Life on the Street : Fear stalks the battle-scarred neighborhood, where drugs are plentiful and the Dukes reign.

Apartment house owner Bill Brower was fed up, mad as hell, ready to rumble.

He had tried getting tough by refusing to rent to gang members. He had tried winning their friendship by taking tamales to their strategy meetings.

His reward was being surrounded by rock-throwing gang members, having the tires on his BMW slashed and having a six-foot concrete wall nearly dismantled with sledge hammers.

Last summer, he and several other owners of Blythe Street properties decided they had been pushed around enough. They vowed to launch the urban equivalent of Operation Desert Storm to retake the street.

“I was the original guy out there who took a stand against the gang,” Brower said. “I was the only one who wasn’t apathetic.”

The owners hired a squad of burly free-lance security guards, off-duty police officers and self-styled bounty hunters for $6,000 a month. Their mission was to, as Brower said, “go in and make some moves” against the gang.

They hired David Roybal, a Los Angeles tracer of bail-jumpers, to assemble a crew. Five or six people a night would patrol the street.

“We were supposed to act a little aggressive to get the gang members out of there,” he said.

They faced down shotgun-toting gang members and chased them over rooftops. They discouraged drug buyers with their presence.

But Desert Storm it wasn’t.

On one of the first nights Roybal and his crew were on the street, a fusillade of 15 shots was fired. Roybal took cover behind his van.

Later he took some Guardian Angels along. Shots were fired that night, too, and the Angels refused to return.

Another time one of his crew members suffered a flesh wound from a shotgun blast. The gang struck back when the crew was gone. Several hundred feet of newly installed security fence costing $23 a foot was knocked flat on Brower’s property. Windows were broken and fires were started in vacant apartments.

The private troops were gone in less than a month.

“We could have stayed there,” Roybal said, “but there would have been people, either on my side or their side, going to the mortuary, and I didn’t want that.

“Blythe Street was just a little bit too dangerous.”

As far as Brower is concerned, the war is over and the Blythe Street Dukes have won.

“It’s going back to the lender,” he said recently of his building. “I’ve sent the bank a letter on all the hardship I’ve put up with.”

Considering lost rent, repairs and his original investment, Brower said, he will have lost more than $100,000 and his credit rating.

So it goes on Blythe Street, a San Fernando Valley horror story for years whose residents say conditions are worse than ever.

Tenants who can afford to leave, leave. Vacancies on the block are estimated at 25%.

At the same time, the units that are occupied are jammed. Families commonly double up. Some apartments house 20 men.

Of all the familiar urban problems that beset the street, the gang is the most visible, the most feared, the most discussed, the biggest obstacle to improvement.

“I think it’s as bad as it’s ever been,” said Chuck Ferbrache, who has owned a 10-unit building on the street since 1976.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Blythe was a starter-home street to General Motors workers, many of them returnees from World War II and most of them Anglo.

“It was a nice neighborhood,” said Dorothy Shaffier, the owner of a building on the street since the mid-1960s. “We didn’t have gangs in those days. My mother lived there. Every one of my kids lived there at one time.”

Milestones on the road downhill include the arrival of large numbers of poor immigrants from Mexico in the 1970s, the spread of crack cocaine in the early 1980s and, in 1987, almost as an admission of defeat, the installation of the concrete barricade that turned the block-long strip of Blythe Street into a cul-de-sac.

In the 1980s, gangs moved into the drug trade on the street level.

“It used to be that gangs were pretty much territorial, and they wouldn’t bother anybody who lived in that area,” said Chuck Leber, a supervising police officer in the area. “Now, even if you live here and even if you’re Hispanic, you’re the target of their terror.”

All day long, as many as 50 young men are on the sidewalk at any time, wearing L.A. Raiders caps and shirts from Duke University. They stare at passersby, sometimes standing in the middle of the street, daring drivers to go around or through.

Mothers pushing babies and vendors pushing carts filled with steaming corn walk past the young men as they peddle rock cocaine.

An Anglo man in a Mazda RX-7 hands over a twenty and warns the Dukes that a cop is around the corner. Two white women in a Chevrolet Impala go past, make a U-turn at the barricade and make a buy on the way out. Two black men in a red pickup do the same.

When a squad car turns onto Blythe Street, youngsters begin whistling and gang members hurry along well-worn escape routes, into apartments and down driveways. There is even a tunnel on the street, gang members say, but authorities have yet to find it.

The Dukes say their philosophy is live and let live.

