Gangbanger.com
He trashes most of the messages, including one from someone in Georgia who said he was having trouble with rivals and asked if Tony could send some guys down for backup. But he says he sometimes offers advice to correspondents, whether they’re worried parents or misguided brothers in a far-flung chapter. He adds, “I’m not into recruiting. I get a lot of stuff like, ‘I just moved to Florida, and I’m looking for a chapter to hook up to. I’m from New York.’ That could be some FBI agent wanting to get in. I check it out to a certain degree, and there’s no way I’m gonna vouch for anybody I don’t know. I’ll introduce him to some guys–and he ends up being a fed, and he starts indicting people over things they say.”
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Tony, who didn’t want his real name or his real King name used, calls the Latin Kings a “street organization,” not a gang. And he claims that the group originated in the 60s as a political movement–like the Young Lords and the Black Panthers–and was corrupted by criminals and government conspiracies. He admits that the Nation became notorious for drug dealing and murderous turf wars, but insists that he and some friends want to restore its noble origins. “We’re not saying, go out and be a King,” he says. “But you can be a King and still do positive things. I’ve been a King for a while, and I’m not out there doing illegal things. A lot of people hear about the Kings in the paper and the news about killing and selling drugs. But then they don’t know about the ones that do community outreach and social work and good stuff. And there are a lot.”
Tony says he realized that the best way to try to redirect such hotheads was to create his own site. On his first page, under the headline “Kingism,” he put a photograph of an enormous black-and-gold Latin Kings mural that once adorned the side of a building on Division Street. A short text followed: “The Black & Gold will rise above thier oppressors and put an end to all the shit that’s going on nationwide. The political tactics used by politicians to gain public recognition at the cost of others, most of the times not knowing the real story, but making shit look alot worse than what it is. They say we’re a nusance, we’re bad people a gang, menaceses to society, but hardly do you ever find these people coming into our communities, seeing what kind of things that we do in the barrio’s, they never ask us to help participate in certain events cause it will portray a negative image unto themselves. THAT’S ALL BULLSHIT!! That’s why we have to empower our own! Start putting our own Jente in these political positions, positions that will bring changes, bring fear among those politicians who over the years badmouthed our Nation, our race.”
Tony puts his friends and himself in the third category. He points to “Ernesto,” who’s in his mid-20s and works for a social services agency, sometimes as a mediator between scrapping gangs. Ernesto says he’s built up enough trust with rival leaders that he can walk into any neighborhood in the city, but he wants to be anonymous because his employers and the police he comes in contact with wouldn’t understand his continued membership in the Kings. “It’s just one of those things you can’t shake off,” he says. “If anybody told you, ‘The Kings–oh, we don’t kill anybody. We’ve never killed anybody.’ C’mon. You can’t say that. It’s proven–there’s people behind bars. You can’t deny that it’s a part of the history.”
