ANOTHER BITTERSWEET VICTORY FOR A WATCHDOG

At last! Honest man discovered!

"I love to get my name in the paper," says Robert Gangi, who does so
with remarkable frequency. "It's definitely an ego thing."

His large, expressive hands flap the air. "So is this my 15 minutes of
fame?"

Rock out, Gangi. This week, after 17 often lonely years of telephoning
reporters and bureaucrats, compelling attention with your high-pitched
nasal voice, you got what could almost be described as a win.

Of course, you called it a disappointment. You're supposed
to.

As director of the Correctional Association of New York, which
monitors prison conditions and argues for changes in sentencing laws,
Gangi has the unenviable task of rallying support for a despised
constituency: prisoners. One issue has been the Rockefeller-era drug-
sentencing laws, which he and others have criticized as harsh, costly
and ineffective. On Monday, Gov. George E. Pataki proposed to loosen
them.

Although Pataki did not offer to lower sentences, he would allow
first-time drug-possession offenders to appeal their 15 years-to-life
sentences, which would affect about 250 inmates. In exchange, he asked
for an end to parole.

"There is no victory in the substance and if we're stuck with it, it
worries us," said Gangi, whose office has produced nine reports over
the years about the drug laws. His big, emotive features brighten with
the piquant joy of the tireless gadfly. "But the victory is that he
came out with anything: we smoked him out!"

Gangi is 55, which means that he is of the right era and correct
political persuasion to be dismissed as a fossil from the late 60's.
Almost on cue, he happily quotes obscure Bob Dylan lyrics. He leans
back in his armchair -- precarious, when one is a lanky 6 feet 2
inches -- in a paper-strewn brownstone office on East 15th Street and
rhapsodizes about the thrill of fighting the good fight during the
Lindsay years. "We took over agencies" and occupied their offices --
his issue then was community-controlled day care centers -- "we
negotiated with cops!"

But Gangi is not so readily dismissed. For despite the loquaciousness
("I love this story, so let me bore you with it" -- and he does) and
the bleeding-heart pleas, he turns out to be a superb strategist in
step with the late 90's.

Assemblyman Jeffrion L. Aubry, a Democrat from Queens who sponsored a
bill to repeal the Rockefeller drug laws and restore sentencing
discretion to judges, said that when Gangi comes to pitch, he
unleashes a barrage of facts, rather than tear-jerking anecdotes.

"He's been at it long enough to understand that the population he
works for doesn't draw a lot of sympathy," said Aubry, who credits
Gangi for advising him on how to sell the bill, which now has 28
co-sponsors. "Bob said, 'Focus on what people will pay attention to:
how much does it cost to continue this policy and does it work?' "

S OME administration insiders see Gangi as an extremist. And in the
April newsletter of the State Department of Correctional Services,
Commissioner Glenn S. Goord singles out Gangi as "The Correctional
Association, a speed-dial-a-quote inmate lobbying group."

No apologies from Gangi, who is personally liked by many grudging
opponents. "It's important to have a good working relationship with
the other side," he says, "not to take cheap shots, to get reports to
them first so they can respond, and to recognize that they have to
answer to political pressures that we don't because we're out of the
system -- so we can call them as we see them."

Given the near-unbroken stretch of defeats since 1982 when he joined
the Correctional Association, Gangi comes across as seasoned rather
than jaded, even ebullient.

"Did you ever see Rocky III?" he asks. "Do you like Shania Twain? I'm
listening to a little hip-hop, mostly Lauryn Hill." There is an
unpublished novel. His shelves are lined with photos of his two tall,
grown sons and of Barbara Kuerer Gangi, a psychotherapist who, come
June, will have been his wife of 30 years.

Gangi, a Columbia University graduate who made it through one semester
of social work school before being asked to leave ("I challenged some
policies"), ascribes his commitment to the underprivileged to his
Catholic education (St. Francis's life-affirming ethos), his Flatbush
Sicilian family tradition of taking care of whoever came into their
orbit, the influence of the 60's, and his father, stricken with
multiple sclerosis when Gangi was a boy.

"I couldn't help him," Gangi says. "It filled me with a certain anger
and desire to respond to others who were sick or hurt."

Gangi counseled gangs and foster children and later helped a church
coalition lobby successfully against a 1981 prison construction bond.
"The appeal of prison work," he says, "is that it puts you in touch
with the heart of the beast."

And his father? Despite a doctor's death knell, the senior Gangi, who
had a devoted wife and a joyfully stubborn will to live, hung on until
1984, dying when he was 76.

And so a peculiar optimism in the darkness is born. Gangi says: "One
of my tasks was to slow the prison expansion and when I started here,
there were 22,000 inmates in the system. Now there are more than
70,000." His smile is at once self-deprecating and defiant. "So think
how much worse it would have been without us!"