Highland Park. 

I was born at Huntington hospital in Pasadena and lived in Highland Park my entire life. Highland Park is a neighborhood in Northeast Los Angeles and I've lived on every corner. It’s a predominantly Mexican-American populated neighborhood; there are very few whites and even fewer blacks. It’s made up of a lot of hills, backstreets, alleyways and secret passages. You really need to know the area to travel the backroads, and you can travel the entire neighborhood using them. There are many apartment complexes, projects, smaller buildings and from what I remember, there's boutiques, a movie theater, a recreational center, as well as a lot of small Mexican-American restaurants and food stands. If you’re not involved in gangs, it’s a very nice area to raise a family. I loved growing up in Highland Park, we had so much fun as kids. We’d hang out late at night in the streets playing tag and all kinds of games. Gangs were present, but they were less violent and it was actually safe back then.

Then the crack epidemic began in the 1980’s and everything changed. Crack hit the streets along with other drugs like PCP and soon to follow was drug addiction, violence, prostitution and this is when gangs became dangerous. Automatic weapons were becoming more prevalent and murder rates began to rise. At one point in time, LA County had the highest murder rates, and in the early 90’s, Highland Park became well known for gang activity. Highland Park originally had 3 different gangs; Avenues, HighLand Park and Dog Town and to give you an idea of the size of these gangs, Avenues had about 600 members, HighLand Park had about 300, and Dog Town was smaller. Each gang has its own subgroups called “clicks”. I joined HighLand Park later, but our click started out as a crew of kids and we called ourselves BSK. 

BSK was originally about 10-15 kids that were in their late teens- they were real artists who did these crazy murals around the neighborhood. When we started getting recruited into BSK in ‘87/ ‘88 the numbers really started to grow. We were just a tagging crew and it was just a few of my friends and I. We skateboarded and just hung out and got into trouble. My tag name was Sket and then some of my closest friends were Villen, Youth, Cure and Blaze R.I.P. to those four guys. Hiver, Sure, Pics, Poize, Sern, Panik and Once. By the time I was 15, I was heavily involved with my click. For some reason, we were different from other taggers and it was well known throughout Los Angeles. FOX news even started doing these specials on graffiti and were calling us “Tag Bangers.” 

While I was getting involved in the streets, I would also spend the summers with my aunt. My dad would send me there because I was getting into too much trouble. I remember this one summer we went to South Dakota and my Aunt and Uncle had a beautiful ranch out there where they would foster troubled kids. I remember going horseback riding on Mount Rushmore and I really enjoyed the lifestyle there. Although those experiences with my extended family were important, it just wasn’t enough to keep me from the path I was going down.  My family had their own lives and they didn't know exactly what was going on with me. My Dad had no control over me and I now realize that at that point in time I did not value myself. I didn’t have any goals, the future was never a topic and I was just living day by day. I just wanted to hang out with my friends and break the rules. I felt accepted and loved by my friends and they cared about me. We were all from broken homes, homes without solid parental figures. Our parents were either drug addicts, dealers or gang members. 

I’ll share a story with you from when BSK really started to come together. So, my friends and I needed to start to make money, so we got into selling weed to make a few bucks for clothes and things we wanted. We weren't trying to be big time. So, about a year into selling weed, we were doing better than we expected. We had a good spot and plenty of customers. One night, these three older guys ran up in our spot and robbed us of our money and weed stash. We had no gun at reach to defend ourselves from these guys with guns. We had no choice but to start all over again with nothing.

During the re-start we were trying to find out who it was that jacked us, which took us about two weeks. We also found out that these guys were actually making money hustling drugs and the reason they jacked us was because we were taking business from them. So we plotted and planned how we could get these dudes back. We decided among the six of us that we all needed guns. So we hustled and saved for about six months until we had enough money and when the time was right we hit this guy’s spot. This guy could not believe that 6 kids were standing in his house with guns robbing him. So we came up on some money, plus a few pounds of pot, jewelry and more guns. So from that day on we knew we had a tight circle. No one knew or even guessed it was us. We decided that robbing drug dealers was way less risky than selling drugs. I mean what drug dealer is gonna call the cops and say that they've been robbed of their drugs? That was the start of my “profession.”

By this point, BSK had already been dealing with gang rivals and by the time I was 15 years-old, I was in and out of juvie and had already been shot in my hip and stabbed 7 times. My close friend was unfortunately shot in the head and killed. When the 90’s came around there were some gang laws that changed in regards to tagging and graffiti and you were only allowed to do it if you associated with a gang, so that’s when BSK was faced with the decision to assimilate.