Before he was Monster Cody, he was just Cody Scott, a kid from South Central trying to survive a broken home. But one brutal night changed everything. At only 11, Cody was initiated into the crypts. And from that moment, fear became his language. He wasn’t chasing dreams. He was chasing power, reputation, and respect.
What came next would shock even the streets that raised him. This is the story of the boy who became a nightmare and the monster that America helped create. Now, let’s be honest. Most 11year-olds are worried about cartoons or playing outside, not murder or gang life. But Cody Scott, he wasn’t your typical 11year-old.
Born on November 13th, 1963, right in Los Angeles, California, Cody de John Scott came from a rough setup. His parents, Ernest Scott and Birdie Canada, had moved from Houston, Texas, trying to make something better for themselves. Cody was the fifth out of six kids, Kevin, Kim, Kerwin, Kershawn, Cody, and Kendis. A full house with a lot of noise and even more chaos.
Now, Cody believed something wild about his roots. He claimed he might actually be the son of former Los Angeles Rams running back Dick Bass, saying his mother had an affair with the football star. There’s never been proof of that, but it added a layer of confusion to an already messy home. Things were bad between his parents. Ernest had built up a deep bitterness over Birdie’s affair, and that pain turned violent.
He regularly abused her, and Cody caught some of that same anger himself. Ernest was the type to make sure Cody knew he wasn’t his favorite. He’d take his biological kids out to movies, dinners, even trips to Houston while leaving Cody behind to deal with the silence. That kind of rejection sticks to a kid.
When Ernest and Birdie finally divorced in 1970, it didn’t really solve anything. Ernest still came around on weekends, still made it clear he didn’t like Cody, and still kept that same cold energy. By 1972, Birdie packed up her kids and moved to West 69th Street and Danker Avenue, deep in South Central LA, an area already crawling with gang activity.
Cody was only 10 when he got jumped by two older boys who took his money. That was his first taste of the streets. With Birdie working multiple jobs just to keep food on the table, Cody started drifting. The streets became his second home. And that’s where he met a man who would change everything. Stanley Tuki Williams, the leader of the Westside Crips.
According to Tuki’s memoir, Blue Rage, Black Redemption, there were days when the Crips would gather at his house smoking PCP and lifting weights, bragging about the fights and shootings they had been through. And there, sitting quietly in the corner, was young Cody, wideeyed, soaking it all in. Those moments hit him deep.
Years later, Williams admitted he regretted what he exposed Cody to. He blamed himself for letting that young boy see too much too early. Because Cody Scott, who the world would later know as Monster Cody, followed that same dangerous path right down to the same drugs and the same darkness that once fascinated him as a kid.
It was 1975 and the streets of South Central LA were already boiling over with gang activity. That year, a [ __ ] named Sidewinder decided to start a new set on the west side. He called it the eight tray gangster crips, sometimes written as 83GC or ETG. This new crew would soon become one of the most infamous on the block. Fast forward to June 15th, 1975.
That evening was supposed to be a celebration, Cody Scott’s sixth grade graduation. But instead of heading home to cake and congratulations, the night turned into something else entirely. Cody was courted into the ETG crips, jumped in by the older homies, as they called it.
It was a brutal initiation, fist flying and pride on the line. It was the moment that would set the tone for the rest of his life. See, Cody had already made his mind up long before that night. Back in elementary school, he decided he wasn’t going to be anyone’s victim. Growing up where he did, there was no middle ground. You were either banging or you were getting pressed.
And for a kid surrounded by chaos, the gang life didn’t just look like danger. It looked like belonging. That same night, things escalated fast. What started as an initiation turned into a full-blown war mission. Cody and a few of the ETGs stole a car, grabbed their guns, and rolled out looking for members of the Brims.
A blood set that had dared to step into crypt territory. They found about 15 brims hanging out and without hesitation opened fire. Cody was handed a sawed off 12- gauge shotgun and told not to come back until he’d empty every round. He followed that order to the letter. That night, he officially crossed a line he could never uncross.
