Randol Contreras has been looking frail ever since gastritis started eating at his gut. Sitting at his desk, at the University of Toronto’s sociology department, nothing about him suggests the hard streets. He looks like he might fade into the bare walls of his office.

He grew up in a poor Dominican enclave of the South Bronx in New York City. It was the height of the crack cocaine market and local drug dealers were swimming in cash, splashing it on convertibles, flashy clothes and hot women.

For many in Contreras’s marginalized neighbourhood, the dealers had achieved the only version of the American dream available. “These men were kings,” he says. Some were his relatives, some his close friends. He wanted to be them.

“I failed miserably,” he says, laughing. “I was a really bad drug dealer.”

The experience wasn’t a complete loss. It made him intimately qualified, after joining U of T in the fall of 2014, to teach a sociology course on “drugs in the city.” This fall, at the age of 45, he launches another on street gangs, informed by extensive field research he’s conducting with aging members of the Maravillas, the Mexican neighbourhood gangs of East Los Angeles.

He’s being applauded as a rare voice in academia, making waves in a discipline where ethnographic studies of poor urban communities have “mostly been written by senior white men,” notes U of T sociologist Jooyoung Lee.

He burst onto the sociological scene in 2013 with an astonishing insider’s account of his old neighbourhood. His acclaimed book, The Stickup Kids: Race, Drugs, Violence, and the American Dream, follows the violent path of several South Bronx drug dealers — most of them his childhood friends.

He describes their metamorphosis from simple dealers to gruesome torturers between 1999 and 2004, a fate Contreras narrowly escaped. It is not a portrait of sociopaths. They appear like shockingly brutal pragmatists navigating the social, economic and political pressures bearing down on them.

“He’s demystifying stereotypes,” says Lee, who has used Contreras’s book in his classes on hip-hop culture and gun violence.

“He’s saying, ‘Look, it’s very easy for anyone to get swept up in this; I almost did,’” Lee adds. “He’s showing that these guys are not just bad apples. There’s this larger backdrop of forces that starts to constrain people’s options. There are much larger things that influence the way people behave.”

“It’s a phenomenal book,” says Philippe Bourgois, a leading anthropologist and ethnographer at the University of California, Los Angeles, known for his studies of drug addicts in Harlem and San Francisco.

“It should transform how urban poverty, violence and drugs are understood. It’s a completely new voice,” he adds over the phone from his L.A. home.

Contreras believes knowledge of his background is essential to understanding the perspective he brings to his work. But during his first interview with a major media organization, he made clear he also feels the need to tread carefully.

He worries that the more his ties to a criminal past are publicized, the more it might jeopardize his chances of becoming a tenured professor. One way he deals with the tension is by not discussing his background with colleagues.

“I don’t want them to think that at some point I’m going to start selling crack down the hall,” he says with a nervous chuckle. “These things go through your mind. If there’s a computer missing or something, I don’t want them to think it was me.”

Contreras’s past isn’t the kind one easily shakes off. The day we met in his office at U of T’s Mississauga campus, he was bothered by the failure of a gas pump that morning to spit out a receipt. As a teen, receipts proved his whereabouts to cops searching for suspects.

“It’s just a product of the way I grew up.”

There are few in the ivory tower struggling with that kind of worry. Their privileged tastes, habits and mindsets — the ingrained cultural traits that make up what sociologists call habitus — come from a world wholly different than Contreras’s. He negotiates it at every turn.

When discussing the Star’s photo shoot, Contreras suggested that wearing his navy blue jacket would present the image expected by academia. I encouraged him to keep it off, and he eventually did.

Handling his ties to a criminal past is far more challenging, particularly when experiences he didn’t mention in his book still haunt him.

“Whatever I was involved in, I was lucky no one got hurt,” he says. “I look back and this guilt just comes over me.”

New plan: robbing dealers

Contreras was born in the South Bronx to Dominican parents who arrived in the late 1960s. His mother worked as a dressmaker in a sweatshop; his father pressed clothes at a drycleaner. They divorced, leaving Contreras and his two siblings to be raised by their mother.

