You'll never know anything other than the same old stories revisited over and over if you stick with books/docs/reports. To actually get a feel for the streets and know the things you never heard before you have to mingle with not the guys you read about necessarily but the people that know them and are apart of their lives because those people are the true gossip queens. People from the neighborhood, and neighboring neighborhoods (whatever), friends of friends, friends of family members and so on.