COLUMN ONE : A Father, a Son and a Funeral : Michael put his hopes in sports; now he is in prison for murder. Brandon put his hopes in rap, only to be murdered. The ghetto cycle of hope and despair again was passed from one generation to another.

Like his father before him, Brandon Niles seemed to have a ticket out of the poverty and violence of the ghetto, a gift capable of transcending the despair that cuts so many lives short.

At 17, he was an aspiring rapper dishing out gritty rhymes about the twisted logic of the gang world. He earned high marks at Jefferson High School, worked the counter at El Pollo Loco and impressed adults with probing questions about the inequities of his South-Central Los Angeles neighborhood.

Two decades earlier, Michael Niles had attended the same high school, surviving gang brawls and the death of his parents to lead the Jefferson basketball team to a city championship. His fiercely emotional play later propelled Cal State Fullerton to its most remarkable finish ever and made him a crowd favorite during a stint in pro ball with the Phoenix Suns.

But for both father and son, the prospects were too few, the lure of the streets too strong.

After a short-lived NBA career, the elder Niles had few skills to fall back on. He left Brandon and his mother, began using cocaine and eventually was convicted of having his new wife murdered for insurance money. Now 37, he is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Brandon, an infant when his father took off and a teen-ager when he learned of his crime, seemed to cry out for male guidance. Disillusioned, he sought brotherhood from the same gang as his father--by then called the Bloods. On Oct. 3, he was buried, the victim of a gunshot to the chest fired by a suspected rival.

“They talk about the cycle that gets repeated. It’s so parallel,” said Brandon’s aunt, Cheryl Taylor, as she sat in his maternal grandmother’s home, close enough to Jefferson High that the sounds of the marching band filter in every afternoon.

“We have dreams and ambitions and we aspire like everyone else,” she said, “but if there’s not somebody to step in and give young men a road map--if they can’t realistically look at somebody who’s made it--then they just kind of settle, accept their plight and put their dreams on hold.”

It is probably too simple to say that Brandon Niles was doomed to repeat his father’s mistakes, that the apple would never fall far from the tree. Mike Niles had little involvement with his son’s childhood and Brandon himself was shaped by other factors--coincidences, personal choices, his own squandered chances.

But on the difficult path to manhood--an especially treacherous journey for young African-American males in the inner city--Brandon came of age in an environment that too often breaks the spirit, sours the mind and robs the body.

His father, though he came so close to escaping, ultimately had little to bequeath his son but that world.

“I have never felt so inadequate and helpless,” Niles wrote in a letter from prison to Brandon’s mother last July. “My son is in the beginning stages of destroying his life and knowing that I’m partly responsible really hurts.”

While the details may be unique, the story of Mike and Brandon Niles is remarkable mostly in its ordinariness. Every day, young men just like them walk a fine line in the struggle to survive, leaving behind wasted lives when they stumble.

*

Martin Luther King and the others fightin’ and prayin’

For what? For us to start gangbangin’...?

In the long run we betta make a change

Or 100 years from now we’ll be goin’ through the same thang

--From “We Too Lazy,” a song by Brandon’s rap group, Thugstas by Law

*

Michael Donnell Niles, his right knee heavily bandaged, lunged for the ball and stripped it from his opponent’s grasp. Though known more for brute strength than flash, the 6-foot-6, 220-pound Cal State Fullerton junior then dribbled the length of the court and--in a scene that would make highlight reels for years to come--jammed the ball in a ferocious two-handed stuff.

“Unbelievable!” shouted the NBC commentator.

The dunk brought Fullerton to within a basket of sixth-ranked Arkansas in the 1978 NCAA playoffs, an improbable feat for a Cinderella team that had already exceeded all expectations by upsetting fourth-ranked New Mexico and eleventh-ranked San Francisco.

Although Fullerton eventually lost the game--a win would have sent the team to the nation’s Final Four--the season stood as a milestone for Niles. He was named the Titans’ most inspirational player and won honorable mention as an All-American.

“He’s proof,” Coach Bobby Dye said at the time, “that a guy who wants it can make it.”

As a boy, survival was Niles’ only goal.

The second-youngest of 13 children, he never knew his father, who died when he was an infant. His mother, who once was caught stealing a turkey to feed her children on the holidays, died when he was 12. Mike was left homeless, penniless, sleeping in alleys.

He found camaraderie among the gangsters hanging around Jefferson Boulevard, where Mike gambled, drank and swung his fists. He developed a hardness, an intimidating edge, forged from years of fending for himself.

