COLUMN ONE : Uncivil War on Drugs : Soldiers of fortune, hired by apartment owners to put dealers out of business, bust heads and ask questions later. Critics say the private guards are violating civil rights.

David Roybal, 6 feet, 3 inches tall and 280 pounds of hired muscle, was nose-to-nose with a handcuffed suspect and he didn’t like what he was hearing.

“You lying to me, I’ll beat the s--- out of you,” Roybal spat, slapping the man across the face to end the threat. “How many times you been arrested? Don’t lie to me. I’ve seen you in jail.”

He had hauled the 22-year-old day laborer off the street and frisked him in the dim hallway of the Pico-Union apartment house, turning up a couple of rocks of cocaine in the man’s dirty camouflage jacket. Roybal, who had been asked by the building’s owner to chase away drug traffickers, meant to scare the man away forever.

“Can you run? Can you run to your house?” Roybal taunted, his hand on the Swiss 9-millimeter handgun holstered at his waist under a black T-shirt. “You’re going to get the f--- off the street aren’t you? I see your ass back over here, you might be going to jail, you might be going to the hospital. It depends on how I feel.”

The tough talk of Roybal and two associates was backed up by guns and handcuffs, slaps and punches. And the 13 meekly compliant men accosted during the crew’s three hours on duty at 1144 Grand View St. fled into the night like scared rabbits.

A 33-year-old repo man and bounty hunter, Roybal moonlights as a soldier of fortune on an increasingly busy battlefront in the drug war. He is also an outlaw who lacks the state licenses required of security guards or permits to carry the 9-millimeter, the .22-caliber pistol or the Smith & Wesson .357 magnum revolver he uses on the job.

With many police forces too depleted to put small-time dealers out of business, apartment owners and managers in poor areas of communities as scattered as North Hills, Panorama City, Pomona, Inglewood, Compton and Venice are turning to Roybal and other private contractors to do what the police no longer can--quickly reclaim buildings or blocks blighted by the drug trade.

What they get for their money is an armed force to harass suspected drug buyers and break down the doors of dealers, ordering the occupants to choose at gunpoint between arrest and moving out. Passersby are told to keep moving. Those slow to comply are jumped and threatened with trumped-up assault charges. The squads make citizen’s arrests and turn their captives over to police who take them to jail.

While working at an apartment building on Tobias Avenue in Panorama City a few years ago, Roybal and his crew collared so many residents and squatters for drugs that they converted a recreation room into a holding tank and handcuffed arrestees to a blood-spattered wall. They planted a voice-activated dictation machine there to gather incriminating evidence.

Residents of affluent neighborhoods have long hired patrol companies to bolster police efforts by reporting crimes. In stark contrast, crews such as Roybal’s, a shifting cast of bouncers, bodyguards and security guards, have won respect and envy from some beat cops by attacking the drug trade head-on.

“If we could do what these security guards do, we’d get rid of the crime problem, just like that,” said a Van Nuys division officer, referring to Roybal’s success cleaning up the Tobias building.

But, the police officer added, “talk about violating civil rights. If I did any of that stuff, I’d be indicted, just like that.”

Detective Richard Rudell, assigned to do investigations for the Los Angeles Police Commission on security guards who patrol city streets, likened Roybal’s approach to vigilantism. But he said the rise in such activities is understandable. “The department is being cut back, response time is extremely slow and you can’t blame people for looking for an alternative,” he said.

Such methods--which in the Tobias case included kicking down dozens of doors to get to suspected dealers--are decried by civil libertarians and advocates for the poor.

They say the tactics cause the thin fabric of civil order in poor and immigrant neighborhoods to fray further.

“This is a violation of those people’s rights and something ought to be done,” said Luke Williams, a community advocate with El Rescate, a Pico-Union agency that helps the area’s large Latino immigrant population.

He criticized police for failing to shut down the squads. “These are people who have fled war-torn countries where they have been harassed . . . and have come to Los Angeles as a safe haven where they can try to rebuild their lives and to allow this kind of clandestine police force to operate is wrong,” Williams said.

Barry Litt, a Los Angeles attorney who routinely sues landlords on behalf of tenants, compared the hiring of crews such as Roybal’s to lynchings. “If you allow this to go on, you encourage people to take the law into their own hands . . . which leads to anarchy,” he said.

