The Corner Plague : Oxnard: Drugs and dealers dominate the area of Cooper Road and Hayes Avenue. Violence is worse than ever.

On the edge of an inner-city island divorced from the rest of Oxnard by the busy Southern Pacific rail line, the marketplace is alive and filling with buyers.

Mothers guide strollers along broken sidewalks in a tired and tattered pocket of the La Colonia district, headed for simple neighborhood markets. Dark barrio barrooms and pool halls quickly become crowded, even though it is not yet noon.

But in this shabby area surrounding Cooper Road and Hayes Avenue, the biggest business goes down on the street.

Young dope dealers are everywhere, leaning on cars and storefronts, hunting for junkies who need a fix. These peddlers of tar heroin and crack cocaine set up drive-through service in alleyways and on street corners, supplying out-of-town drivers of luxury cars just as often as locals on 10-speed bikes.

The Cooper and Hayes area is a bustling mix of storefronts and old homes protected by iron bars.

It’s a place where kids play ball in littered alleys bordered by wobbly wooden fences blanketed by graffiti. And it’s a place where an endless stream of immigrants have settled and made good.

But it’s also the drug-dealing capital of Ventura County, police say, a nasty place that in recent years has turned more violent and more deadly.

“All the junkies in the county know if you want to buy dope, you come to Cooper and Hayes,” says Oxnard patrolman Jim O’Brien. “Not a night goes by where we don’t have problems down there.”

The Outlook

At a time when Oxnard officials are out of money and cutting services, the drug problem at Cooper and Hayes is worse than ever.

Last year, police arrested 416 suspected dealers and users in an area of three square blocks surrounding the intersection, accounting for more than 20% of the drug busts made citywide. Drug-related robberies, assaults and homicides are also on the rise.

In the two previous years, drug arrests in the area represented about 10% of the city total.

Then there are the numbers that can’t be computed. Police say every time they take a dealer off the street, another replaces him the next day.

“Cooper and Hayes is legendary,” says retired Police Chief Robert Owens, who ordered one campaign after another that failed to wipe out drug sales. “It is the most complex kind of sociological riddle that you could possibly have to deal with.”

Third- and fourth-generation La Colonia residents have resorted to selling drugs because they can’t find any other way to survive, Owens says. They have been joined in recent years by immigrant farm workers who have discovered that they can make more money by dealing dope than by pulling food from the ground, police and community activists say.

The city can’t hire enough police officers to rid Cooper and Hayes of drug dealing, Owens says. Without the help of area merchants and residents, who generally fear retaliation and are reluctant to come forward, Oxnard will continue to lose its war on drugs.

“It affects the balance of the neighborhood,” he says of the brazen dope sales and related crimes. “It makes people more fearful.”

The Rough Life

Swollen-eyed young men who station themselves at street corners and alleys around Cooper and Hayes also fear this drug scene.

These are the street dealers, young toughs who have been locked up much of their lives for selling dope to feed their own heroin habits. Deep purple needle tracks scar their arms and legs and necks.

Some of the tracks are still fresh and oozing pus.

These guys fear they will catch AIDS from sharing dirty needles. And they fear that their next run-in with the law will mean hard time instead of juvenile hall.

But mostly they fear that one day they will feed their veins with a deadly dose of the warm brown liquid that has comforted them for years.

“You can do enough business around here to get you from day to day,” says a 19-year-old who guesses that he injects a mixture of heroin and cocaine about 30 times a day. “It’s a rough life, but I don’t know any other way.”

Local residents are afraid to talk publicly about the drug dealing that has paralyzed this urban pocket. Many refuse to leave their homes, or even open their doors, when the streets are crawling with dealers.

“What else do you want to know about drugs?” an old man yells before slamming his door. “Look for yourself. See what happens here. See how we live.”

It’s tough to tell the good guys from the bad around here. Not everyone on the street deals dope. Police officers periodically sweep the area and roust loiterers, patting them down and making them turn their pockets inside out.

Usually they find nothing. Most dealers are smart enough to not carry drugs, stashing their goods under rocks and in bushes.

“I look onto these streets and I see myself there,” says Julian Martinez, who pushed and used narcotics for many years near Cooper and Hayes until he found religion.

Martinez says he robbed and stole to support his habit. He traded food stamps and a Medi-Cal card and bottled water for cocaine and heroin. He once even used a credit card as a deposit for drugs.

Now the needle tracks on his arms are dark and fading, but memories of the crazy life at Cooper and Hayes never will.

“It’s going to take a lot of work to clean this place up,” says the 30-year-old who now hits the streets to persuade others to give up dope. “Cooper and Hayes has been rotting for years.”

The Arrests

Armando Ruiz was making good money. Drug money. The kind that rolls in until you get caught.

He was part of a three-man team that controlled the drug trade in an S-shaped alley--a blacktop playground where kids play soccer and toddlers chase rubber balls--linking Harrison and Hayes avenues.

But a few months ago, residents complained that it had turned into a drug dealers’ haven, with Ruiz a key member of the sales team.

