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  Then the agent asked for IDs. We didn’t have any, of course, because all that stuff was back at camp. So he called another agent and they split us up and took us into three different rooms to see if we could keep our stories straight. We did, but we got betrayed by Gallo’s underwear.

  They told us to strip down so they could check us for weapons or whatever. Sleepy and I were smart enough to change into underwear we found in the storage room. Gallo had kept his issued underwear. Sure enough, when he took off his pants, there was the big C.D.R. (Campo Del Rancho) stamped on his boxers. The agent made a call and was told there was a BOLO (Be On the Lookout) for three teenagers that had escaped from youth camp.

  The agents cuffed us up and we sat in a room until that night. A van came to pick us up and we were driven back to camp. When we got there, the place was locked down for the night, so they put us in the Program Office and told us to get some sleep. They would take us to Juvenile Hall in the morning to face escape and burglary charges, for stealing the clothes.

  We were awake all night even though we were worn-out from not having had any sleep the night before. The next morning, they cuffed us up. I was cuffed to the arm of a wooden bench. Sleepy was cuffed to the other end of the wooden bench. They cuffed Gallo to a metal chair across from us. At breakfast time, they sent in this giant, goofy white guy to bring us some food. We could see right away that this kid wasn’t too smart. But he was like six feet two and weighed about 240 pounds. He was really sympathetic and said that he felt bad for us. We could see that he was for real and a little soft in the head.

  So we tell him that if he really feels that bad, he should help us out. He says he doesn’t know what to do. I tell him he should kick the wooden arm of the bench I was cuffed to so I could move around a little. Sure enough, he takes one mighty stomp and breaks the arm of the bench. And I’m free. He does the same thing to the end of the bench that Sleepy is cuffed to. And Sleepy is now free. But the chair that Gallo is cuffed to is made of metal. Even with his size, there’s no way he can kick metal apart.

  We start looking for something to cut Gallo loose, but there’s nothing in the room. But as we’re looking, we can see through the glass into the next office and notice that somebody had left a set of keys on a desk. There was a cuff key in the set. So we tell the goofy white kid to go back to the kitchen and just pretend that nothing happened. We promised we wouldn’t rat him out. He was nervous as hell but went and did as he was told. As soon as he leaves, Sleepy kicks the door in and I go grab the keys and unlock Sleepy’s cuffs. They’d taken our shoes the night before, but they were still there in the next office, so we grabbed them too.

  Apparently, the door we kicked in was wired, because as soon as it swung open, the alarm sounded. We ran out and immediately crawled under the building because we knew all hell would break loose. Sure enough, here came the counselors stomping into the room we had just been cuffed up in and we could hear them talking through the wooden floor. “Dammit, the little bastards got away again.”

  As one of them was cursing, the other one got on the camp intercom and issued orders to lock down the whole camp. “All inmates report to your dorms.” We stayed huddled up under the building and we heard the sheriff show up and radio to all units about our escape. That lasted for a few hours, but by noon, the camp was off lockdown when they didn’t find us and everybody started reporting for their normal duties—school or work.

  By this time we’d been under the building for five hours and we were hungry and thirsty. The only guy we saw walking around was this kid named Huero who came from Sleepy’s neighborhood, National City. We knew he was nowhere near being a good soldier. He was sort of a nerd and we didn’t hang around with him, but we were starving. Plus, we wanted to get some intel to see what the cops were doing and where they were doing it. Sleepy calls out to him from under the building, and when he finally gets his attention, Huero yells out at the top of his voice, “What the hell are you guys doing under there?” We tell him to lower his voice. If he kept talking that loud, he’d bring the whole camp down on us.

  Right away he started preaching. He told us everybody’s looking for us and that we should give ourselves up. We said we would eventually but we were hungry and thirsty right now. We knew he worked in the staff living quarters, so we told him to go in there and bring us back something to eat and drink. A few minutes later he came back with sandwiches, popcorn, and sodas. And again he told us to give up. We told him we were thinking about it but right now we needed to eat and get some sleep. We were exhausted. He promised not to rat us out.

