Prostitution Protesters Picket 5 Motels on Sepulveda Boulevard

Ten protesters, carrying signs linking prostitution to the deadly disease AIDS, marched Friday in front of five Sepulveda Boulevard motels that they say cater to prostitutes.

“They are allowing the prostitutes to use their rooms to do their thing,” said Dennis Kovarik, who owns a flower shop near the area of the protest, north of Nordhoff Street.

“That’s completely false,” said a man who answered the telephone at the Vagabond Motel, one of those that were picketed. The man, who would not give his name, and representatives of two other Sepulveda Boulevard motels contacted by The Times, said they do not intentionally rent rooms to prostitutes or their patrons.

“How do you tell which one is a prostitute and which one is not?” the man at the Vagabond Motel said.

Continued Complaints

Prostitution along Sepulveda Boulevard in Sepulveda and Van Nuys has been the source of continued complaints from Kovarik, other business people and residents of the area.

An analysis by the Los Angeles Police Department’s Devonshire Division found that about 500 arrests, mostly for drug dealing, had taken place in 12 motels along Sepulveda Boulevard between Roscoe Boulevard and Lassen Street during an 18-month period in 1985 and 1986, Sgt. Paul Haberman said. The five motels where the pickets marched Friday were among the 12, he said.

Uniformed and undercover officers watched the protest closely. No apparent prostitutes or patrons appeared at the motels while the pickets marched.

Meeting With Police

Police met with a group of 30 motel operators last week and threatened to close motels that are the site of repeated prostitution, said Capt. Tim McBride, head of the Devonshire Division patrol force.

“They said, ‘We don’t know what a prostitute looks like and what a drug dealer is,’ and we said, ‘We think you do know,’ ” McBride said.

McBride said vice investigators are gathering evidence against four of the most notorious motels, which he would not name, so that police can take legal action to close them if illegal activity continues.

Police believe the efforts of a 12-man task force have moved much of the prostitution, which police said is closely related to drug trafficking, from the street into the motels, Haberman said.

But Bernice Johnson, 56, of Sepulveda, one of the picketers, said she looked out her kitchen window one morning three weeks ago and saw a man and a woman engaged in sexual intercourse on a mattress in a nearby vacant lot.

Drop in Property Values

Johnson, a real estate agent, complained that prostitution has diminished property values in the area.

The AIDS signs, written in Spanish and English, were meant to discourage men from consorting with prostitutes, said Lisa Dunn, executive director of the Panorama City-Sepulveda Chamber of Commerce, which helped organize the march.

A federal study released last week reported that 11.7% of 835 female prostitutes tested in seven areas of the United States had been exposed to the virus that causes AIDS, acquired immune deficiency syndrome. The study’s authors noted that the extent of infection varied widely among the cities studied. In the Los Angeles area, eight of 184 prostitutes tested, or 4.3%, were infected.