Ex Gang Member interview - Sam

all right sam yes sam where'd you grow up where are you from originally uh i'm from uh rural new hampshire a town of 4 000 people um i lived there until my early teens and then i moved to uh south pasadena but on the edge of northeast l.a i come from a life of upper middle class extremely white privilege i come from a very culturally the not diverse place like uh my grade school was a hundred people one was puerto rican everyone else is white i came to los angeles my brother and sister are much older than me 12 and 9 years apart they were born in the 60s i was born in the 70s and they moved to california as adults and i visited a few times i got the bug and once they had children we immediately moved out here and as soon as i moved out here uh it was an intense culture shock to say the least from new hampshire yeah and i i have like i said i come from an upper middle class life of privilege um world traveling i've you know been to england 13 times we'd go every summer my parents are all artists as are my brother and sister visual artists that being said the privileged thing comes from the socio-economic aspects of my life nice you know never had to suffer got all the stuff i want dark side of that is my mom and dad are both workaholics my mom comes from an extremely horrific childhood of abuse she's an extremely traumatized deeply disturbed individual my father is was uh in the asperger's spectrum but uh you know had 160 something iq um he had a three degrees english teaching and fine arts um and a hyper intelligent person uh but that being said i experienced extreme neglect um and severe physical violence at the hands of my mom my brother my older brother when i was you know pretty much since i could remember my earliest memories are flashbacks of being brutally assaulted from the age of two and on and um my brother was a monster and you know he he lives a life of extreme privilege again i'm not gonna say who he is um they've gaslighted me my entire life to make me think i'm a bad guy but i extreme experience extremely violent uh beatings daily sometimes three times a day every day until i started physically fighting back around age 11 or 12 probably a combination of puberty and me finally get taking martial arts lessons and uh i just became an incredibly violent person um because that's how i was raised and i actually sought help from adults uh teachers um uh you know uh even doctors things like that and the response because it's i'm born in 1978 the response was then don't be a baby don't be a tattletail or they would just deny it and then i would get severely uh corporally or corporally punished after the fact and so i just realized that no one had my back i was rejected neglected not taken seriously so once we moved to california the first people that were nice to me were chicanos mexican americans and you know that world i didn't realize how dangerous the world that i was stepping into a lot of it was involved in the punk rock uh sort of scene but you know the the their punk rockers have cholo and chola cousins and brothers and you know sisters and stuff like aunt aunts uncles parents grandparents and i found that lifestyle to be attractive to me because one thing that i think is very important and that people don't understand is people have this stigma about gang members being selfish and self-absorbed and and you know they don't care about anyone else and how could you there's a massive thing is one of the most important things to understand when you're dealing with gang members and people involved in criminal organizations is that you're dealing with people that can be usually 99.9 of the time have experienced tremendous physical sexual and psychological emotional abuse i feel like i i may have repressed memories i don't yeah and and these are people that have been completely rejected by their families or not necessarily rejected but hurt by someone and maybe unbeknownst to their major guardian or parental unit like well i don't understand every everyone else is such a good kid blah blah blah for example my brother and sister are vanilla as as it comes you know what i mean they are wonder bred corny ass white people and um and they uh have no tattoos um they're square you know they're artistic you know they're already people uh they have a little bit of a freaky side to them as far as like aesthetic goes but they're square you know my sister's never smoked a joint in her entire life my brother did drugs for a couple years got caught stopped um i've been uh but anyways i'm digressing um one thing i would say it's very important thing that i think people would help people understand gang member and gang mentality criminal mentality is that especially with gang members is you're dealing with people that are egomaniacs with no self-esteem that is one of the most dangerous combinations of a human being that you can get for example myself uh i'm a i i i am working on it i've made tremendous breakthrough through eight years of tremendous amounts of talk therapy without the aid of prescription medication i tried here and there it made me violent worse punching holes in the walls but tremendous amounts of tactile to work through this really intense uh just overwhelming narcissism that stems from uh no self-esteem i never planned to live past 40 i'm 44 i i live life as if i was i didn't i was once i learned 40 i was like oh my god i can't believe i [ __ ] lived this long you know uh i wasn't planning on looking like this i wasn't planning and ending up like this i i kind of was just gonna either fade away or go out in a blaze of glory and i lived my life and made my choices accordingly and uh another thing um we we you know touched on this before but uh there's a distinction i i've been involved in