October 22, 2013 · 6:18 pm

Mexico’s gypsies, traveling movies & the blond-haired Roma girl

Europe is abuzz with the discovery of a blond-haired, blue-eyed girl named Maria, found among Roma gypsies in Greece and presumed to have been abducted. At least those with custody of her are not her biological parents.

So far, however, her DNA has not matched with any missing girl in Europe.

I’ve watched this with interest.

I had an encounter with the Roma several years ago in an isolated village in Mexico. Roma came to Mexico in the 1920s and there are about 16,000 of them, though they’re all but invisible.

“Gypsies have been ‘de-historified’; they do not appear in the history of Mexico,” David Lagunas, of the National School of Anthropology and History, told Inter Press Service. “We know very little about them.”

I had no idea they existed. But they remain a fairly coherent group, still speaking Roma and wandering through the country — the ones I met did anyway.

This was several years ago — 2002 I believe. I was a freelancer in Mexico. The O.C. Register called and asked if I’d go to a village in Puebla where a boy was to be buried. He had been shot to death by Huntington Beach Police and the family was sending his body back. That was a whole other story.

But while I was in the village, waiting for his burial the next day, I heard a loudspeaker announcing something I couldn’t understand. A few minutes later, I saw a ramshackle truck, filled with chairs and tables and barely hanging together.

Then it stopped and ten or twelve people piled out. They were the Brandy family — three generations of Roma gypsies.  I went over to talk to them, wondering who on earth they could be and what they were doing in town.

They spoke Spanish and Roma. Turned out, they spent their lives touring the most isolated villages, showing movies and charging 15 or 20 pesos. Many Roma people did that much of the year in Mexico, they said.

For some villages, impromptu Roma theater was welcome entertainment, though the Brandys allowed that with cable TV, VCRs and DVDs the numbers of these villages was dwindling.

I watched as the Brandys cordoned off a lot with high sheets so no one could see in. Inside, they set up a projector, put out chairs and benches they had in their truck, and as night fell, they charged admission and put on the worst monster movie I’d ever seen.

I hate all monster movies, but this was the worst. It featured, I remember, building-sized snakes. I remember a desultory crowd of 15 or so enduring this flick.

I didn’t stick around long.

I wanted desperately to go off with them the next day, but the Register needed a story and so I remained. The Brandys didn’t have telephones or maybe they told me that so I wouldn’t tag along.

Either way, I never forgot them.

Photo: Maria (IBTimes)

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October 21, 2013 · 11:15 pm

The last Arellano-Felix, dead by clown, stole a queen once

Francisco Rafael Arellano-Felix, of the notorious family that ran (terrorized) the Tijuana drug plaza for about a decade, was shot to death the other day in Los Cabos by a man dressed as clown.

Never met the guy, but I once wrote about him.

Francisco Javier actually stole the queen of Mazatlan’s carnival once, and forced her into matrimony — this in 1990.

Her name was Rocio del Carmen Lizarraga. This was before his family was a household name in Mexico, but was well known for the wrong reasons in its native Mazatlan.

In 1990, Francisco Arellano Felix was owner of Frankie Oh’s – a crass discoteque built with a Flintstones prehistoric decor of large stucco boulders along Mazatlan’s beachfront drive. He was known to be anxious to enter the city’s high society. He was a friend of the great Mexican middle-weight, Julio Cesar Chavez.

That February, Rocio del Carmen Lizarraga was selected Queen of Carnival, one of the most high-profile positions in Mazatlan. She was 17, a fresh-faced high school student from a middle-class family.

A few months later, a small article appeared in the newspaper reporting that Rocio del Carmen had disappeared. Not only that, but that possibly she had been stolen by Francisco Arellano Felix. The newspaper said that her family was distraught, feared for her safety and hired private detectives to search for her.

Mazatlan spun with rumors. But though the reigning Queen of Carnival had apparently been stolen by a member of one of the state’s most notorious drug-running families, newspapers published only occasional short stories below the fold.

There were reports the couple was in Guadalajara, that they had married in a church. (Turned out that the bishop in the area refused to marry them, and they had to resort to a minor priest to perform the service.)

Finally, Rocio del Carmen’s mother, Oliva Lizarraga, told reporters she had spoken with Arellano Felix, who had not let her speak with her daughter, since “she was showering.”

The mother said her daughter, and her now-jilted fiancee, Oscar Coppel, from one of Mazatlan’s wealthiest families, were “victims of destiny” and that “God was the only one who can put things  in their place.”

It was all very surreal.

