After Doing Time, Work and Trust Are Hard to Find
July 27, 2004
By DAVID GONZALEZ
New York Times

Ramon Cabrera once called himself Reverend. That was when
he and his wife opened their home to three dozen homeless
men and former convicts, offering them a place to live,
pray and start anew. Many of them - the boys, he called
them - worked with him on construction jobs around the
city. Grants and loans helped him buy the building that
housed his United Christian Prison Ministry on Second
Avenue near 119th Street, which he and the boys hoped to
renovate, too.

For four years, however, the place has been a wreck. The
building's top two floors, where the men lived in tight
barracks, have been empty since July 2000, when Buildings
Department inspectors said too many people lived there. A
lot next door, once the site of festive prayer services and
food handouts, is similarly decrepit and forlorn,
especially after a fire tore through a pavilion last year.
If not for the thrift shop that his wife, Mercedes, runs on
the first floor, he would have lost everything by now.

Ramon Cabrera no longer calls himself Reverend. His
ministry is in limbo, with only a half-dozen men living in
a windowless basement. Hoping to cash in on some of the
many construction jobs in his East Harlem neighborhood, he
founded a new company with a very secular name: SoHo
Renovation Construction.

"There is so much construction around here, but nobody from
the community is getting hired," he explained. "If I called
this United Christian Prison Ministry Construction it would
just bring me problems. You know, people do not trust those
who come out of jail."

The new company is just one of the last-ditch plans he has
hatched to save the building and jump-start his ministry.
He recently started selling food at a Bronx block party,
although in recent weeks he has had more leftovers than
sales.

And he has either signed preliminary agreements or listened
to pitches from eager speculators who have offered him
quick cash and construction work in return for taking over
the mortgages he has on the building and lot.

"Like I tell Cabrera, concentrate on what you need to do,"
his wife said. "Instead, he pays attention to what
everybody says and he loses focus. You can't cook and do
construction at the same time."

There was a time when Mr. Cabrera felt he could do many
things at once. He had served 10 years in a New York State
prison on a weapons charge by the time he arrived in East
Harlem in the early 1990's, full of faith and dreams. He
and his family belonged to a storefront congregation whose
members helped him when he started giving other parolees a
place to stay.

A foundation awarded his growing ministry $50,000 while
another charity loaned him $100,000, which, he said, he
used to buy the building and the adjoining lot.

For a few years, the place was abuzz with life: prayer
meetings in a downstairs chapel, counseling in a neat
office, a soup kitchen that fed the homeless outside. By
the summer of 2000, 35 men were living in the building,
until city inspectors came calling with a vacate order.

"We have been in suspension ever since," Mr. Cabrera said,
standing in the half-finished third floor, where wires
dangled from the wall and roils of insulation lay on the
battered floor. "This is not easy."

With few men living at the center, it has proved harder to
get together a crew he can hire out for construction work.
But that had already become difficult, even before the city
closed him down. Too often, he said, he and his men were
hired by local churches who look at construction as charity
rather than a job.

"I would go with the boys at 7 in the morning and work all
day, breaking down walls, putting up walls, roofs," he
said. "At the end of the week they would give us an
offering for 20 men to share. We once renovated an entire
church. I tell you, they owed us at least $70,000 in
labor."

Tauntingly, a wave of construction swept through the
neighborhood after most of the men were forced out of the
building. It's the first sight that greets Jose Anthony
Colon the minute he emerges from the basement room he
shares with five other men. Across the street, the building
where he once helped manage a first-floor laundry awaits
renovation.

"I lost my job at the laundry on Christmas Eve," said Mr.
Colon, who served 15 years for killing a man he said had
raped his son. "They sold the building to turn it into
condos."

He now does odd jobs to earn money.

"You do 15 years, you do good time and you get paroled," he
said. "The real sentence begins when you get out."

His own home is a corner of the basement, where a thin
sheet separates him from his roommates. Books, radios and
television sets are tucked into various corners of the
room, where men hang clothes off overhead pipes. The place
is dark and damp, hardly reminiscent of its days as a
prayer hall.

"Hope? You know that is the last thing you lose. Hope," Mr.
Colon said. "You always find someone to help you. If you
lose hope, you can just go out and throw yourself under a
train."

More than a few people have helped Mr. Cabrera over the
years. Some said he had failed to follow up on suggestions
that would have assured his group's survival. He replied
that some of them forgot about him, were pushy or wanted
him to evict men who needed a third or fourth chance. The
charity that lent him the money for the lot did not respond
to repeated messages, while a foundation that provided a
sizable grant declined to comment.

Lucille Banta, a longtime supporter, still likes him. She
just thinks his strengths are not in administration.

"He is the kind of man who wants to do things on a
handshake," she said. "He does not have a head for
business."

That is obvious. Mr. Cabrera said he wants to sell the lot
to a buyer, allowing him to pay off the loan and then use
what is left over to renovate the building. The problem is
that he also had a preliminary agreement to sell the
building to some downtown investors. He insisted he is
trying to break that last deal.

He even spent several hours listening to a man who dropped
in on him last week with an offer to buy the building from
him for $2 million, even though it was worth $200,000. The
man talked about having access to $3 billion, which got Mr.
Cabrera's attention. Then it turned out that the figure
came from a 1997 form letter from President Bill Clinton,
talking about how much was budgeted to help states move
people from welfare to work.

"I gave the guy some food and then he left," Mr. Cabrera
said. "If I thought he could help, I would still be
talking."

Instead, Mr. Cabrera wound up the next day sweating on a
Brooklyn rooftop, fixing up somebody else's building. He
was still waiting for the day he and the boys could be
working in their own neighborhood, if not their own
building.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/27/nyregion/27wide.html?ex=1091939580&ei=1&en=768f033462969397