UNDERSTANDING THE RIOTS PART 1 : THE PATH TO FURY : CHAPTER 4 : ‘You can’t save for a rainy day because there is nothing to save.’

The sagging bungalow court on Florence Avenue had seen better days. A generation earlier it had cheated fate when dozens of nearby build ings were bulldozed to make way for the Harbor Freeway. Now the bungalows looked out on a Burger King, four gas stations with security windows and a quick-stop mini-mall.

The bungalows became home in the 1980s to mostly poor working Latinas with small children. The courtyard was a good place to have a barbecue or to let the children play in safety. Mothers looked after each other’s kids. If one of the women fell on bad times, the others pitched in for food.

Leticia arrived there in 1988. She had boarded a bus in her native Mexico City. The ride took three days. She was an illegal, but no one caught her as she crossed the border and journeyed north to the apartment of her friend, Anna, who had come to the United States in 1976 and worked in a beauty shop.

The apartment had side windows facing the mini-mall--toward the Liquor Market owned by William Hong and the doughnut shop that had no name.

Hong had made a far different journey to this intersection in South-Central Los Angeles. He had left South Korea at age 24 and come to America to reunite with his parents, who had emigrated earlier. The year was 1981. He took a job as a janitor in a restaurant. And then, with his savings and the help of family and friends, he started a hamburger stand at 3rd Street and Fairfax Avenue.

Hong worked long days, but he always seemed to be struggling. By the time he opened the liquor store at Florence and Figueroa, his illusions about America had evaporated. “I thought if you work hard, 14 hours a day, you can make your dreams come true,” Hong said. “That’s what I expected. Now, I see you have to be satisfied with just making a living.”

Hong and Leticia were part of a historic--and in many ways turbulent--migration of peoples to Los Angeles throughout the 1980s. Each one had a story to tell about why they came, but the bigger story was the total impact of their arrival.

For the public sector, the migration posed monumental challenges as demands for health services soared and public schools scrambled to find more classroom space. Los Angeles schools groaned, in a decade adding 100,000 children speaking dozens of tongues. And all this happened in the post-Proposition 13 era, when government finances in California were strained as never before.

For private business, the influx of immigrants meant new consumers, renters and home buyers--and a huge reservoir of low-end wage earners to work in factories and shops.

But while the American economy of the 1980s created jobs and built up communities, the gap between rich and poor widened. In few places was this more evident than in South Los Angeles.

The changes were jarring for blacks who saw their neighborhoods transformed into the West Coast’s fastest-growing Latino barrio. While black-owned stores faded away, Korean-owned businesses seemed to dot every shopping area. Jobs seemed to be going to other people. Would blacks ever get ahead?

Many Latinos had come to Los Angeles looking for higher paying work than they could ever find in their homelands. Others fled political repression in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Los Angeles, already home to a large Latino population of Mexican descent, became a destination for thousands of Central American immigrants. By the end of the decade, Watts--whose name is synonymous with black Los Angeles--would become almost 50% Latino and begin holding Cinco de Mayo parades. The population of entire Guatemalan villages moved to the tenements of the Pico-Union neighborhood--many former residents of the village of San Miguel Acatan now live, for example, on or near Bixel Street just west of downtown.

The women who lived in the bungalow court would go to work in garment factories, or as maids, housekeepers and nannies, taking care of white people’s children. Whatever they saved went to family back in Mexico or Central America. “We have to live here because we can’t live anywhere else,” Anna said. She learned to adjust, to make the best of the situation. When she had a little extra money one week, she bought some shiny blue tile to spruce up her one-room apartment.

Hong, like his fellow Korean merchants, saw the poor neighborhoods as a business opportunity. Among the thousands of Koreans emigrating to the city, the word was out that South Los Angeles was the best place to get a fast return on your dollar. Store rents were relatively cheap.

Many blacks wondered how it was that Koreans could come to this country and in no time find the capital to go into business for themselves. They needed to look no further than Myung Lee, who owned a store next to Hong’s in the mini-mall.

