A Neighborhood Scourged by Crack Finds Redemption : Drugs: On 69th Street, the plague destroyed dreams, lives and families. But some survived and found new life.

The aging, wood-frame house that Ronald White once called home--the house he left in search of greatness, the house he returned to in disgrace, the house where he now struggles for redemption--stands at 69th and Normandie in South-Central Los Angeles.

Once, its large spreading tree, covering the front lawn, was a magnet for crack dealers, providing perfect cover. Today the house is a magnet for White, two brothers and three-dozen other recovering addicts. On Sundays they flock there to confront the disease that swept over them.

On this single block, like so many others in Los Angeles’ poorer communities, the evils of crack converged at once--the dealing, the homelessness, the prostitution and betrayal.

One home after another, one family after the next, was felled by the plague. It was not just that lives were lost, it was that life --simple civility--was lost.

But remarkably, life has returned to the White family and their neighbors on the 1300 block of West 69th Street. What happened there is a lesson in the agonizing cycle of survival that crack creates: Only when its users reach moral exhaustion can they confront their weaknesses and crawl out.

The Family Goes Under

Sixty-Ninth Street once symbolized the upward mobility of blacks who migrated to Los Angeles from the South, a stream that began after World War II and exploded in the 1960s. African Americans settled first near Central Avenue, then spread west as opportunities grew.

In 1969, when Marie White, a native of Mississippi, moved her family of six boys to 69th Street from a cramped apartment two miles east, she found an integrated working-class block whose 30 single-family homes had gardens and fruit trees. The new arrivals were people with office and Civil Service jobs. It was a community with Little League, Pop Warner football, a neighborhood beautification program and a culture in which parents watched out for their neighbors’ children.

Mrs. White raised her sons to aim high. Ronald never had time for drugs or alcohol, nor did he spend much time in the neighborhood. He had his sights set on becoming a lawyer. It was a dream he shared with his older brother Ralph and his younger one, Reggie. They would one day have the firm White, White & White.

They were the first post-civil-rights-movement generation of African Americans, graduating from high school in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s with a sense of hopefulness and new wave of affirmative-action programs. “We never considered the possibility of failure,” Ronald said.

They went to college and never looked back: Ralph to UCLA, followed by Ronald at Loyola Marymount University and Reggie to Redlands University.

Of the three, Ronald was the only one to become a lawyer, graduating from Hastings College of Law in San Francisco in 2 1/2 years in 1979 and passing the Bar on his first try. He returned to Los Angeles with the goal of making a million dollars a year as an entertainment lawyer. A diminutive man with a warm and thoughtful manner, he worked for a while with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, moved to an entertainment management company and even hung out his shingle for a time.

But success eluded him. It did not, as he’d imagined, solve his childhood insecurities about his small size, dark complexion and bookish personality. There was always something missing--a hole in his gut--and in an age-old tale of addiction he tried to fill that space with drugs. In college it was alcohol and marijuana.

“I felt tall, I felt good-looking, I felt popular,” he said. “I was part of a crowd.”

By law school he was snorting cocaine. By the time he was practicing law he was freebasing it, not long after comedian Richard Pryor severely burned himself while freebasing cocaine in a notorious San Fernando Valley incident. His suits and professional title kept up the pretense of success.

Then crack came to town on a large scale.

At first, it was an experience Ronald enjoyed sharing with his brothers, like talking politics or watching a football game. But the drug’s brief, intense euphoria was overwhelming, and he began spending more and more money, time and energy chasing it.

Soon, at 29, he was living the life of an addict, not a lawyer. He rode the bus to work and slept on a couch in Reggie’s apartment.

Eventually, he moved back in with his mother. Not long after, Ralph came back home. His wife, her bank account depleted, angrily dropped off his clothes. Then Reggie followed. They too had become addicts.

The block, whose temptations the older brothers had largely avoided while growing up, suddenly became the center of their adult world. Through crack, these more sophisticated siblings bonded with two of their younger, less successful brothers, Roderick and Ricky. Roderick’s street contacts kept the older Whites in good supply; Ricky, who was developmentally slow, had a source of income: a monthly government check.

For a while, it worked. They were members of that prized brotherhood: crack addicts who still had jobs, providing enough cash to party in rented motel rooms. Ronald finally felt that sense of power he’d craved.

