By Jon Nielsen
The Dallas Morning News
One of the first times Don Smarto walked through the gates of a juvenile detention facility to teach poetry to a bunch of hardened teenagers, one of the administrators gave him a tepid greeting.
“You’re going to have a bad day,” the man said.
The cold reception took Smarto, 63, by surprise.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“If you’re doing creative writing, this group will not respond,” the administrator said. “You won’t hold their attention, not for 20 minutes.”
The administrator couldn’t have been more wrong. Smarto has delivered the seminar through his Duncanville-based ministry to more than 800 imprisoned teenagers in the last six years.
His lessons include the meaning of alliteration, symbolism and personification. Yet the teens learn more than how to express themselves with words. They learn how to tap potential they never knew they had.
They also get a chance to hear Smarto tell how he shed his rage-filled youth, and broke the ties to a family connected to some of the most notorious mobsters and crimes in American history.
Capone connection
Smarto’s collegial face disarms the young criminals he speaks with. A salt-and-pepper mustache and goatee frame his warm smile. But under his left eye is a reminder of his past. The scar runs down Smarto’s cheek like a streaming teardrop, the result of a fight in which an older brother sliced into him with a piece of glass from a broken chandelier many years ago.
Smarto grew up in a Chicago family connected to organized crime. His grandfather worked covertly with Al Capone.
Smarto’s late father, a violent man and gambling addict who drank Scotch every night until he passed out, also fit the family’s criminal reputation. Sons followed their fathers in crime, cousins followed uncles.
Smarto’s two older brothers continued in the “family business,” and Smarto seemed destined to follow the family’s notorious lineage.
He once declined $50,000 to join his older brother William in a $1 million burglary of items from safe-deposit boxes at an Illinois bank. At the time of the 1981 crime, it was the largest safe-deposit vault heist of a federal bank in the U.S.
Smarto eventually became part of the investigation that led to his brother’s incarceration.
Although he had executed his share of street-corner holdups, Smarto resisted the temptation of the more lucrative crimes.
Instead, he turned to his burgeoning spirituality, a desire for a college education and his determination to become the man his father never was.
Smarto said it was tough going against his family. William, his only surviving immediate family member, no longer speaks to him.
Smarto had kept the family secrets and inner turmoil to himself. Then in the early 1990s, it hit him. He decided that sharing his tale could help others who struggle to find themselves.
Today he teaches the poetry seminars as part of his ministry, called Youth Direct.
When he tells the juvenile offenders that “you can turn your life around,” Smarto means it.
‘Can’t see a way out’
Lisa Cooke knows first-hand the fate that awaits most of the teens who are released from a Texas Youth Commission facility.
“Working with the kids that we worked with, they have a tendency to not see that there’s much hope for them. They just can’t see a way out,” said Cooke, a former administrator at McFadden Ranch in Roanoke, which houses about 40 teenage felons with drug and alcohol problems.
After seeing the influence that Smarto had on the young inmates after his initial visit to the facility, she invited him back.
“The more they wrote, the more they wrote, the more they wrote,” Cooke said. “They were just spilling their soul.”
Some of their work was featured in Smarto’s recent self-published book, Heart of the Young Gladiator. The teenagers reveal thoughts of hopelessness and despair and their desire to regain self-worth in a world that seems to have abandoned them.
When Smarto teaches the four-hour-long poetry seminars, he said he envisions the young men not dressed in their prison uniforms, but in a surgeon’s coat or a graduate’s cap.
“When I look at these kids the first thing that hits me is nobody is born to be a failure,” said Smarto. “Nobody has told them they’re smart. Maybe the greatest gift is to give them the vision of possibility.”
Once, Smarto stopped during a lesson and asked his students, “Why do you think I’m here?”
One boy considered the money. No. Smarto doesn’t get paid for the seminars.
Another suggested that Smarto didn’t have anything better to do. Again it was the wrong answer. With his books, a radio program he hosts and his ministry, there’s plenty to keep him busy.
Then a teenager said, “Because I think you care about us, sir.”
That was it. Smarto said he had to do his best to keep his eyes dry.
“When I got in the car, I really cried because I didn’t really know how much I love these kids,” Smarto said.
Most of the boys at McFadden Ranch know Smarto’s story. Some have read about it in the autobiographies that Smarto donated to the facility’s library several years ago.
He returned recently to teach his fifth seminar at the ranch in rural Denton County, where teenagers are assigned to complete their Texas Youth Commission sentences.
Blind pony
It’s a sprawling ranch-style group home with Spanish architectural influences, surrounded by scrubby mesquite trees and land only good enough for growing hay. A blind Shetland pony that the boys rescued from slaughter greets visitors to the facility.
Inside, staff scurry about with walkie-talkies as they lead groups of juvenile felons from one activity to the next as part of their daily routine.
On the second floor, nine teens who have already obtained their GED certificates listen to Smarto talk about writing.
“I ain’t very good,” an 18-year-old named Travis says in the first few moments of Smarto’s PowerPoint presentation.
“I wasn’t very good when I was young either,” Smarto says.
For three hours, the teens are engaged. They read snippets of poetry from Carl Sandburg, Gwendolyn Brooks and Sylvia Plath. They discuss hidden symbols in company logos and that all movies begin with a writer.
Quick poems
At the end of the seminar, Smarto asks the group to write a quick poem about life at McFadden Ranch. Do they miss their family and friends? Do they think about the future? Do they have dreams?
They quietly scribble in their notebooks, their thoughts bleeding on to the pages.
After 10 minutes, they turn the papers over to Smarto.
Smarto reads the rhythmic “Locked Up,” which 18-year-old Brandon just created.
I’m surrounded by kids but I’m all alone
This place is hell, it isn’t home
Smarto looks up from the paper and gives Brandon an approving nod. He leans in and whispers, “Did you know you’re a good writer?”
Brandon nods.
Smarto reads a couple of other poems about how nobody sees the teens’ potential, and about their thoughts of isolation.
“I’m seeing some real talent here,” Smarto says. “You guys have real potential. When you get out of a place like this, consider college, because it can help you. Don’t let other people put you down.
“If it gets to that point where nobody else believes in you, don’t give up.”
Smarto asks for a volunteer to read his poetry.
The teens shy away until one courageous boy sitting in the back relents.
His name is Jose. He knows he has something good on the paper before him; he wants to send a copy to his mom.
He stands up and reads:
In and out, in and out
These last five years have flown, no doubt
Started out at 12, now 17
A lot of things I’ve missed
Wish I could have seen
Sometimes can’t sleep
Too much on my mind
A future for myself
Not easy to find
I roam the streets with thugs, as if I’m blind
Always looking to check if the cops are behind
Sometimes I wonder where my life’s leading
Will I die an old man?
Or on a street corner bleeding?
Copyright 2010 THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS