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Harassed by the East Side Longos, the Cambodians organized gangs with names like Tiny Rascals and Asian Boyz. They helped swell Long Beach's gang membership to more than 10,000. Mad Dog and the others imitated their enemies. They "kicked back" on street corners and marked their turf with graffiti. Between turf shoot-outs, they also began to extort "protection" money from local businessmen. Fearing reprisals, the merchants have rarely complained. Gang detective Norman Sorenson remembers contacting dozens of Cambodian merchants after police found a detailed list of extortion victims in the car of a Tiny Rascals leader. "They all denied it," says Sorenson. Cambodian gangsters killed their first East Side Longo in a retaliatory drive-by in October 1989. Gang-related deaths last year: 46.
Many Cambodian gang members became hardened to violence during their escape from the killing fields of Southeast Asia. "I remember walking and walking," recalls Little Devil, 16, describing his family's trek out of Cambodia when he was five. "If we didn't keep up, we'd be lost." Perhaps because of their past globe trotting, Cambodian gang members can be astonishingly mobile. When Long Beach cops saturated the "Anaheim corridor" this summer after a burst of shoot-outs, the Cambodian gangs vanished. "They took off for Stockton and Modesto -- maybe farther," says Mike Nen, an ethnic-Cambodian cop. Adds gang detective Sorenson: "The Hispanics sit on the corner and stare at you. The Asians might fly to Chicago."
Some observers think the East Side Longos would be wise to get airplane tickets too. "The Cambodians know what real war is," says Nen's partner, Patrolman Dan Brooks. "The Hispanics have a street mentality. They shoot on impulse and go home thinking they're safe. But the Cambodians know better." When combat looms, for example, Cambodian gang members sometimes call in reinforcements from hundreds of miles away. Little Devil is an Oriental Lazy Boy from downtown Los Angeles who rode into Long Beach recently with Lazy Boys from Tacoma to help battle the Longos. They left when one of the visiting Lazy Boys was wounded.
"The real issue is family breakdown," says Benton Samana, a Buddhist monk. "Don't believe that snow job about the kids joining gangs to protect themselves." In Southeast Asia, parents take wayward children to monks for counseling. In providing that service here, Samana constantly encounters war- related emotional problems, such as withdrawn or hysterical parents suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. "Their children think they are wacky," he explains. "They don't want to be around them."