“All we do is sell drugs,” said Robert Chavez, 19. “They want problems, we’ll give them problems. They don’t want problems, we’ll leave them alone.”

His statement does not square with the level of fear on the street.

Narcisa Valdez, 33, worries every time she has to leave her apartment building. She has lived on Blythe Street for nine years.

Four years ago her 6-year-old daughter was kidnaped in front of the building by a youth she said was on drugs. Other children screamed and chased the teen-ager, and the child was saved, but it left her shaken.

“Around here you say what you saw and you’re taking a risk on your life,” said Stella Vega, who has lived on the street for five years. “They see you talking to a cop, they think you’re a snitch.”

The first time Vega saw death was on Blythe Street about five years ago. A bloody young man ran through the courtyard and collapsed. He had been shot.

“I’ve never in my life seen nobody die in front of me. I’ve gone to funerals, but to see somebody die. . . . He was only 17 years old,” she said, her voice trailing off.

Fear of the gang dictates when mothers shop for groceries, where parents allow their children to play, where visitors--those brave enough to venture onto the street--park their cars.

“I usually don’t come out much because I’m scared,” Wendy Estrada, 9, said, looking down the street. “At night they shoot. It’s not good for me.”

Not far from Wendy’s apartment a small park with brightly colored swings and a sandbox sits empty. Many youngsters live on the street. Courtyards are full of children. But few mothers allow their children into the park, even during the day.

“I’ve never been in there,” said Lidia Olmos, 15, who has lived on Blythe Street all her life.

Stolen cars regularly turn up, stripped and crashed. A pizza deliveryman was recently beaten. A salesman’s briefcase was stolen and he was beaten.

Almost every owner on the street has a story of a confrontation with gang members. One longtime owner said he was stopped in the street but got away by pointing a gun at them.

Years of fitful police crackdowns have been ineffective, Officer Leber said.

“If we had a crime problem we would send X-police in to do enforcement, and once the problem subsided we would pull those officers out,” he said. “We really didn’t address all the sundry issues that are still there. . . . We didn’t address the problem of targeting the problem people.”

From July, 1987, until May, 1989, the street was the subject of an intensive narcotics operation. Officers made more than 500 arrests, clearing the street of gang members and drug dealers. The success was temporary.

The squad left and the gang returned.

The barricade was installed in 1987 to make it easier for buyers to be arrested. But it gave the Blythe Street Dukes safety from drive-by shootings and easy arrest, emboldening them so that now their hold on the street is unquestioned. Police now want the barricade removed.

Last week Councilman Ernani Bernardi asked the Los Angeles City Council to remove the barricades. The council is expected to vote on the issue Tuesday.

Police tactics are changing as the department moves into so-called community policing. Leber is a senior lead officer responsible for establishing neighborhood ties.

A foot patrol was started in August in the area that includes Blythe Street. Officers walk beats four to six hours a day at irregular times.

“People are becoming more friendly,” Leber said.

But he adds that law enforcement has a limited ability to address social conditions.

“A lot of the problems that occur are because there is no management or poor management” in buildings, Leber said. Gangs are allowed to live in the buildings or use them as hiding places, he said.

Leber said he intends to ask apartment owners to improve record-keeping on tenants and to impose rules of conduct.

Also on the get-tough side of police activism is an effort to link drug sales with specific buildings, which would then become targets of civil nuisance actions by the city attorney’s office.

Residents have their own ideas about what should be done.

“Cops should be stationed there around the clock,” a 22-year-old unemployed man said. “They should knock down all the trees so the cholos can’t hide. And they should put in high-powered lights all over.”

Building manager Memo Mendoza thinks gang members need jobs and recreational opportunities.

“We’ve got to get a gym,” he said. “We’ve got to have more jobs.”

Some gang members, even those who seem to want to change their lives, are pessimistic.

“It don’t make no difference if we stop or not, because the other gang members already know us,” said Danny Graciano, known on the street as Chewy.

Tattooed on their hands, stomachs, backs, legs and arms with the word Blythe , the gang members feel marked for life.

“If they come up to me and say, ‘Hey, where you from?’ and I say, ‘Nowhere,’ it doesn’t matter, because . . . I’ve got tatts,” Graciano said.

Some would like to leave the lifestyle behind.

Said Oscar Solorio, who has spent most of his life on or near Blythe Street: “Ever since I was a little kid, I was seeing people get robbed and people looking out and getting dope, and once I was a teen-ager I wanted to be like them, and then I became one of them.”

Now he wants to “get a life, because this ain’t no life. Get a life and try to survive.”