Firebombings Destroy Project’s Racial Harmony : Violence: Blacks are leaving mostly Latino Ramona Gardens after two attacks. Residents remain tight-lipped, hampering investigations.

“Dear Salia, You are my best friend. I will never forget you . I wish you a happy life.”

--A 10-year-old Latina girl to Salia Peoples, dated Sept. 2, 1992

Two weeks ago, Clifford Warren and his wife were watching late-night television when an explosion ripped through the pantry of their Ramona Gardens apartment in Boyle Heights.

Not until the couple and their seven small children were safely out did Warren realize that the fire had been caused not by a faulty water heater but by a firebomb. Or that across the street, another black family had been firebombed minutes earlier.

Both families lost virtually all their possessions in the fires.

Before that unpublicized incident on Aug. 30, seven African-American families lived among the 2,000 Latinos in the 497-unit public housing complex.

Since then, the two families targeted by the bombs have moved out, and a third African-American family has fled. At least two of the four remaining black families have inquired about transferring out, according to the Los Angeles Housing Authority.

“I was shocked because we had wonderful neighbors and we once thought the place was paradise,” said Warren, 38, who has spent the past two weeks with his family crammed into two small rooms at a motel miles away, as a guest of the Red Cross. “The hard part is that I’m sure everybody knows who did it, but nobody will talk about it.”

The explosions have sent muted shock waves through the community, where no one, including Warren, had premonitions of rising racial tensions. Police and Fire Department investigators say they have no leads in the case; none of the project’s residents have come forward to provide information.

Warren says he has no idea who hurled the firebombs.

But, with little hesitation, he blames the silence that keeps his attackers’ identity a secret on the bold young gang members who have instilled fear among project residents--a gut-wrenching fear that keeps toddlers inside on hot afternoons and turns law-abiding citizens deaf and blind to crimes committed outside their windows.

“I’d say probably only 15 little boys wanted us out of there and the rest were real nice neighbors who are scared to death,” said Warren, who lives on disability payments. “Nobody can control these kids. The big guys don’t want to tell on the little ones. The mamas don’t want to get their boys in trouble. And everybody else is afraid.”

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Ramona Gardens, built in 1941, is the city’s oldest public housing project. Nestled in a dell between a freeway, railroad tracks and low-lying hills, it seems insulated from the Boyle Heights community that surrounds it. Some families have lived there for generations.

Unlike other projects, where gangs vie among themselves for power, a single gang named Big Hazard dominates this grassy complex, whose buildings are painted with bright Mexican murals. Police who have worked there for years consider it a cradle of the prison-based Mexican Mafia.

Last March, one reputed Mexican Mafia member named Charles (Charlie Brown) Manriquez was shot to death at the project. Two months later, popular gang counselor Ana Lizarraga, who had grown up in Ramona Gardens, was assassinated outside her home. She had worked as a consultant on the film “American Me,” which chronicles the rise of the Mexican Mafia. A 20-year-old gang member recently released from prison has been charged with her murder. The Manriquez case, like many other project crimes, is unsolved.

In the insular Ramona Gardens complex, gang members are not outsiders, but homeboys--boys from home--sons and grandsons who marry each other’s sisters. The code of silence is strong.

“Ramona is just different,” said LAPD Officer Michael Marchello, who first patrolled the project on a foot beat in 1973. “Many family members have lived there such a long time that family and gang are all mixed up, so it’s hard to extract information. There’s a lot of good people in there who try to break away, but they live in constant fear.”

Isabel Ayala, president of the Ramona Gardens Resident Advisory Council, has raised eight children at Ramona. Unlike most residents--who either close the door when a stranger knocks or refuse to open it at all after peeking out the curtain--she smiles at a stranger with the assurance of a grandmother who has seen it all through her kitchen window.

Still, she hesitates when asked about the firebombings.

“The only thing I can say is they (the black families) were very nice people,” she said.

As she spoke, a young gang member washing cars to raise money for a homeboy’s funeral walked by and put his finger to his lips in warning. He needn’t have bothered; if Ayala knew anything about the incident, she wasn’t talking.

“To be honest,” she said, “nobody says nothing when something happens here because you know not to ask questions.”

