Stanley Tookie Williams III (December 29, 1953 – December 13, 2005) was an American gangster who co-founded and led the Crips gang in Los Angeles. He and Raymond Washington formed an alliance in 1969 that established the Crips as Los Angeles' first major African-American street gang. During the 1970s, Williams was the de facto leader of the Crips and the prominent crime boss in South Los Angeles.
Williams's activities with the Crips ended in 1979 when he was arrested for the murder of four people during two robberies. Convicted of the murders in 1981 and sentenced to death, he spent over two decades on death row until he was executed by lethal injection in 2005. The highly publicized trial of Williams and extensive appeals for clemency sparked debate on the status of the death penalty in California.
Early years Williams was born on December 29, 1953, in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was christened Stanley Tookie Williams III but was usually called by his middle name Tookie (pronounced ). His father abandoned the family when Williams was one year old. In 1959, Williams moved with his mother, Louisiana Williams, to Los Angeles, California, and settled in the city's South Central area.
As Williams' mother worked several jobs to support them, Williams was a latchkey kid and often engaged in mischief on the streets. He recalled that, as a child, he would make some money from "the hustlers": "These hustlers would bet on just about anything—even who could spit, urinate, or throw a rock the farthest. I have witnessed cockfights, cricket fights, fish fights, and pay-per-view street fights among individuals between six and fifty years of age. Older hustlers would bet on children to fight".
Williams said that he was often paid a couple dollars after dogfights to take care of the injured dogs. He was also occasionally paid to participate in these street fights as a teenager and earned his reputation as a vicious street fighter in South Central's West Side afterwards. This, alongside a host of other factors that made him "intimidating", contributed to his expulsion from George Washington Preparatory High School and denied entry by several other high schools in the South Central area.
Williams was sent to Los Padrinos and then to Central Juvenile Hall for the first time after the formation of the Crips, charged with a robbery at Clifton's restaurant which he denied participating in.
Gang activity
In the late 1960s, juvenile crime increased in South Central as older gangs disbanded to join the Black Power Movement, most notably as part of the Black Panther Party, initially to protect black people from police brutality and corruption in the Los Angeles Police Department. Increasingly violent youth gangs formed in their place, which Williams initially despised as predatory. Because of his viciousness and willingness to fight older youths, Williams earned the respect of many gangsters on the West Side. These gangs were mostly small-time neighborhood cliques that operated independently from each other and therefore leadership was not chosen but determined informally. At age fifteen, Williams was invited into a small West Side clique after he befriended a local teenager, Donald "Doc/Sweetback" Archie. Williams soon earned the clique's respect after beating up one of their members for insulting his mother. Williams became the unofficial leader of this clique as his violent reputation began to spread across South Central.
In 1969, aged 15, Williams was arrested in Inglewood for car theft and was sent to the Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey. While doing time at the detention center, Williams was introduced to Olympic weightlifting by the facility's gym coach, which would spark an interest in bodybuilding. By his release from custody in early 1971, aged 17, Williams was physically bigger and stronger. According to Williams, upon his release from custody the review board asked him what he planned to do after being released, to which he replied "being the leader of the biggest gang in the world."
Shortly after his release from prison, Williams was approached by Raymond Washington at Washington Preparatory High School after hearing of Williams through a mutual friend of both young men. The friend had informed Washington of Williams' toughness and his willingness to fight members of larger, more established street gangs such as the L.A. Brims and the Chain Gang. According to Williams' account of the meeting, what struck him about Washington was that, besides being incredibly muscular, he and his cohort were dressed similar to Williams and his clique, wearing leather jackets with starched Levi's jeans and suspenders. Washington was from South Central's East Side, where he was a prominent gangster similar to Williams, and proposed they use their influence in their respective regions to form the larger Crips street gang. The purpose for creating the gang initially was to eliminate all street gangs and create a "bull force" neighborhood watch in South Central. Williams said: "We started out—at least my intent was to, in a sense, address all of the so-called neighboring gangs in the area and to put, in a sense—I thought 'I can cleanse the neighborhood of all these, you know, marauding gangs.' But I was totally wrong. And eventually, we morphed into the monster we were addressing."
