[DavidI]

“He could really get down with his hands,” says a rival Kitchen Crip, one street fighter appreciating another. “It takes more than a gun to get respect.” Yet in this new Wild West, most gang members came to see a gun as survival gear. By the late 1970s, even the best street fighters had turned to firepower. Evil became as unfazed by shooting people as he had been at stomping their teeth in. From the most ruthless family members, Evil created a commando unit of sorts, which he called the 88 Monsters. Though he still lived with and respected his parents, on the street his rage would flow. Defending his outgunned ‘hood became an obsession.

“When his anger goes off, it is a something to check out, blood,” said a member of the Swans. “It was scary. He be getting like a hurricane, and you can’t stop him when he want to jack up someone. You know that he ain’t just talking, like so many other brothers. If he said it, I would say to myself, ‘Someone gonna die tonight.’ ”

Thanks, in part, to Evil, the LAPD and the District Atorney’s hard Core Gang Unit came to view the 89 Family as the deadliest small gang in the city. “Part of the reason they were so violent was that they were surrounded by much larger gangs on three sides,” says South Bureau Homicide Det. Christopher Barling, who testified as a gang expert in the murder trial. “To keep their little territory, 89 had to fight harder.”

Det. Thomas Mathew calls Johnson “the most cold-blooded killer in the city,” and sees himself as Evil’s nemesis. One of the gang’s traits, he says, was their turnaround time when it came to a retaliation shooting. “They were notorious for quick paybacks. Whenever we heard there had been shooting [on 89 Family turf], we would rush over to the rival’s turf and wait for them to come by. Sometimes they had already given the payback.”

But Evil wasn’t just fast. He was a street strategist, detectives say.

“Most gang members are reactionary, heat of passion,” says Barling. “You shoot us, we shoot you. Evil was different. Evil would think and plan things out.” He built a reputation for beating murder raps and for allegedly calling in several murders from behind bars. He even ordered the assassination of Mathew. For a time, an LAPD SWAT team shadowed the detective to counter the threat.

Evil’s crimes, meanwhile, were becoming street folklore. Barling recalls a 1991 assault on the Avalon Gardens housing project that Crips, Bloods and cops still talk about. “Evil had his guys do two other shootings just to get police away from Avalon Gardens,” he says. “He had guys in stolen cars waiting as getaway drivers. He had guys going into [the project] on the flanks. Then he led 10 of them--walking--into the middle of the project and fired off more than 200 rounds. It was lucky only one person died.”

Such tactics do not go unnoticed. In 1994, LAPD’s South Bureau homicide squad organized an 89 Family Task Force, consisting of detectives, FBI agents and the district attorney’s office. Their goal: bring down Evil for good. To succeed, however, the task force needed something authorities had always failed to get--witnesses who would take the stand. Many times Evil had been arrested as the prime suspect in a murder case and many times he had walked. His myth grew as word spread that he was untouchable. “How many times you gonna get arrested for murder then get out right away?” asks the former girlfriend of an 88 Monster. “Everyone in the neighborhood was talking about it. He gonna get out and kill you if you ratted on him. It was really simple.”

In 1994, Gloria Lyons told authorities that she saw an 89 Family member kill a man. She was killed. Georgia Denise Jones testified in the same case. She was killed. Two years earlier, Albert Sutton was due to testify in a murder trial. He was killed. But in developing evidence in the Loggins and Beroit murders, detectives latched onto a witness, Freddie Jelks, who was facing life in prison for a murder. During the Loggins-Beroit murder trial, Jelks said that Evil had ordered the killings. The jury voted to convict and sent Johnson to San Quentin’s death row. Now he’s in the Pitchess Detention Center in Saugus preparing to represent himself in yet another murder trial in January.

Big Evil receives a visitor from behind the thick glass window of a small metal cage that his 6-foot-2, 220-pound fat-free frame fills to capacity. These are the visitation arrangements the sheriffs reserve for their most explosive charges.

It is not the man’s menace that strikes you, though, or the bulging biceps, or his shaved head and piercing eyes. It’s Big Evil’s engaging smile.

