Gang Expert Takes Knowledge to Court

Their faces are etched in his memory. Sometimes they appear in his dreams: gangbangers he has saved from the death penalty, those he’s put behind bars and the wrongly accused who have been freed based on his testimony.

From his lost days as a teenage dice hustler on the streets of New Jersey to working inside juvenile detention centers, in jails and behind a professor’s lectern for 31 years at Cal State Northridge, Lewis Yablonsky has devoted half a century to understanding gangs. When he started, they toted homemade “zip guns” fashioned of wood, pipe and rubber bands; today they carry AK-47 assault rifles.

At 76, most would retire. But after gaining emeritus status from CSUN in 1994 as a professor of sociology and criminology, Yablonsky’s sights have turned from the classroom to the courtroom, where he is putting to use “50 years of wisdom” as an expert witness in criminal cases from here to Florida.

“You are dealing with a lot of realities here,” he said recently of the more than 40 cases he has worked on.

If he believes in the case, he will pore over court records and police reports and interview defendants and their families to find something, anything, to convince a judge or jury that they may not have the right guy, or if they do, to spare his life.

“About 5% of [murderers] are Jeffrey Dahmers,” Yablonsky said of the notorious serial killer. “But most of these guys can be turned around. That’s what I’m about.”

He saved one Tucson gangbanger from the death penalty, arguing that the 24-year-old turned to gang life as an adolescent only after his father brutally murdered his mother.

And he helped free another boy who was wrongly accused of a drive-by shooting in Sacramento after shots rang out of a truck in which he was a passenger.

He has on rare occasions testified for the prosecution, earning thanks from former Los Angeles Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti for testimony that helped put Damien Williams behind bars for the brutal beating of Reginald Denny following the Rodney G. King verdict in 1992.

“In the case of Lewis, we are talking about someone who is saving lives and helping shape the court system,” said sociologist Andrew Scott Ziner, who helped select Yablonsky for this year’s William Foote Whyte Career Award for Sociological Practice presented by the American Sociological Assn.

“It’s a great swan song for him,” said former student and current social worker Mike Boretez. “To take all the years of his work and to be able to effectively incorporate them--the criminal and the therapeutic side.”

Yablonsky is considered the “most celebrated and distinguished faculty member in the department and the university as a whole,” said Jane Prather, chairwoman of the CSUN sociology department.

“I probably have a lot more to give now than ever before in my life,” Yablonsky said of the 7,000 to 10,000 interviews he has conducted with gangbangers over the years.

As a child in Irvington, N.J., he was beaten by thugs because he was Jewish, he said. He carried a switchblade until he was nearly 18 to protect himself from black gangs in Newark. They beat him routinely, he said, because he was an ofay--a white boy.

“I learned what it feels like to be an underdog,” he said.

While he never joined a gang, he befriended kids in trouble with the law, such as his best friend, who ended up in prison after hijacking a fur truck. “I went on to do well,” Yablonsky says, “and I’ve always wondered why he went the way he did.”

After a three-year tour in the Navy, Yablonsky enrolled at Rutgers University supported by the GI Bill. It was there that he picked up his first book on sociology.

He earned master’s and doctorate degrees in sociology and criminology at New York University. During that time, he worked full time at a juvenile jail in his hometown, where he faced many of the gangsters he knew from the street.

He is a proponent of a form of therapy called psychodrama, in which participants act out their rage in a clinical setting. After decades of research, Yablonsky came to see himself as a translator of gang life, a sort of anthropologist of the street.

At his modest Westside apartment, he is working on his 17th book, “Criminology: Into the 21st Century,” and reviewing stacks of paperwork for upcoming cases.

He is paid $250 an hour for his casework, but said, “I’ll take a case for a few hundred dollars if I believe in it.”