The distance between Jordan Downs and Nickerson Gardens is approximately one mile. One mile. In a city the size of Los Angeles, that is nothing. In Watts, it is everything. It is the distance between the Grape Street Watts Crips and the Bounty Hunter Bloods. between the largest gang rivalry in the history of American public housing and the community that has been living inside it for over 50 years.
Between two housing projects built by the city of Los Angeles in 1955 and left to develop without adequate investment for decades while the war between the people housed in them accumulated a body count measured in the hundreds. one mile and across that mile for over 50 years the same war.
There was a moment when it almost ended. April 28th, 1992. Imperial Courts housing project. Four gangs in the same room. Grape Street Watts Crips from Jordan Downs. PJ Watts Crips from Imperial Courts. Bounty Hunter Bloods from Nickerson Gardens. Hienda Village Bloods from the Hienda Village projects. men who had been shooting at each other for 20 years.
They signed a peace treaty modeled in its structure and its language on the 1949 armistice agreement between Israel and Egypt. The next day, the Rodney King verdict came down and Los Angeles burned. And in the middle of the riots, the Crips and Bloods from the Watts projects were partying together. They issued demands to the city.
They said, “We will stop killing each other if you give us a reason to stop. If you build something here worth not destroying, the city of Los Angeles did not adequately deliver on that.” The war resumed. More people died, more families were broken, and the distance between Jordan Downs and Nickerson Gardens stayed exactly what it has always been.
One mile, the same projects, the same zip code, the same war. This is the story of how it started, how it has lasted 50 years, what it has cost, and why every attempt to end it has ultimately failed. It is not just a story of two gangs. It is a story of what a city built, what it refused to invest in, and what it produced by leaving people in those conditions for half a century. April 28th, 1992.
Imperial Courts Housing Project, Watts, Los Angeles. Four gangs sit in the same room. Grape Street Watts Crips from Jordan Downs. PJ Watts Crips from Imperial Courts. Bounty Hunter Bloods from Nickerson Gardens. Hienda Village Bloods from the Hianda Village projects. Men who have been shooting at each other for 20 years.
Men who have buried friends and family members because of each other. Men who have grown up in three housing projects sitting within blocks of each other. separated by invisible lines drawn in blood that have never held for long. They sign a peace treaty. It is modeled in its structure and its language after the 1949 armistice agreement between Israel and Egypt.
That is not hyperbole from the people who brokered it. That is the actual framework they used because the people in that room understood that what they were trying to stop was a war and that wars require formal instruments to pose, not just handshakes and good intentions. One day later, the Rodney King verdict came down and Los Angeles burned.
The watch truce became famous. In the days following the acquitt of the officers who beat Rodney King while the city around them was in flames, the crips and bloods from the watch projects party together at Nickerson Gardens and Imperial Courts. They declared the riots an opportunity to transform themselves and their community.
They issued demands to the city government. They asked for investment in the neighborhoods that the city had been neglecting for 30 years. They said essentially we will stop killing each other if you give us a reason to stop. If you build something here worth not destroying. The city of Los Angeles did not adequately deliver on that.
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And the truth that the most famous gang war in the history of American public housing produced on the eve of one of the worst urban uprisings in American history frayed and eventually broke down. The war between the Grape Street Watts Crips and the Bounty Hunter Bloods, the most violent and most enduring gang rivalry in the history of Watts is still going.
It has been going for over 50 years. And the story of how it started, how it escalated, what it has cost, and why every attempt to end it has ultimately failed is a story about three housing projects. one city’s decisions and what happens to a community when the institutions that are supposed to invest in it decide for 50 years running that it is not worth the cost.
Watt sits in the southeastern part of Los Angeles about 12 miles from downtown close to the city of Compton and bounded by the city of Lynwood to the south and the Alama corridor to the east. It is one of the most storied and most misunderstood neighborhoods in American urban history. People outside Los Angeles know two things about Watts.
The riots of 1965 and the gangs. Both of those things are real. Neither of them is the whole story of what Watts is or how it got that way. Watts was incorporated into Los Angeles in 1926 after being developed as an affordable street car suburb for workers who could not afford housing closer to downtown.