“I always wanted to be in charge of the good time, flashing money, spending money, being able to call the shots,” he said. “We saw it as a paradise.”

Inevitably, they quit their jobs or were fired, and they were no longer controlling crack. It was controlling them. They started selling it so they could keep buying it.

One of crack’s perversities is how bad it makes you want it. It destroys not only people but taboos. Friends (or brothers) who had warmly shared other drugs soon began to cheat on each other for crack.

The White brothers became part of a nocturnal subculture of dealers, panhandlers, shopping cart scavengers and prostitutes that haunted the 1300 block. A house for rent quickly became a crack house. The Whites’ garage became another. Eventually, homeowners with no connection to crack--people such as Kenneth Middleton, who made his living as a security guard--would hear their doors being rattled in the middle of the night by users presuming that every house on the block sold rock.

There were problems on the block long before crack arrived, to be sure, but crack--in a way that no drug ever had done--was exacerbating them, magnifying and speeding up their effects, turning years into a blur that would later stand to many users and neighbors as a scarcely recollectable interval.

On the street, Ronald was now known as “Lawyer,” the man who sometimes dressed in suits and offered you legal advice in exchange for a hit on the pipe. He became, variously, a small-time con artist, a crack-house doorman and an escort for women who sold their bodies for a $10 rock of crack.

Ritual controlled him: hustling for money, cutting the deal, cheating and stealing more and more, settling for smaller hits . . . anything for another hit.

He and a handful of crackheads would sometimes use an abandoned house not far from 69th Street to smoke themselves dry. One night they were waiting for a young woman to return to the trash-strewn house with money after turning a trick at a nearby motel. Like men of a millennium ago they waited in darkness, only a candlelight flickering on the floor, no toilet, no running water. They had been smoking for hours, days, pausing to break only when the pipe was empty, when it was time to hustle more money to buy more crack. Ronald’s hands were black from the heat of the pipe, his cheeks sunk in, his eyes bulging, his skin ashen, stretched tight across his skull. A can of food was warmed on a hot plate. No one dared to leave. They might miss out; there would be no sharing.

“Everything I said I’d never do, everything I scoffed at, I ended up doing. It was pathetic,” he said. “But when I was in the life, it seemed like everyone was in it.”

Whenever they ran out, the block’s main dealer, a younger man named Donnell, was waiting.

The Dealer Rises

Donnell Alexander and his two brothers and two sisters lived on the other side of 69th in a neat, well-furnished home in the middle of the block. His father was a Postal Service worker with high expectations for his son. As a child, Donnell had admired the White children on the corner. When he went off to community college, he dreamed that he would make it in professional football.

But crack took Donnell too--in a different way. Attracted by early reports that the new drug was an aphrodisiac, he was one of the first on the block to try it; he was disappointed. Then, as the market took flight, he was drawn by the financial prospects of selling a drug that forced the users to buy it over and over again in an increasingly tighter spiral of abuse. Donnell was 21, typical of the youthful first wave of crack dealers. Their customers tended to be older men and women, raised in the 1970s, an era that celebrated casual drug use.

Donnell never had a qualm.

“It was business,” he said matter-of-factly. “Crack could make you do anything--anything maybe except shoot yourself in the head, because then you wouldn’t be able to get any more. I didn’t care if the (users’) kids didn’t eat. I just wanted the money--and crack was a moneymaking machine.”

His early drug experiments had given him contacts among the neighborhood’s older dealers. He knew how to cook up crack by shaking baking soda with cocaine. Donnell had one more advantage: He was not hooked on crack. He was hooked on power. The drug would become a tool to manipulate lives like the Whites, whose stars shone brighter than his.

He began delivering crack on a moped and eventually set up crack houses, including one that he rented a few doors from his mother’s home. With the money, he employed a small legion of dealers--mostly crack addicts--to peddle his product, paying them with the drug.

The block was a great source of labor. Ronald and his college-educated brothers, selling to support their habits, occupied the lowest rung. Roderick White, a childhood friend of Donnell who had hung around the house with few ambitions after graduating from high school, often worked as a courier, delivering drugs to dealers in San Diego. Donnell didn’t trust him; Roderick tended to sample what he sold.

