By W. Zachary Malinowski
Journal staff writer

PROVIDENCE

Tou Pathoummahong, a former member of the Laos Pride street gang, took a long look at the young man in the wheelchair. He didn't hesitate when asked what he would have done to him a few years ago.

"To be honest," he said, "I probably would have shot him."

Ray Duggan, the man in the wheelchair, laughed. He is a former member of the Young Bloods, another street gang that has battled Laos Pride for years. In fact, Duggan and the Providence police suspect that two Laos Pride gang members ambushed him and left him for dead on a city street.

Pathoummahong and Duggan didn't know each other. But that doesn't really matter. Their mutual hatred had everything to do with colors and street cred: Laos Pride wears blue clothing; the Young Bloods are red.

"We used to hate each other with a passion," Duggan said.

Today, Pathoummahong and Duggan work side by side as street workers at the Institute for the Study & Practice of Nonviolence. The nonprofit agency, which is financed solely through grants and donations, has a stable of former gang members and ex-convicts who work around-the-clock to mediate disputes among warring rivals in the city's worst neighborhoods.

• What can be done to keep young people out of gangs? • In the Renaissance City, the streets are what many youths call home • Once he killed; now he turns to peacemaker • He gave up crime to save others from gangs • The street behind her, she's now a mother • Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence • W. Zachary Malinowski, on why he did the story • Credits • State of the Mob: W. Zachary Malinowski's in-depth look at the history of organized crime in Rhode Island.   BACK TO MAIN

Pathoummahong, 28, and Duggan, 25, try to convince young gang members to stay away from the dead-end lives they once embraced. They work to keep them in school, land jobs and settle their slights -- real or perceived -- through peaceful means.

Their troubled backgrounds give them instant credibility on the street.

"When they see me in a wheelchair, it hits them," Duggan said.

The two former gang members are from different parts of the world: Pathoummahong, who is Laotian, spent the first seven years of his life in Laos; Duggan, who is white, was raised in the city's Washington Park neighborhood.

Working together at the nonviolence institute has shown them that they share more similarities than differences. Gang members lose their lives, freedom, or in Duggan's case, the ability to ever walk again, for foolish reasons.

"All it is, is different colors," said Pathoummahong. "It's all over nothing."

Pathoummahong has an early childhood memory that has burned in his mind for years. His family had fled Laos and spent a year in a crowded refugee camp in the Philippines. He remembers waking one morning and watching their hungry neighbors roast a rat for breakfast.

The image is a reminder of the poverty that he experienced in the Far East.

In the late '80s, the Pathoummahong family moved to California. They lived in Modesto and Sacramento, and Pathoummahong ran with the Tiny Raskal Gang, an Asian gang with a national reach that has members in Providence. He said that he had a cousin, also a Tiny Raskal Gang member, who was murdered outside of San Francisco.

One day, the Pathoummahongs packed up their van and five children and drove across the country to Rhode Island. Pathoummahong said his parents sought a better life for their family and they wanted to escape the gang culture in California.

Instead, he said, the Pathoummahongs found exactly what they were trying to leave behind. The family settled in Providence behind the State House in the Smith Hill neighborhood. The area was teeming with Asian immigrants and the Laos Pride street gang was a powerful presence.

"You're here now," Pathoummahong thought. "This is who you hang with."

Trouble soon followed. Pathoummahong was hanging out with gang members who were involved in shootings, home invasions and lobbing pipe bombs into the homes of rivals. He was expelled from Mount Pleasant High School for fighting.

On the street with few options, he spent more time with the gang.

On the other side of the city, Duggan's life was on the same downward spiral.

His mother, Sharon, a single parent, raised him and three sisters in Washington Park, not far from the Cranston city line. Duggan's father, also named Ray, was out of the picture: he was serving time at the Adult Correctional Institutions on robbery and weapons charges.

At 14, Duggan said he was expelled from the Samuel Bridgham Middle School for threatening a teacher. He was reinstated and enrolled at Hope High School. He got a girl pregnant and dropped out three months later.

The Young Bloods street gang was ready and waiting for him. Duggan was an impressionable teenager with a bad temper and a propensity for violence. The gang served as the father and brothers that he never had. Duggan robbed people, fought rival gang members and terrorized the West End.

He said he had his first gun -- a .380-caliber handgun -- by the time he turned 17. It made him feel powerful and he enjoyed firing off a few clips.

Asked whether he ever shot anyone, Duggan replied: "Not with that gun."

Duggan said he was often involved in several shootings a week -- as the shooter or intended victim. Gang life, he said, is stressful because the next car or pedestrian that passes may be gunning for you.

On Smith Hill, home of Laos Pride, Pathoummahong had two bad experiences that led him to second thoughts about his life as a gang member.

In February 1998, he was arrested with a loaded gun in the city's West End. Pathoummahong said he had just arrived for a rumble involving the Oriental Rascals and Providence Street Boys. His "mission" that day, he said, was to bust down the door of a Providence Street Boys hangout and "start shooting."

Instead, Pathoummahong spent the weekend locked up. A few months later, he pleaded no contest to a charge of carrying a pistol without a permit. He received a five-year suspended sentence and probation.

In retrospect, he's glad he was caught. "To this day, I'm glad I didn't do what I was going to do," he said.