His population through the 1930s and 1940s was mixed with Mexican-American, white working-class, and black families living in a neighborhood that was dense, poor by Los Angeles standards and shaped by proximity to the railroad lines and the industrial corridor along Alama. After World War II, as black migration from the South accelerated and as restrictive housing covenants pushed black families into a narrowing range of available neighborhoods, Watts became increasingly black.
The Watts housing projects, the three major developments that would become the geography of the gang war, were built during this era. Jordan Downs was built in 1955 on the site of a former chemical plant. is 103 buildings house families and apartments that were from the beginning significantly below the quality of housing available in other parts of Los Angeles.
Nickerson Gardens completed in 1955 became the largest public housing complex west of the Mississippi River. Imperial Courts, the third major project, sat between the two. three housing projects within walking distance of each other, housing thousands of families, surrounded by a neighborhood that the city of Los Angeles was already beginning to disinvest from as white residents left for the suburbs and took the political weight that drives municipal spending with them.
By 1965, when the Watts riots broke out on 103rd Street near the old Watts Vario Grape Street territory, Watts was a neighborhood that had been telling the city of Los Angeles for years that it was being neglected, abused, and left behind. The riots were a response to a police encounter that ignited decades of accumulated grievance.
They left 34 people dead, more than a thousand injured, and 4,000 arrested. property damage ran into the hundreds of millions. And when the smoke cleared, the structural conditions that had produced the uprising, the poverty, the unemployment, the inadequate schools, the hostile policing remained essentially unchanged. The McCone Commission convened by the state to investigate the causes of the riots made detailed recommendations for investment in South Los Angeles.
Most of them were never implemented. The gangs that would become the grape street watch crypts and the bounty hunter bloods were products of that world, not products of individual pathology or cultural dysfunction. Products of specific decisions made by specific government bodies about where to invest and where not to, which communities to build up and which to leave to their own devices.
The Bounty Hunter Bloods trace their origin to 1969 when a social club called the Green Jackets formed in and around the Nickerson Gardens housing project. Gary Barker, known as Straw Dog, is credited as one of the founders. Percy Jackson suggested the bounty hunter name, which Barker then promoted through graffiti across the project.
Junior Thomas was an early influential leader. The group coalesed around 1969 to 1971 as a neighborhood protection and social organization for young men in Nickerson Gardens. Most of them from fatherless or unstable households drawing together in a peer community that the housing project’s legitimate social institutions were failing to provide.
By 1972 and 1973, the Green Jackers had become the bounty hunter Watts Bloods, adopting the blood identity as the anti-Cry coalition that was forming across South Los Angeles in response to the Cry’s rapid expansion. The Crips, founded by Raymond Washington and Stanley Tuki Williams in 1969 in South Central, had grown explosively in the early 1970s, establishing sets across Los Angeles and developing a reputation for violent territorial enforcement that drove independent neighborhood gangs to organize in opposition.
The Bloods, which coalesed as a coalition of those independent gangs, gave the Nichlson Gardens crew a wider identity and network. The Bounty Hunters became the dominant blood set in Watts. The Grape Street Watts Crypts emerged from a different but parallel process. The Jordan Downs neighborhood in the 1960s and early 1970s contained a mixed black and Latino gang called Watts Vario Grape operating on and around Grape Street near 103rd Street.
A man known as Peewee is credited with founding the Jordan Down Crypts around 1973. By 1976, under the leadership of Kenneth Crowe Day, the group had become the Grape Street Crypts, aligning with the [ __ ] Network that was by then the dominant gang structure across large portions of Los Angeles. The Day family and particularly Betty Day, who would later become a significant community activist known as the godmother of Watts, became central figures in the grape street world.
Her son, Honcho Day, was among the gang’s most recognizable figures through the 1980s and 1990s. As the Latino members of the original Watts Vario Grape aligned with the Mexican mafia and became Serenos, the black members consolidated as the East Side Grape Street Watts Crips, claiming Jordan Downs as their exclusive territory.