“Michael was the first boy who ever shared really deep secrets with me--his pain, his hurting,” said Brandon’s mother, Sylvia Bryant, who met Niles in 10th grade and became pregnant in her senior year. “On the outside, he was always like, ‘I’m OK, I’m happy,’ you know, making people laugh. But deep down, he just never had anybody that he thought cared.”

Sports was one of the few endeavors for which his rough-and-tumble adolescence had prepared him. Brawny and intensely competitive, Niles was a sensation in high school. Named the most valuable player on the basketball team, he was photographed in 1973, his senior year, with both arms extended, palming a ball firmly in each massive hand.

At Fullerton, he was known as the enforcer--always playing at full throttle, thriving under Dye’s regimentation. Because of academic troubles, however, Niles was booted off the team his senior year and did not graduate. He headed instead into semi-pro ball, where he played a year for the Lancaster Red Roses in Pennsylvania before being cut.

Finally, at the age of 25, he set out for the Phoenix Suns training camp, a long shot for a spot as backup forward. He turned heads with his hustle and stamina. The one-year contract he received in 1980--for about $40,000--represented more money than he had ever made in his life.

“I never thought about the material things when I was trying to make it,” Niles told a Times reporter in an article that year chronicling his rise. “They’re nice, of course, but the greatest thing of all is the respect I now get. Wherever I go, I finally get respect.”

The Suns went on to win their first division title and compile what remains the franchise’s best record--57 wins and 25 losses. But Niles, though a crowd pleaser, was a bench warmer. After averaging 2.6 points and 1.3 rebounds a game, he was cut at the end of the season.

By then, he had married a college sweetheart, Sonja, and settled in a rented home in Corona. His wife, who graduated from Fullerton, found work as a prison guard at the California Institution for Women. But Niles, out of his realm and without a diploma, floundered. For six months, he worked as a maintenance man at Disneyland.

“He had his day of glory in the fast lane of the NBA . . . but it was kind of a false dream,” said Frank S. Peasley, a Riverside attorney who would later argue successfully to spare Niles the death penalty. “When the one thing he could do was over, he didn’t have anything else in his life.”

Frustrated that his wife was supporting him, jealous of her career and apparently sliding into the grasp of cocaine, Niles embarked on a scheme that would erase all he had achieved.

On Dec. 13, 1984, according to court records, he drove to South-Central Los Angeles, stopping to visit an old friend from Jefferson High. Niles asked if there was anybody who wanted to earn a $5,000 cut from a $100,000 insurance policy. “I want the bitch killed,” he said, records show.

That same day, Niles hooked up with Noel Jackson, a veteran gang member known as No-No. With virtually no planning, Jackson armed himself with a .12-gauge shotgun and rode back to Corona with Niles. Niles left him in the house, then went to pick up his wife from work. Back home, he feigned an argument and stormed out.

While Niles waited outside, court records say, Jackson took 29-year-old Sonja Niles by surprise. Still dressed in her guard uniform, she bolted out the door, but Jackson caught up with her across the street. Shoving the barrel of the gun against the back of her skull, he literally blew her head off.

A neighbor keeping an eye out for kids stealing Christmas lights recognized Niles’ car as it sped away in the darkness.

*

Ya still wonder why a n---- can’t act right?

I stated the main reason, remember I’m livin’ a fight

Scarred for life, if ya know what I mean, friend

The past time’s nightmares all comin’ back again

--From “N---- Gone Mad,” by Thugstas by Law

*

When Brandon Niles walked through the doors of Jefferson High School for the first time, Rosamy Gross gasped.

“Oh my goodness,” said the veteran administrator, known at the school on East 41st Street as Mama Gross. “Your name has to be Niles.”

Gross, the dean of students when Brandon’s father was a student and now dropout prevention coordinator, recalls that the boy “looked like Michael had spit him out.”

If Brandon had the same strapping build and flinty facade, he also enjoyed certain advantages that his father lacked. His mother, a program assistant for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, worked hard to keep him clothed, fed and entertained with such middle-class staples as Nintendo.

A photo album shows Brandon flaunting his Pop Warner football uniform, drawing a poster for the DARE anti-drug program, getting doused at a baptism and posing nobly in a sharp white suit at his elementary school graduation. By the time he arrived at Jefferson, he had earned a spot in the school’s program for the gifted and talented.

But if the world in which Brandon came of age offered a few more opportunities than in his father’s day, the neighborhood had become a much scarier place.

Handguns had replaced fists as the arbiter of disputes. Marijuana and beer were nothing compared to the mind-numbing jolt of cheap cocaine. Virtually all of South-Central Los Angeles was divided into gang territory--Crips here, Bloods there--with little neutral ground for a boy trying to avoid taking sides.