  After a while the three of us actually were dozing and didn’t hear the work recall alert over the intercom loudspeakers. They told everyone to get back to their dorms. What finally woke us up was a sheriff’s deputy shining a flashlight into our eyes and another one holding us at gunpoint with a shotgun. “Don’t make a move. Just relax.”

  The opinion we had of Huero was justified. The guy was not a camarada, a soldado, or anything close to being a real homie. He was a rat and told the counselors the minute he got a chance. In a way, we were relieved it was over. We were exhausted, still hungry, and we needed a shower. We were taken directly to Juvenile Hall and were now charged with destruction of state property, two escapes, and the burglary charge for stealing clothes. The three of us caught another six months and this time we had to do it all in Unit 100 in Juvenile Hall. No more camp without fences and dorms. We spent our time in cells.

  I did close to a year in YA. When the day came for release, the staff took me to the door and just said, “Go out there and behave.”

  I was fourteen by this time and I didn’t go home.

  6

  Power Boosting

  I had names of people on the street I’d gotten from the older guys in YA. When you’re in that world, you survive by connections and allies. If you have any kind of status, that information gets out there and you’re welcomed wherever you go. I knew I wasn’t going home and I asked them if they knew people I could go live with. If I had no status, they would have ignored me and thrown me away. Instead, they gave me the names, addresses, and phone numbers of people on the outside who could use me. I was told by my homeboy Chato that he had a sweet setup for a place to stay, dope connections, and the chance to make some money. Chato and I grew up together in Oceanside since we were babies, and our mothers had been good friends since they were practically babies too. That’s how far back we went.

  Before I got to Chato, I hooked up with a neighborhood girl named Tiny. She was a runaway like me, so we started hanging together and eventually we went to see Chato. Chato said that an apartment in his building was empty and that Tiny and I could live there. We broke into the place and slept on the floor for a while.

  Tiny and I would go around stealing anything that wasn’t nailed down to furnish the apartment. We even robbed her mother’s house. The building already had some squatting runaways like us, so we didn’t have any trouble with the neighbors. We were all in the same boat.

  A month later, Tiny and I were having sex in the apartment when the landlord of the building came through the door. She was showing the apartment to a couple. The three of them backed out of the apartment, and the landlord right away wanted to call the cops. I stopped her and told her that I was paying rent to a guy who came by once a month. I told her I was paying $375 a month. It was a lie, of course. We were living there illegally for free. On top of that, the place was full of the stuff we robbed from Tiny’s house and other places—jewelry, clothes, food, and a couple of guns that Tiny’s mother had around the house.

  As if that wasn’t enough, Tommy Garcia and I had just broken into a pawnshop one night and we took mostly clothes and bullets. We wanted the guns too, but they were locked up behind bars and in big safes. We were selling the clothes and the ammo to buy food, furniture, and drugs. When the landlord went off to call the cops, Tiny and I grabbed everything we could and
took off. We left behind a lot of stuff plus a .22-caliber rifle that Tommy and I had stolen from a house. Weapons and drugs go together because sometimes you have to make deals with people you don’t know. In the dope world, there’s always the danger of getting ripped off. You have to have weapons because you can’t go crying to the cops that somebody stole the dope you were trying to sell. So you have to be responsible for your own security. Otherwise you’ll end up broke and dead.

  Tiny and I bailed out of the apartment just in time, because a half hour later, five police cars pulled up to the building and found the stolen rifle, some dope, and a lot of the clothes we stole from the pawnshop.

  Tiny and I dumped what we couldn’t carry into trash cans and took a Greyhound bus to San Diego. We had the name of a guy who ran a shady sort of hotel in San Diego. He called it Pops Treetop Garden. As long as you paid him five dollars a night in cash, he didn’t care who you were or that I was fourteen and Tiny was thirteen or you were Jack the Ripper or John Dillinger. We had our own room, but we had to share the shower and bathroom with a couple of other “guests” at the Garden. Pops knew that we were runaways, but all he cared about was the five dollars a night.