Finally, the episode concluded when Rocio del Carmen took out a large newspaper ad with a short letter that is both thoroughly bizarre and a beautiful exposition of Mexican fatalism.

She was in Mazatlan, she wrote. She thanked people for their support, but added, “I don’t want to be asked by anyone because it would be embarrassing to have to say whether I left of my own will or was taken by force.

“I don’t want to judge the father of my children and he who gave me his last name, since he’s never mistreated me. I accept with resignation the path that destiny has prepared for me, and if God has put me on this road, I have to continue.”

She signed the ad, “Your friend, Rocio del Carmen Lizarraga de Arellano.”

And with that the episode ended, as quietly as it began.

About the worst that came down were pronouncements from Mazatlan’s high society. Arellano Felix “will never be accepted by the Mazatlan society that he wanted to enter,” Ernesto Coppel, owner of one of the city’s largest hotels, father of a Senorita Sinaloa and uncle of Rocio del Carmen’s ex-fiancee, said at the time.

Today, the AF cartel is nothing like what it once was. One other AF brother, the feared Ramon, was killed in 2002.  Three others are in US prisons. And so the death of this Arellano Felix is more about history than anything else.

Indeed, the story of how he took a wife was just one in a rich history between Mazatlan’s Queen of Carnaval and narcos from Sinaloa, the birthplace of Mexican drug running.

Btw, later this video circulated on Youtube of the shooting, with the clown briefly visible dressed in blue.

Photos: Francisco Rafael Arellano Felix, Arellano Felix family; wanted poster for Arellano Felix brothers (Benjamin, now imprisoned, and Ramon, deceased) and key members of their organization.

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October 16, 2013 · 7:21 pm

Compton Latino gang members and race

IMG_9401Two Latino gang members from Compton pleaded guilty (Thursday, Oct. 16, 2013) to federal hate crimes in attacks on black youths in a case that showed how much the town had changed.

Jeffrey Aguilar and Efren Marquez, Jr., admitted to violating the federal Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

They each face a maximum of 10 years in prison, said Reema El-Amamy, the federal prosecutor in the case.

Aguilar and Marquez are reputed members of Compton Varrio 155, a small street gang that has feuded for years with a black street gang a couple blocks north. They were arrested in January. Sheriff’s officials said at the time that the family they allegedly targeted had no gang association and had only lived on the street for a few months.

I went out to the neighborhood one rainy day after these arrests were announced. The street is working class, with stucco two-bedrooms crowded next to each other.

What struck me was that the gang seemed especially energetic. Their graffiti was everywhere. This is something you don’t see so much in Southern California any more. Most gangs don’t have the same public presence — largely because of federal indictments and gang injunctions. Graffiti, certainly, is far less common.

The case seemed to me emblematic of many that have taken place over the years and have gone largely unnoticed. They involve Latino street gangs targeting blacks who live in their area.IMG_9395

Beginning in about the mid-1990s, Latino gangs emerged as the leading perpetrators of hate crimes, especially violent hate crimes. This happened all over: San Bernardino, Pacoima, Azusa, Canoga Park, Highland Park, Harbor Gateway, Hawaiian Gardens, Pomona, and so on.

Compton, long a black enclave that gave birth to gangsta rap, has transformed into a majority Latino city in the last 15 years. Nothing showed that more than this case, unless it’s the school fields on Sundays that are filled with people playing soccer.

ADDENDUM: By the way, if you go back further — into the 1980s — you find that black gangs preyed mightily on Mexican immigrant kids in much the same way. this coincided with the influx of Mexican immigrants into black areas like South Central, Inglewood and Compton during that decade, which in Mexico was an economic catastrophe.

I’ve heard this from many people. But here’s what one blogreader just wrote, remembering those times:

“…back when I lived in Compton, specially when I went to Compton high school between 89-93, things were tense between the black gangs and the mostly Mexican students at Compton, there were a lot of instances where I witnessed Latino students not gang members being jumped brutally for no reason…there were even riots on my senior year where these black gangs that were around Compton high school would start hitting random Latino students and these students would fight back with their cowboy belt buckles, this was the time of quebradita and chalino Sanchez….so a lot of us would go semi cowboy to school….”

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October 7, 2013 · 5:06 pm

The Dead Presidents Case…Finally the End

On the night of July 9, 2000 on the West Side of the city of San Bernardino, several armed gang members went into the driveway of a duplex and opened fire.

Johnny AgudoFour people were killed that night. They included two brothers, Johnny and Gilbert Agudo. The Agudos were presidents of their respective west side gang cliques — 7th Street Locos and the Little Counts.

