A SHOT IN THE DARK

Miami Herald, The (FL)
September 18, 1988
Author: JOEL ACHENBACH Herald Staff Writer

Legs wide, hands on hips, Danny Figueroa guarded the parking space, prime real estate on a Saturday night in the Grove.

"This is our turf tonight," he said.

He was an International. He had a nickname: "Psycho." The only problem was that so many other gang members had picked the same name.

This was early June and school was out and a rumble seemed likely. The Kings and the Internationals had already scrapped in Peacock Park. Now Danny monitored the traffic, the usual parade of T-Birds and Iroc-Zs and Daddy's sports cars, tape decks cranked with the music of choice, "bass" they aptly call it, disco reduced to a throb, like a palpitating heart heard through a stethoscope.

"I just came to meet girls," he said. "I don't want any trouble."

He waited.

A car slowly drove by the space.

A kid leaned out the window and looked Danny right in the eye.

A gun.

There were five or six shots. Danny dove for cover behind a car and felt a burning pain in his knee. The gunman's car peeled away.

His friends dragged Danny up off the street onto the grass. The bullet had passed through his left leg just above the knee -- two neat holes -- then nicked the right leg in about the same spot.

"I'd never seen him before," Danny said. "I looked right in his eyes before he shot. They said, 'This is for all you gang pussy motherf---ers.' "

The girls were crying. Paramedics ripped off his pants legs. A photographer took his picture. A reporter asked him questions.

"I can take it," he said.

"I can take it."

His face showed no pain, no fear. But more than a touch of pride. He was being a man about it.

"Man, there's going to be such retaliation, oh my God," Danny Figueroa said a few days after he was shot. "Internationals declared war on the Kings. They're probably going up to Northwest and shoot up some Kings."

War! So dramatic. Maybe in other cities. In Miami the gangs -- the groups that call themselves gangs and use the signs -- remain largely stuck in rumble mode. Sell some drugs. Steal some cars. Get in fights. These are not complex hierarchies of criminal enterprise; those groups long since graduated from this "gang" silliness.

Danny, 16, had dropped out of school after the 10th grade.

"In school, the teachers, the staff, they treat you like you're a kid," he explained one day at his home, where posters of sports cars adorn his bedroom walls. He was joined by his friends Willie, 18, and Sammy, 15, who are also Internationals. Sammy wants to have INP -- for International Posse, a fancy way of saying "gang" -- shaved into the back of his head.

"I demand a little more respect," Danny said, "because I give a little more respect. I think of myself as growing into a man, and I don't want to live in a little kid's world. That's what school is, a baby-sitting service."

Sometimes Danny Figueroa and his friends will shoot up the house of a rival gang member or anyone they call a "redneck."

"It's actually to scare people. It's to show you that if we could shoot your house, we could shoot you just as easily."

Other times they do kid stuff. Danny explained this one day as he sat on his bed in his family's small house near Homestead.

"We stay up all night, and we sleep all day," Danny said. "We just hang out. When I'm in the house alone, I hang out and watch TV. When I go out with friends, we just drive around with baseball bats out the window and hit mailboxes. Just foolish stuff like that. . . .

"The other night I started cutting myself with a knife. I don't know, it was just something to do. Stupidity."

The Internationals began less than a year ago. It's a Latin gang, black and white. Willie's father is a businessman in Homestead. Danny's is a corrections officer at the Dade County Jail.

"Homestead used to get kicked around a lot. They'd go to a party and get jumped. So we did this to show that we've got balls, too. So this thing, the Internationals -- we've only lost one fight. We were with La Familia, and we were going up against the 34th Street Players and the Latin Kings. Then La Familia turned evil, and they turned around and started running. They left the Internationals by themselves. We had to retreat. That was the first fight we were in," Danny said.

"We go out to have fun. Other gangs go out to destroy us," Willie said.

Danny said he did badly in school because, "I just didn't go to school often enough. That was a time when I was stealing cars. We'd go and steal a car from South Miami, we'd drive around, that was my kick out of it, driving it around. We'd strip 'em down sometimes. You'd start off with the rims and tires. Then you go to the seats. Then we could take off the fender. There was really no high demand for engines, so we'd take out the spark plugs, the carburetor, the fuel injection system. We did real well with fuel injection systems."

At home, away from the action, these boys can be well- spoken, friendly, reflective. But when they hit the streets and cloak themselves in the aura of the International Posse, they take on a different persona. "It's like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," Danny said.

The nickname of the guy charged by police with shooting Danny is "Power." So now Psycho owns a bullet with Power's name on it. Literally engraved right on the shell. P-O-W-E-R.

As the boys were talking, the phone rang. Danny's mother. She had a job prospect for Danny.

"Do I know how to type, Mom? I know how to type two words a minute. They taught typing in school, but I don't want that job. Bueno, mira, typing is not my cup of tea."

Sammy, the quiet 15-year-old, looked at his knuckles, scuffed and red from being in a fight. "Typing?" he said to himself. "That'd f--- up my hands."

Danny didn't get a job all summer.

But by August he decided he was tired of the gangs.

"I'm thinking about retiring," he said. "Something tells me, give it up. It could have been a slug in my head. It could have hit me in my head, it could have hit me in my chest. My family's going to suffer if anything happens to me. I'm wising up. The gang is cool and it's fun. I'll always be there for the gang. They've done a lot of good things for me. I would never turn my back totally on the gang. . . . I'm thinking for the future. I'm not going to be in a gang for the rest of my life. This is just a pastime."

A few days later he was back in the Grove in front of the church, right where he'd been shot at the beginning of summer. He said he came just to meet girls. He didn't want any trouble.

It sounded familiar.

Edition: FINAL
Section: TROPIC
Page: 12

Copyright (c) 1988 The Miami Herald