Faced with the dilemma of devoting their lives to their religion or bombing the homes of rivals, Mormon gangbangers decided they could do both.
In the 1980s and 1990s, young men in Salt Lake City engaged in brutal beatings, stabbings, and shootings to show solidarity with their gang members and in the drug trade.
Some of these thugs carried small copies of the Book of Mormon in their pockets.
How did Utah’s capital city — known for snow-capped mountains, Karl Malone and John Stockton’s pick-and-rolls, and being the center of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — become a hotbed of crime?
When Ron Stallworth arrived there in 1986 to establish and lead an anti-gang police unit, he saw the answer clearly: Southern California’s Crips and Bloods were traveling nearly 700 miles a day to sell crack cocaine to the Beehive State’s devout, mostly white residents and recruit followers to their gangs.
“When I and others in the criminal justice field attempted to warn about the emerging threat from street gangs, the church would not admit that their faith was failing their children,” Ron Stallworth writes in his forthcoming memoir, “The Gangs of Zion: A Black Cop’s Crusade in Mormon Country” (out Sept. 17, Legacy Lit/Hachette).
He added, “Nobody was willing to look beyond their religion and accept the fact that when they weren't attending religious services, these kids were throwing Molotov cocktails through windows.”
Stallworth had already bolstered his law enforcement resume after successfully infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 1979 — a feat he recounts in vivid detail in his first book, 2014’s “Black Klansman.” (John David Washington portrayed him in the Spike Lee-directed film adaptation, “BlacKkKlansman“Released in 2018.)
His latest hardcover book reveals how his black and blue identities often clashed in the minds of others.
Though Stallworth’s race made it easier for him to blend in as an undercover police officer, he writes that he was also underestimated by his co-workers, distrusted by citizens who looked like him, and ostracized by those who weren’t racist.
Yet he never backed down from a challenge. Stallworth’s stories read like excerpts from the script for “Ratchet,” as he regularly asserted his point by testing the limits of police protocol and ending conflicts with a quip.
Once outnumbered by racists in a bar, he responded to a skinhead’s abuse and threats by propositioning his mother — and then pulling out his Glock.
When a Crip began spreading lies about beating up Stallworth, the officer challenged the big man to a hand-to-hand fight until he backed down — an effective deception that wasn’t allowed by rules.
It was his tenacity and bold demeanor that helped Stallworth in his mission to solve Salt Lake City's gang problem and save the souls of local youths caught in the net of the underworld.
“Young men who join gangs always get out; the question is how,” Stallworth writes. “We had to do everything in our power to encourage them to leave gangs — if not avoid them altogether — before prison or death became the only exit options.”
Stallworth learned the language, customs, and culture of the Bloods and Crips in order to improve relations with members. He made a one-time concession to minor lawbreakers by sending them home to their parents rather than to the police station.
Yet Stallworth faced resistance from several fronts.
Many parents were skeptical of the anti-gang unit's efforts, accusing Stallworth and his colleagues of bias or ulterior motives. Church officials refused to cooperate, some insisting that only non-white Mormons — primarily Polynesian believers — were causing problems.
But the most opposition came from police and government officials, who did not act on evidence that a federally funded vocational youth program called Job Corps had become an incubator and pipeline for Southern California gang members coming to Utah.
These men included Gary Nicholas “Babyface” Avila, who, according to Stallworth, used a fabricated L.A. persona to turn his Surenos 13 syndicate into Salt Lake City’s largest Hispanic gang — and inspired many others to follow suit.
“During the escalating violence, Clearfield Job Corps officials lied about the gang members in their program, denying their contribution to crime in Salt Lake City so they could continue receiving federal dollars,” writes Stallworth, who later testified at congressional hearings in Washington, D.C., focused on the effectiveness of the Job Corps.
When Stallworth became aware that gang culture was being disseminated through gangster rap, he familiarized himself with songs by artists such as N.W.A. and Ice-T.
Despite initially being repulsed by the musical genre, he eventually developed an appreciation for its sharp social commentary and unfettered expression, and became a rare police badge-wearing advocate for the arts in an era when politicians and other activists were pushing for censorship.
“We must recognize music as a tool that makes us better policemen,” writes Stallworth, who astonished peers, gangbangers and once even the rapper Ice Cube with his word-for-word rendition of N.W.A.’s “F—k tha Police.” “Cops must listen to the songs, and if you fail to do so, shame on you.”
This self-education not only fueled Stallworth's work in his hometown; it also made him an industry expert, called upon to share his expertise in high-profile legal matters in other jurisdictions.
Stallworth testified in the 1993 murder trial of Ronald Ray Howard, who killed Texas Highway Patrol Trooper Bill Davidson the previous year while listening to Tupac Shakur's anti-police song “Soulja's Story.” He later testified in a related First Amendment case in support of Shakur and his record label's parent company, Time Warner.
“I had to explain why gangster rap was a legitimate sociopolitical expression for inner-city minority youth,” Stallworth writes. “Yet I also felt an obligation to denounce the idea that the music could legitimately be used to defend the murder of a police officer.”
Stallworth eventually became a champion for freedom of speech and artistic expression, and an opponent against the criminalization of minority youth — particularly black children. His more than 30 years in law enforcement have given him a keen understanding of how to best protect and serve disadvantaged communities.
Nevertheless, Stallworth concludes his memoir by addressing critics who have failed to reconcile his former profession and his race—particularly filmmaker Boots Riley, who, in a scathing critiquestressed that “BlacKkKlansman” is fiction.
“These radical militant individuals, blinded by their desire to establish their own blackness, cannot accept me into the ‘collective club of blackness,’ for which everyone else’s sense of racial identity pales in comparison to theirs,” Stallworth writes of Riley and those like him.
In another place, he talks openly about “bullying”Sorry to bother you” The filmmaker during the 2019 Directors Guild Awards
“I wrote ‘The Gangs of Zion’ not only to tell my experience of policing in a highly unusual context during an important cultural moment, but also to let the Booty Rileys of the world know that I am a police officer who understands American history, defends my race, and takes an uncompromising stand for the civil and constitutional rights of all people,” Stallworth writes.
