TV Reviews : ‘Desperate Passage’ Charts Lives of Gang Members

It was a young and desperate crew that skipper Lee Stanley hand-picked for a 10-day cruise aboard his sailboat in 1986.

Street-gang members, drug dealers, armed robbers--the seven were all juveniles whose offenses had landed them in Camp David Gonzales, the toughest youth camp in California.

It took Stanley four years to get permission, but he believed that the teamwork and discipline necessary to man a 58-foot sailboat would have a powerful, life-altering impact on his street-hard crew of bad boys.

Stanley’s high hopes brought mixed results, as “Desperate Passage,” KTLA’s excellent and often moving documentary of Stanley’s voyage and its aftermath, shows tonight (8-10 p.m. on Channel 5).

Hosted by Michael Landon, the film was produced and directed by Stanley, a film maker-turned-volunteer chaplain whose Wings Foundation works to help incarcerated youths straighten out their lives.

With Stanley rarely on camera, the two hours focus on the boys: seasick and vomiting over the side, swabbing decks, plotting courses, diving off Catalina and meeting up with a Coast Guard cutter whose young crew includes a former Crips gang member.

As the days pass, Stanley is able to get the boys to open up a little. They talk about their troubled pasts, their drug taking, their gang activities. Even their futures.

They act as innocent as Guardian Angels, but as narrator Landon warns early on, they are all chameleons and con artists who are skilled in hiding their true feelings and are used to telling people what they want to hear.

Yet by journey’s end there are real changes in their attitudes. One boy, Gary, weeps and spills his guts about how drugs have ruined his life, about how he was molested in a boys home and how he wants to be a normal person who doesn’t have to lie and steal all the time.

Gary’s story of his wrecked and confused young life could make a prison guard teary-eyed. But there are many other moments of sadness--and joy, too--particularly in the follow-up film (shot a year after the voyage) that tells what became of the seven delinquents after they served their time.

Stanley’s fine documentary (to be repeated Saturday at 11:30 p.m.) ends with no big messages or claims of success or pleas for funds, just Landon’s simple but powerful request for brotherly love: “Make yourself available to a kid, to a group helping kids or to wherever you think you’ll make a difference.”

Stanley himself is proof of the difference one person can make.