Heartbreak Motel : Officials Intensify Campaign to Close the Atlantis in Cudahy

It sits along Atlantic Boulevard in an area where police say prostitutes ply their trade for anything from $40 to three cans of beer and a $15 IOU.

The Atlantis Motel consists of two stories of dirt-encrusted, broken-down rooms that stink of frying grease. Most of the tenants have lived there for months, sometimes years, signing over their welfare checks to the manager to cover the $150 average weekly rate.

Many are on drugs, police say. Almost all have small children who play in the parking lot and are sometimes spotted bathing in the swimming pool, which reeks of urine and too much chlorine.

The Atlantis has been around Cudahy for 25 years, and every year, according to residents, business people and city officials, it becomes a bigger sore spot on a busy street lined with some of the town’s most established businesses. Business people say they can’t remember a time when the Atlantis was a decent low-budget motel where truckers or traveling businessmen, seeking clean rooms and color televisions, came for the night. Instead, they say, it is a place where drug deals are made from room windows and prostitutes hook with their children in tow.

“Our customers can’t even walk down the street without being propositioned or asked if they want to buy drugs,” said one businessman.

The Atlantis, acting City Manager Jack Joseph said, is nothing more than “a blot on the city.”

Area business people and even some tenants say the only thing that will straighten out the old motel is a bulldozer.

“This place is basically a dump,” said one tenant. “The best thing that could happen would be to knock it down.”

Over the last few months the city, with help from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, has launched a feverish campaign to wipe the Atlantis Motel from Cudahy’s streets.

Officials have tramped through the security gates innumerable times in the last few months for building inspections, fire inspections and Health Department inspections. Cudahy building inspector Daniel Pulone said inspectors from his office visit the Atlantis about twice a week, noting code violations.

With long lists of violations from the county Department of Health Services and county Fire Department, the city is building an arsenal of evidence it plans to use to file suit against the owner in an effort to have the motel declared a public nuisance and closed. The city recently changed the curb marking in front of the motel from a temporary no-parking zone to a no-parking zone in an administrative attempt to stop drive-up drug transactions and prostitution.

If the paper work onslaught fails to shut or clean up the Atlantis, city officials say they hope law enforcement will succeed. Sheriff’s deputies have spent 263.3 hours in two months just responding to calls at the Atlantis Motel, Lt. Dennis Dahlman said. Dahlman said 36 arrests for prostitution have been made and there have been an unknown number of arrests for drugs.

“It’s a major problem,” Dahlman said. “But we are not going to give up by any stretch of the imagination. We’re going to keep pounding on them and pursue every avenue to get it closed down.”

Shutting the Atlantis Motel for good may not be easy, city officials said. Although the motel has a long history of violations, inspectors said, violations are corrected within deadlines.

“They do just the minimum to keep us from shutting them down,” Pulone said.

It has been a frustrating experience for city officials, who insist that the place is nothing more than a haven for drug dealers, vandals and prostitutes. One walk through the place, they say, tells the story.

Room 106 of the Atlantis Motel is the room inspector Pulone says is least likely to win the Good Housekeeping award. The door has been broken off its hinges and rests precariously against the frame. Inside, a double bed with a stained mattress dominates the room. There is trash everywhere--on the floor, piled on the kitchen table, crammed into cracks of ripped furniture. The curtains are tattered and faded green. The carpet is brown. Everything is covered with grime.

This is the room from which deputies say many of the drug sales occur. They have arrested one of the women who lives there at least twice on suspicion of possessing and selling cocaine. Just last Wednesday, Patricia Hession, 31, was arrested after a sheriff’s deputy found a pipe he said was used to smoke cocaine in her room.

Upstairs, in cramped Room 209, 19-year-old Becky Sanchez tries to clean up after her two infant children. She lives in the $190-a-week room with her uncle, a friend and her children. She wants to get out, she said, but has to stay home with her children and can’t save any money for first and last week rent deposit on an apartment. Her brother, she said, pays for everything.

Down the hall, eight people live in Room 206. There are mattresses stacked against the wall in the bedroom and two cots in each corner of the bedroom. Sisters Carol San, 25, and Marcy San, 19, say they live there because, like Sanchez, they can’t save the money to move out.

“We can’t pay rent and save at the same time,” Marcy San said.

Both say they hate being forced to live at the Atlantis because of its bad reputation, but they say: “Not everybody that lives here does drugs. We don’t mess with that stuff, but people think because we live here, we do.”

Almost everyone blames the condition of the motel on manager James Wu and owner Jau Huang.

“The manager doesn’t care about us,” tenant Sandra Shaw said, plopping down on the bed. “There are drug deals going on at all hours of the night, screaming. We can’t even call 911 because we don’t have a phone in the room and we are too afraid to go out.”

Although Huang has owned the motel only since May, 1988, inspector Pulone says he has made no effort to clean it up and, in fact, has let it become more squalid. Pulone said Huang told him he bought the place sight unseen for $1.5 million. Huang is listed on a business card as vice chairman of Radisson Plaza Hotel South Bay, which is scheduled to open in July in Carson. According to building permits, Huang is vice president of Wei-Chuan Construction, the Monterey Park company now building the Radisson Plaza.

Huang, who lives in San Marino, is now in Taiwan, Wu said. Representatives from Wei-Chuan construction refused to comment on the condition of the Atlantis Motel, saying it is Huang’s private business, not theirs. However, Wei-Chuan Construction pays the water bills, according to city records.

Wu blamed the motel’s problems on the tenants.

“We paint in the afternoon, they writing by the next morning,” Wu said. “Who can handle? I cannot handle.”

Wu, who had a pile of eviction notices on his desk, said he has tried to evict unruly tenants, but added: “They don’t want to leave.”

Pulone is not sympathetic. If Wu can’t get rid of unruly tenants, somebody else should, he said.

“You know who I really feel sorry for?” he said. “The kids. All those poor little kids.”