Landlord Leads Anti-Pusher ‘Jungle’ Warfare

Eric Crumpton is what you call an activist landlord. When drugs and gangs threaten your investment, you don’t just sit in an office somewhere, collecting rent, he says. Get out there and change things.

Sure, there are problems in the Jungle, the Crenshaw-area community where he owns eight buildings and leads a group of more than 80 landlords and tenants. “But we’re actively trying to do something about them.”

A tall, dark man with the affability of a politician, Crumpton is eager to show you what he means. He bundles you into his Mercedes for a hectic tour of the troubled neighborhood, pointing to the signs of progress.

“This,” he says, standing at the corner of August Street and Stevely Avenue, “used to be the epicenter of drug activity in the area. You couldn’t even drive down the street because there were 30 guys here selling rock cocaine.” On this day, there wasn’t a drug dealer in sight.

The strategy of the landlords and tenants in the Crenshaw Apartment Improvement Program is simple. Get the pushers out, at all costs. “I’ve been going belly to belly with them,” said Crumpton, the president of the organization.

In his own buildings, Crumpton has hit them with eviction proceedings, encouraged police raids and, when all else failed, bought them out.

“I paid one guy $1,200,” he said. “He knew as well as I did that he wasn’t going to get out any other way.”

Sometimes, as in a real jungle, you literally hack out a space. Crumpton has taken to removing some of the palms from his property, thinning out the vegetation. “Because they grow so dense,” he said, “people can hide drugs in them.”

“He’s a good man,” Capt. Nick Salicos, Southwest Division patrol commander, said of Crumpton. “Through him we’ve been able to reach more of the community.” Crumpton has helped set up a network of building owners to alert police to new concentrations of drug dealers and forcefully spread the word to “naive” landlords to be wary of whom you rent to, Salicos said.

The results of landlord pressure and police enforcement are documentable. Police statistics show that in this neighborhood of 30,000 people, murders were down to five last year from eight in 1986, aggravated assaults down to 157 from 200 and robberies down to 121 from 137. Drug arrests almost doubled in the Jungle during the same period, from 187 to 357.

But the Jungle still has a problem, which isn’t helped by a name that suggests that to live there is to struggle to survive, Crumpton said.

“People call me about an apartment from parts of the city that are really dangerous,” said Crumpton, who is leading a drive to have the neighborhood officially named Baldwin Village. “They ask me if the place is in the Jungle. Then it’s, ‘Well, I don’t know if I want to live there. ‘ “

The “jungle” aspects of the area began whimsically enough 40 years ago, long before the Watts riots and white flight. It was a tropical-style, postwar apartment community. Palms and banana trees jostled for space in tight little patios. Begonias spilled out of alleyways. Young families lolled beside their buildings’ small, apostrophe-shaped pools, listening to balmy breezes rippling through the palm leaves. The neighborhood became known simple as “the Jungle.”

The lush physical aspect hasn’t changed that much for the community. It’s just that decades of intervening social history have changed the meaning of what had been an innocuous sobriquet.

Moreover, Crumpton’s boosterism sounds unreal to some residents. They still see local youngsters haunted by gang violence and drug dealers selling in Jungle alleys. “It’s a chess game,” one resident said. “Once a place gets known as a dope spot, they move to another alley.”

But others sense some progress, said Al Civetta, who lives in one of Crumpton’s buildings. “People aren’t afraid the way they used to be,” said Civetta, standing next to the pool in the patio of a building on Palmyra Road. The building used to be a dealer’s haven.

“Some good tenants all of a sudden decided they wanted to be drug dealers,” Crumpton said. Last year, angry tenants helped the police set up a surveillance operation that led to a raid, and the building has been clean ever since, Civetta said.

Progress in the Jungle comes in small steps, Crumpton said. It’s a matter of money and attitude. “Pockets aren’t as deep here,” he said. “And some people could care less about this community. There’s a fairly transitory tenant base.”

But Crumpton hasn’t a shadow of a doubt that someday people will “thirst to live in” the Jungle.

“It’s a do-able deal,” he said.