They became the stuff of Second Amendment lore — young men with firearms, patrolling the streets and positioned on rooftops in the Koreatown neighborhood during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
Thirty years later, as the City of Angels again faces threats of anarchy, coupled with a defunded and demoralized police force, many people recall the group of men — later known as the Rooftop Koreans — who took it upon themselves to bulwark their community.
“Back then, I didn’t really have any skin in the game, so to speak,” Tony Moon, now 53, tells The Post.
As the fires and looting crept north from South Central to Koreatown, Moon’s father no longer had a business in the neighborhood. In fact, the family was living in nearby Hollywood.
But a friend’s brother asked for assistance protecting his stereo-equipment store on Hoover Street, and Moon, then 19, joined the militia of around 75 men to patrol the neighborhood from looters and vandals.
It worked. Bedlam gripped the city — the LAPD had stood down to the rioters — but Koreatown remained unscorched.
The ’92 riots erupted on a Wednesday after four LAPD officers were acquitted in a police brutality case in which they were caught on video beating suspect Rodney King, who was black, during an arrest after a high-speed chase for driving while intoxicated.
The unrest lasted six days and would become the most destructive civil disruption in US history, leaving 63 people dead, thousands injured and a billion dollars in property damage.
LA Koreans felt particularly vulnerable; tensions with the black community were at an all-time high.
A Korean shop owner in South Central the previous year shot and killed 15-year-old Latasha Harlins following a struggle when the woman accused the girl of trying to steal a bottle of orange juice. The shopkeeper was found guilty but sentenced only to probation, enraging the black community.
In response, that year rapper Ice Cube released “Black Korea,” a track full of anti-Asian racial epithets and threats of violence against Korean shopkeepers.
“It was lawless. A lot of us wondered if this was going to be a full-on attack on the [Korean] community. You could have pretty much gotten away with anything,” Moon recalls.
But with riots returning to Los Angeles in recent years — Black Lives Matter in summer 2020 following George Floyd’s death and again to a lesser extent last week protesting federal immigration enforcement — Moon sees few, if any, similarities to 1992.
“When the Rodney King verdict came through, there was genuine anger and frustration from that community. And I felt it, too,” Moon tells The Post from his home outside Los Angeles.
“These are not organic. There’s no groundswell support from the community. Having gone through the 2020 BLM-Antifa riots and seeing how those were organized, we know that these are all manufactured, and they need to pay these people to show up,” he says.
He accuses “dark-money NGOs” of bankrolling the unrest, pointing for instance to Neville Singham, a China-linked tech tycoon who’s under House probe.
“Another good example would be the Tesla protests that you saw not that long ago, where they would show up at a specific time and they’re out of there a couple hours later. If you’re really passionate about your cause you would probably stay from sunup to sundown, but you can tell these people were on the clock.”
His experiences in 1990s LA, in part, led to Moon’s early, enthusiastic support for Barack Obama — until the Democrat’s presidential term wore on and Moon became disillusioned with the Washington establishment.
“I have a heart for the black community because I grew up with that culture. My hope was, with Obama, that with the black community, there would be a real, genuine change. Because as a country, we’re only as strong as our weakest link. And right now, those areas are, I consider, our weakest link. Because they are the least educated, have the most crime. But I didn’t see that change with Obama. And I saw how everything was just business as usual. Obama was just a neocon elitist, like everyone else,” Moon says.
“That’s what communism is, which most people don’t understand. These kids that are pushing for socialism, communism think that the people on top are going to be generous and kind to them, but they’re not. They’re just being used as useful tools. It’s a feudal system again.”
While he was born in West Germany and immigrated to America at age 5, Moon grew up with horror stories of life under the communist North Korean regime.
In one family tale, his grandfather — suspected of having ties to anti-revolutionaries — was marched into a field to be executed by North Korean soldiers. A chance flyover of American helicopters spooked the troops, and he escaped.
That’s when the family decided to leave, eventually landing in the United States.
But at 19 years old, when Moon found himself standing guard outside a shopping center on Olympic Boulevard and New Hampshire Avenue carrying the Remington 870 shotgun he’d bought himself with his first paycheck, he wasn’t thinking of any of that.
He always thought of himself as an Angeleno first — being Korean had little to do with it.
At the time, “I was kind of a screw up. I didn’t finish high school. My dad was on to me,” Moon recalls. He got his act together and went to the University of Southern California, where he studied business. He began working as a mortgage lender and started a family; his kids are now 14 and 16. “I became just a Joe Schmo citizen.”
As COVID-19 restrictions intensified in 2020, Moon began to suspect the authorities were lying about the illness’ severity. Then he started following bizarre behavior from vote-counting precincts on election night that year.
He joined Twitter to have a place to vent his political frustrations and was shocked to discovere he’d become a meme: The younger generation had stumbled upon 1992’s “Rooftop Koreans” (a term Moon had never heard before) and, from 2020 riots’ ashes, had sent out the bat-signal beckoning their return.
“They understood the call went out. A lot of the Korean guys were saying, ‘Yeah, I’ll go out again,’” Moon remembers. (Turns out they weren’t needed; Koreatown was left untouched in 2020, as if someone had already gotten the message.)
By now the mild-mannered suburban father was rapidly becoming a full-on political activist. On Jan. 6, 2021, Moon showed up in Washington, DC, to express solidarity with election-integrity protesters — though he didn’t go inside the Capitol that day.
“I would fight for anyone’s right to protest and speak their mind regardless of whatever side of the issue you’re on,” Moon says, taking a swig from an orange water bottle — the very same bottle that in July 2021 led him to become another meme.
That month he joined a protest outside Wi Spa in LA’s Koreatown in support of women who’d complained about a nude male in their changing room, clashing with pro-transgender activists. As Moon was giving an interview a woman approached and kicked him in the groin. He reacted by bonking her with the water bottle, a moment that went viral.
With more anti-Trump protests being organized across the country, does Moon think we’re in for a repeat of 1992? Or a sequel to 2020’s “Summer of Love”?
Not really.
“You can’t fool people a hundred percent of the time. You can’t use the same playbook over and over again. People have a certain degree of pattern recognition,” he says, believing the unrest is more theater than heart.
“I think everyone’s going through riot fatigue.”
Maybe even the ones being paid for it.
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