From there, Cody fell deeper into the life. An older [ __ ] named Trey Ball took him under his wing, showing him what it really meant to be in the set. But things went from bad to worse in 1977. At just 13 years old, Cody and Trey Ball tried to rob an older black man. The man fought back, landing a punch that sent Cody into a rage.
For 20 straight minutes, Cody stomped and kicked the man until he was left in a coma, his face permanently disfigured. That’s when the legend of monster was born. Police at the scene reportedly said whoever did it was a monster. And word got back to Cody, the name stuck and he wore it like a badge. Later, he would reflect on it all, saying that America had created him, that his community was sick.
But back then, he embraced the name living up to it through more violence and destruction. To Cody, gang banging wasn’t about chaos. It was about structure, respect, and survival. He didn’t see himself as just another street thug. In his mind, he was a soldier keeping his neighborhood safe by making others fear him.
He once explained that gangbangers saw fear as a form of protection. It was how they made their world safer for themselves. By the time he hit his teens, Cody had dropped out of school and was completely locked into the gang life. He treated the streets like a career path. Always grinding, always looking to earn that OG status.
Original gangster. He worked like a man chasing a promotion, putting in work day after day. And work didn’t just mean shootings. It was everything from tagging walls to starting fights. As he put it, if he hadn’t put in work that day, he couldn’t sleep at night. His reputation grew fast. Kids in the neighborhood were terrified to even walk past his house.
Former gang members would later say that just hearing his name gave them chills because nobody knew what he might do next. Cody’s focus was laser sharp. Every move was about building that reputation. He climbed the ranks from little homie to homie, leaving a trail of bodies behind him. Respect was everything, and he was determined to earn it no matter the cost.
Then came his first serious run-in with the law at just 14. A worker at a fast food spot had attacked Cody’s younger brother, Kershaw. Later, that same worker assaulted Cody and even pulled a gun on him. Cody responded by shooting and killing the man. It was his first taste of real consequences, the kind that follow you for life.
Even his brother got pulled into the cycle, joining the same set and going by the name Lil Monster. And just like that, the pattern repeated itself. A week after Cody got out of jail, he was back behind bars. This time accused of shooting a member of the Englewood family bloods. A setup he claimed. The arrest just kept coming.
By 1979, he was locked up for assault and grand theft auto, serving nine months at Camp Munes in Lake Hubes. While Shakur was locked up at Camp Muns, the streets of South Central LA were straight up on fire. The cry world was in chaos and big names were either getting snatched up or taken out. First came March 15th, 1979.
Stanley Tuki Williams, the co-founder and heavyweight leader of the Westside Crips, was arrested. The charges were coldblooded. Four murders tied to two different robberies, all supposedly carried out while he was high off a drug bench. Tuki swore up and down that he was innocent, but the system didn’t care.
He was convicted, hit with a death sentence, and eventually executed by lethal injection in 2005. That moment shook the entire Cry empire to its core. Then not long after came an even bigger shock. On August 9th, 1979, Raymond Washington, the original founder of the Crips, was murdered in a driveby right near his own home.
What made it wild was how it happened. Raymond was known to never approach cars ever. But that night, he walked straight up to the shooter’s vehicle and started talking to them before he was blasted. That told investigators everything. They weren’t strangers. His killers were people from his own circle.
Word on the street pointed to the Hoover Crips, who later became known as the Hoover Criminals or Hoover Gang. That hit sparked an allout war between the East Side Crips and the Hoovers. While Shakur was behind bars, the foundation of the cry world he once knew was collapsing and new wars were being born.
When Shakur got out, he and his right-hand man, the Alree Crazy Dinar, jumped right back into the madness. The two were deep in the ongoing war, allegedly responsible for hitting back hard. Shootings, assaults, and straightup warfare against rival sets like the Rolling 60s. They weren’t watching from the sidelines. They were frontline soldiers.
Then came New Year’s Eve 1980, a night that nearly ended it all. 16-year-old Shakur was ambushed by three older members of the Rolling 60s. They opened fire, hitting him six times. The setup came from a group of girls tied to dudes in his own set. It was betrayal from inside the house. Here’s the twist.
