6 Members ‘Break Bread’ to Symbolize Truce : Gangs Greet Yule With the Gift of Good Will

The six young men were seated in places of honor and were applauded by a crowd of more than 200. They were treated to a performance by armless guitarist Tony Melendez, who is best known for playing for Pope John Paul II. They shared the dais with Pomona Police Chief Richard Tefank and with a Roman Catholic bishop, who spoke glowingly of them.

“You guys are really special,” Bishop Juan Arzube of Los Angeles told the six privileged guests. “All these people have come here for your benefit.”

The teen-agers who received this acclaim are neither football heroes nor junior statesmen. They are gang members.

The six youths, representing three Latino gangs, gathered Sunday at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Pomona for a “breaking of the bread,” a symbolic pledge to honor a truce during the holidays.

Truce Terms

Their appearance was a partial victory for the Combined Agencies Committee--a coalition of police, churches, community groups and the county Probation Department’s specialized gang-supervision program. For more than a month, the committee had brought together representatives of various gangs to discuss terms of a truce.

But when the bread was broken at the church auditorium Sunday, neither 12th Street--Pomona’s largest Latino gang--nor any of the city’s black gangs was represented.

And less than 36 hours before the truce was to have begun, two teen-age members of the Sur Trese gang were shot and wounded, one critically. Sgt. Gary Elofson, head of the police department’s Crimes Against Persons Unit, said that the shooting was not an instance of inter-gang warfare, but an internal dispute within the gang.

Yet for Brother Modesto Leon, who has worked with gangs in East Los Angeles for the last 14 years, the participation of three such groups in the ceremony was a promising start.

“It takes a while,” Leon said. “You have some people who are very angry. The healing process takes a long time. We don’t expect young people to just quit overnight. There’s still going to be violence. The important part is to have a round-table where people can talk.”

Another positive note was that two members of Sur Trese participated in Sunday’s ceremony, though they said the shooting incident “made us think twice” about attending.

“We don’t feel really good right now because we got a home boy in the hospital, but we like this (ceremony) because it helps us feel better,” said Mario (Snipper) Cruz, 17. “We give thanks to everybody for doing this.”

However, the efforts to bring peace to the streets of Pomona have been initially greeted with skepticism by many gang leaders.

“I think there’s a certain amount of apprehension and mistrust among the groups,” Police Capt. Jack Blair said. “But we haven’t given up on any group and we won’t give up.”

The forces of community pride and peer pressure that lure teen-agers to gangs make them wary of breaking with tradition, Leon said. Viewing the 20 gang members who attended Sunday’s ceremony, Leon said, “It took a lot of guts for these young people to come here.”

Elofson said police have received truce commitments from four Latino gangs--Pomona Sur, Sur Trese, Happytown and Cherrieville. The problem at this point, he said, is the intransigence of 12th Street, which boasts a membership of about 200 and a territory that covers a broad section of south Pomona.

“We’re meeting some stumbling blocks in getting a hold of 12th Street,” Elofson said. “They aren’t in our program. They don’t want to meet with the other gangs. I told the members of Cherrieville, you can relax in your barrio, but you can’t let your guard all the way down because you’re still at war with 12th Street.”

After a rash of shooting incidents last spring, Blair asked Leon and Mike Duran, director of the Probation Department’s specialized gang supervision unit, to come to Pomona in the hope that they could duplicate their success in East Los Angeles.

Leon has used the Catholic Church’s influence to bring together gang members and their families to heal the wounds caused by decades of fighting. Duran has recruited former gang members to work with teen-agers and provide them with alternatives to violence.

Their approach appears to be working in East Los Angeles, where for years, between 15 and 20 people had been killed annually in gang-related attacks, Duran said. Last year, there were four such slayings, and there have been two so far this year, according to Sheriff’s Lt. Al Scaduto.

‘Did Make a Difference’

“I think we did make a difference,” Duran said, adding that the drop in the number of gang-related murders has been matched by a reduction in the number of teen-agers entering his program.

Speaking at Sunday’s ceremony, Duran, a former gang member from East Los Angeles, offered himself as an example.

“When I was 16 years old, I was doing the same things these guys are doing,” Duran said, patting a gang member’s shoulder. “Some well-meaning people got us together and got us to cut the crap out as far as the fighting was concerned. . . . If you want to cut the crap and get on with a life, you can do it.”

Gang violence has existed in Pomona for as long as anyone can remember, though no one seems able to recall why it all started. Since the 1920s, members of the 12th Street and Cherrieville gangs have battled over pride and turf.

In recent years, these two groups have been joined by a host of smaller Latino gangs such as Happytown, Pomona Sur and Sur Trese, and black gangs such as the Bloods, the Crips and the 357s, police said.

In the early years, youths fought with their fists, but today, combat usually takes the form of drive-by shootings. It is an endless cycle of attacks and reprisals, in which bystanders have died with increasing regularity.

