Sam Slovick

The wad of crumpled $20 bills stashed under Ollie North's pillow had Freeway Rick Ross' fingerprints all over it when the CIA got caught slanging rocks in South Central back in the '80s. Grimy, crumpled and smeared with ghetto tears, the deal bought Freeway Rick a very public trial. His......

Papa Dad didn't make the big Martin Luther King Jr. Parade on MLK Boulevard. He was shot dead on Jan. 3 at 103rd and Crenshaw. Jay Rock and Punch didn't attend, either. It's a turf thing. They want to stay alive. So on the day of the parade, they hung......

"They call me Gizmo, I'm trying to go fuck somebody up," the man says with the manufactured intensity of someone who has been locked up 10 of his 27 years. He is 5 feet 6, 170 pounds, bald, buff and gangster-tense. "The devil tickled my feet," he says, considering his......

There are at least 63 moons of Jupiter, about the same number of students under the tutelage of Alex Stickler (aka Mister) on any given weekday at downtown’s Abram Friedman Occupational Center. Steady and studied, Mr. Stickler mans the shot-caller seat in a capacity-crowd classroom, a sea of bodies in......

Astronomers have recently discovered an extremely prolific star factory in a very remote galaxy. This galaxy is 12.3 billion light-years from School on Wheels on the corner of downtown’s Fifth and Pedro streets, a tiny bright light in the decidedly dark universe of a childhood on Skid Row. School on......

“Twenty five, twenty four, twenty three, twenty two, twenty one,” the kindergarten class counts down in unison, all eyes intently focused on teacher even as a few children struggle to sit still at Las Familias Del Pueblo. The nonprofit, one-room storefront school, which serves the garment workers of downtown L.A......