The incident became known as the Dead Presidents case and involved betrayal and greed and murder worthy of Shakespeare’s best tragedies.

The Agudo brothers’ murders changed gang life in the West Side Verdugo area, the flatland barrio separated by the 215 freeway from the rest of San Bernardino and made up of families whose ancestors first settled the area in the 1920s and found work at the Santa Fe Railroad.

What made it more amazing was that it was the Agudos’ own homeboys doing the killing.

The case came to a long-awaited end last week, when the last of four defendants to be convicted for the crime, Froylan Chiprez, now 36, was sentenced to four life terms without parole, and 31 years for the attempted murder of two others at the scene that night.

Chiprez, a gunman that night, was arrested in December, 2011 in Tijuana, where he’d been living for a decade.18-e1381189731659

The case fractured West Side Verdugo, the largest Latino gang, then comprising four cliques, in San Bernardino, said Denise Yoakum, the prosecutor in the Chiprez case.

“Gang officers have told me that many gang members weren’t sure who to trust after that,” she said. “They refer to it as their 9-11. A lot of the old gangsters, you ask them a question [about some event], and they’ll say `Was this before the Dead Presidents case or after?'”

The  murders took place supposedly at the behest of Sal “Toro” Hernandez, the Mexican Mafia prison gang member who controls San Bernardino Latino gangs.

One member of the 7th Street gang, Luis Mendoza — aka Maldito — was Johnny Agudo’s best friend. Together they started the 7th Street clique.

Mendoza organized the shooting that night, believing he could be made president of the gang, and possibly a Mexican Mafia member himself, if he followed Hernandez’s orders and killed Johnny Agudo, who was believed to have been talking to police.

Gilbert Agudo was killed because it was believed he would always avenge his brother’s death if he lived.

Mendoza and another shooter, Lorenzo Arias, were sentenced to death in 2008. John Ramirez, another long-time 7th Street homeboy, spent 12 years in prison for his part in the shooting that night, his sentenced shortened due to his cooperation with prosecutors.

These guys all went to school together. Their mothers babysat for each other, and they knew everything there was to know about each other’s families.

I always took the case as a sign of how Southern California barrio life, once so tight-knit, almost cloistered, began to shred under the influence of the Mexican Mafia.The Virgin of Mount Vernon

In the early 1990s, the Mafia came out to the streets and put Latino gangs under its control, forcing gang members to tax drug dealers and kick Eme members a percentage. In time, Eme members began ordering gang members to kill their own.

On the streets of Southern California, this undermined the long-standing, deep loyalty that many Latino gang members felt for their own homeboys. This case, and others, showed that that loyalty pretty much doesn’t exist any more.

A lot has changed on San Bernardino’s West Side since then. Mexican immigrants have replaced many of the Mexican-American families who once lived there.

The Agudos’ parents moved away from the west side long ago.

“Some of the victims moved completely out of state,” said Yoakum.

The physical presence of the gangs in the area has diminished notably. There’s far less graffiti and no gang members hanging out at markets or at a large park on the West Side. That doesn’t mean the gangs have disappeared, Yoakum said.

In fact, more than 13 years after that night, only the influence of the Mexican Mafia remains constant in the barrio where the presidents died.

Photos: Johnny Agudo, Gilberto Agudo, Mount Vernon Virgin of Guadalupe

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October 2, 2013 · 9:01 am

Cortez the Killer — Los Cenzontles and David Hidalgo

Check out this video of Neil Young’s Cortez the Killer by the ever-cool Bay Area Mexican psychedelic roots folk band known as Los Cenzontles.

Love this band, and David Hidalgo’s voice is always so fine.

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David Hidalgo

David Hidalgo

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September 30, 2013 · 1:56 pm

Ernie Johnson, legendary coach dies

A great teacher will leave behind a raft of students doing well.

Ernie JohnsonThat’s how I first heard of Ernie Johnson.

As I moved back to Southern California and began writing about the area, I ran into his students, now well on in life and doing very well. The name came up a few times.

Johnson was a legendary football coach, producing dominant teams at El Rancho High School in Pico Rivera and later at Cerritos College.

He was one of the first coaches to meld white and Hispanic players into football dynasties — a rare thing back then.

Johnson died last month at the age of 87.

He was one of those Marine-style football coaches, who took kids by the face mask to make a point.

The first to tell me of Johnson was Ruben Quintero, who played offensive tackle on the great El Rancho teams in the mid-1960s. Quintero is a professor of literature at Cal State, Los Angeles.

(I met Quintero while doing a story in 2007 on the murder of his sister, Maria Hicks, who had accosted some taggers writing on a wall and who fired upon her when she approached.)

