Steel Doors and Bogus Signs on the Wall Fooled None of Rock House’s Neighbors

The East Side Social Club was a cheap, modern-day speak-easy a short drive south from downtown. Everybody in the neighborhood knew the place, from the kids who play on the sidewalk out front to the old people who remember when it dispensed shoeshines instead of cocaine.

The Los Angeles Police Department raided it Tuesday night and arrested 22 men and 10 women inside. It took a police battering ram and sledgehammers to punch through the three layers of steel doors that protected its proprietors and clientele.

“Toughest rock house I ever worked on,” said Chick Daniels, who drives the battering ram.

LAPD narcotics Lt. William Costleigh said Wednesday that the storefront, a boarded up old building with no sign, was the most heavily fortified rock house police have ever found, and was one of only a few such places known not only to dispense cocaine, but provide a secure place for buyers to smoke it.

Those arrested were booked on charges that included suspicion of possession of cocaine and being in a place where narcotics are used, he said.

A Messy Scene

The place was a shambles Wednesday morning. And, with its filthy old sofas, cement floors and plywood anterooms, it clearly had never been pretty. Empty bottles of cheap wine with labels like Wild Irish Rose and Night Train Express lay on the floor. A book of food stamps, a welfare notice, and a court notice setting an arraignment for a petty theft were scattered on a stained table.

There were three carefully hand-lettered signs taped to the walls that police speculate were either a joke or an attempt to make the place seem legitimate in case of a raid.

“The East Side Social Club Rules,” said one. “No drugs, no gambling, no profane language, no physical abuse, no weapons, no standing, and no loud talking.” Another reminded that only “members” were allowed entrance. Membership cost $10 a year, $7 for “ladys” (sic).

One young black woman standing outside said she had patronized the place and had friends arrested in the raid. She described it as a flophouse for young black women and old black wino men who had no place to sleep. “Didn’t let no Spanish in,” she said, scattering a group of young Latino children who had gathered outside.

She described the heavily screened little room from which the dealer handed out the cocaine as the “teller’s cage.”

The cage was a tiny cubicle protected by two heavy steel doors. The “teller’s” identity was hidden by a one-way mirror covered by a steel grate. The cubicle was next to a toilet where, police said, they found an ounce of rock cocaine they estimated to be worth $500. Brown said the more than one-minute delay it took to get into the building gave the suspected dealer time to leave his cubicle and mingle with the patrons.

Doubts Over a Name

A sign over the cage read: “East Side Social Club, James Ramond, president.”

“Old Boom Boom Ramond, he not the president of anything,” said Mary McCrosky, who lives upstairs. “Old Boom Boom, he dead. That man died in what, Myrtle? 83? 84?”

Her landlady, Myrtle Baker, 85, who said she bought the old building with her late husband in 1970, said Ramond had given shoeshines in the old storefront.

She said the old shoeshine man died while she was in the hospital with a broken leg. When she got out, she said, the apartment had been rented to someone she knew only as “Mr. Davis,” who paid his $300-a-month rent in cash and told her he ran a “rehab center.”

Asked if she knew a drug operation was using her building, she answered: “You lose your husband. You’re alone. You get your leg broke and you can’t walk. The only thing left is to try not to think evil things of no man.”

However, even a beer truck driver making deliveries to a neighborhood store said the operation had been widely known.

“Everybody knew the dope house,” said a 13-year-old girl named Tammy, who added that people came out of there “all piped out. My mama told me to stay away from the dope house.”

Someone had scribbled a single sentence on a piece of new plywood covering up the hole left by the battering ram on Wednesday.

“They got the spot,” it read.

But, the kids in the neighborhood will tell you, they didn’t get all the spots. There are more, they say, each one pointing in different directions.

But, they added, drugs were almost as easy to get on the street as in the dope house. Tammy’s brother, Timothy, 11, said he bounced his ball instead against a safer wall where young men “be smokin’ Sherm (PCP) all the time.”