DR. JAY ROSENBERG HOISTS PARAPLEGIC Angelo Perez from his wheelchair onto a table at Saint Joseph Hospital in Elgin, Ill. While another doctor assists, Rosenberg uses a penlike laser to trace the shape of a spear on Perez's back—a tattoo from his old gang Ambrose that he desperately wants to lose. "Oh, man, that hurts!" Perez grunts, as the laser explodes tiny drops of pigment under his skin.

Rosenberg zaps away. The founder of Operation Fresh Start—a program that rids gang members of identifying tattoos—he is used to his patients' pain. Once a month, Rosenberg, 51, with the help of Dr. Vladimir Tkalcevic, registered nurse Patricia Affett and hospital volunteers, erases the past for up to 50 people, aged 13 to 56, over a number of sessions. His message: "You were dumb for doing it. Now you want it off, and that's wonderful—but it's going to hurt."

That pain is nothing for Perez, 27, compared with what he went through as part of the Ambrose gang. On Aug. 28, 1991, while talking to friends in a Chicago neighborhood, rival gang members drove by and opened fire. "We all got down behind a car, and I tried to shield my friend," he says. "[The bullet] entered my lungs, ricocheted through my spinal cord and out my back," leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. No longer a gang member, Perez, who recently got off drugs and alcohol, is trying to start over with a clean slate.

For former gang members with their tattoos still visible, new beginnings can be tough. Earlier this year, even though he was paralyzed, Perez was roughed up by once-rival gang members when he removed his shirt at a concert, revealing the Ambrose insignia tattooed on his back. "I'm alone and go everywhere by myself, but I can't go where I want anymore," he says. "It's a part of my life I want over." Besides the danger, tattoos also make it hard to find work.

Operation Fresh Start, which kicked off this past January with assistance from former Chicago Bears football player Roland Harper, 41, helps change that. A onetime gang member in Louisiana (whose worst offense was throwing eggs at houses), Harper volunteered to be the first to have his tattoos erased. Since it began, Operation Fresh Start has removed 440 tattoos from 140 patients. And there is a waiting list of 3,500 men and women, many from Chicago's South Side, an hour-and-a-half away. "We wish we could do more," says Affett, director of the Advanced Surgery and Laser Center at the hospital. "We get a lot of calls and referrals from court that we can't handle." Expenses are part of the problem. The hospital absorbs the $12,850-a-month cost of Operation Fresh Start, including $500 for the laser.

Without it, Operation Fresh Start wouldn't exist. Developed by Continuum Biomedical, Inc., a Livermore, Calif., company that leases the machine below cost to the hospital, the high-powered laser heats tattoo pigments, causing them, to break into tiny particles that are expelled by the body's immune system. The process, a recent breakthrough, leaves a ghost of a scar—an improvement over the alternatives. Rosenberg, a plastic surgeon specializing in postoperative breast reconstruction and skin cancer removal, learned about it by accident. During a 1992 medical conference in Florida, he picked up an envelope that included news on tattoo removal for gang members. "As it turned out, it was for a different Dr. Rosenberg," he says. "But I thought, 'What an interesting idea.' "

Until now, gangs have never been part of Rosenberg's life. Raised on Chicago's North Side by his father, George, a clothing manufacturer, and his mother, Eva, a homemaker, Rosenberg began his practice in suburban Elgin in 1976. He, his wife, Jary, 49, a retired gym teacher, and sons Jordan, 23, and Jeff, 16, live in Deerfield, a suburb as yet untroubled by the gangs that have become common in other parts of the Chicago area.

"Gangs are equal-opportunity recruiters," says Robert T. Anderson, the presiding judge of nearby Du Page County's juvenile court, who has referred at least 30 gang members to Operation Fresh Start. "They cut across all racial and economic lines."

And they almost always leave their mark. Robert Spencer, 16, whose tattoos put him at risk with rival gangs, says, "What pain there is, it's definitely worth it to get rid of this stuff."

DOUG HATT
BONNIE BELL in Elgin