Their new rivals were the Bounty Hunters and Nickerson Gardens. The distance between the two projects is approximately a mile. They have been at war ever since. The Crips and the Bloods have been in open conflict in Los Angeles since roughly 1971. But the specific rivalry between the Grape Street Watch Crypts and the Bounty Hunter Bloods is described by gang researchers, by law enforcement, and by the people who have lived inside it as the most violent and most enduring feud between two gangs in the history of
Watts. That distinction carries weight in a city that has produced more gang violence than almost any other American metropolitan area. The rivalry through the 1970s was territorial in the fundamental sense. Two organizations in close geographic proximity, each claiming the housing project that anchored its identity, each responding to incursions by the other with escalating violence.
The weapons of the early period were largely conventional firearms, the kind of street level violence that had characterized gang conflict since the 1950s. Serious and deadly, but constrained in its scale by the limitations of the available tools. Then crack cocaine arrived. The crack epidemic that swept American cities beginning in 1984 and accelerating through the late 1980s transformed gang warfare in Los Angeles and across the country in ways that are difficult to fully overstate.
Crack was not just a new drug. It was a new economy and the gangs that were already established in the neighborhoods where crack found its largest markets became the distribution infrastructure for that economy. Almost automatically, the housing projects of Watts with their dense population, their concentrated poverty, and their already established gang territorial control became among the most lucrative crack distribution sites in Los Angeles.
And the money that crack generated funded a level of violence that the 1970s gang wars had never approached. The fortified crack houses of the mid 1980s in Watts had iron gates and video surveillance. The men defending them wore body armor and carried military-style weapons. Driveby shootings became the primary tactical form of gang violence with multiple shooters firing from moving vehicles in operations that required organizational coordination beyond what any individual could manage.
The death toll during the crack years in Watts was catastrophic. Researchers and law enforcement officials who covered that period described it as an open urban war zone. The cost in human lives across the broader Watts gang conflict, including the Grape Street and Bounty Hunter rivalry, was measured in hundreds over the course of a decade.
The FBI’s 2000 conviction of 30 Bounty Hunter Watts Bloods members on federal drug violations for the distribution and conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine is one data point in the federal record of what the crack era meant in Nickerson Gardens. The LAPD’s Operation Hammer, launched in the summer of 1987 in response to the crack epidemic, swept up thousands of gang members in mass arrest operations, but was also documented as inflaming community resentment through its militarized tactics, including raids that damaged homes and were described by
residents as resembling the conduct of the gangs themselves. Jordan Downs and the Grape Street operation ran on the same crack economy. Kenneth Crow Day in the Day family was central to the Grape Street organizations commercial operations during the peak crack years. The geography of crack distribution in Watts was the same geography as the gang territory.
the same projects, the same blocks, the same corners, but now with vastly more money at stake and vastly more destructive weapons available to defend it. The 1992 Watts truce is the most famous attempt to interrupt the war. Its origins are in the air I can program led by former NFL player Jim Brown which had been holding meetings in the early 1990s focused on personal responsibility and self-determination with gang members from across the Watts projects.
The men who participated in those meetings went on to organize the April 28th, 1992 peace gathering at Imperial Courts. What happened that day and in the days following was genuinely remarkable. Four gangs, the Grape Street Crips, the PJ Watts Crips, the Bounty Hunter Bloods, and the Hosienda Village Bloods sat down together, agreed to terms, and signed a document modeled on an international armistice agreement.
They partied together at Nickerson Gardens and Imperial Courts during the riots that erupted the next day. They demanded that the city of Los Angeles invest in Watts, money for rebuilding, jobs, improved schools, better housing. They said clearly and publicly that the conditions they were living in were untenable and that they were willing to change if the city was willing to change, too.
The city’s response was at best inadequate. Some resources came in, some programs were funded. The summer night lights program, which eventually kept parks and recreation centers open later in high crime neighborhoods, was one of the more successful interventions. But the fundamental conditions of the Watts housing projects, the poverty, the unemployment, the quality of the housing stock, the quality of the schools, the relationship between the community and the police, none of those changed at a scale that matched what the truce had asked for.
