Court Orders Owners to Halt Drug Dealing in Apartment Buildings

A court order was issued Friday to force owners of a row of battered and overcrowded apartment buildings in Atwater to immediately halt drug trafficking in the buildings and to clean up the rundown area.

City Atty. James K. Hahn obtained the order after Los Angeles police made more than 140 arrests for drug-related crimes during a six-month investigation last year at three apartment buildings in the 3400 block of Drew Street.

In the last four years, the city attorney’s office has been working with the Police Department to enforce the state’s Controlled Substances Act, a law that went into effect in 1971 but previously had been little used.

The law allows the city attorney, district attorney or a private citizen to file civil action against anyone with a legal interest in a property consistently used for selling, storing, giving away or manufacturing controlled substances.

Police Officer Efrain Baeza, who led the abatement investigation, said the neighborhood “is known throughout the area and Los Angeles” as a place to buy PCP, cocaine and other narcotics.

“There’s heavy drug dealing, constant drug dealing. It’s one of the worst,” Baeza said.

The area also is plagued with gang problems related to narcotics activities, he said.

The court order--a preliminary injunction issued by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge David P. Yaffe--requires owners to evict tenants arrested for drug-related activities, to hire private guards to patrol the premises and to install lighting, fences, security gates and take other measures to discourage trafficking and to assist police. The order also requires landscaping and other physical cleanup measures.

Hahn said the drug dealing at the three buildings at 3401 1/2 to 3411 Drew St. “has been creating a major problem for the entire Atwater area for over a year.”

Special abatement teams have investigated several other drug-trafficking locations in the Northeast Police Division area, but landlords in those cases have since corrected the problems without court action, officials said.

Owners of the Drew Street apartments have refused to cooperate, Hahn said.

Failure to comply with the court order, a civil action, could result in stiff penalties against the owners and possible closure of the apartment buildings for up to a year.

The injunction stemmed from abatement lawsuits filed by the district attorney Oct. 6 under the California Controlled Substances Abatement Act.

Defendants in the suit are Yuri D. Shane and Claudia Lee Shane of Fountain Valley, Dean Winston Monroe and Vane Eugenia Monroe of Huntington Beach and Riven and Polina Polyakov and Ilya Polyakov of Los Angeles.

The Shanes and the Monroes could not be contacted. Riven Polyakov refused to comment.