Legal aid lawyer Louis Rafti was leading a group of law students on a tour of skid row when he saw it in the corner of a homeless shelter.
The cot. The very one, he could swear it was, that he had slept on during his last night on the row a few years before.
Rafti froze. He didn't say a word, but a sense of wonder overwhelmed him.
Wonder that he did not have a crack pipe in his hand. Or a needle in his arm. That he had a home, a job, a life.
These days, Rafti is a pugnacious housing rights lawyer for the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, known for his take-no-prisoners advocacy on behalf of the poor and disabled.
What many of his clients and colleagues don't know is that until six years ago, Rafti was a homeless cocaine addict. He contracted HIV from dirty needles. He watched friends die. He would get cleaned up, only to relapse and return to the streets.
Now, at age 49, dressed in sensible shoes and a dark polo shirt, he is back on the streets of skid row -- this time as a lawyer for the kind of person he once was.
He's as single-minded about helping the down-and-out as he once was about doing drugs with them.
"I am somewhat obsessive-compulsive," he said. "It's a drug addict thing."
This means that he has at times taken on so many cases that colleagues worried he was overextended. But it also means that Los Angeles' poor have found a passionate new advocate.
Tai Glenn, Legal Aid's director of housing, said she had no idea of the details of Rafti's past until she was told of them by a Times reporter. But she said she had noticed his "special insight into our client community."
"He's the bravest new lawyer I've ever met," said Glenn, who recently hired Rafti away from another public interest job. "He is Mr. Take Action."
A slippery slope
Rafti grew up in the San Fernando Valley, just another suburban kid who "liked to party."
"About the time I became too old for comic books I discovered drugs and alcohol," he wrote in an essay arguing for admission to the State Bar of California despite his guilty plea in a misdemeanor drug case in 1998. Drugs "provided me with an alternative to the coping skills that I sorely lacked."
After high school, Rafti attended UCLA. He thought of going to law school, but got drunk the night before the Law School Admission Test and was sick during the exam. Considering that door closed, he found work in finance -- first as a trader's assistant, then selling securities.
