Mario Corona, 30, says he had the "traditional" problems growing up on the wrong side of the tracks in Pacoima.

His abusive father, an alcoholic and heroin addict, was continually in and out of prison. His uncles were also gang members. His mother tried to cope with all this while supporting a family cleaning houses on the west side of the San Fernando Valley, where Mario went to school.

In middle school someone asked him where he was from, and the adolescent made the naive mistake of telling the truth. "So from that day on, I was getting in fights everyday with the local gang," he recalls. "It was to the point where I just figured, 'Man, I'm getting jumped everyday, I might as well join up.'"

At 13, he was initiated into the Pacoima Criminals, which led to a lot of petty crime and, eventually, stints in juvenile halls and probation camps. At one, Camp William Mendenhall in Lake Hughes, he remembers a probation officer saying, "Look at me now. You guys could do the same thing."

It planted a seed.

In assessment tests, Mario scored very high. And by the time he got out of the camp, he'd acquired a "whole bunch" of high school credits. He went to a continuation school, working his way back to Cleveland High School in Reseda, one of a dozen secondary schools he'd dropped out of.

At Cleveland he met an economics and political science teacher who, after seeing his potential, expected him to get As on all his tests. And he didn't disappoint her.

"It was so different from school before or with the police, everybody telling me how I wasn't going to amount to anything - I was going to get killed," he points out. "This was the first time in a long time that somebody actually believed in me."

Next the teacher started talking to him about college, something he couldn't image himself doing. But she bugged him so much, he finally enrolled in Pierce College to "shut her up."

At the community college in Woodland Hills, Mario flourished, even making the football team. But on Christmas break, he was home late at night when there was a knock at the door. After confronting two men, one shot him in the chest twice with a powerful .357 magnum handgun. His mother rushed him to the hospital, where doctors expected he wouldn't survive.

"I heard about this bright light, but I can tell you there is such a thing," he reports matter of factly. "It was a white bright light, you know, just in front of me. I remember talking to it. I remember talking to God, telling him that I'm not leaving yet. I knew there was a reason for me being here. I wasn't done with my mission."

Mario lived, but wound up getting arrested and sent to Los Angeles County's "super-max" jail, Wayside, for possessing assault rifles and other weapons. After a couple months, he started asking himself, "Is this something I want to be doing for the rest of my life?"

When he got out of jail, he went back to Pierce - in a wheelchair - and graduated. Another teacher took him under his wing, encouraging the former gangbanger with good grades to transfer to a four-year college. He did, graduating from California State University at Northridge and then earning an MSW (Master's Degree in Social Work) from the University of California three years ago.

Community In Schools
Today, Mario Corona directs the job development program at Communities In Schools of the San Fernando Valley/Greater Los Angeles, where he also interned as a graduate student. The agency, which is part of a national network, serves gang-prone and gang-affiliated youth in low-income communities through prevention, intervention and so-called "hard-core" intervention programs.

The typical teen who walks into the North Hills CIS office looking for work, has few - if any - marketable job skills. Often, the director's first task is to convince his new client he should enroll in an adult school or occupational center.

Volunteer college student tutor/mentors, along with Corona, also provide practical workshops and one-on-one help with everything from how to dress for a job interview to computer skills to producing a professional-looking resume. Often, the director will even accompany a client to an interview.

"The small things are a big deal here," he says. "What's important about this whole program is being able to at least give them that boost, that insurance that there's somebody here to help them and just give them that support."

Communities In Schools was founded locally by William "Blinky" Rodriguez, a world champion kick-boxer and martial arts expert, in 1994, after his 16-year-old son, Sonny, was killed in a drive-by shooting. He joined with a friend, Bobby Arias, a social worker and public administrator, to develop an "integrated service delivery approach" specifically for gang kids.

Their goal was daunting, especially in Greater Los Angeles: to end gang violence by helping gang-involved youth transform their lives.

Today, their organization - which employs some 40 fulltime case managers, gang-intervention workers, after-school outreach employees and job development specialists - focuses on five areas.

LA Bridges I is an after-school program offering arts and crafts, computer and karate clubs, field trips plus anger management, counseling and other services to more than 200 kids at Maclay Middle School in Pacoima. Its counterpart, LA Bridges II, provides hard-core intervention services to gang members, their families and others affected directly by gang violence.

In partnership with the Los Angeles County Probation Department, CIS functions as the lead agency for the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys, Hollywood and Venice to administer the Juvenile Justice Crime Prevention Act. CIS provided in-home outreach, clinical counseling and tutor/mentoring to nearly 800 youths on probation and their families last year.

