Surviving Where a Gang Rules

Hoping to catch God’s eye, Amparo Lianez dragged her teenage sons into the middle of one of the meaner streets in Los Angeles.

Pray for my boys, she begged a sidewalk gospel band sobbing into a microphone over the sins of Orion Avenue. Ask the Lord to keep Randy and Rudy safe from the gang, that they might grow up to serve him.

It was a touching display of a mother’s devotion. But it wasn’t the whole story. A few weeks later, Amparo bent over her stove, ladling out $5-a-bowl lunches of potato soup for the gang members who sold drugs every day in front of her apartment building.

On Orion Avenue, they have a phrase to explain how the inconceivable can become the inevitable: “Todos tienen su oficio.”

Everyone has his job. So live and let live.

Amparo was a single mother who needed cash. Gang members had it. Just because she didn’t want her sons swept up by the gang life did not mean that an entrepreneur like her--who also sold stray cats to pet shops--should refuse their money. She could cook. They were hungry.

And what of the example she set for her boys? “What are we going to do, act like Charles Bronson and kill everyone?” she snapped.

This block in the center of the San Fernando Valley is a place where the strings on the social contract have come untied. One block east of the San Diego Freeway in North Hills, Orion Avenue is home to squatters in derelict buildings, abandoned cars and, when police are not around, an open-air, all-night crack market. Locked behind heavy iron gates, residents live in fear of the stray bullet and of making the wrong person angry.

It is a place for people with few alternatives. They are new to the country, or their drug habit brought them here, or they lost their grip on their rightful rung of the American ladder and slipped downward, tumbling out of control until they landed on Orion.

Once here, they hastily escape--or they craft a workable peace with the outlaws. One resident, a 65-year-old woman whom the gang members call “mother,” never considered calling the police when they sold drugs in front of her building. That was their job.

“Everybody needs to have money to eat, to pay the bills,” she said.

Todos tienen su oficio.

‘A Lot of . . . Bad Energy’

The Times allowed photographer Carolyn Cole and me to live on Orion Avenue for three months, to focus an outsider’s eye on daily life in a troubled neighborhood. Streets like Orion (pronounced OR-ee-on by everyone we met) can be found across the Valley and the rest of Los Angeles, but journalists usually drive past them, stopping only when someone is killed or some other tragedy strikes.

Our interest in this story grew out of the familiar, mind-numbing images that parade too routinely across the 11 o’clock news: crying mothers, coroner gurneys, and a craggy cop talking about the latest child killed in a drive-by, or walk-up, or run-by, or whatever.

Not to be too melodramatic, but I wondered if this was the same country I grew up in. I could remember when teachers told us about troubles in other latitudes and said how lucky we were to be Americans. Now, people in other places were clicking their tongues about us.

Carolyn, 36, has shot photographs in some of the world’s hot spots and speaks Spanish. She spent two years in Mexico City and was eager to work again in a predominantly Latino community. I am a 49-year-old white male, raised blue-collar in Colton, who returned home to Southern California several years ago to find it changed.

Times staff writer Jose Cardenas, 26, visited frequently and helped conduct interviews in Spanish.

Some might argue that we were naive to think we could understand and accurately portray such a complex milieu. We thought it important to try.

These are some of the things we unpacked with our toothbrushes and dishes when we moved into Apartment 30 at 8960 Orion Ave., a building enclosed by iron gates and barbed wire with a big tree out front where the street’s gang took shelter from the sun.

For $550 a month we got two bedrooms with a threadbare carpet, a thriving cockroach colony and entree into a community that exists within but apart from mainstream America.

We would find life more complicated than the cliches. The gang terrorized our neighborhood, but its guns were less dangerous than its power to corrupt everything it touched.

We found people poor by any standards, living lives of paralyzing deprivation. But we also discovered people managing to construct a fragile community. Most worked hard, raised families and waited patiently for deliverance. If it was slow coming, it was not for a lack of would-be saviors.

Street preachers and gang counselors were frequent visitors. And while we lived on Orion, the police launched a major anti-crime task force. But they had launched task forces before. Nothing worked. Or, rather, everything worked, as long as the police were there in overwhelming numbers. When they pulled back, things always reverted back to the way they had been.

As Psycho, one of the more thoughtful gang members when he wasn’t stoned, said one day in his hideaway atop an abandoned apartment building on the street: “There’s a lot of concentration of bad energy here.”

