When he was a younger man, Jagdeep Mangat used to set out to Whytecliff Park, marvelling at West Vancouver's luxurious homes with spectacular ocean views as he drove by. Breathing in the fresh salt air as he stood on the park's rugged beach, where he watched yachts glide across the water, the East Vancouver born youth would start to dream. He, too, would make it big one day.

For 10 years, Mangat chased his dream in a world where money plenty of it can be had quickly and easily as long as you're tough and hungry enough to get it. It came with a price. Starting out in the underworld of crime when he was only 14, Mangat rose to become a gang leader, and by the time he got out at age 24, he'd been cut, hacked, and shot more than once. Of course, he roughed up others along the way. He'd also been arrested, tried in court and convicted, and had served time. "The first night in jail, it was like, 'What did I do with my life?'" he said.

It's been more than a decade since Mangat left the streets. Now 34, he's midway through his first year of law studies at UBC. His parents were both lawyers in India, but they weren't able to practise their profession when they immigrated to Canada. When he sat down with the Georgia Straight one afternoon on the patio of a West Broadway café after attending class, Mangat said he wanted to be a human-rights lawyer.

"I was sick of living that life," Mangat said, reflecting on his old world. "I've got scars on every inch of my body. The fact that I'm alive today, that's a miracle."

There has been considerable public concern over a spate of shootings in the Lower Mainland that has killed a number of people known to police for their gang associations, as well as innocent bystanders. The drug trade has been largely blamed for this rash of violent incidents. This doesn't surprise Mangat.

"You got such a tremendous amount of profit to be made from drugs, and you're seeing competition among different groups to maximize profit," he said. "There's a public perception, I think, from watching the media that there's something extraordinary that's going on right now. But I would argue that there really isn't."

In its 2007 Annual Report on Organized Crime in Canada, the RCMP-led Criminal Intelligence Service Canada notes that the illicit drug market, primarily for marijuana and cocaine, "continues to be the primary criminal market in Canada in terms of estimated generated illicit revenue, the number of participating organized crime groups, and the number of consumers.

"As a result, no single organized crime group dominates any specific illicit drug market, either nationally or regionally," the report states. "Unchanged from 2006, approximately 80% of all crime groups in Canada are involved in this market, particularly as street-level traffickers. A smaller proportion of crime groups are active in more sophisticated operations such as wholesale distribution, importation and domestic production."

It also points to periodic firearms-related violence between rival crime groups and says that such cycles of violence tend to peak in intensity and subsequently decline, "often due to targeted law enforcement intervention".

In British Columbia alone, the RCMP E Division estimates that the "annualized retail return" for marijuana cultivated for local consumption and export is about $6 billion.

"Marihuana alone appears of the same order of magnitude as tourism or the fishery as a second-rank industry in the province, and dwarfs (by comparison) the film industry," the division's criminal-analysis section stated in a June 2005 report, The Scope and Impact of Organized Crime in British Columbia. The study went on to note that this "estimate of $6 billion puts BC's marihuana economy at some 4% of provincial GDP". It also said that as an export-oriented sector, if "marihuana production factored into provincial accounts BC's current trade surplus would increase by 230% from $2.6 to $8.6 billion".

According to Mangat, the only difference between people in the drug trade and legitimate businesses is that the former are excluded from legal mechanisms to resolve their disputes.

"In what we call the legitimate business world, there's an area of contract disputes," he said. "What do they do? They go to courts. But in the background there always must be force, even in legitimate economic activity. You go to the state, you get an order from the court; you have to listen to it because if you don't, the police will come. It's the same shit that's happening on the street."

However, Mangat went on to suggest that in "alienating" capitalist economies, gangs are part of the social fabric.

"The most important thing I have to say is that in capitalist societies, we'll never get rid of gangs, period, ever," he said. "They're just as much a part of our society. They're a social institution. They operate within certain unregulated spaces within the economy, and they meet a demand which arises out of the nature of an alienating economy, and they're there to provide the supply."

Referring to both Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government and Premier Gordon Campbell's B.C. Liberal government, Mangat argued that there is a reason why governments with a "right-wing agenda" typically respond to gang violence by moving to impose tougher laws and longer prison sentences.

"That right-wing agenda has no way of explaining what's going on on the streets other than describing it as a matter of individual choice," he said. "It doesn't look at the social context out of which gangs arise, the demand for their products arise, and the social motives that gang members have."