The truce held for a period. The gang violence in Watts declined through the mid 1990s and researchers attributed part of that decline to the truce’s effects. But the structural conditions that produced the war were still there. The personal vendettas and family losses that had accumulated over 20 years of warfare was still there.
The crack economy was still there. The territorial lines were still there. And gradually, inevitably, the violence resumed. The decades after the truce saw the war between Grape Street and the bounty hunters continue in a pattern of periodic escalation and relative quiet, never fully resolved, always capable of reigniting when a shooting or a murder created a new cycle of retaliation.
Individual incidents added names to the ledger of losses on both sides. Losses that required response in the logic of the gang world, which guaranteed that each response created the conditions for the next. In 1997, members of the 118 East Coast Crips shot a school bus in an attack intended to kill bounty hunter members, killing 17-year-old Cory Williams instead.
That killing a bystander dying in an attack that was not even aimed at her is the kind of loss that communities in the shadow of gang wars absorb repeatedly and invisibly to the outside world. In 2003, shots were fired at LAPD patrol officers in two separate incidents in the Nickerson Gardens projects. In 2004, an injunction was imposed on the bounty hunter bloods that restricted the movements of gang members.
In 2008, Brandon BL Bullard, a veteran of the Grape Street Watch Crips, who had become a gang intervention worker, was murdered by the East Coast Crips. Another reminder that in the gang world, past affiliations follow you regardless of what you are trying to do with your present life. In 2013, rapper Kevin Flipside White, an affiliate of the bounty hunter Watts Bloods and member of the group of was shot dead by alleged Grape Street Crips members.
He was a musician who had built a following beyond the projects and his death pulled the war into public view in the way that losses from the streets rarely do. JRock, born Johnny Reed McKenzie Jr. in 1985 and raised in Nickerson Gardens as a bounty hunter affiliate built a rap career through Top Dog Entertainment that made the story of Watts internationally known.
His 2015 album 90059, named for the zip code of the Watts projects, addressed the gang world he had grown up in with a directness and a weight that drew on lived experience in ways that artistic distance cannot replicate. His career represents one of the legitimate paths out of the Watts projects that the truce negotiators have been asking the city to create.
It is one path available to one person shaped by a specific set of talents and opportunities that are not universally distributed. The documentary Crips and Bloods, Made in America, directed by Stacy Peralta and released in 2008, brought the history of the Watts Gang War to a national audience that had heard the names Crips and Bloods for decades without understanding the specific geography and specific history that produced them.
The film’s account of the watch truce and its fragility of the demands the gang members made and the inadequacy of the city’s response is one of the more honest mainstream accounts of why the war has never ended. Nickerson Gardens is the largest public housing complex west of the Mississippi River.
Jordan Downs across the few blocks of watts that separate the two is smaller but no less central to the identity of the gang that calls it home. Both projects sit in a zip code 90059 that carries some of the worst statistical indicators of any neighborhood in Los Angeles. poverty rates, unemployment rates, educational attainment, infant mortality, life expectancy.
Every metric that measures a community’s access to the resources of functioning society is supposed to provide runs at or near the bottom for the Watts housing projects. The people who live in these projects, the vast majority of whom are not gang members, are the primary victims of the war between Grape Street and the bounty hunters.
They are the people who cannot sit on their porches without calculating which direction the gunfire is coming from. They are the people whose children learn before they can read which streets are safe to walk on and which are not. They are the grandmothers who have buried their grandchildren. They are the schoolage kids navigating a geography of conflict that they had no role in creating.
They are the bystanders who get shot in the crossfire of disputes that have nothing to do with them. The truce of 1992 was at its core an acknowledgment that this population deserve better. The men who signed it were not signing it for themselves alone. They were signing it in recognition that the war they were fighting was destroying the same community they had grown up in.
That the people being most damaged by the conflict were not the gang members but the residents who had to live inside it. That recognition was real. The demands they made of the city were reasonable. The city’s failure to meet those demands adequately is a significant part of why the truce did not hold and why the war continued.
