Harbor Hills residents bewildered by mystery mailer warning of gang menace.

Karen Reed has lived in the Harbor Hills Housing Project in Lomita for 22 years, raised two daughters there, is close friends with her neighbors and has never worried about gangs or crime.

“We sit out here and talk to our neighbors at night, our kids play in the streets,” Reed said last week as she stood outside her apartment. “You just don’t do that in infested areas.”

So Reed was more than a little surprised when she was handed a copy of a mailer that had recently been distributed in the middle-class neighborhood surrounding Harbor Hills. The mailer warned that gangs were moving into the 300-unit complex, turning it into “a spawning ground and haven for gang-terrorists.”

“Gang-terrorists In Harbor Hills County Housing Project!” its headline screamed. “Rolling Hills, Lomita and Rolling Ranchos Under Siege!”

The mailer, purportedly put out by a group called the Citizens Anti-Terrorist Underground, preached that tax dollars were being used to support “the Crips, the Bloods, and other gangs with low-cost housing while they invade and destroy your neighborhood and your property values.”

” . . . These gangs are GROWING and EXPANDING, overflowing the boundaries of South Central Los Angeles, Wilmington and Harbor City and invading peaceful communities as far away as Iowa!” the mailer continued.

Just who was responsible for the five-page pamphlet is as anonymous as the Manila envelopes in which they were mailed.

Law enforcement agencies in California and Arizona--the mailer carried a Phoenix postmark--said they have never heard of such a group. A single individual could have been behind it, they said.

And just how many mailers were sent out--they were addressed simply to “resident”--is also unknown. Several homeowners on nearby Hillcrest Avenue, a stone’s throw away from the complex, said they received a copy; another woman who lives a few blocks away said she also got one.

“It is hate mail, that’s all it is, hate mail,” said Milton Patterson, who oversees Harbor Hills for the county’s Community Development Commission. “. . . I have no tolerance for it.”

Patterson and Los Angeles Sheriff’s Capt. Dennis Gillard, who heads the Lomita station, said they are unaware of any organized gang activity at Harbor Hills, a sprawling complex that borders Western Avenue in the southernmost part of Lomita.

Although there are gang members who live in or visit the complex, and there have been narcotic busts there, Gillard said that the more violent gang-related activities common in nearby communities such as Harbor City or Wilmington are non-existent at Harbor Hills.

“Within the last year, I think we have had more (gang problems) than in the past,” Gillard said. “But when I say more, we’re only talking a half-dozen or so incidents, and that is certainly very, very minor compared to the frequent daily activities we have elsewhere.”

The mailer prompted only a phone call or two to the Lomita station from residents wondering whether its claims were true. “The phone hasn’t been ringing off the hook. I think a lot of people recognize nonsense when they read it,” he said.

That was the case with one Lomita man, who requested anonymity. He said his mother had received a copy and showed it to him. Neither he nor his mother, who has lived in the neighborhood since 1949 without experiencing any crime problems, were concerned.

“It’s a waste of paper,” he said.

A Lomita woman who received the mailer said she was concerned about the type of people behind the pamphlet.

The mailer urged residents to organize into small groups to fight gangs and to “carry out in secret those activities to combat gang-terrorism that cannot be carried out in mass.” The mailer stopped short of advocating violence.

“It was scary to me, it really was,” said the woman, who also asked that her name not be used. “. . . I’m just as afraid of people like that as I am of the gangs. I think they are gangs.”

At Harbor Hills, about 10 residents interviewed one day last week appeared more bewildered than angered by the mailer’s rhetoric.

Katria Newsome, who was visiting her aunt at the complex, said that compared to the South-Central Los Angeles housing project where some of her relatives live and where she dreads to visit, Harbor Hills feels like a sanctuary from gangs and criminal activities.

“These are the quietest projects I have ever seen,” she said as she tended to her two small children. “These are like apartments.”

Said Edna Young, who has lived at Harbor Hills for more than 30 years and raised five children there, “It’s been really good in this project, thank God.”