His survival came down to one wild detail. Earlier that night, Shakur had been celebrating, knocking back cheap bottles of Night Train wine and smoking PCP with his homies. When those bullets hit, his body was so twisted from the mix that he didn’t go into shock. It’s crazy, but that might have been what kept him alive.
While he lay in the hospital fighting for his life, things got even darker. Shakur later said he hallucinated seeing the faces of every person he’d ever shot since joining the crypts and then hauntingly the face of his baby daughter with his girlfriend Tamu. Despite all that damage, he pulled through, spending weeks in recovery.
But his little brother Kers Shawn, better known as Leo Monster, wasn’t about to let that slide. On New Year’s Day 1981, just hours after the shooting, Kershaw went hunting for revenge. Alongside a few teenage ETGs, he went on a violent spree through rival territory. First, he shot two teens outside a party in the Rolling 60s neighborhood.
Later that same night, he hit a driveby that killed another teenager just walking down the street. The retaliation was brutal and immediate. When police finally caught him, Kershaw was hit with a murder charge and sentenced to 5 years in the California Youth Authority. Meanwhile, back in the hospital, Shakur’s recovery was far from peaceful.
The same Rolling 60s who shot him actually showed up at the hospital to finish the job. Luckily, a quick-thinking nurse stepped in and stopped them before they could pull it off. Once he was back on his feet, Shakur didn’t slow down. The violence, the revenge, the gang life, it all kept spinning.
Through the rest of the 1980s, he was in and out of the system, constantly caught up in shootings, assaults, and robberies. For him, the cycle of gang banging had no pause button. It just kept feeding on itself, one violent moment after another. But everything started to shift for Scott while he was locked up in the 1980s. He was serving time at the youth training school when he met a man named Muhammad Abdullah who was leading Muslim worship services inside the facility.
Muhammad wasn’t just preaching religion. He was waking brothers up. He introduced Shakur to Islam and handed him literature like message to the oppressed which would end up planting the first seeds of change in his mind. Muhammad had a way of cutting through the noise. He challenged Cody and the other young crips with hard truths, asking why they were so busy killing each other when their real enemy, the system that oppressed them, was out there smiling.
His message hit different. For the first time, Shakur began to question everything he thought he knew. That moment sparked something. He started leaning toward Islam and eventually got involved with the CCO, the Consolidated [ __ ] Organization. The CCO wasn’t about random violence. It was about order, discipline, and even unity between rival gangs like the Crips and Bloods. Their goal was simple.
stop destroying each other and focus on building strength. But as time went on, Shakur began to see cracks in the CCO’s leadership and direction. That’s when he stumbled into something even deeper, the new African Independence Movement. This new ideology completely flipped his perspective.
The movement’s teachings gave him the answers he’d been searching for about who he was, why his community was suffering, and how to fight back for real. He said the lessons redeemed him. Once he started studying the New African principles, he began seeing cripping for what it was, a symptom of something bigger.
That’s when he broke away from the gang life for good. When people asked him what being new African meant, he broke it down through his own story. He said that when he first got to San Quentin in January 1986, he came across study materials from the Black Liberation Movement. He dove into writings from the Black Panther Party, the African People’s Socialist Party, and others pushing the message of black power and self-determination.
The more he read, the more his old mindset began to crumble. These weren’t about civil rights marches or trying to fit into America’s system. This was about building a nation within a nation. He realized something deep. Black people weren’t just a minority. They were a whole nation trapped inside a system that never saw them as equals.
As he put it, you can’t be disenfranchised if you were never infranchised to begin with. The more he studied, the more he understood how the system had evolved, using civil rights and integration as tools to control instead of liberate. But while the movement itself had been defeated by the late8s, the ideas still burned strong in him.
He admitted though that reading all the old texts only got him so far. He could quote George Jackson, Huey Newton, and Malcolm X all day, but those words alone couldn’t help him understand what was happening in 1986 America. He needed something updated, something that spoke to the current fight.
That search led him to the Black Liberation Army Coordinating Committee. Through them he connected with figures like Sundiata Akoli and Usu Yaki Yakubu who started sending him new African ideological material. That was the turning point. He said once he got that new material everything clicked. The fog cleared.
