Wiping the Slate Clean

The off-white wall at the side of the house on Millbury Avenue in Bassett was splotched with the names of gangs and their members, as well as other erratically written messages and obscenities.

The painted-on scrawlings disgusted at least one neighbor, who decided to call the San Gabriel Valley Boys Club’s graffiti hot line. That same day, Chris Ramirez, 22, arrived in a pickup truck with paints and rollers. Fifteen minutes later, the wall was painted clean.

At the same time, Boys Club officials had begun a related process they consider as important as ridding the area of eyesores.

They attempt to determine who might be involved by tracking names and nicknames scribbled among the graffiti and meeting with those responsible.

“What we really want is for them to stop doing it,” said Clayton Hollopeter, 47, executive director of the San Gabriel Valley Boys Club.

Work of Gang Members

Artie Gonzalez, a gang member involved in another Boys Club program to assist troubled youth, was suspected of taking part in putting the graffiti on the wall because his parents live nearby. When a Boys Club official found him at their home, he admitted that he was partly responsible.

“The night we done this, we were partying,” Gonzalez told Jack Gutowski, a Boys Club official. “Someone brought out a spray can and said, ‘Hey, let’s write on the wall.’ ”

For 14 years, the Boys Club has been cleaning up after those who have left their marks with spray cans and paint brushes. Hollopeter estimates that the club has removed “millions of square feet” of graffiti.

What was a public service during the Bicentennial has expanded into a money-making operation.

‘Gift to the Country’

“It started as a public service,” said Hollopeter. “Our national organization had an idea that we should do something for the Bicentennial. It was our gift to the country.”

By 1979, the program had developed into a major source of funds for the local Boys Club, which operates a wide range of sports programs and youth services for an estimated 200 youths each week from its building in El Monte.

The cities of Alhambra, El Monte, South El Monte, San Dimas, West Covina and Hawaiian Gardens contract with the Boys Club for graffiti removal and are expected to pay the club $108,000 this year for its services. Los Angeles County will pay the club an additional $95,000 this year to clean up unincorporated areas within Supervisor Pete Schabarum’s 1st District.

The money goes to pay the salaries of the six full-time workers and the expenses of the program, with some left over for other Boys Club activities.

People who live in any of the six cities or unincorporated areas can call the seven-day-a-week, 24-hour hot line at (818) 442-6666 to report graffiti on public andprivate property. A crew usually arrives that day or the next to clean it up at no charge.

Private Firm Competes

The Boys Club faces competition from at least one private firm.

Graffiti Removal of Monterey Park provides service for 13 cities in Los Angeles and Orange counties, including the San Gabriel Valley cities of Monterey Park, Montebello, Rosemead and La Verne, according to Tim Sullivan, 39, a partner in the firm.

Sullivan said his company employs seven full-time workers. He would not disclose how much money is received from the cities.

But he said the competition from the Boys Club doesn’t bother him.

“We have plenty enough work,” Sullivan said.

Graffiti removal is more than a business venture for the Boys Club, according to Hollopeter. He believes that quick elimination of graffiti may help reduce gang violence.

Ken Weldon, community relations supervisor for the El Monte Police Department, agreed. By painting over the graffiti before it can become an issue between gangs, violence might be averted, he said.

Rises With Gang Activity

Gang members use graffiti to instigate violence, he said. “As gang activity rises, so will graffiti.”

Weldon said that violence most often occurs after a gang ventures into another’s territory and scrawls its symbol or acronym as a challenge to the local gang. Nicknames are left behind to show who has visited.

“The rival gang will come and cross that off,” Weldon said. “It’s a put-down.”

When gang graffiti is left on walls too long, it sometimes leads to fights, according to Gutowski, director of the Boys Club’s Project Return, a program that helps juvenile offenders readjust to society after they are released from probation camps.

Gonzalez, a 19-year-old member of the Bassett Chico street gang, has taken part in Project Return.

Gonzalez has served time in county probation camps for auto theft and narcotics convictions, and knows firsthand about the connection between graffiti and violence.

“One time, I went over to Puente (gang territory in Puente Hills)--the heart of their neighborhood,” Gonzalez said. “They had writing on their wall. I was drunk and I started crossing them out and they seen me and I heard a bullet come by me.”

Friend Not So Lucky

Gonzalez said he ran to his car and got away, but on another occasion, one of his friends wasn’t as lucky: “One of my friends was writing on the wall here at the liquor store. They just shot him. He was hanging on the fence when they found him. He was trying to get away.” His friend died.

For most people, though, graffiti is an irritation.

Don Waites, 55, lives with his wife and two children across the street from the Gonzalez home. The wooden fence around his house has been stained with graffiti several times during the 19 years he has lived in the area.

“It’s a damned shame,” Waites said. “How would they like it if someone wrote on their wall? I’ll bet they wouldn’t.”

Waites said that since he confronted the youths he believes were responsible for the graffiti three years ago, he hasn’t had to worry. He said he asked them to stop, and they did. But he added: “If you say too much, they’re going to come back and start writing.”