  Pops would pay me for odd jobs around the hotel. And he got Tiny a job as a waitress at a diner that his friend owned. We lived like that for a couple of months, but I knew it couldn’t last forever. By that time the cops had a warrant out for me for burglary and possession of firearms. Tiny had some sort of paperwork out for being a runaway. Tiny’s mom, I found out later, was a clerk in the San Diego court system and she had a lot of her cop friends looking for us.

  I wasn’t getting any information about how close the cops were to getting me and I was running out of money, so I called my mom to see if she could give me some cash. She told me the cops had been to her house and were looking for me. And Tiny’s mom had also been to the house and she wanted to charge me for kidnapping and rape. She was convinced that her precious daughter would never have robbed her own mother’s house if it wasn’t for my evil influence. She had no idea that Tiny was as out of control as I was.

  My mom asked me where I was staying. I thought she wanted to know so she could send me some money. Like a dumbass, I told her. The next morning, around 7:00 A.M., I was asleep on the bed. Tiny had already gone to work. And then the cops showed up. They found a stolen .45-caliber pistol under the bed and a bunch of stolen property. They put me in the police car and we went to get Tiny at her work.

  They released Tiny to her mother’s custody and I was getting ready to face kidnap and statutory rape charges in addition to the burglary and weapons beefs. A few days later, Tiny’s mother sent her to be examined by a doctor and she was told that she was pregnant. Her mom came to me and said that, as the father, if I signed the abortion papers, she would convince the cops to drop the kidnap and rape charges. So I signed the papers and Tiny got her abortion. They couldn’t prove that the .45 was mine and they couldn’t trace it as stolen, so that charge was dropped too. I managed to avoid going back to YA. In a perverted way, I really wanted to go back there. Instead, they released me to my mom who, in my mind, was nothing more than a rat and a snitch. That sort of ended any relationship I had with her for years.

  Tiny’s mom was afraid Tiny would run away again, so she put her in a group home for runaway girls. About a month later, I made a date to go see her and snuck her out of the group home for a few hours. By that time, Tiny wasn’t the same Tiny I’d known. The abortion changed her completely. It’s that Catholic thing. We took a walk through a cemetery, we had one last round of sex, and I never saw her again. Before I left, she said she was tired of running and she was intending to turn her life around, go back to school, and become a normal person. Nothing about that experience changed me at all. I knew where I was going and it wasn’t school or the military or a warehouse job. I didn’t trust anybody. What my mother did was out of concern and love, and as mad as I was, I couldn’t stay mad at her. Still, the bond between me and my crimies was way stronger than what I had with my own family. I was going to become a gangster and the rest of the world could go fuck itself.

  I looked up people I met in YA and we started seriously stealing and boosting anything that was lying around. We stole a Honda three-wheeled off-road bike right off the dealer’s lot in broad daylight and sold it. We broke into a school at night and stole power tools from the shop classes.

  We did a lot of what we called Power Boosting. They were like mini invasions or smash and grabs. I’d go into a clothing store and look around while one of my crimies would hang out near the door with a gun. I’d grab as much clothing as I could and blast out of the door. If anybody tried to stop us, the gun would come out and stop anybody chasing us.

  I started hanging out with a heroin addict named Santos. He and his girlfriend were boosters like me and we robbed a lot of stuff. Through Santos, I met a crazy girl named Bonnie. She was a homegirl from Sherman and she was the kind who would do anything for money or a cheap thrill. She’d had a lot of boyfriends who were now in prison and she’d tell me stories about all the people they used to rob, the cars they stole, and the dope they ripped off from dealers. She wasn’t just bragging. What she was doing was seeing if I had the same pair of balls that her former boyfriends had. She was basically daring me to do the same. Or worse. Like a fool, I decided to do worse.