The BLACC had reworked the old revolutionary ideas into something real for their time. A guide that spoke to the past, the present, and the road ahead. For the first time, Shakur felt grounded. He finally understood his place in the struggle and connected deeply with the movement’s leaders. People who had fought on the front lines like Kuwasi Balagon, Jalil Montaim, Seeku Odinga, and Sundiata Akoli.
These were real soldiers, political prisoners, people who had lived the fight he was now trying to join. He described being new African as understanding that you come from a distinct culture, a people within the belly of the beast. It meant living by principles, the New African Declaration of Independence, the creed, the code of Umoja, and the Enuzo Saba.
It meant pledging loyalty to the Republic of New Africa and dedicating your life to the fight for sovereignty. For Shakur, that was revolutionary nationalism. his new form of warfare. Though he dropped out of high school, prison became his university. He wasn’t just reading books. He was rebuilding himself.
He changed his name to Sanika Shakur, symbolizing that transformation. For the first time, his priorities shifted. He began valuing his wife and kids more than his set. He was finally seeing that the true legacy wasn’t in destruction. It was in responsibility, family, and nationhood. When he got out of prison in 1988, he wasted no time making it official.
He married his longtime girlfriend, Tamu, and stepped into his new life as Sana Shakur, a man reborn, carrying lessons from the yard into a mission much bigger than the streets he once ruled. By January 1991, Shakur found himself in trouble once again. This time, he was arrested for assault and Grand Theft Auto after beating up a crack dealer who, unknown to him, was actually working as a police informant.
To make matters worse, he stole the man’s van right after the fight. So when the 1992 Los Angeles riots broke out after those four officers who beat Rodney King walked free, Shakur wasn’t even on the streets. He was locked up. What’s wild is that one of the most shocking moments of those riots, the beating of white truck driver Regginald Denny, happened right in Shakur’s own neighborhood.
The ones behind it were from the eight trade gangster crips, the same crew he’d grown up around. That chaotic time mixed with his involvement in Leon Bing’s book, Do or Die, pushed him to tell his own story. The result was Monster, the autobiography of an LA gang member, a raw, unfiltered look inside the streets of South Central.
By 1995, Cody Scott had turned his name into something bigger than just gang infamy. His memoir blew up, selling over 100,000 copies and getting translated into 10 languages. He was done banging and started calling himself a political activist. When he walked out of Pelican Bay State Prison after 4 years for robbery, he had the world waiting for him.
A book deal, a movie deal, and a shot at redemption. Hollywood wanted him as a consultant for his own life story. It was like watching a street legend go from the hood straight to Hollywood. But that picture perfect comeback didn’t last long. In March 1996, everything flipped. Parole agents hit his house in Moreno Valley looking for drugs and demanding a test.
Instead of cooperating, Scott bounced. Just like that, the man who finally escaped the cycle was back on the rung, facing up to a year behind bars once caught. Now, for most people, that kind of setback would kill any chance of success. But somehow, Scott kept moving. Even while dodging the law, he was still giving interviews, checking in with his agent and calling his film director almost daily.
He even took a break from hiding to sing Happy Birthday to a friend over the phone. The truth is, Scott understood his reality more than anyone. He just didn’t have the strength or maybe the peace to live differently. In a Rap Pages interview, he admitted, “I just ain’t ready to go back in.” It’s hard for me that fear, that constant fight between freedom and survival defined every move he made.
When a reporter found him in Ontario and asked why he violated parole, he didn’t offer an excuse. He simply said, “I always ran from the police. I never ran to him.” That line said it all. State officials confirmed his parole officer hadn’t heard from him in weeks. His friends were worried, confused, and heartbroken.
Leon Bing, who once wrote about him, summed it up perfectly. Living outside those prison walls can shock the system. Inside, you follow orders. Outside, you have to make choices, and those choices come with pressure. Freedom for Scott came with heavy strings attached. His parole conditions boxed him in, forcing him to stay in Mareno Valley and miss speaking gigs across the country.
