[DavidI]

During my 34+ years of law enforcement, I have never met a more vicious, ruthless, charming, disarming, calculating, and friendly killer than Cleamon Johnson (aka "Big Evil"). I knew him very well and understood how dangerous this man is. His crime partner "Fat Rat" recently died of a drug overdose in jail. I read today that Cleamon is eligible for parole! I cannot believe this! Here is some background on him from an LA Times article several years ago. You can also Google him and watch some YouTube interviews to observe his charm. This is truly a scary man. He had a brother nicknamed "Sinister" who met an early death a few years back. He also had a son who had his life taken from him by way of lead.

"In these days of support groups, Violet Loggins could start a large one for people whose husbands, sons, brothers, daughters or friends were murdered by one man. Loggins’ own mourning began seven years ago. Her husband, Donald Ray Loggins, worked at a local cable company, and since the birth of their son five months earlier, he had been as punctual as a Marine Corps reveille. He would pull into the driveway of their pleasant two-bedroom, South-Central Los Angeles home at 2:45 p.m. to watch the baby while Violet got ready for her swing-shift job. But on Aug. 5, 1991, Violet was sitting on the couch, cradling their child and staring at the telephone, wondering why her husband was so late.

Had Violet been outside at about 2:30 p.m., she would have heard distant gunshots, the sound of an Uzi being fired into the skulls of her 30-year-old husband and his friend, Payton Beroit, as they waited at a carwash on 88th Street and Central Avenue. It was the sound that symbolized the reign of terror of street gang leader Cleamon Johnson, who authorities say ordered the murders as he sat 100 feet from the carwash on the porch of his parents’ home, his throne.

Loggins and his friend were killed because they lived east of Central Avenue, a dividing line between Crips and Bloods. Evil says neither was a gang member, but Johnson, seeking to provide a newly recruited Blood with a mission to earn his stripes, spotted them and issued their death sentences.

“He tore my family apart,” says Loggins. “My husband was one of the good guys. He was always doing favors for people. Now I’m bringing up a child without a father . . . . All I have for my son are pictures. What do I tell him?”

Few of the loved ones of Johnson’s victims, Violet Loggins among them, know the real name of the man who ruined their lives. But their eyes dart about nervously and anger distorts their faces at the mention of his street name.

This is the story of how a sweet young boy named Cleamon Johnson grew up to be “Big Evil.”

By the early 1990s, the neighborhood controlled by the 89 family Bloods, Big Evil’s neighborhood, was among the deadliest in California. In 1993 alone, there were 12 murders in the gang’s half-square-mile turf. If all of Los Angeles had such a rate, there would have been 22,512 murders in the city, 4,635 more than in the entire United States last year. Big Evil was not responsible for all the mayhem, of course. But in a city with 100,000 gang members, he stood out.

“Every gang has a bad ass, a shot-caller,” says LAPD Homicide Det.

Rosemary Sanchez. “Evil was the most violent one I ever knew about.”

FBI Agent Jon Lipsky says only famed Mafia killer Anthony “Tony the Ant” Spilotro was as violent. “Johnson has admitted to 13 murders by his own hands. That makes him a serial killer.”

In total, police attribute more than 20 murders to Johnson. But even using the lower figure to which Johnson has confessed, that means he murdered as many people as “Freeway Killer” William Bonin or “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez. In all likelihood, Evil’s relative obscurity has to do with where the slaughter occurred. No celebrities among these victims. No Palos Verdes bankers or Newport Beach realtors. These were innocents just trying to survive, or young gang members in way over their heads. Johnson’s defense tried to portray him as a victim of geography. “Evil is a product of 89th and Central,” said Joe Orr, counsel for Johnson’s co-defendant, Michael “Fat Rat” Allen. “With his charm, there’s no telling how far he could have gone. He was talented, but his abilities were diverted to the streets. If he had been raised in a different area, this would not have happened.”

His own mother, however, can’t believe it’s that simple. After a jury sentenced Johnson to death for Loggins’ and Beroit’s murders, she pondered her personal version of the question that has kept sociologists and criminologists and theologians bickering for decades. What makes a boy go bad? “I feel I gave him my all. I just don’t know what happened. Sometimes I feel I am to blame, but I did all a mother could do. I don’t know why it turned out like this.”

