Return of the Ugly One

Freddie Torres is back on the street.

You can spot him hanging around La Valenciana restaurant in Montebello, talking to the vatos locos who swagger in like fighting cocks to feast on Rosina’s homemade chicharron.

He hunches over a table staring into their souls, the flat face solemn, eyes intense, tattoos showing under the roll of his shirt sleeves, and he talks to them like no other preacher would dare.

“Hey, man,” he tells them, “I used to walk that walk and talk that talk, but God got ahold of me.”

“Hey, man,” he tells them, “I was full of hate and rage, shooting up, getting high. They put me in prison for five years and gave me up for dead three times.”

“Hey, man,” he tells them, “I used to eat guys like you. I was the meanest of the mean, until I had a miracle.” He leans in. “Look at me!”

He whips off his shirt right there in the best Mexican deli in town and displays scars of combat that mark his body like dull red checks on a calendar of violence.

The little gang-bangers stare in wonder at the ugly rips and punctures of nine stab wounds and a bullet hole.

Freddie lets it all sink in, transmitting the horror, and then he says in a tone that vibrates on the sultry air, “Pray with me, man.”

And in the intense quiet of the deli, he takes their hands. . . .

I met Freddie 14 years ago. He was a legend of evil in the barrios, stalking the mean streets with a gait part swagger and part boxer’s bounce, on the balls of his feet, bare arms swinging, prowling like an urban predator through the hot summer jungles.

They called him El Feo , the Ugly One, and if there was ever a metaphor for rage, Freddie was it. In Juvenile Hall the first time at age 7, on heroin by the time he was 13, Freddie possessed enough hate to fill hell and gladly showered it on those who crossed his path.

He was one of seven brothers who marched through the neighborhoods like an army out of a nightmare. Two of the brothers died in the streets; all did prison time.

Freddie, by his own measure, was the most violent of them, inflicting pain by whatever means available, including thunder-punching fists that made him a boxing champion at three state prisons.

“I don’t know how many people I knifed or how many I shot or even whether I killed some,” he told me once. “You don’t keep count, man.”

Then one day, the kind of day that lightning strikes from a clear blue sky, there was what Freddie considers the first miracle. Stabbed and bleeding at the end of a fight, he ran through the streets to his home, looked in a mirror and stared.

“There wasn’t a mark on me,” he says, the wonder still in his voice. “No blood, nothing.”

That night for the first time in his life, Freddie Torres--the slashing, raging, meanest of the mean--got down and prayed.

And the new Freddie was born.

I met with him the other day at Rosina’s deli. He was wearing a suit and tie and there was a kind of joy to the hard outlines of his face.

Since the 14 years of that first miracle, Freddie has become an ordained minister in the Assembly of God church and founded three churches for gang-bangers and drugs addicts in the barrios.

Now 43, he works as an evangelist in the streets, still going to the gangs, talking to prisoners, counseling little kids before it’s too late.

“You know, man,” he says, “there have been other miracles in my life. God keeps me alive no matter what, and I’m filling the destiny he’s got for me.”

He says one of the miracles occurred the night his pickup truck tumbled down a 100-foot cliff on the way to Corona. The accident killed his mother and severely injured his stepfather, but spared him.

“If that wasn’t a miracle,” he asks, “why didn’t I die? What am I doing here?”

The second incident took place on a street corner in Pomona. Freddie says he was trying to talk a kid out of the gangs. A car drove up. Shotgun blasts ripped the air and the kid lay dead.

Freddie emerged without a scratch.

Whether or not you believe in miracles doesn’t matter. Freddie does. And the greatest miracle of all might be that a guy whose life was drenched in violence emerged from it to become a man of peace in a society at war.

Freddie Torres is back on the street, but this time he’s got a Bible in his hand instead of a knife.

“Look at me!” he says, muscular arms outstretched, tattoos flashing, and you can’t help but wonder. Look at me!