INTERVIEW WITH JASON ALFONSO, DECEMBER 11, 2024

Jason Alfonso grew up in poverty, with an abusive father, in gang-infested neighborhoods in Los Angeles.  His older brother was mistakenly murdered by a rival gang that was actually targeting Jason. Jason was 19 years old when this occurred.

Father Gregory Boyle, in his Headwind interview in this issue, describes some of the horrendous traumas kids who join gangs have to carry, and Jason is no exception. 

Jason has worked at the same job for 24 years. Ironically, he works at a mortuary, one at which Father Greg has presided over many funerals.

Years ago, Jason renounced gangs and has been helping to implement truces among warring gangs.

Despite all of Jason’s efforts, less than a year ago his beloved 24-year-old nephew was stabbed to death by rival gang members in L.A. County jail.

I recently had lunch with Jason in Santa Monica and had the following conversation:

RITKES:   Where were you born, Jason?

ALFONSO:    Los Angeles, California.

RITKES: Where in L.A. did you grow up?

ALFONSO:  Koreatown, off of Melrose and Wilton. South Central, and then downtown Los Angeles off of Third Street and Union, specifically 250 South Union.

RITKES:  Did you live with brothers, sisters, mother, father?

ALFONSO:  My mother, and one older brother.

RITKES:  Was your father in the household?

ALFONSO:  No, he had another family.

RITKES:  Did you see your father?

ALFONSO:  Yeah, occasionally.

RITKES:  Would he come to visit?

ALFONSO:  Yeah, there were times he’d come over. He’d be drunk, abusive, and hurt my mother.

RITKES: How old were you when you first met your father?

ALFONSO:  About five. He left my mom when I was born.

RITKES:  Do you have memories of seeing your father when you were five?

ALFONSO:  Yes.  One was that he came over to drop off child support. He was drunk, possibly high on cocaine. That was his habit. He argued with my mom, and he slapped her. He threw a chair at her, and it hit me in the head.

RITKES:  You were five at that time?

ALFONSO:  Yes.

RITKES:  Where were you living at this time?

ALFONSO:  Koreatown. One day, several years later, we got a letter in the mail that the house was in foreclosure.  My uncle had refinanced the house, taken money out, and gone into the Navy, taking the money with him.  My mom, brother, and I tried to pay the bills as much as we could, partly by my brother and me selling drugs. We held the house until we had to go to a short sale.

RITKES:  Didn’t your father take some of your money?

ALFONSO:  I was awarded a settlement for $40,000 as a kid when we were in a car accident caused by a drunk driver. The money was supposed to stay in a blocked account for me until I was 18, and I would have the money at that time.  But my father found a way to get to the money, and he took it.  He controlled the account.  My mom wasn’t knowledgeable about all that.  He blew the money on women and drugs, so it all went down the drain.

RITKES: How old were you when you lost the house?

ALFONSO:  I was about 14 when we lost the house. I was in high school at Daniel Murphy Catholic High School in Hancock Park.

RITKES:  Were you and your brother going to a private school?

ALFONSO:  I was, but by that time, my brother had already dropped out of high school.

RITKES:  Tell me about your first contact with gangs.

ALFONSO:  I was in second grade. My mom was double-jobbing it in a single-mother household. You are looking for love. You’re thinking, ” Why isn’t my mom here?”  Not realizing she’s doubling down. Trying to keep clothes on your back, shoes on your feet, warm food in your stomach.  My mom would pick me up from school, take me home between her jobs, and then put me to sleep. She’d leave because she had to go to work. By the time I woke up, my mom was gone. There was food on the table, but no one to play with, so, okay, lemme go venture outside.

RITKES:  And what did you encounter?

ALFONSO:  A group of kids.

RITKES:  This is in Koreatown?

ALFONSO:  Yes.

RITKES:  What was the ethnic makeup at that time in that area?

ALFONSO: Majority Hispanic.

RITKES:  What were your encounters like?

ALFONSO:  In that era, the early 1990s, it was: you don’t bother us, we don’t bother you. One of the older guys took a liking to me, like, “What’s up, little man, what are you looking for?”  You get that false love. Slowly, I started migrating towards it.

RITKES:  Were there any particular activities that you guys would do?

ALFONSO:  They’d hang around. I didn’t know at that time they were selling drugs, but it was really just hanging out in front of a house, playing music.

