Skip to main content

3304 Drew Street was a sophisticated nerve center for one of northeast Los Angeles' most notorious street gangs

3304 Drew Street was a sophisticated nerve center for one of northeast Los Angeles' most notorious street gangs. A 30-ton excavator made quick work of the stucco house Wednesday, turning it to rubble as jubilant officials and somewhat more skeptical neighbors looked on. "This was the 'In-N-Out' for drug sales in this particular neighborhood," City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo said. "People were shot outside the front of this property, it just has been a menace." For more than two decades, the house was inhabited by a powerful family in the Avenues, a multigenerational gang named after the numbered roads crisscrossing the area about six miles northeast of downtown. Ex-residents included matriarch Maria "Chata" Leon, an illegal immigrant who was arrested in 2002 for allegedly selling cocaine, and one of her sons, Danny Leon, who police say carried out a drive-by shooting in February last year. Immediately after the shooting, he pulled an AK-47 on police officers, who shot him dead outside the house. Between 2002 and 2005, police conducted 14 narcotics raids, arrested more than a dozen homicide and other suspects, and confiscated drugs and automatic weapons from the property. "This house served as a terrifying monument which sought to intimidate and control this neighborhood," Delgadillo said.
Two alleged Avenues gang members not connected to the house pleaded not guilty to murdering a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy who was gunned down Aug. 2 in front of his nearby home. Despite its frightening reputation, the house was once a home. The names of several family members – Nicolas, Francisco, Jose – had been written into the poured cement along the footpath and an ornate fitting was still attached to a light switch in the kitchen. The city attorney's office initially targeted the house in 2005 and in November that year a court ordered the residents out. The property was barricaded in January 2007. Local officials reached out to federal law enforcement and immigration agents, sparking an investigation that culminated last year in a federal racketeering indictment and the arrest of more than 70 alleged Avenues gang members and their associates, Deputy City Attorney Nicholas Karno said.
His office has since filed lawsuits against 12 other alleged gang homes in the area, though those properties remain occupied. Several neighbors said the area had improved since the arrests, and new street lights made them feel safer at night.
"In the nighttime, we couldn't even go out," Cecilia Martinez, 28, said as she corralled her chihuahua puppy back toward her home. "Now it's cool." Others watching the excavator noisily chew through the home questioned razing a house in an already tightly populated community. "It hurts my heart," Lidia Martinez, 46, said in Spanish. "There are kids without parents and older people who need a place to live."
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Timothy “Fuzzy” Timms, a 45-year-old member of the Hells Angels Motorcycle club, stood up Monday for his First Amendment right to freedom of expressi

Timothy “Fuzzy” Timms, a 45-year-old member of the Hells Angels Motorcycle club, stood up Monday for his First Amendment right to freedom of expression. Timms, a resident of the San Diego community of South Park, refused to take off a black leather vest with the motorcycle club's “death's head” insignia when he reported for jury duty. He's a big burly man, 5 feet 8 inches, 250 pounds, with a full beard and auburn-colored, shoulder-length hair. At 7:45 a.m., Timms' stance got him booted from the San Diego Superior Court's Hall of Justice by sheriff's deputies, along with another Hells Angel who also refused to remove his insignia vest. Nine hours later, representatives of both the Superior Court and the sheriff's department apologized to Timms and club member Mick Rush for “misunderstanding” an order issued April 24 by Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Fraser. Rush also had been reporting for jury duty. “It all boils down to a misunderstanding of Judge Fraser'
Post a Comment
Read more

Rashawn and Deon Beneby Someone mowed down the brothers, some 15 yards apart, on a grassy strip

''They may have been into drugs but they didn't do anything to harm anybody,'' said their aunt, Cheryl Watkins. ``It was cold-blooded murder to lay them out like that.''Miami-Dade County's 80th and 81st homicides of 2008: Rashawn and Deon Beneby, brothers and suspects in a string of violent robberies, shot dead Thursday afternoon next to the Liberty City middle school they once attended. ''It's cold-blooded, outright killing out there -- and we're not even in the summer yet,'' said the Rev. Richard Dunn, a community activist who lives three blocks away. Witnesses said a group of men were gathered outside an apartment at the Annie Coleman Gardens housing project when the shooting started.Someone mowed down the brothers, some 15 yards apart, on a grassy strip next to the chain-link fence that separates the community from the baseball field at Charles R. Drew Middle School, 1801 NW 60th St. Rashawn was executed -- shot in the head an
2 comments
Read more

Jorge “Rivi” Ayala, Griselda Blanco, aka the Black Widow

Rivi was, for a time, the hit-man of choice for Griselda Blanco, aka the Black Widow. Griselda was the grande dame of the Miami cocaine business, a Colombian mother of three, of impoverished origins, who slaughtered and intimidated her way to the top of a billion-dollar industry. She is a central character in this movie, the most deadly figure in a story in which the bodies are stacked like dominos. Conspicuous by her absence as an interviewee, she is one of the few key survivors of the era whom the film-makers were unable to coax before the lens. “Her release was imminent at that point, as was her deportation. I think she has changed her mind since, because we have been reapproached,” Corben says. contract killer Jorge “Rivi” Ayala, the director of Cocaine Cowboys Billy Corben says: “He told me where there is a body buried in Miami, by the Florida turnpike. It’s all developed now, malls and condominiums. He knows where all the bodies are buried. We told the police. I think he told the
6 comments
Read more