A Peaceful Pay-Back : Man Finds Anti-Gang Message the Best Revenge for Friend’s Death

At age 17, when he lived in East Los Angeles’ Maravilla housing project, Gus Frias lost his best friend in a gang ambush. Later, he recalls, an adult handed him a gun and demanded that he avenge the death.

“ ‘If you want peace, you better wake up, because there is no such thing,’ ” Frias remembers being told. “ ‘If someone kills one of our own, the laws of the street demand pay-back.’ ”

Many others might have committed the revenge killing, but Frias refused.

“You want me to kill an innocent brother--I’m not going to,” he remembers saying.

And, despite threats and curses from the older man, Frias refused to back down.

Today, at age 38, armed with a master’s degree in public policy, two years of law school and an impressive knowledge of the streets, Frias still fights for the position he took as a teen-ager--that the cycle of gang violence must, somehow, be broken.

Frias’ current battleground is Los Angeles’ 1st Council District and its neighborhoods. Councilman Mike Hernandez has hired him to develop a long-term community strategy for attacking the gang problem.

Hernandez said Frias will coordinate the many different agencies involved in steering youths away from gangs. He will also help representatives from these agencies develop programs to fill gaps in existing efforts.

“We already have money we are spending in that area--we are just not using it effectively,” Hernandez said. “All the decisions here are piecemeal and reactionary.”

A report on gang violence prepared by the district attorney’s office in May found that existing gang prevention efforts were “short-term, reactive and self-defeating” and involved “shifting inadequate resources from hot spot to hot spot.” The report called for developing a long-term prevention plan that would coordinate law enforcement programs with public and private efforts in homes, schools and neighborhoods.

Frias intends to bring that ideal to fruition. In particular, he thinks that more attention should be paid to preventing young children from becoming caught up in gangs. Currently, he said, most efforts are focused on trying to persuade hard-core gang members to leave their groups, a tactic that usually comes too late.

“We have to do this with young kids at very early grade levels,” Frias said. “Anything afterwards isn’t prevention anymore.”

Children need to understand that “death is death--these divisions that separate us are nonsense,” he said.

On Friday, Frias had a preliminary meeting with more 20 representatives of various governmental and community organizations--including the Los Angeles Police Department, the city attorney’s office, Los Angeles Unified School District, the county Probation Department, the Los Angeles Conservation Corps, local boys clubs and Concerned Parents, a group of people who have lost children to gang violence. Several former gang members, who now help others leave gang life, also attended, Frias said.

During the session, Frias laid the foundation for the development of seven interagency teams, each to be assigned to a junior high or high school in the council district to assess the gang problem and develop strategies to combat it.

Specifically, Frias said, the teams will be asked to develop plans for school and community safety, parent and teacher training, student leadership development, use of special gang prevention curriculum, crisis management, using the private sector to secure job opportunities and mentorship, and developing recreation opportunities. Representatives from each team will meet regularly to discuss their efforts and to prepare an overall plan for the area.

“As we deal with the madness around here, we need to be sure that each finger of each hand knows what every other finger is doing,” Frias said.

Hernandez, a resident of Cypress Park, decided to lead a broad-based community initiative against gangs after three teen-agers were shot within a block of his home in a month.

“It’s a battle between the gangs and the neighborhood,” Hernandez said.

Although the entire city is affected by gangs, Hernandez said his district--sweeping from Highland Park through Elysian Valley and from Chinatown down through downtown L.A. to the Pico-Union area--is among the hardest hit. In just one week in August, there were 14 homicides in his district, most of them gang-related.

Hernandez is using $25,000 of his district’s discretionary funds to hire Frias for a year. The councilman said Frias is uniquely qualified for the task.

“This is his mission in life,” Hernandez said.

As a boy, Frias said, he was inducted by adults and teen-agers into the culture that breeds gang violence. As were other children in his project, he was taught early on that he was “part of Maravilla” and that “anyone who disrespects that identity does not deserve to live.” By the time he was in third grade, Frias said, he and most of his friends were carrying weapons to protect themselves from older rival gang members who had grudges against the gangbangers of Maravilla.

“We, as children, became victims of adults in the environment--enemies who had been at war with each other prior to the date of my birth, . . . “ he said. “We didn’t know what the criminal law was. We did know that people were trying to kill us and we were trying to survive.”

But Frias, who never actually was in a gang, said he always abhorred the violence. He attributes this to his grandmother, a deeply religious woman who gave him a strong sense of moral values.

His best friend’s death had a lasting impact on his life. The next year, Frias was elected student body president at Garfield High School. While in office, he engineered a gang truce that made the school neutral territory--safe for everyone, regardless of where they lived, he said.

Ever since, he has been involved with gang prevention programs--for the Police Department, the state Office of Criminal Justice and the county Board of Education.

His goal--which he hopes the teams created Friday will achieve--is to make children see the futility of gang life, and to show them other options.

“Our children are not born to be killers,” Frias said. “The environment--the adverse forces in the environment--are what cultivates those killer behaviors.”