Thieves Get Rich, Saints Get Shot - By Jodi Compton Page 0,6

first time, I’d smiled bitterly, thinking, This is how the glass ceiling breaks in the ghetto, with death threats on a wall.

The pressure didn’t come just from rivals on the street. There were rumors that Magnus Ford, the feared LAPD gang-intelligence officer, had taken an interest in Warchild.

Gang suppression is one thing. It’s a war of attrition, hassling the street-corner guys, making petty arrests that often don’t stick, doing intervention with the youngest gangbangers who might still be saved. Gang intelligence, or organized-crime intelligence, is something else. Magnus Ford was the quiet force behind the arrests of several high-level Mexican Mafia shot callers. There were rumors that he was a fed planted within the LAPD. Nobody knew what he looked like. He was apparently so valuable that he was never photographed, not for the newspapers, not even on law-enforcement websites.

Thinking ahead, Serena had taken steps to protect herself from threats on both sides of the law. For example, the rented house that I used to call “Casa Serena,” with the orange tree out front and the couch or floor space for any of her homegirls who needed it, was no more. Serena was now living NKA, or “no known address.” Sometimes she crashed with her homegirls, other times with her brothers, occasionally, when money permitted, at a Vietnamese café-bar where they rented rooms upstairs for assignations. The main thing, for Serena, was that no one know where she slept.

She didn’t ever acknowledge the stress she was under, but for several months she’d been having stomach pains; intermittent, but sometimes bad enough that she’d retreat to one of her sleeping places and lie down, handing off her pager to me and telling me to TCB—take care of business—for a while.

I’d told her more than once that she should see a doctor. She said the pains always went away. I said they always came back. But she still hadn’t been through a clinic door.

I guess that all this is a long explanation of why I stayed at Serena’s side: My most subtle and unspoken role in our relationship was not just to protect her from danger but to keep her from being a danger. The odds had been against her getting even as far as she had. Age twenty-five was past time for a hardcore gangster to be in the grave. I knew that Serena knew this, that she thought about the endgame and the money that would fund a transition to a better life. And I knew she was willing to take risks to get it.

What I’m saying is, increasingly I saw Serena as a loaded gun. I was the safety on that gun.

Or maybe this is all a lot of justification, of the type I told the drug-company truck driver I didn’t do anymore. Pare it down to its simplest, and it’s this: Some people like to say the greater the sinner, the greater the saint. What they don’t tell you, I guess, is that the reverse is also true.

3

“Hey, Hailey, did I tell you about my new girl?”

It was a little more than an hour after the Great Truck Robbery. We were at a storage facility off Olympic, where Serena rented a small walk-in locker. It was there that she stored her boxes of stolen pharmaceuticals, a few unregistered weapons, and some emergency cash. There was an overhead light of two long fluorescent tubes, but we hadn’t turned it on, working instead in the glow of a flashlight set on its end and pointed at the ceiling. Serena never drew attention to her presence when she visited her unit.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “New like newly jumped in?”

“Uh-uh. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” she said, pushing a box backward on the shelf until it was flush with its neighbors. “Diana wants to fight you. For her initiation.”

There aren’t a lot of choices in the gang life. One of them, though, is the initiation ritual. In too many places, for girls, it’s sexual: They roll the dice and have sex with that number of their gang-brothers-to-be. The hardest part to understand was that many girls were offered the choice of taking a group beating—the conventional jumping-in ritual for guys—or the sexual option, and they willingly chose the latter. It was less an act of cowardice than an acknowledgment that a life of emotionless sexual use was inevitable.

Serena had never tolerated anything like that. For a girl who wanted to be a sucia, the only way