The Peacemakers : Ex-Gang Leaders Now Fighting for Better Future for Younger Generation

They are not the type of people from whom a Roman Catholic cardinal normally seeks advice.

But there they sat one afternoon this past week around a conference table in a 4th Street law office--three former gang leaders, two of them ex-convicts--exchanging ideas with Cardinal Roger M. Mahony on street gangs and how government programs have failed to cope with the problems they pose.

Mahony asked for the meeting after hearing that members of 48 rival gangs in Orange County signed a “peace treaty” last weekend calling for an end to gang violence.

The question in Mahony’s mind was whether the Orange County experience could be duplicated in Los Angeles.

In Orange County, the cardinal was told, the veteranos in the neighborhoods are the ones guiding the younger gang members away from retaliatory killings and into jobs. And it was through the efforts of these veteranos that hundreds of gang members have met regularly in local parks since January to cool heated tempers and to keep a tenuous truce, originally limited to Santa Ana but now extended countywide.

Recounting the advice the men gave the Catholic prelate, Pete Ojeda, one of the peacemakers, said, “You have to get someone who is streetwise, someone they respect in the neighborhood, someone well liked, well known and well respected.” Only through preaching nonviolence and respect for human life can the effort begin to succeed, he added.

This is the work of the United Gangs Council, a group of former gang leaders who hold themselves up not as Boy Scouts but as examples of what the younger generation of Latinos should avoid becoming.

Four of the five council leaders, including two who met with the cardinal, have spent a total of 70 years in federal and state prisons on convictions ranging from drug dealing to involvement in a gang-related shooting.

The one who has avoided state or federal prison, 30-year-old Art Romo, also is the only one who finished high school.

Bobby Martinez, a 39-year-old council member who works the Anaheim-Fullerton area, said he still struggles daily to control his craving for heroin and is currently seeking help through the Set Free Christian Fellowship, a ministry dedicated to helping the homeless and substance abusers.

Another council leader, Gilbert Gonzalez, 50, said he quit using drugs earlier this year--about the time he signed on with the United Gangs Council.

“I don’t want the kids to go through the same things I went through,” said Ojeda, the 50-year-old council president, a former drug abuser freed from state prison five years ago. The part-time construction worker said he quit using drugs a year ago but is still enrolled in a methadone program.

Ojeda’s soft, raspy voice belies his tough reputation. His selection as council president came about, he explained, “because (gang members) would not listen to anybody else.”

Some law enforcement officials suggest that the young gang members listen because of Ojeda’s reputation as a leader of the “Mexican Mafia” prison gang.

“I am entirely different from what (police) portray me to be,” Ojeda said with a smile. “They portray me as a villain, as a mean guy, so I am using that (on the street). It helps me; it gives me the respect that I want.”

In prison, Ojeda said, he occasionally provided protection for “someone getting into a predicament,” and that led to lasting friendships once they were outside. Part of what makes him a natural go-between in this new effort to pacify warring gangs, he added, is the number of contacts he has that cross neighborhood boundaries.

Growing up in central Santa Ana, Ojeda had his first brush with the law at age 15 when he was hauled into Juvenile Hall for beating up a classmate. A year later, he was arrested for burglarizing the store where he worked. By age 18, he was headed to federal prison for attempting to smuggle heroin across the U.S.-Mexican border. Until his release five years ago at age 45, Ojeda had spent most of his adult life in one prison or another.

Lamenting his lifetime of crime, he said, “I will never find out what I am good at, really.”

Late last year, Ojeda said, he began worrying about the growing number of gang-related shootings. At about the same time, he heard that Romo and another friend had been thinking about bringing rival gangs together but had been discouraged by a lack of support from Santa Ana city officials.

“Something put us all together with the same idea, and we said, ‘Let’s do it,’ ” Romo said.

Still doubtful that officialdom would ever give its blessing to the effort, Ojeda nonetheless organized a leadership committee and called for the initial peace conference held last January.

Of the five council leaders, Romo is the youngest. Although he has been arrested five times for minor offenses, his only lengthy jail time was a four-month sentence for drug possession four years ago, he said.

Romo said he was a former gang leader but not a “gang banger” and limited his involvement in violence to fistfights. One incident that “mellowed” him early on, he said, occurred when he was in the third grade.

“This guy came around and started picking on me, and I stabbed him in the leg with a pencil by accident. He fainted, and it scared the hell out of me. I thought I had killed him. I was in the office crying,” he recalled.

Using the settlement from a job-related accident at a manufacturing firm where he formerly worked, Romo got himself retrained in computer-assisted drafting and is looking for work in his new trade. In the meantime, he said, he and Gonzalez are the two council leaders who most frequently respond to reports from the neighborhoods that shootings or fights are about to take place.