He felt punished for trying to go straight. He said, “I transformed my criminal mentality into a revolutionary one, wrote a book, paid taxes for the first time, and they still treat me like Hannibal Lecter.” His parole routine was brutal. meetings twice a week, drug tests every week, a psychiatrist once a week, and travel restrictions that killed his progress.
All this while his drug tests came back clean. Still, officers suspected him of using after they found a gram of weed in his car. When they raided his home, they found nothing. At home, his wife, Tamu Naima Shaker, said he wasn’t the violent man people imagined. She described him as peaceful at heart, but forced to act tough to survive where they came from.
That pressure to always be hard, always be on guard. That’s what finally broke him. By fleeing, Scott joined the ranks of nearly 14,000 paroleles who’d gone off the grid in California. But his case stood out. His name was known nationwide, and a warrant for his arrest went out coast to coast.
Even then, people around him tried to keep him grounded. His agent said he promised to turn himself in. His director, Antoine Fukqua, said they still talked daily, describing Scott as clear-headed, smart, and determined to make their film powerful. On the cover of his book, Scott looked like a monster, shirtless, built like a fighter from years behind bars.
But in person, he was leaner, quieter, and deeply frustrated. He accused parole officers of breaking down his door and roughing him up when he refused arrest. “I won’t let them bully me because I’m a parole,” he said. “If they come and pounce on me, I’ll fight back. I want to live like the next person, but I’ll be damned if I live it on my knees.
” Eventually, LAPD caught him after another chase. This time, he didn’t fight. One officer remembered him saying he didn’t mind going back because at least in prison he’d have time to write. And funny enough, the cops already knew exactly who they had. The man’s own book cover was pinned on the wall at the 77th Street Station.
Now around February 2007, everyone around Scott truly believed his life was finally on the upswing. People close to him thought he was done with the streets for good, ready to leave behind his past as monster and step fully into his new lane as a writer and reformed man. They pictured his name up there with best-selling authors or screenwriters one day.
So when just a few weeks later he popped up in a far different kind of lineup, it left everybody stunned. At that point, Scott had just turned in the manuscript for his next novel to the respected Atlantic Monthly Press, which had already agreed to publish it. And director Antoine Fukqua, the same man who gave us Training Day, was still working on adapting Scott’s life story into a film.
On the outside, it looked like Scott had finally shaken off his demons. He had converted to Islam, spoken about peace, and told anyone who’d listened that he left the violence behind. Then came the twist. His face showed up on the LAPD’s top 10 most wanted gang members list. The charge, burglary. Police said Scott had assaulted an acquaintance after being denied a car loan and then took off with the man’s vehicle.
Sergeant Manny Santoo from the 77th Street Division Gang Impact Team later called it more of a carjacking than a burglary and made it clear this was no small charge. If proven it could count as Scott’s third strike, setting him up for a life sentence. When asked why someone like Scott couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble, Santoo didn’t sugarcoat it.
He said Scott was simply too deep in the gang culture to walk away. And honestly, Scott himself had once admitted as much in his autobiography, bragging about his violent past, even detailing how he’d shot people and survived being shot seven times. But others painted a different picture.
Some who knew him insisted the 44 year old wasn’t a threat anymore. They couldn’t understand why the LAPD would list him next to killers and drug lords over something like a burglary. Gang researcher Alex Alonso called the move absolutely ridiculous, saying Scott hadn’t been active in the streets for years.
James Harris, a former [ __ ] who now worked in gang intervention, had spoken to Scott just a few months earlier. He said Scott was fighting drug addiction, but genuinely trying to turn things around, chasing a movie deal and a better life. Harris believed the LAPD was trying to block Scott’s success, claiming they didn’t want him becoming a bigger celebrity.
Even Scott’s publisher, Morgan Entricken, was shocked. He just received Scott’s new manuscript that same week. He called Scott a smart and talented guy and the news hit him hard. To him, this was a man fighting to evolve, not someone back on the block. Activist Akila Cheryls also questioned Scott’s placement on the list, wondering if there was something personal behind it.
He pointed out that everyone else on that list was wanted for murder or major felonies, while Scott’s charge was minor in comparison. He even mentioned rumors that Scott had previously threatened Chief William Bratton, suggesting that politics might be at play, that the LAPD wanted big names to make headlines.