In the mid-1960s, El Rancho High School had just been formed from parts of two school districts, after Whittier wanted to rid itself of a chunk of its district that had a lot of Mexican-Americans. On one side of the new district lived working-class Mexican-American; on the other, middle-class whites.

Johnson forged them into a statewide football force. El Rancho crushed its opponents during these years. It was chosen the nation’s best football team one year.

“He had a very successful football program at same time that the city was working to unify north and south parts into one program,” Quintero told me. “We were all part of something that in many ways representative of what Pico Rivera was, a kind of mixed community that was doing something very, very successfully. We were a public school that beat all these Catholic schools that could recruit from all over the place.

“He crystallized in the successful football program something that was larger in the community.”

Johnson didn’t allow dancing celebrations or steroids or trash talking. But the El Rancho squad was so dominant that the players would go three quarters, take no water, never take off their helmets and begin doing jumping jacks as the the fourth quarter started to cow their opponents. That’s what Quintero told me.

A couple years later, I met Ernie Vargas, the recreation director for the city of Hawaiian Gardens, on a story I was doing about his use of rugby as way of guiding kids away from gangs. Vargas played for Johnson at Cerritos College.

Vargas lacked football talent, but had a desire to play that impressed Johnson.

“In the neighborhood, a lot of kids didn’t have discipline,” said Vargas. “Not only was I being coached, but I was also being mentored to be a better man. These were the principles I live by today. I don’t need to steal. I don’t need to lie. Be true to myself. Coach wanted us to be true to ourselves. I was just in awe of what he had to say.

“He said: Be where you’re supposed to be. Be on time. And do your best. Those three principles are all you need for life.”

(YOUR OWN MEMORIES OF ERNIE JOHNSON? Please add them to Comments below.)

I later interviewed Johnson, the son of Texas cotton pickers who had came to Orange County to pick citrus, by phone. Here are a few things he said:

–“It’s like playing human chess, football is.”

-“El Rancho High School was built to cleanse Whittier High School of Mexicans. We got every gang – Jimtown, Canta Rana from Los Nietos. What they didn’t understand was that they also got rid of a lot of great players and all the good-looking girls.”

-“I was raised in a Mexican neighborhood in Fullerton. They called me Gringo Uno. I learned more in the neighborhood67-00-00_El_Rancho_Johnson Crop that eventually helped me because they couldn’t tell me about being poor. Having been raised where I was, I was a minority for a long time myself. The people in Fullerton honestly thought that I was an albino because they never saw me with anyone but Kiko Munoz and Eddie Montoya.

-“At a reunion not long ago, two guys came up and said., `You don’t know who we are. I’m Naranjo from Jimtown. The other was Ray Chavez from the Montebello Jardines. I had them both in continuation PE. I would tell them,`You change your ways or you’re going to die in the gas chamber.’  They said, `We came here to tell you we did not die in the gas chamber.'”

-“One night we beat Whittier, the team all knelt and prayed. We always sprayed before the game but never prayed to win. We prayed that nobody got hurt, and have the privilege of playing. Then we get a complaint from Whittier about us praying on the field. I said I didn’t tell them to get down and pray and I’m not going to tell them to get up. Then they saw what miserable little people they were.”

And my favorite:

-“If there’s one secret to being a coach, it’d be to show you love your players more than you love the game.”

Two memorials for Ernie Johnson are planned.

One is a tribute at halftime of El Rancho High School’s football game on Friday night, November 1.

The next is a memorial service Sunday, November 3, 1 p.m. at the high school, 6501 Passons Blvd., in Pico Rivera.

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September 25, 2013 · 6:48 am

Candace Pert dies; discovered opiate receptor

 

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I did not know about Candace Pert until I read that she had died in this great obituary by Tom Maugh in the LA Times.

Pert explained why humans get addicted to opiates.

She discovered the receptor in the human body to which opiates attach, fitting like a hand in a glove and allowing both for the calming of pain and the addiction to the substance produced by the opium poppy.

Her research and discoveries have never been more timely than they are today, amid a nationwide opiate epidemic.

Great quote from the story: “God presumably did not put an opiate receptor in our brains so that we could ultimately discover how to get high with opium,” Pert told Smithsonian magazine.

Still it was others who discovered the reason for the receptors: substances produced naturally by the human body — endorphins — that reduce pain and produce euphoria when they attach to the receptors.

Utterly fascinating, I think, that one plant, alone in all that we know of nature, produces a molecule that fits so perfectly onto this receptor in humans.

