A Labyrinth of True Crime

 I've just finished Julian Rubinstein's excellent, The Holly: Five Bullets, One Gun, and the Struggle to Save an American Neighborhood. The book won the Colorado Book Award for General Nonfiction. (My Western, Luther, Wyoming, was a finalist in Historical Fiction but didn't get the prize.) The Holly blends history and memoir with the central character being Terrance Roberts who can't seem to run away from his gang past. Roberts' odyssey unfolds as he goes from small time hoodlum to hustler to gang boss to peace activist with time served in jail and prison.  Rubinstein does a great job giving the backstory of Blacks migrating to Denver, the arrival of the Black Panthers, followed by their dissolution, then the emergence of the Crips and Bloods. The book is named after the shopping center where the Bloods used to hang out and has since been razed and the neighborhood gentrified. While I enjoy true crime, what most drew me to the story was that it overlaps my time in Denver. I could follow the action and events though I seldom ventured into gang territory east of Colorado Boulevard. 

Much of the narrative dovetailed into what I know from CDC and US DOJ research into "gun violence," depicting dysfunctional communities prone to violence where minor beefs are settled with beatdowns, knifings, and shootings. For all of today's talk about stopping the iron pipeline of illegal guns, the gangs had no trouble getting heaters, even Kalashnikov rifles during the much-touted Assault Weapons Ban, and later during Colorado's ongoing "common-sense" gun reform. As the story progresses, what comes into focus are two Denvers. The one Denver of disenfranchised Blacks, mostly men, and the other Denver of wealthy white liberals, some sincere and well-intentioned and others who exploit the carnage for political and economic gain. The present rhetoric of "violence interruptors" and using community activism to prevent violent crime and especially homicide and "gun violence" is nothing new. I've studied Oakland Ceasefire, which used this approach and from 2012 through 2018, reduced homicides in that city by 40 percent. Meanwhile in Denver, over the same period, homicides increased by over 70 percent because the local efforts to address gang and gun violence were a sham. Black neighborhoods were promised much, then had the carpet yanked from under them. What happened in Stapleton was a great example as Blacks were priced out of their homes and the community and its problems dispersed to Montbello and Aurora. Rubenstein provides chilling evidence that the DEA, the FBI, and Denver police gave carte blanche to informants to commit crimes, even murder, and thus stoke gang violence, often to secure more funding as part of the criminal justice industrial complex. In many ways, The Holly reminded me of Death Wish, in which the mayhem and bloodshed take a backset to the maneuverings of big city politics. Rubinstein doesn't scrimp on the details and even if you've lived in Denver for decades, you may need a scorecard to keep track of the dead bodies and the back room deals.