gangbanger

You didn’t have to be a gangbanger to get that kind of treatment.

“On the gangbanger side, you wanna be the man. You wanna be known. You want people to fear you,” Philpott said.

Johnson was never a gangbanger; he was one of those unsupervised boys who was “just around,” spending his time on the corner of Bassett and Dixwell, the center of his world.

Luis J. Rodriguez, literary lodestar The trajectory from gangbanger in South San Gabriel to city poet laureate and bestselling author would have been dramatic enough.

“He was no longer a gangbanger. He was a world-known recording artist and so much more,” the prosecutor said.