Someone clearly wanted the black residents out. But who? And why?

The most common theory, among those who offer any at all, is that one of the many “sets” within the Big Hazard gang feared that African-American residents would attract competing gang members from outside the project, leading the homeboys into a demeaning fight over their own turf.

Just as likely, police say, someone suspected that one of the project’s black residents had snitched on them. Or the firebombing was a skirmish in a power struggle between the young gangbangers and the older generation of veteranos, those 35 or older.

“I heard that the old guys didn’t mean for this to happen,” said Warren. “But they say they can’t control the young ones. They can’t kill ‘em, they can’t turn ‘em in and they can’t stop ‘em.”

The veteranos --men whose forearms bear the scars of long-ago fights when knives were the weapons of choice--are still around the project. Some have gone straight; some have not.

One, who sports an old tattoo he says means “trust no one” in Chinese, said he helped douse the flames caused by the firebombs. But, he said, he didn’t see anyone set the fires.

“I’m Hispanic and I don’t like racism,” he said, explaining that he taught himself respect for African-Americans despite early childhood warnings from his father that he would be slapped if he associated with a black youngster.

Forty years ago, according to some old-timers, many of the project’s residents were black.

“When I moved in in 1952, almost everyone around me was black, and we had white picket fences with daisies here,” recalled Virginia Lopez. “Everyone got along. . . . Then in the late ‘60s, a Mexican kid got killed by a black boy. Within three or four weeks, maybe a hundred black families moved out.”

At least two people died in the internal strife that followed, she and others said, but those battles have either been lost to history or were not noted at the time they occurred. Not even the Housing Authority, which runs the projects, has archives on those days, a spokesman said.

*

During the five years his family lived in the housing project, Warren heard occasional racial taunts from young gang members, but prided himself on his ability to get along.

“The young gangbangers, they’d ride around doing wheelies on their bicycles with .22s in their hands,” he said. “They’d ask what was I doin’ here--this wasn’t Compton--and they’d really be ‘Naziing out.’ I’d smile and stroke ‘em just right.”

When a young gangbanger asked for a feria, or toll, he’d hand him some change. Then, being a Christian, Warren said, he would bless him.

Occasionally, when youngsters seemed to say what the Warren children call “the bad word” when talking about blacks, Warren told them not to take offense. “Negro” means “black” in Spanish, he’d say; perhaps the Latino children just didn’t pronounce it right.

Most of the time, Warren and his wife--a former day-care teacher named Valencia Peoples, 36--and their seven children, got along. They had friends in the project. The children’s best friends, in fact, were all Latino.

Now, the firebombing that destroyed their apartment also has shattered those friendships, perhaps forever.

Among the few personal memories Warren’s 10-year-old daughter Salia has of her old neighborhood are two dozen letters written to her last week by her old classmates at Murchison Street Elementary School. All were signed by children with Spanish surnames.

“Dear Salia, Hi! I am sorry for what gang members did to your family . . . the cholos are so stupid,” wrote one classmate, who signed her letter, “Friends Forever.”

“I bet you and your family are scared,” wrote another. “I feel so sorry for you. I wish I could take your place. . . .”

Another decorated her letter with a painting of a broken flower.

Because of the firebombings, “We had about eight (black) kids who left the school,” said Murchison’s principal, Robert Bilovsky. “One fifth-grader was very upset. She told me, ‘I thought they were my friends.’ ”

The firebombings are common knowledge on campus and the school has held assemblies to talk about the incidents. But come next February, when the school is planning its first observance of Black History Month, about a third of its black students will be gone.

The city Housing Authority is trying to relocate the bombed-out families and has launched its own investigation.

But identifying the culprits “either requires the community bearing witness, or police doing undercover work,” said agency spokesman Marshall J. Kandell.

“And there is no way in the world to put undercover police into that community without everybody knowing exactly who they are. It’s sad, because Ramona Gardens really is full of wonderful and warm people. They just have a serious problem.”

So silence prevails.

“We have no witnesses and nobody to trail,” said Los Angeles Fire Department Battalion Chief Les Hawkes, who oversees arson cases. “The investigation is now inactive. We just don’t have anything to go on.”