Lee had come to Los Angeles in 1980. The weather was nice, she thought. The winters were temperate, not like the long, bitterly cold winters in Seoul. In Los Angeles, Lee also could escape the rigid social values of her country. Right off, she noticed that being a single woman was easier in American society. There weren’t too many opportunities for a 37-year-old single woman in South Korea.

“I liked the freedom,” she said. “In this country, I could have dreams. I could be a woman, on my own, and make some money.”

Her first job was at a South-Central gasoline station, where she worked the graveyard shift as a cashier in one of those sealed-off glass booths that are supposed to provide a measure of security. For three years, she earned minimum wage, enduring a handful of stickups during the crazed pre-dawn hours at Hoover Street and Century Boulevard--all so she could save money and one day buy her own business.

In 1989, she legalized her status in the United States. Soon after, her dream came true. With $40,000 of her own savings and a loan from an aunt, she opened the no-name doughnut shop in the mini-mall at Florence and Figueroa.

From start to finish, the ‘80s brought a burst of prosperity to Southern California. Billions of dollars were pumped into the defense industry. Entire cities were born in the Inland Empire. Where once only wild grass grew after winter rains, men and women hit the roads before sun-up to reach their jobs closer to the coast.

It was a dizzying dance, the 1980s. The average Joe read about corporate takeovers and wondered what it was all about. Greenmail, golden parachutes and white knights entered the lexicon of finance. Unions began to fade. Tabloids trumpeted untold stories about the rich and famous. In 1987, a junk-bond dealer from Encino named Michael Milken made $550 million in salary and bonuses.

But the real economic news for people in South Los Angeles was occurring no farther away than the local market. Residents complained that they were paying higher prices for food and other necessities than they could afford. To make ends meet, people needed better paying jobs, but many did not have the training. Others did not have jobs at all.

Cletus, the former Compton Crip, by now had moved to an area near Rodeo Road and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard called “The Jungle.” Although he got kicked out of Dorsey High School for fighting with Bloods and later dropped out of another school, Cletus completed his general equivalency degree. Then, at the urging of his mother, he enrolled in a computer training school in Hollywood. He attended on a $3,000 federal loan which he was to repay once he landed a computer job with the help of the school. He graduated, but could not find a job. Businesses told him he needed two or three years of job experience.

A friend told him about a job at a computer company where he worked, so Cletus took the test along with four whites who applied. According to the friend--who graded the tests--Cletus scored higher than the white applicant whom the company eventually hired.

By then, Cletus had a family to support. He had to do something. So he went to work as a security guard for $6 an hour. “This is about the only kind of job you can get. I’m supposed to be making more money than this, and I would if I was doing computer work, but I’ve got a wife, and two kids. I’ve got to do something. I still owe the government $3,000.”

What was happening to Cletus was not what the government’s anti-poverty experts intended. In the 15 years following the Watts riots, the federal government would pour billions of dollars into community development programs and hundreds of billions into programs to lift poor people out of their poverty. Beginning in 1981, the presidency of Ronald Reagan put the brakes on programs such as the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), while providing incentives for business people to rescue the inner cities.

One of those entrepreneurs was Richard Breen, a New York native who arrived in Los Angeles in 1976 with $140 in his pocket. A decade later, he had built his trucking business, Daylight Transport, into a $40-million enterprise. It was so big he had to move, so he made a sweet deal with the city of Los Angeles, which was anxious to draw businesses to its South Central Los Angeles “enterprise zone.” Breen got a $1.35 million low-interest government loan to transform an old junkyard on Hooper Avenue into a new terminal for his trucking company.

For Breen, a former social worker, it was a chance to finally use his business acumen for the good of the inner city. “You have to create a work force, then you have to create jobs. I really believe businessmen can play an important role in bringing back these communities. That’s why I came here in the first place.”

As part of the deal, Breen promised to hire people from the neighborhood. On one bright day, 150 people lined up around the block to apply for jobs. Only a handful of those workers were qualified; most had little or no training or experience.

