Man draws on past experiences to guide youth

Ex-North Side Mafia member didn't like life of violence, drugs

David Montero, Rocky Mountain News

Published January 20, 2007 at midnight

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The kids in the basement of the Denver City and County Building on Thursday night look like piles of clothes draped over chairs.

Grim-faced, slouched and fidgety, they gaze at their feet or watch from beneath brims of baseball caps as Cisco Gallardo shuffles some papers on the desk. They don't talk much to one another - but why should they? They're members of different gangs.

Tonight there's a lot of red and black clothing. One, in an oversize leather jacket, flips open his cell phone, and his fingers dance quickly over the keypad. It's one example of how gang boundaries are less-defined now than they were in the 1980s and '90s, Gallardo said. With text messages, cell phones and teens having more mobility, hard-and-fast street boundaries melt away a little easier these days.

But turf still matters, and neighborhood matters even more.

The 35-year-old Gallardo fixates on a kid who looks about 16, but is really 12. He asks the boy, who is sporting a tilted red baseball cap, if he's affiliated with the 16 Block.

Pause.

"How did you know?" the kid asks, slightly surprised.

Gallardo rolls his eyes.

"How did I know?" he repeats with a sarcastic sigh.

There is another pause. Then the 12-year-old sits up and leans forward in his seat and looks at the bespectacled Gallardo.

"You know about 16 Block?" the kid asks.

"Yeah, I know about 16 Block," Gallardo replies, his answer soaked in experience.

A former enforcer's recall

The 6-foot-2, 250-pound nightmare was on his way to collect unpaid drug money from scared, broke single moms with children.

He loathed himself for doing it, but his set - the 41st Street Diablos of the North Side Mafia street gang - required the 17-year-old to do the grunt work. Collecting money from deadbeats was a way to earn the respect of the gang. Besides, Gallardo's hulking frame and dead stare made him perfect for the task.

"You have to be mean to people who never did nothing to you. That's where the drugs and alcohol play a part because you get high and you don't care," he said. "But I didn't like doing it. Especially when you have to deal with a mom who has kids and she's trying to sell you their games or the TV the kids watch. But you have to get something from them, so you take what you can or just beat them up."

Gallardo is quiet for a moment. The memory is over. He's back to being 35 and is driving his old car down Logan Street, his brown eyes scanning the rearview mirror, wishing he didn't have such vivid recall.

For years, he got anxiety attacks from recalling his gangster past. He said his two children - now 16 and 13 - sometimes get "freaked out" by the things he did, and they often wonder how he survived his seven years in gangs.

But the reminders are always there, and more frequent now in the wake of the Darrent Williams murder and the possibility that the shooters had gang ties.

Gallardo finds he's talking more about his past - the war stories, as he calls them. About how he was shot at by rival gangs. About how he got high for the first time at age 7 as a way to escape a fractured home. The four funerals of friends he attended - all gang murders - while he was in his gang.

About how it's time to try to end it. The Williams murder has given gang violence a high profile again, and Gallardo will talk to anyone who will listen - especially if they're gangbanging now.

Is there a nice Crips hotel?

The 12-year-old sitting two seats down from Gallardo in Thursday's session is Josain, who's the son of Sponge, an Original Gangster in G.K.I. - Gallant Knights Insane - currently serving time in prison. His 13-year-old brother, Benito, is also present. Gallardo asked only first names be used.

Josain is articulate, often waxing philosophical as he talks to the dozen kids currently involved in gangbanging. Gallardo said his reach-out group, the Gang Rescue and Support Project (GRASP), doesn't usually allow kids Josain's age into the sessions, but because of his pedigree and his intelligence, Gallardo lets him stay.

The talk is about neighborhood and its importance to gang members. Gallardo says it was the hardest part of gang life for him to kick - the sense of identity and belonging that came with being in the North Side Mafia.

Sitting in the back, former Blood gangster Rudy Balles said gang loyalty is like ultra-local nationalism. But Balles asked a couple of the Crips there if, after 25 years of existence, the gang had done anything for them in return for their undying loyalty.