For this reason, one unseen particle, the morphine molecule, produces both heaven and hell — the most merciful pain relief and most harrowing enslavement — in the planet’s dominant mammal.

We are seeing the effects of this all across the United States, from rural America to the wealthiest suburbs.

It appears from Maugh’s obituary that Pert was largely blunted in her research by male researchers above her, then had most of the recognition usurped by those same men.

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September 23, 2013 · 7:32 pm

An interview with RWR, “…the hell you know about the 740?”

Last week, as I was busy working on my book about opiates in America, I was amazed to see the reaction to a rough-hewn video from some guys from Portsmouth, Ohio known as RWR (Raw Word Revival).

The song they put out, “What the Hell You Know About the 740?”, describes the several crises their town has lived in for decades — and describes a lot of heartland America as well.images-1

Among them, Portsmouth was ground zero in the opiate epidemic that is now sweeping the country. I’ve been there four times for the book: twice to hear about the degradation that took place with economic decline and the rise of prescription pill use; twice to hear the stories of how Portsmouth is emerging from that hell and a recovery community is forming.

I hope to return a fifth time.

What I found electric about the RWR video was that it was not a celebration of thuggery. Instead it was journalism — a description of what these guys had grown up in, using Portsmouth as the video backdrop — and a call to rebirth for their images-11hometown.

I suspect Bruce Springsteen and Merle Haggard would find a lot to value in the RWR and their song.

Plus it was DIY all the way, and, as a fan of early punk rock that pioneered DIY attitudes, I thought it looked great.

Anyway, five of the nine members of RWR  took some time to talk to me about the group, the song, the reaction and more. Portsmouth born and raised, they are: Clint “Random” Askew, Nick “Big Mung” Mungle, Donricko “D’Gree” Greene, Barry “B.E.Z.” Munyon, Justin “JLew” Lewis. (Others in the group include Lexxy “Riide R Diie” Jackson, David Packard, Arrick “Lil Mont” Montgomery and Angelo “Anjo” Jackson) rwr8

You can listen to them at the link above or download it.

Check out their story. Tell me yours. Leave it in Comments.

Meanwhile, you can read the fantastic comments so many left on earlier posts I did last week.

And follow me: On Twitter.  On Facebook.

Here’s my website: www.samquinones.com

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More posts from True Tales: A Reporter’s Blog:

From the 740: An addict talks about poetry and dope

What the Hell You Know About the 740?

Here’s what I know about the 7-4-0

Where have you seen the 740?

I who am your Mother … The Virgin of Guadalupe

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September 20, 2013 · 5:54 am

Here’s what you know about the 740

The response to the video by RWR, the Portsmouth, Ohio rap group, has been extraordinary.

So I sifted through the comments for some excerpts that tell the story of a small American town that is beaten down and rising up.

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“…I’m 60 yes old….have lived here since I was 9. I cry when I see what had become of the town I grew up in. I remember a downtown that was filled with stores and restaurants. Christmas shopping was magical. Shoulder to shoulder, bellsIMG_4113 ringing… You could find anything you wanted! There were no Kmarts, Walmarts or malls. …”

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“…We never locked doors and never had to worry. Now we live behind closed locked doors with alarms on them. The working class is worried about keeping what they have while the others steal to get what we work for. Kids being raised by grandparents because of the drugs here….”

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“Drugs have been prominent as early as Dr.Lily and Dr.Proctor. With a steady and fast decline ever sense then. With businesses shutting down. No work around the area….”

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“…Watched the girl next door go from straight A’s to prison in just two years from the first O/C. watched my son’s friend go from valedictorian to living in his own filth, without any utilities. … At one point the estimate was that of every 10 adults in Scioto county, 7 were addicted to oxycontin. think about this. you go to the store, the clerk is high. you take your dog to a vet, you see the pinprick pupils. you stop at the post office, you see the obvious proof of addiction, it is … as if someone crop dusted the county. with opiate.”IMG_0637 - Version 2

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“… knew our town was on trouble when people young and old were lined up down Chillicothe (the main street in Portsmouth) to see the pain pill doctor. Or maybe it was when I bought pills from friends Grandmother. Or how about when I saw a former high school cheerleader walking the stro….’

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“…I got pregnant I was unable to stop so my son was taken from me n I went to treatment immediately after five weeks of treatment my father was shot and killed robbing theCarry out…”

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“…You can’t leave the house alone without fear of coming up missing to never be heard from again….”

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“…You got to survive the 740 is what the hell I know….”

