If you managed to survive a beating by over 100 gang members one cold October night deep in gang turf, would you ever go back into that neighborhood? M. Rutledge McCall not only went back, he moved into the 'hood--for over a year.
This shocking saga details the year and a half investigative journalist M. Rutledge McCall spent living in the largest, most violent ghetto in America. During his time in the 'hood, gang members were sending bullet-riddled corpses to the county morgue at the rate of one every 12 hours. After spending months in gang turf on a regular basis, sufficient mutual trust and respect grew between gang members and McCall that they allowed him to be involved in every aspect of their lives: to go where they went, to see what they saw, to do what they did. ...To move among them as no white outsider had ever been allowed. McCall saw it all, from crimes committed by gang members to crimes committed by police officers. He saw firsthand the path that leads 6 year-old boys to becoming 16 year-old killers, and society's role in creating and fostering the mayhem and violence in America's big-city ghettos.
By 2010, street gangs such as La Eme (the Mexican Mafia) and the BGF (Black Guerilla Family) had spread into and gained virtual free reign of the nation's prisons, where Latinos far outnumber Blacks, and violence between the two had risen to alarming levels. This is a true story of the more innocent days, 18 years earlier, when a white writer moved freely among the gangs of South Central L.A. during the year that encompassed some of the most violent episodes ever to grip the city. The book has gone into eight reprints (including the e-book version) and was optioned for film by David Sacks (Co-Founder and former Chief Operating Officer of PayPal).
The events that this writer witnessed and participated in, not only shattered his perceptions of racism in America today, they shattered his entire life. The sequence of some of the events in this stunning account has been shuffled, in order to protect the guilty...the author included.
"I could fill a hundred books with what I saw and experienced in my year and a half in the South Central ghetto," says McCall, "including unspeakable atrocities, which shall remain unspoken. Had I known what lay ahead of me when I began this research... Only by the grace of God did I survive. Most do not." - M. Rutledge McCall
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