RITKES:  These were school-age kids you were hanging around with?

ALFONSO:  Yeah. The youngest were 13 or 14, double my age.  I never saw ’em go to school. They were all on the street. I thought, Okay, they were already home from school.  In second grade, I was already bringing guns to school.

RITKES:  Where did you get guns?

ALFONSO: My cousin — he used to carry a little .22 in his backpack.  As we got older, in junior high, we started smoking cigarettes, then marijuana. But back then, marijuana was the extent of it. If you went any further, like freebasing rock cocaine, you get beat up. If you try meth, you get beat up. If you try any hard drugs, you get beat up. You are somewhat held responsible, but you can party. But mostly you drink beer and smoke weed.

RITKES:  This group of guys, did they have a name? Was it a particular gang?

ALFONSO:    The first group I hung with was Jefrox, predominantly Filipino. They were the only Asian gang with physical territory, with a so-called neighborhood. We had from Melrose and Van Ness to Melrose and Oxford. To Beverly and Oxford. To Beverly and Van Ness.

RITKES:  What is the significance of having boundaries?

ALFONSO:  You were protecting your neighborhood.   This was your neighborhood, where you can go anywhere in that zone and feel safe.

RITKES:  What happens if you walk out of that zone?

ALFONSO:  If we were to go north of Melrose, our main rivalry was MS 13, but at that time, it was very calm. There was no hostility towards each other. And then if we went eastbound past Oxford, that was another gang called C 14, which is Clanton 14^th Street, a very large Spanish gang. If we went westbound, past Van Ness, that was another gang called CXL, or Carnales 13.  If you went south, past Beverly, now you’re in the territory of other gangs, 18th Street, and there was a little blood gang that was in that area, also.

RITKES:  What if you have to pass through rival territory, by bus, or car, simply to get where you have to go?

ALFONSO:  If you’re on a bus, depending on your attire, either you get a pass, or, nine times out of 10, there’s an encounter.  It’s, “Where are you from?”  Or if you’re walking in that territory. Back in the nineties, there was a gang code; everybody dressed a certain way. I was raised with the mentality that if you see an outsider in your part of town, you’re going to approach aggressively with, “Where are you from?” You’re raised with that pride.

RITKES:  If you’re on a bus and you’re on your way to visit a relative, how are you supposed to answer when you’re asked, “Where are you from?”

ALFONSO:  You’re proud of your gang. There’s no denying your gang, your affiliation, that you represent, win or lose.  Even if I was outnumbered, as long as you were down with a fight, you have the respect. But if they get back to your gang that they asked you, “Where you from,” and you said, “Nowhere,” you’re pretty much treated like you’re not in the gang.

RITKES:  Can you ever take a time-out and decide that I don’t want to wear the attire? I’m going to the museum or the park, or I want a day off?

ALFONSO:  No, in a gang, it’s 24 hours, seven days a week; there’s no rest.

RITKES:         What do you get from being in a gang?

ALFONSO:  Growing up, it was, “What do you want? You want girls, we have girls. You want money, okay, money. Now there’s a return. If I gave you some money, I gave you some girls, I need you to go beat someone up. It’s that manipulation. It’s a false love. That’s the biggest thing.  And people are willing to do a lot of things to get that false love.

RITKES:  Do people join gangs voluntarily, or are there some people who get “jumped” into gangs?

ALFONSO:  Some guys get jumped into a gang.  Or, guys who want to be in gangs:  first, you hang around, then they test your loyalty. They test your willingness; you’re a prospect, you’re hanging around for a while until they feel you’ve earned it, you’re worthy. Then, depending on your size, you can either get jumped in by 3, 4, 5, 6 guys, depending on your stature and your size, and that’s a 13-second beating. And then you’re welcomed into the gang once you successfully endure that.

RITKES:  Do any guys get jumped into a gang where they don’t want to be in a gang?

ALFONSO:  Oh yeah. We’ve done that many times. Say in your area, there’s this tagging crew that writes on walls; they’re up and coming, and you notice they’re getting pretty big. So you rile up your troops, and you beat ’em all up on the way to school or on the way home from school.  And if they deny or refuse, then they get another beating, and nine out of those 10 are not going to refuse or deny. And now guess what? They’re just multiplying your group numbers because they don’t want to get beat up again.

RITKES:  I assume having a larger number of gang members is advantageous.