  I went back to selling dope on the beach just as a sideline. By that time, PCP hit the streets and I was selling lots of it. This was also right around the time when I first tried heroin. I took it almost on a dare. I didn’t want Bonnie to know that I hadn’t done it before, so when she offered it, I took it like I’d done it a dozen times.

  That first shot was pure heaven. I’d never felt so good. I could see right away why people get instantly hooked on it. I remember getting a little nauseous. But after that passed, it was pure bliss. I knew I’d found the perfect drug. I started doing it every few weeks and I started heading down that addiction highway until some of my homies found out.

  Gangsters are fairly tolerant of drug use. Pills, liquor, and pot are pretty much acceptable for partying and having fun. But when it comes to heroin, even the hardest EME criminals draw a line. From experience, homies know that a heroin addict, a tecato, is ruined as a solid warrior. Once you’re hooked, you’re a liability. You’ll sell out your mother and rat on everybody you know just to get high. So one day, some of my homies took me aside and basically beat the crap out of me to teach me the life lesson about heroin. I didn’t completely stop doing heroin, but I kept it under control. Every once in a while when I wanted to shut everything out and take a break, I’d use heroin. But I was careful not to let anyone know about it. I didn’t want to wear the tecato jacket. I had a career in crime to think about and I couldn’t let heroin sidetrack me.

  One of the biggest robberies I remember committing at that time was in a Macy’s department store. We planned it with what we thought was military precision. Our target was a bunch of fur coats. We knew from doing a recon that the fur coats were attached to the racks with steel cables. We also figured out the fastest way in and out of the store and where to park the two getaway cars. We knew a girl named Linda who said she could help us unload all the coats in one big move.

  So four of us figured out a plan. I went in with bolt cutters. I had one of my crimies standing guard with a pistol, just in case. And we had two drivers ready in two separate cars. We had Linda standing by in her neighborhood, ready to hide the fur coats and unload them.

  That afternoon, I boosted twenty-seven fur coats from Macy’s and had them sold to Linda’s friends less than an hour later. My cut was $3,000. I was sixteen and that was more money than I’d ever seen in my life. Who the fuck needed school, a bullshit job, or an education. This was living. Fast easy money, dope, girls, and the thrill of the robbery. I was absolutely hooked on the gangster life and I was damned good at it. In the gang world, kids that age aren’t supposed
to be making this kind of money and pulling crazy daylight burglaries in front of God knows how many surveillance cameras. We were off the charts. And we were also stars. We were earning status and the girls were all over us. I found out real fast that the badder and ballsier you are, the more the homegirls want to fuck you. Something about being with gangsters just made them want to fuck you more.

  It was odd, the girl that snitched me out to the principal tracked me down one day and basically asked me to take her virginity. She wanted to be with a badass and I would have been a fool if I didn’t go for it. That’s how crazy the shit gets on the streets.

  After all the crazy boosting, the fur coats, the three-wheeler, and dealing at the beach, I finally got arrested for stealing twelve pairs of Levi’s from a Miller’s Outpost. It was a stupid move and I should have been a lot more careful, but I was so drunk with my own self-importance as a criminal that I got sloppy. I thought I was invincible. I was still underage and I went back for another tour of YA.

  By this time, I had a solid reputation as a criminal. Although I hadn’t shot or stabbed anyone, I had a rep for being absolutely fearless. Daylight smash and grabs? Boosting a motorcycle right in front of the dealer? A $3,000 take for ten minutes of work? Yeah. I was a star.

  I walked into YA with a swagger I didn’t even have to think about. By now it was natural. It was part of me. It was the walk, the way you carry yourself, that first broadcasts to everyone around you that you’re not somebody that can be pushed around.

  I was still wearing my hair longer than most of the soldiers. Right after I landed in YA, Tommy was sent there on some beef or other. We looked at each other, hugged each other, and I finally divested myself of any pretense of being anything other than a criminal. I went to the barber and had him shave my hair. Samson got weak when they cut his hair. I went the other way. I was a bald-headed gangster, a pelon, and I no longer cared who knew it. I was now ready for bigger crimes, more status, and more violence.