Crime Is Nearly Driving Crenshaw Boulevard Car Dealership Out of Business

Car dealer Samir Yousif keeps a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson in his desk drawer. His sales manager carries a sturdy wooden bat that is not just for hitting baseballs.

The men say they need the protection because Yousif’s Crenshaw Boulevard auto dealership has been besieged by a crime wave so relentless that Yousif was ready to close the doors on the business this month--until the police promised to help.

“It’s a war zone here,” Yousif, 44, said this week in his office behind a locked iron security gate.

Yousif owns a Nissan dealership in the 2900 block of Crenshaw near Jefferson Boulevard. When he bought the business two years ago, he named it Wilshire Nissan, despite its Crenshaw address, because he hoped that would lure more customers to the run-down Southwest Los Angeles commercial strip, which has been battling a sagging image.

Crenshaw was once a bustling center for the new- and used-auto trade, but over the years the number of dealerships has dwindled to a handful. This year alone, two large dealerships that had been on Crenshaw for more than four decades shut down--one due to bankruptcy.

Until Wednesday, Yousif was prepared to add his business to the list of closures. But a promise of extra police patrols has changed his mind--for the time being.

“I’m going to stay open as long as they (police) give me protection,” he said. “Then I think we can survive.”

Yousif said his dealership has been so plagued by crime--by employees and outsiders alike--that hardly a week has gone by without a break-in or act of vandalism or thievery. He said employees have stolen about $500,000 in cash from the business. Thieves stole car stereo equipment off a truck while it was being unloaded. Scores of hubcaps, headlights, tires and other expensive items have been ripped off, and cars on the lot routinely get pelted by rocks.

The worst, however, came in July when his last sales manager was robbed of a Rolex watch at gunpoint in the showroom, an incident that, Yousif said, caused the entire sales staff to resign. Since then, it has been difficult to keep anyone on the sales crew longer than a week.

The sales staff, which once had 14 employees, now is down to one. And, instead of an average of 100 cars sold a month, the dealership has been selling only five or six. Because employees are afraid to be on the property after dark, the showroom closes before 5 p.m. every day.

Despite hundreds of dollars’ worth of newspaper ads, “we’re lucky if we see one customer a day,” Yousif said. “People are afraid to come to this neighborhood.”

The businessman, who also owns a Subaru dealership in North Hollywood, estimated that the crime wave has cost him $2 million in property damage, thefts and lost business. In two years’ time, his insurance costs have tripled to $10,000 a month.

Yousif, who moved to the United States from his native Iraq 30 years ago, said he has been in the auto-selling business for 20 years, working his way up from a $1.05-an-hour job washing cars at a Volkswagen dealership in the San Fernando Valley. Although it was a tough area, he said he was looking forward to selling cars on Crenshaw because he grew up nearby and considered it part of his old neighborhood.

But his experiences over the past two years, he said, have only made him bitter.

Fifteen new cars have been stolen, five of which Yousif said were taken by customers who asked to go on test drives but pulled a gun on the salesmen instead. No one was injured, but the few cars that were recovered were stripped of valuable items.

In August, vandals poked a hole through the fiberglass panels in the roof over the service area, apparently to steal the sunroof from a customer’s 1984 Nissan 300Z that was brought in for repairs. They toppled the car from the hoist on which it was raised, cracking the windshield and badly denting the body.

Last week, Yousif lost the headlights and front grill out of one car, the taillights out of another car, and the hubcaps and windshield wipers off of four others.

Over the weekend, the trunk of a brand new, $31,000 Nissan 300ZX was smashed by vandals attempting to steal the spare tire.

“It was $8,000 damage to take a $75 tire,” said an exasperated Yousif.

The same weekend, someone used a car or truck to plow into the six-foot iron fence that borders the Crenshaw side of the car lot.

On Monday morning, when he saw the crumpled fence, he said, “That’s it. I’m closing down.”

All this has occurred despite a $10,000 burglar alarm system, $40,000 worth of wrought-iron fencing and yards of barbed razor wire along the perimeter of the property.

But Wednesday, after repeated calls to the Los Angeles Police Department’s Southwest Division, Yousif finally was promised help--extra patrols for as long as needed.

Southwest Division Capt. Noel K. Cunningham said he agreed to provide the service because “we certainly want and desire the business to remain here.”

Cunningham said, however, that Yousif’s business has not been more heavily victimized than other car dealerships. Auto dealerships, no matter where they are located, tend to be a magnet for criminals because of the large black market for expensive auto parts. But the police captain acknowledged that Nissans are among the most popular targets now.

And, despite Yousif’s view of the area as a “war zone” dominated by criminals, the southwest area is not the city’s highest in crime, according to LAPD statistics.

During the 1960s, at least eight auto dealerships were located on Crenshaw Boulevard, but that number has dwindled to four over the years. One of the two that closed this year was O’Connor Lincoln-Mercury, which filed for bankruptcy in August, 10 months after the dealership’s body shop manager was murdered during an attempted robbery on the premises.

Yousif cited the murder--which police say they are close to solving--as evidence of the severity of crime plaguing businesses along Crenshaw. But other Crenshaw car dealers paint a different picture.

“We’ve never had a robbery or had anyone threatened. We’ve never had a violent act here at all,” said Randy Jacob, general manager of Majestic Pontiac-Honda. “I don’t understand (the problems at Nissan) at all, to be totally honest. Maybe we’re just fortunate.”

Another owner, who did not want to be quoted by name, said that all the dealers along Crenshaw suffer from “terrible vandalism” but that crime alone is not the reason why they have been shutting down. Citing the sagging economy, he said, “the auto business is just a tough business to be in now.”