What Happens When a Cop Goes Undercover with the Crips and Bloods in ‘Mormon County’

Faced with the dilemma of whether to devote their lives to their religion or burn down the homes of their rivals, the Mormon gang members decided they could do both.

In the 1980s and 1990s, youth in Salt Lake City were involved in brutal beatings, stabbings, and drive-by shootings because they were in drug trafficking territory and in solidarity with their gang members.

Some of these hooligans did this while carrying a pocket-sized copy of the Book of Mormon.

How did Utah’s capital city, known for its snow-capped mountains, pick-and-rolls by Karl Malone and John Stockton, and being a center of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, become a hotbed of crime?

When Ron Stallworth arrived there in 1986 to organize and lead a police unit dedicated to fighting gangs, he saw the answer clearly: The Southern California Crips and Bloods traveled nearly 700 miles to sell crack cocaine to the Beehive State’s devout, mostly white residents and to recruit followers for their gangs.

“As I and others in the criminal justice field tried to sound the alarm about the emerging threat of street gangs, the Church would not allow its faith to fail its children,” writes Ron Stallworth in his forthcoming memoir, “The Gangs of Zion: A Black Cop’s Crusade in Mormon Country” (out Sept. 17, Legacy Lit/Hachette).

“No one was willing to look beyond their religion and accept that these kids, when they weren’t going to sacrament meeting, were throwing Molotov cocktails through windows,” he adds.

Stallworth had already padded his police resume after successfully infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 1979. He recalled the endeavor in detail in his first book, 2014’s “Black Klansman.” (John David Washington portrayed him in the Spike Lee-directed film adaptation, “BlacKkKlansman,” released in 2018.)

In his latest hardcover book, he talks about the ways in which his black and blue identities often clashed in the eyes of others.

While Stallworth’s skin color made him an easy fit as an undercover agent, he writes that he was also undermined by colleagues, distrusted by citizens who looked like him, and challenged by racists who didn’t look like him.

Yet he never backed down from a challenge. Stallworth’s stories read like excerpts from the script of “Shaft,” as he frequently made his point by testing the limits of police protocol and ending conflicts with a quip.

In a bar, he was outnumbered by racists. When a skinhead insulted and threatened him, he once responded by proposing to his mother, then pulling out his Glock.

When a Crip began spreading lies about beating up Stallworth, the officer challenged the much larger man to a fistfight until he gave up — an effective bluff that was anything but by the book.

It was that persistence and daring behavior that helped Stallworth in his mission to solve Salt Lake City’s gang problem and save the souls of local youth who had fallen into the trap of the underworld.

“Young people who get involved in gangs always get out; the question is how,” Stallworth writes. “We had to do everything in our power to encourage them to get out of gangs—or avoid them altogether—before prison or death were the only ways out.”

Stallworth learned the language, customs and culture of the Bloods and Crips, and tried to cultivate relationships with members. He also gave juvenile offenders a one-time leniency pass by taking them home to their parents instead of to the police station.

Still, Stallworth encountered resistance on several fronts.

Many parents were skeptical of the anti-gang unit’s efforts, accusing Stallworth and his colleagues of bias or ulterior motives. Church officials refused to cooperate, with some insisting that only nonwhite Mormons — primarily Polynesian believers — were the problem.

The biggest resistance, however, came from law enforcement and government officials who refused to act after evidence emerged that a federally funded youth vocational training program called Job Corps had become a breeding ground and conduit for Southern California gang members coming to Utah.

Among them was Gary Nicolas “Babyface” Avila, who, according to Stallworth, used a fabricated LA persona to build his Sureños 13 syndicate into Salt Lake City’s largest Hispanic gang — and inspired several others to follow in his footsteps.

“Amid mounting violence, Clearfield Job Corps officials persistently lied about gang members in their program, denying their contribution to crime in Salt Lake City so they could continue to receive federal dollars,” wrote Stallworth, who later testified at a Congressional hearing in Washington, D.C., focused on the effectiveness of Job Corps.

When Stallworth discovered that gang culture was being transmitted through gangster rap, he familiarized himself with songs by the likes of NWA and Ice-T.

Although he initially disliked the music genre, he eventually developed an appreciation for its sharp social commentary and unbridled expression, becoming one of the few proponents of the art form to hold a police badge, in an era when politicians and other activists were pushing for censorship.

“We need to recognize the music as a tool to help us become better cops,” writes Stallworth, who once stunned his colleagues, gang members and even rapper Ice Cube with a verbatim recitation of N.W.A.’s “F—k tha Police.” “Cops need to listen to the songs, and if you don’t, shame on you.”

That self-study not only strengthened Stallworth’s work in his hometown, but also established him as an industry authority who wanted to share his expertise in high-profile cases in other jurisdictions.

Stallworth testified in the 1993 trial of Ronald Ray Howard, who had murdered Texas Highway Patrol officer Bill Davidson the year before while listening to Tupac Shakur’s anti-police song “Soulja Story.” He later testified in a related First Amendment case in support of Shakur and his record label’s parent company, Time Warner.

“I had to explain why gangster rap was a valid sociological expression for inner-city minority youth,” Stallworth writes. “But I also felt an obligation to reject the idea that the music could be legitimately used as a defense for killing a police officer.”

Stallworth eventually became an advocate for free speech and artistic expression, and an opponent of the criminalization of minority youth — particularly black children. His more than 30 years in law enforcement have given him a keen perspective on how best to protect and serve underprivileged communities.

Still, Stallworth frames his memoir by addressing critics who cannot reconcile his former profession and his race, most notably filmmaker Boots Riley, who insisted in a scathing critique that “BlacKkKlansman” is fiction.

“Blinded by their desire to affirm their own blackness, these radically militant individuals cannot accept me into the ‘collective club of blackness’ that demands that everyone’s sense of racial identity pale in comparison to their own,” Stallworth writes of Riley and his ilk.

Elsewhere, he opens up about intimidating the “Sorry to Bother You” filmmaker during a meeting at the 2019 Directors Guild Awards

“I wrote ‘The Gangs of Zion’ not only to chronicle my experiences as a police officer in a highly unusual context during a pivotal cultural moment,” Stallworth writes, “but also to let the Booty Rileys of the world know that I am a police officer who understands American history, protects his race, and stands unwaveringly for civil and constitutional rights for all people.”