Our block is one of the most densely populated in Los Angeles. It is a first stop for immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador--but by no means a last stop. More than two-thirds of the students at Langdon Avenue Elementary School around the corner don’t come back a second year.

Like a thousand other apartments in the Valley, the 36 units in our building look down on a narrow pool court, except the pool was filled in years ago with dirt. All concrete and aqua-colored stucco, the building bakes in the heat all day, and our neighbors left their doors open, waiting for the faintest of breezes to drift in. Few had working air conditioners.

When the gangsters would occasionally vanish for a few hours, and if residents were out on the sidewalks, the street looked no more menacing than many others in Los Angeles. But it was an illusion.

The square mile around our block includes two of the busiest LAPD districts and two large and active gangs, Langdon and Columbus Street. Police have recorded 17 gang-related homicides there in the past decade. The Sepulveda Boulevard prostitute stroll is two blocks away.

Los Angeles police blame the Langdon gang--the one whose turf we lived on, named for the street one block east of Orion Avenue--for a minimum of five murders since 1987. While not the most violent gang, that makes Langdon “bad enough to terrorize a community and worse than the average gang,” according to an LAPD expert.

Orion Avenue once belonged to African American drug dealers, but they were pushed out by local boys, most of them Latino. “We grew up and took over,” said the Langdon gang leader we knew as Skrappy.

That job, which entails meting out punishments and overseeing the bank account used to help support the jailed homies, is rotated among an elite group of respected gang members.

The regulars in front of our building included Jimmy, a conservative, quiet man who saved his drug money hoping to open a Mexican bar in St. Louis; Spooky, the lanky, mustachioed leader of the Spanish-speaking gang members, known as “wetback homies,” who taught the new arrivals how things worked in America; Boxer, square-bodied and angry because his imprisoned younger brother was given more respect; Midget, an admitted triggerman who lost the most in the gang wars; and Psycho, the skinny, stoned philosopher who spent his spare time smoking primos--marijuana rolled with crack--in his rooftop hideaway.

At first, the gang avoided us. They moved their base of operations from the tree in front of our building, and an occasional piece of fruit was thrown our way when we trailed them on the street. Eventually they returned for the shade, and some members began to open up and let us observe them.

Despite their reputation for violence, it looked to us as if a gang member’s life is a dull one. A typical day for Jimmy, the frugal gangster, consisted of rising early and walking a block over to Orion, which everybody called “going to O.” He sold drugs until the cops got too thick, then drove to a billiard parlor and played for $5 a game. In the evening, he sometimes went dancing, had a few tequila-and-Sprites and went home.

That was it. Every day, unless it was wartime. “It’s boring just being on the street,” Spanky, 15, said one day. He had just joined Langdon and was surprised to find that the renegade life was mostly one long curbside loaf.

Boring or not, members were required to put in time on the street. It’s called patrolling, and it’s designed to discourage encroachments from other gangs. The Langdon gang kept such regular hours that a lunch truck pulled up each morning to serve them greasy bacon cheeseburgers as if they were any other group of laboring men.

Ten Langdon gang members have died in the past decade, not all at the hands of their enemies. Asked how many they have killed, Sal Saldana, a well-muscled man who helped form the gang, said proudly, “More than we got dead.”

Altogether, Langdon claims 200 members. The gang has so many cliques--Tiny Locos, Locos, Schoolyard Locos, Chicos, Pee Wees--that even Skrappy has trouble keeping tabs on them all. Yes, they commit crimes, they admit. But they also protect the neighborhood. From other Spookys, Midgets and Psychos.

“Them four blocks are our kingdom,” said Midget--whose real name is Ricky Trejo--referring to the heart of the gang’s territory surrounding Orion Avenue. “We ain’t giving up that street.”

All Night Crack Bazaar

What they are protecting is prime turf in the crack trade. Drug sales around Orion are “nearly out of control,” said Deputy Chief Martin Pomeroy, the Los Angeles Police Department’s commander for the Valley.

The action outside our building went on all day and all night. The first week we went out in the street at 3 a.m. and watched how it happens.

A half-dozen Langdon gang members took turns flagging down drivers who turned onto Orion from Nordhoff or Rayen streets, looking to buy drugs. When a car slowed, the dealer would lean in the window and make a quick exchange--$10 for a single nugget of crack.

