<Begin Segment 19>

MN: Then you had other ally groups with you.

JM: We had absolutely allies, right.

MN: Who were they? What were they called and what area were they from?

JM: We had another group that lived in J-Flats, and they called themselves the Junior Decoyos. Now, where in hell they got a name like that, I'll never know. But I guess you would call them the nicer guys in J-Flats. I think they saw themselves as a cut above us. They were the more educated, they were... they were strictly into their sports. They were the epitome of what Japanese society among young people wanted to see. School-oriented, they were like basketball stars, they just happened to live next to a bunch of low-achievers called the Black Juans who thought they were tough-ass or something like that. But when it came down to a dance and they were getting nervous about something, all of a sudden they were like, "Oh, we're with you." So there would be like ten or twelve of them. In terms of numbers now, imagine, if we went to a dance, and there were like twenty of us now, going to a dance, and now all of a sudden, now the Decoyos wanted to be part of us, and you can always tell because you had the clusters. Now, our clusters were something like thirty-something people. And that's a lot of folks at a public event, at a Nisei Week, at a this... you had thirty something people. We commanded respect. So they, they were always part of us when they needed us, but when they didn't need us, they didn't know us. Fine, fine, we'll live with that.

We had another group coming out of Chinatown, and they didn't have the large amounts of Chinese immigrants that came later on, so we had, they had a smaller group of people that lived in Chinatown, so their younger group called themselves the Chinatown Lowriders, and they had some renegade Mexican Americans in there, too, because the gangs in that area of Chinatown were very established. They had Alpine, which was a very large Mexican American group, Macy, Clover, well, the Temple Street Boys. But Alpine and Macy were the really big groups, and they were like, they made the headlines quite often. They would literally get into in the streets, and you know, you'd read that the Alpine and Macy battled it out, three or four were stabbed, you know. They had some knock down, drag out battles for turf over there. And so you had the small group over there of Chinese guys and their renegade Mexican allies, and they had, oh, maybe eight or nine. But they were kind of addicted to armament. If you went down to pick a fight in Chinatown, you could be looking, you know, staring at a shotgun coming back at you. Because they weren't into man to man fisticuffs like we were. You know, I'm a football player and I went to judo, so to me, going toe to toe was the way you went. I thought the use of weaponry was, among my group, was cowardly. "Hey, you don't have the guts to face me." You don't go toe to toe, you want to shoot somebody from a distance, oh, how cowardly can... you know, we kind of looked upon that with disdain. But to Chinatown, it was, "Hell no. You mess with us, we're not gonna get beat up, we're gonna shoot you." So that's where they were coming from. Somehow, we got to be kind of friends with them, so they were sort of like, they became allied with us.

So we had a very unreliable bunch in the Decoyos, we had Chinatown, which threw in with us because they were so small. So now you're talking about a potential cluster of forty, with ten of those guys really willing to, you know, fire away. And one guy in particular, which I'll never divulge the name, and he's still around to this day, he was what you'd call a shooter. But not with the Asian groups, but with the Chicano groups. I mean, I shouldn't use the word Chicanos, because "Chicano" has a political context.

MN: Latinos?

JM: Yeah. And they were always looking for this little guy that opened up on them. It was a Chinese fellow. But anyway...

MN: I know you had other allies, but what about --

JM: Well, that was there, and then, of course, we needed places to go. Now, I don't want you to think that that's all we did was run around. The whole idea was to, it was party time.

[Interruption]

MN: Okay, Jim. Before we left off, we were talking about all the different groups that were allied with the Black Juans. You talked about the Chinatown Lowriders, the Decoyos from J-Flats, and I know you had some other allies.

JM: Well, we were, we tried to keep a friendship with the folks out in the valley. They were called the Freelancers and the Junior Freelancers. The reason we wanted to keep things very nice with them was they threw dances out there in the Sun Valley Community Center, and it gave us an alternative to having to, if there was nothing else going on. But on the other hand, too, we didn't want to go there as some invading force, so we spent a lot of time with them getting to be friends and what have you. So we sort of said, "Well, anytime you come to L.A., you can consider yourself part of our group, and we hope that we can be friends the other way around." So they didn't, but they had something like twenty guys over there. So if they ever came into L.A. and we had our forty, you could be talking about sixty. [Laughs] So I'm just saying, that's just the senior group. Then there was the... it came along in another few years or so, the Baby Black Juans, and they had a much larger, they had a fairly large group, too, but they had their different allies.

MN: What about Boyle Heights? Did you have any allies there?

JM: Well, the only reason we were relatively friendly with east Boyle Heights was we considered that the east side. So at one point in time, as the things began to evolve, for some reason, everything split along the east-west divide. 'Cause the west side had a large number of people in the Crenshaw area, and actually, we kind of assumed that Gardena was part of that group. And everything outside of that was sort of like, it was sort of like a no-man's land, which was the old Uptown area. I think you said you used to live there, and Little Tokyo. And the reason none of us claimed Little Tokyo was that we always had to, we had a lot of business to do in Little Tokyo. You know, people were coming and going, and it wouldn't seem like an invasion, somebody coming into our territory, so to speak. If they came to the Virgil area or J-Flats, yes, they were in our territory. We became more and more territorial. And yes, it wasn't that we had a love of that particular area, it was sort of like it was an affront to us, that they would dare to come in. You know, "Who are you people coming in to our, our homeland area without our permission?" That's the way that mentality, it's really locked down in the city of east L.A. among the Mexican gangs. God help you if you stray one block over. You know, you take your life in your hands. Ours were, we were much more mobile, and like I say, we were very car-oriented. And again, our focal point was parties, dances, house parties. And all the other stuff was stuff that we'd just as soon not happen. But if it happened, so be it.

MN: So then you're talking about, like, the uptown and Little Tokyo area was basically a neutral area.

MN: Uh-huh.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.