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“…My daughter is an addict in early recovery. She was in the top 10 of her graduating class, and on the dean’s list at SSU…until the dope got to her. She went from pain pills, to heroin, to meth. … She got busted and sent to jail. … Maybe I never paid enough attention, maybe I was just to busy trying to work to survive. Maybe I just didn’t want to believe that things were so bad in our town….”

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“…I’ve only been free from prison since May 31st,2013 and I know I can’t go back to living in Portsmouth….”

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“…I noticed an out-of-towner at a coffee shop and asked what brought her to town. She was on a boat trip down (and back) the entire length of the Ohio River. In all her trip preparations, no one had ever mentioned Portsmouth. She had pot lucks and stops scheduled in towns all along the river, but stopped in Portsmouth by accident, to pick up supplies. She added a couple of days to her itinerary to look around. “What happened here?” she asked. “This was a real city once,” she said. “All the buildings are taller than a lot of places I’ve stopped. But it seems like a ghost town.”

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“…7-4-0 reminds me of my hometown, Elkhart, Indiana (574). Elkhart was built on the pharmaceutical, band instrument, and musical instrument manufacturing industries. Because of the mobile home industry, it tags along with the fortunes of Detroit. Don’t know about heroin, but backpack meth and home meth labs (one blew up across the street from the high school) are everywhere….”

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“…WTH do I know about the 740? I was born and raised here I watched it go from a quiet little town, where you didn’t have to be afraid to go out at night, or lock your doors, to a poverty sticken, low job rate, drug capitol. Portsmouth is starting to fight back finally …”IMG_4083

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“…went to prison cause I couldn’t stay clean my mom did a lot by raising my oldest most of her life,sometimes it’s like a never ending battle,but we do have recovery in our town,an once again back in treatment…”

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“…am a mother who use to addict to pain pills been to prison twice and finally went to treatment in the 740 which changed my life for ever.Now I have been working full time for 5 years going back to school to finish my degree and have overcome a lot trying to stay clean and sober it is possible in the 740…”

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“…I’m currently involved with a group of people who are looking to start a worker cooperative in the city as a IMG_0659 - Version 2means of providing work and education for the unemployed. …”

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“…here are 2 options: be the change you want to see, or change your surroundings & the people you spend your time with!…”

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“…I am finishing my Master’s in natural resources and environmental science so I can publish research on this post industrial town and its resulting drug addiction….”

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“…we are recovering like crazy down here in little ole Portsmouth!!! I also know one of the men in the video, watched him grow into adulthood and become a GREAT man, a father, and a caretaker despite all of the hurdles that he faced, and he really did beat the odds…”

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“…I personally have overcome my past, and will not let the downfalls of MY hometown get me down or pull me back! I did it and so can you Portsmouth!!!! All you need is a lil inspiration, and thats what these men are!!!…”

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“…I really dont like rap i usually listen to country but i loved this song n so proud of them….”

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“…What I know about the 740 is good people are doing something about it….”IMG_3327 - Version 2

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“…The people here need to save our “740″. No one is going to do it for us….”

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“…I’m still here and I recently just got out of rehab….”

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“…No longer does this have to be a “junkies town”, or “drug infested” … she is inching herself back to be the home I grew up in. A place where doors are left unlocked at night. A place where its okay to send your children to the store. … It doesn’t come easy. It will get better though. (progress not perfection) I’m an addict. My story and the stories of many of my fellow addicts are similar to the story of our city. We can/do Recover. Today I am proud, honored, and happy to say that I am living in the solution and not in the problem….with that I pass….”

–Θ–

So that’s Portsmouth’s story, folks. Share it if you like it.

Tell me yours. Leave it in Comments.

And follow me: On Twitter.  On Facebook.

Here’s my website: www.samquinones.com

_____

More posts from True Tales: A Reporter’s Blog:

Here’s what I know about the 7-4-0

Where have you seen the 740?

I who am your Mother … The Virgin of Guadalupe

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September 19, 2013 · 8:40 am

Where have you seen the 7-4-0?

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I said I’d never been there before I went to Portsmouth, Ohio.

Later, when I thought about it, and saw the video by RWR (Raw Word Revival), I realized I had been to the 7-4-0 many times.

Seems like the 7-4-0 is in the 6-2-0 (southwest Kansas), where the farming towns are empty, streets are vacant, and storefronts are boarded up. I was there several years ago.

One reader said this:

7-4-0 reminds me of my hometown, Elkhart, Indiana (574). Elkhart was built on the pharmaceutical, band instrument, and musical instrument manufacturing industries. Because of the mobile home industry, it tags along with the fortunes of Detroit. Don’t know about heroin, but backpack meth and home meth labs (one blew up across the street from the high school) are everywhere.

