‘Things happened so fast’

Harvey Duro emerged from his office and headed toward Harvey Lane, a road he named after himself.

Stopping at a picnic table in the shade, Duro, 60, lit a cigarette and surveyed the sprawling desert shantytown before him.

There it stood: row upon row of densely packed trailers, restaurants, a grocery store, a self-service laundry, used-car lots and even a church. A fierce sun beat down on the stark, dun-colored kingdom.

“When I look at this place, it amazes me that things happened so fast,” said Duro, sounding like a proud but harried parent. “It’s like a dream, but now it’s crazy with all these people chasing me.”

Those chasing him, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the U.S. attorney’s office, say Duro is running a dangerous slum disguised as a business that imperils the lives and health of more than 4,000 tenants. Though the park isn’t far from Palm Springs, it seems an utterly different world.

The government calls it “indecent,” “offensive” and “intolerable.” Officials are asking a federal judge to force Duro, a former chairman of the Torres Martinez tribe, to make immediate repairs or be shut down. A hearing is scheduled in December.

The publicity-shy Duro agreed to an interview because after years of threats, he thinks the government might be serious this time.

“He has been given many, many chances, and he ignored them,” said James Fletcher, superintendent for the Bureau of Indian Affairs for Southern California. “We offered him technical assistance and help through a guaranteed Indian loan program. We have given him three years to pull it together, and he blew us off. Now that he sees the writing on the wall, he is interested in talking.”

A story by The Times in March detailed the lives of residents and the conditions they lived in at Duroville and other trailer parks on the Torres Martinez Reservation, where local health and safety standards don’t apply.

Park officials say the reports are exaggerated. Duro has filed a lawsuit against Fletcher alleging he has been unfairly targeted.

“James Fletcher is working for the Man, and the Man is not on the side of Native Americans,” said Alan Singer, a spokesman for Duro who has accused the BIA of racism against Indians and Latinos.

Before running the park, Duro worked for the city of Banning’s Water Utility Department. In 1999, when Riverside County began cracking down on illegal trailer parks in the Coachella Valley, he looked around his patch of barren land and had an idea.

“I saw dollar signs in my head,” he said. “I had 40 acres, my trailer and a well and said, ‘Why not do a trailer park here?’ ”

After other park owners on the reservation assured him the business was a gold mine, he flung open the gates and thousands of low-wage, mostly Latino, farmworkers flooded in, dilapidated trailers in tow.

He christened it Desert Mobile Home Park but it became better known as Duroville. All the dirt roads were named for his family members.

But Duro had no experience running a trailer park, and now scores of desperate people were sitting on his land without services or infrastructure. Electricity, water and trash pickup were sporadic or nonexistent.

“I was a little overwhelmed at first,” he said. “No one ever came forward to tell me what to do or how to do it; otherwise I wouldn’t be in the spot I’m in today.”

There have been improvements, but the BIA says many of the old problems persist, compounded by illegal dumping and fires spewing toxic fumes from a closed but still menacing dump next door.

Duro, a Vietnam vet, seems baffled by his predicament. He lives in the park, he said, so how bad can it be? He said he even turned down a $3-million offer for his land from a La Quinta businessman.

“If the BIA thought this place was so dangerous they would be in here tomorrow with an order to shut it down,” said Duro, who sports a black headband, black shirt and has two cellphones dangling from a cord around his neck.

Presented with the litany of health and safety issues cited in a recent BIA report -- including poor water quality, trailers too close together, jury-rigged electrical systems, raw sewage under trailers, fire hazards and possible disease-carrying rodents -- Duro dismissed them.

The trailers aren’t too close, he said. The sewage on the ground is simply water from evaporative coolers. And the water is perfectly safe to drink.

Rodents and flies, he said, are part of life in the desert.

When asked why he took so long to put a fence around a large sewage pond, Duro thought a moment.

“We didn’t fence the sewage pond because we didn’t think we had to,” he said. “People said, ‘You need to fence that because someone will fall in,’ and we said, ‘Yeah, that makes sense,’ and we put up a fence.”

The BIA said Duro delays making repairs until absolutely necessary. In 2003 he was ordered by a federal court to make improvements to water, sewage and electricity -- improvements the BIA said he never made.

“I’m not trained to do this,” Duro said. “I created something here but not with the intent of hurting anyone. Leave us alone and we will make improvements. It won’t look like Palm Springs, but it will be adequate.”

He even offered to sit down with Fletcher to “smoke the peace pipe.”

It may be too late for that.

“The U.S. attorney has the ball and is running with it,” Fletcher said. “I don’t think I could stop it if I wanted to.”

But Duro is making changes.

After a fire in May torched six trailers and caused the evacuation of 120 families, the park has tried to spread out the mobile homes and decrease their numbers. Bulldozers are removing three junkyards close to the trailers. Park manager Jack Gradias said the space was to be filled with grass and trees.

Park streets are being made one-way. Parking regulations will be enforced to allow room for firetrucks. Rodent traps are being set out, and dozens of stray dogs will be rounded up to be returned to owners or taken to the pound. Tenants have been told to maintain trailers so they are not eyesores.

“We had a meeting with the tenants and told them if they want this place to stay open they have to do their part and keep up their property,” Gradias said.

Rumors of an imminent shutdown have unsettled park residents, causing many to stop paying rent, which is about $275 a month. Duro said his tenants owed him $300,000 in rent.

Many tenants are Purepecha Indians from the Mexican state of Michoacan. Many speak neither Spanish nor English and are often poorer and more isolated than other Mexican immigrants.

“I have heard rumors that they are closing,” said Veronica Felipe, 17, a Purepecha, walking through the park with her 2-year-old daughter.

“If they did we would have no other place to go.”

Not far away, two Purepecha men prepared a basket of prickly pear cactus for dinner, gently cutting away their spines.

“If they close I would have to go to the city or find a place on a ranch,” said Pedro Estaban Poza, who said he was seventysomething. “So far I am comfortable here.”

As for Duro, he said if the park closes he has one last option. “I’ll go look for that guy in La Quinta with the $3 million,” he said.

david.kelly@latimes.com