The recent Glassell Park Shootout where L.A. S.W.A.T battled heavily armed gang members who had gone on a rampage killing a man playing with his two year old granddaughter and later participating in a Mad Max style gun battle with a rival gang on the lawless L.A. streets was the end result of decades of festering chaos that grew in the heart of a once quiet suburb.
It all began with one “undocumented worker” named Maria “Chata” Leon who found the perfect place to settle down, start a family and a business:
MORE THAN 100 YEARS AGO, Drew Street was a beautiful green spot named by pioneer Andrew Glassell after his son, Drew. For most of the 20th century, it was a tucked-away suburban enclave flanked by the Los Angeles River and Glendale’s Forest Lawn cemetery. Then, starting in the 1960s, the city built apartments on its dead-end streets and avenues — and a bad element moved in, seeing the isolated little neighborhood as the perfect lair.
Drew Street, with its long, straight rise, offered the perfect viewing base from which to espy approaching cop cars. It turned out to be just the thing for Maria “Chata” Leon, a young toughie from a rough, lawless Mexican village who settled there and gave birth to 13 children — a half-dozen of whom became criminals. With a new baby on her hip every year or two, Leon dealt drugs and staked her claim on Drew Street, in a Bleak House stocked with guns and explosives.
She regularly did stints in jail and prison, and her growing brood, the extended Leon crime family, which has close ties to the Avenues gang that controls the area, slowly turned Drew Street into a hellish microcommunity that L.A. cops, politicians and code enforcers could not turn around. But hope materialized last year, when the city announced it was shutting down the Leon home and banning most of the Leon brood from their longtime family compound.
Leon was already gone, moved to Victorville, and many of her violent and drug-dealing sons were in prison. Some Glassell Park neighbors, who tell stories of around-the-clock drug deals and rampant gang activity at the house — including a murder in Leon’s front yard — began to hope the nightmare might be over
It wasn’t however. The Leon family is just one part of a larger problem caused by liberal policies that facilitate illegal immigration, gang control of areas and generation upon generation dependent on the racist welfare state of California:
TELL-TALE TENNIS SHOES HANG from power lines above Drew Street, letting customers know that drug dealers are present and open for business. Tall, wrought-iron fences surround the mostly stucco single-family homes and dense apartment buildings, but they don’t keep the bad elements out — or in.
The area is isolated by the Glendale Freeway to the southeast, and by Forest Lawn cemetery to the north and west. A hillside runs perpendicular to Drew Street, upon which multistory apartments with signs desolately touting “luxury townhouses” provide local criminals with excellent high ground — lookouts from which they can easily spot incoming police cars. Two apartment buildings on Drew Street are known as “Twin Towers” — named after the two multistory buildings at the Los Angeles County Jail — because they harbor so many convicted felons and convicted and suspected drug dealers.
Drew Street is a testament to city planning gone bad, home to more than 8,000 residents who mostly live in more than 1,500 apartment units the city allowed developers to cram into the area during the 1970s, wiping out a quiet single-family enclave. The residents are a mix of illegal immigrants and second-generation Mexican immigrants, elderly Filipinos and a few white and black families. Housing is definitely “affordable”: a one-bedroom costs about $750 per month; a two bedroom, $950.
It’s a dumping ground for stolen vehicles, a well-known drug bazaar — and a tough place to try to be a good citizen. Graffiti covers the sidewalks, the curbs, the streets, the apartment buildings — even the neglected trees. “I had to paint the back of my building four times in the last year-and-a-half,” says apartment owner Eduardo Garcia — a rare resident willing to give his name. “I had to paint the front twice … I can’t have managers do it because [local thugs] will threaten him and tell him they will kill him.”
Twice, when the Los Angeles City Council tried to install surveillance cameras on Drew Street, they quickly were shot out and stolen — both times — so the city gave up. Yet normal, law-abiding families are trying to make a stand here. On nearby Weldon Street, you can see nice houses with Nissan Pathfinders or better parked in their driveways. These families create a thin layer of civil society in an area run by the Avenues gang, which takes its name from the numbered corridors that slice across Figueroa Street several miles away in Highland Park’s bustling yet economically poor shopping district.
The current illegal immigration crisis has compounded the problems of this community already under siege:
The Avenues operates in cliques, each of which claims a gang territory based on where the members live. Gang experts say that in recent years, longtime Avenues gangsters have begun to allow tough, illegal Mexican immigrants to join their ranks, with Drew Street drawing immigrants from a rough village in Mexico’s Guerrero State — an area that has a reputation for extreme lawlessness. This new mix spells disaster, says one law-enforcement official, because, “Here is one group of people who already had a tremendously lawless culture, on top of another, existing violent gang. And the synergy of the two produced what we saw the other day.”
But back to the Maria Leon, one illegal mother struggling to makes end meet in a country so bitter and spiteful that she lives in the shadows, in constant fear of deportation:
MARIA LEON MOVED FROM GUERRERO State to Drew Street around 1985. The once-petite 5-foot-2-inch toughie immediately got into a brush with cops, arrested in October of 1985 for assault with a deadly weapon. As her arrests piled up, so did her births — 13 kids by four or five men. Her sons — including Jose Leon, Danny Leon, Nicolas Real, Randy Martinez, Francisco Real and Jesus Martinez — all grew up on Drew Street, and most attended Fletcher Drive Elementary and Washington Irving Middle schools.
A law-enforcement official tells the Weekly that Leon’s arrests included theft in 1986; burglary in Riverside County in 1986; selling PCP and marijuana in 1992; and extortion and drug dealing in 1994.
She was finally convicted of drug felonies, in 1995 and again in 1997, and by 1998 she was one of the first Avenues gangsters supervised by the probation department under the CLEAR gang task force, which was inspired by the horrific September 1995 murder of 3-year-old Stephanie Kuhen after her parents made a wrong turn in their car and ended up in no-man’s land — an alley near Division Street in Glassell Park. That same year, Leon was convicted of petty theft.
Her longest stint in prison came after a Halloween bust in 2002, when the Glendale Police Department used a search warrant to enter the longtime Leon home on Drew Street. She was arrested for narcotics sales and child endangerment after officers found automatic weapons and explosives throughout the home — where she was also raising young children.
In 2003, while she was in prison, a local man was shot to death in her front yard — an apparent drug deal gone bad. Inside the house, the cops discovered a shrine to the patron saint of narco trafficking, Jesus Malverde, a folklore hero in crime-ridden Sinaloa. Danny Leon and his half-brother, Francisco Real, were convicted of accessory to murder in the killing.
Then Maria Leon was released from state prison in 2006. One resident says the Leons and the Avenues gang are constantly outsmarting the justice system. “It is so weird — they go to jail and after a day they’re out,” says a resident who grew up with the Leon boys. “How can it be so soon? How can they get out of jail so fast? People who work and have a good life — they get deported.”
Apartment owner Garcia echoes the sentiment, saying, “They can’t own the whole neighborhood like that. It shouldn’t be happening in this day and age.“
There are two sides to the border issue and they myth of pitiful workers unjustly persecuted by nativists must be tempered by the reality of powerful Latin American crime groups importing their lawlessness to our streets.