In what may be the highest-profile Crips murder case since the Snoop Dogg “Murder Was the Case” incident, a Los Angeles high-school football star on his way to a full ride at Oregon was implicated last week in an investigation that reads like a Sociology 101 lesson in Crips hierarchies.
Jurray Casey, a star linebacker for Long Beach’s Poly High football team, was identified in a pretrial hearing by police gang experts as a member of the Insane Crips gang. Casey, it seems, had originally been tagged as an Insane gangbanger following a February 2005 shoot-out between the Insane Crips and members of another gang, called the Rolling 20s. Police investigating that incident found a shoebox in Casey’s room that read “B.I.G. Ray Ray (forever),” which police speculated meant “Baby Insane Gang,” with Ray Ray being Casey’s “gang moniker.”
“He’s basically in it to win it,” Detective Tina Jones said of Casey.
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MIAMI'S URBAN BEACH WEEK: (roughly translated by police as "Let's go round up some black people") saw Gilbert Arenas pulling a Ty Law when he allegedly proclaimed to police officers, "You can't arrest me, I'm a basketball player."
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According to news reports, both the Rolling 20s and the Insane Crips are considered part of the Crips gang, although the two are rivals. In a sports-relevant side note to the trial, Jones, the testifying officer at the hearing, was apparently threatened during testimony by a known Crips member. He was overheard saying to her, “You’ll catch my fade,” which is apparently a threat in Crips-ese. It’s also a football term, as New Englanders are probably not aware, since the midget wideouts on the Patriots have all but driven the fade from the home team’s playbook in recent years.
Casey and a co-defendant are charged with shooting a 17-year-old named Rashad Ali in a drive-by this January. The shooting took place following a local krumping competition in Culver City; both the victim and Casey’s co-defendant had participated in the contest. If you’re white and/or older than 25, you should know that krumping is a sort of African-inspired mutation of break dancing and a major LA street-culture phenomenon that’s about ten minutes away from having its own 2 Fast 2 Furious–esque Hollywood treatment.
Insane hoop moms
First it was Bron-Bron’s mom. Now the mother of another celebrated high-school-to-NBA star, the Phoenix Suns’ Amare Stoudamire, has been sent up on aggravated-DUI charges, and she may actually see some very serious time.
In a case that is significantly less humorous than the Gloria James case, Carrie Mae Stoudamire was sentenced to three years in prison for driving drunk and crashing into a Jersey barrier last October 21. Carrie Mae was also charged with showing a fake license to the arresting officer.
Amare’s mom has been in trouble with the law before. Among other things, she was convicted in a shoplifting case involving $1000 worth of Nieman Marcus goods, and she was also convicted in a 2003 DUI case that left her on probation and under house arrest. The judge in Carrie Mae’s case was sufficiently nervous about her unsupervised presence in society that she rejected her request to attend church services.
Carrie Mae will be given credit for the 162 days she has already spent in jail. “She doesn’t want to be a distraction to her son,” her attorney told reporters.
Wizard vs. cops
This week’s Ty Law award goes to Gilbert Arenas, the eminently driven, draft-scorned superstar guard for the Washington Wizards, who, during a highly questionable arrest last week by the Miami Beach police department, told officers, “You can’t arrest me. I’m a basketball player. I play for the Washington Wizards.”
The Arenas arrest occurred during a mass sweep of Miami Beach that also led to the arrest of fellow Wizard Awvee Storey and newly drafted Pittsburgh Steeler wideout Santonio Holmes. The sweep came during Memorial Day festivities, which are gaining renown as a sort of mini Freaknik, a hip-hop beach party known as Urban Beach Week. Florida police plus thousands of visiting black partiers seems like a bad combination, and it was: police made 557 arrests, mostly for misdemeanors such as disorderly conduct and public intoxication. The Arenas arrest occurred when the guard got out of his car to stand near Storey as he was being questioned by police. When Arenas refused police requests to get back in the car, uttering his soon-to-be-infamous proclamation (angry Middle American bloggers are already going ape over the millionaire basketball player’s remarks), he was arrested on a resisting-without-violence charge.
Our own Ty Law, remember, was busted in that same Miami Beach area a few years ago. He ran from police and, upon capture, said, “Don’t touch me. I’m a professional athlete.”
Another former Boston athlete, Slavic clunker Vitaly Potapenko, once notoriously told police, “You can’t arrest me.” Where was he arrested? Try Miami Beach. Is there something in the air down there?
When he’s not googling “DUI” and “Mother of NBA star,” Matt Taibbi is writing for Rolling Stone. He can be reached at
M_Taibbi@yahoo.com
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