Cleamon Demone Johnson was born on Oct. 15, 1967, in Los Angeles. He had what many hard-core cases dream of--two loving parents. Aileen and Cleamon Johnson raised their son in a three-bedroom home on 88th Street. The white house had a large porch and a big backyard, complete with a pigeon coop that served as a playground for Cleamon, his two older half brothers, two younger brothers and a boisterous bunch of neighborhood boys. Norman Rockwell could have painted that scene, or the summer afternoons when Aileen gave her sons and their friends Kool-Aid and sometimes invited the neighbor boys to dinner, at which the family of seven said grace before eating.

Neighbors remember Cleamon as a sweet child with a big smile and an eagerness to help ladies bring groceries from their cars. He’d scan the bags, grab the most overflowing and wobble toward the porch, peering through the leafy contents to avoid curbs and steps. As a member of Boy Scout Troop 374, he earned many merit badges, including one he is still proud of: Survival. Like all boys with brothers, Cleamon learned to roughhouse from an early age, to fight back when the older boys slugged him, and to fight back tears when the punches hurt.

That was a time when South-Central’s gangs still fought with fists, an occasional tire iron, a rare knife, and street trouble seldom spilled into homes. No one had yet heard the rumblings of an Uzi or AK-47 here. But in 1970, when Cleamon Johnson was 3, an epochal event occurred: Less than a mile away, some young men got together and started calling themselves the Crips. Things in South-Central would never be the same. Enter the era of families routinely ducking for cover, of sleeping on floors, of burying babies. Soon the “The City of Angels” was better known as the “Gang Capital of America.”

In response to the Crips, various groups of young men and boys from rival gangs--the Piru, the Bounty Hunters, the Brims and the Swans--banded together into a loose confederation that became known as the Bloods. Over time, large, well-armed Crips factions--East Coast Crips, Avalon Gardens Crips and, directly across Central Avenue, the Kitchen Crips--hemmed in Johnson’s neighborhood on three sides. That embattled horseshoe engendered the 89 Family Bloods.

One sweltering afternoon, when Johnson was 8, he was sitting on a fire hydrant at 84th and Towne when a car drove up. Teenagers got out and opened fire, shredding the body of his friend Darryl. It was Johnson’s first numbing, close-up view of death. Within a year he saw another boy murdered. Violence became part the backdrop, like the sound of jets descending toward LAX. Soon Johnson was caught up in it.

When word got home that he’d been fighting, Cleamon Johnson knew what to expect: “An ass-whipping.” But he doesn’t begrudge his parents their attempts at discipline. He says he enjoyed his childhood, and by all accounts, even during this time of schoolyard fistfights, he remained a good student, a curious, intelligent boy with a certain charm and bright smile. Cleamon’s parents took him and his brothers camping throughout the West. They understood the advantages such experiences offered, and because they sympathized with the children who came from broken homes, they often took along some of the pigeon coop boys. Cleamon was particularly fond of Oregon’s Crater Lake, a tree-sheltered pool of serenity atop a dormant volcano.

Though far from rich, the Johnsons spoiled their boys. At Christmas, when other kids received roller skakes, the Johnson boys got go-karts. What they couldn’t give them was immunity to the forces transforming the city. By the time he was 12 or 13, attending Drew Middle School near Watts, Cleamon was encountering young Crips hourly.

It was there, in the seventh grade, that he first tasted the thrill of being a bad ass. A larger and older Kitchen Crip had been bullying some youngsters. Johnson charged the boy, got the upper hand, and kept on going, smashing the boy’s face into a basketball pole until blood spurted onto the court. From then on, the other boys looked up to him. So did some of the girls. Nearly two decades before he received the death penalty, the battle for his life had begun.

From that point on, Johnson’s family found itself in a tug of war with the 89 Family. His parents dug in, pulling steadily; the gang yanked with adrenaline-filled spasms on the other side. The family pulled with love. The gang with power and fear. The gang won.

Johnson graduated to hanging with older, hard-core men, many of them ex-convicts. They were glad to have him on their side. “Evil was a great street fighter,” says Ricky Parker, Johnson’s half brother. “He was good with his hands, his elbows, his head, his feet, his knees, his teeth.”