The Whites joined other sons and daughters of the block who were busy transforming 69th into a drive-through minimarket for crack. Louis (Paco) Radford, the stepson of another postal worker who lived down the street, was also a foot soldier. Next door to Donnell’s crack house lived Joanne Smith, who sat on the porch and monitored the block for police or other signs of trouble in exchange for crack.

“Nobody ever left the block,” Smith said. “You’d go away for a while and end up right back here. The neighborhood just sucked you up. . . . My crack pipe was my MasterCard.”

Business at the corner, under the house with the great spreading tree, was frenetic. You pulled your car up and got instant service. Sometimes there was a rush of competing hustlers. Once Ralph White beat them to a car pulling up to the house and held out his rocks. He looked into the car’s open passenger window, said “What do you need?” and stared into a face that was familiar and terrifying.

It was his mother. A friend was dropping her off from church.

“I turned, broke and ran,” he said. “Humiliation. Total humiliation.” Ronald, standing nearby, slipped away into the crowd.

For three years this was the nightmare that Marie White, nicknamed Saint Marie by her neighbors, lived. She had escaped the harsh rural life in the small Mississippi Delta town of Cleveland. She’d come here as a teen-age single mother and supported her family by doing everything from housecleaning to taking in laundry. In her 40s she’d gone back to school, earning a degree with honors from Cal State L.A. And now, just as she began preparing to enjoy her own life, her sons’ addictions were pulling the house apart.

Her shoes were stolen from the closet, food from the refrigerator. The gold clock she was awarded for community service disappeared. She could not leave her purse unattended. Her garage had become a smokehouse for her sons and other neighborhood addicts. When she left home for a week on a vacation cruise they turned the entire place into a crack house, selling rocks out the front door and smoking in the back. After she returned and they closed down sales, customers continued to drop by the house at all hours.

“I couldn’t believe educated people did this,” she said. “It was the hardest thing for me to admit.”

As her sons’ devotion to crack hit its peak, she began to suspect that they were planning to kill her to take the last of what was left. She called a breakfast meeting and confronted them.

“Don’t even think about killing me to get what I have left,” she told them. “I don’t have anything for you. You won’t get a dime.” They thought she was crazy.

Through it all, she never put her sons out, clinging to the belief that they would turn around. She had frequent nightmares that someone would call to tell her that one of them was dead. She counted heads to be certain they made it through another day. She cringed motionlessly at their stupidity.

Like the day Ronald was assigned by a dealer to hawk marijuana and used the profits to buy and smoke crack.

He was at his mother’s house when the dealer came looking for him. On the lawn, under the tree, the dealer knocked him down and began kicking and stomping him into the street. Out of the corner of his eye, Ronald could see his mother on the porch. He was waiting for her to cry out, but she just stood watching.

“Thank you, thank you,” Mrs. White was saying to herself. “Maybe this will do it.”

She turned and coldly walked back to the house.

“She was the last person who had believed in me,” Ronald said, “and she was turning away. That’s when I knew I had hit bottom.”

The next day he checked into a rehabilitation center on Skid Row. Off the street, he rested for the first time in weeks, suffering through sweats, fighting the nagging craving for crack. Bone tired, he did little other than sleep and eat. “No more games, no more hustling,” he decided.

Ronald was the first to successfully complete the journey out. Several other brothers soon began to slowly push each other in the same direction.

Roderick saw the change when he got out of jail after serving a six-month sentence for selling to an undercover officer. He’d expected the comfort of crack at home. It wasn’t there. With encouragement from his brothers he checked into a treatment center but couldn’t stick with it, dropped out and wound up living on the street on Skid Row.

Weeks later, Roderick placed a desperate call home, asking if he would be allowed to celebrate Christmas with the family. When he walked into the house, his mother didn’t recognize him. His clothes were tattered, his hair matted, a string holding up his pants.

“He smelled like something that had been buried,” Mrs. White said. “This was my baby.”

The other brothers hadn’t told their mother where Roderick was. “If you had known, you would have gone and got him,” Ralph told her. Roderick, the brothers insisted, had to make the change himself for the change to stick. It did.

That Christmas, 1987, was different. The brothers, who used to eat quickly and sneak off to smoke, stayed longer and enjoyed each other more.

