I spent yesterday with police and Sheriff’s deputies as they traversed hills and freeway embankments looking for homeless folks. They moved them out, offered them services, such as shelter housing, which some of them took. (See the LAT story.)
One encampment had nine people, sleeping in a line next to a wall that ran along an on-ramp to southbound Highway 101. The place was strewn with bedding, cigarette and fast food wrappers, and hand-made signs. Here are a few.
Filed under Los Angeles
Good story by AP’s Mark Stevenson, one of the deans of American reporters in Mexico, about how the Mexican left and presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador seem to be slipping and out of touch.
Filed under Mexico
The other day, on my way out of town on vacation, I stopped by a San Bernardino County Courthouse to hear a bit of the trial of Richard Gatica.
Richard Gatica is accused of strangling his cellmate at West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga in 2006. He then propped up the cellmate for more than a day, pretending to talk and play chess with the cellmate, and moving the corpse occasionally, so that jailers wouldn’t realize what had happened.
Gatica, who grew up in Rosemead, was already doing two life terms in prison when this happened. So prosecutors are asking for the death penalty.
I happened to catch the testimony of the psychiatrist, employed by the prison system, who examined Gatica for several hours and reviewed thousands of pages of documents about him, and concluded Gatica suffered from several kinds of mental illness.
The doctor described a childhood of apparently nonstop abuse by a sadistic mother who “was severely mentally ill, both because of addictions and because of an innate mental disease which appears to be major depression. … Mr. Gatica was, along with his younger brother, the focus of his mother’s illness and anger in that Mr. Gatica was physically and emotionally abused through much of his childhood.”
Among the mental illnesses Gatica developed was post-traumatic stress disorder.
The doctor went on to say that later, in the prison system, Gatica was incarcerated in a special housing unit, SHU, which amounts to solitary confinement, where inmates are denied human contact, often sunlight and are let out of a cell an hour a day. The SHU is reserved usually for inmates who’ve committed some crime in prison, or been part of a prison gang. Gatica lived in a SHU for a dozen years, the doctor said.
“He grew up without a father in the home and with a crazy abusive mother who was also a drug addict. There wasn’t much opportunity for Mr Gatica to learn coping skills, how to be a loving, caring person. What he learned was how to be a drug addict and a criminal. Being in the segregated housing unit only reinforced Mr Gatica’s dwelling in his internal world of disassociation and very pathological defense mechanisms.”
One of which, the doctor said, was to develop an extreme phobia to germs to the point where he would scrub his cell with a toothbrush “20 to 30 times a day or [wash] his hands 20 to 30 times a day.”
Gatica sat in his seat, dressed in a lavender shirt, a tie, black slacks, glasses, short, gelled hair — looking like a business executive and watching the very middle-class jury absorb all this.
Filed under California, Gangs, Prison
Headstone, Hollywood Forever Cemetery
I don’t know who this woman was, but I thought this tombstone was a nice, simple way to say a lot.
Filed under Los Angeles
Donut Shop
So I was in this donut shop today — it’s at Santa Monica and Western, a neighborhood of Central Americans and Oaxacans.
I often go to donut shops to write, as it puts me in neighborhoods that don’t often see a Times reporter.
As I sat there writing, facing the door, who should pull up but teen pop heartthrob Justin Bieber, with his girlfriend, whose name escapes me for the moment.I didn’t first recognize him as he was wearing a wool cap hiding all his hair, but his BMW didn’t really fit in the parking lot of older model Nissans and Toyotas and Fords.
Wikipedia, if I can believe it, informs me that he’s Canadian and just turned 18.
Anyway, they get out, walk in to the Subway shop next door — advertising 6″ sandwiches, buy one, get one free — and five minutes later walk out with the sandwiches and get in a drive off. I heard later that he’d just purchased property in Calabasas.
It was not a little surreal, like a movie or a river passing before my eyes — there went a pregnant mother, a couple of construction workers, a skateboard kid, Justin Bieber and his girlfriend, a woman pushing a stroller and leading a kid licking a lollipop …
A while after that, I got into a conversation in the shop with a Guatemalan guy named Eduardo. Eduardo is a metal recycler. He buys junk metal and recycles it. Most of his clients are auto shops and he travels all over Southern California to get their discarded metal, from Riverside in the Inland Empire out to Thousand Oaks in Ventura County.
Seemed like a couple of strange encounters, but just like Los Angeles.
Filed under Los Angeles
This party story in Holmby Hills, near Westwood, reminds me of high school a bit — just on steroids.
Five hundred people showing up in half an hour, outside your home. Cell phones like cigarette lighters.
I love the woman, Ms. Newman — who overnight becomes my armchair tech philosopher.
Filed under California, Culture, Los Angeles
Miguel de la Madrid
Miguel de la Madrid, who, as president, tried without success to reform Mexico’s one-party state and instead presided over one of the most corrupt periods in the country’s modern era, has died, according to media reports.
