COLUMN ONE : A Mission Twisted by Violence : Beto Villalobos, a 60-year-old <i> veterano </i> of gang life, tried to keep neighborhood youths out of trouble. But now he faces a murder charge and his street crusade has lost its credibility.

Gaunt and grizzled, his body marked by faded gang tattoos, Beto Villalobos wanted only to keep youngsters from repeating his own mistakes.

At 60, he was a lonely and destitute ex-con, his health failing and his family estranged. But as he roamed the streets of South Whittier trying to befriend hardened teen-agers and cool violent tempers, he commanded respect with tales of the 20 years he served at San Quentin for murder.

His self-styled mission was praised by everyone from gang cops to social workers to the barrio’s mostly Spanish-speaking residents, even though he had no funding, no phone and no official backing. In a world ruled by mystique and tradition, he had something far more valuable--his status as “Don Beto,” a veterano from the Zoot Suit era with a record of hard time at California’s most notorious prison.

“He was as grass-roots as you can get--just Beto, out there on the edge,” said L.H. (Butch) Redman, a member of the South Whittier Coordinating Council, which represents the unincorporated, mostly working-class community. “He knew he had screwed up his own life. That’s why he would do anything he could to get these kids to stop the violence.”

But gang turf is perilous terrain, fraught with pitfalls that can snare even the most savvy peacemaker. On Aug. 4, as dozens of youths watched, Villalobos took a life from the gang he tried to save.

It happened just before sundown as he rushed to break up a fistfight at the Mayberry Park handball courts. Instead of being allowed to intercede, he was confronted by Peter Awana, a 37-year-old Little League coach with ties to the South Side Whittier gang, who also was trying to atone for a long prison record by steering youths away from the streets.

The men had argued before, reportedly because Awana feared that Villalobos was trying to exert too much control over the neighborhood. This time, sheriff’s detectives say, Awana ordered Villalobos to leave the park and pushed him, knocking off his glasses.

Villalobos, staggering backward, reached to his waistband and drew a 9-inch hunting knife--a weapon, he says, that he carried for slicing fruit. As the men moved toward each other again, authorities allege, Villalobos plunged it once into Awana’s chest. Then he ran.

“Beto was trying to do good, but he let a bad situation control him rather than the other way around,” said Gus Frias, a veteran anti-gang educator from East Los Angeles.

The most ironic twist is not that Villalobos killed again, but that he had never killed before. Unknown to almost everyone, his reputation as a warrior was largely a fabrication, a myth that he wove to enhance his credibility on the streets.

Court records show he had been little more than a small-time crook, spending two decades in and out of custody for a series of petty, and often tawdry, drug and burglary convictions. Although he did end up at San Quentin, it was for breaking into the home of a South Whittier woman while she slept--not the lethal street fighting that has him locked up today.

In a recent interview at Los Angeles County Jail, where he is being held on $500,000 bail while awaiting trial on a murder charge, Villalobos insisted he acted in self-defense. He also conceded that he had embellished his criminal past, but only to help stop the killing.

“It served a purpose--not as an ego builder, but as a way of opening communication with the kids,” said Villalobos, who turned himself in to police after a day on the lam. “Once you have their ears open, you can feed them some more positive things. . . . The last thing I wanted to do was hurt anybody.”

At a hearing today in Norwalk Superior Court, prosecutors are expected to propose a plea bargain, possibly dropping the charge to manslaughter. Villalobos, who could face up to 25 years to life, told his public defender he might be interested in the deal if he were guaranteed a far lower prison term.

No matter how the case is resolved, it represents another sad, conflicted chapter in the life of a man whose six decades span virtually the entire history of Mexican-American gangs. Although he has been applauded for his redemptive spirit, Villalobos can also be enigmatic and intemperate--a well-meaning grandfather figure with a mean streak that from time to time has landed him in serious trouble.

A few days after the killing, somebody taped a photo of Villalobos marked with the hand-lettered threat--”Wanted Dead”--to the front door of a local grocery store.

“Everybody liked Beto, everybody counted on him,” said Johnny Martinez, 20, a gang member who credits Villalobos’ guidance for helping him stay out of trouble. “But the message he was trying to spread was no damn message because he went and done this. It erased everything. It’s over. He threw it all away.”

*

Roberto Ordonez Villalobos was initiated into the criminal culture half a century ago when he joined the ranks of Primera Flats, a Boyle Heights gang that still claims 1st Street as its turf.

His father, born in rural Chihuahua, supported a wife and five children by plastering walls, including those of Dolores Mission, which stood across the street from their home. But young Beto--sporting creased khakis, wingtips and plaid shirts buttoned to the top--was more intrigued with building his reputation as a vato loco , the craziest of homeboys .

“At the age of 12, all young kids start to lie about themselves,” Villalobos said in a hand-written manuscript that he hoped to expand into an autobiography. “I was the homeboy with a mask, and that mask was a bad face. I never feared again.”

