Past Haunts Immigrant Who Says He Cut Gang Ties

Tony Alvarado’s past cuts through his life like a razor.

Had he been born in the United States, he might have shed his rap as a juvenile gang punk in the course of his 10-year struggle to redeem himself.

Alvarado, 28, has a letter from Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City) praising him for shielding kids from the siren call of gangs and drugs. He was honored by the Los Angeles Police Department for helping wrestle a suspect into handcuffs. He married a U.S. citizen, had three children and bought a house. His pastor praises his Bible classes and calls him a “good citizen.”

None of that meant much to the FBI agent and LAPD CRASH officer who seized this prodigal son of the streets in August during an investigation of a San Fernando Valley gang. Alvarado says that they wanted him to wear a surveillance wire and dive back into gang life as an informant, and that he refused.

In September, he became one of hundreds of people in California indicted on charges of reentering the country illegally after deportation--an offense that, for someone with a criminal background, carries a maximum sentence of 20 years.

Alvarado, an illegal immigrant almost since birth who had a dubious 1990 drug conviction built on a CRASH arrest, is classified as an “inadmissible alien.” He has been deported twice. He says his gang days are long over, but his name keeps resurfacing in computerized gang databases like a shard of glass buried in the sand.

Los Angeles prosecutors say the reentry law is generally applied here to those who, like Alvarado, have criminal records.

Alvarado’s predicament underscores the difficult job federal authorities have in distinguishing criminals from the millions of law-abiding illegal immigrants whose families are deeply woven into the fabric of American life. It shows how U.S. society--which has entered into a tacit agreement to benefit from cheap illegal immigrant labor--grapples with the decisions about who deserves to reside here permanently.

For a generation of illegal-immigrant children, Alvarado’s long trip through the federal justice system also demonstrates the irrevocability of any youthful misstep, especially if the transgression earns the computerized scarlet letter: gang member. For people like him, there is no statute of limitations.

Authorities say the illegal-reentry statute is aimed at criminals who prey on other immigrants. It has become the single most prosecuted federal crime in San Diego as well as the seven-county Central District that includes Los Angeles, according to Thom Mrozek, spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles.

Thomas Schiltgen, district director for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Los Angeles, said the law also has a deterrent effect that “enhances our enforcement posture. That’s the heart of the issue.”

Alvarado’s outlook is bleak. He could get a federal prison sentence at a cost to taxpayers of $23,500 a year. If so, his $6.20-an-hour earnings will no longer supplement the $30,000 annual salary of his wife, Maricela Carmona, 25. His three sons--Anthony, 7, Andrew, 3, and Adam, 1--will be deprived of their father’s presence.

“There is an emotional cycle of poverty when fathers are absent,” Carmona, 25, a dental assistant, said. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

‘I’m Not Going to Tell You I Was an Angel’

Alvarado knows that from experience. As a teenager, he squandered his chances of legal residency, racking up a nonviolent juvenile record.

He had come to the United States as a baby with his mother, a Mexican immigrant. He was reared in a housing project where thugs once murdered someone in front of local kids. Home alone, youths gravitated to gangs that combined the companionship of a baby-sitter with the menacing presence of a schoolyard bully. Alvarado joined the Project Boyz.

“I’m not going to tell you I was an angel,” he said. “Those were the people I grew up with. You know what my summer camp was? Juvenile detention.”

But Alvarado says he was not guilty of any crime in 1990 when officers from the Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums unit of the LAPD’s Foothill Division found nearly 3 ounces of PCP beneath the passenger seat of a friend’s car that Alvarado was driving.

The passenger and owner of the car, Luis Selvera, has always maintained that the PCP belonged to him and not Alvarado.

The arrest record quotes Selvera--he says falsely--as saying Alvarado knew the drugs were in the car. “Tony didn’t know at all,” Selvera, who is in detention for violating parole, said in an interview with KCOP-TV Channel 13. “They didn’t want to hear it. I know for a fact he was innocent.”

Alvarado’s attorney, David A. Katz, said the amount could have been considered a personal use quantity--possession of which is a misdemeanor. But Alvarado was charged with possession for sale.

Alvarado alleges that his public defender agreed, without his consent, to let a judge decide the case. He said he expected a jury trial and was stunned when a judge declared him guilty and sentenced him on the spot.