At the end of each working day, Breen drove through the impoverished neighborhoods surrounding his business to his home in the winding streets of Laurel Canyon. The great disparities of wealth and poverty were jarring. How long, he wondered, could the city go on like this?

Like thousands of other San Fernando Valley residents, Steve Frank fled the city with his family. “We could see the gangs coming,” said the public affairs consultant. “And the area had become so dirty. Not the air. The smog didn’t bother me. It was the graffiti.

“And the Valley was the best part of L.A. It was pathetic.”

In 1988, the Franks found sanctuary in Simi Valley, with its low crime rate and good schools. It was like the San Fernando Valley 30 years earlier. For $320,000, they bought a three-bedroom home with a large back yard. Steve’s wife, Leslie, got a job as an elementary school principal and played the organ at the United Methodist Church.

A staunch Republican, Steve Frank had come from a working-class family--his father operated a hand-laundry business in the Bronx. “No one handed me anything,” he said. “I doubt if my father ever made more than $10,000 or $12,000 a year. I make that with one client.”

Forty miles to the south, Nettie Lewis and her family were living on East 89th Street. It was a war zone where Lewis hated to see darkness come. At night, there were so many shootings.

One day, she dove to her kitchen floor when someone opened fire from the back of her house. Then there was the time stray bullets ripped chunks out of a friend’s wooden bed. The danger came not only from guns. Lewis’ grandchildren, who live with her, and their friends were accosted by older kids with knives.

“Hey, I like your new shoes,” junior-high toughs would taunt youngsters like her 11-year-old grandson, Derrell. “Give them to me or I’ll cut you!” One 6-year-old gangbanger bragged to Derrell about owning a small pistol.

Lewis just tried to get on with her life. “I know a lot of gangbangers,” she said. “I don’t bother them. They don’t bother me.”

Years earlier, Nettie Lewis had felt safe enough to take leisurely evening strolls around her South-Central Los Angeles neighborhood. Her daughters swam in the nearby public pool. They rode bicycles from Watts to the beach or to drive-in movies. When the Santa Anas came, neighbors would stay outside long after dark to escape the stuffy houses. Neighborhood children would run to the schoolyard to shoot baskets or play flag football on afternoons and weekends. Few walls and houses seemed marred by graffiti.

The decade brought fewer jobs, but plenty of drugs and crime to Lewis’ neighborhood. There was little money to spend, but prices were spiraling. Bicycle trips became confined to the neighborhood. Children were shooed in before nightfall, followed close behind by parents and grandparents. The schoolyards were chained shut after hours. Parks became the bastion of gangbangers. Taggers were everywhere.

“A lot of people who think you come from South Central think you’re ignorant or you’re on welfare,” said Lewis’ daughter, Cookie. “Most of these homes here are owned, including my mother’s . . . People think if you’re from South Central that you’re automatically on welfare. But it’s not true.”

Nettie Lewis chimed in: “Down here we’re working payday to payday to make ends meet. You can’t save for a rainy day because there is nothing to save.”

For Onamia Bryant, teaching became much more than just opening up textbooks and chalking lessons on a board. She saw the rising unemployment, the entrenched poverty, the drug culture reflected in the faces of her students. She became their surrogate mother, father, counselor and disciplinarian. What else could she do?

A fellow teacher once told her a story that sticks in her mind. The teacher asked a little boy what he wanted to be when he grew up. “I’m going to be in jail,” he said. “Why?” the teacher asked. “My daddy’s in jail, and he’s fine.” To the little boy, to live in jail was safer than to try and survive on the streets. It was the place to be, like Daddy.

And Bryant recalled a story from her own experience. One day, a boy came into the classroom. “Don’t use the stapler unless I’m here,” Bryant said.

“Oh, I know how to use a stapler.”

“How do you know that?”

“Oh, my daddy lets me staple the little bags together.” The plastic bags, Bryant knew, probably contained crack that the child’s family was selling.

For immigrant parents such as Basiliso Merino, living in South Los Angeles forced them to confront a gritty reality. Low-flying police helicopters rattled his little stucco house on Denver Avenue. The streets were often barricaded during drug sweeps. He had hoped his three daughters would get a good education, that they would learn English and start careers. But at the local public school, Bethune Junior High, the children discovered that some of their fellow students carried guns and knives. After a year in school, the girls had learned hardly any English.