He began stealing pickles and dried fish from the many Jewish-owned stores then in the neighborhood, later graduating to hub caps. He had “1st Flats” tattooed on his right calf and a small cross on his left hand. His parents tried to intervene by sending him to a Los Angeles Police Department cadet program when he was 14. A year later, in 1947, he had his first taste of heroin.

For the next decade, court records show, he passed through the judicial system’s revolving doors, beginning with a juvenile conviction for incorrigibility. He served 1 1/2 years in the Youth Authority for hiding a friend’s murder weapon, then served time for petty theft, burglary, marijuana possession, failing to register as a narcotics violator and driving on a revoked license.

“I think we were all starving for attention and recognition,” Villalobos said in an interview three months before the Awana killing, sitting on the graffiti-stained picnic table in Mayberry Park he used as his desk. “In itself, that’s not so bad, but we became addicted to it. It was like, how far could we go?”

He found the answer in 1959, when he was charged with the kind of shameful crime that can sink even the toughest convict to the lowest rungs of the inmate hierarchy. That year, during a period of heavy drinking, he was accused of trying to sexually assault two women in the South Whittier barrio of Sunshine Acres, where his parents had bought a bungalow several years before.

In one case, he slipped into the bedroom of a sleeping woman, who managed to flee after he allegedly put a knife to her neck. In the other case, he entered a woman’s bedroom but ran off with his face buried in a coat when a baby-sitter discovered him and screamed.

“In a way, I would prefer to go to the penitentiary to see if I can learn something there,” Villalobos told his probation officer. He got his wish, pleading guilty to one count of burglary in exchange for dismissal of other charges.

Behind the walls of San Quentin, which houses California’s Death Row, Villalobos underwent a transformation that he says changed his life.

He became steeped in the politics of the time, reading the works of Chairman Mao and Che Guevara. He was an early leader of EMPLEO, a renowned self-help group aimed at educating Chicano inmates. He also helped organize a strike for better conditions that paralyzed the maximum-security prison for five days, while Flower Power radicals--treated to a free concert by the Grateful Dead--rallied in support outside.

After his parole in 1968, he was hired by the state Department of Corrections to help other ex-convicts ease back into society.

“He hardly ever spoke of being in prison--you could see it was a sensitive subject,” said a 48-year-old San Gabriel Valley woman with whom he later lived for eight years. “He did his time and wanted to put it behind him by making things right for people.”

But, three years after his release, Villalobos reverted to his criminal ways. In an exact repeat of the incident that landed him in San Quentin, he was charged in 1971 with sneaking into the bed of a South Whittier woman and attempting to assault her before being scared off by her roommate’s screams.

By then, however, a probation report showed he had already earned high marks as a counselor in several state-funded programs, a fact that greatly impressed Ernest L. Kelly, a sympathetic Norwalk Superior Court judge.

“I think you are boot-strapping yourself up,” Kelly said, according to a transcript of the sentencing. “I am sure you made mistakes in your past, but who the hell hasn’t?”

As he did 12 years earlier, Villalobos pleaded guilty to burglary in exchange for having the sexual assault charge dropped. Kelly, in a remarkable act of faith, chose not to send him to jail again.

“I doubt very much if I ever see you again,” the judge said. “I don’t think any court will.”

“Not in this situation,” Villalobos replied.

*

Two decades later, after a string of jobs counseling gang members on Los Angeles’ Eastside, Villalobos returned to South Whittier at the age of 55. By then, the truth of his criminal history had been lost.

Most of his old friends were dead from shootings, overdoses and suicides; in an album of faded black and white photos, Villalobos had marked an “X” under the face of each casualty.

His 93-year-old mother, with whom he lived, never knew why he had been to prison. Even the woman whom he attacked in 1971 had all but forgotten the incident.

“That was so many years ago, I don’t even remember his name,” the woman, now 73, said recently. Then she noticed that her small courtyard apartment, just a few blocks from the park where Villalobos did his counseling, bore one reminder of the assault: “After it happened, I put up these bars,” she said, pointing to the wrought-iron grills covering every window.

His past a blank slate, Villalobos felt free to spin a more romantic yarn for the homeboys and homegirls of South Side Whittier, a gang of about 200 members that is abbreviated as SSW--or, as some of the younger members like to say, the Sly, the Sick and the Wicked. To them, Villalobos was an elder statesman of the gang world, a pinto viejo-- an old con--whose prison term shone like a badge of honor.

“A lot of us who have been to prison walk around pretending to be something we’re not,” said Arturo Espinosa, 60, an ex-con who has known Villalobos since they were boys. “You put on this negative-type mask and become a macho guy with a big mustache. It’s like a survival mechanism. Even out here in society, I don’t think you ever get rid of that old phony person inside.”

For a time, at least, it allowed Villalobos to talk peace without appearing weak.