In April, four people--including two young girls--were wounded when a gunman believed to be a member of the 12th Street gang fired into a crowd of mourners at the funeral of a Cherrieville youth who had been killed in a drive-by shooting.

Two months later, four were wounded when a gunman opened fire on a crowd that had gathered in a park for a meeting on alternatives to gang violence.

According to the most recent figures quoted by Elofson, Pomona has 11 recognized gangs with 1,160 members. In 1985, gangs were responsible for 34% of all crime in the city--including 11 murders, 298 felony assaults and 68 drive-by shootings.

But despite the carnage bred by gang activity in Pomona, Duran said the cycle of violence does not seem to be as deeply entrenched here as it was in East Los Angeles when he began his program there.

“East L. A. had something like 50 years of cement piled on top of it; I thought we would never make a dent,” he recalled. “Pomona’s not so cut-and-dried that way, not so mired in cement that it couldn’t see itself getting some help.”

Gang-related murders are gradually on the decline in Pomona, Elofson said. After 11 such slayings in 1985, there were six in 1986 and seven so far this year. In the mid-1970s--when youths from Chino and Ontario came to Pomona to battle the locals--gang-related deaths accounted for more than half of the city’s homicides, with as many as 14 fatalities in a year, he said.

Pomona’s gang program will also draw on the experience gained through trial and error in East Los Angeles, Duran said. The most important lesson learned there was the effectiveness of the Catholic Church in dealing with Latino gangs, he said.

Because the institutions of church and family exert a greater influence over most gang members than do law enforcement agencies, Leon has succeeded where police and probation workers have failed.

Haven for Adversaries

In East Los Angeles, he has established a “spirit house,” a community center viewed as neutral turf by rival gangs. Here, members can meet in safety to try to resolve their differences. The house also offers counseling to parents of gang members.

“I would hope we could establish that same concept here in Pomona,” Blair said. “We feel that here in Pomona, as far as the Hispanic gangs are concerned, the Catholic Church is a keystone or an anchor.”

Authorities have yet to find such an inroad for dealing with black gangs, which differ significantly from Latinos both in their cultural background and their reasons for fighting. While Latino gangs battle over turf out of neighborhood pride, black gangs fight primarily over territory in which to ply the lucrative trade in drugs such as rock cocaine, Duran and Blair said.

“If they ever had truce meetings, it would be to carve up the narcotics trade,” Duran said. “It would be like the Mafia, where they agree to have peace so they can do business. Maybe that could happen (in Pomona), but it would be a negative reason for having a truce.”

Elofson said the 357s have attended truce meetings, but have declined to participate in the program.

Not Much Progress

“They came to the meeting, they sat and talked, they put all their problems on the table, they made an agreement with Cherrieville--who were the only ones they were fighting with--and left,” Elofson said.

Neither the Bloods nor the Crips have attended any of the meetings so far, Elofson said, adding that police intend to “be more aggressive” in their efforts to get the gangs to participate.

Besides the church’s efforts, the county Probation Department is using former gang members to try to help teen-agers active in the gangs make a break with that life style.

“Sometimes it’s just tattoo removals,” Duran said. “Other times it’s getting them glasses or physical checkups. Other times it’s helping the individual to find a job. There are a lot of resources out there, if only the probation officers are smart enough to avail themselves of them.”

Most people eventually give up gang membership when they get older, and as adolescent bravado gives way to family responsibilities. However, there is always another generation of teen-agers to continue the fighting.

Early Prevention

In Pomona, former gang rivals have joined forces to help divert children from gangs before they reach their teen years. On Monday, a group of 15 former members of the Cherrieville and 12th Street gangs put on a Christmas party for students at Roosevelt Elementary School, handing out presents and advising the children to say “no” to violence.

“We’re trying to let them know that even though there are different groups and members, eventually you have to grow up,” said Rudy Gutierrez, who grew up in the Cherrieville neighborhood and now serves as director of Casa de Esperanza, a mental-health referral and counseling service in Pomona.

“We’re trying to tell them that they don’t have to wait to grow out of it,” Gutierrez said. “Those decisions are always there for them. They have a decision of whether to join a gang, and they have a decision in how far they want to go with it. You can still be in a gang, but you don’t have to do everything they do.”

Must Keep Trying

Gutierrez said the efforts to end fighting among warring gangs will be long and difficult, but added that despite their reluctance to agree to a truce, most gang members do want peace.

“Deep inside, they hope for it, but they can’t support something like this because of peer pressure,” he said. “You have to be positive for it to work. No matter what happens, you’ve got to be positive.”

Joe Rodriguez, also a native of the Cherrieville community, agreed that it will take a sustained effort to end decades of bitter fighting.

“There scars are too deep,” Rodriguez said. “I’ve lost a lot of friends. The hurt will never go away for a lot of people. They would never want to have peace. . . . There’s always going to be that sense of retaliation for someone getting shot. When you see someone you care about die in front of you, it’s hard to get that out of your system.”