The strength of their family had saved the White brothers. But just as they began to exit the drug life, their block, like so many others throughout Los Angeles, was plunging further into hell because of the irreversible forces unleashed by the genie called crack.

The Block Goes Under

One of the ways Donnell established his reputation as a dealer was by giving free samples. He wanted to be looked upon as a benefactor. Word got around. New, competing crack houses sprang up on 69th Street. Throughout South-Central Los Angeles, newly prosperous dealers were willing to spend a few hundred dollars a month renting inconspicuous single-family homes. Marie White was stunned when she realized that the people who had rented the house next to her were part of a Jamaican drug gang.

Crack users--some of them middle-class people driving in from a surprising swath of Los Angeles--began turning over paychecks, cars and other possessions to Donnell to feed the monster inside them. Donnell remodeled his crack house, adding a pool table, a microwave and television monitors to scout both ends of the block. At one point he had $50,000 to burn.

Trouble was, with all that cash he soon needed protection, not just from the police but also from criminals who viewed crack houses as an easy mark. He stockpiled Uzis and other automatic weapons--and made sure competing dealers knew about them.

“Anyone who opened shop on the block had to first go through us,” he said. “They had to get our approval.”

Donnell’s crack house drew increasing scrutiny. After neighbors complained about the traffic, undercover police placed the block under surveillance. One night police made a buy outside the house and raided it. Donnell got away, but one of his brothers was arrested. Another time, Donnell was shot in the leg by a gunman who broke into his father’s guest house demanding money. Donnell’s other brother was shot and stabbed by a rival dealer, who himself was found in a car trunk a few days later, shot to death.

“I felt like a target,” Donnell said.

On surrounding streets, once-reputable neighborhood businesses became fronts for crack sales: A hot dog stand added a new, unadvertised item to its menu. An ice cream truck repeatedly circled the block long after the children were asleep. Pimps were driven out of business by women so addicted to crack that they plied their trade alone on the street, in cars and alleys.

Kenneth Middleton, the security guard, had moved onto the block a couple of years before the crack epidemic with his wife and two children. One day, returning from a trip to the store, he was confronted by a panicked dealer.

“Where’s my stash?” the dealer demanded. Unbeknown to Middleton, the dealer had hidden marijuana in the bumper of Middleton’s car.

Even the ethnicity of Middleton’s wife was a drug flash point. Because she was Jamaican, and because a Jamaican gang ran a crack house on the block, users once mistakenly tried to buy drugs at the Middleton house.

Despite the constant danger, Middleton, like many others, did not confront the madness. He adapted, rather than challenge the drug traffickers and their customers.

“They didn’t bother me, so I didn’t bother them,” he said.

Nevertheless, the elders on the block lived in fear of the children. The stronger parents laid out the rules and held their breath. Rosalyn Durr, who lived a few doors east of the Whites and had grown up a friend of the brothers, heard it from her father: You can go to the corner house and stop, or you can keep walking.

“I decided to keep walking,” she said.

Her younger brother, Eric, also missed the worst years of the plague. A couple of years before crack’s birth, he was sent to prison for killing a man in a Marina del Rey nightclub. It was a blessing, Rosalyn decided later. “It probably saved his life.”

With business to attend to, Donnell lost sight of what crack was doing to his family.

His younger sister, Monique, became hooked and started hanging out in crack houses, where she was abused by men who lured her with the drug. She was 17 and on the edge of one of the most pitiful sights of the plague: crack-smoking women who eventually became prostitutes. These women got pregnant, had children and lost them in a cycle of indignity. “Skeezers,” the men called them. “Hos.” “Strawberries.”

Some nights, Joanne Smith, the friend who lived next to Donnell’s crack house, would find Monique at another crack house, drive her home, stand her up outside in front of Monique’s parents’ house and honk her horn.

“She never had a chance,” Joanne said. “It was a bad scene because she was so young.”

One evening the two planned to go out smoking together, but Monique rushed off for a date with a man in a rust-colored car. She said she would be back in a few minutes but never returned.

“She ran off, and I had this feeling that something is wrong, very wrong,” Joanne said.

On Sept. 12, 1988, Monique’s nude body was found by a man walking his dog in an alley near Vernon and Western avenues. She had been shot several times. Police listed her as one of several possible victims of a serial killer who preyed on prostitutes and crack users.

