Wounded Warriors – Table of contents

The boy in the alley calls himself Zeke. He’s thirteen years old; he has a part time job selling cocaine on a corner. He swears he didn’t fight no pit bulldogs to the death. He didn’t hang no dogs from no roof with telephone wire, neither. That’s what he told the judge, anyway. Life and death on the mean streets of North Philadelphia’s Little Puerto Rico.

 

By some accounts, Christopher Michael Langan is the smartest man in America, with an IQ of 195. He is certainly the smartest nightclub bouncer in America. As he likes to say, quoting Kermit the Frog, “It ain’t easy being green.” Welcome to the HiQ Nation, where smartest, it turns out, isn’t necessairly best.

 

One night as he slept, special agents from the DEA entered Robert’s bedroom and planted a tiny speaker in his brain. Rick heard Samoan war drums; Connie thought her body was covered with bugs. Derek also though he had a DEA implant– he used his to contact famous men from history. A report from Hawaii on the ravages of crystal meth.

 

Kobe Bryant may well be the most misunderstood figure in sports today. It is a tragic misunderstanding, for his sake and for ours. You can blame it on the press. You can blame it on the way the world revolves around fame and money. You can blame it on Kobe and his wife. Five days in Vegas with KB24 and his mamacita, Lady V.

 

After fighting in Vietnam, unwilling to return to America, these vets put down stakes in a place they thought would be better than home. From the sex bars of Bangkok, to the blood red sunsets over the Mekong River, to VFW Post 10249 in Udonthani—what happens when you follow that wild hair to the end of the earth.

 

Oh no! Here he comes again, leading another protest– hair luffing, flesh roiling and juggling beneath the silky nylon of his jogging suit, size XXL. He’s got Martin Luther King’s dream, James Brown’s hairdo, and a date with political destiny. “I just haven’t learned how to talk to white folks yet,” he says. At home and on the road with the Reverend Al Sharpton.

 

Back in the day, when gangs fought for turf and respect, V-13 ruled the streets of Venice, California—proud vatos in their pendleton shirts and hair nets. They drove shiny low-riders and sold heroin to the miatas, the poor blacks across the street. Then crack arrived in the neighborhood and the tables turned. Life inside an LA gang.

 

At first it seemed like just another exotic assignment: Go to Tahiti and find Marlon Brando. But the worldwide search for the legendary Method actor, the star of Apocalypse Now, On the Waterfront, and Mutiny on the Bounty, soon became a quest, and finally an obsession. One man’s journalistic coming of age.