Fear and Decay Move In as Crack Dealers Set Up Shop

From middle-class suburbs to gang-plagued low-income neighborhoods, crack cocaine dealers have commandeered dozens of abandoned residential properties throughout Los Angeles, transforming apartment buildings and single-family houses into centers of drug trafficking.

The squatters often intimidate their neighbors into silence, creating fear and leaving widespread property damage in their wake.

Once entrenched, the squatters are difficult to evict. Even police raids often fail to dislodge them.

In many cases, authorities say, the drug dealing is confined to one or two units in an apartment complex. Soon, however, the quality of life deteriorates for all the building’s tenants, who invariably complain of being accosted by the dealers or being afraid to allow their children to venture outside.

At one 32-unit apartment complex on West Boulevard in Southwest Los Angeles, break-ins, vandalism and open drug use abounded last year after the complex was abandoned by its owner and taken over as headquarters by the West Boulevard Crips.

“Sometimes there would be so many (crack cocaine dealers) standing in front here, you couldn’t get inside,” said Maria Gaytan, a 25-year-old mother of four, nodding toward the narrow walkway in front of her one-bedroom unit.

“And shooting!” she added, rolling her eyes. “That would happen all the time. At night, we would just lay on the floor.”

Gaytan’s sister, who lived in the same complex, felt so unsafe after a break-in that she fled with her own four children to her sister’s already cramped three-room apartment.

The sisters and their eight children lived as virtual prisoners for months, Gaytan said, staying near the apartment during the day to protect it from burglars, staying indoors after dark.

Even after Gibraltar Savings foreclosed on the property last summer--encircling it with a 10-foot iron fence and hiring armed guards to oust the Crips--the drug dealing did not stop, said Gaytan and other tenants.

Such problems, police say, are not confined to poor neighborhoods. They occur in all but the most affluent sections of the city.

“You’re going to see less of it in Westwood, of course” said Sgt. Gene Brummell of the Los Angeles Police Department’s South Bureau. “But it’s just about everywhere.”

In the South Bureau, which encompasses the southern quarter of the city, Brummel said police have identified 40 properties taken over by drug-dealing squatters.

In January, the South Bureau created a special four-man unit to make sure that landlords clean up their properties and evict troublesome tenants. By the time the South Bureau Abatement Unit is assigned a property, police have already spent an average of 600 hours answering calls, making arrests and writing crime reports at that location, Brummel said. That is the equivalent, he added, of one officer working nearly four months on nothing else.

“An undercover officer can spend three months doing surveillance and can make arrests all his life,” said Deputy City Atty. Robert Ferber. “But while he’s making his case on one spot, the dope dealers have taken over three others.”

Dealers and their colleagues tend to operate as close to their original selling spot as possible so customers can easily find them, Ferber said. As a result, he said, if police are successful at closing one spot, another will likely open up nearby.

Crime is not the only problem confronting neighborhoods where the squatters congregate. Property damage can be dramatic.

Last summer, for example, a vacant four-unit building on a quiet, otherwise well-kept street near the USC campus had windows broken, plumbing and even steel security doors stolen after squatters took it over. The structure was firebombed three months ago, but drug dealing has continued inside.

Kerman Maddox, president of a neighborhood improvement group on the same street, said gang graffiti, never a problem there in the past, now are scrawled on sidewalks and buildings.

The activities at the 24-hour “drug supermarket,” neighbors say, are so blatant and intrusive that about 40 residents have signed sworn declarations that police hope to use in a court abatement case against the owner.

“I’ve seen women with their bathrobes on and their hair in curlers walking into that place at 7 o’clock in the morning holding their little children by the hand,” Maddox said. “Women selling their bodies stand out in front and they proposition people as they pass by.”

Residents all over the city have become frustrated by what they see as the ineffectiveness of the police in ridding buildings of the squatters. Some have taken matters into their own hands.

In Hollywood, groups of angry apartment dwellers confronted drug dealers on the street while blowing whistles, banging pots and pans and screaming at them.

In the mid-Wilshire District, residents painted their own graffiti on a squatter-filled, abandoned apartment building, identifying it as a crack house and drawing media attention.

In the San Fernando Valley, residents applauded when police set up street barricades to keep drug users from cruising through neighborhoods looking for crack houses.

While such tactics may bring temporary relief, permanently ridding an area of a nuisance property can take months.

