COLUMN ONE : Gangs in Affluent Black Turf : Parents who thought they had escaped urban horrors by entering the middle class find their kids lured by gangs. Though their numbers are small, the youths are increasingly violent.

The future had never seemed brighter for Salmon Paul Daniels Jr. At 18, the son of a successful internist was living in a fashionable condominium just outside Beverly Hills, working a full-time summer job as a grocery store clerk and preparing to go off to college.

Then, one Sunday afternoon in August, after returning home from church, he left to go on a date on the Venice boardwalk. At 6 p.m., Los Angeles police officers found the youth lying in an alley off Speedway, not far from the beach. He was mortally wounded by a gunshot in his back. Witnesses told police he had been attacked by 15 to 25 gang members. Taken to Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital, Daniels died minutes later.

Detectives at first thought that Daniels had been killed by mistake, an innocent middle-class victim of the violence that wracks the city’s poor neighborhoods. But the investigation soon revealed that he had been slain by members of the Sex Jerks, a gang made up of middle-class black teen-agers like him. And more ominously, Daniels’ parents were told by police, Daniels had been associated with the Mobsters, a rival middle-class gang.

“It’s tragic,” said Detective Mike Berchem, an anti-gang expert investigating the Daniels case. “How do you tell a doctor that his son is a gangbanger?”

Even as a tenuous truce has held throughout the summer among South-Central Los Angeles’ omnipresent street gangs, police and youth workers have seen mounting evidence that some children of Los Angeles’ more affluent black families have come under the sway of gang life. Parents who once believed that they had escaped urban horrors by climbing the ladder of success now find those horrors lurking at their doorsteps.

This new wave of “preppy” gangs has become increasingly violent, authorities say. One gang was responsible, police say, for a shooting last month at Westchester High School. Other gangs have been tied to shootings in the Crenshaw area. And similar middle-class factions have been tied to thefts of merchandise at shopping malls scattered from Sherman Oaks to Crenshaw in raid-like operations known as “racking” or “mobbing.”

These youths are lured into gang life for many of the same reasons that poorer teen-agers fall prey to crime--peer pressure, adolescent rebellion, an abiding fascination with gang culture and the lack of supervision by working parents, experts say. Just as gang members represent a small percentage of the teen-age population, middle-class gangs are a nominal fraction of the city’s gang population, according to police.

That is little consolation to Dr. Salmon Paul Daniels Sr., who insists that his son may have known--and befriended--gang members, but was not one of them.

“If the police had their way, they would say everybody is a gang member,” Daniels said.

His son, a Hamilton High School graduate, died Aug. 2, a week before he was to leave for Cuesta College, a two-year institution in San Luis Obispo. When the youth and his 17-year-old date arrived at the Venice boardwalk that day, the strip was alive with its usual carnival atmosphere.

His timing could not have been worse. A group of Sex Jerks was roaming near the beach. One of them apparently spotted the couple and recognized Daniels, Detective Berchem said.

Realizing that her date had been spotted, the girl “pushed him and told him to run,” Berchem said. Daniels vaulted a car as 15 to 30 gang members pursued him. But they grabbed him, dragged him down and started beating him, witnesses told police. One youth pulled out a gun and shot him, police said.

Witnesses were able to identify the gang as members of the Sex Jerks. But they were unable to identify specific culprits, Berchem said. One 16-year-old who lives near Inglewood was arrested, but he is not believed to be the triggerman.

Berchem said investigators believe that Daniels was attacked because of an earlier dispute with the gang--and because of his affiliation with the Mobsters, another preppy gang.

“He didn’t die because he was out walking on the beach,” Berchem said. “He died because he had ties to a gang.”

The elder Daniels was notified about the shooting by a friend of his son. After years of experience as a doctor dealing with South-Central’s human tragedies, the father knew precisely what it meant when a Freeman hospital official on the other end of the phone refused to give his son’s condition.

“I knew right then and there that he was dead,” the doctor said.

Daniels said his son did know gang members--many of them younger teen-agers. He said his son even considered himself something of a mentor to them. “He was very strong on school and talked a few of them into going back to school when they were thinking of quitting,” Daniels said.

The youth loved basketball and cherished a 1990 snapshot of him shaking hands with former Los Angeles Lakers Coach Pat Riley during a trip to Riley’s basketball camp. “He was a very good basketball player,” said Daniels. “But he didn’t play for the school team. He was more interested in dancing.”

The teen-ager’s involvement in an informal hip-hop street dance group explained his baggy clothes and other affectations that might have led police to consider him a gang member, Daniels says. “My son was in a dance group, but he was not a gang member,” he said.

