Feb 27, 2005

The gangster who got out alive

Author: Mike Roberts - The Province

That first night in jail, safe and away from the streets at last, relief washed over Jagdeep Singh Mangat. Alone in his cell on a cold metal prison cot, he felt a great weight lift from his shoulders.

"I tell you," the former gangster recalls today, "it was the first time I'd slept well in years. I slept for days and days."Jagdeep was just a skinny, misfit kid of 14 when he set off on the ill-starred course that would take him deep into the criminal underworld. For 10 years he ran fast and wild on Vancouver's streets, every new crime more hardened and serious than the last. It began with impromptu muggings and petty thefts; it ended in the violent gangland world of drugs, guns, extortion and debt collection.And all the while, guilt and disgust ate away at the young man. He pushed his compassion and humanity "deep down inside" and away from those who would denounce his doubts and self-loathing as a weakness and a liability."We did things that still haunt me," admits Jagdeep, now 31 and very much a different man from the one who bully-thugged his way through life with stolen guns and other people's money.Jagdeep was 19 in 1992 when he was sentenced to a year in jail and two years' probation for two armed robberies and possession of a prohibited firearm. There was no jail-cell epiphany, he says, no philosophical thunderclap or revelatory illumination.But for the first time in a decade, the young gangster found himself alone, insulated and safe from the dark world that lay beyond his prison-cell walls. Ironically, he maintains, it was jail that ultimately set him free."I asked myself a question that very first night: 'What happened to my life?'" says Jagdeep."You become so involved, you can't see it," he says. "And you can't see the future . . . Your expectation of a life, it's gone."There's a certain fatalism that just takes over. You're walking on the streets, you're just waiting for it to happen. Sometimes I'd sit down and think, 'Wouldn't it be nice if a bullet came from across the street and punctured my skull and put this [expletive] behind me?'"Does Jagdeep Singh Mangat seek sympathy? No. He only hopes that his story serves some greater good, perhaps warns parents about the danger signs or sways a young man away from a life that's claimed some 83 of Jagdeep's Indo-Canadian brothers in the past 12 years.Today, remarkably, the one-time gang boss is a Simon FraserUniversity student about to graduate in political economy from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology.He is actively involved in a number of political and social justice organizations, including the South Asian Youth Alliance and the South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy. He is a respected mentor and counsellor to youth at risk. He works part-time for the Downtown Eastside Residents' Association, bettering the lives of the downtrodden.He is clever, passionate and articulate on any number of contemporary topics. And his community service record, he bashfully acknowledges, is now considerably longer than the criminal record that still hangs over him like a millstone.Jagdeep was born in Vancouver, the son of immigrants from the Punjab region of India. He grew up Sikh around Fraser and King Edward, "a typical blue-collar working-class neighbourhood" in East Vancouver.By Grade 7, his parents' "acrimonious" relationship was deteriorating. He began acting out -- little things, kids' stuff.Afraid their son might get caught up in the youth gangs infiltrating East Vancouver high schools in the mid-1980s, the Mangats decided to send Jagdeep to a west-side high school.Jagdeep can laugh now, at the irony."They sent me to Eric Hamber," he recalls. "Whoa! What a disconnect."He was one of just a few East Indian kids in the school."And we're talking the second-largest school in Vancouver -- and all these other kids have got $400 sneakers and a different shirt each day," he says.Taunted and bullied, Jagdeep began to gravitate toward other immigrant kids from his own neighbourhood. Chinese, Fijian, Irish or Vietnamese, it didn't matter, he says, camaraderie was forged in the balancing act between the two equally alien cultures of the old world and the new.Then a large group of these East Van kids, led by older Vietnamese toughs, showed up at a Hamber Grade 8 dance. The experience forever altered the course of Jagdeep's life."These boat kids were ruthless guys, 17, 18," Jagdeep recalls. "They'd moved here two years earlier and they'd grown up in a refugee camp, 10 guys to a room fighting over a bowl of rice. These guys grew up under brutal conditions. Hardcore kids, hardened to the bone."They smacked the school principal aside and pushed their way into the dance with meat cleavers under their coats, Jagdeep recalls."They're sitting there smoking, doing whatever they want, I'm totally enthralled," says Jagdeep. "These haircuts, 40 pounds of gel, the black leather jackets and the rolled-up pants, I thought it was cool."There was this bully, forever tuning on me in the locker rooms, to the point where I was afraid to even go to P.E. They took care of it, knocked him out and rolled him down the steps. The next day, I was going to join a gang, too."Jagdeep says the Chinese and Vietnamese kids began to drift away as they became "absorbed and integrated" into the junior ranks of established Vancouver street gangs like the Red Eagles and Viet Ching.By the age of 14, Jagdeep was running with his own mixed group of bad apples, "hangers-on" at the bottom of the Los Diablos gang barrel."We started hanging out, walking around rolling people for their jackets," he says. "I was like, 'My parents can't afford this [expletive], I'll just take it.'

"'I want your watch.' 'Give me your wallet.' But I'd go home and just have these horrible guilt trips. But after a while I came up with all kinds of . . . rationalizations."

By the late 1980s his "gang of seven" was cashing in on the new car-stereo craze, breaking into 10 cars a night, stealing $700 tape decks and flipping them for $100 a pop.

Boys Town, 1-800-448-3000
Any type of family problem. Professional counselors. (More than 100 languages)

Child Abuse Hotline, 1-800-387-5437

Kid's Help Line, 1-800-668-6868

National Runaway Switchboard,
1-800-621-4000 ( In addition to counseling, runaways and parents can leave messages for one another.)

Youth Against Violence, 1-800-680-4246

National Youth Crisis Hotline for ages 17 and under. 1-800-448-4663

Info on AIDS and STDs, 1-800-772-2437