SALT LAKE CITY — As Ron Stallworth tells it, gang members thought Utah police were a joke.
“One kid,” Stallworth recalled in an interview with FOX 13 News, “even said, ‘Coming to Utah and dealing with you guys is like going to Disneyland,’ which really pissed me off.
“I probably violated his rights a little bit when I grabbed him by the neck, pushed him against the wall and told him to never talk to me or any other Utah cop in that manner.”
To Stallworth, the badge was a tool to make a difference. Stallworth’s difference was… different.
His infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado Springs, Colorado, became a book that Spike Lee turned into the film “BlacKKKlansman,” a somewhat-fictionalized account of the Black cop Stallworth fooling America’s foremost bigots.
Stallworth’s new book, “The Gangs of Zion: A Black Cop’s Crusade in Mormon Country,” picks up a few years later, mid-1980s Salt Lake City. It reads like a Western as much as a memoir. In so many words, Stallworth is the confident stranger who arrives to clean up the town, if not the whole state.
GANGSTERS: UTAH STYLE
The Utah Department of Public Safety hired him to be a narcotics officer. After seeing Utah had burgeoning gangs, which Stallworth credits himself as recognizing before others, Stallworth ditched the undercover work for on-the-streets regulating.
“I knew I was right,” Stallworth said of the self-confidence that runs through the book. “I knew I could back up the things that I was saying.
“I never said anything that I wasn't prepared to get on the witness stand, put my hand on the Bible and say, ‘I do’ to the judge.”
Stallworth writes in the book about seeing Bloods and Crips from Los Angeles arriving in Utah. They created new crack markets.
A report Stallworth sent his superiors circa 1987 recommended that the state start an anti-gangs task force. That task force exists to this day. Stallworth was assigned to it.
Stallworth soon noticed a made-in-Utah shift — young white men claiming to be Bloods and Crips.
“And my partner, who is a devout Mormon,” Stallworth told FOX 13, “cracked up when he heard it, and I was cracking up with him because we had never heard of white Bloods and Crips.”
“They also say they're Mormons.”
That partner was Salt Lake City police officer Kevin Crane. He died in 2016. Stallworth dedicates “Gangs of Zion” to him and compliments Crane throughout.
In video below, Stallworth talks about his partner on the gang task force, Salt Lake City’s Kevin Crane.
But in a Western, for every great partner, there’s a crop of locals who are more hinderance than asset. That’s how a lot of Utahns come off in “Gangs of Zion.”
CHECK YO SELF
Stallworth writes about a visit to Price where he found gang graffiti all over town, including near the rear door of the police headquarters where the chief entered every day.
That chief, Aleck Shilaos, spoke to FOX 13 News by phone. Shilaos contends that no one, including Stallworth, actually found gang members in Price. And that’s a point of pride for the long-retired chief.
Price had gang prevention efforts in place, Shilaos said, that included communication with the school district and speaking with parents every time a kid was caught drawing a gang sign on a wall.
“And it worked,” Shilaos said. “But we did have wannabes — don’t get me wrong — at the junior high level.”
To Stallworth, Price was an example of what he saw across Utah. Leaders were applying for grants targeting gangs while also telling the public they didn’t have a gang problem.
“They kept falling back on the old dodge,” Stallworth said. “‘This is Utah. Utah is white. Utah is conservative. Utah is primarily Mormon.’”
Speaking of that last point, Stallworth describes one co-worker’s effort to convert him to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Stallworth responded with some pointed questions centered on race.
Let’s just say there was no further attempt by that co-worker to add Stallworth’s name to the membership rolls.
“Gangs of Zion” also touches on Stallworth becoming an authority on rap lyrics, complete with testimony before Congress. There’s a cameo by Ice Cube during a concert stop in Utah.
THE BOTTOM LINE
The memoir does not have a storybook ending.
Stallworth was removed from the gang task force in 2000 over what he describes as bias. It wasn’t the racial kind.
Stallworth contends that his superiors at the Utah Department of Public Safety favored cops who came up through the state trooper ranks. Stallworth was re-assigned to the state’s concealed firearm permit program.
Below, Stallworth discusses his final five years — or was it four? — as a police officer in Utah.
Meanwhile, Stallworth and his wife, Micki, were raising their two children in Davis County. Micki Stallworth, who met her husband in Colorado Springs, died of cancer in 2004. Stallworth describes an episode at work in the midst of grieving that aggravated his anguish.
His 19th and final year at the department — there was supposed to be a 20th — concluded not so much in a ride into the sunset as a hop onto a stagecoach that was going anywhere but where he was. While he still has family in Utah, Stallworth has remarried and moved to El Paso, Texas, where he grew up.
Now age 71, Stallworth isn’t on any book tours.
“I've been diagnosed with prostate cancer,” he told FOX 13 News. “I've had surgery. It's stage one.”
“The bottom line is,” Stallworth added, “there are too many people in the world left for me to piss off, and I'm going to write another book and address it all.
“And I'm not going anywhere.”