Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member

Written from a California maximum-security prison, this memoir traces the life of Kody Scott, who at eleven was recruited into the Eight Tray Gangster Crips, one of the most notorious street gangs in South Central Los Angeles. Over sixteen years, Kody evolved from a child soldier into a feared "Ghetto Star," a neighborhood celebrity known for gangbanging, before undergoing a political awakening that led him to renounce gang life and adopt the name Sanyika Shakur. Writing at twenty-nine, Shakur frames the conflict between the Crips and their rivals, the Bloods, as a civil war that has lasted longer than Vietnam, sustained by narcotics and ignored by the wider world.

On June 15, 1975, Kody graduated from elementary school already mentally detached from his classmates. That evening, sponsored by Tray Ball, a rising figure in the local Crip set (a neighborhood gang clique), he underwent initiation and was driven into enemy Blood territory, where he fired a pump shotgun into a gathering of roughly fifteen rivals. Alone at home that night, the boy felt guilt and shame but found no justification for what he had done and never shared these feelings.

Kody's violence escalated rapidly. At thirteen, he stomped a robbery victim so severely that police described the assailant as a "monster," and Kody adopted the moniker, compelling him toward ever-greater viciousness. When Tray Ball was jailed in 1978, Kody found a new road dog (best friend) in Crazy De, a loyal companion his own age. Together they pursued O.G. (Original Gangster) status through the required stages: building an individual name, linking it with the set, and promoting the larger Crip identity.

War erupted between the Eight Trays and their former allies, the Rollin' Sixties Crips, after a new recruit killed a Sixty's brother during a fistfight. Diplomatic talks failed, and war was formally declared. Kody and De swore a pact to never stop until all enemies were destroyed. Kody notes that Crip-on-Crip violence, not the Crip-Blood rivalry, was becoming the deadliest force in South Central, a pattern that would intensify for decades.

By 1980, the war had split the entire Crip community into two superpower-like factions. Kody expanded the set's territory through tactics he compares to colonial settlement. He met Tamu, a civilian who was older, employed, and unconnected to gang life. When Tamu became pregnant, Kody agonized over choosing between fatherhood and his gang career. On the day she went into labor, he deliberately detoured through enemy territory, spotted a rival, and shot him three times in the chest. His decision was made: Banging was his life.

On New Year's Eve 1980, three men confronted Kody in a dark parking lot and shot him six times. He experienced a near-death vision and, for the first time, understood what "rest in peace" meant, having lived only in war. While he recovered in the hospital, his younger brother Kershaun, known as Li'l Monster, who had joined the Eight Trays, led a massive retaliatory offensive across South Central. When Kody's assailants appeared in his hospital doorway, his nurse confronted them and bought time for Li'l Monster to arrive with armed reinforcements.

Released after two weeks, Kody returned immediately to the streets. He was arrested for a murder he did not commit and tried as an adult in the L.A. County Jail juvenile tank (a juvenile housing unit), where he overthrew the reigning tyrant in a fistfight. At trial, medical records proved Kody had a cast on his left hand the night of the alleged shooting, contradicting every prosecution witness, and the jury acquitted him in under an hour.

Upon release, Kody resumed nightly missions with Crazy De and fellow Eight Tray members Diamond and Tray Stone, forming a self-styled "Demolition Squad" aided by intelligence from LAPD CRASH officers (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, a gang-focused unit). After Kody was shot in the back during an attempted robbery, he and De were captured for a separate robbery neither committed. De received five years in state prison; Kody, still a minor, received four years in the Youth Authority, California's youth prison system.

At the Youth Training School (Y.T.S.), a maximum-security youth prison, Kody's political awakening began. Through Muslim services, he met Muhammad Abdullah, a militant minister who gave him a pamphlet filled with Malcolm X quotes about self-defense and liberation. Muhammad spoke to the prisoners as warriors, redirecting their energy toward consciousness of systemic oppression rather than demanding disarmament. Attendance at services surged from nine to eighty before the institution suspended him. Walter Brown, a formerly incarcerated teacher, challenged Kody by cataloging his vulnerabilities: young, Black, unskilled, using drugs, gangbanging. During this period, Tray Ball died playing Russian roulette after someone secretly loaded the remaining chambers of his revolver, and Tray Stone was killed by a fellow Eight Tray. Kody was paroled on March 7, 1984.

Back in South Central, Kody found his combat unit decimated. He briefly sold drugs and smoked PCP daily. After his apartment was raided in September 1984, he was charged with mayhem and attempted murder and sent to L.A. County Jail's Module 4800, the designated Crip module. Members of the Consolidated Crip Organization (C.C.O.) arrived from state prisons, teaching Kiswahili (the Swahili language), political science, and Crip history. C.C.O. leaders told Kody to join or be destroyed for the good of the Crip Nation; he committed, reading and burning their constitution as instructed. Salahudin, a member of the Black Guerrilla Family (B.G.F.), a Black prison revolutionary organization, gave Kody the Kiswahili name Sanyika, meaning "unifier, gatherer of his people." Kody was sentenced to seven years.

From 1985 to 1988, Kody moved through Chino, Soledad, San Quentin, and Folsom prisons, undergoing a profound intellectual transformation. At San Quentin, comrades taught him Kiswahili, mathematics, and revolutionary theory. His mother revealed that his biological father was Dick Bass, a former Los Angeles Rams football player who had abandoned him before birth; the man Kody knew as his father, Scott, had hated him for being another man's child. As C.C.O. fractured, Muhammad introduced Kody to the New Afrikan Independence Movement, which frames Black people in America as an oppressed nation. In 1987, Kody and his closest comrade, Talib, left the Crips entirely and pledged allegiance to the Republic of New Afrika, a Black nationalist movement advocating for an independent nation-state.

Paroled in November 1988, Kody returned to a South Central transformed by crack cocaine and automatic weapons. He took a job as a file clerk, driven by the conviction that he must join the working class to understand the weight of the state. He gave backyard lectures to young Eight Trays and distributed political pamphlets. The most painful obligation was visiting Crazy De in jail. Separated by Plexiglas, De told Kody he was "stuck," facing the death penalty for two murders and a kidnapping. De respected Kody's transformation but declared that gangsterism continues. When the phone clicked off, the two men saluted each other: Kody with a clenched fist, De with the Eight Tray sign. Kody recognized this as the breaking of the final chain.

In the Epilogue, written from solitary confinement, Shakur reports that he was captured again in January 1991 for assaulting a crack dealer, receiving seven years. He notes that Kershaun has joined the New Afrikan Independence Movement and lectures nationally, that he and Tamu married before this incarceration, and that Crazy De escaped the death penalty but received life without parole. Reflecting on the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, Shakur interprets the rebellion as an inevitable eruption of oppression. He acknowledges the Crip-Blood ceasefire but stresses that meaningful peace requires Crip-on-Crip peace first. He closes with a plea for children who deserve a decent childhood where they live, declaring his dedication to eradicating the causes of gangsterism.