“If rights exist, they have to exist for everybody, or they don’t exist for anybody,” Litt said.

Roybal and his employers, several of whom spoke only if not named, acknowledge the legal risks in his activities. The squads could be subject to prosecution for false arrest, carrying concealed weapons without a permit, assault with a deadly weapon, misdemeanor assault, trespassing and other misdemeanor offenses, as well as for various violations of the regulations regarding security guards.

Moreover, according to the Los Angeles city attorney’s office and Rudell, the landlord-employers could be liable for civil damages in the event of injuries or deaths.

Still, desperate owners and managers say their only other choice is to sit by and watch their investment in an apartment house evaporate in a cloud of cocaine smoke.

An aggressive security squad “is the only option left,” said one building manager who specializes in turning around drug-blighted properties in the San Fernando Valley. “And David Roybal is the best.

“None of us are vigilantes, and we don’t like having to protect tenants from . . . people on the street, but there are terrible things going on out there,” he said.

Several landlords said traditional security guard firms are too costly and ineffective against entrenched dealers. Trying to evict dealer-tenants is also unrealistic, several said, because law-abiding tenants are often too scared to testify in court proceedings.

In the case of the run-down 16-unit apartment house on Grand View Street, the problem was neighborhood nickel-and-dime rock cocaine sellers who had set up shop. When police cars came around, dealers escaped out the back, the resident manager said.

By the time Roybal was asked to investigate in April, a third of the apartments were empty.

Approaching on foot, Roybal, Teresa Palencias Diaz, 27, and Thomas Johnson, 22, swung into action. Identifying themselves as police, they told a young woman and a teen-age couple standing on the street to leave. Then they searched three men hanging out on the building’s stoop.

They found nothing, but the men were sent running, and Diaz took their place, posing as a drug seller. If anyone showed interest, Roybal and Johnson would burst from the building and drag the would-be drug purchaser inside to be slammed against the wall.

Each was frisked. Their pockets were emptied, their paper money shredded and their stashes of cocaine or marijuana seized. Halting answers brought punches or slaps. One man, who admitted he was there to buy cocaine, sobbed.

All of that was “completely legal,” Roybal said. “If there were more people out there doing what I do, I don’t think things on the streets would be as bad.”

Born in Pacoima, Roybal has worked for apartment owners since 1986. He was a security guard for about 12 years in New Mexico and California until 1989, according to his deposition in a civil suit in which he was judged liable for assaulting a bar patron while on duty. Since then, his main income has been from repossessing cars and tracking down bail jumpers. The apartment work provides him a lucrative sideline, sometimes paying $1,000 a week or more.

In 1990, his security guard’s license was not renewed because he shot at a car he thought was stolen as it left the garage of a Panorama City apartment house he was patrolling. He said he was returning fire, but failed to appear at an appeal hearing to defend himself.

He said he uses force as needed. He is careful, though. He checks for witnesses. He does not leave marks. And, if someone complains, he said, he tells police the suspect was resisting a citizen’s arrest.

“There are two or three places on your body I could hit which wouldn’t leave bruises but you’d feel nothing but pain,” Roybal said.

He also does not worry about being sued, although he twice lost suits accusing him of assault while employed by security guard companies. He paid no part of those awards and said he could not pay a judgment now. Roybal said he tells potential clients that, if they were to be sued, they should disavow hiring him.

Rudell, the Police Commission detective, said Roybal’s actions invite lawsuits. “A security officer’s duty is to observe and report and anything beyond that is questionable. If you stop a person from doing what he wants to do and that person hasn’t committed any crime . . . you’re really opening yourself to civil litigation.”

Rudell and officials with the state Department of Consumer Affairs, which also licenses security guards, said the number of such crews is growing, although there are no firm figures on the increase.

Los Angeles Deputy City Atty. Earl Thomas said he gets many inquiries about the legalities of citizen’s arrests and security guards. He tells callers citizens may arrest someone they have seen commit a misdemeanor or know to have committed a felony. It also is legal to forcibly enter a residence to make an arrest for a felony.

But he said he also explains the legal risks of a mistake.

One possible result of the increase in aggressive security forces is a rise in complaints.

The number of complaints against security guards investigated by the state has increased more than fourfold since the 1986-87 fiscal year, from 92 then to 444 for 1991-92. They include excessive force, incompetence, unprofessional conduct and guards working without licensing.