He added: "When you gut the social programs, the people will end up having a greater demand for drugs. Sociologically, it's been established that the more poverty that exists in a society, the greater the demand for drugs and alcohol. These are ways of escape. There's more demand. So it feeds it. It becomes a cycle. They're contributing to the demand as well as contributing to the supply and their only solution is to build more fucking prisons."

Mangat's thesis also seeks to partly explain why gang life is attractive to some youths. "When you gut labour standards, when you cut the minimum wage like, you know, for teenagers a job is $6 an hour, for god's sake there's no positive incentives to make money in a legitimate way," he said.

Mangat even suggested that gangs with their drive to maximize profits through risk-benefit analysis are, in fact, embodying the capitalist ideal.

"They're saying, 'Here's the possible benefits; here's the risk. You're an individual; we're all individuals go out there and pursue your fucking wealth,'" he said. "The Fraser Institute talks about minimizing state regulation of the economy, that the invisible hand of the market will take care of itself. You want to see a perfect classic example of laissez-faire economics? That's in the world of gangs."

Mangat made it clear he's no gang apologist. As a former counsellor at the Downtown Eastside Residents Association, he has helped people dealing with drug addiction, and he considers them victims as well of gangs.

Law enforcement, according to him, has a role in mitigating the impact of gangs. He said that drug busts, for example, particularly the smashing of marijuana grow ops, would decrease supply. The former gangster also believes that funding should be increased for drug-use prevention, treatment, and harm-reduction strategies. He likewise said that there must be intervention programs that would support gang members who want to leave a life of crime, programs that he claimed don't exist.

Indira Prahst is a sociology instructor at Langara College, and Mangat is one of her former students. Prahst chairs the media committee for the antigang media watch campaign of the South Asian Community Coalition Against Youth Violence. She is a regular contributor to the community paper Indo-Canadian Voice, and she has also organized forums with speakers such as Attorney General Wally Oppal.

An active antigang educator in the South Asian community, Prahst works with Vancouver police detectives Adam Dhaliwal and Doug Spencer in presentations in her sociology course that seek to deglamorize gang life.

In an interview with the Straight, Prahst noted that youths, including those who come from relatively well-off families, aren't immune to the allure of the wealth and status offered by gang life. She said that in a place like B.C., where drugs are easily accessible, the temptation to engage in illicit activity is strong.

She asserted that in the context of immigrant families, like many in the South Asian community, feelings of alienation from mainstream society serve as an added push a situation that she described as a part of the "diasporic challenges".

"Some of the diasporic challenges is parents that come to Canada, they don't have their [professional] credentials recognized, therefore they're working two to three cheap jobs to make ends meet," Prahst said. "The experience of racism, the experience of marginalization that parents have experienced, instills very, very, very powerful pressure on kids. What some of the youths have told me is they feel they're failures. Because their parents want them to be doctors, they want them to be lawyers, they impose a career on them. Not every kid is academic material. You're forced into this college or university, and you're doing poorly, so they want to make quick money."

Mangat said that his generation can relate to that situation. "People my age the gang members in the 1980s and 1990s when we were young men, they were the children of people who came during the late '60s and early '70s," he said. "My parents in India were both lawyers. In Canada they were nothing."

He also recalled overt acts of racism at that time, when people of his race were regularly abused with taunts of "Fucking Hindu, fucking Paki, go back to where you came from."

"For young men at that time–that every day being called Hindu, Paki, sometimes by your own teachers in school for us this was a form of, 'You know what? From now on, nobody's gonna fuck with us, because if somebody fucks with us, they're fuckin' gonna get it.'"

Mangat, however, noted that now, factors like alienation and marginalization aren't the driving forces that make youths go to gangs. "It's not a negative pushing them the lack of options there's something else," he claimed. "There's also that drive to pursue wealth."

Prahst also points to the culture clash within families. She said that a number of parents "don't realize that parenting means unfreezing your mindset about the way tradition and your society was in your home country and waking up to see what is going on in contemporary [Canadian] society". Alienated from their own families, youths seek out a sense of belonging in gangs.

"Parents are afraid to even seek help from police," she said. "There's a stigma in their home country: police are dangerous and you're going to be automatically jailed. Part of bridging the gap for helping ethnic minorities is to build trust between communities and police."