three different types of gang activity one being at the um during it's it's a punk rock scene phenomena it's a thing called uh sh arps which stands for skinheads against racial prejudice it's very very hard to get that into people's heads that what skinheads are not racism but yes initially in the 1960s skinheads were not racist it was a reggae-based culture where they were emulating west indian jamaican culture as those two cultures existed side by side the poor working class white and west indian culture in london in part different parts of england and then during the 1980s uh when things became enormous amounts of unemployment etcetera etcetera then the white supremacist aspect came into it uh with the national front in england and i'm not going to give a whole history lesson on it but what sells is hate and fear not a bunch of guys that are into reggae and like to dance and dress weird and shave their heads what is interesting is a bunch of scary white guys with their head shaved with swastikas that's what's interesting and that's what gets the public uh that's against the public eye and it's funny because 99 99 of people that call themselves skinheads are not white supremacists so anyways again i don't really want to get into a history lesson with that but that is uh as i started off as um punk rock is what appealed to me i like that i grew up with that that's the music i was exposed to as a kid my brother and my sister it was a goth and uh that was the thing where i still felt weak i'm like i didn't want to be a punk rocker i wanted people to fear me i wanted people to respect me so i became a sharp um and it quickly got involved with gangs with that and then the thing with sharps is they're about fighting nazis neo-nazi people that skin heads um and that also gets very complex because at the end of the day it's not no one really has your back fear is god and uh everyone turns on themselves one way or another and it comes down to who's the most popular it's just like an alpha male contest you know and again back to the uh egomaniacs with no self-esteem again which is a very dangerous world to live in and ultimately can be fatal and doom doomed for failure once i started getting into drugs i you know i smoked weed from when i was about 12 and i started getting into drugs mostly lsd and uh mushrooms uh i tried speed when i was 16. this is methamphetamines wasn't really a thing yet i mean it existed but it wasn't as violently overwhelming as it is now there used to just be speed uh it was white it wasn't crystal it could have been any substance i did that that made me feel kind of super human and you know i could dance and party and hang up and talk over everyone else for hours at a time and eventually that started to become a problem started doing it all the time every day and then you start to develop toxic psychosis and paranoid delusional schizophrenia based on that stuff and then i got involved that the the skin the sharp lifestyle didn't make sense to me because it didn't involve money it didn't involve drugs and i didn't i couldn't work because of my mental state was so ravaged so what i did eventually uh is i knew gang members in a particular mexican gang in um part of northeast l.a area and again i'm not going to say who but i got involved with them took me in very quickly and it was all about money drugs and power uh and then once uh i got off the rails very quickly as my uh amphetamine usage got worse and worse and worse i was literally doing it every day uh i had a hard time telling what was real and what wasn't um and eventually uh i ended up uh a friend three or four of my friends uh this other gang member um he sexually assaulted one of our friends sisters um and uh traumatized her sexually so bad that she became a non-verbal disassociative schizophrenic um catatonic schizophrenic is the term um and he was proud of it and then we basically exerted vigilante justice upon the sky put him in a wheelchair in a colostomy bag everyone got we fled the scene everyone got caught but me and you know i don't i don't snitch even though people will probably say i'm snitching just by talking about this but hey uh and uh i did the time and the way our system works as a first-time offender i'm a white guy so you know i got a attempted murder mark down to aggravated assault and battery uh i played the white guy card and i got a year and a half in la county and because of overcrowding they knocked it down to six months and uh one thing a tremendous crashing down of my loyalties and what i understood to be how things worked was when i entered the prison system as a mexican even though i'm a white guy as a mexican gang member the first thing that happened is i went to go eat i went over to people i literally knew from high school some of my friends dads and uncles and even one of my friends grandfathers and i said hey what's up guys they said you can't sit with us and i it's like what do you mean and they they said uh you got to go sit with the peckerwoods the white boys and i and i have this visceral hatred for them as a former anti-racist nazi hunter essentially and i'm considered what they call a race trader um because of that and uh or lame or whatever and uh i was like i'm not [ __ ] sitting when those guys were like well you can't sit with us man i'm sorry in the streets it's different but in here this is a completely different world we love you we got your back but sorry man take a [ __ ] walk and then i just went and sat by myself and then the white supremacists came up you know big nazi guys giant swastika on his face probably like almost seven feet tall like a monster you know something that looks like something like an extra from game of thrones minus the armor and uh they came you know what are you doing over here by