes has trouble seeing over the dashboard. Frog is 13 years old.
One night Frog was teaching the tricks of his trade to a couple of eager apprentices, ages 10 and 11. Just as he was selling a $20 packet of crack to a customer, a squad car pulled up. With 15 rocks on his person, Frog was promptly busted. He was also thrilled. "The cop made me put my hands behind my head," he boasts, "and pulled me by my thumbs."
After a few days in the Los Padrinos Juvenile Detention Center, Frog is not so exultant. He sits glumly in his 9-ft. by 9-ft. cell, his locks shorn, one eye swollen, two front teeth missing. Twice he has been beaten bloody by older inmates. "They were big," says the 85-lb. Frog. He seems harder, more wary. Then a visitor mentions that cocaine comes from a plant grown in South America. Frog's eyes grow wide, and he suddenly looks like the confused little boy he is. "You think it is a plant?" he asks in astonishment. "That's silly. Everybody knows cocaine comes from Compton ((a town just south of Los Angeles)). The gangsters make it there."
LIKE MOST YOUNG AMERICAN people, they are material girls and boys. They crave the glamorous clothes, cars and jewelry they see advertised on TV, the beautiful things that only big money can buy. But many have grown up in fatherless homes, watching their mothers labor at low-paying jobs or struggle to stretch a welfare check. With the unemployment rate for black teenagers at 37%, little work is available to unskilled, poorly educated youths. The handful of jobs that are open -- flipping burgers, packing groceries -- pay only minimum wages or "chump change," in the street vernacular. So these youngsters turn to the most lucrative option they can find. In rapidly growing numbers, they are becoming the new criminal recruits of the inner city, the children who deal crack.
) In Los Angeles last week, Frog was ordered to a foster home, where he will be closely monitored by probation authorities. Meanwhile, in Dallas, prosecutors were faced with the case of a 15-year-old from New York City who was caught carrying 50 bags of crack. In Detroit, Police Officer Paul Dunbar was buried after being fatally shot outside a suspected crack house by a 16- year-old. In Washington, elected officials from Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia met to discuss the record number of drug-related killings and arrests in their region and propose stiffer penalties for selling drugs near schools. Said Washington Mayor Marion Barry: "No young person in this region is not at risk."