Merchants of Menace in War on Drugs : Paraphernalia: Household items that can be used in smoking crack are stocked at many stores in parts of the city.

In some parts of Los Angeles, getting the paraphernalia needed to smoke crack cocaine is as easy as stopping at the corner store. The items are on the shelves at almost every liquor store and neighborhood market. Because most are common household products in everyday use, store managers seem unconcerned about running afoul of the law. But for drug users, these products take on an entirely different meaning.

Glass tubes are easily fashioned into crack pipes. Copper mesh scrubbers used to scour pots are taken apart and made into tiny pipe screens. Cotton balls doused with 151-proof rum are a preferred method for “firing up.” And there are tiny zip-lock bags for storing and selling the highly addictive form of cocaine.

The same is true of the clothing gang members use to identify themselves. In some stores and at swap meets it is easy to find bandannas and athletic shoelaces in colors or brands favored by certain gangs, clothing with gang names sewed or stamped on and even magazines and catalogues targeted to gang members.

As crack use and gang activity mushroom in Los Angeles and across the country, so has the demand for these products, although few store owners seem to be getting rich on the sales. In neighborhoods hit hard by gangs and the crack epidemic, merchants are being criticized for profiting at the expense of their communities.

“It’s like one big conspiracy of greed and everybody’s a part of it,” said Leon Watkins, who operates the South-Central Los Angeles-based Family Hot Line, a telephone service for families in crisis. “The worst part about it is it’s all out in the open where kids can see it. Everybody knows the stores.”

Some merchants contend that they merely stock the products they know sell quickly. They insist they have no idea how the items are used once they leave the store. Police often are skeptical of these claims, yet seldom are able to act because the items have legitimate uses.

But the way in which these products are displayed at certain stores and the volumes in which they are sold leave little doubt as to the intentions of many merchants and buyers.

In an informal survey of more than a dozen liquor stores and markets in South-Central Los Angeles, a reporter found the pot scrubbers in every outlet, usually displayed conspicuously near the front entrance, away from other cleaning products.

In other instances, they were stored behind the counter because--as a clerk at one liquor store along Western Avenue put it--”If we kept them on the shelves they (crack addicts) would steal them.”

When asked why his customers were purchasing the scrubbers, the owner of the Western Avenue store, who identified himself only as Mike, began vigorously scrubbing the counter. Almost as an afterthought, he lifted the scouring pad to his nose and took a long sniff.

“Smoke, too,” he said, shrugging.

Other merchants seemed similarly resigned to the sale of products used by gangs and drug users.

“If we don’t sell it, the guy down the street will,” said one clerk at the L.A. Slauson Swap Meet on Slauson Avenue in South-Central.

The clerk, who identified himself only as Rick, was explaining why he was willing, upon request, to sew onto the back of a jacket the words “Playboy Gangster Crips,” the name of a faction of one of Los Angeles’ most notorious and deadly street gangs.

A few miles away, a tiny shop that specializes in decorative lighting featured several cases filled with glass pipes that the owner insisted were intended for smoking tobacco and herbs. There also was a supply of small plastic bags ostensibly designed for storing jewelry.

“You don’t sell cars so people can get run over,” said the shop owner, who spoke only on the condition that he not be identified. “But it happens. Does that mean you stop selling cars?”

The problem extends beyond Los Angeles and Southern California.

In Chicago, Father George Clements, a Catholic priest who gained national attention several years ago when he adopted a child, has mounted a highly visible campaign to rid neighborhood stores of glass pipes and other items that could be used to smoke crack. In Detroit, a newspaper writer was responsible for halting gas station sales of pipes, tiny weighing scales and the miniature zip-lock bags by printing in her column the names of the mostly suburbanite station owners.

In Los Angeles, protests against drug paraphernalia sales have been less visible. Police say they receive few complaints from citizens about stores that sell these products, said Detective Dennis Zeuner of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Zeuner, who coordinates the department’s efforts to crack down on drug paraphernalia, said officers are aware of the problem but focus their enforcement efforts on stores that sell large numbers of items that can more easily be categorized as drug-related. Most of these are stores that in the 1960s would have been called “head shops.”

Under California’s 7-year-old drug-paraphernalia law, Zeuner said, it would be all but impossible to prosecute owners of, say, a liquor store that stocks common household items that also are used to smoke crack. He cited the copper mesh pot scrubbers as an example of the difficulties in pressing a case.

“Now there have got to be some people who buy those things to clean pots,” Zeuner said, adding that some merchants may not know that the scouring pads also are used to smoke crack. On the other hand, he added, some stores sell the mesh already cut into pieces and packaged in little plastic bags for as much as 75 cents, about the price of a whole scourer.

Under most conditions, Zeuner said, merchants could be prosecuted only if they advertise the scourers as crack paraphernalia and indicate they are selling them solely for use with the drug, by selling pipes along with them, for instance.

The same is true with other products such as disposable lighters or the cotton balls and rum that some addicts use to make homemade torches. None of these products, in and of themselves, can be classified as drug paraphernalia, even though spent disposable lighters and burned-out homemade torches typically litter areas where crack users congregate.

To discourage stores from selling items such as glass pipes and the small plastic zip-lock bags, officers will sometimes visit store owners or managers, show them a copy of the state law and ask them to sign it.

“In 99 cases out of a hundred,” Zeuner said, “the stuff disappears because it’s not a large part of the guy’s inventory.”