Most transactions were routine. But being a customer was chancy. When a man in a worn Volkswagen tried to talk the gang into giving him drugs for free, they pried off his aerial and were about ready to take his car when he sputtered off, smoke curling from his tailpipe.

We watched the business unfold until a small man walked up and ordered us to leave. Who says? we asked. He pointed in the direction of shadowy figures down the street. We found out later that this was where some of the leaders stationed themselves to keep tabs on sales.

After the warning, we called it a night and retired to the apartment.

All kinds of people bought drugs on Orion. Many rumbled up in dented old Toyotas, but there were also single women in Cadillacs.

Crack came into the gang’s hands from many sources, in tennis ball-size lumps and small, square chunks called “sixteenths.” The drug was sliced into small pebbles for sale, sometimes on the sidewalk in front of us and others.

“I don’t like kids seeing this stuff,” Psycho said one evening, breaking up a lump on the hood of a car as neighborhood children watched. He wrapped each pebble in cellophane and burned the ends off with a match.

The profit from each sixteenth is about $100, and a hard-working dealer, which Psycho is not because he smokes up too much of his profits, can make $700 a day.

When out on the street dealing, the dealers hid the packets in their mouths, ready to swallow if the police came. Jimmy said he gulped 30 pieces once, $300 worth. Because he never taught himself to throw up, it was a complete loss.

And surprisingly, not every dealer on Orion is a Langdon member. The gang makes a nice side income renting space to outsiders for $90 a week. Some are recent immigrants who cannot find work, while one young man who worked in the local taqueria picked up a little extra cash dealing. Some of our neighbors looked down on him, but others understood.

Todos tienen su oficio.

Malena Makes Her Peace

Magdalena “Malena” Rivas, our apartment manager, had reluctantly made her own accommodation with the Langdon gang.

When she arrived on Orion three years earlier, Malena, a businesslike woman with dark eyes accentuated by thick black mascara, called the police to report the drug deals she witnessed through her bedroom window. She even knew where they hid the dope.

Most of the time, she said, the police didn’t come. Sometimes they came but betrayed her identity to the gang, putting her in danger.

One of the owners, Charles Gray, a former Las Vegas dancer who bought the building in 1993, set aside an apartment overlooking the street for a police undercover operation. Pretending to be painters, the undercover cops drove up in a nearly new truck, carrying a ladder that didn’t have a speck of paint on it. The gang wasn’t fooled.

“I decide, why should I call them?” Malena said. “Now, [the gang members are] not my friends, but they’re not my enemies.”

This was when Malena gave in to the wisdom of todos tienen su oficio. When the police come, they might help, or they might hurt. But one thing was certain: They would eventually leave.

Now, even Malena did business with the gang. Spotting a fetching pair of pumps at Malena’s Sunday morning yard sale, a female gang associate raced into the street and sold crack until she had enough money. Another time, Malena offered to buy a vacuum cleaner that the gang had taken in trade for drugs.

This, not the rare, random killings, was the kind of slow corruption that eats away at a neighborhood. Malena began as a crime-fighter but made her peace with the outlaws.

Yet, like everyone else, she was never sure where she stood. People who thought they were on good terms with the gang would come out one morning to find their car windows broken out. Or they were beaten up and never found out why.

One day, Malena heard that the gang was planning to kill three apartment managers on the street, a threat that was never carried out. She hurried to ask if she was on the list, just as an ancient Greek might hurry to the Oracle at Delphi to learn one’s fate.

No, the gang reassured her. Far from it. When Malena was threatened by a drifter, the gang chased him through our building and pummeled him out back.

The gang’s role as enforcer on the street was reassuring to some. Kathleen “Kat” Khalil, 27, who lived across the street, said she moved to Orion to save money, not knowing its reputation. Yet she said she felt safe knowing that random crooks were not going to come in here to commit crimes.

Richard the Historian

Our neighborhood also had several vacant, crumbling apartment buildings that were damaged during the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Of the 17 so-called “ghost towns” created by the quake, the Orion neighborhood has yet to be fully restored.

Picking through one vacated building on our block that was used by prostitutes and drug addicts, we stumbled upon Richard Sanchez. If this building was a museum preserving a partial record of one neighborhood’s collapse, he is its tour guide.