you know by the [ __ ] or whatever and i was like [ __ ] you guys and i knew i was gonna get assaulted so i attacked a guy split his face open with my lunch tray and the last thing i remember is just being pummeled into unconsciousness and when i woke up i was handcuffed to a drainage pipe in some the bowels of l.a county and it's probably one of this is probably the top three most traumatic if not the most traumatic events of my life where they had a german shepherd snarling and biting an inch from my face tearing my clothes off they were beating me with sticks their night sticks like that they electrocuted me several times physically kicked me with their hands and feet pepper sprayed me an inch away while i was literally handcuffed to the wall or the pipes sorry and then uh they put me in a solitary confinement cell and this is important to the story is i have uh what it's called severe severe uh moussophobia and if you don't know what that is it's fear of rodents i have no idea why um i think i just saw a lot of rats get caught in traps as a kid and it really [ __ ] me up but they put me in a cell naked pitch black and rats would crawl all over my body and bite me and i believe i was in there for two weeks and they would throw food in there and immediately the food would get swarmed by rats uh i had to drink out of uh this disgusting like fetted toilet water the thing in the back didn't work and i was uh same height i'm six feet tall i weigh 100 and 210 pounds now i was 135 pounds when i got out of there i looked like a concentration camp victim and it brought me out and one thing that they did is they'd have a thousand watt light bulb in the hallway to literally blind you intentionally and i couldn't see for 30 minutes it was bizarre being white white blank like not darkness it's just white and it took about six hours for my vision to go gray and then back to color probably by the end of the day and then later on they had me doing some basic work in a kitchen which is not very common but they kind of wanted to separate me and the next thing i remember and this is uh two weeks later so i was in there for a day that happened two weeks later probably a couple days later and i was washing dishes and i felt this bizarre pressure in the side of my neck right about here and then i remember leaning over the sink and my hearing went out i couldn't hear anything and then all i saw was this it was my vision went black and white and all i saw was this brown it looked like chocolate syrup swirling into the uh drain and then the next thing is i woke up and i was shackled to bed and they said i had uh my heart had starved three times i had lost more blood than they'd seen anybody lose in their entire life but it didn't puncture any lymph nodes or anything but apparently i got stabbed five times in the neck with a filed down toothbrush and that's just the information the nurses are sharing me could be true could be not but they said it was so expensive to keep me in there and because of the overcrowding and this is in 1997. i was so overcrowded they just let me out that was it i did three months and uh you know i i did not not three months but i did i was in the coma i was in a coma for let's see they said two to three weeks or something like so a little over a month uh five or six weeks and again it's i'm not clear on that but i got out of jail and i was so traumatized from that i i felt like as if i was a skid row person where i was walking around like what are you looking at what you look [ __ ] you may know like this bizarre bizarre fully kicked in paranoid delusional psychosis and everyone's out to get me don't look at me i'll [ __ ] kill you and within a week i was back in jail it put me in solitary confinement again it [ __ ] me up even worse uh they let me out after uh two weeks in solitary this time i had lights at least and then they let me out and then three days later i got arrested again for attacking someone on the street because i thought they were looking at me funny uh right around this very right by a union station and then the third time they were like uh if you come in here again we're really gonna kill you and i managed to stay with the right people who kept me away from going back into this and just kind of let me rage out in their garage and flip out and just pretty much 24-hour watch to me and uh within a month or so i kind of like calmed down and then it wasn't until after that i started doing uh mdma because i have been self-medicating my entire life mdma with a combination of lsd mushrooms here and there and it was like as if someone took a squeegee to my brain um i had i completely let go of all this like what i was just one of those like what the [ __ ] have i been doing type moments and but i was still so involved in i had lived that lifestyle for so long where why could i why am i going to work this minimum wage job where i could go rob this liquor store or i could go rob this other drug dealer or this or sell drugs and pretty much a it's a it's a horrible lifestyle but it's just something huge risk ma big payoff type thing and i basically you know have worked stupid jobs being a bouncer here and there um just to have some sort of like taxable income so to speak but i've basically been a drug dealer criminal uh you know robbing other drug dealers so to speak etc pretty much until i met my wife when i was 37-ish uh no wait 40-ish 40-ish i kind of realized like tried to phase out of it so when i was like 40-ish i met my wife um she completely she she's the first person that i felt really loved me unconditionally and i realized had to stop doing what i was doing my father passed i got an inheritance so i didn't have to live like that and then during this time period i started seeing a psychologist um and i would