ALFONSO:  No, not really.   The bigger you are, the more people who turn on you.  Jefrox was small, loyal, and the mentality was never a gang lifestyle; it was always a brotherhood.  That group would barbecue on the weekends; we’d hang out.  When the time came for a fight, it was expected that you would do what you had to do. We were never taught to go look for trouble. At that time, we had rivals coming towards us to our neighborhood to fight. We never went out looking for a fight, but if it came, we were ready.

RITKES:  Would you guys disclose to your parents or, in your case, your mother, that you were in a gang?

ALFONSO: It’s not secretive. Parents aren’t ignorant. They see their lifestyle change.  I went from a kid that had hair, to all of a sudden start shaving my head and buying clothes at three times my size, creasing my clothes up …

RITKES:  How did your mom react when she started seeing these things?

ALFONSO:  She was in the house. She was so busy. Double and triple- jobbing.  She had no idea.

RITKES:  What about your brother — he was three years older than you?

ALFONSO:  He joined Jefrox before I did, but he tried to keep me away from it. But little brother kept trying to be like big brother. He set the wheel in motion.

RITKES:  Why did he try to keep you out of it?

ALFOSO:  I carried a 4.3 GPA through high school, and he didn’t want me to drop out. But I chose to be a knucklehead and drop out. I don’t regret where I am today. At the time, I just wanted to be with the gang, with the homies. I didn’t care about anything else. I grew up as the passenger of the car. Never the driver. That was because, as a passenger, if we saw a rival within our territory, that’s automatically a reason to jump out of the car; as a passenger, you jump out, you respond.  You ask them, “Where are you from, and do you know where you’re at?” If they don’t bang, then you walk away. If it’s a rival gang, it’s an automatic fight. If they say they don’t bang, which means they’re not even affiliated, you have to lift up their T-shirt and see whether they have gang tattoos.  I was raised that if you are walking in my neighborhood and you feel safe, I’m doing something wrong.

RITKES:  Did you get any complaints from neighbors?

ALFONSO:  They complain about the graffiti a lot, but when you write on their walls or whatever, you protect your land, you protect your people, and the neighborhood knows who you are. The neighbors pretty much don’t bother us, and we don’t bother them.

RITKES: You were in Jefrox through junior high? And your brother, did he finish junior high?

ALFONSO:  Yeah, he finished junior high, and then he dropped out of school in the 10th grade.

RITKES:  And what happened with your brother?

ALFONSO: Unfortunately, he was killed in 2002.

RITKES:  What happened

ALFONSO:  The night before he passed away, me and my best friend, who was from another gang, were walking around the neighborhood. We had altercations with a group of MS 13 guys because the message was to our side to take back territory from MS 13 and take it over. We got into the altercation; we won. And that was Saturday night. Sunday morning I had to run an errand with my mom.

At the time, my brother was strung out on meth. He was addicted to meth, and he was doing his own thing. Yeah. The altercation I had with MS 13 was around the corner from the house. We left the next morning on the bus.  My brother and two of his friends and my best friend, they went walking about five blocks to the liquor store. On the way back, he encountered a car full of MS 13 guys. They jumped out of their car, and they approached my brother, his two friends, and my best friend.  They asked where he was from.  They were looking for me.  They wanted me dead. When they got my brother and they heard Jefrox, they started laughing. They thought they finally encountered me because we looked identical. They pulled out three firearms, and they discharged the firearms. My brother pushed his two friends and my best friend out of the way, and he received all nine bullets.  When we got to the house, we seen the cops and the helicopter. We seen my best friend and one of my best friends, sitting in front of the house, handcuffed, covered in blood.

And then I knew; my heart dropped; I knew. The cops approached; they talked to my mom. We went to Cedars Sinai and saw my brother lying on the ER table. Tubes all over, doctors doing CPR, covered in blood, and we were sitting there. Then the surgeon came in; I grabbed the surgeon. I still remember his neck in my hands, and I was choking him until he was blue. I told him, “You didn’t do enough.” One of the older members from the gang, he was there with us. He had to pull me off the doctor; I was in a blind rage. I watched my brother’s dead body covered in blood. When we got the autopsy, my brother had more than half an ounce of meth in his system. So after he got shot, he bled out in seconds. His heart was pumping so fast, he bled out, so he didn’t feel anything.