When gang members were arrested, he stood before judges, pleading for more lenient sentences. When a youth from the neighborhood was killed, he raised money for the burial and comforted grieving parents. Always, he offered his shoulder to a confused young boy or girl, giving a hug or buying a taco, when nobody else seemed to care.

“I generally don’t like gang workers or trust them, because I think most of them are aiding and abetting these little gangsters,” said Dave Barrette, a probation officer with several South Side gang members on his caseload. “But Beto was really honest and sincere and had positive values. He wasn’t a hypocrite. He was right there in the lion’s cage, going against the nature of the beast.”

The person he ended up going against, Peter Awana, also carried the credentials that commanded respect in the neighborhood.

A member of the gang’s second-oldest clique, Los Chicos, he began to go astray when he was 13 after his father died of cancer and his mother began drinking heavily, according to family members. A string of robbery and burglary convictions, court records show, kept him in prison for 10 years.

After his last release in 1991, Awana’s wife, Connie, threatened to leave with their 7-year-old daughter if he ended up behind bars again. “That sort of woke him up,” said his mother-in-law, Lupe Rodriguez. “He needed somebody to give him a chance and show him the right road. My daughter just happened to be the one.”

Unable to find steady work because of his gang tattoos and criminal record, Awana devoted himself to the Pico Rivera Little League. As a coach for the last two seasons, he baked cupcakes for his players, baby-sat at their parents’ request and warned the youngsters to stay away from gangs.

But Awana, known by his nickname, Pelon, still cherished his old South Whittier stomping grounds, returning occasionally to play handball in Mayberry Park. “Pelon hadn’t gangbanged in years, but he was still down for the ‘hood,” said Ernesto Hernandez, 31, a South Side veteran.

Although many of the younger gang members responded to Villalobos’ guidance, those of Awana’s generation tended to view him with suspicion. Those concerns came to a head last spring, when Villalobos hosted a meeting in the park--one of many that have been held across Southern California--announcing that the Mexican Mafia prison gang was ordering a halt to drive-by shootings.

It is uncertain what connection Villalobos has with the syndicate, although friends believe he would have exploited any ties if he thought it would help his peacemaking. Some older South Side members, however, feared that the Mexican Mafia had sent Villalobos as an emissary to get its hand in their neighborhood affairs.

“Beto wanted to stop the violence--and that’s good--but it seemed like he was using the kids so that he could be a big shot or something,” said one older member of the gang. “Beto wanted to take control. Pelon said: ‘Forget that.’ ”

Villalobos tells the story differently, contending that Awana was the one stirring up trouble. When they argued, he said, it was because Awana wanted to see the gang engage in more violence, not less. “He felt I was interfering with his agenda,” Villalobos said.

With a sense of vindication, Villalobos accepted an invitation last April to join the Los Angeles delegation at the National Urban Peace and Justice Summit in Kansas City, a much-publicized gathering of gang members aimed at channeling their negative power into more positive pursuits.

“Some of the young kids here have accepted me as a peer, which makes me feel good,” he said, sipping a beer in the bar of the Howard Johnson in Kansas City.

But upon his return, he found that he was losing the daily struggle to stay afloat. He had no income and, much to his siblings’ dismay, depended on their ailing mother for food and cigarettes. When she had to be placed in a nursing home last May, they put the house up for sale and booted Villalobos out.

Villalobos, who takes heart medication, hoped to survive on a $15,000 grant he was seeking from County Supervisor Gloria Molina. But Molina’s press deputy said that Villalobos never put his proposal in writing, so they could not weigh it against other programs competing for the same scarce funds.

“I don’t believe in structure,” Villalobos said in the interview last summer. “I like to step over lines.”

Several days before the deadly clash, Villalobos told a friend that he had lost the stomach for his mission and was going to leave town.

*

On a wall in Mayberry Park, there is a mural that has stood for 18 years unmarred by graffiti.

“Misguided machismo leads us to destroy each other, leaving heartbreak and sorrow in its ugly wake!” reads the text, which was painted in 1975 by South Side gang members. It adds: “The scars that the knife leaves never heal.”

Just a few steps away, 50 to 60 people are believed to have watched Villalobos thrust a dagger into Awana’s chest. But no more than a handful have consented to be interviewed by detectives.

At a preliminary hearing Aug. 27 in Whittier Municipal Court, the only witness called by prosecutors said he could not remember anything. Afterward, in the hallway, authorities pleaded with Awana’s widow to help them find others who would be willing to take the stand.

All of this would seem to enhance Villalobos’ prospects, but he is not worrying about that now. In only three months, he said, he has already adapted to the routine of jailhouse life--another opportunity, if nothing else, to offer youths the wisdom of his years.

“This is going to sound weird, but I feel I’m very much in my niche,” he said. “Some of the youngsters come up to me and say, ‘Hey, what’s up, Pops?’ and ask me about how it was in the old days.”