Peacemaker Among Gangs Is Cut Down by Gunfire : Crime: Tony Thomas helped forge truce. He walked fine line between hero and target of culture he tried to reform.

Tony Thomas’ transformation from gangbanger to peacemaker ended Thursday night when he was gunned down at the Imperial Courts housing project, an attack that has sparked anguished soul-searching about the future of the Watts truce and about the violent culture it has struggled to mend.

Thomas, a 30-year-old veteran of the streets who walked with a limp from an earlier shooting, was one of the most celebrated architects of the movement to unite South-Central Los Angeles’ black gangs. After the 1992 riots, he founded the nonprofit Hands Across Watts corporation, appeared on “Oprah” and is featured in an upcoming book about the history of the Bloods and Crips.

“He was like a real diplomat in the ‘hood,” said rapper Ice-T, who serves on the Hands Across Watts board of directors. “Ice-T might say, ‘Stop,’ but Ice-T makes records. When these brothers, like Tony, said ‘Stop,’ that means something.”

But even as he gained stature, Thomas found himself walking a fine line. Some gang members resisted his nonviolent preaching. Others resented the notoriety he won. Sometimes, friends said, he packed a pistol for protection. Along with his trademark Georgetown cap, he also donned a bulletproof vest.

“When you stand up against your homeboys, like Tony did, you face that danger,” said T. Rodgers, a former Bloods leader who runs a consulting firm known as Sidewalk University. “Once you make that change in your life, you no longer believe in what they believe in. Your thinking has changed. And that’s what’s scary to them.”

Details of Thomas’ slaying remained sketchy Friday, despite three news conferences--one a curt report from police detectives, the other an emotional farewell attended by grieving homeboys, and a final one at a Watts mosque in which activists sought to dispel what they termed false rumors that the truce was unraveling.

At the Los Angeles Police Department’s South Bureau homicide detail, officials described the shooting only as an “act of gang violence” that also led to the wounding of Andre Wicker, 22, who was in critical condition with multiple gunshots at a hospital, and Rodney Compton, 20, who was treated and released.

“There were dozens of rounds shot that night,” said Lt. Sergio Robleto, adding that Thomas got the worst of it, being hit “multiple times throughout his body--from head to toe.”

Officers were looking for eight to 10 potential witnesses, but no arrests had been made.

In a teary gathering at the Kedren Community Center in Watts, friends said Thomas had gone to the housing project to play dice because he needed money to pay the phone bill at the Hands Across Watts office, which has tried to translate the gang truce into increased economic empowerment.

As he did almost every day, they said, Thomas also searched out a few of the younger PJ Crips, urging them to lay down their weapons and do something positive for the community. Although police could not confirm this account, Thomas reportedly made the mistake of lecturing several suspected drug dealers who apparently did not want his advice.

“Brother Tony did not approve of drug dealers,” said a sobbing Malik Spellman, 30, who worked with Thomas at Hands Across Watts. “He took a stand.”

In a separate interview, Becky Hammonds, Thomas’ girlfriend of 14 years, said she believed he was “ambushed by some PJ Watts Crips who wasn’t keen on the peace.” She added that witnesses told her that Thomas was carrying a pistol and that he fired back at his assailants, possibly wounding two of them.

“I can’t believe it,” she said. “All the wrong we done, then we start doing right, and this happens.”

In many ways, Thomas had come to symbolize the truce’s redemptive spirit, turning his life around after spending nearly nine years behind bars. Barbara Cottman Becnel, a writer who has interviewed him extensively for her upcoming book about the Crips and Bloods, said his death brought home just how difficult the transition was that Thomas had been attempting.

“When you and I decide that there’s some little glitch in our psyche that we want to work on, it’s usually a little, minor, internal project,” she said. “Tony was making the kind of change that few of us ever demand of ourselves. He was this man of the streets, working with everything he had in him, with all of his heart, to claim a solid place in the legitimate world. It was very, very hard.”

She attributed the change in Thomas, widely known as Tony Bogard, or “TB,” to two pivotal events that he frequently spoke of--the death of his mother and his brush with mortality.

The first occurred in the 1980s, during one of his stays in County Jail, when he was unable to comfort his terminally ill mother. “That really hurt him,” Becnel said. “He didn’t want to keep living the kind of life that, when his mother was dying, he couldn’t be there.”

After his release, rivals shot him eight times with an AK-47, a nearly lethal attack that kept him disabled for almost two years and left several slugs lodged in his body. In what Becnel described as “a sort of deathbed epiphany,” Thomas vowed to forever change his life.

“His deal with God was that: ‘If I survive this situation, I’m going to do good,’ ” she said.

By most accounts, he worked feverishly to make good on his vow. Earning a small stipend from county Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke’s office, he initiated a youth program that took hundreds of youngsters from the Watts projects to Dodger games, amusement parks and the beach. He helped secure a $200,000 grant for a job-training program launched last month for 150 young adults. In honor of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, he had planned to hold a peace treaty picnic today at Imperial Courts.

“There might have been some who didn’t agree with him, but he reached people,” said Cynthia Mendenhall, president of the Imperial Courts residents council. “He took the time and explained to kids what he did, where he came from, why he walked with a limp. . . . Tony as a child grew up rough, and he wanted it better for these kids who’s coming up now.”

Even though he was candid about the challenge of undoing decades of violent rivalry, he also believed that the people of Watts--steeped in the community’s sense of history and identity--had a special responsibility to lead the way.

“Watts is showing all the other communities that we can get together, that we’re all one,” he told The Times in a 1992 interview. “But all we can do is be an example. You can’t go out there and make nobody do what they don’t want to do.”

Times staff writer Eric Malnic contributed to this story.