Mistrust Stymies Efforts to Battle Blight

It was the kind of story that sends news crews sprinting for the camera trucks and social watchdogs lunging for the nearest podium. Gang members peddling crack cocaine on the street were giving samples to students at the local elementary school.

Undercover police swarmed the neighborhood. The Methodist minister began standing on the corner every day after school to interfere with the drug deals. The Rev. Jim Hamilton didn’t retreat, even after a threatening message was left on the church answering machine and one of the gang shouted, “Get out of here--business is down three straight days.”

Police finally made some arrests, and the gang abandoned one of its favorite drug-dealing locations. Thank-you calls flooded the church.

What made this incident unusual was not the gravity of the crime. What was surprising was how easily the gang was routed, at least temporarily, in the face of a united, outraged community. Even more surprising was how rarely that happened in the neighborhood around Orion Avenue.

During the three months a Times reporter and photographer lived on Orion, we found enough goodwill and civic heroism to turn around several blighted neighborhoods. If Hamilton wasn’t playing basketball with gang members, street preacher Daniel Quintanilla was counseling them. Free breakfast was served at the church. Toys were given away at Christmas.

But because these were human beings, and because everyone had a different vision of how to save Orion, the goodwill was often coupled with doubt about everyone else’s motives.

The churchmen were suspicious of the police. One neighborhood coalition accused the other of being outsiders. White homeowners wanted the police to crack down, while Latino activists said the whites just wanted to keep brown-skinned teens away.

Then there was the day neighborhood graffiti warrior Eli Quinonez was threatened with arrest for erasing graffiti without a permit. With everyone fighting each other, sometimes it seemed there was no one left to fight the criminals.

Cleaning Up the Neighborhood

Harry Coleman is the kind of brash, rugged individualist that America has always bred in quantity. A successful medical equipment salesman, he retired at 34 and devoted his life to travel and good drink. He made the Guinness Book of World Records for driving his Volkswagen van around the world.

Now snow-topped and trimly tan at 58, he was in the thick of the battle to save Orion Avenue. He chaired the North Hills Community Coordinating Council, an association of homeowners and business people that met to find solutions to the crime and blight that have afflicted the neighborhood for more than a decade.

His obstacles were not just the gang members who threw bottles and fired warning shots at his van. He also faced the hostility of a competing group of community activists who wanted to clean things up too, just not his way.

“They wouldn’t be caught dead in the middle of the night here,” sniffed Paula Rangel, a member of the North Hills Residents Assn., a grass-roots group that insisted the solutions must come from the people in North Hills, not outsiders.

She liked to point out that Harry didn’t even live in North Hills, something he freely admitted. He got involved, he said, to prevent crime from spreading to his neighborhood in Northridge.

In fact, Harry and Paula shared more than they imagined. Both were proud, outspoken, intense people who never backed away from a confrontation. Paula managed a building in the heart of gang territory and routinely went face to face with lawbreakers.

A large woman with close-cropped hair and an urgent way of talking that threatened to squeeze the vowels out of her words, Paula helped organize a mothers’ march against violence in the neighborhood. Now, she had even bigger plans.

“We eventually want the North Hills Coordinating Council to die,” she said bluntly.

“You think I’m having a good time over there?” Harry responded to charges that he was an interloper. “If somebody doesn’t like it, tell them Harry said to shove it.”

The Great Tamale Raid, as it became known, was an example of good intentions gone awry.

Responding to community complaints about the unsanitary conditions under which the food was prepared, city officials, with police escort, confiscated dozens of food carts from unlicensed vendors who served Orion Avenue.

An angry crowd gathered. “They want them to sell drugs I guess,” the Rev. Hamilton fumed. He had been alerted to the police action and rushed to the scene.

He fired off a letter of complaint to the Los Angeles Police Department and accused the police in the church newsletter of busting down doors and laughing at the vendors’ “fear and helplessness. . . . Why does the LAPD do this when a block away is the ‘drug capital of the San Fernando Valley’ where millions of dollars change hands weekly?”

We saw no doors busted down or laughing police. But the pain in the vendors’ faces was real, and that was enough for the pastor, a former Vietnam War protester who was arrested in a peace march in Washington. Though his hair was gray and his waistline a little larger, his zeal for the plight of the poor was undiminished by the passage of years.

Ken Cioffi, the cop assigned to the Orion neighborhood, said he was “very hurt” by the pastor’s complaint. “It bothers me that people accuse you to stir the pot, to put the community against the Police Department.”

Such conflict was all too common, said the previous neighborhood cop, who tired of the infighting on Orion. “Too many agencies were involved in trying to clean things up,” said Officer Henry Acosta. “They all want to be in charge.”

