Gang Truce Leader: From Peacemaker to Prisoner : Justice: He’s serving time for a robbery he says he didn’t commit. Some call him a ‘potential savior’ for city.

Of all the young men in Watts credited with forging last spring’s gang truce, none was more impassioned about making peace than Dewayne Keith Holmes.

Weeks before Crips and Bloods tied together blue and red bandannas, he was the first gang member from the Imperial Courts housing project to risk venturing onto rival turf, launching a remarkable transformation that continues to serve as a healing force.

Holmes, however, is not there to enjoy his creation. He is sitting behind the bars of state prison, convicted of an armed robbery he insists he did not commit.

Moved by Holmes’ pleas of innocence and inspired by his peacemaking efforts, former Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) appeared in court to praise him as a courageous leader who should be treated leniently for saving untold lives. The judge called him “a danger to society” and sentenced him to prison for seven years.

The story of this 25-year-old member of the PJ Crips--his evolution as a truce leader and his descent back into the criminal justice system--strikes at one of the fundamental questions shaping the future of gangs in Los Angeles: To what extent can young men steeped in a violent, self-destructive culture change their ways and find redemption? Are they capable of wiping the slate clean? Will a system with enduring memory ever let them?

Many law enforcement authorities view such metamorphoses with suspicion, contending that the antisocial traits of hard-core gang members are so deeply ingrained that only naive sympathizers would embrace claims of sudden rehabilitation. Although the truce has led to a sharp reduction in gang shootings in some neighborhoods, the number of major crimes reported in South-Central Los Angeles is up 2% from the same time last year.

Holmes may have helped bring an end to a bloody rivalry, but he was still willing to stick a gun in somebody’s ribs and demand cash, Deputy Dist. Atty. David C. Brougham said.

“It’s not something we would like to believe . . . but he did betray those principles he was aspiring to,” Brougham said. “Change for most of us is a long process.”

Those who work with gang members believe that marginalized individuals can and do make positive changes in their lives when provided opportunities that have been long denied. Only a cynical legal system bent on criminalizing a generation of minority youths, Holmes’ supporters argue, would sentence someone with such a hopeful vision to seven years in prison for a robbery that is said to have netted him just $10.

“I think people like Dewayne are among the potential saviors of this city,” said urban theorist and author Mike Davis, who has rallied to Holmes’ cause. “By punishing him . . . society gains nothing.”

Beyond the facts of the case, Holmes’ story is one of squandered opportunity. Even if the legal machinery has functioned as designed, even if justice has been served and the punishment fits the crime, there is one less peacemaker in a city that desperately needs peace.

That irony is not lost on Holmes, whose tattoos, braids and bulging biceps seem at odds with his thoughtful, self-assured demeanor.

During an interview in County Jail shortly before his Nov. 24 transfer to the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi, he conceded that there was a time when he could have committed the robbery for which he was convicted. But during the last year, he insists, he has dedicated his life to strengthening his community, preaching to his homeboys against doing exactly what he was found guilty of having done.

The problem, as he sees it, is that his name sits in a police computer with the label “gang member” affixed, along with nine arrests and a five-year stay in the California Youth Authority for assault with a deadly weapon. Though he now espouses a more constructive philosophy, he believes he is forever vulnerable to being pinned with a crime--if only because he fits the stereotype of the guilty.

“I want to live like everyone else--I want the home, the wife, the kids, the job and the picket fence,” he said. “But every time I try to do right, it seems like wrong is always going to be there because of my past. . . . I don’t think guys like me get a second chance.”

But even those who believe Holmes, who think that his conviction and sentence were fraught with inequities, say he stubbornly clings to one last rule of the streets that suggests his transformation may not be complete.

Within the insular community of the housing project, many residents--including Holmes--purport to know the identities of the true robbers. Rather than name them to save himself, though, he continues to uphold a code of honor that considers snitching the ultimate violation of the gang ethic.

“It hurts to see a young brother who was doing so good let the old values get in his way,” said Perry Crouch, a longtime Imperial Courts activist and a friend to Holmes for the last two decades. “This is his freedom on the line. You can’t complain about it if you know who did this b.s. and you stay closemouthed.”

Whether it was society’s hand or his own foibles, Holmes’ transformation hit a snag Feb. 16, when he was appointed chief of security for a daylong talent show, dinner and dance at the Imperial Courts recreation center on East 114th Street.

The event, according to court records, went smoothly until 10:30 p.m., when two cousins--Gregory Walker, 23, of Lawndale and Kenneth Brown, 25, who lived near Inglewood--showed up at the gym door, looking for a friend. When told they would have to pay the $3 admission, they declined.

“You (expletives) aren’t even from around here!” the man guarding the door shouted, a police report states. “Why don’t you give the ‘hood the money?”

As Walker and Brown headed back to their car, another man approached them. “What’s up, cuz?” he asked, pulling out a handgun.

Walker was kicked in the ribs and hit in the head. Someone yanked a thick gold chain from his neck, while others took his rings, watch, bracelet and wallet. He was then told to disrobe, records show, revealing $647 in cash stuffed inside his shoe.

Brown, who also had a gun pointed at him, gave up two five-dollar bills. Then, as he walked away, he was clubbed in the head with the barrel of a pistol.

After driving to a fast-food restaurant and calling for help, they were picked up by police and taken back to Imperial Courts. Officers rounded up several dozen men from inside the gym and had them parade single file with spotlights trained on them while the two victims identified their assailants from the back seat of the patrol car.

