THE PIT : It’s the...

In a span of 10 minutes and three blocks in “The Pit,” beat cop Tim Plaster encountered dope dealers hustling customers, a prostitute having sex with a “trick,” a drunken woman sleeping under a car, a vagrant screaming that someone just tried to kill him.

“That’s the way it is down here,” said Plaster, who has spent nearly all of his 14 1/2 years with the Police Department on foot patrol in Los Angeles’ Skid Row. “It never changes.”

The Pit, as 5th Street is commonly called by its inhabitants, is the toughest turf in Skid Row--a place where violence, drunkenness and filth, but especially violence, are so pervasive that the homeless inhabitants accept it as routine.

Such Is Life

For the men and women of The Pit, benumbed by mayhem, booze and squalor, warnings that a serial killer has murdered six transients, shooting them in the head as they slept, count for little. Such is life on these mean streets.

Besides, this serial killer is not the first to prowl among the estimated 15,000 homeless on Skid Row and elsewhere downtown. In 1974-75, the Skid Row Slasher killed nine people; Vaughn Greenwood was found guilty of eight of the slayings. Four years later, the Skid Row Stabber claimed 10 lives; Bobby Joe Maxwell was convicted of two murders.

“These people have seen a lot worse,” said Jesus Leyvas, 60, a recovered alcoholic who has spent most of his adult life in prison or on Skid Row. “I’ve seen something--a dead body or somebody drunk or somebody getting robbed--on every street corner around here.”

Bellicose Prostitute

“I ain’t afraid of no (jerk) with a gun,” bellowed one prostitute on Main Street. “I’ll show ‘em. I will. Don’t mess with me, darling. . . .”

Said an unemployed carpenter: “Let me tell you--there are a lot meaner dudes than this punk shooting lonely souls at night.”

The Pit and the 50 square blocks that make up Skid Row have among the highest rates of narcotics violations, street robberies, assaults, purse snatchings and possession of illegal weapons in Los Angeles, police statistics show.

There’s only one place to go from The Pit and that’s up. But few of its habitues do. Instead, they mostly go from doorway to doorway and sometimes they can’t even do that. The Golden Gate Cafe on 5th Street near Los Angeles Street, for example, has sprinklers above the entrance that are used several times a day to drench those loitering in the doorway.

The stench of urine and rotting garbage is everywhere. With no public restrooms in the area, men and women are left to squat in alleys or defecate in their clothes.

Brown bags hiding “short dogs”--street lingo for $1.25 bottles of Thunderbird and Night Train Special wines--litter the sidewalks and gutters, left behind by winos in search of more to drink. Those drunks unable to move sprawl on the sidewalk.

Men and women, most wearing several layers of dirt-encrusted clothes, plead for jobs at some of the flourishing toy stores in the area. If they can’t get a job, they will try to steal a box of merchandise that will buy a meal or drugs. If nothing else, they will snatch wooden crates for a fire or a cardboard box for shelter.

Preoccupied With Survival

Just surviving is the round-the-clock preoccupation of those in The Pit, and it requires street cunning and bravado. With it, few will be challenged in the constant scheming for money or drugs. Without it, one could become easy prey in minutes.

“You don’t want to show a weakness,” Plaster said. “If the muggers think they can get an edge on you, they’ll take it. They’re like dogs that smell blood. They’ll go for the throat.”

On a recent evening, Gustavo Mora’s weakness was smiling at a girl.

Mora, a transient from Texas, was on his way to a bus stop with he encountered a girl who returned his smile. Unable to speak fluent English, he hesitated to speak, but he continued to smile at her. She lulled him into an brief exchange of broken English and hand gestures.

Then, without warning, two men jumped Mora from behind and beat him. They disappeared behind some office buildings with his wallet, which he said had $300 in it.

“I guess I was an easy mark,” Mora said. “I shouldn’t have had that much money on me. . . .”

The Pit is virtually on the doorstep of the Police Department. The Central Division station house is on 6th Street near Maple Street. The homeless sleep on and around the block walls that surround the fortress-like police station. Drug dealers amiably chat with parking enforcement officers. Prostitutes occasionally flirt with officers in passing patrol cars.

While the police know they hardly dent the crime rate of The Pit, they never stop trying. Some of the best officers in the division patrol the area on foot “to show the colors, to let the locals know we mean business,” Sgt. Steve Twohy said.

Childhood Experience

One of them is Plaster, 41, called “Red” in the street because of his ruddy complexion. He knows a lot about The Pit, dating back to his childhood when he spent countless hours exploring downtown while his mother worked at the downtown Robinson’s department store in the 1950s and ‘60s.

