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Life Inside L.A.'s Most Notorious Gang
St. Martin's Press
August 2005
352 pages ISBN: 0312329296 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
Colton (�C-Loc�) Simpson was a Crip. Beginning at the
impossibly tender age of ten in the mid-1970s, Simpson�s
world was defined in terms of war. By the time he quit�the
first gang member allowed to do so�he�d risen through the
ranks to become Stabilizer and later, General. Simpson was
the son of Dick Simpson, a ballplayer for the California
Angels, but even before he became a gangbanger, his
childhood was tough. Raised by his grandmother at the edge
of Los Angeles�s South Central, Simpson didn�t turn to the
streets so much as become engulfed by them: without asking
to be part of the gang, his induction into the Crips
involved running down an alley while the members opened fire
on him as he ran. Simpson was an elite gang soldier, loyal to a fault,
participating wholly in a system whose rules and unique
ethics he quickly mastered. But Simpson�s run at the top of
the Crips was cut off by betrayal, injury, and a prison
stint that plunged him into an even fiercer war beyond gang
violence: the war in Calapatria prison between the Crips and
the corrections officers. It�s impossible not to care about the youth Simpson was, or
about Simpson�s fellow gangbanger Smiley, or about Gina, the
long-suffering friend and mother of two sons who eventually
married Simpson in prison. INSIDE THE CRIPS is an intimate
detailed look at gang life in the 1970s-1990s, and at the
same time a story of both buoyant camaraderie and
devastating loss. It places the reader in the center of the
rush that comes from participating in gang violence and puts
the extraordinary life and times of one Crip into a larger
context.
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