The middle-aged man had fled Cambodia to save his family from the genocidal Khmer Rouge. Now, as he stalked furiously back and forth across the grimy patio behind a cramped bungalow in the Little Phnom Penh section of Long Beach, he saw a very different threat materializing -- within his own family. His 14-year-old son, gang-named Flipper, and another homeboy, Slicc, 18, were bragging to a stranger about a shoot-out.
"I'm on the corner phone with my girlfriend," Slicc recounted. "The Mexican drives up and yells, 'What set you from?' I yell it ain't none of his business, and he busts three caps ((shoots three bullets)) at me. I take out my gun and bust four back . . ." At that point, the father began to wave his arms and shout. Friends of Slicc's and Flipper's pushed the man firmly back inside his house. "Parents don't understand," shrugged Flipper.
In the bizarre and bloody world of Southern California gang life, armed and alienated children are guerrilla warriors. Cambodian gangs battling Hispanic gangs is but the newest infection. Ira Reiner, district attorney for Los Angeles County (pop. 8,776,000), estimates that 130,000 gang members operate in his jurisdiction alone. They range from subteen "peewees" to as many as 13,000 hard-core killers. Last year in the county the gangs accounted for 18,059 violent felonies and 690 deaths. Nearly every ethnic group is represented in the mayhem: the highly publicized black Bloods and Crips; multigenerational Hispanic groups that account for nearly two-thirds of all California gangs; whites; Asians; Pacific Islanders; and Jewish and Armenian groups.
The kid who traded shots with Slicc was a member of the East Side Longos, a large Mexican-American gang rooted in the Hispanic community that settled along Anaheim Street in Long Beach (pop. 429,000) after World War II. Three decades later, Cambodian immigrants seeking affordable homes arrived. "At school the Mexicans looked down upon us and hurt us," recalls Mad Dog, 29, a "retired" homeboy whose mother was a Phnom Penh university professor. "We saw that American people had groups, white with white, black with black. We decided to become more famous. If they could steal cars and do drive-by shootings, so could we."
In Southern California that was a logical step for the young Cambodians to take. "You land in a gang neighborhood, it might seem natural to form a militia to defend yourself," explains Steve Valdivia, director of Los Angeles County's Community Youth Gang Services Project. Nearly all the state's street gangs started out copying Hispanic "cholo" (lowlife) styles. Scholars trace Hispanic gangs back to the 1920s, when Roman Catholic parishes organized social clubs for children who felt unwelcome at white high school dances. Despite drive-by shootings and drug trafficking, the gangs were tolerated as a "community" issue for half a century. Explains former teen gangster Ysmael Pereira, 48, who is now a gang counselor: "The code was always to keep it quiet."