“When I worked for Xerox, (after high school) of all the places they could have sent me to work,” he recalled, “they sent me downtown. When I became a policeman, of all the places they could have sent me--they sent me downtown. But this is where it’s at. The Pit.”

In his almost 15 years on Skid Row, Plaster has been chased, shot at, stabbed and spit upon. Several years ago, he said, he was unaware that he had been stabbed during a brawl with a knife-wielding transient. “After it was over, I saw all this blood and I then realized that the knife went through my belt,” the 6-foot 2-inch, 220-pound patrolman said.

“You do have to watch yourself down here. I deal with the baddest of the bad.”

As he patrols 5th Street, Plaster pokes his head into the grimmest of places. “How are you?” he calls out in a disarming tone of voice to the crowd in the Plantation Club. “You having a good day?”

Most of the patrons don’t look up from their beer. Despite the soft voice, they know that Plaster will come down hard on them if he has to. He strolls around the bar’s pool tables, occasionally glancing over his shoulder. After 10 minutes Plaster leaves, concluding that the bar and its “don’t-tread-on-me” atmosphere was not likely to explode soon.

Methodical Patrol

The procedure is repeated in every liquor store, movie house and street corner by the officer. “Haven’t I seen you before?” is a frequent Plaster query.

“You got the wrong information,” he was told in many of these Skid Row interrogations. “Not me, Red. I ain’t done nothing wrong--in the last 10 minutes. . . .”

Plaster grins at such explanations. “Let’s see if we can stay out of trouble,” he says.

“It’s the same thing over and over,” the veteran officer observed at the end of one shift last week. “There are very few success stories in Skid Row. These are just people with no place to go.”

Jesus Leyvas and Miguel Ybarra go into The Pit each day, too. And they share Plaster’s view of that squalid world.

Leyvas and Ybarra--both recovered alcoholics who used to live in The Pit--run a “civilian assistance patrol” for People in Progress Inc., a nonprofit organization that offers a detoxification program and sobriety counseling.

Six days a week, the two climb into their station wagon--dubbed the “boozer cruiser” by the winos--and drive around The Pit, offering a ride to a detox center or an encouraging word to destitute winos.

Familiar Group

They pick up a familiar group of drunks everyday--”Oscar,” a destitute Vietnam veteran; Vivian Sanchez, a bad-tempered woman known on Skid Row as the “Queen of 7th Street;” Robert Saldana, a middle-aged East Los Angeles native who breaks down in tears when reminded by the two men that he may die in Skid Row.

Many of the riders reek of alcohol and of the streets. Leyvas and Ybarra carry Lysol and personal pesticide.

They say they don’t preach to the transients about sobriety. They merely remind them that The Pit will be the death of them unless they stop drinking. Few listen. Most either cry and curse at the prediction.

“It’s tough, but most of them don’t care,” said Leyvas, a husky, 60-year-old ex-convict who said he spent many years on downtown’s toughest streets. “You talk about sobriety and they say, ‘Sure.’ But they wanted it yesterday. They’re very impatient.”

Bette Ripp, director of the boozer cruiser program, estimated that the wagon picks up as many as 1,000 winos in The Pit each month. Authorities estimate that number is only 25% of all the inebriates picked up by police paddy wagons monthly in Skid Row.

The service is voluntary and no drunk, regardless of how intoxicated, can be forced to go to the detox center. But Leyvas and Ybarra, however, wish that they could force them, especially when they see friends sprawled out, victimized by a mugging or booze.

Drunk on Sidewalk

“ Orale, Clemente, vamos a detox?” cried out Ybarra, 40, to a Latino man clad in two soiled overcoats who was passed out on the sidewalk on Los Angeles Street. Ybarra repeated the question--”Want to go to detox?”-- several times but “Clemente” hardly muttered a reply. Ybarra left him where he was.

Later that same day, Ybarra gently scolded a transient from Mexico after he found him beaten and robbed--as well as being drunk--on Main Street. The man, who could no longer walk because of malnutrition, is a frequent rider in the boozer cruiser.

“Why do you keep hanging around here?” Ybarra asked in Spanish. “What for? You can’t even walk. If you have to drink, at least go some place where they won’t beat you up.”

The boozer cruiser took him to a day shelter operated by the St. Vincent de Paul Society and later to the Union Rescue Mission on Main Street. Officials at both places did what they could for Fernandez, but he is seen later in the place where he was found by Ybarra.

“Remember what I told you,” Ybarra called out as the wagon cruised by. “No more . . . no more” was the reply.

But Ybarra and Leyvas shook their heads. They knew they would run into him again.