As of today, the rivalry between the Grape Street Watts Crips and the Bounty Hunter Bloods continues. It is not what it was in the crack era when the body counts were highest and the violence most constant. The overall gang violence in Los Angeles has declined significantly from its peaks in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
LAPD statistics show their violent crime in Watts fell by 30% between 2011 and 2013 under Chief Charlie Beck’s community focused policing approach. The summer night lights program which Mayor Antonio VASA funded at significant cost was credited with reducing violence in the parks that served. The gang intervention infrastructure that community activists built over decades.
The people who put themselves between the sides, the former gang members who chose to spend their lives trying to stop what they had once been part of has had real effects. But the structural conditions that produced the war have not been resolved. Jordan Downs has been the subject of an ambitious redevelopment plan that has been in process for years, aiming to replace the outdated housing stock with mixed income development and better facilities.
The redevelopment has moved slowly through funding challenges and planning disputes. Nickerson Gardens remains the largest public housing complex west of the Mississippi, a designation it has held since it was built in 1955 and that reflects a concentration of poverty in a single physical space that has proven remarkably resistant to change over 70 years. The gangs have not dissolved.
Their membership has evolved through generations with young men from the projects joining the same sets their fathers and uncles were part of, inheriting the affiliations and the conflicts that define them. The personal losses on both sides accumulated over 50 years create their own perpetual motion. Someone’s cousin was killed by the other side in 2018.
And that loss creates an obligation in the logic of the gang world that the structural arguments about poverty and housing policy cannot neutralize. Both dimensions of the conflict are real simultaneously. the structural one that operates at the level of policy and investment and the personal one that operates at the level of grief and loyalty and the need to respond.
What does it mean that this war has been going for 50 years? It means that there are grandparents in the Watts projects who can remember the beginning of the rivalry, who grew up with the people who founded both gangs and who have watched their neighborhood absorb generation after generation of violence. It means there are children in Jordan Downs and Nickerson Gardens today who are growing up with the same geographic constraints, the same territorial logic, the same proximity to violence that their grandparents grew up with.
The war has lasted long enough to become a feature of the landscape rather than an event in it. The 1992 truce was signed by men who had lived through 20 years of the war and who saw clearly that it was destroying them and their community. They asked for help to end it. They got some help and not enough. The war resumed. More people died.
More families were broken. More children grew up in the shadow of a conflict that preceded their birth and that they are not equipped to resolve on their own. That is the indictment that the 50-year history of the Grape Street and Bounty Hunter War represents, not an indictment of the gangs whose violence is real and whose victims are real and whose accountability for that violence is real.
The body count of the Grape Street and Bounty Hunter War is impossible to document with precision. the 50-year span of the conflict, the overlapping nature of the violence with other gang conflicts in Watts, the under reporting of gang-related violence in poor black neighborhoods, and the absence of any single comprehensive record all make a definitive number unavailable.
Estimates of deaths attributable to the rivalry between the two gangs across its history run into the hundreds. The broader Watts gang conflict, which includes the PJ Watts Crips, the Hosienda Village Bloods, and other sets in addition to the Grape Street and Bounty Hunter rivalry, has produced documented casualties that are even higher.
What is certain is that the war has been running for over 50 years, that four gangs signed a peace treaty in 1992 and the war resumed. that multiple subsequent attempts at truce have had partial and temporary effects. That the people who paid the highest price for the war are the residents of the three housing projects who are not gang members and who have been living inside a conflict not of their making for their entire lives.
That is the 50-year legacy of the Grape Street Watch Crypts and the Bounty Hunter Bloods. Not just the body count, though the body count is real. The legacy is a community that has been living inside a war for 50 years in housing projects built by a city that then declined to invest in them adequately, asking for help that arrived in insufficient measure.
Trying truses that held for a while and then broke, producing the next generation in the same conditions as the last, and watching Los Angeles grow and prosper around them. While the conditions that produce the war remain essentially unchanged, the war is still going. The projects are still there. The distance between them is still one mile.
And the city of Los Angeles is still deciding year after year what the people who live in Jordan Downs and Nickerson Gardens are worth. So far, the answer has not been enough to end the war.
