June 24, 2001 LA Times

Good Turns;
Making a Deal for a Trip--and a Future;
The priest told the three students in Boyle Heights: Stay out of gangs, graduate and I will send you to Hawaii.

BYLINE: JOSE CARDENAS, TIMES STAFF WRITER

BODY:
The priest, affectionately known to the three young boys as "G," made them an offer.

"Graduate from high school without joining the neighborhood gang and I'll send you on a vacation anywhere you want to go in the United States," he told them.

The boys, growing up in the Pico-Aliso housing project in Boyle Heights, knew of a place they'd like to go.

"Even Hawaii, G?" they asked the priest.

"Even Hawaii."

Four years ago, the three boys--Richard Chagollan, Edgar Delgado and Leo Ochoa--took the priest up on the offer.

They aimed to defy the natural order of things here: In the project, anyone with older brothers in the gang automatically becomes the next generation to join.

The three boys have known G, otherwise known as Father Greg Boyle--who is known nationally for his unconventional methods of reaching out to gang members--all their lives.

Boyle arrived to minister at the Dolores Mission parish in the project in the mid-1980s when the boys were very young. The boys lived in the Pico-Gardens section of the project, a gritty neighborhood between 4th and 6th streets and Pecan and Clarence streets.

For generations, the gangs--about eight of them--that terrorized Pico-Aliso were as much a part of the landscape as the hot sun that shone above it. They murdered and dealt drugs and made the neighborhood east of downtown one of the most dangerous in the city.

The gang in the boys' two-block, Pico-Gardens neighborhood was Cuatro Flats.

When the boys were 10, too young to join the real gang, they and a few dozen other youngsters formed their own clique. Neighbors took to calling them the Pandilla Mugrosa--the Dirty Gang--because of the filth on their clothes. From an overpass, they threw rocks at cars on the Golden State Freeway and egged people's houses.

It was mostly children's mischief, but they were only two years away from being serious candidates for the real gang. Indeed, all had older brothers already in Cuatro Flats. Delgado had seen his brother--barely a teenager--get "jumped" into the gang in a friend's backyard. It's a vicious rite of passage for any new member.

"I saw his own friends beating him up," remembers Delgado, now 17. "I didn't know what to do."

Boyle knew the boys would be next to be drafted into the gang, so when he would see the idle youngsters on the street, he'd call to them: "What are you doing?"

"Nothing, G," Chagollan would yell back.

"Let's go eat," the priest would offer.

He got them off the street for a while.

The three boys' older brothers went to Dolores Mission Alternative School. One of their teachers was Cara Gould, who would later work for Boyle.

"They were respectful to me," she remembers. "There was a lot of goodness in them, but they were violent when it came to gang stuff."

She knew their little brothers--the three boys who by this time were sixth-graders at Second Street Elementary School--and she feared they would be sucked into the gang.

"If you lined them up and said, 'Who's going to be the next members of Cuatro Flats?' these are the [three] you would pick," she said.

Frequently, she and her colleagues would pick up the younger boys and take them to the mountains, to the movies, to the beach--anything to get them off the street.

When the trio were finishing elementary school Gould made the them a deal: "Graduate from middle school without getting jumped into Cuatro Flats and I'll take you to any amusement park in Southern California."

The challenge was made. Again and again, Chagollan, Delgado and Ochoa resisted gang life, even as, one by one, the other children in their Dirty Gang were jumped into the real gang.

They resisted even as one of their friends--just 12--was shot to death.

Although their own older brothers shooed them away from the gang, the temptation lingered.

"My brother would try to make me not get into gangs," Delgado says, "but I still had that 'Oh, but I like how he lives. I like how he's making money. I like all the girls he's getting.' "

The temptation was too strong for a fourth boy who had taken Gould's challenge. He joined Cuatro Flats. But in 1997, Chagollan and Ochoa graduated from Hollenbeck Middle School. Delgado, who attended Paul Revere Middle School in Brentwood, where the curriculum was a better match for his academic abilities, also graduated.

It was time for Gould to pay up, and she took them to Universal Studios. When Boyle heard of their deal he asked for details. Then he challenged the boys to finish high school.

In some ways, this challenge was easier because junior high was a bigger test. But the urge to join the gang never left.

"Sometimes it would be tempting," says Chagollan, now 18.

But Chagollan, who struggled to keep his grades up, drew strength when the other two boys reminded him of the deal.

"They would tell me, 'Come on, fool. Hawaii. We don't wanna go without you,' " Chagollan says.

Chagollan made it. All three did. On Thursday they will graduate from Roosevelt High School without having joined the gang.

Boyle doesn't know yet how he will pay for a week on the island for the three boys and a chaperon. So the trip probably won't be until later this summer to give him time to gather the money.

The three will attend Cal State Los Angeles, where they are leaning toward majoring in something like sociology. They'd like to come back to the neighborhood and work with young people--just like the man they call G.

"The chance they gave us," Delgado says, "I wanna give that to others."

GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Father Greg Boyle and teacher Cara Gould, back row, helped Edgar Delgado, left front, Leo Ochoa, center, and Richard Chagollan through Roosevelt High School without joining a gang. PHOTOGRAPHER: RICHARD HARTOG / Los Angeles Times