Gang buster. (Oscar Contreras in person).

ARE YOU LOOKING FOR SPEEDY?" A TEENAGE BOY ASKS, rounding the corner from behind the Holy Cross Parish rectory in South Side Chicago's Back of the Yards neighborhood. The young man wears dark blue athletic gear, and the baseball cap on his head is pulled around to point backward at an unnatural angle, tip-offs to his membership in a local gang, the Saints. "Speedy's out back; he's looking for you."

"Speedy" is the street name for Oscar Contreras, a gang outreach specialist for Catholic Charities USA. It's a handle that dates back to his own days in a gang in East Los Angeles when Contreras made a reputation for himself as a guy who could be fast on his feet when a police car threw gravel to the curb.

Contreras ran with Lote maravilla for 22 years, devoting 11 and a half of them to advanced gang studies, courtesy of the California penal system. He began his "conversion," as he puts it, away from the gang life after a neighborhood mother pleaded with him to spare her son from a fatal retribution. The boy had abandoned another gang member, his own brother, during a gang fight that resulted in the brother's death. The woman was facing the loss of both of her boys before Contreras intervened. "I saw the face of my grandmother in that woman," Contreras says. "I went home and for the first time I was afraid, I was scared. I looked at my life, and I knew this wasn't the life that I wanted. I thought, `How is this going to end?'"

Where it would likely end, he realized, was in a life sentence in prison or a sudden and violent death on the street. It still took the patient intercession of Claretian Brother Leon Modesto and the man he calls his adopted father, Leo Cortez, a California probation officer, to finally pull Contreras away from the gang life for good. "I give credit to God, but through these men he worked his miracle. They saw something in me that I could not see myself."

Now it's Contreras' turn to seek out gang kids, trying to get them to imagine different futures for themselves. "I want to see these kids become kids again. I want to see them drop this tough-guy mask they think they have to wear. Most of the tough guys I knew are dead or in jail," he says. "They have the faith, they have the values from the church and their families inside them. Someone has to pull it out of them."

Why do the children of Holy Cross join gangs? Contreras will tell you there are no simple answers to that question. Many of Holy Cross' young people are children of recent immigrants whose parents have not learned, and many never learn, how to properly negotiate an urban culture so profoundly different from the Mexican rural life they know. In many families both parents work, sometimes several jobs, trying to make ends meet. That leaves too many children learning the lessons of belonging and commitment and respect from the improvised family of the neighborhood street gang.

"Life is hard here [for the parents]. They have to work hard, and they have to struggle. But if you don't give your kid love and you don't give him attention, someone else is going to steal your son away. When I was in the gang, that was my job, to steal the kids away."

Just a few years ago, Holy Cross buried six of its children taken by gang violence. Some of Contreras' good work and a number of other public and private initiatives appear to be making some difference. Last year the parish only buried one victim of gang violence, a 12-year-old boy walking home from school, who was at the wrong corner at the wrong time.

"My mission in life is to make sure the church does not close its door on these guys," he says. "These kids should have the opportunity to hope and the right to dream.

"They're `bad,' they're gang members, but these are our kids," says Contreras. "We can look at them like they're different, but they're not different, they're the same as any other kids. We're just trying to give them tools they need for different options in life, so that they see they are somebody, that they are children of God."

OSCAR CONTRERAS GANG OUTREACH SPECIALIST

PARISH: Holy Cross/Immaculate Heart of Mary, Chicago

WHAT SUSTAINS ME DURING DIFFICULT TIMES: Being around the kids I work with

THREE PEOPLE I'D LOVE TO MEET: Moses, Pope John Paul II, and Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata

IF I WERE PRESIDENT, I'D: Focus more on domestic issues facing poor people

MOST PEOPLE DESCRIBE ME AS: A person with a lot of heart

SOMETHING MOST PEOPLE DON'T KNOW ABOUT ME: A lot of the pain I carry from my past

ONE WORD TO LIVE BY: Love

By KEVIN CLARKE, managing editor of online products for Claretian Publications in Chicago.