View From the Inside: How Gang Members Use Secret Codes

veryone knows Thomas Angel Porter as AROCKS, a name he was given while growing up in Harlem during the 1990s. While playing basketball with his crew of friends, they would constantly yell at him to pass the ball, or “rock.” Within the next year his crew of friends were recruited—along with thousands of black youths across the city—by the Bloods, a big, national gang with a new chapter that had been