Zeuner does not believe that any liquor store or market owner is getting rich from selling scourers or lighters to crack users. Pipes, however, depending upon the volume of a store’s sales, can be very profitable, he said.

The smallest can be purchased for 50 cents and sold for up to $8, Zeuner said. Some large, ornately shaped or decorated pipes go for considerably more.

Some anti-drug activists contend that the manufacturers of the products popular among crack users are making big profits from the crack epidemic. But there are no sales figures to support their claims.

Nancy Dedera, a spokeswoman for the Phoenix-based Dial Corp., manufacturer of Brillo brand copper mesh pot scourers, which are found in stores in the Los Angeles area, said sales did not increase as drug use surged. She insisted that Dial’s share of the pot-scourer market is tiny and referred a reporter to a competitor.

A representative of the New Jersey-based Airwick Industries, maker of the Chore Boy, the brand Dedera contended is the largest seller on the market, did not return phone calls.

Profits made by manufacturers of gang wear or stores that stock the clothing are similarly difficult to determine.

Some stores surveyed by The Times stocked only a single product--bandannas, typically--and displayed just a few of the items.

Customers include hardened gang members and those who simply want to emulate their style. Swap-meet vendors who sew gang names on caps and other apparel said this represents only a small percentage of their business. Other store owners said it was never their intention to serve gang members.

Dennis Conway, the owner of No Sweat, an athletic-wear shop on Manchester Avenue, said that several months after he opened his business he was stunned to discover some of his customers were gang members who adopted the logos of professional and college sports teams as their own. Particular products are chosen by gangs because a team name corresponds to the initials of their gang faction, the color of the item corresponds with a favorite color of the gang, or because the team’s name sounds menacing.

“Gang members don’t come in here throwing high signs, but they occasionally come in,” Conway said.

Conway said he has since learned much about what gang members want. One South-Central gang that calls itself the Kitchen Crips wears clothing stamped with KC for the Kansas City Chiefs, he said. Another Crips set that operates on nearby Main Street likes the initials of Michigan State University because they can also stand for Main Street University, a name the set has adopted for itself, he said.

Police and school officials say the logos of teams such as the Los Angeles Raiders and the Pittsburgh Steelers are popular with Los Angeles gangs. A Crips faction that claims as its turf portions of Grape Street in Watts has adopted Los Angeles Lakers apparel because much of it comes in purple, one of the team’s colors.

Anti-gang workers sympathize with merchants like Conway, who clearly are not going out of their way to cater to gangs. But they are less tolerant of merchants who, they are convinced, know what buyers intend to do with their products.

Dan Guzman, a Community Youth Gang Services worker who speaks to schools and parent groups about gang paraphernalia, said he has found in the racks of convenience stores magazines that are unmistakably targeted to Latino gang members. The letters and articles in one appear to be written in a code common to some gang graffiti.

Guzman also has in his collection a catalogue from a store in Reseda that advertises apparel adopted by gangs, including colored bandannas and intricately woven cords that are worn on the hands and wrists of “cholas,” or girl gang members.

Other activists point to liquor store owners who stock blue bandannas in Crips neighborhoods, knowing that blue is the gang’s color, or red in a Bloods neighborhood, knowing that Bloods favor red.

Last fall, volunteers in the Brotherhood Crusade’s anti-gang, anti-drug “Taking Our Community Back” campaign surveyed stores in a targeted area in South-Central and asked store owners to remove blue bandannas wherever they were found.

At one store, the owner refused to honor the request. The activists entered en masse, demanded the bandannas be turned over, then burned them in the store’s parking lot.

Although schools have attempted to discourage gang-style clothing, prosecutors say merchants who sell bandannas to rival Crips or Bloods, even knowingly, have broken no laws. As is true for much of the drug paraphernalia, certain kinds of apparel cannot be banned, they say, because many of the logos adopted by gangs are the legitimate logos not only of sports teams but of clothing designers and manufacturers.

For example, Calvin Klein apparel that carries the initials CK is favored by Bloods who say the initials actually stand for Crip Killers. Athletic shoes and other apparel bearing the initials of the manufacturer British Knight are favored by Crips, who say the letters stand for Blood Killers.

The problem, some activists say, is that there are shootings almost every day in Los Angeles in which the victims are targeted chiefly because they happen to be wearing the wrong color or brand of clothing. In some cases merchants, they insist, have a duty to warn law-abiding customers of the dangers.

V.G. Guinses, executive director of Save Every Youngster Youth Enterprise Society, a 20-year-old anti-gang, anti-drug program in South-Central, cited the case of a well-regarded high school student who was gunned down in a drive-by shooting in Southwest Los Angeles about two years ago simply because he was wearing blue shoelaces in an area claimed by Bloods sets.

“A person has a right to buy what he wants,” Guinses said, “but he should at least be told that it could get him killed.”

Despite the killings and the notoriety of Los Angeles’ street gangs, there are some merchants in crime-ridden neighborhoods who insist they know nothing about the problems that surround them.

At the J.C. Mini Mall/Broadway Swap Meet on South Broadway in South-Central, a woman who refused to give her name agreed, without hesitation, to sew the word “Crips” on a baseball hat at the request of a reporter.

Afterward, she said she had no idea what the name stands for, even though it was scrawled in large letters among other graffiti on the front of the building where she works.

“Gangs?” she asked. “(Are) gangs bad?”