GUNS AND GANGS: "I thought I was bulletproof"

Jesse Sidhu wants you to know that he isn't proud of what he did
during the years he lost to drugs and guns, but he still wants to
talk about it because he wants other young men to know that kind of
life goes nowhere.

"I want people to realize where that road leads," the 25-year-old
Surrey resident says. "It's death, if you're lucky, or jail for the
rest of your life."

He's talking about a bad time in his life, a time when he lost
himself in a bad-boy world of guns and drugs.

"I was never so much Mr. Gangster myself, but I was around some
pretty heavy-duty people."

He was a professional fighter, a rising star in kickboxing with a
string of championships to his credit.

He won the intercontinental title and fought for the world
championship in Mexico City.

He took up martial arts because he was smaller than other kids in his
Surrey school and discovered he was very good at it, rising to be
ranked number one provincially and nationally.

Then he was discovered, by the young men with the guns and the new SUVs.

There was, Sidhu says, a sort of glamour to living what he calls a
"Scarface kind of life" after the Al Pacino movie about an refugee
from Cuba who builds a criminal empire.

"Nobody paid any attention to me and then all of a sudden people
started paying attention because they started recognizing me from the
magazine or TV and started allowing me into their circle and that
circle I found so glamorous," he recalls.

"I thought that was where I wanted to be for good."

He rode with them, even carried unlicensed handguns himself.

They were easy to get, he says.

"You just have to know someone."

Carrying a gun was a way of feeling powerful, Sidhu recalls.

"I thought I was bulletproof," he says, but he soon found out differently.

In "Scarface" Al Pacino as Tony Montana eventually gets too deep into
drug abuse, sending him over the edge into near-insanity. Sidhu made
the same trip.

"That's what I'm ashamed of, more than anything else in my life, is
the time when I was whacked out, because I did things that are so out
of character for me."

During a fight at a house party in 2001, Sidhu beat a bigger man into
a coma, at a time when he was already on parole for a previous
conviction for assault causing bodily harm.

His record also includes firearms and robbery convictions.

"I've never shot anybody but I've seen people get shot, right in
front of me, and it's a crazy thing. It sure humbles you real quick."

There is a lot of violence in that kind of life, he says, and it is
all quite senseless.

"It's over nonsense. It's over ego and control of street level drug
trafficking stuff that is not worth your life. Your life should be
worth more than that."

What saved his life, he says, is getting jailed for six years.

He was doing federal time at Kent penitentiary, and he got to know
some lifers, people serving 25-year minimum terms for murder.
"They're dead inside. They're not there anymore. And it scared me."

Now, he's out on parole and he wants his old life back, the life
before the drugs and the guns and the easy money that nearly cost him
everything.

These days, he lives a deliberately quiet, focused life, working as a
trainer and preparing for a comeback fight (April 28, against Mike
Dowsett at the PNE Agridome).

Guns are even easier to get than they were before he went to jail,
Sidhu says, and there seems to be just as many foolish young men who
think there is something glamorous about the gangster lifestyle.

He's trying to get his message out, but it hasn't been easy.

Sidhu was disappointed by the reception he received when he recently
approached a local anti-violence group, volunteering to be a speaker.

"They were very friendly. Then, they said 'okay, tell me your story.'
And I told them my story. And I held nothing back."

It may have been a little too gritty.

An appointment for Sidhu to speak to a group of high school students
was cancelled at the last minute without explanation, he says.

"I told them, shame on you, you guys are looking for someone who can
help you with this gang violence issue. One comes knocking on your
door and you say, no, no, no."

He says the gang and gun culture is even more prevalent than it was
before he went to prison.

Most of the people carrying guns are not even gangsters, just young
men who want to feel powerful.

He avoids the nightclubs and pubs now, determined to avoid trouble.

"I don't go out," Sidhu says.

"I might get shot."