Leonard David Flippen IV
Leonard Flippen, like all convicts, was assigned a prison number that will follow him and follow his name for the rest of his life. However, quite another number with an entirely different purpose was bestowed upon Leonard long before his involvement in a long string of gang and drug related crimes. It was the number 4, written “IV”. Leonard David Flippen IV was born on June 3, 1961.
“I’m a military brat,” Leonard says in the crisp, forceful and articulate language that usually accompanies a position of authority. “So I was extremely lucky in that area. I lived a very sheltered life up until the age of eleven. My family traveled, so I was exposed to other cultures, and I learned to adapt to them very well.”
When Leonard speaks of his military father, he speaks of a man who would probably have raised his only son with an iron authority inside a framework of tradition.
“My father was a strict disciplinarian. He was mean. Now deep down inside he was a good person, but on the outside he was a terrifying individual. I think that’s where a lot of my authoritarian stuff comes from.”
It is unclear what path a young African American boy being raised in a multicultural environment overseas in a two-parent family might choose. But one would assume that his first career choice would not be drug-running pimp.
“My parents divorced when we were in Germany. My mother left, and she moved my three sisters and me to Atlanta, Georgia—she moved us to the projects of Atlanta, Georgia—she moved us to the ghetto of Atlanta, Georgia. So here’s this eleven-year-old kid with this cultured life who suddenly finds himself in the hood inside a house full of women with no father.”
As was his skill, Leonard adapted to his new environment. But without a dad, and with the dominant male figures in the Atlanta Projects engaged in the business of big city poverty, Leonard very quickly turned to a life of crime.
“That’s when my criminal tendencies started. I can remember aspiring to be a pimp. I was going to be that pimp, and I was going to be a hustler. That’s what the men there did, and that’s what I was going to do.”
So with the bravado of focused intention that Leonard still displays today, that is exactly what he did—at least until his mother, fearing for his life, sent him to live in sunny California. At her request, Leonard packed up his name with its now hollow number “IV” (hollow because it no longer spoke of bloodlines or traditions or paternal guidance), and he moved himself to California.
There, ready to be a man but with no model of fatherhood to guide him, Leonard David Flippen IV would instead be scooped up by a brotherhood of Crips, crime and crack cocaine.
Part II: A Brother Is Not a Father
Leonard Flippen IV’s mother had been warned. People who lived in the Atlanta projects insisted that, given the way her out-of-control son was running the streets and getting in trouble, he was going to get himself killed. So to save his life she sent him to Los Angeles, California. Unfortunately, Atlanta was the frying pan, LA the fire.
“Once I hit California, South Central Los Angeles, I got introduced the Crips, the gang. Unfortunately, I segued easily right into it. That was the era that crack cocaine was introduced into the community. Now, while most of my friends became crack-heads, I became a dealer. That’s where serious trouble started for me.”
Leonard, who today has started an organization called A Vision For Men, believes that his father disappeared at a most crucial moment in a son’s life. Leonard Flippen III, especially because he was a member of the very ritualized world of the U.S. military, occupied a powerful position in a primarily male community that could have tutored, honored and welcomed young Leonard into manhood.
Leonard David Flippen IV as Styx in Blue Train
“In every culture there has been an initiation rite—a ritualized process—to make young boys into men. Men need to earn manhood." However, right when he would have been ready to earn it, his father, as Leonard says, “just wasn’t there.”
Leonard believes that this desire to be initiated is innate, and that a boy will continue to seek it even though it can lead him down many dead end and dangerous roads. The absence of an earned manhood, according to Leonard, “leaves this big, huge, gaping hole that men try to fill with football and cars and guns and gangs and all this other superficial stuff, when in reality what we all know—from one man to another—is that these things aren’t going to do it. There is still something missing.”
“Historically,” says Leonard, “the military has used this void, this need, to entice our young men into giving their lives away. And they do it willingly. Gangs come along and entice young men to do it, and again they do it willingly. All because they want that title of manhood.”
For Leonard, the gang world of the 1970’s inside South Central LA, as well as inside the jails and the prisons, served as his de facto male proving grounds. Yet though this proxy world was decidedly male, it wasn’t a world where fathers nurtured sons toward manhood. It was a world of only brothers—brothers who enticed yet more brothers into giving up everything, even their freedom, in the name of the brotherhood. To a newcomer, especially to a young man without a father, it must have looked a lot like a family and a lot like manhood. But as Leonard would find out, brothers alone—no matter how tough or how many they are—do not make a father. More chapters . . .
