Stanley Williams

Stanley Tookie Williams III (December 29, 1953 – December 13, 2005) was an American gangster who co-founded and led the Crips gang in Los Angeles.

Williams was born on December 29, 1953, in New Orleans, Louisiana.

He was christened Stanley Tookie Williams III but was usually called by his middle name Tookie (pronounced ).

His father abandoned the family when Williams was one year old.

In 1959, Williams moved with his mother, Louisiana Williams, to Los Angeles, California and settled in the city's South Central area.

As Williams' mother worked several jobs to support them, Williams was a latchkey kid and often engaged in mischief on the streets.

He recalled that, as a child, he would make some money from "the hustlers": “These hustlers would bet on just about anything—even who could spit, urinate, or throw a rock the farthest.

I have witnessed cockfights, cricket fights, fish fights, and pay-per-view street fights among individuals between six and fifty years of age.

Older hustlers would bet on children to fight”.

Williams said that he was often paid a couple dollars after dogfights to take care of the injured dogs.

Williams was also occasionally paid to participate in these street fights as a young man.

By the time Williams was a teenager he had gained a reputation in South Central's West Side as a vicious street fighter.

Williams was expelled from George Washington Preparatory High School and denied entry by several other high schools in the South Central area because he was "intimidating".

Tookie was sent to Los Padrinos and then to Central Juvenile Hall for the first time after the formation of the Crips, charged with a robbery at Clifton's restaurant which he denied participating in.

In the late 1960s, juvenile crime increased in South Central as older gangs disbanded to join the Black Power Movement, most notably as part of the Black Panther Party, initially to protect black people from police brutality and corruption in the Los Angeles Police Department.

Increasingly violent youth gangs formed in their place, which Williams initially despised as predatory.

Because of his viciousness and willingness to fight older youths, Williams earned the respect of many gangsters on the West Side.

These gangs were mostly small-time neighborhood cliques that operated independently from each other and therefore leadership was not chosen but determined naturally.

At age fifteen, Williams was invited into a small West Side clique after he befriended a local teenager, Donald "Doc/Sweetback" Archie.

Williams soon earned the clique's respect after beating up one of their members for insulting his mother.

Williams became the unofficial leader of this clique as his violent reputation began to spread across South Central.

In 1969, aged 15, Williams was arrested in Inglewood for car theft and was sent to the Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey.

While doing time at the detention center, Williams was introduced to Olympic weightlifting by the facility's gym coach, which would spark an interest in bodybuilding.

During the 1970s, Williams was the de facto leader of the Crips and the prominent crime boss in South Los Angeles.

He and Raymond Washington formed an alliance in 1971 that established the Crips as Los Angeles' first major African-American street gang.

By his release from custody in early 1971, aged 17, Williams was physically bigger and stronger.

According to Williams, upon his release from custody the review board asked him what he planned to do after being released, to which he replied "being the leader of the biggest gang in the world."

Shortly after his release from prison, Williams was approached by Raymond Washington at Washington Preparatory High School after hearing of Williams through a mutual friend of both young men.

The friend had informed Washington of Williams' toughness and his willingness to fight members of larger, more established street gangs such as the L.A. Brims and the Chain Gang.

According to Williams' account of the meeting, what struck him about Washington was that, besides being incredibly muscular, he and his cohort were dressed similar to Williams and his clique, wearing leather jackets with starched Levi's jeans and suspenders.

Washington was from South Central's East Side, where he was a prominent gangster similar to Williams, and proposed they use their influence in their respective regions to form the larger Crips street gang.

The purpose for creating the gang initially was to eliminate all street gangs and create a "bull force" neighborhood watch in South Central.

Williams said: "We started out—at least my intent was to, in a sense, address all of the so-called neighboring gangs in the area and to put, in a sense—I thought 'I can cleanse the neighborhood of all these, you know, marauding gangs.' But I was totally wrong. And eventually, we morphed into the monster we were addressing."

Williams stated he founded the Crips not with the intention of eliminating other gangs, but to create a force powerful enough to protect local black people from racism, corruption and brutality at the hands of the police.

At the time of the Crips' initial formation there were only three Crip sets: Washington's East Side Crips (later called East Coast Crips), Williams' West Side Crips (later the Eight Tray Gangster Crips), and the Compton Crips, led by a teenager named Mac Thomas.

Williams formed the West Side Crips using his own influence, having befriended many clique leaders and street thugs on the West Side.

Washington, Williams and Thomas went on an aggressive and violent recruitment campaign throughout the black ghettos of Los Angeles, where they challenged the leaders of other gangs to one-on-one street fights.

Williams's activities with the Crips ended in 1979 when he was arrested for the murder of four people during two robberies.

Convicted of the murders in 1981 and sentenced to death, he spent over two decades on death row until he was executed by lethal injection in 2005.

The highly publicized trial of Williams and extensive appeals for clemency sparked debate on the status of the death penalty in California.