Saturday, June 18, 2011

Gangs, drugs, metal, punk, what?

I stumbled onto this short item on a gang shooting in South LA. I was curious about the gang, and it turned out to be The Defiant Ones, a black motorcycle club that started in the '50s.

Trying to find more info on them, led me to a flickr set of the 1982 LAPD gang handbook.

One of the weird things about the handbook is that they say that the white gangs mostly label themselves as "stoners," e.g. Downey Stoners, La Mirada Stoners, Paramount Stoners. So, I start googling for some of those, and run across a 1985 article about Fight For Freedom, some white punk rock gang, which sounds pretty hilarious.

In there, they quote credulously from Gregory Bodenhamer, who apparently ran a program called "Back in Control." Though in the article, he's fairly sane, it turns out that Bodenhamer thought that kids needed to be depunked and demetaled, and ran some crazy brainwashing camps in the '80s, which this rambling blog entry connects to the PMRC, Focus on the Family, the evangelical DC prayer group called The Family, and Hilary Clinton. Bodenhamer is also quoted in this goofy article about druggy metal heads.

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