Romo was the author of the peace treaty written on a large poster board and signed by gang members from around the county who gathered in Santa Ana’s El Salvador Park last weekend.

The text of the peace treaty “came from all the meetings we have been having, what everybody was saying,” Romo said. “I thought we just needed to have it on paper.”

If Romo is the group’s wordsmith, Gonzalez is the orator.

During the signing ceremony, Gonzalez exhorted the hundreds of assembled gang members: “We can make it a lie or we can make it alive. You’re living the peace right now.”

A product of the city’s Santa Anita neighborhood, Gonzalez was not always a pacifist. In fact, he said, it was his anger at a local judge that prompted him to learn to speak, read and write English. After having served almost five years in state prison for forgery, Gonzalez said, he felt wronged by the legal system when he was arrested and ultimately imprisoned for another 5 1/2 years for having marijuana flakes in his pants pocket.

His demands for a different defense lawyer were met by harsh words from the judge. “Shut up and sit down,” Gonzalez recalls the judge declaring. “I got all enraged because I knew that if he were to deal in my world, he wouldn’t dare raise his voice at me, much less tell me something like that. So I thought to myself, I am ready to learn so that I will never again be humiliated.”

Gonzalez left prison the last time in July, 1991, after serving a total of 23 years. Six months later, he kicked his 33-year drug habit.

Gonzalez said he became a practicing Christian three years ago and that his newfound belief in Christ is what gives him the courage and determination to confront armed gang members threatening to kill their rivals.

Of the five council leaders, Mike Salinas, 39, is the only one with a full-time job. He works on an Orange County road repair crew.

Salinas said he became involved in his Delhi neighborhood gang when he was 9 years old. He went to prison 10 years later, convicted of pulling the trigger in a gang-related slaying.

“It was a senseless killing,” he said. “It shouldn’t have happened.”

His five-year incarceration for that crime would be his only time in prison, Salinas said, but he kept getting into trouble with the police. His last arrest, he said, was eight years ago.

The police “didn’t like me, and I didn’t like them until I started maturing,” Salinas said. “I started thinking about my life and about myself and what I wanted to do. Being locked up wasn’t one of those things.”

Now the grandfather of two toddlers, with another expected soon, Salinas said it was his desire to live peacefully in a violent neighborhood that propelled him to get involved with the younger gang members.

Like Gonzalez, Martinez said his dedication to his newfound role as a peacemaker is helping him stay off drugs and be a better role model for the teen-agers he is trying to help.

Martinez said his January release from prison marked the end of a 15-year criminal career in illicit drugs. His latest prison sentence was for armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon, following a violent confrontation with his drug connection, he said.

“I still get the urge (to use drugs) once in a while, but I don’t want that for me anymore,” Martinez said, his arms showing the scars of drug abuse. “I am getting too old to be doing it, to be going back to prison. I feel good about what I am doing because I know I am doing some good.”

Others expressed the same sentiment--that they are perhaps atoning for past misdeeds with their current efforts.

Romo said the peace mission is the best thing that has ever happened to him.

The five do not pretend to see the end of the problem, but they believe the shootings and deaths would be much more numerous had they not become involved.

And they are angry that city officials brush them off because they are “ex-cons.” But, Ojeda said, “I intend to prove them wrong, and hopefully, they will change their way of thinking.”

Santa Ana lawyer Alfredo Amezcua, who heads the Hispanic Bar Assn., said that Cardinal Mahony’s visit gave the gang council “additional inspiration.” Amezcua has become an unofficial adviser to the group and their link to City Hall to promote anti-gang programs.

Amezcua also hosted the meeting between the gang council and Mahony and said afterward that the cardinal’s recognition of their efforts “establishes that what these guys are doing is making a difference in the world.”

In a thank-you letter to the peacemakers, the cardinal expressed his belief “that our best efforts are always enhanced when we learn from one another and from what other groups are doing in different communities. That was certainly very obvious to me during our meeting with all of you, and we do look forward to many opportunities to share our approaches and strategies.”

Msgr. Jaime Soto, Hispanic vicar for the Diocese of Orange, was among those at the session with the cardinal. He said he hopes that a simple gesture such as the signing of a truce can provide the momentum for a larger peace movement.

“I can remember when the summer began three months ago in the wake of the Los Angeles riots and how much anxiety there was here about what was going to happen,” Soto said. “And to end the summer this way, with the truce and the idea that we might be able to export some of the peace to Los Angeles, is a very hopeful way to end the summer.”