Book review: The Triangle - inside the gang war for New York's streets

The Triangle: A Year on the Ground With New York’s Bloods and Crips
by Kevin Deutsch
Lyons Press

crime reporter Kevin Deutsch's opens with three reference pages: a list of characters, a glossary of terms and a map of the part of Hempstead - one of three towns in Nassau County, New York - where the action unfolds. The reader will be glad to have them, because this story takes us into a world so unfamiliar and inhuman, we need all the help we can get.

Of the nine Bloods and eight Crips listed in the cast, fewer than a third make it through 2012 alive; the first death occurs on page 17. The second is on page 36 and it never lets up. In fact, one of Deutsch's challenges is to make sure we can tell the characters apart before they are killed. It is a testament to his writing, and to the nightmarishness of their fates, that a few of them - Devon "D-Bo" LaFleur, Leticia "Black Widow" Lewis and Michael "Ice" Williams - end up permanently etched in your mind.

Deutsch's contention is that what's happening in this blighted spot in Nassau County, so unlike its affluent neighbours, is a war. To explain how this crisis began, Deutsch traces the history of the two gangs, which goes back to Watts, Los Angeles in 1969, and interweaves it with the history of Hempstead and the economics of the drug industry.

"In a community where 21 per cent of residents live below the poverty line … a drug corner is the rare local business that generates large cash profits day after day … It's a system so successful that its participants risk just about everything - their freedom, their families, their lives - to be part of it." Yet these risks almost always result in shattering losses.

Devon LaFleur is a promising high school student, respected by neighbours and police. He worked at CVS and Dunkin' Donuts, but barely made enough to take his girlfriend to dinner. To thicken his wallet, he takes a weekend dealing gig with the Bloods, and soon after is pressured into joining the gang and becoming a supervisor. This involves a horrifyingly violent initiation ceremony.