Detroit isn't the best place to grow up. Sure, there are worse places, God knows how bad that it really could have been. But in a place like Detroit, everyone knows everybody's business. You know who's mama is a crack whore with three different kids from three different dads. You know who's stripping to put food on the table, and you know who was involved with what gang when it all went sideways last week. Yeah, it's not the worst, but that doesn't make it any better. Hell, even in the heyday of the auto industry, it was still a racist piece of shit town. And after the industry collapsed in the Great Depression, it got bad, then after world War Two it all went to shit, the entire city seemed to turn on itself. Each act of violence was fuelled by money, and each act of retribution had to be bigger and badder than the last one was. The seventies saw the rise of cocaine and leading to a full-blown epidemic in the eighties. Then there was Devil's Night, what used to be for small-scale pranks in the thirties saw out of control fires and other acts of violence and arson in the latest decades. Rising gang activity equals lowered property values equals poverty means the entire city went to fucking shit and there's no way in hell they're climbing back out of that hole anytime soon.
Every fucking person in that god forsaken city is controlled by money. That last horrific shootout? Revenge for a drug sale gone south. Someone robbing a convenience store for 400 bucks? 400 can fucking make or break you in Detroit. An entire city divided, growing worse every single day. West Side up against the East Side, both against the SouthWest. Everyone for themselves. And in a place like that, you either join a gang, or you die bloody.
Even as a kid growing up in Harmony Village he knew he had to get in good with a gang if he wanted to live past puberty, so he did what he had to. The Los Lobos had welcomed him into their gang with open arms, well after he went through the ritualistic hazing and initiation. But once he was in he had everything he could want, he just had to move some coke every once in a while or hide some boosted weapons in his home. Maybe steal a car, until he took it all over in one bloody night. He needed respect. And to get respect, you need power. To get power, you need to be top dog, the big man with the bigger gun.
Dante was the only one who knew what he had done, and he definitely didn't approve, but it hadn't mattered at the time. What was he going to do? Go to the cops and rat on his little brother? He going to go running off to tell their mom? No, he was just going to have to deal with it. Not that it even mattered anyways. Fuck, nothing mattered back then, he was just a teenager trying to fit in. By fitting in, he meant 'staying alive.' And if fitting in meant killing people, dealing drugs, boosting cars, selling guns? Well then, he was all over it.