Guards From Farrakhan Group Fired : Housing: Managers say a security patrol linked to the Nation of Islam failed to deter drug dealing and other crime at low-income apartment buildings in Venice. HUD officials had criticized the firm’s performance.

Complaining that the unconventional guards had failed to stem drug dealing and gang crime at 15 low-income Venice apartment buildings, the managers have fired a security firm affiliated with the Nation of Islam.

The firm, N.O.I. Security Agency Inc., won the job last year despite opposition from Jewish groups charging that the preachings of the Nation of Islam’s leader, Louis Farrakhan, were violent and anti-Semitic. It was the first time the firm had been hired to patrol subsidized housing in California.

N.O.I.’s firing comes a month after the security firm was replaced at one of the buildings amid assertions by federal and city officials that its guards turned a blind eye to rampant drug dealing at the building.

The firing takes effect next month. A replacement firm is expected to be hired after the management company submits a new security plan next week to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Two weeks ago, HUD officials threatened to strip the managers’ right to run the buildings--which are privately owned but largely occupied by tenants receiving federal rent assistance--because of the failure to keep the apartments safe.

Officials for N.O.I. and the management company, Alliance Housing Management Inc. of Los Angeles, did not return telephone calls seeking comment Wednesday.

But the dismissal angered a tenant activist who led the drive to hire Farrakhan’s group after hearing reports of the Nation of Islam’s success in patrolling East Coast housing projects.

Tenant leader Regina Hyman said the N.O.I. guards were being blamed for the failures of Los Angeles police and the housing management firm. The unarmed guards did not have the authority to patrol the nearby sidewalks and streets, Hyman said, where much of the crime took place.

“They were doing their job,” she said. “The Police Department did not do their job.”

Hyman disputed assertions by police that surveillance videotapes showed drug dealing taking place in front of the guards. “All the pictures I saw and all the videotapes I saw, (the dealers) had their backs to the guard,” she said.

Federal and city authorities, who showed the surveillance materials to the building owners last month, also said the guards sometimes allowed suspects into the buildings but were slow to open the gate for pursuing police. Officers said the guards appeared to have been intimidated by gun-toting gang members.

The recent criticisms mark a turnaround from the widespread praise that greeted N.O.I. after it took over the $53,676-a-month job last November.

In the first months, the agency’s bow-tied and uniformed guards were credited with pushing drug dealers from the gated complexes out onto the streets, where police could arrest them. Crime figures showed an early drop in incidents at the buildings, which are sprinkled throughout the gentrifying Oakwood neighborhood west of Lincoln Boulevard.

Residents said the buildings were neater and quieter than before, when crime got so bad that U.S. marshals temporarily seized one of the buildings, known collectively as Holiday Venice.

But in the dismissal letter dated Monday, Alliance Vice President David Itkin told N.O.I. managers that evidence compiled by a city drug task force and federal authorities showed “a complete failure of your personnel to perform the duties for which you were hired.”

The letter said the problem was particularly severe at a building on Brooks Avenue that is notorious for drug and gang activity.

That building is now patrolled by armed guards working for another private firm, although N.O.I. has remained on the job at the other 14 sites.

Itkin also blamed the guards and police alike for failing to cooperate with each other. “We cannot afford to be caught in the middle of such a situation,” his letter said.