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Book Reviews of Inside the Crips : Life Inside L.A.'s Most Notorious Gang

Inside the Crips : Life Inside L.A.'s Most Notorious Gang
Inside the Crips Life Inside LA's Most Notorious Gang
Author: Colton Simpson, Ann Pearlman
ISBN-13: 9780312329297
ISBN-10: 0312329296
Publication Date: 8/1/2005
Pages: 352
Rating:
  • Currently 2/5 Stars.
 2

2 stars, based on 2 ratings
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Book Type: Hardcover
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

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reviewed Inside the Crips : Life Inside L.A.'s Most Notorious Gang on + 1775 more book reviews
There is a fair amount of information regarding inter and intra gang relations, especially in in the slammer. This book exalts gangbanging: "Infinite love goes out to all the Crips and Bloods who fought and struggled with me inside prison for what is right. Think not that our energy and efforts were in vain. For those wo have impeded our progress, there has been a price (xii)."
Ice-T knew Mr. Simpson as a youth and praises him: "Cee brought in over $100,000 a year when he was fourteen. That's a lot of money for a kid, enough to make you influential and powerful. I know Cee was earning that much because I knew the moves he was making. As a teen, he was a celebrity ghetto gangster (xvi)."
At age 15 our hero was sentenced to Fred C. Nelles (CYA) for robbery, being relased at age 19. He threw away any opportunity to get an education. When he arrived back on the block in 1984, he found an incoming tide of cocaine.
Some readers may feel that these hardheads tore up the neighborhood, retailing the dope brought in from south of the border, and emptying the area of remaining businesses and most of the decent people, leaving a cleared area for the flood of immigrants arriving since the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965.
Thus Blacks whose ancestors arrived in America three hundred years ago and helped build the West Coast now sleep on the streets and find jobs at the bottom rung of the ladder are monopolized by those who came to S. Cal. over the last half century and insist on working onl;y alongside their 'own kind,' and many bottom feeder employers are glad to oblige them. I myself visited sixty-two Subway Sandwich shops, bought a sandwich, and encountered no veterans employed, one store with American Blacks employed, no one over age forty, no Anglos, and no Chinos.
Mr. Simpson and his cohort did excellent work in so rapidly making their neighborhood into a wasteland by selling the dope brought in from Latin America.
Good index, no bibliography photos, or footnotes.
PS I mentioned that I had it available to some of the folks at the old soldiers' home but both patients and staffers cringed, so I will offer it to the one person here that has it wishlisted.