A few years later, in March 2002, Ubol "Ape," Inthilath, Pathoummahong's best friend and fellow Laos Pride gang member, was killed in a drive-by shooting on Osborn Street in Smith Hill. Five members of the Woonsocket-based gang, Laotians Out of Control and Asian Pride, were arrested.

Pathoummahong was there the night of the shooting and he performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation on his dying friend. He said that it bothered him that a fellow gang member didn't want to drive the wounded Inthilath to the hospital.

"No man. I don't want to get my car dirty," Pathoummahong remembered him saying.

The ordeal stayed with him.

"Ape was pretty much my right-hand man," he said. "I loved the dude. I decided that I needed to step up my game and do something right."

DUGGAN WASN'T having any second thoughts. He was a gangster, full of bravado and plenty of enemies on the street.

In June 2003, Duggan and a juvenile were arrested for jumping a man and striking him in the head with an empty bottle of rum. Duggan was charged with robbery and assault with intent to commit robbery. He later pleaded no contest to a lesser charge and received a 10-year suspended sentence and probation.

Shortly after midnight on Oct. 9, 2004, Duggan's life forever changed.

A few hours earlier, Duggan had dropped off a friend in Smith Hill and run into members of the Laos Pride gang. The rivals spotted him, jumped into cars and chased him. Duggan lost them on Valley Street and raced back to the West End.

He was talking to a friend on Regent Avenue and told him to beware of any suspicious activity. Two Asian teenagers with their heads bowed walked past him. Suddenly, they stopped, brandished guns and started firing. Duggan said two of the bullets ripped through his chest and a third exploded into his back.

He was left paralyzed from below his lower chest. No one has ever been arrested in connection with the shootings.

Duggan spent about a year recovering at Rhode Island Hospital, St. Joseph's Hospital and the Zambarano Unit of the Eleanor Slater Hospital. When he got out, he lived with one of his sisters in Pawtucket. Gang members would stop by and give him a lift to his old stomping grounds in the West End. He said he continued to smoke, drink and hang out with them.

Despite the disability, Duggan was still a player. He kept a loaded handgun tucked under the cushion of his wheelchair. He remembered a gang member wheeling him away from a drive-by shooting.

Eventually, Duggan had a dispute with his sister and she kicked him out. He spent August of 2005 homeless, thrusting his wheelchair to the homes of friends across the city.

IN 2006, Teny Gross, the executive director of the nonviolence institute on the South Side, was looking for a couple of street workers. Someone mentioned Pathoummahong and Gross was immediately interested. He wanted a former Asian gang member who had standing in the close-knit Laotian community.

Gross liked the fact that Pathoummahong had tried to turn his life around. Each morning for 10 months, he had boarded a bus for Newport where he worked for City Year Rhode Island, mentoring young people and serving as a role model. He also had earned a high school diploma and received a $5,000 grant to study automobile mechanics.

Duggan was a harder sell. Gross knew about the gang member's troubled past and the shooting that left him in a wheelchair. A social worker told him that he might have a future as a street worker.

One day, Gross responded to a shooting at a Dominican festival in Providence. Duggan was with the Young Bloods, who were part of the problem. He gave him a business card and told him to give him a call.

Duggan didn't want to be labeled a "snitch," so he didn't bother calling. A few weeks later, he had a change of heart. He agreed that summer to speak to a group of teenagers about being a gang member. He realized that he could steer them away from the life he had chosen.

Duggan said that the Young Bloods supported his decision. "They were happy about it," he said. "I'm not going against them. I'm helping them out. If you turn your back on them, it's a very big sign of disrespect."

Gross told Sgt. Michael P. Wheeler, head of the Providence Police Gang Unit, that he was thinking about bringing Duggan on board. Wheeler told him Duggan had not left the gang and that he was making a mistake he would later regret.

Gross said Wheeler also told him, "If anyone can pull it off, it's you."

THE INSTITUTE has a dozen full- and part-time street workers and Gross knows that most of them were risky hires. He said he wants the police to contact him if they suspect that any of them are involved in criminal activity.

Last November, Pathoummahong and Duggan joined the staff of street workers. Gross placed the former gang rivals together because he believed "it was the right message. It's really what we are about."

It didn't take long for them to hit it off. They have become friends and enjoy working with each other.

They both feel that by joining the staff of the institute, they might be turning a new chapter in their lives. Duggan said he never harbored bitterness toward Pathoummahong for once being part of the gang that left him dead from the waist down.

"I can't go back," he said. "It's part of gang life."

They also know that the police are watching them and that some investigators don't believe they have renounced their gang allegiances.

"I don't blame them for that," Pathoummahong said. "But we deserve that second chance."

Pathoummahong still spends plenty of time with members of Laos Pride. Last summer, he was hanging with some of them when rival gang members drove by and sprayed them with gunfire. He said that he tried to convince the Laotian gang members to let it go and not retaliate with more violence. He said some of the gang members were angry with him, while others respected what he was trying to do.

Duggan also still considers many gang members friends. Despite his disability, he is self-sufficient. He drives his own car and lives by himself in North Providence.

Both men were asked whether they know who fired the shots that left him paralyzed.

"I don't want to know," Duggan said. "If I did find out, I don't know how I would react."

Said Pathoummahong: "Somewhat. But I plead the Fifth," against self-incrimination. "But, to this day, I've got his back."

bmalinow@projo.com / (401) 277-7019