The Last Roll-By for Gang Skaters

There were wall-to-wall cops, all 17 of them wearing bulletproof vests. There were home boys from gangs all over the city.

It was not an unfamiliar scene in Los Angeles, except for the roller-skates.

The police this night stood in the parking lot of a Reseda roller rink while members of the Playboy Hoorahs and the Reseda 13 and a dozen other gangs glided around inside. The occasion was a typical night, ultimately the final night, of a popular Thursday night skating event at the Sherman Square Roller Rink.

After six years of gang-related problems, this would become the eve when violence and pleas from police persuaded the rink owners to say “enough” and end the gang roll-by.

Sherman Square started “adult skating night” about 10 years ago, but by the mid-1980s, it had evolved into a gang members’ night out, attracting gangs from South-Central Los Angeles and elsewhere. After all, even gangbangers need a break now and then from the rigors of selling “schoolboy crush,” or crack cocaine.

So they came to Reseda and glided to the sounds of Public Enemy and other rap groups, met some “skeezers,” as they call women, and “fronted off” all too frequently.

This evening began quietly enough, with routine traffic stops of suspected gangbangers.

Gang members apparently have scant respect for regulations requiring motorists to register their vehicles and purchase insurance, said Sgt. Bill Martin, head of the Los Angeles Police Department’s West Valley anti-gang unit. This penchant to ignore the little things, such as registration stickers, gives police a reason to stop suspected gang members and search their cars for guns or other weapons, he said.

Martin, a craggy giant with eyes the azure of High Sierra lakes, watched for violators from his slate-gray car in the parking lot of an apartment building near the Reseda Boulevard exit of the Ventura Freeway. Many patrons use the highway to get to the rink from south Los Angeles, where the flyers advertising “adult night” on Thursdays are distributed, he said.

The car that gang members find really “def” these days is a Mustang GT convertible with illegally tinted windows that prevent police from seeing in, Martin said.

Of course, non-gang members own the cars also, a fact driven home when Martin pulled over one such convertible driven by a motorist whose only crime turned out to be a tendency to pass on the inside. The man was given a warning to drive more carefully and was released.

Back at the rink parking lot, Martin’s men arrested the driver of a green Cutlass sedan who made three attempts to park before running into a pole. The car had a bullet hole in its side and the man, on parole for selling cocaine, wore a blue “rag,” or bandanna, in the back pocket of his jeans, a signal to rival gangs that he is a Crip. He was arrested on suspicion of being under the influence of narcotics.

Inside the rink, which Martin says police do not enter unless called in by the management, women with skintight shorts, leotards and elaborately braided hair made eyes at men racing by them on skates to the beat of rap songs by Big Daddy Kane. At least four barrel-chested employees on foot and two on skates did their best to keep order by patting down patrons at the door and keeping them moving around the rink.

But when the gangs started throwing signs, the big gun was called in to dissuade them. “Deputy Dog,” as police call private security guard Larry Ervin, is a granite chunk of a man with his hand wrapped around a thick chain at the end of which is “Max,” one of his Rottweilers.

No one is allowed to pet Max, who resembles a small tank with teeth, Ervin said. No one tried.

Ervin, a former Marine who brings his family to “Christian night” on Fridays at the rink, said he has confiscated drugs and dice from patrons playing illegal crap games at the rink. “I just flush those drugs right down the toilet in front of them, so they don’t think I am stealing it,” Ervin said.

By 12:45 a.m., shortly after police left after a relatively uneventful night, a fight broke out in the rink as two men, apparently from rival gangs, “fronted off.” Some rink patrons dove under picnic tables as the fight turned into a free-for-all that even Ervin and Max could not control.

Eight people were hurt, but their injuries were minor because, fortunately, no one pulled a knife or gun, Martin said. The week before, however, residents reported a fusillade of gunfire on Reseda Boulevard just after the rink closed.

“Enough is enough,” said Martin, adding that the closure of the West Valley’s most troublesome spot should reduce the gang problem.

But gang members tend to be migratory creatures, Martin noted, and other locations, including a fast-food hamburger chain at the corner of Ventura Boulevard and Fallbrook Avenue, are already popular gathering places for them.