In Boyle Heights, Brown Learns of Life in Projects : Politics: Presidential candidate gets earful from inner-city youths. At later Laguna Beach rally, he says Orange County’s conservative congressional delegation is partly to blame for strife.

Democratic presidential candidate Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. met with gang members in Boyle Heights on Sunday, ostensibly to hear their impressions of the L.A. riots. He came away with two more passengers for his campaign plane.

The former governor ended his 40-minute discussion with a dozen Latino and black gang members by inviting two of them to accompany him on a campaign trip Sunday night to West Virginia.

Later in the day at a fund-raising rally in Laguna Beach, Brown pointed to the things he had heard in Los Angeles as a sign of economic troubles in this country. And he held Orange County’s conservative congressional delegation in part accountable for some of the problems.

Brown told the crowd of 600 gathered on Laguna’s Main Beach that the youths he met in Boyle Heights earlier in the day all said they had turned to pushing drugs and other crimes because they could find no other employment.

“What they’re asking for is simple justice . . . the right to work and support their families,” Brown said.

“Let’s condemn the looters in L.A., but let’s start right at the top with the President, his sons and his brother. Maybe they were the role models. Maybe Neil Bush was a role model for all those looters,” he said. (Neil Bush was a director of the defunct Silverado Savings & Loan in Denver. The S&L;’s collapse cost the taxpayers $1 billion.)

Brown also attacked Orange County’s conservative congressional delegation, telling the enthusiastic crowd that “those retrograde congressmen you have here” should know “that we are watching you.”

Addressing his remarks to Orange County conservatives, Brown said that “the law-and-order approach has been pilot-tested . . . the (inmate populations in the) prisons of America have been doubled and in some states tripled, and it’s not stopping crime.”

“But it’s forcing the question: Are we going to intervene in our rights and liberties, or are we going to intervene in our economy?” he asked.

During his Los Angeles visit, Brown heard about life in the projects--frequently related in blunt language-and then asked Father Greg Boyle of the Dolores Mission to help choose the young men invited to join him on his campaign plane.

One of those chosen was Titi Gomez, 20. Like many of the others, Gomez said he had heard Brown’s name before but was unaware that he was running for president.

Robert Leon, 22, was also chosen to accompany Brown, largely because he is not in school and does not have a job he would have to miss. The pair were to leave Los Angeles at midnight Sunday and return sometime today. Neither had ever been on a plane before.

Leon, who prefers to be called by his gang name of Ace, was one of the more outspoken of the afternoon’s speakers. He told of working on a construction job in Beverly Hills and being regularly stopped by police who told him, he said, “ ‘You don’t belong here.’ (Police) treat us like animals and think we aren’t human, just because we are poor. There is no justice. We are not animals.”

The informal meeting was arranged through Boyle, an Anglo priest who has gained the respect of the local homeboys. Brown sat in the middle of a semicircle of chairs arranged at the mission’s modest alter. Pointing to about 15 reporters and campaign aides gathered in the church to cover a routine campaign stop, Brown told the youths: “When I’m here, they bring their little machines and they listen to me. But maybe they will listen to you.”

The media, and Brown, got an earful.

“It’s too bad that you people only come down here when they burn the whole city down,” said a young man who would only identify himself as Bandit. “It’s sad that it’s the only way to get attention. But don’t say we are like the people in South-Central. There was no burning or looting here. It’s dumb to burn down our community. I’m glad we’re smarter than that.”

A recurring theme was jobs. Brown asked why more of the young men didn’t work. As others smirked, one gang member explained the economics of the street to Brown: “Why work for $4.25 an hour when you can make $600 a night selling drugs?”

The candidate seemed moved listening to the story of Leonard, a 26-year-old who has eight children. Brown asked if Leonard expected life would be better for his children.

“Gotta be better for my kids,” Leonard said. “I gotta make it better. Whatever it takes, I gotta make it better. I want my kids to have an education, to make something of themselves. We got brains. We think. We’re people too.”

At one point Brown asked for a show of hands, asking how many of the gang members were registered to vote. No hands went up.

“Can you vote if you’re a felon?” one man asked.

“I think so; I hope so,” Brown said.