Swans and Pistols

Fashion icon, Broadway and Hollywood insider, mob mistress, confidante to notorious gang members of both Crips and Bloods, wife, mother, award-winning journalist, Léon Bing has not followed the typical path through life. From her formative relationship with her mother to her days as a star model to her sisterly relationship with Mama Cass Elliot and ultimate reinvention as the author of the bestselling gang exposé, Do or Die, Swans and Pistols details Bing's always exciting and sometimes dangerous life. In a series of riveting stories of unconventionality, Bing wrestles with the themes of mothers, daughters, and reinvention-a concept inseparable from the experience of her early adult life in the 1960s and the city she called home.

A former model, Léon Bing is the author of Do or Die, a profile of the archrival gangs the Bloods and the Crips, which she wrote after spending extensive periods of time among the two factions. She lives in Los Angeles.