De la Madrid, 77, was president during years (1982-88) that saw the emergence of Mexico’s drug cartels and the 1985 earthquake that shook Mexico City and, because government response was so poor, the PRI/government itself. Political observers count it among the factors that led to the one-party state’s eventual demise 15 years later. Many Mexican City non-governmental organizations date their emergence to the 1985 earthquake and citizen do-it-yourself emergency response when they found no help from the government.
He was also president when DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena was killed by drug kingpin Rafael Caro Quintero, for Camarena’s role in discovering a vast marijuana plantation belonging to the drug lord. The case sparked US interest in Mexican traffickers for the first time, leading to a continued US attention and pressure on Mexico to do something about its drug-trafficking gangs.
The investigation found deep connections between Mexican traffickers and government officials.
In addition, he was president during the election of his successor, Carlos Salinas de Gortari — an election believed by many to be one of the most corrupted of any in modern Mexican history.
Filed under Mexico
Earl Scruggs, great banjo player and musical spirit, has died at the age 88, the LA Times reports.
Apart from being a monster instrumentalist, he also was a guy who looked to play with all types of musicians, not just bluegrass folks. King Curtis, Elton John, etc. I remember being stunned as a kid at a guy who spoke with his deep Southern accent yet sought out hippies and black people with whom to play.
This was a rare thing, then.
For a few years there, he was almost a hippie, at least by bluegrass standards, with his hair down just about to his collar.
Here’s a video of Flatt & Scruggs on the Grand Ole Opry.
RIP Earl Scruggs.
Filed under Culture
Filed under California, Drugs
Virgin, West Side Verdugo
There’s a story in Friday’s Whittier Daily News that says a lot about how Latino street gangs in Southern California have changed, and turned on themselves.
The reason is the Mexican Mafia, the prison gang that has controlled street gangs for most of two decades.
In the story, a gang member killed a friend who’d been going around collecting taxes from area drug dealers in the name of the Mexican Mafia, when he wasn’t designated to do so.
The story doesn’t say how good of friends these guys were, but there were many years when Latino street gangs would never kill one of their own like this.
The Mexican Mafia’s taxation scheme — ordering Latino street gangs to tax drug dealers in neighborhoods and kicking up the money to MM members in prison and their associates — changed that. These kinds of killings mark a huge, though quiet shift in Southern California gang culture.
I wrote a story several years ago about the Dead Presidents case in the West Side Verdugo area of San Bernardino, in which, on MM orders, members of two allied, neighborhood gangs murdered their presidents: two brothers, Johnny and Gilbert Agudo, the presidents of 7th Street and Little Counts, respectively.
The victims and the suspects had all grown up together; some had been babysat by the mothers of the others. Yet the mafia had twisted relations in the gang to such a point that, like some Shakespearean play, they turned on each other one bloody night in 2000.
“After what happened, that just broke up the neighborhood completely,” said one guy from the area that I talked to. “Nobody trusted nobody.” Indeed, the gangs really haven’t reconstituted since then.
In Avenal state prison once, I interviewed a 22-year-old gang member who’d murdered a friend he knew from kindergarten, who was at the time even living with this kid’s family because his own had thrown him out. This was on orders of the local mafia member, who said that the friend had to go, apparently over some debt of some kind. The details weren’t clear ever to the 22-year-old, who, without asking a question, took his friend for a ride and shot him in the chest in an isolated part of the San Gabriel Valley.
He told me he wanted, above all, to be a carnal — a Mexican Mafia member — some day and looked up to the Big Homies the way a little leaguer looks up to a MLB player. He’d since dropped out and was on a protective custody yard, a Sensitive Needs Yard, which I’ve written about before in this blog. He also said that because he looked sweet and much younger than his years, he had to do more violence to get the respect of his gang brethren. That was also part of it.
He’s now doing 55 years to life.
This never used to happen in Latino neighborhood gangs — this turning homeboy on homeboy, unless one had snitched. They were clannish things, happy to war with their enemies, but all about “protecting” the neighborhood and not ever about killing each other.
But this kind of killing has been happening across SoCal since the MM’s edicts on taxation were issued in the mid-1990s. Usually the orders come from some old incarcerated MM gang member who hasn’t been on the streets in the lifetime of those homeboys who are about to kill, or to die.
Now, one gang member told me once, when your best homies you knew from kindergarten call and say let’s go for a ride, you don’t do it.
Filed under Gangs, Southern California, Streets
The LA suburb of El Segundo saw a boatload of illegal immigrants come ashore on Wednesday morning; they were taken into custody.
Boats — flat panga boats in particular (used by Mexican fishermen) — are the new transport vehicle in the coyote business. El Segundo is about as far north as I’ve heard them landing.
At first, they were landing in San Diego, then ICE got wise, and they began landing in Orange County. Crystal Cove woke up to a few launches, with footsteps in the sand.
Now they’re coming ashore well into LA County.