The Los Angeles city attorney’s office and police will cooperate with a landlord who wants to evict problem tenants and make their property less attractive to drug dealers. If a landlord balks at police suggestions, however, they can be sued and ordered to pay substantial fines or have their properties closed down.

Marcia Gonzales, a deputy city attorney in charge of special enforcements, said 18 property owners have been taken to court this year.

On West Boulevard, where the Crips operated, no abatement action has yet been taken.

Residents of the complex say the problems began last year after the owner, identified in land records as John P. Williams, who gave a post office box as his address, simply abandoned the property. Soon after, the apartment manager also disappeared.

Most of the tenants are single women with children who had paid up to $390 monthly for their run-down, one-bedroom units. After the manager disappeared, some families stayed on rent-free, but others moved out and left several apartments unattended.

By the time Gibraltar Savings foreclosed on the property in July, members of the local Crips faction had moved into the vacant units, staked their territorial claim in spray-painted graffiti and assumed control.

The property by then was a full-service drug supermarket where customers came into a debris-filled apartment, bought their drugs from an adjacent unit through a hole punched in the wall and smoked the drug where they sat.

Those living in the complex who were not involved in the narcotics trade found themselves surrounded by it. Anyone who interfered was threatened or ordered to get out.

When Gibraltar sent in crews to clean up the property, gang members frightened them off with death threats. The crews refused to go back until Gibraltar hired a private firm--Coleman Security Service Inc.--to forcibly take back the complex.

As recently as this month, residents said, crack was still being sold freely in the complex, even as yet another owner distributed eviction notices to nearly every tenant, a move he hopes will rid the property of drugs and gang members once and for all.

Michael C. Ruppert, a security specialist for Coleman, said it was not uncommon last summer to find crack pipes and other drug paraphernalia littering the walkways. The crack pads were filled with garbage left behind by addicts who broke windows, tore down doors and stole fixtures to sell.

Ruppert, a former LAPD narcotics officer, said gang members had moved into some of the apartments and sold drugs from one room to another through holes in the walls.

“A couple of the apartments had two-foot holes in the walls and were filled with garbage,” Ruppert said. “You couldn’t get in the back driveway because it was so filled with debris.”

In August, Ruppert began mapping a plan to retake the complex.

After days of watching it from a discreet location, Ruppert identified three or four gang members who seemed to be directing the drug trafficking.

“They had it down so pat they were working in shifts,” he said. “The trafficking was rampant.”

Retaking the building resembled a military operation.

Ruppert first made calls to the LAPD to make sure that a black-and-white patrol car would be there to “fly the flag,” he said. At a prearranged hour, Ruppert, the police cruiser, two armed guards and a crew of workmen arrived.

Ruppert carried a 9-millimeter pistol in his waistband.

“We made it very clear we were serious and had enough clout to back ourselves,” Ruppert recalled. “They (the Crips) were basically taken by surprise.”

With coordinated precision, they swarmed onto the property, the guards standing watch while the workmen began erecting the fence around the perimeter.

Once that was done, cleanup crews moved in. Over several days, they carted away debris, painted over graffiti, installed security bars on apartment windows and cut down shrubbery and trees that dealers and addicts had used to shield their transactions.

The sustained show of force slowed the drug trafficking considerably after about a week, Ruppert contends, but tenants of the complex disagreed.

Gaytan and her neighbor, Sandra Robinson, 29, said the dealers continued their business as usual, particularly at night when, the women said, the guards tended to doze off.

Ruppert conceded that private security firms, working without the benefit of a court order, are limited in what they can do to keep anyone--including drug dealers and their customers--off a client’s property.

In October, when Gibraltar Savings sold the complex to Los Angeles-based Property Management Co., the new owner promptly fired Coleman Security.

George Hemingway, a principal owner of Property Management, said he did so because of its high cost--an estimated $30,000, according to Coleman--and because Hemingway felt it was ineffective.

Ruppert disagreed with Hemingway’s assessment of Coleman’s ineffectiveness, claiming that the complex had been cleaned up and the drug dealing virtually halted.

Since firing the firm, Hemingway has served eviction notices on all of the tenants because, he said, they cannot come up with full back rent. Some of the tenants are fighting the evictions, saying their rent payments were refused by the new manager at the complex.

A 34-year-old tenant who said Hemingway is demanding $1,125 in back rent from her, said she is unable to pay that amount at one time and feels twice victimized.

“I never dealt drugs. There was nobody to pay rent to,” she said. “And now, I don’t have a place to stay.”