The fallout for the vendors was even more serious. Vicente Gonzales, 27, said it cost him $150 to make another cart, $250 in lost earnings for the three days he was out of business, plus money to restock the cart. It didn’t sound like much, but it was devastating to his family. He sent his wife and two children back to Mexico and moved to a smaller apartment and started over.

‘Why Don’t More People Get Involved?’

The vendor bust was a fresh example of the ongoing debate and friction over the role of the police in the neighborhood. Should they be reaching out more, or making more arrests, or both? To some cops, both questions were beside the point. No matter what they did, nothing changed.

In 1996, more than 2,400 drug arrests were made in the surrounding area, yet the Langdon gang was still in business. In fact, gang members said business was booming.

Narcotics enforcement on Orion was a frustrating job. The gang hid their drugs in mailboxes, in fence posts, inside the hoods of parked cars. They only kept a few pieces of rock cocaine on them, usually in their mouths, so they could swallow them whenever the police came up.

One narcotics officer said he didn’t bother going after the dealers on Orion. “We stay off that street because they run so much,” he said. “It’s not worth it.”

Police declining to go after dealers because they were hard to catch? Such comments only increased suspicions that some officers didn’t care what happened on Orion.

But even concerned cops found the going rugged when they searched for consensus. A trim, outgoing cop who tended to stand at military parade rest when listening, Officer Cioffi had the job of enlisting the help of the community to drive off the criminals.

“Why don’t more people get involved?” he said in exasperation one day, driving down the littered street. “If 99% of the good people band together, you could take care of them [the gang] in one night.”

Thirteen people gathered in the dimly lit recreation room of a small apartment building one evening to hear the beat cop’s standard pep talk. Huddled together in the shadowed room, a police helicopter rumbling overhead, they seemed few and overmatched. One man asked why it took hours for police to respond.

“We have to prioritize calls,” Officer Cioffi said. “Three males selling narcotics is not a high-priority call. It might take three hours until we can get a unit clear.”

In Chatsworth or Brentwood, that comment would hit with the force of a grenade. But these people took the news without a murmur of protest.

Every month, the officer mailed out 700 newsletters to concerned citizens in the neighborhood. The previous month, 150 were returned undelivered. All in all, it was easier to move out than stay and fight.

One who did fight was Eli Quinonez, 30, a heavyset Mexican immigrant who worked three jobs and on Saturday mornings went out and painted over graffiti. He wore a yellow hard hat and a long apron and kept his decade-old sedan’s motor running so he could escape if the gang came after him. Sometimes his son and several of his friends helped out. Afterward, they all went out for chili cheeseburgers at the local Tommy’s.

Eli was one of Officer Cioffi’s neighborhood heroes. If there were only more like him. Eli and his wife, Mary, loved America right back. They especially admired a country that didn’t let children starve.

There were times, however, when they found it hard to comprehend the ways of their adopted homeland. Such as the occasion when Eli was threatened with arrest by officers who cruised up as he was erasing graffiti without a permit. After questioning him, they let him go.

Eli shook his head. America was a strange place.

Trying a New Strategy

Late in 1996, the debate over the Orion neighborhood crystallized into a resolve that something more had to be done. “This area is 10 times worse than Blythe Street,” said a city Housing Department official, referring to what was at one time the worst street in the San Fernando Valley.

But what could be done that had not already been tried? This small area of North Hills had for years siphoned resources from the LAPD’s Devonshire Division. They had tried barricades, undercover operations and saturating the streets with cops. In July, a small army of officers swept the streets clean over a five-day period, arresting 279 drug dealers, gangsters, prostitutes, armed robbers and one gang member from South Los Angeles cradling an AK-47. He came, he said, to “take back” territory lost to the Latino dealers. As soon as the extra cops pulled out, the criminals returned.

“I have frustration, not just as a police officer but as a citizen, that we as a society have allowed places like this to exist,” said Deputy Chief Martin Pomeroy, the ranking LAPD official in the Valley. “We have a duty because we know narcotics is almost out of control in that area.”

“We’re sending troops to Bosnia,” said Phil Genino, a vice principal at Langdon Avenue Elementary School. “We should be sending them in here.”

Even Paula Rangel, the neighborhood activist, had lost her confidence in the ability of this community to turn itself around.

Earlier, she and her husband and son were attacked and beaten by gang members in her own building. Then, someone scrawled 187--the criminal code for homicide--on Paula’s door.

She hired a security guard, but the company said the situation was so dangerous that if she didn’t authorize two more guards, they were pulling out.

“I’ve wanted to give up in the last few weeks,” she said. “Part of me says this is not going to change.

