Grandmother at Hub of Suit on Cocaine Trade

To police and some residents of east Wilmington, Ione Horsley is “Grandma”--the matriarch of the impoverished community’s most flourishing enterprise.

For about two years, the 70-year-old widow’s beige-and-brown stucco home on East O Street has been the hub of the harbor area’s bustling crack cocaine trade, police say. Since January, they have made 47 drug arrests at the house and 286 others on drug and related charges in the three-block neighborhood surrounding it.

“It is an ongoing hot spot for drug trafficking, and people from all over know it,” said Norm Mikkelson, a narcotics detective for the Los Angeles Police Department. “We get people from Long Beach, Manhattan Beach, Palos Verdes--all over the South Bay--coming here.”

In September, when police arrested Horsley for allegedly selling the crystallized drug at her home, they found several rocks of cocaine and $476 stuffed in her purse, $1,771 in a bedroom dresser, $1,500 in a car parked outside and a stash of rock cocaine behind a sofa in the living room, authorities said.

Eviction Threatened

Later, while booking her at the police station, police discovered $200 that she had concealed in her undergarments. She is scheduled to appear in court this month on the criminal charge.

She is also the target of an unusual civil action in which the Los Angeles city attorney has obtained a temporary restraining order requiring her and her relatives to cease drug trafficking at the home or face eviction and possible loss of the house.

The mother of 13, the grandmother of dozens (she says she stopped counting 10 years ago when she had 63), Horsley acknowledges that drugs are a way of life on East O Street. She says she watches from her living room window and her front stoop as dozens of pushers--many of them teen-agers--deal thousands of dollars in cocaine day and night from the sidewalk and her front yard.

But Horsley, who has lived in the house for 18 years, denies that she and her family have been involved in the drug traffic. She describes herself as a victim of a neighborhood taken hostage by drug dealers. She says the pushers have tried to tear down the chain-link fence around her front yard and that they sell drugs from the yard despite her protests and “no trespassing” signs.

“I stand here all night trying to get them out of the yard,” she said in an interview Monday outside the house. “When the police come, they all run in the yard and the house. I should have locked the door, but I don’t know why I didn’t.”

Horsley, her hair wrapped in a blue bandanna and her brow deeply creased, said she never uses or sells drugs and was unable to explain how cocaine allegedly got in her purse. She said the cocaine and money police found in her house were hidden there by dealers trying to elude the police. The money stuffed in her purse and in her underwear was for her mortgage payment and for a bill she owed for remodeling her kitchen, she said.

“I don’t know why people are so mean to me,” she said, her voice growing softer. “I have been nice to people ever since I lived here. I just don’t know why they pick on me.”

Many of her neighbors say, however, that they are the victims--not Horsley. Last month, seven of them submitted written declarations to the city attorney that described the terror they say has reigned in the neighborhood because of drug trafficking from her home.

“They complained about their children being approached to buy crack, about the constant violence, the traffic and noise,” said Deputy City Atty. Pamela Albers, who collected the declarations after meeting with about 15 residents. “The neighbors say you can walk down there any time of day or night and there are boys, 14 or 15 years old, that will ask you if you want to buy a 20”--a $20 rock of cocaine.

Last week, at Albers’ request, Superior Court Judge Warren Deering issued a temporary restraining order against Horsley and seven of her relatives who listed her home as their address when arrested--and anyone else who might live there--ordering them to stop selling drugs.

City Atty. James Hahn said it is only the second time a civil order has been obtained in California aimed at stopping narcotics sales at a private residence. In September, a similar order was issued against a house in East Los Angeles owned by an elderly couple. Hahn, who expects to file more such civil cases, said traditional law enforcement hasn’t been enough to curtail drug dealing in some of the city’s toughest neighborhoods.

“The idea of closing down a house and evicting residents is a Draconian measure, and we have to be careful it is not abused,” Hahn said. “But here, we have a long history of criminal activity, and in such cases Draconian measures are justified. . . .

“It is a myth that rock houses always (involve) temporary people who come and go fast,” he continued. “The Police Department and Wilmington residents have established a longtime pattern of systematic and organized rock cocaine dealing from that home. The residents in the neighborhood finally have had enough and are asking for some kind of action.”

Police, frustrated by the seemingly endless supply of buyers and sellers who flock to the Wilmington neighborhood despite hundreds of arrests, also welcomed the lawsuit.

“The people in the neighborhood and the police are sick and tired of these customers, the shootings and people not being able to sleep at night,” Mikkelson said. “We need to use every means that is available to us.”

Mikkelson said police find it difficult to keep up with enforcement because many of the people they arrest are back on the street days later as they wait for their cases to work through the courts.

Although Horsley has been arrested only once, police and city officials discounted her version of events, saying she seems to be in the thick of things whenever there is trouble at her home. Horsley managed to elude the police for the most part because dealers working from the house have a sophisticated network of walkie-talkies that they use to alert each other when police officers enter the neighborhood, Albers said.

“She has put the house up for security on bail in a number situations,” Albers said. “On two of the arrests at her house, there have been weapons found, including a .38-caliber gun in a hamper.”

Horsley, who was looking for an attorney to represent her in the lawsuit, said some neighbors have assured her that they will testify on her behalf. In the meantime, she said, she will pack her things, move to Long Beach to live with her daughter and put her house up for rent.

“The judge said it would be a good thing to move,” she said. “People are telling a lot of lies about me. It is hurting. I have to do something to protect my rights.”

Hahn said police officers will patrol East O Street and report any violations of the court order to his office. If Horsley and the others are found in contempt of court, they could each face a maximum penalty of six months in jail and a $1,000 fine.

“I don’t want to give the impression that we would be putting a poor old person out of her house,” Hahn said. “There was $5,000 in cash seized there.”