Chronicler of Life As a Crip Is on Trial

LOS ANGELES -- March 2003 should have been a good month for Colton Simpson. He had hobnobbed with rap stars in New York. A book deal was in the offing. After almost three decades in and out of juvenile hall and prisons, the former O.G. (original gangster) from the feared L.A.-based Crips gang seemed to be turning his life around.

Then on March 17, three men stole an $800 diamond earring from a jewelry store in southern Riverside County, 60 miles outside Los Angeles. Within weeks Simpson was fingered as the getaway-car driver, was indicted for robbery and was facing 25 years to life, his third strike under California's "three strikes and you're out" law.

Today, instead of being on book tour, Simpson, 40, is on trial. And, in a rare move, a California judge has allowed a prosecutor to introduce as evidence Simpson's autobiography, "Inside the Crips: Life Inside L.A.'s Most Notorious Gang," published in August to critical acclaim.

Southern California is the gang capital of the United States, with Los Angeles home to an estimated 1,000 gangs and 100,000 hard-core gang members. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department estimates that 42 percent of all homicides in its territory are gang-related.

Beyond the violence, the gangs have become a cultural phenomenon. Los Angeles's gangs have given birth to gangsta rap, and hip-hop sensations such as Easy-E, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube and Ice-T, the star of the NBC's "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit," who grew up with Simpson and wrote the foreword to Simpson's book.

In recent years, gang members, most of them from Southern California, have penned 27 autobiographies about their rough-and-tumble world. The founder of the Crips, Stanley Tookie Williams, who was executed in California on Dec. 13 for murdering four people, wrote nine children's books. Sanyika Shakur's "Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member" and Terrill Wright's "Home of the Body Bags" were published this year. But Simpson's is the first autobiography in the new gang genre to be admitted as evidence against the writer.

Simpson and his co-author, Ann Pearlman, say "Inside the Crips" is a tale of redemption, the story of a hard-core gang soldier who changes his ways. "I wrote this to try to do something positive with my life," Simpson said in an interview at the Robert Presley Detention Center in Riverside. "This was a way to right some of the wrongs I've done."

But to Stephen Gallon, the Riverside County assistant district attorney prosecuting the case, the book is a brag-fest by a cold-blooded gangster that has been packaged as redemption to get it on bookstore shelves.

"This book allegedly speaks of a transformation and a repudiation of the gang lifestyle," Gallon wrote in an affidavit seeking to include the book as evidence. "This book is neither. It is a vehicle to make money off of the blood and terror of innocent victims."

Colton Simpson was the son of a professional baseball player and a model. He got his mother's good looks, an athlete's physique from his dad, and a foul temper from both. By the time he was 5, his parents had divorced and his mother had won custody.

In the book, Simpson alleges he was abused regularly at home. By 10, he had found another family -- the Crips -- and joined a set of the gang called the Rollin' 30s, which controlled two square miles of South Central Los Angeles. The day after he joined the gang, Simpson was handed a .38-caliber handgun, which he emptied in a retaliatory attack on enemy gang members. Two of his bullets hit home, the book says, and he watched his bloody handiwork with numb fascination. The next day he felt a moment of remorse, but it passed. "It's like being a virgin," he wrote. Simpson took the nickname Lil Cee, changing it in time to Cee-Loc, "Loc" standing for loco, or crazy. He branded himself with Crips tattoos, getting a "30," the sign of his set, etched into his skin next to his right eye.

By his teens, Simpson was specializing in jewelry store heists, and it is these sections of the book that interest prosecutor Gallon. Simpson smashed jewelry cases with sledgehammers, swiping $150,000 worth of goods in one heist and using the money, as the book says, for "more cars, more booze, more clothes and gold jewelry." "I love doing jewelry licks," Simpson wrote in a passage Gallon has introduced as evidence in the case. "I love the power I wield over adults."