go to talk therapy with this guy um one to five times a week and it was just one of those things where the first first time someone a stranger had my back and trust i could trust i i've never been able to trust anyone he led me to believe and it took a lot of convincing and proof to make me finally trust this guy and i realized that the reason i became the way i became was the horrific physical psychological and verbal abuse i experienced at the hands of my family members who are supposed to be the people that love me that way and the people i should trust and um i and yeah that was that a combination of their enormous amounts of talk therapy um and then i had a child um two and a half years ago and even the moment i found out my wife was pregnant was the moment where is like i was still a high-ranking um shot-caller i had got back into the anti-racist um nazi hunter scene again and had just i'm not going to say the state but i i had moved from california and established a chapter um and clicked up with some other anti-racist groups and created a sort of an alliance with them or a firm or a crew or whatever you want to call it a click and i you know heavy is the head that wears the crown and you live in a state of constant paranoia because you're a target you have to make examples of people you have a lot of pressure even within your own group and you're always in a constant state of vicious paranoia and you know my neck hurt it felt like i had wearing a thousand pounds around my neck um and all this sense of uneasiness waking up you know sleeping with a gun under my pillow waking up with panic attacks and who's outside and you know and things like that and what's this guy [ __ ] looking at and uh you know it wasn't i kind of was doing a half-assed job of running things once i started meeting my wife and i think it was our first wedding anniversary a little over two years ago i was just having this horrific kind of meltdown where i was having to deal with this stuff because i was a shock caller and the founder of this chapter um and uh i was like on our wedding anniversary i said i'm gonna quit you know fingers [ __ ] crossed and nothing bad happened to me but i was ready to expect a severe physical uh you know jumping out of and because i had put in so much work in my age and my amount of time of you know 20 12 years specifically with that particular organization um i was allowed to walk off and that was incredible and i still live in a state of paranoia but that was over a year ago now and i've been non-affiliated or i'm a lame or whatever but um and i don't care there's nothing those guys can say to hurt my feelings i have nothing but respect for them um and but i did what i had to do you know and uh therapy meeting my wife hair pregnant having a child those four things are what solidified my mental state into you know destroying this very toxic very dangerous narcissistic fatalistic i don't care if i die i don't care who who goes down with me i'd have a code of honor you know hurt children women you know uh old people kids whatever animals like that i have a you know a code of honor um you know i'm not i'm not a psychopath you know but um but uh it's just it's it's incredible to be free of that you know and and it's still something that i have nightmares about and i i still live in a state of fear and paranoid i don't walk anywhere without knife in my pocket you never know you know and that's something i have to live with for the rest of my life so it sounds like love is what changed you yeah um that's it love uh having never experienced love and someone who just loved me because they loved me and someone who believed in me and believed i was smart i was told i was stupid every day by my mother for my entire life and when someone tells you that every day you start to believe it but i i i still have horrific self-esteem issues i still have body dysmorphia issues um i still have a lot of self-loathing a lot of self-hatred um and it's something i'm working on i work i'm working on it like it's the cure for cancer you know uh and uh it's hard but with the love of my wife and the unconditional love of my my daughter and you know i'm her hero um you know and she it's uh that's love really you know not cheesy or cliche but love really does conquer all love is stronger than hate but at the same time um human beings the root of the human being human experience is fear and fear is more powerful than love unfortunately you can say whatever you want and i agree love is obviously the best but there's also fear associated with what if you lose that love what if you're afraid if someone doesn't love you that's the scariest thing in the world it to me is if i lost my wife or my kid if you know and again legally i have to say this i'm no danger to myself or others and i'm not gonna harm myself but if i were to lose my wife and my child i would kill myself i have nothing to live for you know um i had made it this far and they're they're the light that that that keeps me alive you know even when i have my dark moments and you know i'm diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder um manic depression uh social severe social anxiety i had to take xanax just to get down here you know um and uh uh you know uh uh manic depression uh post-traumatic stress disorder um the list goes on you know um and i've conquered a lot of these things but it's it's an everyday battle and it's an uphill battle at times and some days are worse and sometimes i can't leave my house for a couple days and sometimes it's hard to take a shower and then sometimes i feel like i'm on top of the world and indestructible but that is what is what makes manic manic up and down i i assume you'd say your childhood formed all these problems that you yeah 100 yeah you