Started in 1972

The Boys Club began removing graffiti in 1972, eight years after Hollopeter--who grew up in San Marino and has a master’s degree in education from New York University--co-founded the club and began serving as its director.

For 18 months, Hollopeter and his helpers painted off graffiti in a four-square-mile area of El Monte, and charted the areas where it appeared. He also kept track of the names of the gangs and their members that were scrawled among the writings. For the next six years, the club worked on and off at removing graffiti, helping out on special projects and organizing volunteers.

Hollopeter began recruiting local gang members to help him decipher the special written language that exists among gangs and to identify those leaving their signatures on the walls. He then began visiting their homes.

“We inquired as to what was happening in their lives,” Hollopeter said. “We found that the times when there was high stress, graffiti appeared.” He found that different things contributed to high stress, ranging from trouble with girlfriends to stabbings or shootings involving friends or family.

A ‘Cry for Help’

“If we found graffiti, we were no longer mad at the person for doing it, but interpreted it as a written cry for help,” Hollopeter said.

And in 1979, when county funds became available, Boys Club social workers began making regular home visits to those who left their nicknames sprayed on walls.

Hollopeter “has made (graffiti) a science and shown that it’s not just scrawling on the wall,” Gutowski said.

“We began to ask them why they wrote on the walls,” Hollopeter said. “They gave me all kinds of answers. A lot of them weren’t accurate. A lot of them don’t know why they write on walls.”

On the same afternoon the wall behind the Gonzalezes’ home was being painted clean, Gutowski visited Artie Gonzalez.

Carrying a bottle of beer, Gonzalez came out into the street and admitted he had taken part in the painting. The night he and his buddies spray-painted the wall, he said; it was just something to do.

Pressure From Peers

Gonzalez also said that peer pressure contributes to graffiti.

“When you’re with your home boys and they say let’s do this or that, you just do it,” Gonzalez said. “If you don’t, they say, ‘Are you scared?’ ”

Hollopeter said Boys Club workers make home visits to at least three or four youths every week and that graffiti is one of the topics discussed.

The El Monte Police Department also conducts graffiti-related home visits, Weldon said.

“If a kid writes on the wall, we make a home visit,” Weldon said. “If they have problems, we try to help work them out or pass it along to an agency that can.” When that doesn’t work “we get them into the (juvenile justice) system. That’s our last alternative.”

Recruit From Neighborhoods

In filling jobs on its graffiti crew, the Boys Club tries to hire workers from the neighborhoods they will work in because they can better understand some of the problems and pressures local youths face.

Ramirez, 22, the young man who cleaned up the graffiti on the Gonzalezes’ wall, works for about $5 an hour as a crew supervisor. Ramirez, of Hawaiian Gardens, started working for the Boys Club a couple of years ago. He had previously served time in probation camps for assault, robbery and violating probation from previous offenses such as vandalism and disturbing the peace. He has stayed out of trouble for five years.

Ramirez said he can empathize with the juveniles that paint graffiti.

“I can understand where they’re coming from,” he said. But when the authors of the graffiti hassle him for getting rid of it, as sometimes happens, Ramirez tries to “make them understand where I’m coming from.” But sometimes, the graffiti artists can’t understand and give him trouble.

“We have had a couple of incidents,” Ramirez said. “A couple of drivers had fights with people in the community.” But when things get that hot, Ramirez says he loads up his truck and leaves. Other times, the people listen.

“If I have to, I explain the whole program,” he said.

Seldom Threatened

Victor Lerma, 24, has been working as a graffiti remover for 2 1/2 years, and said he was threatened once by a large group of angry graffiti writers. But now, “they just look at us painting and pass on by,” Lerma said. “They say, ‘Here comes the Boys Club again.’ ”

Hollopeter and the graffiti crew have worked to perfect the art of graffiti removal, talking to representatives from paint and solvent manufacturers, using different types of wire brushes, and mixing different colors of paint to match defaced walls.

“When we first started, we painted walls so they looked like leopards,” Hollopeter said. “We matched paints very poorly.”

But as their expertise increased, the crew worked with a paint company and eventually mixed the eight standard colors they use today.

“We took in a concrete block and said we wanted a paint so that when we paint this block, you shouldn’t be able to see it’s been painted,” Hollopeter said. “We call that paint cinder-block gray.”

Wallace Raley, 75, the owner of Delta Technical Coatings, the El Monte paint company that helped develop the colors, said he believes in the service the Boys Club provides. “It’s remarkable,” Raley said. “The graffiti isn’t here, and those guys did it all.”

The program has also been praised by officials from the county and the six cities the club contracts with.

“They’re doing a great job,” said Mayor Michael Blanco of Alhambra, which began contracting with the Boys Club in December for graffiti removal. “I think its been one of the best investments we’ve made,” Blanco said of the $32,000 Alhambra will pay this year for the service.

“It’s amazing that we have so little graffiti,” said Connie McFall, director of Human Services for the city of South El Monte. “Sometimes by the time I call to report it, it’s already off.”