In July 2005, the federal Liberal government appointed 10 people from the B.C. Indo-Canadian community to develop an integrated approach to addressing youth violence. Over the previous two decades, before this Group of 10 was struck, almost 100 Lower Mainland South Asian men had been killed in gang-related violence.

The group released a report, Community Response to South Asian Youth Violence, in 2006 after the Conservative party won the last federal election. The report noted that it wasn't until the late 1980s that awareness of criminal lifestyles in their community started to grow. "Victims and perpetrators of these acts seem to have come from all socio-economic backgrounds, some growing up in highly affluent families," it noted.

The Group of 10 recommended the creation of the South Asian Youth and Family Integration Strategy, which would address a wide range of concerns, from one-to-one youth-mentorship programs to life-skills training to teaching parents how to parent in the Canadian context. Its report stated that such a strategy would be the first of its kind in B.C.

Rob Sandhu was a member of that group. A UBC-trained retired secondary-school teacher in South Vancouver, he has been active in antigang initiatives in the South Asian community for about four decades.

"Nothing happened," Sandhu said when asked by the Straight what became of the group's report. "We met with all Indo-Canadian politicians, and even”¦they're not very responsive to what was in the report. To be a cynic, I guess when we have about 20 more deaths in a three-week period, maybe we'll get some action."

The Sikh Societies of the Lower Mainland, composed of representatives from various Sikh temples, is continuing to lobby the federal and provincial governments to institute some of the Group of 10's recommendations, according to Sandhu.

"How far have we gotten?" he asked. "We're exactly where we were before. I don't think the Indian community itself is unified to put a lot of pressure on the government. Politicians say temples are dysfunctional. Even if you take a look at domestic violence, what do we do? Woman dies; two weeks later we have a forum. Three weeks go by, there's peace and quiet. Another woman gets killed we have another forum. In gang-related deaths, we go to these meetings, we listen to everything, but no one has taken any action. I'm very pessimistic of anything happening until something really serious happens in our community."

The Indo-Canadian voice recently described Vancouver police inspector Steve Rai as "an excellent role model for Indo-Canadian youths". The 41-year-old officer was born in India's Punjab region and his family came to Canada when he was a young boy. He's currently the executive officer for Vancouver's new chief constable, Jim Chu.

Talking to the Straight by phone, the 17-year veteran of the police force said he's a firm believer in values and effective communication.

"At our house, there was never a push towards money," Rai said. "It was always a push towards 'Do what interests you,' and a push towards being a good citizen. My father always emphasized the value of being a good citizen. It kept us on the right path."

However, Rai also noted that compared to when he was growing up in Kitsilano ("It wasn't that overt, sort of money in your face from everywhere you turned"), society has become "much more commercialized than when I was going to high school 20 years ago".

"If you're a kid growing up, and you're growing up in an inner-city school, and”¦your parents are both immigrants and you're living in a western society”¦[and] you look around you and everything is fuelled by money and economics and status, and you're not there yet as a family 'cause maybe you're new or you're second-generation but you haven't achieved that, it's very hard to look at that every day," he said. "And I believe some of these problems have to be tackled early on in teaching life skills and values, whether in schools or at home. As ethnic parents, sometimes maybe those values and the ways we communicate it in your first country, they aren't necessarily successful here."

Noting that gang recruitment in the South Asian community cuts across income brackets, Rai said that the notion of success appears to have gotten mixed up. "We need to redefine values to our young people," he said. "So at an early age we have to teach maybe in the schools through life-skills teaching, through maybe better education for parents we need to be able to get a message through to young people. I don't mean when they get to be 18 or 19, but when they're in Grade 7 or Grade 8 or Grade 9."

Before becoming an academic, Robert Gordon served as a police officer in Australia, Hong Kong, and London, England. Currently the director of SFU's school of criminology, Gordon doesn't consider the recent gangland killings a mere spike in violence.

"It's a sustained period of conflict between various criminal groups which will likely resurface, I would think, probably within a matter of weeks," Gordon told the Straight in a phone interview. "This is something out of the ordinary. That there had been major disagreements, exactly what that has been is hard to say. It's difficult to know whether it's a war over turf, a settling of scores, or whether one group failed to do what it promised to do or one group ripped off another."