Filed under Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants
Yesterday’s earthquake in Mexico was a barometer of the country’s progress.
The earthquake in 1985, of similar magnitude, not only destroyed large parts of Mexico City, but was part of the shaking of the PRI regime, so poor was the government response to people in such dire need.
This earthquake knocked down buildings, but killed no one. Granted the epicenter was in a sparsely populated part of the country, in Guerrero near the border with Oaxaca.
Nevertheless, in the past, much less powerful natural disasters — floods, heavy rains — have killed many, as well as destroyed buildings, bridges, houses, etc.
Natural disasters are often a sign of a government’s effectiveness and competence. In this case, it would seem important to point out, Mexico weathered it well.
On the other hand, there is the continuing narco-violence, itself akin to a natural disaster.
Filed under Mexico
This is a sad story. La Michoacana — the logo drawn up by a young marketing executive from the town that invented the fruity paleta — is changing its name because the state of Michoacan is too associated with violence.
Alejandro Andrade, a great guy, who I interviewed several times in Tocumbo, Michoacan, years ago, said he’s changing the name of the little Indian girl that has been the national logo for the ice cream shops invented and perfected by Tocumbans over the decades.
The new name will be La Tucumbita. Michoacan is just too violent a name to associate with a sweet thing like ice cream and popsicles, he’s quoted as saying.
In my first book — True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx — I told the story of the folks from Tocumbo who invented the Michoacana popsicle shops that are ubiquitous throughout Mexico.
The photo is from the years when the state was known for other things besides insane violence, beheadings, and wacko Catholic drug cartels. Above is a photo of Alejandro from happier times, and the popsicle monument that stands outside the town.
Filed under Mexico
Juan Gutierrez, Oaxacan baker in Santa Monica
I’ve been reading The Radicalism of the American Revolution by historian Gordon Wood lately. The book talks about the ways in which colonists were breaking from dependence on each other and from Britain, from traditions of England, from old religions to a new, individualistic Great Awakening and new ways of thinking, making a living and doing business.
This break from the Old World and creation of the New has always intrigued me.
Thus I was fascinated to listen to the story of Juan Gutierrez, a Zapotec Indian from a village in Oaxaca, and the owner of Panaderia Antequera in Santa Monica, which was the first Oaxacan-owned business in the LA area when it opened in 1985 or so.
We spoke in his bakery (17th and Ocean Park) the other day.
He and his wife began baking in their house, then found the small shop that was barely surviving and took it over. With the huge population of Oaxacan Indians on LA’s west side (the reasons for which are themselves fascinating, but which I’ll go into later), business has been great almost from the start, and this has encouraged other Oaxacan Indians to start their own.
Living and doing business here, far from the traditions and customs of his village, Gutierrez has had his own awakening, new ways of viewing what’s possible.
Running a business in Santa Monica, he was at the same time dealing with the 17th Century, in the form of demands by villagers back home that he return to do what’s known as his tequio or servicio. Indian villages in Mexico require members in good standing to perform a servicio, unpaid for three years.
This communal custom goes back hundreds of years and has been essential to the functioning of Indian villages. Those who don’t perform it can have their land, houses and property confiscated.
Now, though, many villagers live in the US, with responsibilities up here. Even if they have legal residency, it’s still expensive to go home; if they do not have papers, it’s even more so to return. Plus, they no longer are thinking like the young migrants they were when they arrived from the village as teenagers.
Mr. Gutierrez noted that the village depended on remittances from paisanos in the US, who had also donated money to the annual fiesta each year and funded improvements to city hall and the local school.
He offered to pay someone to do his servicio, saying he had a family and business up here and both needed his attention.
But the village authorities, in his view motivated by envy and believing him rich because he owned a business, insisted he come personally, to be a city councilman for three years.
So for three years he lived in the Old World and the New.
More later on what happened.
Filed under Business, Los Angeles, Migrants
Sgt. Dwight Waldo, SBPD, off duty, playing his violin
At long last, my story on Sgt. Dwight Waldo, of SBPD and an expert in tagging, has run. You can read it here, and watch a video about him as well.
What I appreciate most about the sergeant is his passion and drive. Usually,when I find someone who possesses what borders on obsession for a subject, I know it will almost always make a good story.
In his case, as it happens, the obsession is twofold. Professionally, it’s tagging; personally, it’s for music. For the commenters below the story are incorrect. His music playing is not staged. It is something he does often, walking the streets playing a violin, or bagpipes.
As he told me, he’s become, in an interesting way, a lot like the taggers he stalks, fascinated with finding astonishing places to do his thing: atop a boulder in Gettysburg, a hotel roof, in front of the Queen Mary, or just getting exercise walking through his neighborhood. Of course, he doesn’t leave behind scrawls that cost strapped cities thousands of dollars to clean up.
A fascinating fellow. Thanks for your patience, Sgt.
Filed under Southern California, Streets