This was not the dream that drew Merino to join the Latino migration. An accountant in Cuautitlan, a small town just north of Mexico City, he had come north after an uncle told him he had a job as a roofer at $50 a day. Merino took a note pad and made the calculation: 150,000 pesos. “I thought, ‘That’s a lot of money,’ ” he said. “I could never make that much in Mexico.”

But the pay proved to be an illusion. Not only were taxes taken out of his paychecks, but the work itself wasn’t steady. Unable to afford a place of his own, he moved his family into a crowded, three-bedroom house with his brother, nephews and another family.

No one had to tell Nettie Lewis, Onamia Bryant or Basiliso Merino the statistics, but they were there, compiled by government agencies, if anyone wondered.

By 1990, one of every five of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s students lived in poverty. One-third of all pupils lived in families with no health insurance, and many had never seen a physician before they began their schooling. Sixty percent of the students were scoring below average in basic skills proficiency.

At the Augustus Hawkins Mental Health Clinic in Watts, Dr. Louis Simpson stood in the outpatient clinic and saw the casualties roll in--the child gangsters, the crack dealers, the killers, the broken families, the dispirited and the overwhelmed. We are all victims, the psychiatrist would tell them.

There were plenty of places to lay blame, he would say. But among the deserving, clearly, were the media. Through advertising, the media had created insatiable desires that made people feel inadequate--and it didn’t matter what color you were. In the minority community, these feelings were exaggerated.

For Simpson, the phenomenon of the Crips and Bloods was easy to understand. Historically, gangsters were representative of underclasses who used criminal means to achieve the American dream when every other path was blocked. Earlier decades had seen the rise of Italian and Irish gangs.

The L.A. street gangs had something the earlier gangs did not--crack cocaine.

Cocaine came to Los Angeles’ poor areas in the early 1980s. While the city basked in the Olympic Games, cocaine powder was refined to the cheaper, more addictive “crack.” Like no other drug, crack devastated families, sucking thousands of dollars out of modest households.

Fred Williams saw it whenever he took walks through the Jordan Downs housing project. As a teaching assistant at the local elementary school, he was there to coax parents into sending their children to class. He would find a child and take him home, only to find the parents cutting up dope on the kitchen table. Or he would see a woman stealing welfare checks from her mother to buy dope, and neglecting to clothe her own son. It’s crazy! he thought.

Williams had been raised better than this, in a tough neighborhood but in a single-family house, by a mother who paid attention. With that strength behind you, you could go wrong, as he had, and still have a chance to make it. Here, the odds were preposterous. You could see the Marvin Gaye line: This ain’t living. Williams got a barber’s clippers and began giving some of the young boys haircuts. There were boys 6, 7 years old who’d never had their hair cut! They were cute now, he thought, but in a few years that cuteness would be gone.

He ran into a teen-ager named Darren on the stoop of one of the project’s apartments. Darren had been out of school two years--just hadn’t gone. He had promised Williams he would go back.

“What’s up?” Williams asked softly.

“I didn’t get no clothes for Easter,” the boy said.

“So what?”

“Mother had to pay her bills.”

“You gotta keep washing your clothes by hand, Darren. There some things you’re going to have to deal with. You have to get used to getting up and taking care of business.”

Gang violence in the city seemed to spread by the day. No one was untouchable, not sad-eyed old people, not cool teen-agers, not cooing babies. But it wasn’t until a night in 1988 that the white population of the city really took notice.

A young Asian-American woman named Karen Toshima was shot and killed by gang cross fire while visiting Westwood Village--a place ostensibly safe from inner-city terror. The murder shocked the affluent Westside. The city leaders demanded of Chief Daryl F. Gates and the LAPD that something be done. And so, “Operation Hammer” was born.

In a series of unprecedented sweeps, police temporarily locked up thousands of suspected gang members and drug dealers--many of them black males--for petty crimes. There was little political protest. If solving gang crime required erring on the side of harshness, so be it.