Monique’s death had a chilling effect on the block. It was the first killing that could be blamed, at least indirectly, on crack. Donnell was horrified by the fact that she had bled to death--and troubled by his own, unsubstantiated fear that Monique had been murdered in retaliation by a customer he’d ripped off.

Losing Monique made Joanne, 25--the mother of a 5-year-old girl and now pregnant--begin to question her addiction. But it did not make her stop.

A few months later, something else did.

After five days of marathon smoking, Joanne awoke early one morning and found herself in a hotel about 40 blocks from home. She gathered her purse and a bag of clothes and started walking home.

Somewhere along the way, she would later remember, she blanked out but kept walking. She must have been drifting along in a haze for a block when she heard a horn blow, and a man’s voice.

“Lady! Lady!” he said. “Baby! What’s wrong with you?”

He was an older man in a car.

“I have been following you for the longest,” he said. “You have been walking and crying.”

Joanne told the man she just wanted to go home.

“Where do you live?” he asked. “I don’t want to know the address.”

She stumbled to his car and he drove her to the corner of 69th Street and Normandie.

“Whatever is troubling you in your life,” he told her, “you need to change it.”

Joanne walked into her house. She remembered the man, the ride home, but everything else was a blank. And maybe that was good, she said to herself. Somehow during her journey, she lost her purse and the clothes bag. She had a scar on her forehead.

“What happened? I don’t know,” she said. “I was pregnant and tired. When I got inside my house, I got on my knees and prayed: ‘God just give me the strength to quit because I’m tired.’ And that is when I first decided to give up smoking dope. But in my mind I still wanted to get high.”

Weeks later, five years after crack came to town, she would take her last hit on a pipe, early in the morning on Feb. 4, 1989. It was the day she gave birth to her son Demon, who entered the world with the shakes, suffering from his own addiction to the drug.

Under court order, Joanne left the baby with relatives and checked into a treatment center. She hasn’t smoked since.

“I had a choice.” she said. “I could smoke dope or have my children. I chose to have my children. I had smoked off paychecks, good jobs, good men. Just imagine all the time and energy I spent into getting high, what I could have done.”

The same questions were going through Ronald White’s mind. By the time Joanne quit, Ronald had been clean for two years. He had more options than most crackheads on 69th Street. He had been working as a proofreader and a bookkeeper, and now he started to wonder how he might reclaim his legal career--and how he might explain that gaping hole in his resume, the years he’d spent on crack.

He applied for an opening in the public defender’s office. He was brought before a team of attorneys and ultimately the agency’s chief, Wilbur Littlefield. They reviewed his resume and indicated they liked what they saw. There was, however, one question, the one that Ronald dreaded.

He told the truth, and he told them drugs were no longer part of his life. The job was his.

“It wasn’t a difficult decision,” said Littlefield, who retired last year. “We are there to help people, to give people a chance. If the public defender wouldn’t do it, then who would?”

Soon Ronald moved out of his mother’s house and was on his own. He married in 1991, the same year his wife gave birth to a son, Ronnie. The proud father was there to cut his son’s umbilical cord.

A year later, three streets away at Florence and Normandie, the Los Angeles riots erupted in the wake of the verdict acquitting policemen accused of beating Rodney King. On their television sets, residents watched neighbors throwing rocks and bottles and looting. The very rioters convicted of brutally beating trucker Reginald Denny were acquaintances. Henry Keith Watson grew up on the block. Damian Williams lived a few blocks away, and Antoine Miller was also known in the neighborhood. Miller’s mother was known on the block too, for her past addiction to crack.

For reasons the neighborhood is hard-pressed to explain, crack use seemed to surge upward after the riots, then leveled off and plummeted. Donnell got himself arrested for the first time for selling and served half a year. Paco Radford, who sold drugs on the block, was also arrested.

