City, Neighbors Have Had It With the Villas

When the Voltaire was built in 1964, it seemed like half of Santa Ana wanted to move there.

Designed in a New Orleans style, the 562 garden apartments had wrought-iron balconies, all-electric appliances, carports, two swimming pools, a palm-studded landscape--and a waiting list. “It was very fancy,” said Santa Ana Police Chief Paul Walters, who said the complex even won an architectural award.

But the swimming pools were algae-green and closed on Tuesday, one day after three young men were murdered in what police suspect was a soured cocaine deal. The carports were torn down years ago after homeless people began sleeping inside. And 15 feet from the complex, a visitor stepped on a spent syringe.

Despite a yearlong clean-up effort, the complex at 811 S. Fairview St., now called Fairview Villas, remains a haven for drug dealers, police and neighbors said. On Tuesday, Santa Ana Mayor Daniel H. Young said he would like to see it torn down.

In fact, the mayor and the police chief believe that dealers from other neighborhoods are attracted to the complex by the very design features that made it a hit in the 1960s: meandering garden paths, concealing foliage and a labyrinth of 84 buildings into which to vanish when the cops are in pursuit.

“I don’t say it’s the worst complex in town. The people who live there say it,” said Dorothy L. Davis, who runs a day-care center for 78 children across the street. A year ago, Davis went to the Santa Ana City Council to beg for help.

“It was a house of prostitution and a supermarket of drugs . . . ,” said Jerry Vouaelotas, who owns the nearby Husky Boy Restaurant. “We have been screaming for six years.”

In September, 1989, the mayor announced a crackdown. Police ran several sweeps and stepped up patrols. The apartment managers spruced up the paint, pruned shadowy bushes and installed security gates and floodlights. They also distributed bilingual flyers asking tenants to blow the whistle on dope deals, offering a $25 reward for each arrest.

“We ran a lot of drug dealers out of the area,” said Police Sgt. Chuck Deakins, who heads the neighborhood’s patrol unit. “But a small number of them still hang out around the complex.”

Things did improve markedly for a while, Davis and other neighbors said, but lately the city’s attention seems to have waned. The other day, Davis called police to complain about a group of young men who were drinking, carousing and urinating in the complex in plain sight of her children. “It took them three or four hours to come run them off,” Davis said.

On Tuesday morning, Davis read of the triple murder in the newspaper and rushed down to the day-care center to reassure jumpy parents that their children would be safe. Then, fed up with City Hall, she stormed over to Congressman Robert K. Dornan’s Garden Grove office to complain.

“It was getting better . . . ,” Davis said. “The minute those people found out that the city was on their case, they straightened out. The minute they found out the city didn’t care they were right back on it again.”

“Some people have self-discipline, and some people need to be watched,” Davis concluded.

Up to 5,000 people, mostly Latino immigrants, live in the block-square complex, police and neighbors said. Rents range up to $805 a month for a two-bedroom unit--not cheap, even by Santa Ana standards--with an average of two families per apartment.

A county welfare official said the ZIP code in which the complex is located has one of the heaviest welfare and food stamp caseloads in the county. When a Latino community group offered free classes in how to apply for immigration amnesty, about 100 families from the complex attended, said Nativo V. Lopez, director of the organization Hermandad Mexicana Nacional of Orange County.

For a while, the complex flew the Mexican flag alongside Old Glory and the California Bear. A security guard said the practice was stopped because too many flags were torn or stolen.

On Tuesday, the complex manager referred questions to Cambio Properties Inc. of Fullerton, which manages the villas, but Cambio executives did not return telephone calls. County records show the property is owned by Cambio President Allen L. Boerner, who also did not return calls. The property was last assessed at $22.7 million, records show.

Tuesday morning, in one of the numerous small, grassy courtyards within the complex, Leonardo Sandoval, 34, stood playing catch with his 3-year-old niece. He lives on the other side of the complex and hadn’t heard about the shootings.

“I’ve been here about a year, and I haven’t really had any problems,” said the native of Michoacan, Mexico. “But sometimes the police come and take some people away. And sometimes you hear gunfire.”

Housewife Rosa Perez, who lives about 50 yards into the complex from where the shootings took place, was washing her living-room window as her two daughters played on the porch outside.

Perez said she moved to the Villas because it seemed like a safer, quieter neighborhood than the Madison Street complex they lived in previously. For the most part, she still thinks it’s a good place to live.

“But there are a lot of people, and a lot of vagos, “ or riffraff from outside the area, Perez said.

Porfirio Diaz, 23, lives with six others in a two-bedroom apartment upstairs from where one of Monday’s victims died. A high school graduate from Mexico City, Diaz is now an unemployed construction worker, dissatisfied with his surroundings but unsure of where else to go.

“Drugs are something you can’t avoid in this country,” Diaz said. “And where am I going to move to? It’s cheap here, because there are a lot of Latinos here.”

But Diaz, local business people and community activist Lopez all said the complex management should pay more to police its property better. Several local businesses and bars have banded together to hire their own security guards. And several neighbors noted that the guards at the villas’ security gates do not wear uniforms, are unarmed and are often not at their stations.

“The manager should take care of his property,” said Davis. “I’m not saying the police aren’t doing their work, ‘cause Lord knows we need more police. I say the manager has to take care of it.”

By Tuesday evening, neighbors had placed lighted candles on the lawn where the three bodies had fallen. One 70-year-old woman said the killings do not frighten her.

“I’ve been here too long,” said Gladys Cram, who has lived in a house across the road on Sullivan Street since the mid-1930s, when the complex was a vegetable farm.

“The (drug dealers’) runners would be over on my side of the street, and I’d tell them to get off my property,” Cram said. “I wouldn’t dream of being afraid of them. . . . I’ve found needles in my front yard, but they don’t scare me.”

Cram, who keeps a sharp eye on the guard shack from her front window, says things have gotten better--though while she chatted on the phone, she noted that, once again, the guards were not at their post.

“I don’t care what goes on on the other side of the property, but don’t mess with me on my property,” Cram said. “That’s been my theory and people don’t bother me.”

Times staff writers Marcida Dodson and Bob Schwartz contributed to this report.