“I said, ‘Give me a lie detector test, anything, because I’m innocent,’ ” Alvarado said.

He said his public defender told him to accept the light sentence and get on with his life.

Confirming this is difficult, because critical court records of the proceeding have disappeared. The court reporter took records home years ago and they were lost when she had a stroke and was taken to a nursing home, a court statement said.

“This is the era of three strikes and deportations,” Katz said. “How are we to protect people’s rights if they don’t preserve the records?”

Alvarado served six months in Los Angeles County Jail and then, by many accounts, turned his life around.

He returned to Pacoima and his high-school sweetheart, Maricela. He says he turned his back on gang life, gave away his gang clothes and took a job at the David M. Gonzalez Pacoima Recreation Center.

There, he organized bodybuilding classes and softball and football games as an alternative to gang activity. He organized a graffiti-cleaning team. He was promoted to assistant park director.

When the 1992 riots broke out, Alvarado helped protect a local Korean American-owned liquor store.

“He has done an excellent job in handling the gang-related problems and the drug dealings,” wrote Joseph Dickson, the center’s director, in 1993.

Berman, the area’s congressman, called Alvarado a “positive influence” on youths at risk.

“Without Tony, some of these children would be lost to gangs and drugs,” Berman wrote.

By the time three INS agents showed up at Alvarado’s place of employment in 1993, he was a father. The agents said his drug conviction made him deportable. Alvarado was sent to Mexico, but he returned a few days later. He became his baby’s full-time care-giver, changing diapers and running him to the doctor.

In 1995, he said, he was picked up again, by CRASH officers and an FBI agent, when he visited his mother in the projects. The LAPD officer asked him, “Does San Ysidro sound familiar to you?” Alvarado said, adding that the officers proposed that he wear a wire and become a full-time informant for a gang investigation, which he refused to do.

After another involuntary trip to Tijuana and back, Alvarado got a job at a rehab center under a phony last name, Lopez. He and his fiancee bought a house in San Fernando, got married, had two more kids and “I thought everything was sweet and dandy,” he said.

A 1996 INS file paints a different picture. It describes Alvarado as a gang member “at large,” with no family ties or equities, who had been convicted of “drug trafficking.” It was signed in 1996 by Paul Smith, a supervisory special agent of the Los Angeles INS office’s Special Investigations Unit, which oversees the Violent Gang Task Force.

The task force was part of a comprehensive effort to deal with gangs that had made some neighborhoods in Los Angeles virtually unlivable.

Refusing to Be an Informant

Alvarado’s final moment of reckoning came in August 1999, when an LAPD officer stopped him in response to what federal authorities say was an FBI warrant. At the Foothill station, he met an FBI agent and a CRASH officer, Carlos Sanchez, who made another pitch for him to wear a wire and descend again into gang life, telling him, Alvarado said, “how I could be able to stay here if I was willing to work with them.”

His wife said Sanchez--who has no comment on the affair--took her to lunch a few days after Alvarado was arrested. She said she still has his pager number.

“They wanted him to get wired and go back into that lifestyle and get friendly with everybody again,” Carmona said, “making it look like if he didn’t, it would be very hard for us. Tony could get 12 years. [Sanchez] wanted me to try to talk Tony into it.”

She said Alvarado declined out of “fear for his life and family.”

FBI spokesman Ray Escudero said the bureau does not comment on its investigative techniques or cases that are being prosecuted. U.S. attorney’s office spokesman Mrozek said such information is confidential.

Alvarado was charged in September with illegal reentry.

A few weeks later, his pastor, Jerry Jimenez of Calvary Chapel, urged authorities to “please consider his wife and children.”

“Antonio’s history of employment and clean record clearly demonstrated that he is no threat to society, but rather, an asset,” Jimenez said in a letter. “He is a hard worker, a provider for his family, a homeowner and a churchgoer.”

In December, a federal judge said Alvarado’s determination to be with his family made him an unlikely flight risk, and released him on $15,000 bail, Katz said. As Alvarado walked out of the Metropolitan Detention Center, immigration agents handcuffed him and took him to the INS detention center in San Pedro.

His trial is set for June. Katz hopes to get the drug conviction overturned and the immigration charges dismissed.

Alvarado’s wife has faith that the family will be reunited, because “I’m Christian, so I think God will take care of it.”

And Alvarado has always made it home before.