The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [139]
SOME PARTS OF THE TWIN CITIES seem like they could be a short subway ride from downtown Mogadishu. The Starbucks on Riverside Avenue and Highway 94 in Minneapolis has been turned into a meeting point for Somali men, many of them elders of different tribes; it is rare to see a non-Somali customer. There are mosques, a community center, restaurants, food stores, and the run-down towers of the Cedar-Riverside projects.
Most Somali of all are the malls. To enter the Village Market mall in south Minneapolis is to step into a bustling corner of Mogadishu, with narrow corridors lined with racks of long, colorful skirts and scarves; barbers and travel agents and restaurants where men play dominoes; and windowless stores that sell everything a Somali home might need.
I have arranged to meet a woman named Kali in one of these stores. There isn’t much to see of Kali, just her dark eyes and her hands. The rest is covered by the black and maroon folds of a devout Muslim woman’s garb. The voice-mail message on her cell phone is a long sermon by a Muslim preacher.
Kali is 26. She came to the United States when she was 9. That makes her part of the early wave of Somali refugees—and one of the first generation of Somali gang members.
“All I knew is war,” she tells me when I ask her what she remembers of Somalia. “It was hell. I saw a lot of death. I saw bodies on the streets.”
At her new school in Minneapolis, Kali found herself the target of bullies. They’d call her names, beat her up, steal her money, and threaten to strip her naked or pull her head scarf off, exposing her hair. There was a group of kids at her high school, Roosevelt, called RTS. Rough Tough Somalis. Kali joined. They would tell their attackers, “We kill our own. You think we care about you?”
Some gang members started routinely carrying weapons, but Kali did not go that far. She had her own tactic, something she’d learned in Africa.
“One day I got jumped, really bad,” she says. “And they cut my chest. So I went to the hospital. I was in for a month.” Kali was patient as she planned her revenge against the African-American girls who had stabbed her. She waited until she was fully recovered. Then, one winter day after school, she and a friend followed the two girls who Kali says had attacked her onto a bus. The bus stopped and the girls got off.
“Let them beat me all they want, but I’m going to get their face,” Kali told her friend.
She carried five razor blades in her mouth. Kali says that they cut a little, but she had numbed the pain with alcohol. She nestled one blade in each cheek, a third under her tongue, a fourth on her tongue, and the last pressed against the roof of her mouth. She used an oil to lubricate the blades and make them easier to spit out.
On the street she confronted the girl she says had stabbed her. “When she tried to hit me I spit at her,” Kali says. The blade sliced near the girl’s eye, as planned. “She couldn’t see. She was like, ‘Oh my God, oh my God.’”
Kali caught up with the second girl, who had started running. “I [spit] like four razors in her face.”
Both girls were on the sidewalk, blood from the cuts blinding them. “They were crying like a baby bird,” Kali says.
She ran before the police came.
Eventually Kali dropped out of high school, and her mother threw her out of the house, she says. She had several troubled years and a couple of kids with a man she’s no longer with before she got straight. Now Kali spends as much time as possible talking with younger Somali gang members, persuading them that joining gangs is a big mistake.
“Everywhere in the world, they all have gangs,” she says. “But Somalian gangs are more complicated because they go by tribe. There’s a D-Block gang, which is Darod, which is a tribe. There’s Hot Boyz, which is Hawiye, the ones who are running Somalia right now. There’s a lot of different tribes.”
And then Kali echoes what I’ve heard from law-enforcement officials: “What happens in Somalia is going on right here.”
Her words foreshadowed a tragic event. Just over