Still, the department stood firm. Deputy Chief Gary Brennan says Scott absolutely deserved to be there. There were two active warrants. one from December 15th accusing him of assaulting and injuring someone during a car theft and another from February 1st after he skipped a subpoena to testify in a murder case.
Brennan’s stance was blunt. Scott was violent and he belonged in jail. Not everyone disagreed. Writer Wanda Coleman, who grew up in the same neighborhood as Scott, said none of this was surprising to her. His situation was the classic tragic loop. Street criminals turn authors who eventually slide back into the same life.
She said fame gives them false hope that they have made it, but most end up right where they started. By March 2007, things reached a breaking point. Scott was officially a fugitive wanted for parole violations and that violent burglary. Eventually, the LAPD caught up with him after an anonymous tip.
They arrested him for breaking into an acquaintance’s home, assaulting them, and stealing their car. Later, in an interview with the San Francisco Bay View, Shakur described how it all went down. He said he’d been branded a fugitive with a $50,000 bounty and added that the accuser later admitted he’d lied.
Still, Shakur said the fallout was brutal. He spent $50,000 on legal fees just to beat the case. When news broke, police chief Bratton wasn’t sympathetic. He said if Scott had truly changed, it must have happened since December, brushing off his redemption story completely. To Bratton, it didn’t matter that Scott was a writer or a public figure.
I could give a hoot if he’s a celebrity, he said, as long as he’s not beating the hell out of people and stealing cars. Alex Alonzo fired back again, calling it all politics. He said the LAPD was more focused on optics, showing they were tough on gang crime than on real justice. Arresting one of the most famous former gang members in LA made for a good headline, even if it didn’t make sense.
Scott’s editor, Morgan Entrakin, was left heartbroken. He’d just spoken to Scott days before and had begged him to turn himself in. He still believed Scott had real talent, but admitted it was hard to leave that old life behind. By May 2008, Shakur found himself in deep trouble again. This time, facing serious charges for carjacking and robbery.
He eventually pleaded no contest and got hit with a six-year sentence in state prison. He later said the whole situation felt like a setup. Special prosecutors were brought in and the state threw everything at him. Even though the victim recanted and the real culprits were caught in the car, Shakur still ended up behind bars.
Just like that, he was back in the bay, locked up once again. But while all that was going down, he was making moves in a whole different lane. Literature. That same year, 2008, he officially became a published author when Grove Atlantic Books dropped his debut novel, T H U G L I F E. The timing was wild. He was fighting for his freedom and building a career as a writer at the same time.
After serving twothirds of that six-year stretch, he walked out of Pelican Bay in August 2012. A year later, in November 2013, he released another book, Standup, Struggle Forward: New African Revolutionary Writings on Nation, Class, and Patriarchy. This one hit different. It showed just how much his mindset had evolved.
In an interview with the San Francisco Bay View, Shakura broke down his political awakening. Even back when he was deep in the streets, he already had this early sense of understanding. He called it a nent overstanding that black folks were one people. He explained how growing up in the mid70s, the energy from the black liberation movement was still in the air, the consciousness was real, and even though he and his crew didn’t fully grasp it, they felt like outlaws in the spirit of the Panthers. He admitted it came from an adolescent mentality, but that spark of revolution was already lit. His legal battles didn’t stop there. In July 2017, Shakur got sent back to prison for an assault conviction out of San Diego County. He did time at Sentinella and later Salano State Prison where he was even interviewed on the radio show Uncuffed.
After his release on parole, Shakur made it clear he wasn’t that same man anymore. He reflected on his past, saying he had transformed from a criminal to a revolutionary. He could have leaned into fame as an author, but he didn’t want to be the token gang expert. For him, it was about revolution, not recognition.
Then came the tragic end. On June 6th, 2021, Shakur was found dead in a tent at a homeless encampment in Oceanside, California. His wife, Tamu, was the one who discovered his body. The coroner ruled the cause of death as a stroke. It was a heartbreaking end for a man who had lived through chaos, transformation, and redemption.