A soft-spoken man of 30 whose good looks had not yet been ruined by drug use, he pointed lethargically to the second-floor apartment over the pool where his family once lived. Kids used to jump off the second-floor landing above him into the pool, which now contained a foot of a dark viscous liquid that stunk up the weedy courtyard.

You could still see his initials and those of a long-departed girlfriend carved into a palm tree out front.

Things on Orion started getting bad in about ‘83, he guessed. “The drug dealing started in this building,” he said.

The street used to be all college kids from Cal State Northridge. Then, the first crack dealers moved in and the college kids moved out. He remembered the turf wars between the black and Latino dealers for control of the neighborhood.

He was among the earliest Latino dealers on the street. “I was one of the first around here to drive a Corvette,” he said.

Now, he was an ex-con with a crack habit. He lived with his mother when he wasn’t on a binge. Stoned, he haunts the boarded-up apartments in his old building, peering through the cracks in the plywood at the young men slinging dope in the street.

His mother moved after the earthquake, but Richard can’t stay away. “My heart is right here,” he said. It’s a terrible place for a heart to be, but Richard is devoted.

“There’s so many stories on this Orion,” he said expansively, as if he knew them all and was the only one who could tell them.

He likes to think he has some reputation left in the neighborhood. He’s wrong. The gang members in the street regard him with the universal disdain dealers have for junkies.

At times, that truth breaks through to Richard Sanchez and he can see with unusual clarity what the world of Orion Avenue and the orbiting world of his life have come to. At those times, he can hardly bear it. “This is hell,” he said one day, then disappeared on another binge.

Pastor Jim on Orion

Around the corner on Rayen Street is the United Methodist Church of Sepulveda. Jim Hamilton, the disheveled, impassioned pastor, frets over the people of Orion Avenue and the failure of his church to reach them.

Once, when the now-shuttered General Motors’ Van Nuys plant was gearing up to build Camaros and the Valley was exploding with growth, the church had 1,200 members and five choirs.

Today, the average age of the congregation is above 70 and membership has fallen to 170. When Jim does the children’s moment before the sermon, he must ask, “Any children here this morning?”

A tall, black iron fence divides the neighborhood and the church.

The pastor, who ran an AIDS ministry in his former church and has done marriage counseling with Satanists--successfully, he says--would like to bring the fence down. But the gray-haired congregation won’t consider it.

They recall when bullets flew through the walls of the sanctuary and prostitutes serviced clients outside the pastor’s office.

Jim visited our apartment from time to time, and always worried that he was not reaching out more to the community. Most of our neighbors were Catholics who, if they went to church at all, attended Our Lady of Peace a couple of blocks away on Nordhoff, in front of which one of the Langdon gang, Chato, had been killed.

But Pastor Jim did not excuse himself because the people here were from a different religious tradition. He hired a coordinator to work with the poor families in our neighborhood. The church also fed breakfast to the neighborhood’s sizable colony of homeless roamers on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

As he sat on our couch one evening, the pastor fussed that he should do even more.

“I feel a little guilty because I live out of the neighborhood,” he said. “I’m on the outside still. I have this feeling like I need to live here awhile.”

When I took him at his word and suggested that he move onto Orion, he finally admitted the real reason he couldn’t forsake his Northridge apartment.

“I think I’d get overwhelmed by” the neighborhood, he said. Not by the danger, but by the needs of the people. Surrounded by all the problems on Orion, he feared he would drown.

I didn’t doubt it for a moment. This was a man so attuned to the pain of others that he did not even reflexively react when a transient punched him in the face for no reason.

During one Sunday morning service, his tie loose and his silver hair uncombed, the pastor began a fervent prayer that perfectly described his church’s anxiety in coming to grips with its new neighbors.

“This is our church,” he prayed, “the one with the big, tall fence. It’s kind of hard for us white people to reach out sometimes. Lord, we’re just folks. We’re not used to this neighborhood yet. In 10 to 20 years we’ll get there. Be with us.”

But Jim Hamilton was not the sort to wait 20 years. He began playing basketball at the school with the gang each afternoon. He bought burritos for the drug dealers and, in his passion to reach them, had taken to warning the gang when a police raid was coming.

“They’re neighbors,” he explained. “We all live here together.”

Todos tienen su oficio.

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

Next: The World Inside the Bars.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

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.

* Today: 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.

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

This series will be available in full on The Times’ Web site beginning Wednesday at http://stats.nohib.com./orion