WHAT’S IN A NAME?

By Abigail Goldman

Monday, April 7, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Being little is big on the mean streets.

Just ask Lil’ Capone, Lil’ Mizz, Lil’ Crook, Lil’ Crazy, Lil’ Ump, Lil’ Shiester, Lil’ Sweat, Lil’ Nutty, Lil’ Wee Wee, Lil’ C Rag, Lil’ Spit, Lil’ Mookie, Lil’ A, Lil’ B and Lil’s C through Z.

This is just a small sampling, a lil’ sampling, really, of the thousands of nicknames Metro Police’s Gang Crimes Bureau keeps in its moniker file — a computer database of aka’s and street pseudonyms. A collection that’s closely guarded because it’s so valuable, and valuable because detectives regularly deal with gangsters who don’t know their peers’ real names. Metro Police estimate there are more than 8,000 documented gang members in about 350 identified gangs.

They know each other as Cheeks, Dazzy Dazz, Jameesy, Mr. Scrap, Psycho Collins, Boss Hog, Cornbread, Too Picc.

Of the list of more than 600 randomly selected monikers Metro Police’s gang crimes section provided the Sun, these names fall somewhere in the middle of the bizarro scale.

The real showstoppers are compelling not only because they’re strange, but because they violate the nickname principle — they’re surely longer and harder to say than the gangsters’ birth names — Big Grimestone Capone, Mark Crip Crazy, Matsumoto Brett.

Then there are the nicknames most people wouldn’t want, like Boo-Pooty.

As is the case when any adolescent boys are ribbing each other, nicknames are often born out of a perceived weakness. Highlighting a vulnerability with a mean moniker has been popular since nicknames became a part of gang culture in the late 1960s, said Malcolm Klein, a professor emeritus at the University of Southern California, widely considered one of the nation’s foremost experts on gang culture.

A lot of those Lil’s, in other words, aren’t. Just ask Lil’ Fats or Lil’ Sumo.

Klein knows a gang member who wore glasses and was consequently named Goggles. He knows a Hispanic gang member called Papa, Spanish for potato. It’s short for “potato face” — a dig at his acne.

He knows a girl who dated a gang member for six months without knowing his birth name. When Klein told her the boyfriend’s birth certificate said “Carlos,” she didn’t believe him.

“It’s almost impossible now to find established gang members who don’t have some kind of nickname,” he said.

Which is why it’s almost impossible to find a major metropolitan police department that doesn’t maintain a database filled with those nicknames — alongside other notable information: A gang member’s assumed associates, his address, his height and weight plus any tattoos he might have, and his criminal record, if there is one.

In 2004, when a teen driving down Silver Dollar Avenue leaned out his window and shot two men, witnesses told Metro they knew the gunman as Downer. Gang detectives used their moniker file to trace that name back to Randy Lopez. He is now in prison, where, according to the Nevada Corrections Department, he’s known as Ghost.

Some nicknames imply a criminal record on their own: Little Capone, Little Eastwood, Sticky Fingers, Young Gunner and 30 Odd Six, an ode to, or perhaps just odd variation of a gun caliber — 30.06 (pronounced “30-ought-six.”)

Other names are just catchalls. The three most popular categories of black gang members’ nicknames in Las Vegas, according to Metro, are combinations of any single letter of the alphabet with a Loc, Mac or Wak, so you wind up with guys named X-Loc, P-Mac, D-Wak. The next most popular nicknames are Dre and then Baby with any letter following — Baby-X, for example.

The valley’s Hispanic gang members take a different approach. Their top five gang member nicknames are Flaco, Joker, Pee Wee, Puppet and Wicked.

Sociologists have ascribed great meaning to street nicknames, arguing that the monikers indicate the gang members have taken on greater personas or are trying to re-create a sense of family by adopting pet names. Klein hates this kind of academic hype. There’s no real way to intellectualize a nickname, he says. Only “God knows where they come from.”

Sun reporter Alex Richards contributed to this story.