“He was so nice,” says Sanchez, the homicide detective, recalling her first street encounter with the gangster. Sanchez, a 17-year veteran who had heard the fearsome tales about Johnson, was taken aback by his personality. “He had this big smile. He joked with us. And that laugh. That Big Evil laugh. It was . . . well, it was really evil. I’m happy we finally brought him down.”

Johnson smiles when he hears that Sanchez is glad he got convicted. His laugh rises in volume like a tsunami about to devastate a fishing village. “I think she’s mad at me because I wouldn’t give her any,” he says. “She was listening to me talk nasty to my wife [on a bugged county jail phone], and she was getting turned on.”

Sometimes , even when he’s laughing, it’s hard to tell if Johnson is joking. At the time of this interview, for instance, he was a trustee at the Men’s Central Jail. His job: food server. “No one complains about the service,” says Johnson. “That would be dumb.”

Ask him, though, what life is like now for a man who has deprived so many people of theirs, and the laughter stops. “I’m not really fond of life,” he says. “It seems like I’m already dead. I ain’t never been one that depends on hope.”

Ask him to tally how many deaths he has meted out, and his gaze becomes a glare. “That’s another story. That’s a whole long story,” he says. He pauses. Then he lowers his head and cocks it to one side, and suddenly he’s back 23 years and is talking about that boy who sat on a fire hydrant and watched his first killing. Listen to Evil now, and you can almost begin to see things from his severely contorted, Boy Scout-turned-killer’s perspective. You can almost see how, in the twisted realm of certain neighborhoods, where a parent’s tender hug is counterbalanced by some tough’s shove, a boy’s thinking could go so haywire.

In a way, Johnson was cursed with the rare qualities it takes to transcend the fear that can cripple such neighborhoods, that leaves many inhabitants half-dead with dread. He had that athletic body, wicked knockout punch and the drive to fight back ferociously. In the end, perhaps, the gang won out because to Johnson, love was no longer as vital as power.

And he loved that power.

Most boys at some point in their lives fantasize about being the baddest street fighter, about taking down bullies while girls ogle from ringside seats on the curb. Johnson’s parents and lawyers, the judge and the jury that convicted him, might not be so perplexed about his fate had they ever felt the addictive rush of walking into a party with a reputation that paralyzes the room, of having brutal men turn to you for protection, of hearing tales of your ruthlessness grow into legend.

From his perspective, love never stood a chance. And once Johnson was off on that alternative course, he threw himself into it with all his heart.

“I was the epitome of a gang member,” he says. “I was real. A lot of people be putting on a front that they bad. Acting tough. I wasn’t acting at all. I was just being me. I love to fight. Win, lose or draw. I’d rather put down a gun and fight. I fight to win. If you got to bite, bite. If you got to scratch, scratch . . . . People fail to realize, it was like a religion. It’s not for the fun of it. Some people worshiped Allah or Jesus. I worshiped Bloods.

“It’s like people going to Vietnam and getting programmed to kill. They can’t stop killing, and when they come back, they need help mentally. We couldn’t stop killing our enemies here either. I was one of them sick individuals. They locked us away, but we needed help mentally.”

Det. Mathew reflects on Johnson’s swift transition from boy to out-of-control killer. “He used to come up and ask me for baseball cards. Two months later, we’re looking for him on a murder. Did I have any baseball cards for him? Hell, no. I got handcuffs for him, that’s all.”

With Big Evil sentenced to death, and other key 89 Family members locked away, murders have plummeted in the area. Still, the legacy of the neighborhood that Evil helped create--that helped create Evil--lives on.

Johnson seems unconcerned that he is headed for death row. “I’m not worried at all about going to San Quentin,” he says. “I been in worse places.”

Such as?

“In an alley, with a .45 pointed at me. Too many times. But I’m a survivor. I just turned 30. I never thought I’d make it to 20. After I got the death penalty, I celebrated in jail with some homemade brew. I know I’m gonna be around at least 10 more years with all the appeals. Getting the death penalty saved my life.”