IT WAS NO GREAT SURPRISE WHEN shotgun blasts shattered the silence of a working-class neighborhood on Salt Lake City's west side in February. In a ritual common to many urban areas, residents gawked at the splintered windows of the targeted house, thanked God nobody was hurt, cursed the shootings that threaten their safety--and then got on with their lives. Even in devout, pastoral Utah, they're getting used to gang violence. But they don't have ordinary gangs. Investigators think the blasts were aimed at relatives of a young Pacific Islander who police believe founded the Utah Tongan Crip Gangsters, the state's dominant Polynesian gang.
Missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have long devoted particular attention to Polynesia, perhaps because some Mormon scholars believe that a lost tribe of Israel settled there. Tonga is now roughly 45 percent Mormon; Samoa, about one third. As a result, many emigrants from the islands have settled in the capital of Mormonism, Salt Lake City. But acculturation has not been easy in a state that's 93 percent white, and some kids have reacted by joining up with the likes of the Tongan Crips or the Sons of Samoa. A police study estimates that more than 10 percent of gang members in the area are Pacific Islanders. And they're causing more and more trouble. "They're not doing more crimes, but the crimes are becoming more violent," says Det. Bill Robertson of the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Gang Unit. "When you come up against a 250-pound Polynesian, you'd better have some backup or you're going to get your melon thumped."
Or worse. In March, police say, two Polynesian gang members, one waving a sawed-off shotgun, robbed a tanning salon, a clothing store and two pizza parlors within the space of two hours, firing a blast for effect in one store. That spree followed the robbery of four banks by a team of islanders. Less spectacular assaults and robberies--symptoms, some say, of the gangs' macho ethicare also rife.
Sonasi Po'uha, a 20-year-old Polynesian, is known on the street as "Lazee." "I'm getting out," he says, though "I still have a little more gangbanger in me." He remembers sending younger kids on "missions" to "test their nuts." Po'uha, like many Polynesian gang members, is Mormon, which puzzles and disturbs LDS leaders. "We've got some kids who are believing, who say, 'The church is important in my life, but I'm still in a gang'," says church Elder Alexander Morrison, "I just weep for them." Some say the Mormon policy of organizing separate Tongan "wards," rather than absorbing the immigrants into established congregations, has added to the alienation that makes gang membership appealing. Church leaders deny responsibility for the sins of their Polynesian flock but nevertheless have begun an extensive outreach and parent-education program as the flow of islanders continues. "This is Zion," says Rod Hunt, a Samoan policeman in Salt Lake City. "Mormons say Utah is the place to go." If only the promised land were more like heaven.
DANIEL GLICK and JEFF RICE in Salt Lake