are a product of your environment you're a product of your child and that goes back to the thing of the people saying you know nine nine times out of ten the gang story is oh i had a horrific childhood i grew up in poverty i chose to live that life i chose to live on the streets i felt being i was homeless for three months you know i i i felt safer living in the gang culture on the streets carrying a firearm being harassed and assaulted by the police and living in this nightmare world because that nightmare world was a better alternative to the nightmare world i experienced within my own family and it's very strange i felt safer and happier living in a world of constant physical threats of violence and and terror because the emotional and psychological abuse i experience daily and i don't i i've completely severed any communication i have to to my family because it's it's it's not safe they're not safe for me to be around they don't respect me they fear but the life you built for yourself as an adult matched what you experienced as a child yeah i created this world because um that's the world that i had control over i was the master of violence and that's another thing is um i'm a martial arts expert um i'm not a master or whatever but i've been doing martial arts since i was 11 years old i'm certified to teach two different styles more but i don't practice those anymore and actually that's one of my legal sources of income i've had since i was uh 19 is being a martial arts instructor and that is one of the things that's made me such a dangerous powerful person because in the gang and street culture being skilled at violence or being extreme if you're not physically as able to handle yourself with or with without weapons um you know you got to use a gun you got to use a knife you gotta you know how to know how to manipulate people use power get people to do things for you but i found out one of those things is that no one ever really had my back so i i delved i went head on into martial arts and uh i can fight you know and it's not whether it's like oh i'm [ __ ] invincible or whatever i'm just speaking from personal experience and especially as someone who's been a bouncer where you encounter anywhere from one to sometimes five to ten really intense life or death fights at night vet weapons involved and i've lived that life for a really long time since i was 21 years old i can i i have no physical fear of any other human being in a one to one or even three to one sometimes five to one situation um and i i know what i can do i put a lot of time into conditioning my body and training my body which also makes my per my paranoia and all these other things makes me that much more of a dangerous person because with or without a weapon and with the weapon but even without a weapon i know i could kill people with my bare hands and it's not something like i'm proud of it's just something i am confident that i can do because it's it's i've done i've seen what i could do in real life everything i know i can do is because i've really done it you know um i've broken people's jaws shattered their rib cage caved in their faces and you know i'm not i'm not proud of this i'm not i i have a conscience about it and you know looking back most of the time it was uh self-defense um and you know 99 of the time i never did nothing and nobody didn't have it coming to him or wasn't asking for it but there's been times where i've been in dark places where i just didn't like the way somebody was looking at me and i took it to that level and that's uh that's something i have to live with for the rest of my life and i really wish i could apologize to those people so if you see this i'm sorry if you know who i am and i don't know who you are but i'm sorry um but uh you know one of those that's life life is uh everything is chaos honestly i used uh i studied buddhism pretty extensively and have for a long time as it kind of goes hand in hand with martial arts but um people say oh is that karma and i've actually heard that on some of the things you say oh karma karma is a thing the karma you know there is no such thing as like oh i have karma or that's your karma karma is is the effect is the law of effect the fruits of karma are what happens when you when karma happens for example you know you do this i slap this guy in the face he slaps me back that's the fruits of my karma or he doesn't you know bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people bad guys win and good guys lose my father got parkinson's when he was 38 9 years old and as a illustrator he lost the use of his right hand and then he had to teach himself how to draw with his left hand and then he got brain implants and then had to do that and then had to take 23 pills a day and eventually be went insane from toxic psychosis and i got to watch this profound genius kind man deteriorate into a demonic product of toxic psychosis induced dementia and he never deserved it he never did nothing to nobody you know and that's that's that is what i believe everything is chaos and all you can do is try and be kind including yourself but for me being kind of myself is one of the hugest struggles that i deal with on a daily level the way i treat myself internally just even in a dialogue sense or monologue sense or whatever i would never speak to someone i care about or even strangers the way i speak to myself inside and you know it's something you have to be aware of but my god man easier said than done you know all right sam thank you so much for sharing your story no problem fascinating okay no problem thanks you

Channel: Soft White Underbelly

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Id: Y6t7QSjpoEk

Length: 34min 33sec (2073 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 07 2022