Tired of having to scrap their way through the streets of West Compton in the early 1970s, A.C. Moses and his childhood friends banded together to defend against the other local gangs that were hassling them.
They took to calling themselves the Pirus, after the tiny street where they grew up, and eventually formed one of the first known Bloods gangs. But back then, they were more self-styled neighborhood patrol than the muscular criminal enterprise that law enforcement says they would become.
Moses, who went by “King Bobalouie,” made a name for himself as a fearless brawler who could take a punch as well as he could deliver one. He and his followers protected each other from getting jumped on the way to and from school. Sometimes they crossed into rival territories with payback in mind.
In a 2017 interview with YouTube gang historian Kevin “Kev Mac” McIntosh, Moses told the story of the time he and a friend ditched class and walked to Centennial High School to confront the gang members responsible for assaulting his cousin the day before. Moses was bent on evening the score.
He spotted one of his cousin’s attackers and chased him through the hallways — right into the path of a waiting group of Compton Crips, who beat and stomped on Moses, he recalled.
“I managed to survive that attack and I said, ‘Man, f— that’ and we walked to Piru Street and got all the other brothers, everybody,” Moses said in the interview, sweeping his arm for emphasis, “and we mopped everybody who remained up there.”
Over time, authorities have said, the Pirus’ brand of violence went beyond street fights, escalating to killing, robbery and drug dealing.
When he wasn’t in the streets, Moses pursued his other talent: singing. His husky baritone landed him a spot singing backup for the Philadelphia soul group the Delfonics, which had hits including “La La Means I Love You” and “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time).”
“If it wasn’t for cigarettes, he’d probably still be on tour,” said longtime friend Skipp Townsend.
A.C. Moses’ influence is hard to measure, especially to outsiders who might not be able to look past his gang legacy, according to a longtime friend of his.
(Skipp Townsend)
Moses died last month at 68, leaving behind eight children and 10 grandchildren.
The dichotomy of his life — between hardened gang member and soulful crooner — was on display during his occasional stints in the county jail system, according to Townsend, a former Rollin’ 20s Bloods member, now executive director of a gang intervention nonprofit, 2nd Call.
Townsend recalled how he and Moses were both locked up in a high-security module designated for young Black men whom law enforcement had labeled as Bloods. When the lights went out for the night at 10, he remembered staying awake to see if Moses would put on a show.
“Everybody would be quiet and say, ‘OK, Boba, sing for us,’ ” Townsend said.
His sister, Sandra, remembers one of his shows with the Delfonics, during a stop on the group’s reunion tour at the Proud Bird, an aviation-themed restaurant near Los Angeles International Airport since converted into a food hall.
She was familiar with his gang exploits, but said she also saw another side of Moses altogether. To her, he was always “AC,” the baby of the family who was hopelessly coddled by their mother after he temporarily lost his ability to talk after a childhood surgery.
Growing up, she said, he loved to argue, always eager to get his point across but also willing to hear the other side.
The two of them bonded over their shared love of music, sometimes breaking out into song together, whether at home or in public; their go-to duet was the slow jam “Always and Forever,” originally performed by Heatwave. Moses also took after his mother and his aunt with his love of cooking, she said; his specialty was fried chicken gizzards.
Sandra often played the role of protector, stepping in to shield him from their mother’s wrath or mislead the police officers who came around looking for him. But she also showed him tough love. One time, she recalled, she found him banging on the back door of their home, pleading to be let in to escape neighborhood kids who wanted to fight him. She wouldn’t unlatch the lock, saying he needed to face them.
“I made sure he didn’t run from that battle,” she recalled. “And from that day on, they didn’t mess with AC.”
Trouble seemed to find him, she said — often because he was responsible for stirring it up. Once, at 17, he and his friends “hijacked” a city bus, forcing the driver to turn around and drive them back to the beach.
By the time he reached his 30s, his rap sheet included convictions for robbery and drug possession. His sister tried to distance herself as his family became the gang.
“He didn’t recognize them as a bad influence or something that’s holding him down,” she recalled wistfully. Later in life, he struggled with substance abuse.
The early Black gangs that started amid the racial turmoil of the 1950s and ‘60s were loosely organized crews with macho-sounding names like the Gladiators and the Slausons, according to Patrick Lopez-Aguado, an associate professor of sociology at Santa Clara University who has studied gang identity. They co-existed relatively peaceably while laying claim to many Black neighborhoods, he said.
