Affluence Rings Gang Turf : Sawtelle: Luxury apartments come face-to-face with gang graffiti. High-priced condos meet drive-by shootings. This neighborhood is changing.

Just out of prison, Victor Revelez, 29, would be one of the first to admit that the old neighborhood he calls “Sotel” has changed.

In the Sawtelle area surrounding West Los Angeles’ Stoner Park, where the gang Revelez once belonged to still hangs out, high-priced condos and luxury apartments have replaced many of the old one-story Spanish-style homes. And what was once a low-income, working-class neighborhood inhabited by the gardeners and maids of the wealthy has gentrified.

Despite the changing neighborhood, the gang called Sotel manages to survive, even though many of its current members no longer live near the park. The gang is nearly 50 years old, and some say it will never die. Revelez can chart the history of the gang in sidewalk graffiti dating back more than two decades.

“People always come back. This is home,” said Revelez, whose family has lived near the park since 1953. “This park was my back yard.”

The name “Sotel” is the Spanish nickname for the Sawtelle community, an area bounded by Santa Monica Boulevard, Pico Boulevard, Bundy Drive and the San Diego Freeway.

City parks officials said Stoner Park gets little use from its middle-class inhabitants because of its continuing reputation as the home of the Sotels--a reputation bolstered by occasional drive-by shootings.

Revelez is one of about two dozen former and current gang members who hang out at Stoner, which--despite its graffiti--is a picturesque, tree-lined park the size of two city blocks.

“It’s hard to get people to participate in the park because they are afraid,” said Serena Fiss, the park’s director of recreation. “They see the graffiti, the young men hanging out in the park, they hear about the occasional shootings, and they stay away.”

Stoner Park is by no means a dead park, Fiss said. It includes a baseball field with night lights, a pool for swimming during the summer months, handball, tennis and indoor and outdoor basketball courts, and a sandbox with a brightly colored climbing apparatus for children. The tennis courts are frequently booked solid, and there are many other successful activities, including a day-care program for senior citizens, after-school and arts and crafts programs.

However, many programs lack widespread community support because of fear of the gangs, she said. For example, she said, last Tuesday night the gym was scheduled to be open late for adult basketball, but only six people showed up, not enough for a full court game. “It should be packed in there,” Fiss said.

Law-enforcement officials say the fear is not warranted, particularly considering the amount of violence that takes place at the park.

“This is not an area that is riddled with gang violence,” said Lt. Ron Dina, head of the West Los Angeles Police Bureau’s anti-gang unit, Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums. “Sure, there are a few incidents now and then, but when compared to the rest of the city, when compared to the rest of the bureau, Sawtelle and West Los Angeles is not our biggest problem.”

Last year, Dina said, none of the 25 gang-related homicides in the four LAPD divisions of Hollywood, Pacific, West Los Angeles and Wilshire occurred in the Sawtelle area, a small pocket of gang activity where only a handful of the estimated 8,000 gang members on the Westside hang out. Still, two teen-age gang members were wounded in drive-by shootings last year at the park, and a 15-year-old gang member was killed by gunfire in 1988 at the park.

Despite its occasional violence, Jon Shaughnessy, president of the Westside Residents Assn., an organization representing 150 families in the neighborhood, said many of the critics are guilty of stereotyping those who use the park.

“People go to the park, and when they don’t see people there who are their age or from their social class, they tend to avoid the park,” he said. “They may walk past the park and see a group of young Latino men playing soccer or basketball and think they are gang members and they are not. They are just men playing sports.”

The boom in condominium and luxury apartment construction over the last 10 years has changed the face of the Sawtelle community, scattering many poor families from the homes they have lived in for generations.

It is a pattern that is troubling to Shaughnessy. “We think we have a healthy mix here,” he said. “The last thing we want to become is a yuppy community.”

For many, the park has become one of the few places for free social recreation. Park-sponsored weightlifting and boxing programs have attracted many of the gang members.

“These kids are like any other kids, they need something to do. They need self-esteem and someone to trust,” said Clarence (Corky) Pestino, 41, who founded the weightlifting program in 1988 after the shooting death of Alvaro Velazquez, 15. “We try to give them a little space, some place outside of home where they can feel safe.”

Assisting Pestino in the weightlifting program is the brother of the slain gang member, Alex Velazquez, 20. “I was mad as hell after my brother got shot,” he said. “I thought about taking revenge but that wouldn’t prove anything, and I didn’t want to hurt anyone as much as I was hurting. So I decided to do what I could to help.”

Above the weightlifting room, young boxers were hitting speed bags. “Some of these boys, when they started, just wanted to learn how to fight but they soon discovered that boxing is discipline, not street fighting,” said Isidro Rodriguez Jr., the director of the boxing program.

“Gangbanging is a phase that most of these boys are going through. They think of themselves as soldiers, and they make themselves targets for war on the streets. If we can get them to survive this stage, they will outgrow the need to make war.”

For Revelez, just out of prison for drug possession, the war is over. “I just want to find some work and make my life functional,” he said between sets of pumping weights.

For 17-year-old gang member Steve, who wears his leg wound from a gang shoot-out in November like a badge, the war may have just begun. When asked if the shooting had frightened him into a sense of reality, he said:

“I’m not scared. That would defeat the whole purpose of being in a gang if you’re going to be scared. You can’t be scared of losing your life.”