The South Bronx at the time was a cauldron of pain and resilience. Immigrant residents lost their main lifeline as manufacturing jobs vanished. Authorities isolated and further depressed the borough economically by building a freeway through its heart. Landlords fought rent controls by letting whole city blocks become derelict. Then the buildings got torched.

In his book, Contreras quotes the legendary sportscaster Howard Cosell summing up the state of affairs during a 1977 World Series game at Yankee stadium, when a camera on an ABC helicopter focused on an abandoned school in flames. “There it is, ladies and gentlemen,” Cosell said, “the Bronx is burning.”

By then, U.S.-backed policies in South America, including the building of the Pan American Highway, had pushed the fledgling cocaine market north. U.S. politicians inadvertently boosted market share for the new product with a major crackdown on marijuana in the 1970s. Authorities attacked marijuana distribution networks and sprayed Mexican fields with paraquat, forcing dope smokers concerned about the health impact of the toxic weed killer to reduce consumption. Under pressure, dealers switched to selling cocaine.

It was the kind of environment, in other words, where a teenager might question the point of going to school. Contreras dropped out of community college in the early 1990s and began selling crack cocaine. It seemed sensible at the time: all those he knew with legal jobs were poor.

In his book, he describes pooling savings with a friend and buying an ounce of coke. With the help of an experienced drug dealer, a close friend Contreras calls Pablo, they cooked it into a pile of crack.

“We gonna make crazy dollars, bro!” Contreras shouted at the time.

“I wasn’t thinking about the harmful effects of crack cocaine on the community,” he tells the Star. “I was a very indoctrinated capitalist. I just wanted to make money.”

But Contreras’s crack was “garbage” and sales were slow. Swarms of police unleashed on the Bronx made what by then had become a dwindling crack market all the more difficult to break into.

Reached by phone in the Bronx, Pablo said Contreras wasn’t cut out for the job. Not for lack of trying. “He put in work. I can’t tell you everything, but he did what he had to do.”

One day, when he was 20, Contreras found himself sitting on a stoop, doing all he could to look as innocent as a lamb.

A police cruiser had stopped directly in front of him and a cop in the passenger seat looked him squarely in the eyes. In his pocket, Contreras had 300 vials of crack. He stared at prison time.

He can only guess why the officers drove off. Perhaps he seemed too young to bother with; his boyish looks continue to shave years off his age. Whatever the reason, it spared him the criminal record that anchored many of his drug dealing friends to a world of violence.

“Look, I’m at the University of Toronto,” Contreras says. “If I would have had a felony on my record there’s a good chance I wouldn’t have been able to get into Canada. So I look at that one moment and I just feel lucky.”

Crossing borders would have been the least of Contreras’s worries.

Tough-on-crime policies had turned an already notorious Rikers Island prison into an even more overcrowded and volatile hellhole. Contreras dubbed it “gladiator school.” Each time his friends Pablo and Gus emerged from it, they were more prone to violence than ever.

So when the crack market dried up and the cash disappeared, Contreras makes clear that his friends adopted a violent business model best suited to their skills and limited options: they robbed drug dealers.

They called themselves joloperos — stickup kids.

“If I had been sent to prison, I would have been a stickup kid,” Contreras says. “Because everyone I know that came out of prison and faced some hard times, they all wanted to do stickups. That was the way to make instant big money. There was like a line waiting of people who wanted to be recruited to do stickups.

“They idolized (Donald) Trump. When you talked about making money, you made Trump money.”

The job description was not for the faint of heart. Getting dealers to reveal where they stashed their cash and their drugs required a sustained amount of torture, and Contreras’s friends were particularly good at it. They sliced off fingers, and forced hot, uncoiled metal clothes hangers into ears. Irons were an especially effective tool.

