Don’t call him Lotto.
For 18 years, Lotto was a famous gangbanger and member of the Tre Tres.
In other words, a nobody.
“I changed my real name to a street name. I became an actor. I became part of a circle of people manipulating each other. I did it so I could blend in, so I could breathe.”
Larry Webster, a.k.a. Lotto, has been out of prison for 27 months now, which for a gangbanger is a lifetime. “The last time of incarceration I found myself,” he said. “I was tired of being locked up.”
He was in prison with a good friend who, upon being released, returned to the street and was killed. “It made me change my life.”
It was not so much because his friend was murdered, but because nobody really knew him when he was alive, Webster said. All anybody knew was the character his friend played in the gang.
Webster didn’t want that to happen to him. And he couldn’t stand the thought of that happening to his four sons, who, to various degrees, already had succumbed to the allure of gang life.
“To get to know my kids, I had to mature as a man,” Webster said. “I had to learn to love myself. I was no good to them unless I could do that.”
Webster spent his childhood in Waco, Texas, where his mother had a drug problem. He lived in a series of foster homes until his grandmother took custody of him and brought him to Colorado.
“She was a hard worker and so was my grandfather. Neither one had much quality time for me,” he said.
So he found the gangs, where “somebody always was there when you needed to talk,” and he took on the role of Lotto.
Somehow despite Lotto’s busy schedule with his fellow gangbangers, Webster earned a diploma from Manual High School, where he ran track.
“I was a track star and I was supposed to go to college,” he said. “I had the clothes and everything. I was going to go to Adams State.
“But I was hanging with the gangs.”
There’s no excuse for what Lotto did on the street: the guns, the drugs, the assaults. “Sure, I got beat up and shot, and I did my share. I don’t want to glorify the ignorant things I’ve done. To say I was ignorant is better for me.”
Instead of college, Webster ended up in prison, where for a long time he was still Lotto. Then a few years ago, he started to analyze what he’d become, and suddenly he realized something.
Everybody knew Lotto.
Almost nobody knew Larry Webster.
And Lotto didn’t really exist.
“Larry Webster had an identity, a real identity with moral values,” he said. “Lotto was an actor.”
About the same time, two other things hit him like a fist in the jaw.
One was the stark realization that “if you do wrong, sooner or later you’re going to get caught,” he said.
The other was the fact that everything that had become important to him was an illusion. “The clothes, the jewelry, the cars, even sometimes the friendships … strip them away and you’re naked. You’re nothing.”
In a gang, people say they love you, he said. “They don’t even know you.”
Webster insists he is through with gang life. “I don’t deal with nobody no more.”
He’s picking up jobs on construction crews – doing demolition work, roofing, carpentry, maintenance. “It’s hard. I don’t have no help,” he said.
“If I could, I’d apologize to Colorado for the things I’ve done. I want the community to know that I’m a man now. I didn’t become a man until I was 36.”
Webster also has a message for the people from his beloved ‘hood.
“I want the black community to ask themselves something: Have you forgotten the things we went through? Have you forgotten slavery? Yeah, there are hard things today, but we are oppressing ourselves and we’re doing it for nothing.
“Life right now is all about money. You see a lot of people spend $100 on athletic shoes or a shirt instead of a tutor to further their kids’ education. It’s ignorant.
“I done changed my life.”
Don’t ever call him Lotto. Lotto is gone.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-954-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