Gordon said that what is certain is that the deployment of the gang task force, composed of officers from various Lower Mainland police agencies, is only intended as a stopgap measure.

"The big question is whether or not they're likely to be imposing any kind of permanent solution, and the answer to that is no," he said. "It's on the one hand an exercise in PR, because people are very concerned and there has been pressure on the police and politicians to respond; and, secondly, they would not be able to sustain that level of resource commitment for any long period of time."

Reporting on November 21 after the first week's deployment of the multiregional police antigang Violence Suppression Team, team leader and VPD inspector Dean Robinson said that the increased profile of police officers in the entire metro region "is having the desired effect".

"One of the first results we've seen is gang members and associates are not as thick in the areas as they were throughout the Lower Mainland," Robinson said at a news conference. "We're very happy with the results we have before us."

The police officer also said that the 56-member team will cover the whole region, seven days a week, and that it's "going to employ every tool a police officer has to make our presence known".

But according to Gordon, the presence of these officers in areas known to be frequented by gang members will merely displace criminal activities to other areas. "The individuals who've been involved in this particular rather low level of gang activity, which is all related to the drug trade, just simply go underground for a short period of time and then figure out new ways of doing their business," he said.

Will gangs and criminal activity ever disappear? "There are very few societies that don't have some kind of criminal business organizations operating," he said. "The key to understanding it: supplying the demand that exists for goods and services that have been declared to be illegal but which nevertheless people want in huge quantities. What lies at the root of it all is prohibition. But that's not going to change, however sensible that might be. For example, legalize marijuana. That's simply not going to happen."

The next question, then, according to Gordon, is: what is there to do? There has always been constant police surveillance and investigation, and Gordon noted that antigang police task forces have long been operating in the province, though not entirely successfully. Imposing harsher penalties for criminal gang activity is also important because this would increase the cost of doing business, he said.

"The answer is, you make it abundantly clear that you're not going to tolerate the presence of organized-crime groups in this region," he said. One way of doing it is to have a crime commission responsible for five- to 10-year strategic plans, one that has "some kind of non-police [civilian] oversight".

"If you just go over to the police and hand them a sack of cash, they can spend it and you won't be able to determine how effective they'd been in spending it because they will always mystify what they're doing: 'Oh, we can't tell you; it's secret,'" he said.

Gordon recalled that B.C. used to have such a structure in the Coordinated Law Enforcement Unit during the 1970s, and that its management committee involved people who were not police officers. As far as he can remember, he said, CLEU's mandate and powers were increasingly watered down until it was replaced by another entity, the Organized Crime Agency. "OCA just evaporated," he said. "They just vanished for no particular reason other than, I suspect, police politics in British Columbia."

Since getting out of gang life, Mangat has played a number of roles. He spoke extensively in schools about why gangs are a bad idea as part of his previous work with South Asian Frontline Education. He's become an activist identified with such groups as the Anti-Poverty Committee, the South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy, and Vancouver's Radical Desi Youth network.

In 2005, he also acted in a play produced by Headlines Theatre. Written and directed by the activist theatre group's artistic director, David Diamond, Here and Now tackled the gang issue facing the South Asian community. Mangat played the role of one of the gangsters in the play, and several other members of the Indo-Canadian cast had experience in varying degrees with gangs, either as former gang members or as kin of gangsters.

What became very clear from the play, Diamond told the Straight, was that the young guy who gets pulled into a gang doesn't go in kicking and screaming. "He's open," Diamond said. "He goes there because he wants to, because there's something attractive there, which is a sense of family, a sense of purpose, there's money to be made and the family thing should not be underestimated. Where are those places that we can belong regardless of our cultural background? In the play that we developed, he gets involved with people who give him the things he needs or thinks he needs."

The 54-year-old Diamond the first individual recipient of the City of Vancouver's cultural-harmony award, in 1996 noted that he's been around the city for quite a long time, long enough to remember that before the media spotlight fell on violence in the Indo-Canadian community, that attention was focused on the Latino community, and before that the Chinese community.

"It's gone in waves," Diamond said. "Years from now, that community getting targeted is going to be some other community. One of the things that we were saying when we were doing Here and Now is that: why is it that the Hells Angels just get to be called the Hells Angels and not described as a Judeo-Christian white gang?"