RITKES:  In high school, you joined a different gang called DIA. How and why did DIA originate?

ALFONSO:  DIA, or Down in Action, or Diablos, was formed at Belmont High School.  We were getting picked on by members of the 18^th Street gang and their toughest clique, Columbia Little Psychos.  They were organized, synchronized, and operated like the Italian mob.  They were efficient, bullied everybody, and planned things out; they did not act out of emotion.  A group of us friends formed a gang for protection against this.

RITKES: When people think of gangs, they don’t think of people with jobs. You’ve been employed at the same job for many years.  Tell us about it.

ALFONSO:  I started my job working at a mortuary more than 20 years ago. It kept me out of so much trouble. It was something I love to do.  It began at my brother’s funeral.  One of my conditions of probation was that I not be in the presence of gang members.  My probation officer showed up at my brother’s funeral, where there were a lot of gang members attending, and said to me, “Why are you here?”  I said it was my brother’s wake; I’m paying my respects to my brother.  The probation officer then talked to the manager of the mortuary and told him I was on the same path as my brother, and could he help me in some way, and Jimmy said he was more than willing.

I started pretty much just sweeping up and emptying trash cans. I did that for a month, then he promoted me. Now I’m sweeping and mopping and washing the hearses and the limo. I did that for another month, and then he promoted me.  Okay, now you’re ready to start picking up bodies. And his other son, Mike, took me on my first of five pickups of people who had passed away at hospitals. That was an odd one. We get to Martin Luther King [Hospital], we see a patient on a gurney, eyes rolled back.

We put our empty gurney next to that one in the ER. Eyes are rolled back, all out of the mouth. We’re assuming that’s one we will pick me up. We put our gurney next to that person, and we go talk to the nurse to get the information, and they tell us where your body is. We hear a clatter. That patient next to our gurney sits up, looks around, and stumbles his way down the hall, and the nurse says, “Oh, that’s not yours. Yours are behind the curtain. That was an overdose.”  I did that for a few weeks and got promoted to dressing the deceased.

From day one, the owner treated me like a son, not an employee.  He hired my wife, and he treats her like a daughter.  

RITKES:  At some point you decided not to be in a gang. How did that come about?

ALFONSO:  It was 2012, and my wife- we were dating- and she had met my best friend Will [William, who several years later was convicted of several gang murders], and she told me she had a bad vibe from him and didn’t like him. And slowly she started pulling me away. I stopped hanging out with Will, and all my time was with her.

She’s the first girl that I actually truly loved, where I gave everything I had for her. I gave her my last breath. And as of today, we’ve been married 10 years. She’s my heartbeat.

RITKES:  Since you left the gang, you’ve been involved in activities to try and talk to gang members?

ALFONSO:  Yeah. I helped organize a ceasefire agreement between inner city gangs. It started in 2019. For the years we were active, I helped arrange events and meetings. We had some of the biggest gangs on the West Side of Los Angeles, which was Lenox 13 and Inglewood 13. That was a deep-rooted rivalry, with homicides daily between the two. We had a little boxing mentoring program where they could put on boxing gloves and have a three-round match, and other events. I’d reach out to the representatives of gangs and they would send their representative, and we would go to safe events, picnics, Dodger games, with rival gangs. It was from downtown Los Angeles all the way to Redondo Beach to the south. Rival gangs were there. Not one homicide occurred. Crime went down.

RITKES:  What did you do to bring this about?

ALFONSO:  It was Professor Robert [Professor Robert Weide, of Cal State L.A., who was interviewed in the previous edition of Headwind regarding his study of gangs, Divide & Conquer]. He and a few incarcerated people helped bring the gangs together. And yeah, it worked out. We had peaceful meetings. Food and refreshments were provided there. Most of the participants truly believed in the ceasefire. They were tired of all the violence.

RITKES:  Do many gang members come to rethink their involvement in gangs?

ALFONSO:  Oh yeah. A lot of ’em live with regret after they go to jail. But there’s a fear of leaving a gang. And they say we’re creatures of habit. And nobody is leading the way to show them something new.

RITKES:  What advice would you give to someone in a gang?

ALFONSO:  A lot of people join a gang out of fear and a need to fit in and be wanted.  I would tell people to stand on their own two feet.  Don’t depend on a gang. Be a man of destiny; be yourself. You don’t need that.