Gun-related incidents involving security guards went from 67 in 1989-90 to 116 for 1991-92. Those included shootings and lesser incidents such as failing to report the use of a gun.

But officials say not much can be done to rein in the ad hoc teams. Police often are unfamiliar with rules for security guards, said Rudell. Besides, he and others said, it is the state’s job to enforce them.

One of Roybal’s biggest successes came at 9010 Tobias Ave., beginning in 1989.

Police raids had little lasting impact on the drug trade there. But Roybal rushed it with a team of off-duty cops, moonlighting security guards and bodyguards. “Anybody we saw who looked drug-related or gang-related, we jacked them,” he said. “Nobody knew who we were. We got 10 of them right away, that quick.”

Longtime resident Denise Miller, 37, a court reporter, described them as “a gang of warriors” on a mission to take back the building. Ralph Moratz, 60, a movie extra who had regularly shooed junkies from his door, characterized Roybal as a real-life Robocop.

“They’d simply break in the door, get these guys down on the floor with their hands over their heads and do what they had to do,” Moratz said. “It reached a point where it was like a ghost building because all the doors were broken.”

That was the building where the team set up the makeshift jail. One Van Nuys division police officer, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified, said that some prisoners escaped from the holding cell and called police to complain about their treatment. Police ignored the complaints and arrested them anyway “because it serves the greater good,” said the officer.

Tim Bergstrom, the Police Department’s senior lead officer for the Tobias area, confirmed the existence of the holding cell and said the patrol made numerous narcotics-related arrests. But he said the squad members were unarmed and acted properly.

Roybal said the team made 150 arrests--mostly for drugs or trespassing--over several months. Police officials would not confirm or deny the claim, but an officer who took some arrestees to jail said the number easily exceeded 100.

Roybal said he testified in court and secured numerous convictions, but that claim could not be independently evaluated.

Some of the demand for security teams results from high prices owners paid for apartment houses in the late 1980s, veteran commercial real estate broker Joe Penich said. When the recession stanched cash flow, many owners tried desperately to keep their units filled by renting to disreputable tenants.

Now, said Joseph Rouzan III, a retired LAPD detective and security consultant, owners are looking to “brute force” to regain control. “I tell people what the law is and they don’t want to hear about the law,” he said. “They want to know how to get their buildings back.”

Even licensed outfits say the market for aggressive security squads is growing. Richard Hall, the proprietor of H & H Guard Service based near downtown, said his guards worked for about seven months at the Rayen Apartments in North Hills last year and forced deadbeats and drug dealers out.

“Somebody’s got to rule and when we’re there, we rule,” Hall said. “When somebody says something smart, we body slam him, right on the floor with all of his friends looking. We handcuff them and kick them and when the paramedics come and they’re on the stretcher, we say: ‘Hey, sue me.’ ”

Mark Schwartz, who said he controls $35-million worth of real estate, has hired Roybal several times to work in his buildings in Pomona and North Hills.

“Mr. Roybal . . . is able to go out and talk to these people in whatever language they understand to convince them that they’ve had a free ride on the rent and it’s time to move,” he said.

Schwartz said, however, that “no way on this Earth I would tolerate anybody boxing anybody around.”

But someone was boxed around when the crew was on duty in June at 8844 Orion Ave., a building Schwartz had just taken over from the near-bankrupt previous owner.

A reporter watched as a large man who refused an order to halt was attacked in the building’s garage by three crew members. “If that’s what he wants to do, take him down,” Roybal directed. Instantly, the handcuffed man’s cheek was in a motor oil stain, three guns pointed at his head.

Roybal told the man he would be arrested for assault if he did not leave. Instead, the man began complaining loudly. And, in support, a chorus of 20 residents gathered in front of the building to demand that Roybal and his associates identify themselves.

“I don’t understand why they had to knock me down, tear my clothes, skin my knees and drag me through the oil,” said the man, who said his name was Kenny. “We ain’t no . . . animals. We’re human too. What they did to me in the driveway ain’t right.”

Roybal’s team was outnumbered and left early. But they returned the next night and Roybal said he had to do battle with one obstreperous tenant. He took off his gun and baton and fists began to fly.

“I slapped the living s--- out of him,” Roybal said.