Saturday's newspaper brought two explosive headlines -- that four local educators have endorsed a black empowerment handbook that federal authorities say was distributed by a violent gang to recruit new members and that a convicted murderer had worked in a city school.

Police say the Black Guerrilla Family used The Black Book -- Empowering Black Families and Communities -- to spread its message through the prison system. One of the people endorsing the book, Andrey Bundley, twice ran for mayor and now runs alternative education for Baltimore's school system. In the book, Bundley praises a man police say is one of the leaders of the gang; Bundley told Baltimore Sun reporters Justin Fenton and Sara Neufeld that he met Eric Brown during an outreach program and was impressed by his work to help soon-to-be released gang members.

In the second story, Sara tells us about a man who was hired by a nonprofit to help resolve conflicts at an alternative school. The man also is a top lieutenant in the same gang that uses the Black Book, according to authorities, and was one of the organizers of a gang meeting last month in Druid Hill Park that was busted by police days before sweeping indictments against the gang were announced.

Back in 1998, I wrote about Norris Davis, who was a drug dealer in the 1970s, a petty thief in the 1980s and a counselor at what was then Northern High School starting in 1993. He was hired not because the city school system failed to do a background check, but because officials thought his criminal past helped him connect with troubled teens. A new administration, learning of his past, promptly fired him.

Davis asked, "When do you stop paying for your past?"

Trouble is, we never really know when the past is really the past. In the two most recent cases, authorities say these men are part of the present problem, and if they are indeed using materials endorsed by city school officials to recruit gang members, then then need to be stopped.

Baltimore is a small town and if you grow up here you have friends and sometimes relatives who took different paths. I run into cops all the time who know people from their neighborhood who died in drug fights or who are in prison. And it's not just cops, but teachers and prison guards and probably most other jobs as well. It's hard to make a clean break when you return home and are confronted by your neighbor or your uncle. But a clean break is sometimes necessary so we don't mix real education with gang education.