“I live in a great country called America. Why can’t we live in peace?”

As in countless other “bad neighborhoods” around Los Angeles and elsewhere, the problems were so deeply rooted that they defeated any one person’s vision.

In November, the police tried a new approach. They brought in a task force of officers from several Valley divisions, not just for a week or a month, but for six months. The idea was to hit the criminals day after day, essentially carpet-bombing them into submission.

By this month, Harry Coleman said the streets were quieter than they’d been in years.

“Just looking at that street, I would tell you it’s 90% better,” he said. “There’s still hope for that community.”

Police statistics at least partly back him up. LAPD Det. Susan Plummer said gang crime was down a third in the task force area around Orion. “Things have definitely improved,” said Deputy Chief Pomeroy, who agreed to extend the task force.

Still, he said, it “would be an overstatement to say we have the dealers on the run. We have their attention.”

Going Back One More Time

I went back to see for myself how things had changed in the five months since we moved out. Driving around the neighborhood at night, I saw cops everywhere, cruising and stopping to question people. The Rev. Hamilton at the church welcomed the attack on the drug dealers but said he feared the effort had gone “into overkill. It seems like everybody’s being arrested.”

When I drove down Orion, a 15-year-old gang member we knew as Termite tried to flag me down for the likely purpose of making a sale.

“They’ll never clean it up,” said Magdalena “Malena” Rivas, manager of the building we had lived in, when I stopped in to see her.

The police had made an impact, but she said the gang still hung out in front of her building, intimidating residents. There were new faces now. She said that some gang members had fled to Mexico to avoid prosecution on a rape charge.

Earlier this month there was a gunfight in the abandoned apartment building on our block. A security guard exchanged shots with an unidentified attacker.

That building had been a lawless place when we lived on Orion, so it was inevitable that the gang members and prostitutes and drug dealers would not give it up without a fight. Also, there were rumors a bomb would be set off to show displeasure over the police crackdown.

Malena had more to worry about than the problems in the street. The apartment building we lived in for three months was in receivership over some kind of business dispute. The new man in charge had kept her on, but she didn’t know what the future held.

She needed this job, even though all she received in pay was two free apartments. It seemed a pitiful salary for what she put up with.

There were more changes inside the bars than outside. Amparo Lianez and her two sons, who prayed with a group of street evangelists the day we moved in, were gone. There had been a dispute, and the police were called, Malena said.

She had 12 vacancies now, far more than when we lived there. As I walked around the building, it felt empty. The noise and tumult of the children and the music that I remembered were gone.

Around the corner, I spotted a gang member called Midget. I remembered that he planned to be gone by now. He was saving his drug money to leave for Las Vegas, where he thought life might be better. Yet here he was, slouching along in the twilight toward some destination that only he could guess at, if even he knew.

The family of Psycho, another gang member, relayed word that he had been killed. The report was he’d been hit by a bus. Psycho also had had plans--to go to college, get a job, leave the streets behind.

Sitting in the shed where he smoked marijuana laced with crack, he once said he only regarded Orion as a brief sojourn, a kind of cram course in human behavior. In a few years, after he’d learned all he could and smoked all the drugs he wanted, he planned to join the straight life.

“Because I do this it doesn’t mean my life is over,” he said.

All of this made me realize this wasn’t my neighborhood anymore, if it ever was. I had one question in mind when I moved in: Can people live in neighborhoods like this without being dehumanized?

The answer was yes.

Some of the most genuine people I ever met were on this street. Even the ones who seemed misguided were so honestly and painfully engaged in trying to do what they felt was the right thing that I felt almost ashamed to be merely an observer.

So what’s the answer? I confess that is still beyond me.

Times staff photographer Carolyn Cole and staff writer Jose Cardenas contributed to this story.

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Living on Orion Avenue

Staff writer John Johnson and Times photographer Carolyn Cole lived for three months in an apartment at 8960 Orion Ave. in North Hills--a street in the San Fernando Valley where the local gang openly sold crack cocaine, intimidated residents and assaulted outsiders. The objective was to learn how people survive--and sometimes thrive--in one of the city’s poorest and toughest neighborhoods. Before they left Orion last fall, The Times’ team also found a strong sense of community, created by families struggling to achieve the American dream.

* Sunday: Orion Avenue, where borders of crime, culture and necessity define a separate existence.

* Monday: For many, life on Orion Avenue means existence behind iron bars.

* Tuesday: Even for some gang members, getting out is hard to do.

* Today: The problems on Orion Avenue are obvious, but the solutions elusive.

This series will be available on The Times’ Web site beginning today at http://shop.nohib.com./orion