His grandmother’s house, a small bungalow on East 33rd Street, was in the middle of Bloodstone Piru turf. The kids there stuck Brandon with the moniker “Eyeball.” Even when his mother found her own place at 62nd and San Pedro streets, and later at 103rd Street and Van Ness Avenue--both of which, she later learned, happened to be in Crip turf--Brandon could not shake the Blood label.

“As long as he claims the ‘hood,” said one steely-eyed youth from Brandon’s gang, his head wrapped in a red bandanna, “we his family.”

Brandon was proud to have found a job at an El Pollo Loco in Hawthorne--the kind of minimum-wage position to which kids like him supposedly won’t stoop. But he was crushed when he lost it a year later while on house arrest awaiting trial for robbery--a crime that Brandon insisted, and witnesses ultimately acknowledged, he did not commit.

This past summer, Brandon and his girlfriend applied for jobs in a government-subsidized youth program. She landed a spot at City Hall, but Brandon broke down in tears when told that his mother’s salary--about $25,000 a year--was too high for him to qualify.

He had already begun to lose interest in school. Even before the robbery trial, he had been placed on probation for being caught on the street with a beer. Those closest to Brandon say he felt the pull of a system he believed wanted him to fail.

At night, his frustration poured out as he penned tough tales of urban life, carefully putting each sheet of rap lyrics in its own folder, tucking the folders into a battered cardboard box.

“One of the main reasons I rap about violence, crime and other aspects of ghetto life is because I know a lot about it,” Brandon wrote in a resume that he hoped would catch the eye of music industry executives. “I can really express what I’m feeling through rap. I guess you could just say it is my escape.”

Through most of his childhood, Brandon never saw his father, though he often bragged to friends that his dad had played in the NBA. Once, as a youngster, he came running home in tears when a schoolmate did not believe him.

As he entered adolescence, Brandon began to wonder more about his family, his manhood and his connection to the world. “He asked all the time why his dad didn’t come to see him,” Brandon’s mother said. “I never said anything bad about Michael. I just told Brandon, ‘Your daddy loves you, and I’m sorry he doesn’t have time for you.’ ”

Unknown to either of them, Mike Niles had been sitting in Riverside County Jail since late 1984, awaiting trial. Brandon did not learn the truth about his father until he was 14, in early 1989, when the jury came back with a guilty verdict. At Jefferson High, he told Rosamy Gross he didn’t care. “I knew then that the child, on the inside, was aching,” she said.

Eventually, Brandon decided to visit his father in state prison, even calling a bus line to inquire about the fare to Tehachapi. But when the time came, he could not follow through.

“He really needed his dad, but he was scared,” said his girlfriend, Rosa Cruz, 19. “It was just this fear that his dad wouldn’t be the person he pictured.”

Brandon was talking to Rosa on a pay phone Sept. 26 as he stood in front of a motel on Jefferson Boulevard. On the wall nearby was a hand-lettered sign warning against prostitutes and drug dealers.

He had recently written a rap called “Missin’ in Action,” in which he envisioned his own death. As they spoke, Brandon asked Rosa what would happen if he were killed. A few minutes later, she heard the phone drop, a scream and a gunshot--fired by an assailant who still has not been identified.

Then somebody grabbed the phone and hung it up.

*

I’m goin’ crazy again, I’m in a four-man shootout

Three against me, but they all got took out

Continue my life, just another day of violence

Gunshots tower over cities, now it’s silent

--From “Livin’ a Fight,” by Thugstas by Law

*

If you’re a mother whose teen-age son has just been gunned down on the street, whom do you blame? If you’re Sylvia Bryant, you don’t blame the person who squeezed the trigger. “It’s so sad,” she said, “but that guy is as much of a victim in all this as me and Brandon.”

The Rev. Michael Belt, the minister who stood over Brandon’s copper coffin two Saturdays ago, pointed his finger at those who had strayed from a righteous path. “Look to Jesus, young brothers. Look to Jesus, young sisters,” he told 100 people sitting on wooden pews at a small chapel in Inglewood. “Because that’s the only help you’re going to get.”

The homeboys from the Bloodstone Pirus put some of the onus on Brandon. In gang parlance, he had been “slipping,” letting his guard down. “He was at the phone booth, paying no attention,” a member of the gang said outside the chapel. “We told him to come with us, but he’s his own man.”

Brandon’s father declined to be interviewed. But in the July letter to Brandon’s mother, his feelings come through clearly in two pages of careful script.

“Brandon, please think about what you are doing, not only to yourself, but to your whole family,” Mike Niles wrote. “When we see each other, Brandon . . . you will see the seriousness on my face.”