Tim Howell Jr., then 17, was heading to a dance with some friends. He was driving a Pinto, nothing flashy. A police car pulled him over, he said, and the drill began: Lie on the ground, put your hands behind you, submit to handcuffs. The cops said they thought the car was stolen. It wasn’t. “Messed up our clothes,” Tim Jr. said. “You’re not doing anything. You’re just young and black.” Even if you’re going to go to college. Even if you play organ for the church choir.

Simmering complaints about police brutality erupted into public controversies. On Aug. 1, 1988, a force of 80 LAPD officers stormed into two apartment buildings near 39th Street and Dalton Avenue. They ransacked apartments and beat up tenants. On Jan. 14, 1989, in a “sting,” an NBC News camera crew videotaped Long Beach police officers seeming to push Sgt. Don Jackson, a black off-duty Hawthorne cop, through a storefront window. Then, on Jan. 23, 1990, Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies fatally shot a black Muslim named Oliver Beasley following a traffic stop.

As a police liaison to Mayor Bradley in the mid-1980s, Kerman Maddox heard plenty of citizen complaints. Before that, when Eulia Love was killed by officers in 1979, Maddox marched. During a controversy over police chokeholds, when Chief Gates said the arteries of some blacks were not like those of “normal” people, Maddox took to the streets.

One night in November of 1988, he returned to his La Salle Avenue home and noticed a police car pulling in behind him. Maddox, a Neighborhood Watch leader, went over to see what was up and an argument ensued. Maddox said he was cursed, kicked and beaten by the officers. When he filed a harassment complaint, the officers were cleared by an LAPD internal affairs investigation. But Maddox got a lawyer and won an out-of-court settlement with the city.

Still, even Maddox was unprepared for the images he would see on his TV screen in March of 1991.

Life in Los Angeles: 1980

As the decade begins, the city struggles with cuts forced by the passage of Prop. 13 and the nation endures a recession that will last through the early ‘80s. Population: Los Angeles, population 2,966,850, is becoming increasingly Latino through an influx of immigrants from Central America. The city is 48% Anglo, 27.5% Latino, 17% black and 6% Asian. The schools--70% Anglo in 1965--now are 28% Anglo, 42% Latino, 24% black and 6% Asian. Politics: City government struggles to maintain services following passage of Prop. 13 two years earlier. Tom Bradley, the first black mayor of Los Angeles, is serving his second term, and two other blacks and one Latino are sitting on the 15-member City Council. Development: The downtown skyline is transformed by a burst of high-rise development, including the Bonaventure Hotel, the twin Arco and Bank of America towers and the 62-story First Interstate Tower. Officials begin sprucing up the city for the 1984 Olympics. Economy: With the end of the Vietnam War, the country plunges into a recession that carries into the 1980s. The Southern California aerospace industry declines. The inflation rate soars to 15.8%, compared to 13.3% nationwide. Unemployment in Los Angeles County hits 6.6%, and 506,958 families are receiving AFDC. The median sale price of a house is $101,000. Police: The LAPD, under the command of Daryl F. Gates, is 80% white, 11% Latino and 7.3% black. The percentage of minority officers is slowly increasing, but few nonwhites are in management positions.

New Faces in the Neighborhood

Shifts in Los Angeles County’s ethnic makeup. 1960: Anglo: 80.8% Latino: 9.6% Black: 7.6% Asian/American Indian: 1.9% Other: 0.1% Total population: 6,038,771 1970: Anglo: 68.0% Latino: 17.5% Black: 10.8% Asian/American Indian: 3.0% Other: 0.7% Total population: 7,032,075 1980: Anglo: 52.9% Latino: 27.6% Black: 12.4% Asian/American Indian: 6.0% Other: 1.1% Total population: 7,477,503 1990: Anglo: 40.8% Latino: 37.8% Black: 10.5% Asian/American Indian: 10.5% Other: 0.2% Total population: 8,863,164 Percentages may not add up to 100 because of rounding.

Source: U.S. Census