The gangs of Zion A Black cop's crusade in Mormon country

Stallworth follows up Black Klansman with another fascinating account of his undercover police work. In 1989, a decade after his infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado Springs, Stallworth joined the Utah Department of Public Safety to help combat the state's gang problem. Two years before Stallworth began his work in Utah, the LAPD had warned state officials that members of the Bloods and the Crips had started operations there; by the time Stallworth arrived, the rival gangs had set aside their differences to partner on crack cocaine sales in Salt Lake City. As Stallworth infiltrated the gangs with the help of a special task force, he discovered that Utah's federally funded Job Corps was skimping on background checks for applicants, and thus inadvertently flooding the state with gang members. Stallworth wrings gripping drama from his fight to expose the holes in the program, which earned him pushback from community leaders and led him to testify before the U.S. Senate in 1995. Readers will be astounded. Agent: Sarah Passick, Park & Fine Literary. (Sept.)

Mormon Crips? Yes, courtesy of the collision of suburban ennui and "gangsta" culture via West Coast rap acts. "I inhabit two identities that most people view as contradictory: I am both a Black man and a cop." So writes Stallworth, whose improbable adventures as a Colorado detective yielded the book and filmBlacKkKlansman. Of this episode he writes, modestly, "I wasn't put in narcotics because I was exceptional. I was put in narcotics because they needed a Black face to penetrate Black environments." After running afoul of higher-ups, Stallworth went to Arizona, agreed with Public Enemy's assessment of the place (they hated it), and moved north to Salt Lake City, where he discovered a thriving Mormon subculture of Crips and Bloods. In that milieu, Stallworth did prove himself exceptional: he was able to make sweeping busts largely because the other cops were blissfully unaware of or wanted nothing to do with the problem. It may seem a surprise that Mormon Utah should be a hotbed of gangbanging and drug-trade turf wars, but by Stallworth's account the land of the Saints is awash in crack, meth, and various other non-caffeinated substances. One surprise for Stallworth was the relevance and lure of gangsta rap, which, growing up in the '60s, he wasn't especially attuned to. He soon became an adept, with a perhaps surprising understanding of why a song like "Fuck Tha Police" should resonate--and why the rappers had a point. "The more I learned and lectured, the more I defended the artists' freedom of expression," Stallworth writes. That didn't dampen his enthusiasm for getting the job done until, once again, he ran athwart of the suits upstairs, about which he writes at length and with considerable--and understandable--frustration. A provocative memoir that illustrates, as if there were any question about it, how strange the world is. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.