When motorists drove into the alley, Ruiz and another lookout would watch for police while a dealer named Jose Luna peddled heroin and cocaine.

In six hours on the morning of April 3, the trio made more than 100 deals as a camera secretly recorded their actions. Customers came to the alley on foot and on bicycle. They drove Cadillacs and beat-up pickups and old Volkswagens.

Sometimes the cars came so fast that they stacked up two and three deep.

“This was sort of like the Jack-In-The-Box drive-up window for narcotics,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Mandee Sanderson told jurors this month, noting that the dealers even made change for their customers.

Oxnard police know all of this because they videotaped the whole thing from an empty apartment house on the alley’s north end. Detectives even taped the sale of drugs to an undercover agent--sealed with a handshake.

A jury convicted Ruiz last week of dealing heroin and cocaine and planting a loaded handgun in a bag not far from the drugs. Luna pleaded guilty last month to drug sales.

They are scheduled for sentencing next month.

Sanderson argued the case before a judge who had just finished presiding over a trial involving drug sales near Cooper and Hayes. She is now readying another case against a dope dealer busted on Cooper Road.

“That place keeps us busy,” she said.

The Authorities

Those who know this area best aren’t surprised at how bad things have become.

Cooper and Hayes is a study in neglect, community activists say. It’s what happens when you cram too many poor people and too few jobs into a run-down area with too little housing.

“This community has a history as a place that has been forgotten,” says one local activist who asked not to be identified because he fears retribution from the local drug dealers.

“The fact of the matter is, we have council members who live in gated communities and really don’t want to spend money and resources in areas that don’t produce votes.”

Police Chief Harold Hurtt, who started work this month, has come to town with a battle plan.

He favors establishing community-based policing, a costly but effective tool where permanent police storefronts and foot patrols could bring order to Oxnard’s most lawless neighborhoods.

But he warns that police alone can’t solve the problem.

“Citizens need to become involved with police in taking back their neighborhoods,” Hurtt says. “You can lie in bed and wait for the problem to come and get you, or you can meet it halfway and give it a good fight.”

Two of the men who want to be Oxnard’s next mayor acknowledge that the drug problem at Cooper and Hayes and in other crime pockets is worse than it has ever been. They say they have been complaining about it for years, only to be told by previous police administrations that gangs and drugs were of little significance in Oxnard.

Councilmen Mike Plisky and Manny Lopez say the city’s top priority is to hire more police officers.

“I know it’s scary down there and I have no tolerance for the people who are out in the street, holding that community hostage,” says Plisky, who believes cash for new police hires can be found by trimming fat from the Police Department budget.

“What good does it do to talk about the things we can do for the city of Oxnard when the people of that area are terrorized by hoodlums and bums and slobs who don’t care about anything but dealing drugs?”

Lopez says he regularly gets complaints from residents and merchants in that area about the open and brazen drug sales.

“The people who live down there are victims,” says Lopez, who once lived in the city’s La Colonia district. “I think an element of fear has existed down there for a very long time.”

The Ministers

Things are about to change at Cooper and Hayes, if only for a few hours.

On this particular night, dope dealers are still working the streets. Junkies are staggering along these broken sidewalks, their eyes sunken and glazed.

But 200 church members from Victory Outreach of Ventura County are about to overwhelm this neighborhood, turning it into something it usually isn’t.

Ex-junkies and gang members are on their way to invade the streets to urge users and dealers to give up their destructive ways. These tattooed ministers, many of whom once did their nastiest work on these streets, will soon be praying with the young men who have taken their place.

“It’s a heavy place for drug activity and we’re trying to put a stop to it,” says the Rev. Bob Herrera, leading a Victory Outreach caravan that includes a big blue bus whose riders have broken out in song. “There is some heavy sin in there that we need to deal with.”

As the caravan cuts through La Colonia, gang members flash hand signals and dope dealers approach, hoping to make sales.

The caravan stops at a littered lot near Cooper and Hayes. A three-piece band has already set up and gospel hymns blare from giant box speakers.

Herrera takes the microphone and grabs the attention of all within earshot.

“We did our drugs, we did our life of madness,” Herrera screams as an old man stumbles past, carrying a large bottle of fortified beer. “We ran the streets like you. We know what it’s like to hurt like you. You’re tired and you want out.”

Victory Outreach breaks into song. Some members corner young dope pushers and offer to pray with them. They work the crowd hard with a message of healing and salvation.

But even as Herrera closes this street revival, casting out demons and inviting those who want out to come forward, a sleek black Cadillac pulls to a nearby corner and another drug deal goes down.

“Like I said, heavy sin in here,” Herrera says with a shrug. “There’s a lot of work to be done.”

MINISTRY: Victory Outreach walks Oxnard’s mean streets. B7

Drug Arrests

Drug arrests in area surrounding Cooper Road and Hayes Avenue 1989: 262 1990: 228 1991: 416

Percentage of citywide total of drug arrests 1989: 9.3% 1990: 8.6% 1991: 20.7%

Source: Oxnard Police Department