But the youth was one of six students expelled from school in May after an undercover drug operation run by school district police, Hamilton officials said. Although the teen-ager was handed over to city police, his father said that marijuana charges filed against him were dropped. Barred from graduation ceremonies, Daniels Jr. still received his diploma.

Despite their wealth of knowledge about the Crips and Bloods factions in South-Central, police say they know little about the Sex Jerks--and not much more about the workings of other preppy gangs.

According to investigators and probation workers, the Sex Jerks apparently began in the mid-1980s as a dance group based in middle-class Inglewood and Crenshaw neighborhoods. The group turned to scrawling graffiti in the same areas. More recently, police say, the group has become involved in violent crimes--shootings and armed robberies.

But few groups identify themselves by colors, as traditional street gangs do. And they are rarely traced to specific neighborhoods.

The gangs’ hit-and-run “racking” of department stores makes it difficult for witnesses to identify them and for security guards to put up a defense. The gangs typically enter a mall and create a distraction to divert security. While guards tend to the diversion, other gang members grab clothing and escape.

In the Crenshaw area, the Nothing but Trouble gang--composed of young middle-class taggers--has moved into Leimert Park, prompting noise and graffiti complaints from residents and merchants. The park has become the scene of several shootings, and police trace a series of robberies and thefts to the group.

Last year, Rapid Transit District police arrested 38 teen-age members of the gang after they allegedly ransacked a bus, terrorized passengers and caused $10,000 in damage, said RTD Police Officer Leland Tainter.

Joseph White, psychologist and director of African-American Studies at UC Irvine, said that middle-class children are drawn to gangs because they reject their parents’ values.

These youths often have parents who work during the day and lose touch by failing to monitor their activities. Teen-agers also have rejected their privileged status--preferring to adopt what they see as the earthier and grittier lives of the city’s underclass.

Gang life, glorified in films, music videos and popular dress, can be a powerful lure even to middle-class youths, said Dr. Louis Simpson, a psychiatrist at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center. Affluent teen-agers are just as susceptible as their poorer counterparts to the bombardment of exciting images from gang life.

“The media is constantly telling black and minority kids that this is the way to be hip,” he said. “Teen-agers don’t see themselves. They are so intent on this image, but they don’t realize that it is seen as frightening” by adults.

Like many parents, Stanley Henderson’s first reaction was one of disbelief when he learned that his 17-year-old son, Abdul, was a preppy gang member.

Henderson, a security supervisor at USC who lives in Ladera Heights, describes himself as a “firm believer in corporal punishment. When I found out he was involved in gangs, I gave him a whipping he would never forget. We now jokingly call it the Rodney King beating.

“I told him: ‘The police will beat your ass for no reason, just doing their job, “ Henderson said. “ ‘But I’m going to give you this whipping because I love you.’ ”

Abdul Henderson acknowledges that “hanging out is addictive. You keep wanting to have fun, but times are getting tough and I have to think about the future.”

Abdul said he quit his gang this year and tries to persuade his friends to take life more seriously. “If they don’t listen,” he said, “I tell them I don’t have time. I see them on the weekend or catch them on the rebound. But when I have to study, I study.”

Henderson said that in addition to discipline, he monitored his son’s behavior more closely and began communicating more with him, stressing that the youth’s actions might jeopardize the college education Henderson hoped his son would get at USC.

“I didn’t realize just how fortunate I was,” Abdul said. “Now I do.”

Parents sometimes worsen the situation, experts say, by sending their children to live with out-of-state relatives. Others overreact, excessively regulating their children’s lives.

The Rev. Cecil Murray, pastor of First African Methodist Episcopal Church, fears that insulating teen-agers from the lures of gang life is not an effective tack.

“Parents who try to raise their children as hothouse roses--with ideal food, ideal atmosphere, ideal temperature--do them a terrible disservice,” Murray said. “We do not live in an ideal environment. Children have to be equipped to survive.”

In his own way, Salmon Daniels believed that he had been preparing his son for adult survival. Working at a small market next to his father’s family practice, the young Daniels was rarely out of his father’s sight. Sending him to Cuesta College would have removed him from the lure of the streets, his father believed.

The day before young Salmon left on his last date, Daniels Sr. bought the teen-ager some new clothes for his first semester at college.

“He was looking in the mirror, getting ready to leave, and talking to me,” the elder Daniels recalled sadly.

“It can happen to anybody at anytime,” the doctor said. “Nobody is exempt. That is one message that everyone needs to understand. You can’t remove yourself that far. It doesn’t work like that.”