I was in YIMG_4006oungstown — which looked a lot like the 7-4-0, now that I think about it.

I was in the 7-4-0 in Pecos, Texas, where there aren’t enough food stores of any kind but the fast food variety.

In Huntington, WV (3-0-4), I did a story about the spread of black-tar heroin that had reached the city from one very similar small town in Mexico. More pizza joints in Huntington than there are gyms in all of WV, I’m told.

And having lived in Mexico, I can say that a thousand villages down there are in the 7-4-0, which is why those folks have left en masse, just like so many have left Portsmouth.IMG_4034

I was in the 7-4-0 in Marion, Ohio, where a guy got so upset at the lack of attention to the heroin problem that he put up signs saying, “Heroin is Marion’s Economy.”

And it seems like I’m in the 7-4-0 when I walk the aisles of any Walmart. I always imagine them haunted by ghosts of the storeowners who once sustained small-town America: one aisle by the departed local grocer; down another the former hardware store owner, and next to that, the long-gone woman’s clothier or that pharmacist.

Where have you seen the 7-4-0?

Tell me the story. Leave it in Comments.

And follow me: On Twitter.  On Facebook.

My website: www.samquinones.com

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More posts from True Tales: A Reporter’s Blog:

T-shirts: What the hell you know about the 740?

Here’s what I know about the 7-4-0

What the hell you know about the 740?

Wanna Burrito? A prison tale

 

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· 6:35 am

T-Shirts: What the hell you know about the 7-4-0?

Out in Portsmouth, Ohio, the recovery revival continues to gain energy, surrounding the rap video by local group, RWR (Raw Word Revival), and their song, “What the Hell You Know About That 740?”

Folks are now selling t-shirts with the song title to benefit SOLACE for $15 each. (Save me one, folks!)

SOLACE is a group of Portsmouth mothers who’ve lost children to heroin or prescription pill overdoses.

Formed by Jo Anna Krohn in 2010, SOLACE was the first parents group in Ohio — and really the country, as far I know — to call attention to the opiate epidemic.

Before that, JoAnna told me, parents hid the facts behind their children’s deaths, and lived in isolated suffering. No one in Portsmouth was getting outraged at what was happening. (JoAnna’s son, Wes, killed himself while high on prescription pills at a party in 2008.)

There are now SOLACE chapters in 16 Ohio counties.

The opiate epidemic is a quiet, insidious thing, without the public violence of, say, the crack plague of the 1980s that outraged so many people.IMG_3327 - Version 2

So parent groups speaking out are crucial in ending it, seems to me, because they’re the ones with the stories that can fire public outrage and galvanize the will of political leaders.

Anyway, lots of interesting stuff happening down there in Portsmouth, Ohio.

Meanwhile, here’s the RWR video again, a fantastic piece of DIY journalism:

Tell me what you know about the 7-4-0. Leave it in Comments.

And follow me: On Twitter.  On Facebook.

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More posts from True Tales: A Reporter’s Blog:

Here’s what I know about the 7-4-0

Wanna Burrito? A prison tale

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September 18, 2013 · 5:53 am

Here’s what I know about the 7-4-0

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In answer to the question posed in the post below by the guys at RWR (Raw Word Revival) from Portsmouth, Ohio, I’ll say I’ve been many places as a reporter. Seen a lot. Talked to governors and gang members. I’ve been to a town where everyone’s a pimp and a town where everyone’s a popsicle-maker.

But until I went to Portsmouth…

I’d never been to an NA meeting.

I’d never seen a Medicaid card.

I’d never seen the Ohio River.

I’d never seen a shoelace factory or a white ghetto.

I’d never known you could buy a car with pain pills.

I’d never known you could buy a T-bone steak with pain pills.

I’d never known you could buy clean urine with pain pills.

I’d never known people kept Red Belly Piranhas as pets.

I’d never seen so many people try so hard to rid themselves of a plague.

I’d never seen but one other town with the same heart to try to come back from so far down.

And thus I’d never been so proud to be an American.

So, my hat’s off. Keep working the program, Portsmouth!

Anything else you’ve seen in Portsmouth? Tell me the story. Tell me your story. Put it in Comments.

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My website: www.samquinones.com

More posts from True Tales: A Reporter’s Blog:

What the hell you know about the 740?

One Day in Compton: A True Tale

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California prison hunger strike: How one gang member sees it

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Filed under Culture, Drugs, Global Economy, Streets, The Heroin Heartland

September 17, 2013 · 10:44 am

What the hell you know about the 740?

