Agents for la vida loca

Suspect Entertainment, the Los Angeles talent and production company that provides gangbanger actors and street thug atmosphere for Hollywood movies, videos and TV commercials, is profiled on the front page of today's Washington Post. Founder Manuel Jiminez is 31 with a past.

Jimenez has actual scars to bolster his claims -- that once he was shot near the crotch and spent three days drinking beer before going to the ER, that he was hit in the head with a tire iron and cut on the back with a knife, that when he was a little kid, growing up on the outskirts of L.A., his father, a heroin addict and alcoholic, used to beat his mother in front of him. Jimenez refuses to describe his own criminal life in any detail. Part of the reason, he says, is that while he was arrested and tried several times -- and spent years in juvenile offender camps and county jail -- "they kept busting me for the wrong thing. Don't get me wrong. I did other stuff I got away with."

After 13 years as an active gang member, Jimenez got a job at Toys R Us. One night, sitting on the couch and watching Jay Leno yuk it up with his guest, director Quentin Tarantino, he heard Tarantino say, essentially, that Hollywood doesn't care about a person's past. "You can be a criminal! That's what he said and I thought, 'That's me. I'm going to get a job in the movies.' "

At that point, Jimenez didn't have a driver's license or a car, so his girlfriend drove him around Los Angeles, looking for movies or television shows shooting on location. He eventually got a break. His first job as an extra was on the asteroid disaster film Deep Impact.

He met his business partner, Jesse Acosta, on the set of The Fast and the Furious, the 2001 film about a ring of L.A. car thieves. They realized they had something to sell: real-life thugs.

The piece is by William Booth, the Post's former national correspondent in Los Angeles who moved over some months ago to cover entertainment.