Most had been steeped in the Black Panther rhetoric of “empowerment, self-sufficiency” and community control, he said: “In a lot of ways they functioned kind of like neighborhood defense groups.”
Shootings and murders were far less common. The gangs of those days banded together to defend against police harassment and were “fighting either groups of white kids coming into Black neighborhoods or vice verse, fighting to open up segregated spaces in the city, like pools and parks,” Lopez-Aguado said.
The professor said the groups committed crimes, but their offenses were relatively petty by today’s standards: brawling and shakedowns of non-gang members for their bikes or lunch money.
That changed in the 1980s, when cheap crack cocaine began flowing into South L.A. Rising unemployment and inflation combined with the closure of federal programs that provided lifelines for the poor and fueled an explosion of local drug trafficking. Violence became more regular and indiscriminate. The Bloods and Crips and their affiliates gained national prominence as the city’s murder rate shot up.
Gradually, new sets of Pirus began to sprout. As they did, the influence of OGs like Moses waned. County juvenile camps became fertile training and recruitment grounds. Over the years, the gang has grown and branched off into countless “sets” across Southern California and other parts of the country, who signal their allegiances by wearing hats of sports teams like Philadelphia Phillies or Washington Nationals. Grammy-nominated rapper the Game is among those who claim membership.
Born Arthur Charles Moses in Houston in February 1956, Moses moved with his mother and siblings at an early age.
Moses self-published a book, “The Starting Lineup,” in which he offered a sobering look at the origins of both the Crip and Piru gangs, explaining how the onetime allies turned bitter rivals.
The book traced his family’s journey from Texas to Los Angeles in the late 1950s, following in the footsteps of millions of African Americans who escaped the Jim Crow South to the promise of the North and West.
Moses moved in with his grandmother in Watts. His parents ran a dry cleaning business on the corner of Manchester Avenue. Later, the family settled near 77th Street and Broadway, where he first felt the tug of gang life.
He recalled in recent podcast interviews how he gravitated to older members from the local Avenues gang, who were known for dressing flashy and throwing around money. But Moses was told that he was too young to join.
Later at Mary McCloud Bethune Junior High, he fell in with a group of kids who included Raymond Washington, who went on to form the Crips with Stanley “Tookie” Williams, another South L.A. native. Washington was killed in a shootout in 1979. Williams was executed by the state of California in late 2005.
To get away from the area’s rising violence, relatives say that Moses moved in with his aunt and her family at their home on West Piru Street.
He roamed the streets with his cousins Ralph and Terry, who was killed decades later when he was run over by a car driven by former rap impresario Marion “Suge” Knight outside a popular Compton burger joint. Knight was convicted of voluntary manslaughter for the incident, and was sentenced to 28 years in prison.
After a bitter falling out with his former fellow Crips, Moses and the other Pirus — who first called themselves the Piru Street Boys — joined with several other area street crews into what would become known as the Bloods.
As Moses explained in an interview years later, the split came down to respect. “You get tired of getting pushed around and told what to do and you want your own power,” he said.
Moses is sometimes left out of retellings of the gang’s origins, which list higher profile names including Sylvester “Puddin’” Scott, Vincent Owens and Lorenzo “LB” Benton, whom Moses considered an important influence. Another early Piru leader, Larry “Tam” Watts, was gunned down in a drive-by shooting in 1975.
But the “King Bobalouie” name still carries weight among those who were old enough to remember those days, said Alex Alonso, a gang historian who has worked as a professor in the Cal State University system.
“He was a first generation member of the Crips and he was a first generation member of the Pirus, which became Bloods eventually. At the time they weren’t at odds. But today, it sounds crazy, like ‘He was a Crip and a Blood?’ ” Alonso said. “So he has probably one of the most unique, historical perspectives that any one person has to offer.”
In recent years, Moses was interviewed by Alonso’s Street TV and other YouTube channels dedicated to L.A. gang lore and history, occasionally getting into impassioned debates about the origins of the Pirus.
Townsend, the gang interventionist, agrees that “Bobalouie should be credited” with starting the Pirus. Townsend was in a sea of red and burgundy amid the several hundred mourners who attended Moses’ funeral at Angelus Funeral Home earlier this month.
Even today, Moses’ influence is hard to measure, especially to outsiders who might not be able to look past his gang legacy, according to Townsend.
“He actually unified us,” he said. “Of course somebody on the Westside, they’re gonna say, ‘Oh he’s just a Bloods gang member.’ ”