Communities In Schools also contracts with the U.S. Department of Labor and the City of Los Angeles to provide job readiness skills, life skills training plus union pre-apprentice and certification classes. More than 125 at-risk youth are enrolled in the program, which places an average of 80 individuals in jobs each year in collaboration with local educational and community agencies as well as businesses.

Finally, CIS puts on more than 30 community, sporting and educational events annually. These include job fairs, parades and neighborhood clean-ups.

Working with 'lepers'
According to the non-profit's last annual report, CIS of the San Fernando Valley/Greater Los Angeles serves more than 1,340 youth and young adults through these programs. It's been named a "model" gang intervention program by the State of California, Los Angeles County and the City of Los Angeles.

"What makes us different is we wanted to serve what Blinky, my partner, calls the 'lepers' of our community," says Arias, the 57-year-old president of Communities In Schools. "Those that our community has given up on - gang kids and gang-affiliated kids."

"Lots of community based organizations go after the 'cream' of at-risk youth," he points out. "In other words, they're looking for kids who have a better shot of making it. But the truth is, this epidemic will never be reconciled in our city until we deal with the kids who everyone is running from."

Carlos Rodriguez, 44, the organization's vice president of programs and technology, points out that every tutor/mentor at CIS, mostly college students, receives 10 hours of "intense" training in how to relate to gang youth. He admits it's a crash course, but still believes it teaches volunteers how to understand where gang kids are coming from and how to really engage them.

"If you don't come in on a one-to-one basis and try to establish respect and trust, you're never going to get through to the kid," he says. "You have to have what we term a 'license to operate.' And once you get over the ice-breaking, climbing over the defensive walls and barriers of a 13-, 14- or 15-year-old, then you can engage them. So we give them 'best practices' as far as engaging."

Arias stresses that the main thing separating his agency from other anti-gang efforts, however, is that at CIS all case managing is done right in the home.

"Most community based organizations do not make home visits, which is amazing to me," he says, shaking his head. "I mean, how can you develop a comprehensive intervention strategy if you don't see what that young person is having to navigate in their home situation?"

Then Arias lays out a real case example.

The client was a troubled teenager in the Bridges I program who was doing OK at school, then all of a sudden started acting out. When the case manager made a house visit, he found out that an uncle who had been in prison for years, a real "shot caller in the joint," was now living with the family. Moreover, the kid was being raised by a grandmother, who had no parenting skills and was just worn out.

So CIS had a Bridges I staffer work with the teen, while a parenting specialist gave the grandmother some badly needed practical lessons on how to set up, and maintain, household rules. At the same time, a hard-core gang intervention worker confronted the uncle about how he was negatively influencing his nephew's behavior.

And it worked, according to Arias. The teenager soon stopped getting in trouble.

"We've had many, many failures," he admits with a half-grin. "We've had our challenges in dealing with our population. But I think we can earnestly say that we've learned a lot and that we've helped a lot of kids and their families."

Targeting problem
Malcolm Klein, a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Southern California, studied gang issues for 40 years. He still writes about gangs, serves as a consultant on gangs and testifies as an expert witness in court about gangs. He's written a dozen books on the subject, including co-authoring "Street Gang Patterns and Policies" last year, which reports on 60 prevention, intervention and suppression programs across the country.

Klein's main criticism with anti-gang efforts is that these often self-proclaimed success efforts usually haven't been evaluated rigorously by outside sources.

"Almost none of the programs we recently investigated had evaluations associated with them," he says. "Therefore, we don't know whether they've worked or not. I'd like to believe at least some of them are doing all the right things. I just want to see some data. I'm a researcher. I want something more than anecdotal information, which is totally not trustable."

So what makes an effective anti-gang program?

For Klein that's a no-brainer. First and foremost, it has to identify and then target kids who are likely to join gangs. He says this isn't as simple as it sounds, since even in communities heavily populated with gangs 85 percent of the youth never join one.

"So the real problem is trying to pick out the 15 percent that you want to spend your prevention activities on, and we're not good at that," he explains. "There are hints, variables we know if we add together will help us predict some of those kids"

Factors like having a family member who's a gang member or incarcerated, lack of supervision by working parents, doing poorly or being rejected in school, palling around with "like-minded" gang-affiliated kids and being constantly exposed to graffiti and violence in one's neighboring.

The social scientist believes gangs have become so entrenched in Los Angeles and many other U.S. cities that "we'll never get rid of them. But there's a good deal that probably could be accomplished by way of reducing their activity level, their size and recruitment into them. But that's a massive undertaking."

Mario Corona is living proof hard-core gangsters can change.

"As cliché as it sounds, it was a couple of people who invested some time in me," he says. "That's all it was. You know, it's like we're looking for some magical solution to gangs. But it's not complex at all. It's very simple. It's just a matter of implementing it."