Even though no weapons were found and the jewelry was never recovered, six people were charged with robbery, including Dewayne Holmes, known within the 482-unit complex as “Sniper.”

Holmes, who remained free on bail until early May, has insisted that he was inside the gym when the robbery occurred. When he was called by witnesses to help break it up, he said, he ordered the crowd to return the victims’ keys and walked them safely back to their car.

“I started talking crazy to all the homeboys,” Holmes said, “telling them that’s why we can’t ever have anything good around here, because they always make everything look bad for us.”

But back at the LAPD’s Southeast Division station, the two victims again picked Holmes as an assailant, the one who had robbed Brown. When Holmes was booked, officers removed $20--including two five-dollar bills--from his pants pocket.

By then, Holmes had already been at the center of an intensely emotional transition within the community--part disturbing, part encouraging--that he says changed the way he looked at the world.

It all started during Thanksgiving week, 1991, when he and his cousin, Henry Peco, took a holiday trip to Imperial Courts from Sacramento, where Holmes had spent the previous year trying to distance himself from the spiral of gang life.

Three days after their arrival, on a fiercely windy night, Peco was shot to death by police responding to reports of gunfire during a power outage that plunged the housing project into darkness.

Although two young men involved in the shootout were sentenced to prison--admitting in court that Peco had fired an assault rifle at police before he was killed--that did little to soothe the many angry residents who viewed the episode as the culmination of years of police harassment.

For Holmes, who was never implicated in the shooting, it was a moment of awakening, a time to take stock of the pain and suffering that routinely ripple through the Watts community. Hoping to avoid more bloodshed, he says he urged other gang members not to retaliate against the police and instead channel their energies toward nonviolent protest.

He also journeyed to the nearby Jordan Downs housing project--a previously unthinkable proposition--and asked for a truce with longtime rivals, the Grape Street Crips, until Peco could be buried.

“Our family was in a lot of pain and he just wanted to stop the war,” said Holmes’ mother, Theresa Allison, who believes her family was targeted by police after the Peco shooting. “Sometimes, when you lose someone who’s so special to you, it helps you make up your mind to do what you should have been doing long ago.”

Though the gangs’ battles had been legendary, the truce with Jordan Downs held. Holmes then traveled to Nickerson Gardens, explaining to the Bounty Hunter Bloods that the Imperial Courts gang was seeking peace. There was talk of extending the uneasy cease-fire at least until Christmas.

At that time, Mujahid Abdul-Karim, minister of Masjid Al-Rasul in Watts, began speaking with Holmes about unity, not just among the housing project gangs, but among all disenfranchised people. Their conversations led to a series of truce meetings at the mosque, where Holmes gathered with other gang leaders every Sunday for two months until formally declaring peace on April 26.

“Dewayne was the most crucial individual in terms of bringing the truce about,” Abdul-Karim said. “He is one of the most dynamic, politically aware young men in the Watts community.”

Little of that mattered once the case went to trial in August. His court-appointed attorney, Allen J. Webster, could only raise doubts about the evidence, pointing out that the two victims had criminal records and questioning the reliability of the method in which they identified Holmes the night of the robbery.

Once on the witness stand, only Brown was able to pick out Holmes as his assailant. His companion, Walker, said he could not remember.

Authorities, however, said there was no indication that the victims were involved in illegal activity that night. Although Walker could not identify Holmes in court, he did testify that he was sure the man he had picked out earlier was the culprit. And that person, police said, was Holmes.

“If this individual was a part of the truce, I would be all in support of that, but it doesn’t excuse criminal activity by anyone,” said LAPD Detective Gregory Grant, a 12-year veteran who investigated the robbery. “I just wonder when somebody is going to stand up for that silent majority who live in fear, who live under persecution, who tell me they’re afraid to go out at night. Those are the people I serve.”

A Long Beach Superior Court jury reached its verdict quickly. “I don’t think it was really all that complicated,” said the foreman, who asked that his name not be used. “I don’t remember any wrenching deliberations.”

Although Holmes’ criminal history and peacemaking efforts were not directly relevant to his trial, they were key factors at his October sentencing.

His mother submitted a petition signed by 40 residents, thanking Holmes for bringing “a wonderful change” to the projects and praying for his release. She also gathered two dozen laudatory letters from community leaders, activists and officials.

Jerry Brown, his unsuccessful presidential bid over, was asked to lend his influence. He interviewed Holmes in jail, spent time with the family, talked to the prosecutor and the defense attorney, and hung out at Imperial Courts before agreeing to make a plea for leniency.

“Here’s a guy who did something about peace and that has some meaning,” Brown said in an interview. “I think there’s a real case of injustice going on here.”

A pre-sentencing probation report was far less supportive. It chronicled Holmes’ entire criminal record, beginning with a petty theft arrest at age 10 up to his role as a “ringleader” in the housing project gang.

If, in fact, he was such a highly respected peacemaker, concluded deputy probation officer Leslie Erickson, then “his participation in the present offense must have had a wide-ranging detrimental effect on many in the crowd that were watching.”

Superior Court Judge Richard R. Romero, who declined to be interviewed, told Holmes that he was taking three years off the maximum sentence of 10 years in recognition of his accomplishments.

For Holmes, who has appealed the conviction, it will be a time of introspection.

“Right now, I’m at that fork in the road, kind of confused about which way I should go,” he said. “All I know is it’s impossible for a guy to go behind these walls and come back the same way he was before he went in.”