Williams stated he founded the Crips not with the intention of eliminating other gangs, but to create a force powerful enough to protect local black people from racism, corruption and brutality at the hands of the police. At the time of the Crips' initial formation there were only three Crip sets: Washington's East Side Crips (later called East Coast Crips), Williams' West Side Crips (later the Eight Tray Gangster Crips), and the Compton Crips, led by a teenager named Mac Thomas. Williams formed the West Side Crips using his own influence, having befriended many clique leaders and street thugs on the West Side. Washington, Williams and Thomas went on an aggressive and violent recruitment campaign throughout the black ghettos of Los Angeles, where they challenged the leaders of other gangs to one-on-one street fights. This process resulted in most gangs agreeing to join the Crips, and they were converted from small independent cliques into subgroups (sets) of a gang within the larger gang. The Crips quickly became the biggest street gang in South Central by both numbers and territory, however, numerous gangs still resisted losing their independence. These hold-out gangs formed a similar alliance to combat the Crips' influence, branding themselves as the Bloods, and would become their fiercest rivals. Williams' former rivals, the L.A. Brims and the Chain Gang, joined the Blood alliance and became The Brims and The Inglewood Family Bloods, respectively.
As leader of the West Side Crips, Williams became the archetype of the new wave of Los Angeles gang members that would engage in random acts of violence against rival gang members and innocent people alike. Williams and his best friend, Curtis "Buddha" Morrow, would noticeably participate in these activities, striking fear into both street criminals and the residents of South Central, Watts, Inglewood, and Compton. Williams' violent acts became legendary in southern Los Angeles' criminal underworld as on numerous occasions criminal charges brought against him ended in disarray, and prosecutors were unable to convict him due to lack of evidence.
Crips leader
Soon after the foundation of the Crips, other leaders were either murdered or incarcerated and Williams became regarded as the de facto leader. In 1974, Raymond Washington was arrested for 2nd degree robbery and served two years in prison in Tracy. Raymond was soon murdered after his release from prison. On February 23, 1973, Curtis "Buddha" Morrow was shot to death in South Central following a petty argument. Mac Thomas was murdered under mysterious circumstances in the mid-1970s. Williams began to live an ironic double life in which he worked as an anti-gang youth counselor in Compton while also serving as the overboss for one of the largest gangs in Los Angeles. Williams would work as a counselor and study sociology at Compton College during working hours, then spend his free time participating in numerous violent attacks against the Bloods.
In 1976, Williams was wounded in a drive-by shooting while sitting on the porch of his house in Compton. The shooting was committed by members of the Bloods, who shot at Williams from their car as he was letting his dog out for a walk in the evening. Attempting to avoid getting hit, Williams dove to the ground from the porch, but was shot in both of his legs. Williams was told by doctors that he would never walk again, but after a nearly year-long process of physical rehabilitation and an intense workout regimen, he ultimately regained his ability to walk. After the shooting, Williams re-developed a substance abuse problem when he began smoking PCP. Williams had begun dabbling in street drugs around the age of twelve, and as a preteen befriended a neighborhood pimp who, in return for performing errands for him, would reward Williams with money and drugs, particularly Quaaludes, barbiturates (then known as "Red Devils") or marijuana. Williams' personal life began to unravel; his maternal grandmother, with whom he was very close, died in 1976. He lost his counseling job in 1977 after being implicated in a robbery that was committed by two youths from a group home that Williams supervised. He was denied an opportunity to compete in an amateur bodybuilding contest after it was discovered that he was a gang leader (Williams would later appear on the popular 1970s NBC game show The Gong Show, performing a posedown routine). Eventually his gangster lifestyle began to take a mental toll on him, which included a brief stay in the psychiatric ward of a hospital after Williams experienced a bad trip while high on PCP. With each of these setbacks Williams increasingly found himself using PCP and supported his drug habit by intimidating and robbing drug dealers in South Central.
Murder convictions
In 1981, Williams was convicted of four counts of murder committed in two of three separate incidents. He always maintained his innocence, though subsequent court reviews concluded that there was no compelling reason to grant him a retrial. The prosecution stated that Williams met with a man identified in court documents only as "Darryl" late on Tuesday evening, February 28, 1979.
Williams introduced Darryl to friends of his, Alfred "Blackie" Coward and to Bernard "Whitie" Trudeau, and a short time after the initial meeting, Darryl, driving a brown station wagon and accompanied by Williams and Coward drove to the home of James Garret. Williams frequently stayed and kept some possessions at Garret's home, including a 12-gauge shotgun, and after about 10 minutes inside, Williams returned with the shotgun. He, Darryl and Coward then went to the home of Tony Sims in Pomona, where they discussed possible locations to obtain money through robbery.