As James Howard, Jr., wiped the fingerprints off his second carjack job, police surrounded the Crips’ leader and yelled at him to throw his hands in the air. He fumbled for a non-existent gun, hoping they would fire. Instead, he heard a strange voice in his head: Pray.
Startled, and slightly irritated, by the foreign command, James shrugged it off. He felt trapped in the hustling, the gangbanging, and the double life. This was his out. He held his breath for the shot that he hoped would end his life.
Becoming “the Man”
Fifteen years earlier, James moved from Philadelphia’s organized crime scene to the scrappy streets of south L.A. An experienced criminal at 21, James soon learned he had to play by a new set of rules.
“You can’t just go into a neighborhood and do what you think you want to do and think you’re gonna get away with it,” he explained. “The neighborhood is run by somebody. And those people who run a neighborhood are not going to allow you to be makin’ all the money and them not any money.”
To survive on the streets and earn respect, he had to join a gang. He chose the Crips. From the get-go, it was always about the money—money that just happened to arrive on a drug wagon. James insists he was never a user. Power and greed were the only addictions that fueled his successful “career.”
Starting out as a “thug,” he threw his 6-foot-2-inches and 280 pounds around easily and lucratively, advancing from selling drugs to “running” drugs to stealing semis filled with anything he could sell quickly: electronics, truck tires, toys. Every morning, he woke up ruminating on the next thousand dollars around the corner. It was nothing for him to make $20,000 in a week. He even once landed $60,000 in a day.
But he was known as “the Man” and the “shot caller” (a high-ranking gang member who “calls the shots”), and any gangster who wanted to make some cash knew he had to talk to James. At any given time, he could have between 20 to 25 thugs at his disposal.
On the side, he worked as a licensed truck driver, which provided an easy cover if he ever got caught. And on the other side of town, he played the family man in a nice condominium that he had purchased in Long Beach for his then girlfriend Mary, her three daughters—Jessica, Tiffany, and Shavannah—and his daughter, Anjolique. Despite his reckless lifestyle, James considered his daughters his most valued possessions and saw his lucrative lawlessness as a way to provide them with a comfortable life.
“People would say, ‘If he loved them so much, why did he do the things he did?’ ” he said. “I can’t explain it ’cause I was stupid, because I didn’t know what real love was. I didn’t know how to love.”
By this time James had so mastered the art of façade that Mary was stunned when he was arrested for his second carjacking, a charge that could have given him 18 years to life behind bars.
“It was really surprising, and I was pregnant when I found all of this out, too,” Mary explained. “He was working and I never knew all of the other stuff that was going on.”
When you’re in the street and you’re a player in the gang, nobody really comes to you for help. Everyone is just worried about survival. When you become successful, you become “The Man,” you become an ambassador. - “Ice T"
