Group Wins 1st Battle--Liquor License Lifted

Ask a policeman. Or a prosecutor. Or one of the residents who has been forced to shop there silce the grocery chains started moving out.

Liquor stores in South-Central Los Angeles often mean trouble: purse snatching, assaults, gambling, drug dealing on a massive scale.

And South-Central Los Angeles has a lot of liquor stores--934 of them, more than the entire state of Pennsylvania, according to a tally published about 18 months ago.

As of today, that total probably has not changed much, according to Deputy City Atty. Earl E. Thomas. But as of Saturday, it will have dropped by at least one, thanks in large part to the South Central Organizing Committee.

License Revoked

Thomas; his former boss, Ira Reiner--who has since been elected Los Angeles County district attorney--representatives of the Los Angeles Police Department, and spokesmen for the South Central Organizing Committee gathered in front Moore’s Wine and Spirits Jr. Market on West Adams Boulevard on Monday morning to announce that through their joint efforts, the store’s liquor license has been revoked.

“There has been an extensive amount of surveillance of the parking lot here by undercover Los Angeles police officers,” Thomas told reporters at a sidewalk news conference.

“Over a period of about a year, we learned that drugs were sold throughout the day, seven days a week,” he said. “There was other criminal activity. . . . An administrative law judge in Los Angeles (Rosalyn Chapman) decided that the revocation was warranted.”

It is the first license revocation and one of the biggest victories yet for the South Central Organizing Committee, a grass-roots group begun six years ago by a handful of local Catholic priests, nuns and lay people in an effort “to begin to finally address some of the questions which were asked, but never answered, in the aftermath of the (1965) Watts riots.”

Studying the efforts of successful organizations in other cities with similar goals--and augmenting the original Anglo-Latino, Catholic membership with a solid representation from local black, Protestant congregations--the South Central Organizing Committee began applying pressure to local businessmen, politicians, law enforcement officials and bureaucrats, demanding action to clean up South-Central Los Angeles.

In 1983, after listening to the committee’s complaints about liquor store-related crime, the Los Angeles City Council instructed its staff to cooperate with police and the city attorney’s office in looking into the matter.

Reiner, who was city attorney at the time, said he believed that the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control had “dragged its feet” in attacking the problem. He said he assigned Thomas and others to the case and worked closely with police, who filmed and recorded activities in and around the Adams Boulevard store, which the committee had earmarked as the first of 10 liquor stores in the area it hoped to close.

Assembling the evidence, Reiner said, “we discovered we could get around the ABC and file directly with an administrative law judge, which is what we did.”

Order Issued

Hearings before Chapman were held in January, and on March 28, she issued her license-revocation order, which will become effective Saturday.

Daniel Espinoza, an ABC deputy director in Sacramento, denied that the department had dragged its feet.

“These are difficult cases to prove, because you have to prove there is a nexus, a connection--you have to show the licensee is aware of the activity,” Espinoza said.

He said his department has limited investigative sources to gather such evidence, with fewer personnel statewide than the Los Angeles Police Department has in each of its 18 divisions.

No charges have been filed against Freddie Moore, proprietor of the store, or his business organization, Freddie Moore Enterprises, the licensee at the store.