Working on my book about America’s opiate epidemic, I’m just back from rural southern Ohio, along the Ohio River, and a town of 20,000, with a lot of abandoned buildings that once housed factories that employed people, called Portsmouth (area code 740).

This is rural heartland America, and it’s looking very rough. Lots of dope.

Heroin in the heartland. Who’d have thought? Depleted white culture. Tough to watch.

I’m not the biggest rap fan, but this video, put out by some Portsmouth kids known as RWR (Raw Word Revival), is pretty much journalism. The new town criers with a post-industrial, post-rural apocalyptic kind of groove.

(Turns out they filmed the whole thing on an iPhone. How punk rock/DIY of them….)

(Add: Here’s what you know about the 740 — an excerpt of many comments to this original post.)

What they came up with is certainly truer than all those Nashville country songs about small towns, shit-kicking good old boys working hard and drinking beer on Saturday and in church on Sunday out there in God’s heartland — all of which sounds to me like propaganda.

Actually, I found Portsmouth to be an optimistic kind of place these days, with a lot of new energy and recovery.

But more on that later. For now, I’ll just leave you with the RWR video.

Share it if you like it….

While you’re doing that … TELL US: What do you know about the 7-4-0? Tell us a story of the strongest or weakest person you know. The day you knew things were getting bad or getting better?

Read what others have said in Comments.

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More posts from True Tales: A Reporter’s Blog:

Narco Mennonites arrested again

Dean Williams: An addict comes clean

Latinas and Transgender style

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September 10, 2013 · 10:09 pm

Heroin is Marion’s Economy

IMG_4034 Well, I’m not gonna lie — I like this guy’s style.

Brad Belcher was upset that people in his hometown of Marion, Ohio (north of Columbus) weren’t talking about the rampant heroin/opiate addiction in their midst.

Home to President Warren G. Harding, the rural town of Marion, like much of Ohio, has been hammered by departing jobs and a general malaise of defeatism and inertia, Belcher told me.

Heroin (in the form of courts, jail, the underground economy, etc) has taken the place in the economy of a lot of manufacturing and other businesses that for decades kept the town tight and townspeople concerned for each other. (Marion was once home to Marion Power Shovel, which once employed 3200 people making earth moving and mining equipment. It closed in the late 1990s.)

Now people were dying. Dope was everywhere.

IMG_4060 (1)So to ignite discussion about all this, Belcher printed 800 signs and late one night put them up all over town: in front of Walgreens, outside cornfields, in the wealthy neighborhoods, along the retails strips.

He was caught in the act by three officers of the law just as he was about to put them around city hall and downtown.

They took down most of the signs, but his little bit of guerrilla political theater — a la Abbie Hoffman — was taken up online and in social media.

Belcher, a former addict himself, became a cause celebre.

The signs made the topic okay to talk about, he says. Before people were mortified to admit they had addicts in their families.

The town, he says, is now at least attending to the problem it avoided. Churches are involved. Local folks recently organized a heroin march. The cops arrest more heroin dealers than ever before. People talk openly about what they once kept silent. But the town doesn’t have any drug treatment facilities — besides its jail, that is, which serves as de facto center for detoxifying from heroin.

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September 9, 2013 · 6:48 pm

Cal Worthington, a legend passes. Se habla Espanol

I grew up listening to, and memorizing the commercials of, “Cal Worthington and his dog Spot.”

Cal is now dead. At 92.

Worthington, of course, was anathema to animal-rights folks, as he paraded seals, lions, tigers, hippos, etc, all named Spot before viewers of late-afternoon Westerns on Channel 11 or 9 or 5, urging them to “Go See Cal” with that Beverly Hillbilly banjo going loco behind him.

Cal Worthington was the last, or longest-lived (or both) of the Southern-accented used car dealers who came with the first waves of white migration from the South and Midwest to LA.

You might remember Ralph Williams: “Hi friends, Ralph Williams, Ralph Williams Ford.” He was another.

There were more. Just can’t remember them right now. One guy was not like them. Bob Spreen. Remember him, with the mellow tone? “Bob Spreen Cadillac. Where the freeways meet in Downey.” Like he was from, like, Indiana or some place, but definitely not from Oklahoma.

At first, these Southern car dealers never mentioned Spanish, then as years passed they couldn’t avoid it and began tagging each commercial with a roughhewn “Se Habla Espanol.” Then they just faded away.

Now the South Gate Boulevard of Cars is dotted with used car lots owned by Arabs and Cubans, and staffed by Mexicans selling to other Mexicans.

And now Cal is dead. How can we go on?

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