City Fights to Reclaim Apartment Complex From Drug Dealers

For more than a decade, the apartment complex across from Mary McLeod Bethune Junior High School in South-Central Los Angeles has been a center of gang activity, the site of at least two murders and, as neighbors advise, a good place to avoid whenever possible.

Police have cracked down periodically on drug dealing and other criminal activity at the apartment complex, and the neighborhood of old trees and small, pastel-colored homes is quieter for a while, particularly at night.

Eventually, though, neighbors say, denizens of the apartment complex revive their activities.

The source of the trouble, residents say, is the East Coast Crips, a gang so firmly entrenched that, as one woman said, the only solution is to tear down the two-story apartment buildings.

“I don’t even walk by there. When I have to go by, I drive by there,” she said, adding that she did not want to be quoted by name. “I don’t want any retaliation from those people--they’re crazy.”

As the neighborhood residents were recounting the history of the apartment complex, the street in front of Bethune--where 1,600 seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders attend classes and the chief claim to fame is the Cincinnati Reds’ star outfielder Eric Davis, who was a student there in the late 1970s--was filling with television camera vans.

Uniformed police officers surveyed the neighborhood from the school’s second-floor windows. Police cruisers rolled slowly up and down the quiet street.

None of the police activity was directed at Bethune. The security was on hand for four law enforcement and elected officials holding a news conference Tuesday on a patch of lawn between the school and the street.

One after another, U.S. Atty. Robert Bonner, Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, Supervisor Mike Antonovich and Deputy Los Angeles Police Chief Robert Vernon stepped before the microphones.

Each extolled the virtues of the 1986 federal “schoolyard drug law,” which can impose severe penalties on anyone arrested and convicted of selling drugs within 1,000 feet of a school--whether the buyer is a schoolchild or an adult.

The officials had gathered to announce that Carl Robinson, 30, had been indicted for selling police a single, PCP-laced cigarette and some liquid PCP. For this crime and because he already was on probation, officials said Robinson faced a minimum of 10 years in federal prison, if convicted, and a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

Robinson had been caught at the apartment complex across from Bethune and thus became the third “schoolyard drug law” case to be prosecuted in Los Angeles County.

His case merited a full-blown news conference, officials said, because Robinson was the first person arrested under a joint federal-local program in which the county provided $80,000 and a deputy district attorney to prosecute schoolyard drug cases. The federal government authorizes the deputy district attorney to handle the case in federal court.

Although the law has been in effect for 17 months and only three cases, including Robinson’s, have been brought to court, each event has warranted a news conference, in which officials have praised the law and each other.

Bonner, Reiner and other officials held a news conference in December to announce that they had formed the county-financed federal-local “schoolyard drug law” enforcement program. And Bonner and Vernon held a news conference last May when the first schoolyard drug arrests were made with the cooperation of federal officials and the LAPD.

“These are the first charges brought in an effort by the U.S. attorney’s office, the district attorney’s office and the Los Angeles Police Department to begin to recapture our neighborhoods and especially to put a stop to drug dealers who are peddling their poison at or near the schools of our city,” Bonner said.

Under the law, a suspect caught selling drugs too close to a school must stay in federal prison without bail until standing trial. No longer will drug dealers be back on the streets within hours or days of their arrests.

The first schoolyard drug case already has cleared the court system. The suspect, Michael Jon Enders Jr., 19, of Northridge, pleaded guilty and faced a 60-year prison sentence and $3-million fine. After a change of attorneys and several months of delay, he received a year in prison.

According to Reiner, the arrest of Robinson alone was a major boost to the residents of the homes around the apartment complex. “Before this arrest took place, it was almost impossible to live in this community,” Reiner said. “It’s been almost a 180-degree turnaround since the arrest.”

But an LAPD officer who patrols the area said the apartment complex still is a “breeding ground” for criminal activity.

And, said a woman who lives across the street from the school, “I haven’t noticed any difference at all.”