In his book, Contreras quotes a friend he calls Gus describing a robbery he committed just days before: “So I told my boy to put duct tape over his mouth ‘cause I knew (the drug dealer) was gonna be screaming … We take everything off, his shirt, everything, bro. And while we doin’ all this, we got the iron like heating’ up, getting that s--- hot. Soon as it got real hot, I put that s--- on his back.”

Contreras doesn’t glamorize his friends. He describes them as ruthless and misogynistic. But also as guys making the most of the hand they’re dealt.

Gus grew up in a home where his older brother and stepfather were drug dealers. “For as long as he can remember, money, drugs and guns had been a part of his world,” Contreras writes.

For a while, Pablo was a promising football prospect. But he struggled with injuries, bad grades and poverty. His older brother sold drugs. And his buddy Gus used some of his drug profits to help out Pablo. Drug dealing soon looked to Pablo like the surest way to make a living.

Seeing them as sociopaths, Contreras argues, would mistakenly reduce policy options to “lock ’em up.” The urban planning failures, political decisions and social inequalities that increased the chances of drug dealers becoming torturers would not get scrutinized.

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Today, Gus sits in prison, awaiting trial for an incident Pablo won’t describe, but which he says involves multiple murders. Pablo is 44 and no longer deals drugs. But he doesn’t rule out getting back into the trade “if opportunity knocks and the numbers are right.” He’s most proud of his two sons. Both are in university; one is studying to be a lawyer, the other a psychologist.

“I’m not an animal,” Pablo says over the phone. “People who think that weren’t put in the worst schools, they didn’t live in the ghetto. You can’t judge somebody unless you walk in their footsteps.

“A lot of people were doing what we did,” he adds. “I don’t glamorize it. I don’t want people to think it was cool; it was not cool. But, you know, survival of the fittest. I mean, the strong survive.”

A new direction

Contreras credits a neighbourhood friend with getting him off the streets. As his drug dealing dreams fizzled, the friend presented him with a mostly completed application to a publicly funded community college in upstate New York. Contreras signed it.

“She just wanted everyone to do better,” he says of his friend. “And she saw I was headed down a destructive path.”

He visited Tompkins Cortland Community College and liked what he saw: “I was blown away by all the partying they were doing.” The presence of two close neighbourhood friends, who had enrolled in the school months earlier, assured him he would not face the new journey alone.

“I felt it would give me a decent shot at getting back on the right track,” Contreras says. He got federal grants and student loans to help pay for tuition and housing.

For essays in his sociology course, he wrote about the people he knew best, the stickup kids. His professor, Scott Ochs, was impressed. He urged Contreras to consider a career in academia. Contreras then received a MAGNET fellowship, which pays tuition and an annual stipend for minority students at the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York.

Before receiving his PhD in sociology, Contreras earned extra money as a “violence prevention specialist” in a northern Manhattan high school. He mentored aggressive Dominican students, instilling cultural pride and using art and creative writing to help them think critically about their marginalized communities.

In 2013, Contreras was invited to give the commencement speech to graduates at Tompkins. He praised affordable, publicly funded community colleges as “the great institutions of second chances.”

The video on the college’s website shows him falling silent and fighting back tears when he tries to thank Ochs for guiding his future. The students burst into applause. “I saw that I could be somebody outside of drugs, violence and crime,” Contreras finally says.

When he’s not teaching, he’s in East Los Angeles, studying the lives of veteranos, the Maravilla gang members who survived a brutal war in the mid-1990s with the Mexican Mafia, a prison-based gang. They struggle with addiction and homelessness.

He shaved his hair to fit in with the “homies.” He hangs out with them playing handball and at their barbecues, where he’s reminded that the stress inflamed gastritis he’s been fighting since 2014 makes the eating of most foods impossible. He expects his book on the Maravillas to be published in two years.

L.A. is also home to Contreras’s wife, a tenured sociology professor at California State University, Northridge, and his 21-year-old son from a previous relationship.

