Officials Home In on ‘Grandma’s’ Drug Den

Herlinda Garcia Sotelo gave new meaning to the song lyrics “to grandmother’s house we go.”

Known as “Grandma” to many of her drug customers, the 72-year-old has for years been engaged in narcotics peddling that was something of a family enterprise, according to law enforcement officials.

This year alone, authorities executed three search warrants at her Boyle Heights home, each time arresting Sotelo on suspicion of narcotics possession. In October, she pleaded guilty to drug sale charges and is serving a 10-year state prison sentence.

On Thursday, officials announced that they had filed a lawsuit to seize the house--long a center of neighborhood drug activity--in the 3100 block of Cesar Chavez Boulevard.

“Our police reports indicate that 13 arrests have been made here for drug-related offenses since May of this year,” said Cmdr. James Jones of the LAPD narcotics group.

In the last decade, Sotelo has been arrested nine times on drug-related charges. During a May 20 search at her small, stucco house, Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies found that she had 12 balloons of heroin stuffed in her underwear, along with a key to a bedroom footlocker containing PCP and rock cocaine.

They also arrested two of her daughters, Virginia Sotelo, 47, and Cynthia Sotelo, 36, both of whom have carried on the family tradition of run-ins with the law. Police said Virginia Sotelo has numerous drug-related arrests on her record, while Cynthia Sotelo has been arrested seven times since 1987 on charges of prostitution and drug use. Both are on probation.

Cynthia Sotelo was detained again Thursday morning--and later released--when authorities went to the house to serve the seizure papers and found six adults and five children along with evidence of continued drug use.

After one of her arrests this year, police records quote Herlinda Sotelo as saying she sold drugs “to help ends meet,” and was aware of her daughters’ drug addiction, but only allowed them to shoot up in the rear bedroom.

Although not common, such multi-generation drug involvement is by no means unprecedented.

Mary Clare Molidor, an assistant Los Angeles city attorney assigned to the anti-drug unit that targeted the Sotelo property, recalled the 1991 seizure of a Carlin Avenue house out of which a 60-year-old woman and her children ran a drug operation.

Called Focused Attack Linking Community Organizations and Neighborhoods, the program is a 4-year-old, federally funded task force that tries to eliminate hotbeds of drug activity through the combined efforts of police, the city attorney’s office and building and safety inspectors.