"Is there a Crips conference at some nice hotel once a year?" he asks, standing up and revealing a long ponytail that goes well down his back. "After building something up for 25 years, you'd think they'd have something to show for it, right? A place for you to stay or something?"

A kid says that sometimes he can hide out in a basement.

"A basement?" Balles asked. "After 25 years, that's what

they've got?"

Respect is mentioned. Gallardo asks a broad-faced teenager named Josue if there's someone he respects in his life. The 14-year-old smiles, gestures with his hands and says he respects his mother. The kid next to him, Jorge, says he does, too.

"Everyone says their mom," Gallardo says. "Their dad. Their grandma. But you don't respect them enough to stop doing what you're doing."

Josain interrupts.

"I respect everybody until I lose respect," he says.

Gallardo knows the kids are drifting. Lost. Looking for someone to listen and understand who they are. He knows because he was once one of them.

Too stoned to climb down

Gallardo's parents divorced when he was 6 years old. He said his father was a drunk, but he desperately wanted to love and respect him. His mom married his stepfather the following year - the same year he first got high on marijuana.

It was at Chaffee Park. The tree Gallardo and his friend climbed to smoke in is still there.

"My homeboy's dad used to sell weed. He was a Vietnam vet and a biker and had weed around, so we just snagged a 'J' (joint) one day and we climbed up the tree and decided to toke it up," he said. "We quickly realized we were too high to climb down."

It was a greased rail to harder drugs after that. Gallardo said he soon learned to dip cigarettes in PCP. He drank all the time, following in his father's footsteps.

"He would pick us up and say, 'We're going to the zoo,' and we'd end up at the bar and spend the whole day there," Gallardo said. "That was a typical day. He said he never had money for us to take us to the movies, but he always seemed to have money for a six-pack."

Gallardo fought with his stepfather growing up - and his mother, too. Soon he didn't even want to be in the same house. Instead, he would sleep at friends' houses - friends who were getting into the North Side Mafia.

The progression was gradual. Gallardo said the gang didn't recruit him - they just tapped into a void already existing in his life:

"I'd get angry and I would leave, and then, pretty soon, I wouldn't come home for a day or I wouldn't come home for two or three days. Pretty soon, I wouldn't come home at all."

Rationale for leaving home

Jorge hasn't been home in days. He dropped out of school after a couple of weeks and the 14-year-old doesn't really want to go back. He sits in his chair and answers most questions with either "I don't know" or a shrug of his shoulders. He looks at the ground, leaving Gallardo to look at the top of his shaved head much of the time.

Josue says his mom found a blunt (a marijuana-laced cigar) in his room, and she got mad. He left home, too.

Gallardo asks the kids if parents have a right to be angry about that behavior.

Then he asks them how they would react if their child was smoking dope.

"I'd smack that fool," Josain says quickly. The room fills with laughter.

Lost friends haunting

Violence was so much a part of Gallardo's life, he would often look for fights. And if there wasn't another gang to pick a fight with, he'd sometimes fight guys in his own gang.

"It was a rush," he said.

The gangster lifestyle was filled with guns and knives. He saw his first stabbing when he was 10.

Driving along Federal Boulevard, he points to a driveway where he saw a gang member get shot.

He never shot anyone, but he did shoot at people. Gallardo was shot at, too.

The friends he buried still haunt him.

The group of kids gathered at the GRASP meeting get a sense that Gallardo knows what he's talking about. He presses them with hard questions. Why they won't take the step to fade away from the gang? Several say they fear retaliation against their families and stay in the gang for that reason.

"You die for your family so they can live," Josain says.

After getting updates on a few of the kids, the time is up and Gallardo dismisses them from the basement. They're gone in seconds. Gallardo scrolls the list of gangs in his laptop - 55 total this week.

He turns the computer off and slides it into his bag. He walks out of the room with Regina Huerter, executive director of Denver's Crime Prevention and Control Commission. They think there's hope for an 18-year-old who might be on the verge of taking his GED. Both agree that Josue lied about almost everything.

They hope the youngsters will be back next week, not necessarily because they all want to be, but because it means they're all still alive.

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