Stickup Kids, meanwhile, has won two academic awards and was a finalist for sociology’s most prestigious prize, the C. Wright Mills Award.

It has spurred women and minority scholars new to sociology to seek out Contreras. They want advice on how to incorporate personal experiences involving hot-button issues of race, class and gender without their careers being crushed by the discipline’s mainstream voices, who still largely preach a statistics-based objectivity. Their backgrounds, Contreras says, will give policy makers a richer portrait of urban communities and a better understanding of what needs fixing.

Some sociologists have accused him of being an apologist for his violent friends; others of reinforcing the negative imagery of inner city minorities. Some stopped talking to him.

The sharpest questioning of his credibility came before the book was published. The publisher sent the manuscript to academics for anonymous comment and one questioned his relationship and access to the drug dealers, basically suggesting he may have made some of it up.

“The charge shocked me,” Contreras says.

“No one else gets accused of not being truthful about their connection or research with people who commit crimes in whatever underground economy. And I grew up in the South Bronx. Out of all people, I should have ties. I was like, ‘There’s probably different measures of evaluation for different types of people in academia.’”

To prove his ties, Contreras reluctantly added to the book a picture of himself as a struggling crack dealer in his late teens. He stands in a living room, dressed in baggy pants and a trench coat, his hair shaved at the sides in the undercut style. In his left hand he holds a .25-calibre pistol; in his right, a souped up shotgun. The look on his face means business.

The picture appears in the middle of the book with others depicting the South Bronx. But without consulting Contreras, the publisher, University of California Press, also used it as the author’s photo on the back cover. Contreras hit the roof. For that slot, he had proposed “a very nerdy picture of me with a bookcase behind me.”

He feared being accused by sociologists of seeking cheap celebrity status. He sent “a slew of emails” to colleagues stressing the author photo wasn’t his idea. Some emailed their disapproval to the editor. “One colleague wrote saying, ‘You’re going to ruin his career. What dean is going to hire someone who is holding’ — he exaggerated — ‘an Uzi,’” Contreras says.

Contreras says the publisher eventually described the incident as a misunderstanding and removed it from the back cover for the book’s second printing.

When I asked for permission to publish the photo in the Star, Contreras consulted colleagues and then refused. He worries its wide distribution will hurt his chances at tenure and at permanent residency in Canada.

“I worked too hard to attain my current position and don’t want to jeopardize my academic career,” he wrote in an email. Earlier, over the phone, he gave me the same reason he gave his publisher: “I really don’t want that image to represent me in any way,” he says. “The person in that photo is not the person who wrote the book.”

It is, however, the striking image of a young man who would travel a long way.

What became of the Stickup Kids

Gus

Now 41, he was born in the South Bronx and lived with his parents and three siblings in a basement apartment. Life improved when his stepfather and brother dealt cocaine in the mid-1980s, together earning about $50,000 a week. At 13, Gus was selling, too. A year later he shot a high school kid four times over a girl, then fired at police who chased him. After juvenile jail he returned to selling coke, and eventually torturing and robbing dealers. He had four children with four women. He sits in prison awaiting trial in a case said to involve multiple murders.

Melissa

The only girl in the loose gang, she was born to Dominican parents who moved to the South Bronx in the late 1970s. They also had four sons. When Melissa was a child, her father and brother began selling drugs. By age 12 she was smoking dope “heavily” and cutting classes. She worked as an underground stripper during high school, dancing for men in a Yonkers housing project. At 19, she helped Gus and Pablo by seducing dealers and going to their apartments while the robbers burst in.

Neno and David

The duo were 18 and 19, respectively, when they joined the stickup kids. Both were raised in poor Dominican neighbourhoods, where they smoked dope and robbed homes. Using mountain climbing equipment, they descended from apartment building roofs and entered dealers’ homes through the window. Neno blamed dealers for the torture he had to inflict to get their stash. “They like being hit,” he told Contreras. “Because if you know that you’re going to give it up, give it up and don’t take any beatings.”