A painful transformation was occurring. Gradually, people who spent their time living to buy crack were disappearing--dying or going to jail or starting to grope toward salvation. It was as though the fire that had consumed the block and the neighborhood had run out of brush to burn. New communities of users were sprouting throughout Los Angeles as the plague slowly ebbed in its first home in South-Central and lurched elsewhere. A struggling sense of the old vibrancy began to return to the 1300 block of 69th Street. The Neighborhood Watch club was rekindled. Cleanup campaigns began. Residents chipped in to beautify each other’s front lawns. The block club fought a successful battle to limit hours of a nearby liquor store. Rosalie Galpin, 70, a retired machine shop worker who had lived in her home for half a century, noticed the difference. She had watched the block fall with a sense of frightful wonderment, closing herself off from it, making less neighborly chitchat, losing friends.

“Now that some of those young culprits are gone, things have gotten a lot better,” she said. “People are trying harder to keep the neighborhood up.”

Epilogue

Donnell, 31, abandoned a life as a dealer after his arrest. He now works with his father, Porter Alexander Jr., in the construction business and believes he was a pawn of a government conspiracy to circulate drugs in the black community.

He got out, he said, because he got sick of playing the game.

“I was tired of trying to figure out who I was going to jack (rob) next,” he said. “It was a sickness.”

Joanne Smith, free of drugs for five years, has three children: Schvetta, 11, Demon, 5, and Louis, 2. She also provides a room for two other children whose parents were lost to crack. Her youngest child was fathered by Paco Radford, a seller on the block. Paco was shot to death in a domestic dispute last year with another woman in a Gardena hotel.

Marie White lives with one son, Roderick, in the house with the great spreading tree. Two family photos hang on her living room wall. One reveals a family of men with gaunt, tired faces, warped by life on the street. Ronald didn’t make that picture. The second photo, full of round, healthy faces, brightens up the room.

She knew her voice would echo and eventually steer her boys home, Mrs. White says. It wasn’t simply her wisdom. It was the values of the neighborhood: the friends, the teachers, the extended family--the civility nobody seemed to believe in any more. It grew on this block. It had been resurrected.

“I never really gave up hope,” she said.

On Sunday mornings, a crowd of 30 to 40 gathers at the house. It is a recovery group, loosely modeled on Alcoholic Anonymous, formed and zealously promoted by Ronald in his commitment to staying clean. Of the 12 steps to recovery, he says, the first is the most important: The need to admit that you have a problem, that you are powerless unless you resolve it.

Looking back, Ronald strains to remember.

“Everything was filtered through eyes that were not quite seeing reality,” he says. “It was like suffering amnesia. Every so often, snippets and pieces come back and you say, ‘Who? Did I really do that?’ ”

Ralph White, 41, has remarried and works as a paralegal for a Downtown law firm.

Reggie, 38, is an office worker for a Downtown corporation and is married.

Roderick, 35, works nights in a recovery home for addicts.

Ricky, 37, has his own place a couple of blocks from his mother’s home.

For Ronald, 40, the saga of 69th Street has carried over into his routine as a deputy public defender at the Compton Courthouse, where he often juggles 30 criminal cases, many involving people on crack.

The lesson? “Sometimes,” he says, “you have to hit the bottom before you can reach back and see the way out.”

On a recent day in the courthouse, White represented a gang member accused of shooting his girlfriend’s foot half off in a jealous rage.

The young man sat sternly in his chair as the woman hobbled to the witness stand and relived the painful experience that permanently crippled her.

After the prosecutor concluded her questioning, Ronald asked his client a few. The gang member’s eyes never turned in his victim’s direction.

Then Ronald asked the young woman to show her mangled foot. She lifted it, covered in a neat, white sock. He asked her to take off the sock. A hush fell as she slowly, painstakingly, removed the sock and revealed what was left of her foot.

The defendant’s defiant expression melted away to reflect his horror at what he had done. It was the reaction White had hoped for. This wasn’t about tactics, he would explain later. It was about morality. He wanted the gang member to taste the consequences of his act. He wanted him to hit rock-bottom.

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About This Series

In this four-part series, The Times examines how Los Angeles County’s neighborhoods, institutions and morals have been ravaged by a decade of crack, the most addictive form of cocaine ever devised.

* Sunday: Crack drains funds from vital public agencies, imposing a hidden tax on everyone.

* Monday: Crack creates a new wave of homelessness, bringing more crime and despair to the streets.

* Tuesday: Crack forges an underground economy, luring a generation with false promises.

* Today: Crack takes down a neighborhood--but the spirit of its residents brings it back.